tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14224700995969802742024-02-19T16:07:52.519-08:00JR's UC Voice.Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-89641009299412436882010-08-09T16:27:00.000-07:002010-08-09T17:21:04.884-07:00Unified Excellence: Rodman's view of the Polycom-Microsoft alliance<div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Microsoft has been an interesting duck for a long time. They’re popular by many measures: they’re big, they’re found on the majority of corporate computers, their stuff is fully featured and functional, and they make a wide variety of software tools that function with, and on, devices and platforms from just about any vendor out there. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That last point evolves into an interesting challenge with Microsoft’s continuing move into Unified Communications, initially via OCS and now with the next step of Communications Server Wave 14. By moving deeper into UC and the mainstream of live human communications, this extension has positioned them in a place where they’re now measured by a whole new set of metrics. Real-time human communications are different from traditional text-based channels because there is an inherent philosophical shift: ideas are no longer funneled through the time-insensitive construct of "text", but are swapped back and forth in real time, through our voices and our vision; we're chatterboxes, our expectations become the same as we have when we're together in person, and those expectations are high. But further, they require different techniques, different measurements, and a lot of very specific expertise to do the job well. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you're a company that begins raising your presence in a new part of the market as Microsoft is doing, it's not a bad idea to identify and partner with the strongest expertise and track record in that market.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In announcing a new strategic alliance with Polycom (see Information Week, http://bit.ly/9M8nPM), Microsoft revealed exactly that strategy today. Polycom and Microsoft have extended their strategic relationship, and have committed to a substantial dedication of resources and investments to make Polycom’s highly regarded video and voice solutions an integral part of the comprehensive Microsoft end-to-end UC solution set. That’s a big deal; both Polycom and Microsoft are known for being selective about the partners they choose, and this collaboration holds high promise for transforming how people communicate. I’ll be writing more in the next few days to describe a fuller picture of how and why this partnership is so compelling, but it's a classic synergy play: two market leaders, each in their own field; each is positioned to maximize the strengths of the other, and everybody benefits. </span></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-89241441534504134122010-08-07T11:05:00.000-07:002010-08-07T11:05:26.888-07:00Freeing UC to grow<div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jessica Scarpati's coverage of the tradeoffs between single-vendor and multiple-vendor UC strategies (http://bit.ly/cd6jqQ) got me thinking about why "single-vendor UC" is an oxymoron. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Something as big as UC cannot all come from one vendor. How do I know this? </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because nobody knows what "UC" is! Not really, not completely. Sure, it's "Unified Communications," but that's just words and it doesn't mean as much as we wish it did. And yes, it's videoconferencing and video communications, integrated with calendaring and texting and voice and presence, but isn't that just more words? </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And IM, of course. Is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>that</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> it now? No, we forgot multiscreen telepresence and real-time translation services and media archiving. And SalesForce.com and iPhone apps. Android apps, SIP/H.323. And speech to text, I almost forgot that, and how it should link to calendaring and security... </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You see the point? UC is a constantly evolving story. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said about life: UC is a journey, not a destination. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every user has a different story and takes a different journey that presents a different application, different needs, different priorities. Every user is different; that's why users will always need vendors who can put real focus on particular applications. In Scarpati's article, Gartner's Elliot confirms this - "you can't actually get a [full UC] solution from a single vendor, despite what they're saying."</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is why open standards are so important and why so many industry leaders are joining UCIF (www.ucif.org) to ensure that UC stays open, effective and compatible. UC is open-ended by definition, and that end needs to be fully and openly defined. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">UC's potential and its excitement are emerging because it's being created by a community, not a hermit. Let's remain clear of hermits and their closed platforms. </span></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-469256602377506322010-08-02T15:05:00.000-07:002010-08-02T15:05:46.489-07:00Everybody's Rich!<div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Recently I've heard some people say "oh, foo, that telepresence, it's just for the rich." But really, what does "telepresence" mean these days? </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the word was first invented thirty years ago, it was adapted from "teleoperation," used to describe a rather abstract, all-senses extension in which you not only saw and heard something at another place, but could do stuff and sense stuff from far away: you could feel its temperature, kick its tires, smell its roses. It wasn't just video, not even just immersive video, but it carried all the elements of "being there." But it was a rationed commodity - it was one-of-a-kind lab cookups with miles of cable in universities, it was driving your robot on Mars in science fiction, it was doctoral dissertations backed up with fragments of machinery and sparks. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">More recently, "telepresence" became applied to a small corner of teleconferencing, what's now known as "immersive telepresence." This usage started gaining traction when Polycom's Destiny division (TeleSuite at the time) began shipping it with PictureTel components in 1993; that's what my company, Polycom still calls it, and it's a pretty good description. It's the whole room: controlled lighting, spectacular audio, flawless transport and one-button operation if you want to push a button (you can have a conference without pushing that button, too). It's a wonderful experience. And yes, it's expensive because it carries multiple channels of HD Video, spatial HD audio, and includes everything you need, right down to ceiling panels and chairs. If you want a no-excuses, best-in-the-world experience for a high-end application like a board of directors, it's a good way to go. But it's not the only "telepresence" out there. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Telepresence has acquired many shades of gray since its early days, and there are some distinctions that some people are only now catching on to. Not all telepresence is big, brilliant, and quiveringly expensive anymore; some is big, brilliant, and priced to make a CFO smile. In the same way that cars come in styles and prices from Maserati to Kia, "telepresence" is now applied to anything from those higher-end immersive systems to a simple HD desktop system. If it's well done, it can even be used to describe a handheld experience! </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As quality and understanding continues to increase, more systems are becoming increasingly "telepresent," and as UC continues to mature, these different kinds of systems can talk easily to one another. That's one of the great things about open standards: they allow handheld video to connect to a half-million dollar immersive system, which radically boosts the value proposition, the usefulness, and the quality of experience for everyone who participates.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you find yourself pondering telepresence, give serious thought to how you plan to use it, and what your specific needs are. If you're thinking "video," think "telepresence." It's almost guaranteed that there's a telepresence solution out there that fits your needs, and your budget. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Don't listen to anyone who tells you that telepresence is just for the rich. When it comes to "telepresence," you're rich now too!</span></div><div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br />
</span></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-60875241979358296742010-07-28T09:36:00.000-07:002010-07-28T09:36:46.912-07:00One Word: Writing!<div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This has been the summer of the most lavishly successful internship program that Polycom has ever conducted. Some very talented students have shared their skills and ideas with our people, and have learned from them, in what has turned out to be a really invigorating few months. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Before the interns started to splinter off and return back to school, I agreed to host a lunch with them. I came in expecting six or seven ragged summer hires, seven or eight over-mayonnaised sandwiches, and some lukewarm coffee. The food was better than that, but the interns were better still: interesting, engaged, sparking the discussion. They totaled about 35 in five sites, brought together by Polycom telepresence. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The lunch went pretty well, if you don't judge its success by the small amount of food I was allowed to eat. Finally, amid the crumpling of sandwich wrappers and zipping of laptop bags, someone asked if I had any last words. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was something lame, right up there with "be good to your mother and don’t drive on the sidewalk." </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You know those times when you think of the perfect riposte only after the other guy has left? You’re left with a Homer Simpson “D’oh!” moment, all by yourself? Well, it was only after the thing was over that I had one of those. Too late, I remembered what I had wanted to say. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So for those of you who were at that lunch, please edit the media stream in your mind to append this next bit. Touch the date code, improvise inflections. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I've got three last words: work on writing. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reason is simple. Whatever you do, people can’t see it until it has passed through the filter of writing: an introduction, a note, a whole letter, an article. There's always writing that precedes and surrounds it. This is true whether you’re an engineer, a financier, a marketeer, even an artist. And because your words frame your work, those words add a lot of leverage, for better or worse. Simple errors like misspellings, faulty word choices, or flawed grammar affect the reader’s perception of the work itself. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Simple error’s like mispelings, messed up words and/or whether you used the right tense etc make u look like I better take another look at you're work. Even if its genius its now pushing against a head-wind. Get it?</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing will be an important part of your work, whatever field you go into. You can give yourself a real boost by learning to write well, and then to write better. Here are some of the most important suggestions I can make.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1. The best single guide to writing I have found is a classic, “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. It’s short, readable, interesting, and stuffed with useful tips. Get on top of that, and you're already leading the pack.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">2. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things (homonyms are similar in concept, but are spelled the same as well as meaning the same - check out www.cooper.com/alan/homonym.html for a great list). Picking the wrong one is a quick way to crack your veneer of competence. When I see someone who's confused "your" and "you're," or "discrete" and "discreet," I sigh. You see this a lot in blogs, so keep your sights set high.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">3. Is there a better word? I always keep a thesaurus nearby. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">4. Are you unsure of the spelling? Check it. Sending a note with a wrong spelling is like speaking with spinach in your teeth.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">5. Finally: re-read, review, revise. The last couple of minutes can make or break the whole message.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since I'm away from the web often, I've made friends with some apps on the iPhone: OAWT (Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus), Advanced English Dictionary, and (if you dabble in songwriting like me) "Rhymer." You'll find other tools, too. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'Century Gothic'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To all the interns, thanks for sharing your summer with Polycom. I once had this experience as a summer hire with some of the most gifted engineers in the world at Hughes Aircraft Company, and the experience still shines in my memory. Be well, go forth and succeed!</span></div><div><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br />
</span></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-86083142940349394842010-05-31T15:34:00.000-07:002010-06-02T07:12:16.253-07:00Primum Succurrere: Telemedicine and fast access<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Should telemedicine be prohibited because the doctor doesn't physically touch the patient? That's the argument being made by the Texas Board of Health, according to a recent article in the New York Times at http://nyti.ms/aGY3SO. The issue raised is that there might be subtle cues that are more likely to be noticed if the patient is there than over a video connection.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Like everything, this position has to be taken in moderation. Good decisions aren't made by looking only at the possible risks, but at the possible benefits as well. There will always be more information that could be gathered, but the real point is whether sufficient information is available to justify an action, and whether inaction would be worse.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We all make medical decisions, and we make them frequently. My shoulder hurts: do I have bone cancer? Should I drop everything and race to the emergency room? I evaluate my options using the information available to me, including the fact that I spent much of yesterday digging in the back yard, and conclude that it's more likely a soreness from fixing the plumbing under my wife's lawn fountain than something more ominous down in the marrow. I feel reasonably confident that my arm will not snap off if I give it a couple of days and see what happens. I'm not a medical doctor and I have no scans or X-rays to support my decision, but I'm making a decision of proportional scope and, in all likelihood, consequence. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Doctors do the same. The real questions are how good the information is and what actions are appropriate based on that information. And - at least as important - what level of <i><u>in</u></i>action is acceptable? Is it better to take some action, even if some things remain uncertain, or to wait until fuller information is available? It’s the kind of question that faces doctors and paramedics every day.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Along with the familiar medical dictum, <i>primum non nocere</i> or "First, do no harm," there’s also a second one, equally important: <i>primum succurrere</i>, "First, hasten to help." Both philosophies, whether the considered evaluation prior to treatment, or the more urgent application of palliation or assistance, need fast, accurate information, and that’s home turf for telemedicine and medical telepresence. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">One morning as a young engineer, I had a realization so vital that I made it into a sign and hung it in my office: "Every Decision Must Be Made on the Basis of Insufficient Information" (this was before computers, fonts and laser printers, so I actually had to exercise my drafting skills making that sign). I realized that the search for full and complete information was inherently impossible because there was always another piece of data, somewhere, that might - just might - be relevant to a decision. I realized that part of the value I brought to the job was my ability to evaluate the information available, to decide when I had enough to take action on. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The same is true in medicine. There’s always a process of deciding what information is necessary, and where enough has been accumulated to support a decision for a course of action. This is where telemedicine has become such a valuable addition to the medical arsenal: Telemedicine can cut the time for information delivery to a doctor by an order of magnitude or more. This facilitates the processes of triage, diagnosis and treatment. Siince time is often critical in medicine, this also means that telemedicine can save lives. It's the doctor's responsibility to determine whether the available information is sufficient and reliable, and to decide what actions to take on the basis of that information. This decision is never the same, however. It’s different for every circumstance, and the doctor is in the best position to decide. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Many of the major metrics of modern medicine are already available remotely, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, and pulse rate; even ultrasound scans are now available, delivered via iPhone. Yes, there's always a chance that a physical visit might add a piece of information, but the incremental advantage of the physical visit, relative to the high cost of delay in many cases, has decreased in modern medicine; as </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Dr. Boultinghouse says in the NYT article, "in today’s world, the physical exam plays less and less of a role. We live in the age of imaging.” Add in the growing availability of remote imaging devices such as microscopes and ear-nose-throat cameras, and the remote imaging arsenal is becoming extraordinarily powerful.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">This is where modern telemedicine has become such a game-changer: by bringing secure, live high-definition video, both one-way and two-way, between doctor and patient, it enables not only the directed examination necessary to understand a problem, but also a significant degree of the relationship-building and random observation that can play an important role in medicine as well. In effect, HD telemedicine has brought much of the physical exam back into the game, even when doctor and patient are thousands of miles apart. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
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</div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-81350714224336898752010-05-15T11:07:00.000-07:002010-05-15T11:07:53.118-07:00Redundant, Robust, and UC<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Through the events of the past couple of years, we’re again seeing that the two essential elements of a communication strategy are redundancy and robustness. <br />
<br />
The conventional meaning of redundancy is having a second phone as well as the deskphone, or a battery backup in case the AC fails. But what I’m talking about goes beyond that: it’s not just separate duplicate abilities, it’s having communication paths that use different media entirely, maybe following different physical tracks or even different laws of physics. And similarly, while “robust” may mean a phone that you can drop, it doesn’t help much if the phone wire itself has been torn loose in a hurricane; the strategy, not just the device, needs to be robust. <br />
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This kind of redundant backup is something that we have in the wild, but often lose when we’re connected by technology. If we’re standing together and I talk to you, we’ve got some options when a thunderstorm strikes. If you can’t hear me, you can see me and I can signal to you. And if it’s dark, and you can’t see me either, I can tap you on the shoulder. So what has happened? The audio failed, so I resorted to video; that didn’t work, so I went to touch. Three entirely different media, and I was able to connect. Redundancy.<br />
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Closed standards destroy "robust" because they also close off options. Texting, e-mail, videoconferencing, presence, shared workspaces, multiple unsynchronized clients, cloud and local implementations, there’s a mess of them and they keep coming, yet they often don't work together. And that’s before we add Yammer and Twitter and Tumblr and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and Myspace, Posterous, Qaiku, Ning, Digg, Mixx, Reddit…you see the problem? The proliferation of tools and media that’s supposed to be empowering us? It’s disabling us. What should strengthen us instead makes us more frail. <br />
<br />
This is why this shaking-out in human communications called Unified Communications or UC, is so essentially linked to open standards. It’s often presented as the next, uber-cooler, the even higher technology, but I see it as a naturalizing, a humanization, of this flock of new and augmented communication tools. “Unified” is the important part here. In the same way that my arm-waving is a natural extension of my shout, UC is all about making this rag-tag zoo tie together so one way of connecting is an effortless, obvious extension of another: I don’t need to look up another phone number, URL, or Skype name. If one tool or one vendor chooses to use their own proprietary standard and can't talk to others, it's not really Unified at all. Perhaps we should call those implementations "Fragmented Communications." FC?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Century Gothic"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Finding ways of ensuring confident cross-platform connection via open-standards based UC will be one of the big enablers of human communication in our future.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /> <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /> </span><!--EndFragment-->Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-15586310192101609102010-02-03T13:17:00.000-08:002010-02-03T13:17:14.450-08:00Video Silicon in the Laptop?<div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">As video chat and videoconferencing becomes democratized, the question comes up: will computers now sprout dedicated silicon to perform these video-specific tasks? As in most things, the answer is yes and no; in large part, it depends on what you call a computer. Here's what we're likely to see in the traditional laptop.</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Computers and laptops muddy the question because they can already do pretty good video processing with what they have. The mainstream has brought prodigious speed advances, multi-core architectures, partitionable 64-bit data processing, and integral pixel processing functions that really accelerate the kind of number crunching required for VC. So one answer lies here: yes we'll see specialized silicon to do video processing in laptops because we added it years ago, we just didn't do it as an encapsulated hardware codec. </div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The laptop exists in a continual tension between cost and performance. A computer maker is always looking at the tradeoffs between adding abilities and improving existing ones, versus adding the cost to make these additions. This is why we don't see embedded cameras on every laptop, and why every every laptop's camera we do see doesn't have forty megapixels and a 15:1 zoom lens. What happens is that when they're added, these cameras get the minimum performance that will do a general-purpose job. It's the same reason that computers make lousy speakerphones - they have mics and speakers, but they're compromised to fit the price available. And the space, of course; nobody's advertising a laptop computer that's "New! Improved! A Half-Inch Thicker for Better Sound!"</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Now, sure - not every user is average. Those who want to stretch the envelope with very high-power requirements, like high pixel counts and frame rates, may need special silicon. But if they're doing this, they'll need more than just </div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">the processing - they need the better camera to feed it, and better sound, and a better lens. And the baseline performance level is continuing to improve as well, so that off-the-shelf computers converge with an ever-increasing subset of user requirements (does anyone besides me find that their cellphone camera takes care of a surprising fraction of their snapshot needs?) </div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So this all boils down to one conclusion: computer users are either satisfied with the increasingly good video they can get with mainstream laptops, or they'll invest in outboard stuff to enhance it and that's where high-end specialized processing will wind up. We won't be seeing dedicated H.264 processors in laptop computers anytime soon, at least as we currently think of the laptop. </div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A tip of the hat to Michael Graves, www.mgraves.org, for asking the question that sparked this train of thought. </div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-74434241187644894432010-01-28T08:06:00.000-08:002010-01-28T08:06:49.705-08:00Team PLCM Commences!Polycom has made a truly bold move this week: fully one-sixth of the company, its leaders, its technologists, its best and brightest thinkers and makers from around the world, are being brought together in San Diego to share our vision for universal telepresence and how it is going to empower everything, from the organization of any scale, to the kid. Today will be the first full day, but judging from the dinner last night (that was me, at table ten, hobnobbing with our people from Wales, Brazil, North America and more), I'm looking forward to fireworks and magic.Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-16939270010935405692009-12-03T18:58:00.000-08:002009-12-03T18:59:19.001-08:00Telepresence: Better than Airbags!<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Passenger car fatalities have dropped from 23,000 in 1985 to 17,800 in 2006, according to the US Department of Transportation. Every two months, more people are killed on our roads than died in the 9/11 attack. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">The decrease in highway deaths across the years is doubtless due to a number of factors. Airbags alone are credited with saving 6377 lives since 1990 (of the 600,110 total road deaths, according to DOT) since then. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">But here’s a proposal for saving many more lives: encourage telecommuting. What would this achieve? Let’s look at some figures.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Some workers cannot telecommute at all, due to the nature of their jobs. Others could telecommute virtually every day. Let’s assume that only 50% of the workforce could telecommute at all, and that of that 50%, the average would be 1 day per week. I think this is likely a very low estimate, but let’s go with it for now. So we now have the average American worker telecommuting ¼ day per week. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Let’s also assume that of the miles driven in a day, the commute represents an average of 50%. Again, probably low, but it’s a start. The workweek driving miles are now reduced by 1/8 (12.5%) of a day’s commute per 5-day workweek, averaged across all workers, or 2.5% for the week. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Fatality rates are based on miles driven. This means that as we reduce the number of miles driven, we also reduce the number of fatalities. Cut miles by 2.5%? You reduce deaths by 2.5%. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">And what’s 2.5% of 600,000? 15,000 lives! Telecommuting, even if as sparsely applied as this, would save over twice as many lives as airbags! <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">This makes HD Voice, videoconferencing, and telepresence all potent tools for safety because they greatly ease the process of the telecommute. What are we waiting for?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-7330257693087317972009-11-15T12:41:00.000-08:002009-11-15T12:41:38.808-08:00The Phone Network, an 80-year-old dog<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Why has it been so hard to teach that old dog, the phone network, the new trick of sound quality that's as good as what we hear?</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Century Gothic';">In 1930, the goal of the phone system was stated like this: “In the Bell system the general objective which has been set up for the transmitted frequency range for new designs of telephone message circuits is a range having a width of 2,500 cycles, extending from about 250 cycles to about 2,750 cycles.”</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">The performance of the public telephone network has not gotten much better - even a little worse, in some ways, over the years. As recently as 1984, the higher end was still about 2.7 kHz for long-distance calls, and 280 Hz at the lower end. It’s hard to take something like the global phone network, one with fundamental goals set eighty years ago, and change its underlying fidelity in any meaningful way. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">This why telephones are moving to VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol (or internet telephony), to make better fidelity possible for most people. The internet carries data, and since any kind of signal can be converted into data, this means the internet can carry almost any kind of signal. Did you get that?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">1. The Internet Carries Data<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">2. Any Signal can be turned into Data<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Therefore: The Internet Carries Any Signal<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';">Signals can be HD Voice, desktop video, Immersive Videoconferencing, and most other kinds of information you may want to share. Because the Internet can be made arbitrarily versatile and fast, it can keep up with the needs of live human communication for a long time to come. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Century Gothic';"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reference: “Transmitted Frequency Range for Telephone Message Circuits,” W.H.Martin, Bell System Technical Journal July 1930 Ref. JR1/11 </span></i><br clear="ALL" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" /> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Century Gothic';"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-21259712796628743192009-11-05T15:48:00.000-08:002009-11-05T15:48:44.578-08:00What Is "HD Voice?"<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Century Gothic';">There’s a spectrum for sound as there is for light, and it spans the range from low, booming bass like kettledrums and distant thunder, to high whistles and hisses like birdsong and squeaking hinges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">The “color” of sound is described by its frequency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A single note of music has a frequency, the number of times it vibrates in a second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You see this when a guitar string is strummed – the lowest string, you can almost watch it throb, while the higher strings moves so quickly they’re just a blur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The moving string makes the air move, and it’s those repeating cycles of the moving air, that’s what we hear because they move our eardrums.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">It makes sense, then, that the frequency of a tone is measured in cycles per second, or cps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1960, this nice clear name was renamed the “Hertz” after Heinrich Hertz, thereby inconveniencing all posterity for the sake of a dead guy, but the term still means cycles per second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of these is a hertz (1 Hz), a thousand of these is a kilohertz (1,000 Hz or 1 kHz), a million a megahertz (1 MHz).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The human ear is usually described as hearing 20 Hz to 20 kHz, which is three orders of magnitude or ten octaves.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">In between these extremes is the human voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sounds we make when we talk or sing lie mostly between 80 Hz at the low end, and 14 kHz at the higher end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vowels and “smooth” sounds are mostly below 4 kHz, while a lot of the consonants that tell one word from another, like “fell” from “sell” are above 4 kHz. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">The telephone, however, only carries the thin slice of frequencies from 300 Hz to 3300 Hz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s right, your ears can hear with five times the fidelity of your phone, which is why phones sound so muffled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This started accidentally in the twenties, because the metal wafers, carbon granule microphones, and cloth-insulated coils they used could do no better, but phones today haven’t gotten much better then they were back then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">That’s where HD Voice comes in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“HD Voice” means a phone that has extended its fidelity to at least 7 kHz – doubling the frequency response compared to conventional narrowphones, and dramatically improving the sound and the ease of use.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">I’ll be writing more to give a fuller perspective on why that’s important, but in short: by restoring the missing four-fifths of speech that the telephone cuts out, HD Voice boosts accuracy, reduces fatigue, overcomes accents and background noise, and makes telling people apart easier and a lot more natural.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-75106034008390772802009-10-31T08:59:00.000-07:002009-10-31T08:59:46.117-07:00When an "A" is not an "A"<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Why do some audio codecs need so much more data than others? Consider this:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNK4KHzaM6ztRbh-xQYGB0DbE2L3OrTXZwIb1PO0lJS8FrZbAmNFEUoo85Quy_dmGf14g5bIPpXajgMNo7jEYIKC_DwfO6VppHhHrWgMeq-Hdb5QxUVt9hXCaKIzcNlv7zdnmy-EMflbg/s1600-h/AMRWB+is+to+ADPCM+as+TXT+is+to+JPG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNK4KHzaM6ztRbh-xQYGB0DbE2L3OrTXZwIb1PO0lJS8FrZbAmNFEUoo85Quy_dmGf14g5bIPpXajgMNo7jEYIKC_DwfO6VppHhHrWgMeq-Hdb5QxUVt9hXCaKIzcNlv7zdnmy-EMflbg/s400/AMRWB+is+to+ADPCM+as+TXT+is+to+JPG.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Century Gothic';"><span style="font-family: 'Copperplate Gothic Bold';"><b><br />
</b></span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Text files and image files take completely different approaches to how they save information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A text file doesn’t save how your words look, it saves what the words are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An image file is the opposite:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it preserves the look of things, and doesn’t care with what they represent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">If a text file only needs to distinguish among 256 different characters – and that give you ten alphabets’ worth of special characters – then each letter needs eight bits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One byte per character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s pretty efficient, but it only works because we’ve limited its abilities: it’s only allowed to store text, not pictures, and we have to agree beforehand on what those 256 characters are.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Image files, on the other hand, only assume that the source is an image, any image. A good example is .jpg format (JPEG is “Joint Photographic Experts Group,” the party animals who first agreed on that standard).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So it starts with an arbitrary image, a checkerboard of any number of pixels, and then follows an algorithm to boil that down as best it can by removing redundancies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s always limited by its inability to make many simplifying assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can’t take the easy road that a .txt file can, just assuming the source is a letter; it could be a fondue pot.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Let’s try a simple case:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to send the letter “A” somewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Text file</span></span></b></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">H</span>ere’s your eight bits:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>01000001 in binary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> A bunch of people</span> called ASCII agreed on this lookup table many decades ago – it’s just another kind of Morse code.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Jpg file</span></span></b></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Since I want to send a clear picture of the letter “A,” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj0ceeXymb0h_mFPfsCDfxZRwyzbvBTYLjMvFooCLipFnMlOsJTpG3VTOt9GJVLWAU3ODcn1mhneuulYIKTqQjVxBxTv03wMhvyWDNIg81szAnkBTZYmtQGgE4-m9eCdvSP3dN5uSp3gQ/s1600-h/Letter+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj0ceeXymb0h_mFPfsCDfxZRwyzbvBTYLjMvFooCLipFnMlOsJTpG3VTOt9GJVLWAU3ODcn1mhneuulYIKTqQjVxBxTv03wMhvyWDNIg81szAnkBTZYmtQGgE4-m9eCdvSP3dN5uSp3gQ/s320/Letter+A.jpg" /></a><br />
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</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">I’ll start with an image space about 160 x 180 pixels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s 2880 pixels for a really clear letter (see how nice it looks?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, depending on how aggressive I’m willing to be, I can boil that down anywhere from 2x to maybe 20x.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Add overhead for arbitrary color (three colors, remember), and this one-byte letter is now tens or hundreds of bytes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">What did I get in return for all this extra space?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can send any picture I want.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj15IhyrdGaFMbuyjuF5JlE2B3LwxhyphenhyphenuPXYlM8nB3_wZCXabaohHZrGzioEUVxn_hs7XgdN0yDqEWNZuz7prjCgzufN0ftOFmB2vCF-QnXBvt0Zn6sHH_9DrqVQmNJlvZAGzDXN18Bw6ys/s1600-h/Mountains+for+Blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj15IhyrdGaFMbuyjuF5JlE2B3LwxhyphenhyphenuPXYlM8nB3_wZCXabaohHZrGzioEUVxn_hs7XgdN0yDqEWNZuz7prjCgzufN0ftOFmB2vCF-QnXBvt0Zn6sHH_9DrqVQmNJlvZAGzDXN18Bw6ys/s320/Mountains+for+Blog.jpg" /></a><br />
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</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Speech codecs are like that too - they offer the same tradeoffs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll talk about that next.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";">Footnote:</span></u></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Text coding is a slippery slope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The move to multilingual documentation has pushed a transition to double-byte coding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>256 choices is no longer enough, we now need 256^2, or 65,536 choices to handle the possibilities of Chinese language, Farsi, and all the rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See what happened?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By growing the number of choices, we grow the “codebook” and so make the coding more versatile but less efficient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a form of what is called, in its most general form, “vector coding.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vector coding can be used for image compression, and then the codebook can dynamically adapt to the content of the image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s more efficient – fewer bits, but more complex – more calculation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-28750171829976400852009-10-29T08:41:00.000-07:002009-10-29T08:41:49.111-07:00<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;"><b>LET’S MEASURE HD VOICE!</b><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">Our ability to understand speech can be measured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most common method is to select random syllables and ask a group of listeners to write them down, then mess up the audio (muffle the sound by lowering the bandwidth, for example), and run the test again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When this is done the result looks like this<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqFmKxazoSjUarjYDxPvufOmrm8Z1Xdhx41OywlUl7dWzM4ly3uOyzpMp2SE6w__qKRzSTu9-kv-QfB_5u0jQ6bwt0swo1EQKO7XwzLLV2ghCSZJVilbNrNLrDCGslILZk_eQIzPg5O0/s1600-h/Comprehension+vs+BW+3k3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqFmKxazoSjUarjYDxPvufOmrm8Z1Xdhx41OywlUl7dWzM4ly3uOyzpMp2SE6w__qKRzSTu9-kv-QfB_5u0jQ6bwt0swo1EQKO7XwzLLV2ghCSZJVilbNrNLrDCGslILZk_eQIzPg5O0/s320/Comprehension+vs+BW+3k3.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Century Gothic"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">This picture shows that as we pass more and more of the sound by raising the cut-off frequency, the listener’s accuracy also increases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This makes sense; we all know it’s hard to understand someone who’s very muffled, and it gets easier when they speak clearly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why wideband audio in telephony is so important:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with normal phone fidelity – 3 kHz – people make mistakes on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one out of ten syllables!</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By raising the cut-off to 7kHz with HD Voice, the chart's red line shows this rises to nearly 100%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in real-world settings, like accented speech, speakerphones, people sitting too far away, the difference is even more dramatic.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-37431193024583049562009-10-11T18:41:00.000-07:002009-10-11T18:41:30.643-07:00The Spice of Fidelity<div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It's been said that the higher sound frequencies aren't very important for speech because there isn't much energy there. It's hard to argue the point, because it's true - well, part of it is true. The amount of speech energy that a standard telephone carries is ever so much higher than the amount it cuts off - a hundred times, or more. So yeah, it's not cutting off that much, there's not much up there. <br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But this argument is like those tricksters we find in politics, where a fallacy is linked to a truth and then presented as two truths. There isn't much energy there? Check. Not important for speech? Sound the alarm. We have to ask: when did we start to assume that the value of those higher frequencies was proportional to their energy? This is one of those assumptions that looks good on the surface, but we actually prove it fallacious all the time. <br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Let's talk soup. If you make a quart of good chicken soup, you'll be using almost a quart of water. Some noodles, some chicken, and some of this and that: oregano, thyme, marjoram perhaps, a touch of chile, and a nice pinch of salt. This gives you rough a kilogram of soup.<br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">How much do you suppose those seasonings weigh? About three grams, mostly salt. So we can leave them out, right? They're just a tiny part of the total weight, so they can't be important. Who cares about three-tenths of a percent? It's a lot of trouble to get fresh spices anyway, so the economics don't add up. We'll just leave it all out, and our chicken soup will be soup and chicken, and nobody will be the wiser.<br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Stop looking at me like that, I'm just proving a point. <br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Yes, you're right. Leave out those herbs and the salt, and you've destroyed the succulence of the dish. And yet they're way less than a hundredth of its weight. <br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This principle applies everywhere. Oil on bearings? It's milligrams on grams. Perfume? maybe five milligrams, dabbed behind the ear of a 50,000 milligram lady. You've got a microscopic veneer of paint on your house, a hint of pigment that floods that deep color into a beautiful silk scarf, a half-carat diamond (1/300 of an ounce) making something suddenly very romantic out of a plain gold ring. They're all very tiny proportions, but they're what characterizes in the finished product. <br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The audio that conventional telephones ignore is like that. Not much energy, but it turns "failing" into "sailing" and an exhausted finish into a successful and energized meeting.<br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Set your own company's gourmet meeting chefs free. Restore those HD Voice spices and seasonings so they can begin serving up tastier, more productive telephone conferences!<br />
</div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;"><br />
</span></span></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-1333979189613312282009-09-24T17:14:00.000-07:002009-09-24T17:14:28.911-07:00From consonants to cultureI did not see this one coming.<br />
<br />
I've been talking for years about HD Voice (I'll post another thing about what that is) and how it becomes essential when you have a phone session that's anything less than perfect: accents, speakerphones, room noise, soft talkers, identification, technical talk or detail of any sort. But a CEO was telling a story today that added a new dimension for confusion: culture.<br />
<br />
He spoke to us with a noticeable European accent, although nothing particularly thick. And he told us how some months ago, he was leading a discussion, by speakerphone, with his company's Asia team. He got to the core of the discussion and launched into a long, involved explanation of the most critical points. He had some (but not too many) slides, he crefully guided the team through his spreadsheets, he illustrated his lecture with other stories and lessons, and finally reached the triumphant end of a well thought-out and clearly delivered exposition, energized and ready for the flood of excited questions he knew would be coming. <br />
<br />
Instead, there was silence. The distant chirping of crickets. The room held a long, uncomfortable pause, and finally a quiet, respectful voice hesitatingly stuttered a question that made it instantly clear that they not only didn't understand what he had said, they didn't even understand what the subject was! <br />
<br />
As he drew them out with questions of his own, the light dawned. He realized that their culture was one in which they would never interrupt with questions. By their traditions, many of them would never ask, even afterward - the greater offense would be to question such a person as him, so they accepted their lot and held silent. <br />
<br />
This CEO realized then that any tool that could help them better talk together was going to be essential if this partnership were to succeed. That's when he had the link converted to wideband audio, HD Voice, for the next meeting. <br />
<br />
So I'm adding "culture" to the master list of why-HD-is-essential. It's another element of how people talk, and it can get in the way when they can't talk clearly.Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-47822872040258248942008-07-14T10:32:00.000-07:002009-09-24T18:59:59.698-07:00iPhone vs. Entourage: The iPhone 2.0 Smackdown<i>September 2009 update: Yeah yeah yeah I know that even iPhone <b>3.0</b> is already a fading memory for most of us and Apple is moving on to create better and more creative affronts to our unrealistic expectations of them. Writings behind here are rather old, if you haven't noticed, so please take these elder brethern in the forgiving spirit you would extend to a 1958 issue of Popular Science or a printout of an old Gopher page. They were created on punch cards, after all, so cut me some slack.</i><br />
<br />
With the iPhone 2.0 release now in hand, it’s been time to discover new, and old, issues with synchronization. I’ve inadvertently wiped my Outlook calendar twice, and finally figured out why. There’s a bug in Apple’s iPhone–to–iCal software, and one in Microsoft’s Entourage–to-iCal, if I am getting this right.<br />
<br />
First, let’s review how this has been working for the past year or so. Let’s start with the components.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Apple’s calendar program:</span><br />
Apple has their own calendar program, iCal. It can maintain multiple calendars, which are keyed by color and name. Let’s say you’ve decided to make Private green, and business blue. There’s a list of calendars on the screen, and you can check which ones you want to display at any time. If you have a 9AM private appointment for “Dentist” and a 10AM business appointment for “Meeting”, then your calendar will show “Dentist” in a green box, and “Meeting” in a blue box.<br />
<br />
In that list of calendars, you can also highlight a whole calendar, and delete it (it asks if you’re sure).<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Apple’s iPhone program:</span><br />
When you have an iPhone plugged in, you can specify what things should be synchronized: music, videos, contacts, calendar, and so on. You can also specify “copy computer to iPhone just this once” for each function.<br />
<br />
What it does is sync iCal to the iPhone. It can also sync .Mac (dot mac), which is their web-based service, in the process so you can keep your calendar in the cloud, but I’ve not enabled that since simple earthbound reliability has been enough of a challenge.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Microsoft’s Office and Sync program:</span><br />
Microsoft has an Office suite for Mac, and that’s what I’m using, the latest releast: 2008. Word, Excel, PowerPoint. They all look like their PC equivalents, mostly And, for some odd reason, they call the Office suite Entourage, which does email, calendar and contacts, and looks way different from Outlook. But it works, and connects to the corporate server, so I don’t complain. Entourage has a set of Preferences (like all mac apps), and among these are “synchronize events and tasks with iCal and .mac”.<br />
<br />
Sync services between Microsoft Office and Mac programs are done by a separate program, "Sync", also written by Microsoft's Mac group. It's always running, and for the calendar it coordinates Entourage’s database to iCal. You never know when it will do this; there’s an element of surprise involved. Sometimes it’s seconds, sometimes hours.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Office for Mac 200</span>8<br />
I changed from 2004 to 2008 (hesitant to call it “upgraded”) about four months ago. Things have been working fine.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">The iPhone</span><br />
The iPhone has a calendar program which looks a little like...well, like any calendar program. You can see your appointments, open them up to read them, make new appointments.<br />
<br />
So those are the pieces. I never use iCal specifically, its blue “Entourage” calendar is just a transfer point for calendar information as it buzzes back and forth between Entourage and iPhone.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Iphone 2.0</span><br />
This is where peaceful Mac – Windows coexistence starts to collapse. Two different chains of events occurred.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">First problem:</span> My Outlook calendar was flooded with newly-generated multiple entries for old events, mostly multiple-day events. So I would have eight entries for an all-day meeting called “Event,” on Wednesday, for example, and six entries for “Different Event” on Thursday, and so on. It pretty much filled the screen although I found that the previous entries were still in there, just covered over. I also found that there were now two “Outlook” calendars in iCal.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">What I did: </span><br />
> Deleted the spurious entries in Outlook by hand.<br />
> Unchecked the “sync Entourage to iCal” preference<br />
> Re-checked the “sync Entourage to iCal” preference. When you do this, it gives a new option to copy Entourage to iCal, copy iCal to Entourage, or merge. I chose “copy Entourage to iCal”.<br />
> Found that iCal had a second Entourage calendar again, so I deleted this.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">What happened:</span><br />
> Entourage was zeroed out, all blank.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">What I conclude:</span><br />
> There’s a bug in the Microsoft sync code for this corner case: if you delete the iCal calendar it’s trying to copy Entourage to, it deletes the Entourage data too.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Second problem:</span><br />
It turns out that those multiple entries were caused by syncing iCal to iPhone. I clicked the option to copy iCal to iPhone, and multiple entries were the result.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Conclusions:</span><br />
<br />
> Don’t delete a duplicate Entourage calendar in iCal until synchronization is complete. Even then, be scared.<br />
<br />
> I am still thinking about how to get iPhone back into orderly synchronization. What should work is<br />
> Copy Entourage to iCal unconditionally once, via Preferences<br />
> Copy iCal to iPhone unconditionally once, via configuration option<br />
> Turn on normal sync<br />
<br />
But it’s not operating reliably.<br />
<br />
I offer this for those who may encounter the problem. It’s not dissimilar to problems I had several years ago with Palm synchronization to Outlook, but those things appear to have been cleared up and our IT organization is pretty happy with Good (which accounts for their recent sneers at my problems).Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-9415566001873203742008-01-31T08:30:00.000-08:002008-01-31T08:35:51.245-08:00Entourage Not Connecting via VPN: A hintThere are other sources on the web regarding this problem: Entourage 2004 shows "(Not Connected)" next to the account name, but gives no clue as to why. This occurs even when the VPN connection exists and is solid, and occurs without warning on an otherwise functional computer. Most recently, I closed the laptop at one location and opened it at another, re-entering VPN. Restarting the machine didn't fix it, nor did any of the online advice.<div><br /></div><div>I wandered over to the IP guys, and one of those tolerant gentlepersons suggested that I try using the numeric URL for the Outlook server, rather than its name. This eliminates the step of going to the DNS. </div><div><br /></div><div>Tried that, and it works great. Thanks, guys! </div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-29352467210201574482008-01-18T12:13:00.001-08:002008-01-18T12:15:16.193-08:00GroundswellI'm at a company conference. One guy in a large meeting room came over to talk when he saw my laptop - turns out he had been elected by his whole group to ask me how I got the Mac! <div><br /></div><div>Two weeks ago our desktop computer support person from IT mentioned that he thought we should change all the PC's to Macs. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-16481698164462902012008-01-17T22:08:00.000-08:002008-01-18T12:10:09.025-08:00Cisco VPN with Mac<div><div>Guess what? Cisco has a Mac version of their VPN! It works under 10.4 versions, and under 10.5 and 10.5.1 as well!</div><div><br /></div><div>If your IT department doesn't support Mac (as I've said, they're invariably overloaded so that's not an unreasonable initial stance), you can either pull in a favor from a friend in IT (she just has to go to the protected part of the Cisco site, which she can do if she's in your IT group, and get the Mac client for VPN and email it to you), or google the web for a copy. I found a current copy on some European site, perhaps a university. (Suppose I could have shmoozed one of our IT guys, but I got into the challenge.) The newer version I now have, 4.9.01 from about 2006, is much more forgiving of the vagaries of hotel networks and such, so I am no longer having any problems (well, no more than my PC friends) with consistency as long as the actual connection is good. </div><div><br /></div><div>In a hotel, the sequence is: pick a network, clear a path to the internet, then clear a path through VPN. Hotels are the most challenging, so if you can do a hotel, you're a pro. Home DSL is easy in comparison.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Pick a network.</span></div><div>1. Plug in the network cable, or click on the wireless antenna icon.</div><div>2. If you clicked wireless, it will show you a list of possible networks. Pick the one you want and click on that.</div><div>3. The antenna symbol will now show you some bars, which says you have a physical connection. Or it won't, in which case you are missing a password, or something's changed. </div><div><br /></div><div>What you have now is a path to the hotel's network. From here, you need to get to the real internet; the hotel may give you some ads or limited Yahoo access, but they'll usually charge for full access.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Clear a path to the internet.</span></div><div>1. Click Safari, or your chosen browser. Do you get your home page? I bet you don't. I bet you get the hotel's page, you've been redirected to it, because they want to ensure your satisfaction (charge you money) and deliver optimal performance (charge you money) before they let you get to the network, a grace for which they're likely to want to charge you money. Heck, they're charging you $10.95 for bad porn on the TV with all the interesting bits edited out, why would they let you have internet porn, with those bits still retained, for free? And the details of surfing aren't reported on your hotel bill, so you can go ahead and prepare your expense report with a clear conscience. I'm sure you've done at least one work-related email, right? </div><div><br /></div><div>Incidentally, I know this because I talked with a guy who did this. He was an odd one; he didn't seem to think that we were given sex so we'd be easier to damn. </div><div><br /></div><div>2. OK, you've got the hotel's page, so you agree to the charges, or you click to say that although they're not charging you, you're willing to take responsibility for your own actions. One way or another, you get a few last frantic popups asking for spare change or to meet their sister who is lonely, and it says "you're now on the web." Type www.google.com or something you know what it looks like. If it looks like that, you're done. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Click the Cisco VPN button</span></div><div>If there's a path to the internet, it will show you a small introductory window, looks like a skinny lady on the beach (properly attired, which is Cisco porn I suppose), and then ask for account and name. You type that in, it consults its inner child, and then comes back with a new popup that says that your company owns your computer, your soul, and your sense of self. You agree to that, as I always do, and the window goes away. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then there you're left with this this Cisco window, just hanging around on an otherwise clean screen. Hit Command-h (it's the "hide" shortcut; "Command" is the "Apple" button, or the "four-leaf clover" button; there's not a clear Windows analog to it and it took me a while to figure out when I first started using the Mac). The Cisco window will now tuck itself into the toolbar, wherever you've put it on your screen. If you want to see the Cisco window again, such as to log out of VPN, you can either click that thing at the bottom right or Command-Tab your way through the currently operating programs (do you know that Command-Tab shortcut? it's really handy) to get to it. </div><div><br /></div><div>You're now on your corporate network, courtesy of Wozniak, Jobs, Chambers, Morgridge, and probably 10,000 talented Silicon Valleyers who actually did the work. Welcome!</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Leaving Cisco VPN</span></div><div>When you shut down your computer or disconnect from the web, it's cleanest if you bring the VPN window back up and click "disconnect." Otherwise a complaint pops up and you have to close that too. I had some problems with laptop restart in the past, under earlier versions of VPN, but that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore. </div></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-520250290861574552008-01-16T23:36:00.000-08:002008-01-16T23:50:20.071-08:00MacWorld, and Mr. Jobs' "failure"A very brief note for today. Seeing the responses to Mr. Jobs' keynote, in which viewers are disappointed that they were not "wowed" more, I can't help thinking that the word "spoiled" has unfairly fallen into disuse. The resurgence of Apple is an accomplishment of almost mythical proportions in modern times, and any judging must be done on its average performance, not its instantaneous. If this trend of "he wowed us last year, but didn't wow us as much this year so I'm disappointed" continues, I will expect to see this continue into increasingly fractalized microclimates: "but then he wowed me from 1:18 until 1:22 when he hit a lull and then I was really disappointed, but then at 1.24 he seemed to turn into a tailwind and wowed me again for seven minutes until..."<div><br /></div><div>At some point, this kind of evaluation ceases to serve and commences to strut, hollow-eyed and pointless. We read for understanding and perspective. Please give us that. </div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-21004811781722564502007-11-09T13:19:00.000-08:002008-01-18T12:13:01.924-08:00AC Adapter: PowerBook vs. MacBook Pro<div>Update, January 15 2008: I've heard about problems with the Magsafe connectors. Just to let you know, I haven't had a tick of trouble. Zero heating, zero fraying, nothing that would be a leading indicator of trouble to come. I take care to grasp the body of the connector, of course (no yanking on the wire), but it seems pretty durable. </div><div><br /></div><div>Original:</div><div><br /></div>Three adapters have arrived. <div><br /></div><div>Stated capacity: 85W, up from 65W</div><div>Appearance: Identical</div><div>Size: The new ones are about 10% taller and wider, maybe 5% thicker. In other words, barely larger.</div><div>Weight: Not perceptibly heavier.</div><div><br /></div><div>This gives four adapters, the normal portion. </div><div>> 1 for backpack</div><div>> 1 for work desk</div><div>> 1 for home, downstairs</div><div>> 1 for home, upstairs.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-85001949578261397482007-11-09T13:12:00.000-08:002007-11-09T13:18:21.391-08:00Batteries: PowerBook vs. MacBook ProTwo new batteries for the yet-to-arrive MacBook Pro are on my desk. They are flatter and wider than the PowerBook batteries, so they must be using something other than the classic 18650 Li-ion cells. Maybe Li-polymer? Similar brushed-Al look, and the same wonderful power meter (push the flat button and one to five green LED's on the battery face light for four seconds, depending on state of charge).<div><br /></div><div>Labeled Capacity: Now 60WH, up from 40WH</div><div>Weight: Now 0.95 pound, up from 0.70 pound (postage scale, .05 lb resolution)</div><div>Voltage: Still 10.8V</div><div><br /></div><div>This gives three packs total, which is my normal traveling complement to accommodate long plane flights with no power jack (the situation encountered more often than not).</div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-6207507987730190302007-11-09T13:10:00.000-08:002007-11-09T13:12:53.587-08:00PowerBook to MacBook Pro: Transition ComingThe elements necessary to change from the current 1.25GHz PowerBook, 160GB HDD/2GB DRAM, to a new 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, Core2Duo, 250GB HDD/2GB DRAM, have been ordered. Updates will come as they do. Since this involves swapping out the entire laptop-related personal infrastructure, this comprises a number of parts.Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-1261287646507115042007-11-02T11:51:00.000-07:002007-11-02T13:21:26.649-07:00Post-1.1.1 iPhone statusThings change. In this case, an adventurous upgrade to 1.1.1 resulted in a bricking of the iPhone, although most user experience indicated that it would leave a usable (but application-free) phone as long as the SIM wasn't unlocked. Apparently one of the applications touched the third rail and what remained was a $599 art piece. <div><br /></div><div>Let's define "brick." A brieked iPhone is not completely nonfunctional. A bricked iPhone is actually an iPhone with its function set stripped down from at least a dozen to only two functions: an entry screen that times out (and features a photo of the earth, a lovely planet while it lasts), and a slider that sends you to "Emergency Call." Emergency Call is the second screen, with a 12-key touchpad and a "call" button that I haven't had the courage to press. But you can enter digits, and erase them, and enter more. Eeyore and the Useful Pot, putting digits in and taking them out again. </div><div><br /></div><div>The reliability of operation in this mode is evidence to me that this was a deliberate choice by Apple, not the accidental damage their PR implied. It always works perfectly, just with many fewer functions. That's not consistent with "we don't know what may happen," which usually yields flickering pixels, dead screens, clicking speakers, or just permanent, irreversible silence. I usually don't have much problem with Apple's positions on things, but this bit of spurious pomposity, this seemingly deliberate vandalism, is beneath them. I hope that the decision process by which it was allowed to occur is corrected and not allowed to repeat.</div><div><br /></div><div>But, anyway: it's still useful for showing people. I took this elegant monolith to Denmark, and the amount of interest, even with almost nothing working, was surprising. They were trying to hold it, playing with those digits, talking about everything they could see and feel. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since this happened, there has been a lot of progress with unbrickers, and I've got it back to a reasonably working state. It no longer syncs reliably with the PowerBook, which has always had dodgy USB interoperability even with my old iPod, but it does sync with a Mac Mini, so I think this is most likely an issue with the laptop. </div><div><br /></div><div>Time to move to the next phase in the master plan...</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422470099596980274.post-31631708599988360312007-10-12T12:37:00.000-07:002007-10-12T12:57:08.944-07:00Today's iPhone statusYes, I have an iPhone. Bought it shortly after it came out for all the obvious reasons, including the real ones and the rationalizations. One real reason was to reduce the number of "things" that I carry; at present, the core set is a cellphone, an iPod, and a PalmPilot running some applications. <div><br /></div><div>Getting something new includes figuring how it fits into your life. This is true whether you are acquiring kids, bicycles, or iPhones. In the case of the iPhone, there are several roles that need to transition if this to be considered successful.</div><div><ul id=""><li>Phone: My company cellphone is already on AT&T, but the company does not support iPhone, has not negotiated deals with AT&T. For the duration and to be able to evaluate the phone, I'm paying for an account myself.</li><li>iPod: The old iPod is a third-generation 60GB non-video model. Paring down 60GB of essential audio to about 8GB was a lot less angst than I expected. It's still on the computer, after all. </li><li>Palm: The applications are the hardest part, because the iPhone as shipped is functionally incomplete. The web-based apps that Apple encourages are unreliable and slow. The user community has developed a set of embedded apps, but the latest Apple update breaks them. Deciding that I prefer these apps to Apple's new UI tweaks (and having no interest in purchasing more Apple songs and ringtones, which is also facilitaed by the new update), I'm staying at iPhone v1.0.2 until a better story comes along. This gives me a reader, keychain, true IM, a couple of games, even a Mac-style "Finder" into the OS.<br /></li></ul></div><div>New features. That's another nice part of it. I've found a great belt clip for the iPhone, and so have a free pocket for the first time in years. Can play widescreen movies (watching "An American in Paris" on the iPhone is one of the closest things to miraculous I have experienced in years). Some of those apps exploit the new platform: a pedometer, a tilt displayer, an etch-a-sketch that erases the image when you shake the phone!</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jeffrey Rodmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07905102516180069262noreply@blogger.com0