KPAO by Dave Cortright

High Dynamic Range Audio

This falls in the category of "ideas are worthless unless implemented". I'm throwing it out there to the crowd; maybe an audio engineer will see this and be inspired.

About 20 years ago I had a portable DAT recorder and stereo mic that I toted around Europe while on tour with the Michigan Men's Glee Club. I used it to record every concert from that tour, which resulted in the Great Halls of Europe CD.

I pretty much had no idea what I was doing as far as audio recording goes. I made a bunch of mistakes including improper grounding which resulted in a 60 Hz hum on some of the recordings, and the common mistake of setting the gain too high which clipped the recording.

I remember thinking at the time that if I only had a 4 track recorder, I could record the same stereo signal twice, one at a higher gain for detail in quiet passages, and one at a more conservative gain that would never clip no matter how loudly things got.

Now with all this buzz around HDR photography (Apple even integrated it into the latest iPhone), it got me thinking that this is really the same idea applied to audio. Actually I'd be surprised if this wasn't already being used in some capacity somewhere. If you know of something, post a link in the comments. Thanks!

The inertia of Oracle

I recently left my job as a user experience designer at Oracle. Oracle is a very successful company, and I have tremendous respect for them. They are absolute pros when it comes to extracting money from customers. I've no doubt that the sales team gets outrageous compensation, and they totally deserve it.

But when it comes to caring about the user experience, there's really no core company value driving this. Sure they care enough so that it isn't a deal-breaker in making a sale, but that's the extent of it. While at Oracle I met several people passionate about UE and working hard to change it. But it was all at a grass-roots level. Hit the VP level and up, and nobody cares. And when upper management and execs don't care... well, put together all of the metaphors about uphill battles, going against the tide, and Sisyphus and you've got the idea.

The most glaring example of this is the support contract. Customers need to pay Oracle 20% of the license fee each year for basic support functions, such as bug fixes, knowledge articles, and access to support technicians. This fee is in theory "optional", but no sane business would opt out. There is an endless stream of stability and security patches coming out for every product Oracle supports. It's very much like Microsoft Update popping up every month or so in Windows, with the distinction that the customer must pay. All told, this is a multi-billion dollar revenue source for Oracle each year.

I'm not an economist, but I know an incentive when I see one. If Oracle were to improve the quality of their products so the patches were less frequent and the issues being patched were less severe, some frugal customers would make the financial decision not to pay for support. And that would reduce revenue. And at Oracle, reduction in revenue is very bad.

Yes, it's an oversimplification. The quality of the software is just one piece of the customer experience. And even in the Microsoft model where they have the incentive to keep software quality high (and frankly, they do a pretty good job of it), there are still regular patches to be installed. But the point is that Oracle has billions of reasons to keep customers paying for support contracts. Improved user experience certainly doesn't help (and may even hurt) their ability to do this.

Software quality and support contracts aside, user experience simply isn't a core value of Oracle. Oracle (and really when I say that, I mean Larry Ellison) cares about database performance, new features, winning against the competition, building out the empire, and above all else increasing revenue and profits. It's a great business, but not a very good place for someone passionate about the user experience; someone like me.

Glenn Greenwald calls BS on "Nobody Could Have Known"

This is a fantastic article on the recurring tactic for politicians and pundits to shirk responsibility for their past positions claiming "nobody could have known then that this would have happened". Actually, yes, anyone could have known, had they actually taken the time to study all of the information available without bias.

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures.  The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse.  Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen:  "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that.  One finds identical excuses for each contemporary American disaster.  Robert Gibbs just invoked the same false excuse:  that "nobody" knew the depth of the financial and unemployment crisis early last year.

And I love the Cheney video clip from 1994 explaining with specific details on why invading Iraq is a bad idea.