Philip Khor

A look back at Photoshop’s 20 years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iItTsYmy8lQ

It is interesting because my colleagues were discussing Photoshop and Illustrator and design in general. One of the key features of Photoshop is that it is resource hungry. But I think to myself, “Surely this can’t be true. 20 years ago, computers were running 16 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz Central Processing Unit (CPU). Back then 20 MB hard drive cost US$700 and the super rich bought 400 MB (RAM) drive for US$40,000… and they used it just to run Photoshop 1.0″

Back then, graphic designers and artists were using these tools to create wonderful imagery and graphics. Today, we use Photoshop to crop, resize and apply basic manipulation features (lens flare, anyone?) and yet we complain our dual core 2 GHz + systems aren’t capable enough!

We have 500 times more Megahertz than 20 years ago (8 MHz vs 2 x 2000 Mhz) and in term of RAM (or its derivative), a typical rig used for editing has 1000 x more memory ( 16 MB vs 16 GB)

And still we think it is too slow. Maybe it is because software is bloated!

As computers scale in speed and memory capacity, software developers churn out new versions of their software to use up these extra resources. My friend once asked me this, “I have a 8GB laptop. After booting Windows 7, I check available memory and it reports only 4 GB available! What happened to the other 4? There is nothing running in background!”

(this stuff is premium.. but today is pretty cheap to buy!)

iPad is a different class of machine on its own.

Processor: Dual core 1 GHz low power (think something along Atom / Pentium M / Macbook Air processor Low-Voltage range)

RAM: 512 MB (!) gasp.

Gfx: Ok, this one is quite powerful, 9 x more power than the iPhone 4′s chip but it’s lighting up a 1024×768 screen.

What I’m trying to point out is that, all the cool iOS apps can run within this limited specifications. The developers play within their boundaries. Just grab an iPad and play Infinity Blade or Real Racing 2 HD. The fundamental core of the Operating System is very very efficient. From a coding standpoint, and from a technical design standpoint, it is very lightweight. Windows 7 can run great on a 1GB system or a 8 GB system, but the way it uses memory against the actual performance difference is very negligible. It shows the character of the coders working for Microsoft and how slacking and not serious in their work!

yummy

Even the simple angry bird game runs better on the iPad vs the Chrome browser version or any other of the consoles supporting it. The experience is simply much better!

Here is my effort on PS:

Here’s a little bit of fun (using an online GIF creator tool)

Recently I recall reading something about Performance Management. I can’t remember what issue or topic discussion it was about, could have been technology related, could have been comparison of a product or performance of employees. But the lesson I got out of it was a quote:

“This product is terrible not because it is terrible. Because it was pitted against the almighty [more superior product] and when compared against a giant, it looks pathetic.”

To simplify, I think “in order to fairly compare one to another, it must be done through the correct perspective“. Which leaves me to this deceptive advertisement found on a Nissan car.

Latio deceptive Ad

5 star is the gold standard in most ratings. Eg. a 5-star hotel like Marriott or Hilton is 5-star because they’re the best! But then, when Marketing people run out of creative original ideas, they bullshit their way through. Take the Empire Hotel and Country Club in Brunei Darussalam for example who once claimed to be a 6-star hotel. Sure it’s nice (and if you haven’t been there, you should.. it’s worth the experience!) Then there’s the Burj Al-Arab in Dubai – 7 freaking stars (although Wikipedia rightly points out that this rating is misleading)

The people coming out with proposterous claims back themselves up by saying that ratings are subjective and that there is no one agency charged to regulate how people rate things. Sure, there are ‘bodies and associations’ backed by big corporate giant $$$$ who give themselves awards and recognition.

Which reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s Grammy performance; somewhere when the iPad 1 was introduced he smugly said, “And now… let’s give ourselves some awards!”. Who operate the grammy’s? Who makes the decisions on who to get awarded? Who operate and run the awards that your companies get? “Recognised bodies? Congolmerate of special interest groups?” Pe-tuuui!

I think awards are as useless as it doesn’t solve the world’s problems. Kids in kindergarden and pre-school get awards for everything. There are 40 students in a class… there’s always 100 over awards throughout the year to give out. It is frustrating as these children grow up to expect things to be given down to them.

Back to the issue of comparison, I thank God for the freedom to choose whether iWant an iPhone or Android or WinMo or BB. Often times as they are substitute products for each other, people often compare the awesomeness of their Blackberies to the Android cocktail of devices to the niche Windows Mobile (at version 7.5 already although they’re so new in the market) and the benchmark of today, the iPhone.

Whether your phone is 3 star, 5 star or no star, a smartphone without an internet connection is a dumbphone. I’m looking forward to the day 4G LTE capable smartphones become a common place. Digi 3G right now is just miserable when (if and rarely) functional. On the road (especially the highways on long trips), I just couple it with Yes 4G mobile broadband.

This December, I hope you have a good time. Work hard, party hard. And as the economy and the world around us crumble, hang on to your faith. Hang on to your belief (the stuff that kept you going for the past 5 years) because I forsee troubling times ahead!

It wasn’t a holiday for me — I had to work all 5 days of “raya week”. Well, I kept my sights on the 10 day core leave I plan to take during CNY; and that kept me going!

Over the weekend, I did some workout. Had 2 classes of Hip Hop / Salsa / Latin at the gym with Luciano. It was a very good workout. To add to that, I did 3 km in 30 minutes on the ‘mill. Legs are aching, but satisfaction wise — amazing!

Dad’s cooking tonight, looking forward to that. Yesterday I had dry + soup BKT, alone. Cost a bomb, but satisfaction wise — amazing!

Marketplace Conference was… ok. Dato Sri Idris Jala’s speech was good, very entertaining and insightful.

This week’s objective — continue the good momentum in bringing my weight down by doing more exercise. Seems like work stresses has automatically brought weight down from 95 to 92 kilos! September target: 88kg!

Wish me luck!

Oh my gosh! I did it!!!!

Here’s some info on Deuce-7 as your starting hand!!

1. 2-7 (offsuit)

This is the worst hand to start with in Texas Hold ‘Em Poker because there are so few good options: you have no straight draw, no flush draw, and even if you wind up with a pair of 7s or a pair of 2s, you’re very unlikely to have the best hand. Of course, you’ll see some crazy flops every now and then. But just because you might see a rare 7-7-2 flop once in a blue moon doesn’t make this a good hand to play.

Deuce 7 offsuit!

Wow, just wow!

Deuce 7 offsuit

Big shout out to poker kaki @natlerrad @melvynwee

Now I can start my week (for real)

Bring it on, TUESDAY!!!

Internet Security – overlook it and it’ll cost you.

I got some Chinese pirate friends! Arrrr..

I served 8 Gigs yesterday, a record!

Everybody likes Dido and Christina Aguilera.

It was partially my fault cuz I didn’t directory list protect my /src directory where I keep all my good shit. Google/Yahoo bot came, index it and boom, its available via a special string search.

I was gonna gloat about last night’s victory, but I’ve come to humble myself abit now… after what happened.

.. but I did told you so ;)

When you lose, blame the referee!

Don’t we all do it?

I like to predict stuff, and you can imagine how happy I am when my prediction came true this morning!

Tonight’s prediction, Man Utd to draw …

Last night’s numbers

Stamford Bridge (41,597)
Goodison Park (39,309)
Villa Park (35,578)
Ewood Park (29,584)
Molineux Stadium (28,674)
Britannia Stadium (27,385)
Fratton Park (17,510)

Tonight, Old Trafford will have 46% more than the highest turnout last night. At 76,000, it will only be 3/4 of what we had in Bukit Jalil last month (100,000 est).

Support for a football club is measured in the number of fans. If you wanna talk passion, you will lose. Because an organisation I know has relatively fewer numbers, but their followers are bloody passionate about their cause.

They call themselves Al-Qaedah.

31 July FRIDAY = SIB camp at El Sanctuary in Melaka.

Promises to be a great time there.

Michael Schumacher is back in F1, probably for 3-4 races while Massa recovers. F1 seems to be in turmoil after BMW pulls out and Toyota will make an announcement within the next 3 weeks.

Lukas will have his Honda Civic 2.0 by 5pm, if all goes well.

My streamyx is fast again. Just for kicks, I put a stopwatch to see how much I can suck over 3 hours and what the average is, well, here it is!

171 kilobytes/sec average combined (1368 kbit/sec). This is not a “peak”, but rather a “sustained average”!

1450 Megabytes = 290 MP3 songs! = 2 movies at decent quality (think axxo) = 2 episodes of Top Gear.

What that means, is that if a phone call is encoded at 28kbit/sec (4KB/s), I have tied up Telekoms “capacity” for 48 simultaneous calls for the past 3 hours!

Same story with SMS. If each SMS is 200 bytes, then I have transferred 7.25 million SMS. I have been downloading stuff from BitTorrent, so if it were to happen on Maxis or Digi’s SMS network, it would have costed me RM 700,000 just for that 3 hour session.

REMEMBER, data is all digital, so its the same whether its SMS or Bit Torrenting.

Now, are you angry as to why your telco overcharges you for SMS when so little data is transmitted?

Congratulations to Cain for successfully passing the final paper. Guess I don’t need to chop off my balls now!

Working on 2 projects: khalij-petroleum.com and cherrygoround.com (online shopping sites selling women’s clothing).

GO KART – hmm.. week of 10 August, ok? Save up your cash, cuz we’re going 2 stints (thats RM 70, ok)?

Badminton Tue – Thursday 4-6pm, Subang Jaya. Going right now :)

August is here, new experiences. New friends in college. It can only get better!