The Simon & Garfunkel concert was just plain awesome.
There were a few opening night jitters including the odd slightly bum note. But one jitter turned out to be the highlight of the night. The PA system blew during Bridge Over Troubled Water, which could have resulted in an awkward silence but instead the audience picked up the slack – you truly had to be there.
OK so the heading was a subtle and not so clever Simon & Garfunkel reference which you may have missed, but that doesn’t matter because I’m seeing them live tonight.
Can’t wait!
I recently noticed an ad for www.grababid.co.nz while browsing gmail. It was advertising LCD tvs for $1, no doubt because I had been bidding on such items on trademe, and the keywords would have been fairly prominent in my inbox (don’t you love targeted advertising?). Normally I ignore crap like this, but it looked like a New Zealand auction site so I had to check it out – anything that competes with Trademe is good for the market in my book.
Except perhaps, in this case.
I visited the site and at first glance it looked promising – $1 reserve auctions for high value electronic goods. The problems become apparent quite quickly when you dig deeper.
Grababid is a “Penny Auction” site, and placing bids on is not free. You have to pre-purchase a quantity of “bids” in packages. The site encourages you to buy larger packages of bids in two ways – by giving you more bids for your dollar in larger quantities, and also by giving you 30% extra on your first purchase.
I’d encourage you to read the following wikipedia article (which is not up to the usual wikipedia standard but informative none the less). What it comes down to is that bids are placed which increase the sale price by a fixed amount (say 10c, not sure what it is in grababid’s case). The last bid placed wins the auction, but each bid extends the auction to give other “players” (let’s be straight here, you’re playing a game) the chance to bid. The final sale price is usually well below RRP, but since each bid that is placed has already been paid for, the auctioneer collects fees for each bid in addition to the sale price. So for a $1 start auction with a bid price of $1 and an increment of 10c that finishes at $100, the auctioneer has actually collected over $1000. The “winner” probably got a good deal, but the other bidders/players all have lost out. Note that the price appears to be fixed at $1 for many of grababids auctions, so it’s basically just the last person to bid $1 that wins…
In game theory terms the players are playing a game of brinkmanship, where each bid placed lessens the reward. But in the case of a website there is a third party – the webmaster – and they hold all the cards. The potential for abuse is huge as the webmaster can easily deprive any player of a win simply by placing a shill bid, which would be almost impossible to detect as only the webmaster truly knows who placed each bid. It would also be rather easy to create the impression of a busy site by running a whole lot of bots, and grababid actually does seem rather busy at first glance…
The point is, that unless you like games where the odds are stacked against you (i.e. you’re a gambler), you’d be wise to avoid sites like grababid. I’d sooner do my research and shop around than throw money away trying to “win” a game of brinkmanship. The fact is that if they weren’t making a margin on the goods they’re selling, they wouldn’t be in business. Given that margins are already rather low on electronic goods it makes far more sense to shop elsewhere.
You might also be interested to know that despite the .nz domain name and the skytower graphic in their logo, Grababid.co.nz was registered by someone in Hong Kong with a German registrar:
domain_name: grababid.co.nz query_status: 200 Active domain_dateregistered: 2008-07-08T12:38:27+12:00 domain_datebilleduntil: 2009-07-08T12:38:27+12:00 domain_datelastmodified: 2009-05-01T11:14:51+12:00 domain_delegaterequested: yes % registrar_name: Key-Systems GmbH registrar_address1: Prager Ring 4-12 registrar_city: Zweibruecken registrar_province: RP registrar_postalcode: 66482 registrar_country: DE (GERMANY) registrar_phone: +49 6332 791850 registrar_fax: +49 6332 791851 registrar_email: [email protected] % registrant_contact_name: Jerry Reddig registrant_contact_address1: Flat 5, 10/F, Yuen Shing Ind. Bldg.,, Yee Kuk West Street registrant_contact_city: Hong Kong registrant_contact_postalcode: 1033 registrant_contact_country: HK (HONG KONG) registrant_contact_phone: +852 4246860 7 registrant_contact_fax: +852 11111 1 registrant_contact_email: [email protected]
Also note the existence of grababid.com, grababid.co.uk, they’re all the same thing (it doesn’t appear that much localisation was done other than the graphic).
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not you want to join this site, but it should be fairly apparent that I won’t be buying my LCD TV from there.
Recently I picked up a “resealed” (very close to new) Dell E4300 at what I think was a pretty good price, well below the $4000 RRP. The downside is that there’s no warranty on it unless I purchase one from Dell at about $460 for 1 year going up to over $900 for 3 years. Since even the 1 year warranty is over a third of the cost of the machine and I can fix/diagnose many problems myself I think I’ll pass. It’s a risk but a calculated one.
Of course I didn’t really need an E4300, I already have a HP 2710p tablet PC which has been serving me very well. So now I have to decide which one to keep. To help me evaluate, I’ve rated them on the categories that are important to me, other people will have different priorities.
The E4300 is configured with a Core 2 Duo SP9300 (2.26ghz, 6mb L2 cache), versus the U7600 (1.2ghz, 2mb L2 cache) in the 2710p. While the 2710p rarely frustrated me with slow performance, it is running Vista and I have disabled indexing and the Aero desktop effects. I probably won’t need to do this on the Dell. The 2.5” 5400rpm hdd in the Dell is also streets ahead of the 2710p’s 4200rpm 1.8” IDE hard drive – a major downside of many 12” ultraportables.
Both have 4gb of ram (DDR2 in the 2710p and DDR3 in the E4300).
Result: No contest, this one goes to the E4300 by a country mile.
You might expect this one to go to the 2710p, but actually the Dell lasts longer. I don’t have the extended battery for the HP, just the internal 6-cell one and I generally get between 4 and 5 hours from it with normal use. Dropping the display brightness and using other tricks such as setting the display to 16-bit I’m sure I could get over 5 hours, but not by much. The Dell lasts 6 hours with its higher wattage CPU, and the battery is also a 6-cell model. It does protrude out the back, although this doesn’t bother me at all. Another factor to consider is that I don’t know how old the HP battery was when I bought it, and I’ve used it for another 6 months, so it may have lasted a bit longer than it does now (although going by the reviews I’ve read I seems to be getting similar battery life).
With the E4300 I feel I could possilby get through a whole day’s work on one charge, as long as I aggressively used the power saving features and put it to sleep when not in use.
Result: E4300, but this probably isn’t fair
Both have webcams and VGA ports (I can forgive the 2710p for this as when it was made displayport wasn’t available and HDMI wasn’t all that common, but why on earth are Dell putting VGA ports on laptops in 2008/9?).
The Dell has an anemic two USB ports, and one of those is a dual purpose USB/ESATA port. The Dell has a built in DVDRW, the HP has one but it’s in its docking station (which is actually designed to be left on the laptop if you so chose, it’s rather slim). If you chose to leave the docking station on you get another 4 usb ports bringing the total to 6 which is pretty incredible for a 12” device (admittedly a rather bulky one). I don’t have the Dell docking station – it has more USB ports and a DVI connector, but it’s not the sort of thing you’d throw in your laptop bag.
The HP has bluetooth, WLAN, WWAN (HSDPA, or 3G), whereas the person that configured this E4300 omitted the bluetooth option! I can forgive him/her for not adding HSDPA but omitting bluetooth is inexcusable. Maybe Dell are to blame for overpricing an option which costs just a few dollars to implement.
While the ESATA feature of the E4300 is nice, this one goes to the 2710p easily for having Bluetooth as standard and more flexibility.
Without its docking station the 2710p is obviously quite a bit smaller and does weigh less. With it attached however the weight is actually about the same. The 2710p does feel a lot “denser”, and my first impression of the E4300 was that it is rather light – probably because the weight is spread over 13 inches rather than 12.
Size is a matter of personal preference and the weights are similar so the result is a TIE.
The Dell feels more solid, but the HP is handicapped somewhat by being a tablet as it has to have a rotating lid. Both have metal bases, but the HP has a matte finish on the base which doesn’t appear to dissipate heat as well, although that may not actually be the case, just my impression. The HP’s lid is plastic, the Dell’s in a much nicer brushed metal. The Dell wins narrowly in terms of thermals, it gets a bit warm on the lap but not quite as warm as the 2710p.
The screen of the 2710p weighs quite a bit which puts more stress on the hinge, and the latch is fiddly and difficult to release with one hand. The Dell’s screen is lighter, has a really nice hinge and a magnetic latch which is effortless to open.
While this isn’t really fair due to the different nature of these devices, I’m giving the edge to the E4300.
Well the 2710p is a tablet so we’re not really comparing apples to apples here (although that was never my intention, I just want to decide which one to keep). The Dell has a trackpoint and touchpad which makes it more flexible than the 2710p (which only has a trackpoint) in laptop mode. The keyboard of the 2710p feels nicer, and in my opinion is higher quality – I’ve had several people comment on how nice it is. The keyboard on the Dell feels cheap, but in actual use it’s pretty good – I can type very fast on it.
In terms of keyboard layout, having the page up & down keys right by the arrow keys on the Dell is fantastic – the HP’s are virtually impossible to find without looking, but it is more constrained for space. The Dell lacks the right click menu “application” key, which many people probably don’t use but I actually miss. It’s especially handy for spell checks as you just navigate to the word with the keypad and then hit the button instead of switching to the mouse. I like the third mouse button of the Dell though, it’s extremely handy when things don’t quite fit on the screen (rather common at 1280×800).
Result: While the HP is a tablet I can’t really take that into account so the result is TIE.
The 2710p’s display is really nice. Both are 1280×800 and LED backlit but the Dell seems to have a problem with moiré (I think that’s what it is), where you can sometimes see very fine diagonal lines moving across the screen. It feels like Dell cut a corner here, and if I had paid $4000 for this I would be pissed. Brightness is comparable, the E4300 is obviously larger but that isn’t a consideration here. The Dell also seems washed out by default, I had to reduce the brightness in the Intel control panel applet, but the HP has never needed any sort of adjusting.
Result: 2710p, and very comfortably.
The E4300 has Latitude On, a lightweight Linux distribution which you can boot into to check your Outlook calendar or email without waiting for Windows to load. I haven’t installed a Linux distribution on it, but I assume hardware support won’t be a problem, it’s mostly Intel stuff. Dell generally seems to have pretty good Linux support, as they offer Ubuntu on some models.
The 2710p never had any problems with Linux, even the tablet functions are supported. Like the Dell, it’s mostly Intel hardware, and even the bits that aren’t Intel are supported such as the Sierra wireless 3G card and the Wacom digitiser.
UPDATE: Originally I called this one a tie, but my faith in Dell’s Linux support is somewhat misplaced, there are issues with Linux on the E4300 but to be fair you get this with any new laptop model. Also I gather they are “working on it”, and the problems should be fixed with an updated bios.
Result: 2710p
It’s difficult to decide actually. I have a desktop so a laptop for me is a portable computer, and portability is more important than performance. However with the E4300 I don’t feel as though I’m giving up much portability to gain a lot of power. The tablet functions were handy, but it’s not something I use everyday and I can certainly do without it. So I feel the performance trumps the pen. The HP night-light was very handy, and the E4300 has a backlit keyboard as an option but this one doesn’t have it.
At this stage I think I’ll keep the E4300, I feel it suits me better and allows me to do more things on the road than I could on the HP. The eSATA port and more powerful CPU make running virtual machines a possibility, which is something I wouldn’t bother with on the 2710p.
Both are top-class laptops, and while neither is without flaws the overall quality and design of these laptops is quite outstanding (and you’d hope so too given their recommended retail prices). But I’ll be using the Dell for a few more days before I finally decide!
This is perhaps a more reflective post than I ever intended to make on this blog, but digital photography is an interest of mine, and it’s interesting to note how it’s changing society.
The Obama election night pictures are particularly fascinating as they’re behind-the-scenes images that you just wouldn’t have seen several years ago. But what’s significant is that those two links contain (as far as I can tell) raw, virtually unedited photos from official photographers of political parties. The kind that photographers might have provided to journalists back in the day, open to the public. I think it reflects a shift in society that we’re seeing more than just posed photographs officially sanctioned by a publicist.
I remember I got my first digital camera at Christmas 2002. It was a Fuji Finepix A303, and cost approximately $900 NZD. At that stage digicams were pretty rare, and I was the first amongst my friends to have one, although the earliest picture in my photo library actually dates back to January 2001 when my cousin was showing me his Fuji 6900 Zoom (that thing was impressive back then). But over the following year the entry price of a decent digital camera dropped dramatically and finally film point ‘n shoots became obsolete. So 2003-2004 was really the point where digital point ‘n shoots began to replace entry level film cameras and is thus what I consider to be the start of the digital revolution (just early enough to take some embarrassing university photos!), and when Digital SLRs caught up to the resolution of film in 2004-2005, film became obsolete (some argue it was earlier/later, I reckon it was when the ID Mark II was released in June 2004).
This is one of the earliest digital images in my library. It was taken on January 24th 2001 by my cousin in Wairoa, New Zealand.
When you consider the explosion of content that digital media has facilitated, you can’t escape the fact that our lives are documented far more thoroughly (an order of magnitudes more) than any other generation in history. Historians looking back to our time 100 years from now might struggle to find content from the 80s and 90s, but get to the 2000s and they’ll have an abundance, probably more than they can sift through. The problem then becomes not one of scarcity, but of finding the diamonds in the rough.
Metadata (information about information) will assist with this. First of all, virtually all cameras embed the date, time, and lots of photographic information in every picture they take. Future cameras will embed GPS coordinates if the users chooses, some actually already do this (my cell phone does, but if you want a DSLR to do it you need an expensive addon, and I haven’t seen any point ‘n shoots with an embedded GPS yet). Sites like Flickr gauge the quality of a photograph via the concept of “interestingness“, and also allow users to tag the files which further helps describe the content. A photo that didn’t get any views in 2009 probably won’t be of much interest to historians in 2109, but is Flickr going to be around in 2109? I find it hard to believe that this data would be lost forever, although when you consider the fact that it could well be based in just one room in a single building in the US… that great repository of our generation’s content looks rather fragile. One would hope they have a distributed network of some kind, or at least an off-site mirror, but I digress…
Another interesting use of digital media is the 3d reconstruction of scenes and landmarks using digital photos. When you allow your mind to wander through the possibilities this opens up, it’s not hard to imagine a system in the future that allows you to “travel back in time” and walk around a scene that existed today. What’s more, this system would be fed by the vast amount of user photos posted online, and its accuracy would only be limited by the number of photos of a particular scene and the number of angles they were taken from. I can see this becoming a pastime of hobbyist photographers everywhere – taking detailed photographs of an area previously “unexplored” (or explored in poor detail) thus opening it up to the virtual public.
The digital revolution was only the beginning, what will be more interesting is what we do with all this new information over the coming years, and I’ve no doubt we’ll see many fascinating developments within our life time.
By the way that Fuji A303 (my first digital camera), finally died late last year. I passed it on to my brother in 2005 and it was roughly 6 years old when it died, which is a pretty good run considering the hard life it had… It survived many university parties, and even had coke (with something else) spilled on it at one point which made the selection wheel sticky. My current point ‘n shoot is an F50fd. :-)
