Like my fancy title? What I’m really going to write about is how to manage the balance between computational power and portability. This is only relevant to people who do “heavy lifting” with their computers. Most people probably don’t even need to worry about this stuff outside of just needing more storage available on-the-go. Since lots of us have experience with manual transmission cars the concept of an optimal shift point might be useful as an analogy.

Powerful computational devices (Lower Gear)

Powerful computational devices are, at the time I write this post, desktop machines, clusters and servers. Damn physics is holding us to CPUs that generate heat (and thus require vents/fans/cooling blocks that take up physical space) and consume power (which decrease battery life). Moreover many of these computationally intensive tasks still take time. I’m talking about video cross-encoding and so forth. Serious heavy lifting and shmushing digital assets against one another (yes, shmushing is a technical term and defining it is outside the scope of this post).

Portable Computational Devices (Higher Gear)

Then there’s the stuff we need to do everyday. Multiple times a day even. Like check our email. Fire up OpenOffice. Surf a little web. These tasks don’t require much shmushing or heavy lifting. As a result, no need for cooling blocks and the power consumption is lower. This is pretty frickin’ handy because we send email a lot more often than we render video or composite HDR panoramas (at least I do).

The Problem, in a nutshell

When to shift between low and high gear? What if you’re in high gear and need to shift back? What if shifting back means travelling a few hundred miles? In a car it’s easy enough to shift gears. For computers maybe not. You need to shift into the lower gear as your need for computational power increases. And you need to shift into a higher gear as your desire to be mobile increases. But sometimes you gotta move fast and haul a heavy load.

21st Century Split Shift

What if we had a place where we stored the assets (the gigandor video files or whatever) and the instructions for what to do with those assets were light-weight (like a video edit-decision list or settings for node-based compositing or whatever–something text based that a machine can use as instructions). What if we had something portable that could control, remotely, the heavy lifting (iPod Touch, MacBook Air, Kindl, Nintendo, whatever is capable of messing with an XML file I suppose). Probably, we’re going to need some sort of low-bandwidth prep-work preview VNC voodoo to get at least a glimpse of what we’re doing on our NinKindle Air, but if the heavy lifting is done by the low-gear machine maybe it’s all going to be fine. Oh yeah, we’re going to need bandwidth too.

Here’s the shopping list:

• Heavy lifting machine
• Portable machine
• Software that can do EDL-style communication between the portable machine and the heavy lifter
• Hardware that can make previews quickly
• Bandwidth to transfer the EDL from the portable machine and previews from the heavy lifter.

I’m guessing we’re damn close on this sort of thing. Aside from the software part anyway (when is Pshop going to ship with a client/server version where the client is a NinKindle and the server is an Xserve in your basement?). It’s already easy enough to use VNC on an iPod Touch to get back to a main rig. And audio server-on-the go has done a lot for pushing data back and forth.

Anyway… what do you think?

David Lynch iPhone Parody.

Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy watching Mad Max on my iPod Touch this week. But still funny.

Two excellent industry call-outs allow me to re-suspend my disbelief. One that I can’t find anymore (regarding the whole NBC dustup) and another about the EFF whom I love completely but the call-out is best for the lovers because the EFF is living in a bubble in terms of what the average consumer does to get some ringtones (and, yeah, that’s why I love the EFF).

Aside

FSJ, I nominate you to succeed His Steveness in the unfortunate event that His Steveness is called back to Jupiter before I leave this world myself. But let’s get back on topic. Topic is:

Cell Phone Ringtones and paying for them

Let’s start out by sifting out the techno-elite.If you can solder your iPhone, install crap-ass GUI-devoid whatever applications, don’t mind doing it all every time that Apple adds some truly functional software via software-upade and/or don’t mind spending an hour sifting through garbage-torrents for your content then you are techno-elite and should read no further because it won’t make you happy, you have more spare time than me and your advice might not be good for others lackingt your l33+ sk1llz or 5w33+ p4+13nC3.

If the above doesn’t describe you (or is unintelligible), then you are a consumer; the sort of person who pays other people for the convenience/joy of just getting stuff that works and getting back to living your life with your family, friends and so on (where “and so on” may equal re-playing all those StarCraft episodes so you’re ready for the upcoming release of StarCraft 2–you can be a dorkbot and/or technology-literate and still be a consumer).

Mea Culpuh, Let’s Get it Ovuh

I know, I know… “Consumer” is a crass and ugly term. But it doesn’t have to be so. “Consumer” could mean “the sort of folks that value their time enough that they pay the 2 dollar shareware fee so they don’t have to bother figuring out how to pirate the g00dz.” Consumers might be people who pay the rent for people who make 5w33+ g00dz.

The meat of this post is much less than the preamble

You don’t use and iPhone and you are a consumer. You pay more than 2 bucks to turn a song snippet into a ringtone and you have to work with a very poor user interface.

Apple charges you one dollar for a seamless way to turn songs into ringtones (I know, I know you wanted it for free because you were planning on using that dollar to buy a Dr. Pepper then drink said Dr. Pepper then pee and forget you ever drank said Dr. Pepper… you’re a Pepper). Outrage. Bring on the outrage folks. Somone is going to charge you a dollar to give you software that allows you to edit audio and load it into your phone for use as a ringtone. Get OUTRAGED! I prefer you do it in Peoria though.

En Summa:

Get worked up about paying a buck for song-editing software so you can make ringtones all you want and point fingers and call people names. Then, when you’re done, show me your free alternative.

Small fact zone:

I believe that His Steveness is a peskatarian, not a vegan. He knows where the movement really happens. But I’m just bloggin’ so do your own fact-checkin’ please.

Also, what’s so fucking crazy about the FSJ link I’ve posted, is how great the Pshop on His Steveness is to the cat thing from the “Austin Powers Does the parody of “Casino Royale” (not to be confused with the contemporary-in-relation-to-this-post-and-best-Bond-flick-in-ages “Casino Royale”) is… That shot is perfect. Whoever did the photoshop work on that rocked it. You’ve seen a Stevenote. You know what His Steveness wears. You are probably visually inclined. The supporting image for this particular post should stand as a model for other fakrs out there. It’s friggin great. Motherfucker. Nuff said.