New Picasa 3, beta version, looks fantastic

Introducing Picasa 3.0 (beta)



I posted a while back about Picasa 2.7, the stable version that I currently use. It's a wonderful, useful, Free to download and use program from Google, that runs on Windows and Linux.

As the video demonstrates, the Picasa Beta Version 3.0 looks amazing, with many new and wonderful features. But it's still Beta, potentially unstable, so I'm going to wait for the final release. Unfortunately I couldn't find a target date for that, but when it happens I'll be sure and blog about it again. In the meantime, these new features look like something we can look forward to.

Webmonkey has a short review on the latest Picasa beta for Linux:

Picasa for Linux 3.0: Photo Management Done Right


     

2009: The end of TV broadcasting as we know it

In February of next year, all TV stations are supposed to make the switch over to digital broadcasting, making analog equipment obsolete. We are being inundated presently with advertising, advising people with analog TV's who still get their programs through the airwaves instead of cable, to get adapter equipment to upgrade their TV's to receive digital broadcasts.

That would be fine... if it worked. But will it work just as good as the analog broadcasts it's replacing? If the following article is any indication, I would say "no". From Doc Searls at Linux Journal:

What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February?

[...] On February 17, 2009, all U.S. television stations will be required to switch off their analog transmitters and use digital transmission exclusively. Nearly all of that will happen on what's left of the UHF band. Most stations will maintain their old channel branding, and still be known as "Channel 2" or "Channel 12", but their signals will in nearly all cases be coming in on a new UHF channel.

[...]

If you have an HDTV and live within sight of New York TV station transmitters on the Empire State Building, you can probably pick them up over an antenna on your set or your roof. In fact, a loop or bowtie antenna will do. So will length of wire about 5 inches long, attached to the center conductor of your coaxial connection on the back of your set.

But if you live farther away, good luck. Your old VHF TV station not only won't have the range it did on VHF, but will probably not have the same range as an old analog signal on the same UHF frequency. It certainly won't have the same behavior. The signals tend to be either there or not-there. They don't degrade gracefully with increasing "snow", as analog signals did. They break up into a plaid-like pattern, or disappear entirely.

[...]

Digital signal transmission is also very different from the analog sort. For a variety of arcane technical reasons, many (perhaps most) digital signals are directional. That is, they operate at their full licensed power in only a few (or perhaps only one) direction, and have big dents or "nulls" in other directions. In the old analog days directionality was the exception rather than the rule, and was usually intentional, to protect other signals on the same or adjacent frequencies, or to pull back on the signal in the direction of a mountain that might cause unwanted reflections or places (such as the sea) where nobody lived anyway. Not the case with DTV. Lots of new DTV signals are directional just anyway.

It's interesting to see how this plays out where we live in Santa Barbara (and where I'm writing this now).

On my old roof antenna and its rotator, I got just about every analog TV station between Santa Barbara and San Diego. That included both VHF and UHF signals. With that antenna (the top one from Radio Shack) I even got little K35DG, a low-power UHF station at UC San Diego with a signal that puts a deep null in our direction (west-northwest, nearly 200 miles across the Pacific ocean). I sent them emails reporting reception and they were amazed.

In our new house (next door to the old one that had the big roof antenna) I anticipated the digital switchover and installed a high-gain Winegard HD-9022 UHF antenna. For analog reception it gets every UHF in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana — in nearly all weather, at nearly all times of year. But that's analog. What about digital?

For DTV, the Winegard does the best it can, but it's not enough. The slight terrain shadowing between here and Broadcast Peak (where most our local TV stations radiate from) makes the two digital signals from there — KPMR and KEYT — almost impossible to receive. I haven't seen KPMR at all (could be it's not on the air yet), and KEYT's signal on Channel 27 is barely there. In fact it's so bad that the one time I got it the signal didn't stay visible long enough for me to shoot a picture of it. That's a far cry from KEYT's signal on Channel 3, which was crystalline on our old roof antenna and is still okay with rabbit ears on our old Trinitron in the basement.

Ironically, the only clear DTV pictures we get are mostly from 200 or more miles away across the ocean — from San Diego/Tijuana. All our HD viewing of over-the-air TV is from there. As you see here and here, reception is either perfect or gone. In fact it's most of the time. Setting up the DVR ro record programs is pointless, give the low hit/miss ratio of reception.

My points:

1. For many viewers, the digital signals aren't going to be there, no matter what the viewer does (other than hunt them down on cable or satellite).
2. The stations themselves in most cases are giving up viewers, including (as in WECT's case -- see below) whole regional markets.

It's all a big new game of hard-to-get.

Of course, what you get from the FCC and the TV industry is pure propaganda. If you watch TV at all you have surely seen many reassuring messages about what's going to happen in February. If all you watch are cable or satellite, you won't notice the difference. But if you watch over the air signals, the difference will possibly be huge, regardless of what the promotional messages say. So will the disconnect between the whole concept of television and its origins as a live terrestrial medium. Hey, what's the "range" of a YouTube video? Or of anything you send over the Net, including live video streams? [...]

It's the end of TV as we've known it. I suspect that so many people now get their TV from cable or satellite, that the people who complain about the new digital broadcasts limited reception will simply be ignored, and told to get cable if they want better reception.

Meanwhile, the FCC has auctioned off many of the former analog TV bands for about 20 BILLION dollars, to new owners like AT&T, and Verizon:

FCC releases 700MHz auction details, Verizon, AT&T big winners

Some people are predicting that the next "Big Thing" will be TV content being sent to cell phones. We shall see.

I can't personally say I will miss analog TV broadcasting, because I haven't used it for decades. In the city, so many things interfered with reception, we went with cable. Here in rural Oregon, we have only one TV station within analog broadcast range, and it comes in so badly that we don't watch it. We get DISH satellite TV. The programing you pay for also tends to be better than the crap the networks offer for free.

I'll miss the concept of analog TV the way it was, but I won't miss it in practical reality. The change-over may suck for those who still depend on the airwave broadcasts, but Doc Searls believes that all things considered, the change is ultimately a positive development in the evolution of TV:

[...] This essay, and a shorter one in an upcoming Linux Journal, are swan songs for my expiring expertise (such as it is, or was) in analog broadcast engineering. Knowing this kind of stuff will be as useful to me as the Morse code I haven't used in close to 50 years. And I'm looking forward to it.

Because the failures of the DTV switchover will bring into sharp relief the obsolescence of official notions about What TV Is.

What we called TV has already become nothing more than a form of data that can be carried over the Net at nearly zero cost, and stored anywhere for about the same. Live transmission is a demanding thing, but not once the pipes get fat enough. Where they aren't, we have podcasting and variations in file size to avoid bandwidth hoggery.

Already anybody can produce high-def TV. As devices such as the Red camera come down in price, along with processing, data storage and render farming, Hollywood-grade video production quality will no longer be exclusive to Hollywood. Collaboration and distribution over the Net will inevitably follow.

As it does, it will become ever more clear that "TV stations" will be repositioned as doomed mainframes.

There will always be a need for local and regional news, and coverage of events by organizations and individuals whose interest and expertise is also local and regional. But "range" will be determined by interest, not by transmission medium. [...]

Read the rest to see what he has to say about the brave new future of TV. The whole article is worth reading, it has many more details (and references and examples) than I've excerpted here, and lots of embedded links, too. It's a thorough examination of the topic, and you won't have to be a geek to understand it.
     

Are we becoming a nation of idiots?

This piece from the Dallas Morning News looks at several major factors in the dumbing down of public discourse, and gets it exactly right:

Susan Jacoby: Is America getting dumber?

[...] Dumbness, to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print (and by video, I mean every form of digital media); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book – fiction or nonfiction – over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) Americans are reading less and less. The lines between news and entertainment are becoming blurred, into a mish-mash of "info-tainment". Focusing on video media instead of reading seems to also encourage shorter attention spans, which is even manifesting itself in the way presidential campaigns are conducted:

[...] As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, politicians are under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that from 1968 to 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate – featuring the candidate's voice – dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, it was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge. [...]

It's not my imagination the electorate seems to be getting dumber and dumber. A growing number of people seem to lack the most basic kind of knowledge. But it isn't just the lack of knowledge that is the the problem:

[...] That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.

Call this anti-rationalism – a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation. [...]

Exactly. How are people who don't even understand the basics of the earth's physical relationship to the sun going to be able to even begin to understand debates about the weather and so-called "global warming"? They won't bother to understand; they'll just follow their "feelings". I find this pretty scary stuff. It's a kind of Brave New World that we don't need. This article goes into a lot more detail, and is well worth reading. Identifying the problem properly is the first step to begin turning it around.

And clearly, it DOES need to be turned around. The facts are appalling:

Only 1 of 2 students graduate high school in US cities: study

[...] "Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma."

Based on 2003-2004 data, the report said that across the country the graduation average for public school students is 69.9 percent, with the best success rate in suburbs -- 74.9 percent -- and rural districts -- 73.2 percent.

Asian-Americans score the highest graduation rate, at 80 percent, with whites at 76.2 percent and Hispanics at 57.8 percent.

Women graduate at a much higher rate than men, 73.6 percent to 66.0 percent.

In the country's city schools, the study found that in urban areas generally, just 60.4 percent graduate, and in the principal school districts of the top 50 cities, barely half graduate. [...]

And as if these figures are not bad enough, consider that many of the students who do graduate are "functional illiterates". They can read traffic signs and labels on packages at the supermarket, but they can't understand newspaper or magazine articles, comprehend written instructions, write letters or balance a checkbook. A high school diploma is worth less and less. Nowadays many employers consider applicants with less than two years of college to be unemployable.

All of this is fixable, but we need to start reversing it now. Political correctness and Self Esteem BS be damned.