Status-Q

The general population really doesn’t understand digital technology. And it’s costing them money.

This was brought home to me last weekend while helping a friend choose a new TV. In the local shop, I noticed a variety of HDMI cables for sale. Now HDMI, for those of you not familiar with it, is quite a nice standard. It provides digital video and digital audio down a single compact and convenient connection. Much neater than the bulky DVI, VGA, SCART etc which preceded it.

However, notice that it’s a digital standard. This means that, subject to major failures, what goes in at one end ought to come out at the other. Why, then, does the store sell a variety of cables of different qualities and prices? In the days of analog connections, there was something to be said for low-impedance connections and for careful screening. Who knows, those articles in the hi-fi press extolling the virtues of gold plugs and low-oxygen copper cables might even have had something to them.

But in the digital world, if you put ones and zeros in one end of a cable and don’t get something recognisable as ones and zeros at the other, you don’t get a slightly worse picture or sound. You get complete breakdown, and major image or sound corruption. A cable which does that should not be sold at a cheaper price; it shouldn’t be sold at all. Better-quality cabling will allow things to work over greater distances, but for the average user with a DVD player under his TV, it will make no difference at all.

For example, my (quite expensive) CD player is connected to my (quite expensive) amplifier through a digital COAX connection. I use a single phono-phono cable I bought for about $1 in a Radio Shack sale. And the sound is perfect.

So I asked the nice man in the shop about the fact that they sold a modest-length HDMI cable for over £100 just beside the one for £15 (which, incidentally, probably costs less than a dollar to make).

“Oh yes”, he said, “it does have an effect. We had a customer do a side-by-side test just recently and he could see a difference. He bought the more expensive cable.”

“But how?”, I asked. “It’s ones and zeros! You don’t get better quality ones or nicer-shaped zeros by paying more! How could there be a difference?”

“Well, the customer said there was one. I don’t really understand the science behind how it all works…”

The customer is always right, you see. Even when science is against him.

And now back to my copy of Richard Dawkins…

Followup: Gizmodo did some tests and agreed with my assertion. It makes no difference whether you have cheap leads or expensive ones for short distances. It can be worth paying the extra if your cable is more than 50ft long.

Why should I sell the Canadian farmers’ wheat?

So asked Pierre Trudeau, a Canadian Prime Minister in the sixties.

“Why on earth am I reading that quotation here?”, asked the readers of Status-Q.

Well, simply because it struck me when I saw it in the Economist this morning as a lovely illustration of why kids need to be taught how to use the apostrophe, something which appears not to be fashionable in schools today.

The Economist, of course, got it right. But if Trudeau had asked “Why should I sell the Canadian farmers wheat?” it would have had almost exactly the opposite meaning – a ‘coals to Newcastle’ scenario.

And if the apostrophe had been one place to the left, he would either have been questioning a specific favouritism to one farmer, or making some more general statement about a stereotypical agrarian Canadian. We think the latter more likely because we happen to know he was PM of that country, but had M.Trudeau been a grumpy flour merchant in Provence who disliked one of his new immigrant neighbours, things might have been different.

Anyway, nothing earth-shattering here. I simply offer it to parents who need more examples of why homework is important!

DisplayLink seem to have made quite a splash at CES with their demo of a monitor connected via wireless USB. Lots of people have picked up the story:

• EverythingUSB
• Ars technica
• Engadget

to name just a few…

A quick test of Joe Tan’s Flickr Photo Album plugin for WordPress.

It makes it very easy to drop photos from your Flickr albums into blog posts. This is jolly convenient, but I have to decide where I want to keep my online photos in general. If I keep them here on my own server, then they’re always under my control. I expect this blog to keep going for many more years, but what happens to the archives if, say, I let my Flickr Pro account expire…

Some people have been asking how my jury service (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) was going.

The answer is that it didn’t!

I duly turned up at Cambridge Crown Court for the first two days, sat in the jurors’ waiting room for a few hours each day and then was allowed to go home at lunchtime. On the second day, they told my group we wouldn’t be needed until the following Monday and we had the rest of the week off for good behaviour.

On Monday, I returned, to spend another morning waiting, before the clerk said that they just didn’t have as many trials as expected, and were there any volunteers who would like to be excused further service at this point? My hand was up before she’d finished speaking, and so it was that I spent three long mornings inside the Crown Court without ever actually seeing a courtroom.

Some people might have been annoyed at this unnecessary disruption to their life, but I wasn’t, for three reasons:

• First, I rather liked most of my fellow jurors-in-waiting and the court staff, and there was a generally cheery atmosphere.
• Second, having my laptop and a 3G connection meant that I could do quite a lot of real work, and I had podcasts to listen to and watch, as well as a good book. I carry my office in my backpack and can work almost anywhere now.
• Lastly, and most importantly, I remembered John telling me what Gerard, a mutual friend, had said when John complained about the inefficiencies in his jury service experience. I probably won’t do Gerard’s argument justice (pun intended!) but it was along the lines of the following: There are inefficiencies in the justice system. It’s a nuisance. But it’s a price we need to pay. The most efficient way to deal with criminals is to round them up and shoot them. But if we want a better system than that, we have to be prepared for some inconvenience.