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I have a Friend who was born in the same year as me, 1945 and rather oddly on the very same day in October as my elder brother Michael who died in New York in the late 1970s and was born in 1943. My friend Alan and I met at Primary School and over 50 years later are still mates through thick and thin.

Anyway, earlier on this year he bought an iPhone and passed me his rather nice Nokia N73 he had been using which was fine except, I warned him that I might pass it on to one of my Sons because it was far more sophisticated than my current PAYGo usage or indeed, requirements. However, I suspected that he rather wanted me to have it and in due course I found someone to whom I could pass on my rather nice but simple Nokia I had bought in January to replace my 5 year old phone.

And Then Again…

Within a few months, the iPhone was upgraded to a 3G version and apparently my mate Alan was entitled to an ‘upgrade’, all jolly good stuff ! Now the iPhone is a wonderful bit of kit so when he went to pick up his 3G upgrade he was quite surprised to find that they didn’t want the original (only a few months old), handset back. Very kindly, Alan sent me the original iPhone although whether you could get a pay as you go deal on it was a question in itself.

I played with it and decided that it was indeed a clever bit of kit but, it was also very clearly a “lifestyle” technology and I just didn’t have such a lifestyle so no good for me clearly ! However, I did know somebody who…

To cut a long story short, O2 had already been working on PAYG deals on the iPhone because they knew that with the launch of the 3G version, there would be lots of ‘spare’ handsets floating around. I sent it to my son Michael who has made good use of it all on a monthly ‘deal’ that was better than the one he had previously.

Mobile phones are little computers and ‘smart phones’ must be worth £500 each but whilst some phones, this iPhone being an example where the model still being ‘desirable’ there will be a second hand value but in a sense, that is the exception to the rule because probably the vast majority of second hand mobile phones have a value of zero.

Other Thoughts That Flow…

Clearly anyone that can keep the same mobile handset for 5 years is no “phone/fashion freak” and the painful truth is that I have had the same phone number since 1999 and still can’t remember it off the top of my head so mobiles are not a personal fetish. However, in part because that was how I earned my living but as importantly through computer generated graphics, I am a keen user, computers are of great interest to me but even here I feel a large degree of “overload” and even a degree of irrelevance in much that is currently being offered.

It is almost as if, setting aside any global downturn, as consumers of electronic gizmo’s we would stop buying anyway because we are totally ‘pigged out’ on that stuff.

3D Graphics

Back in 1996 I started investing heavily in 3D graphics with the launch of Autodesk’s Max software which was designed to run on NT 3.5/NT 4 a 32 bit operating environment but, Max also had another “trick” in that the programs code was optimised to run on dual processors.

All computer programs ultimately are “mathematical” but none more so than relational databases and computer graphics so when one talks about a program being optimised for multiple processors, it means that the “problem” can be divided into streams that can do the number crunching using more than one processor and reassembled into the final result. Possibly the most spectacular example of this in commercial use concerns something called network rendering.

CGI – Computer Generated Imagery is now a common factor in many Hollywood and TV productions and whilst designers will build the graphic sequences on workstations, the final output will be ‘film frames’. If we take British TV, we work to the PAL standard which is 25 film frames per second, 1,500 for a minute, 90,000 for an hours worth of output.

Each frame has to be rendered – turned into an individual picture and the time that takes will vary according to the complexity of the scene but as an illustration if we take one hour of finished footage which is 90,000 frames @ 3 minutes per one = 270,000 minutes or 4,500 hours which one machine running 24/7 would need just under 188 days to do ! So the solution is to have 100 PCs configured for network rendering and that comes down to a more realistic 18.8 days. I understand that on Lord of the Rings they used a “rendering farm” of over 200 machines.

Multiple Core Processors

In the 4 years I have been down in Somerset, with a lot of help from friends and former colleagues, my whole computer set up has been radically updated. I have two Quad Core workstations, one Intel one AMD, one with 6Gb of RAM, the other with 8GB plus a Dual Core workstation and a Dual Core laptop so I am a very lucky boy. However, whilst Windows Vista x64 and XP x64 are designed for multiple core processors and my latest version of Autodesk Max certainly is, the vast majority of all the other programs I use aren’t and in reality, all this processing capability is going to waste.

Windows itself reminds me of the problem of the “Dreadnought” battleships and the “Heavy Tank” whereby the weight of the protective armour reduces mobility and speed to zero. Vista is total bloater ware and the sooner Microsoft kills it off the better for both them and us because it appears to have been written by machines rather than people. I have just had to do a total rebuild on one Vista PC because an automatic Microsoft Update that went wrong, totally messed it up.

The Bottom Line is:

The technology is great in terms of the hardware, our real problem is the structural complexity combined with the poor quality of the software and therefore one assumes, the poor quality of the software writers.

When I first bought into 3D Max, with VAT the package cost me around £3,000 and I did every upgrade along the way. A few years back they launched an annual “Subscription” scheme which for about 10% pa of the original purchase price, gives me every upgrade free plus, a lot of on-line ‘goodies’ and support.

It is a complex product but a good one that improves all the time and more companies should adopt this business model because we don’t need better hardware, but we sure as heck need better software and perhaps for software companies, regular income rather than “New Product Launches” might encourage better and more efficient programming.