iApple's iOS's iMaps

Recently i[sic]'ve been following the "new iOS maps are rubbish"-discussion with moments of humour, fumour and complete astonishment. First of all, let's get facts straight - most of the time I do like what Apple is doing (so there is your fanboy card) and other times I honestly hate what they're doing (and there is your ... umm, what... "anti-fanboy"-card?)

So... what is the problem?

Well, Apple is the newcomer in the field of mapping. That much is certain.

For some reason, everyone expected their maps to be a marvel in this field. Granted, what they put up in their earliest proof-of-concepts (or actually - exactly what they put up there) was nothing short of what I like to call "the Apple fantastique". Eventually we have found out that those PoCs were exactly that; exaggerated fancies of the company executives of "what this technology can be at it's best" ... ok, we only need to go back a short while to see how Nokia announced their image stabilisation and how they were crusifixed after it became apparent that the technology demos were not taken with the actual piece in question.

Oukidou, I'm straying a bit off the subject here... back to Apple. Before publishing iOS6, we got plastered with some magnificent looking "3D-flyover look of real map data through our acquired partners' software". And yes - those looked magnificent. But no-one explicitly stated that "this is what our maps will look like". It was implied, true ... but in the business they're in - they are selling impressions beforehand. And - we did see that the same imagery they used in the technology demos (from around the Hoover Dam) the imagery provided by iOS6 was way different. Even emparrasingly different, I might add.

Ok, so - what's the catch?

Oukelidou - you might be wondering... why am I blogging about this? They didn't deliver what they promised?

Ah... but there is the catch there... They didn't promise the final user experience was going to be anything like the technology demos. Never. They just said "with this new technology we just bought, this is what we can do". What they didn't say is "...on something your handheld smart phone is ready to handle... at least just quite not yet".

So again, why is it that you (I) are (am) blogging about this again?

Well - guess what..?

What they did is what every operator in the field does. And for some reason, people still do expect more from Apple. Well... they do.

Granted, if mr. Jobs was still heading the company, this writer's personal belief is that the decision to drop Google from their data providers would not have been so quick. Steve would've looked into it that when they bring a "new feature of their own" into the game, it would've matched or would've been better than that of the competition's.

So... again... why am I (you) interested in this?

The problem with people at this point is that they are comparing (pardon the pun) Apples to oranges. All the competition has been there for ages; Google maps was launched 7 years ago, Bing had their mapping system debut almost two years ago. Tomtom et al have been at the business for almost a decade.

Ok... so what? So... interestingly, all of these parties are buying data from each other. They do it to make their maps better. The origin of the maps they buy might be very old (the newer the data you acquire, the more it costs - no matter if it has been changed or not).

Basically; all of the players start with the same set of data (if they're willing to pay the price). Getting the "latest set of data" from any one source will not be enough, since all of the data acquirement will basically be a one-way street; you buy the data, you do whatever you want with it... and it never gets back to the source.

That is the way for mapping companies to keep their advantage ahead of other mapping companies. "We have these updates, you don't. We win." ... or "You want these updates, you pay", if you want ;)

They all start with the same dataset. For example, many of the pictures I've seen posted online show how "empty" or "wrong" the Apple datasets are. Guess what - Google looked the same just a little while ago!

After the companies start with a dataset, they update it ... and (you might've guessed it) these updates never get back to where the data originated from. The "fixed data" in the database is the company's own "we have these, you don't"-way to success. Whoever has the most (and most correct) data is the winner.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple took the lead of the competition fairly quickly. Not to mention their own "report problems with map", they have quite a lot of information from sites that list irregularities in iOS6 maps. What other companies think as a "win" for them, might actually be a "win" for Apple... Honestly - if you see something funny on a map, are you more inclined to report it to Apple or to just post it online for everyone to see ... hey, guess what - even Apple follows the Interwebs ;)

Oukelidoukeli, this is all important... anything more?

Well... not exactly important, but... honestly - people are sending in a million or so pictures of problems with bridges and airports. Really?!?

With bridges, the companies have very little to go by. They get the generic orthographic imagery of the area and they get the height data (usually) from NASA.

As good as NASA is mapping the universe, their systems are fairly limited when targeted to earth. For example, for a bridge (and - assuming You've read what I wrote earlier about the data sources - a bridge that has not been "manually fixed") they generally do get the "height of the water-level" and either "the height of the deck" or "the height of the pylon" ... depending on the resolution. But never both.

The reason above is the "zigjaw-lines on bridges" seen on so many pictures recently. Honestly, every bloody bridge needs to be "manually fixed" for it to look right.

Back to previous... Apple posted some magnificent footage of the Hoover Dam in the technology demo. However, we've seen how it turned out in real life application (bad). Also, we've seen seom other applications' rendition of the same area (which are also bad). So... Making stuff like that work well in 3D... either you need to have a good 3D source for all of the world or you need to manually fix the problems. No shortcuts.

And now back to the fanboy-choir

Just wait. Few more months, few more years. After that I believe Apple will have no problems in the competition.

Please do not compare a newcomer (2 weeks or what) to oldtimers (360+ weeks) just yet at this point ;)

And I think that final sentence did put me back in the fanboy-choir... oh'dammit ;)

The gravity of the situation...?

Where it all starts

Sometimes I find myself thinking of stuff I should not be bothered with. The most recent time this happened was when I saw this GIF showing a simulation of what happens when a star is consumed by a black hole (it looks marvelous, I'd say)

Well, this got my mind working... Black holes are not some gigantic vacuum cleaners in the sky preying on unsuspecting stars to consume. In fact - for the black hole to have any kind of effect on the trajectory of a star in the first place, the black hole would need to have a mass comparable with the star, which something that is a way lot more than most people are even able to visualize in their mind.

The experiment

For the sake of satisfying our scientific hunger, let us create a lab room for testing things with black holes. The room is created in such a fashion that no amount of gravity escapes from the room (thus making it safe to test some serious shit inside the lab) ... for the sake of argument, let's do this by magic, since I know of no way to actually achieve it otherwise.
Now, let us put a black hole in the middle of the room that has a mass of one million metric tons. And since we are sadistic beasts that couldn't care less what PETA has to say, let us put a mouse inside the lab and see what is going to happen to the mouse?

This is going to be legen-(wait for it)-dary!

Aaaaand... absolutely nothing. Wait? NOTHING you say?!? Yes, the mouse is unharmed. As is the lab assistant that went to the room to put the mouse in there. Even me, the mad scientist performing this experiment that entered the room to see what went wrong is completely unharmed.
The "mad scientist"-me is furious. Why did the experiment fail? Did our magnificent black hole escape the room before we started?
Interestingly, the answer is that the experiment didn't fail - it simply proved that black holes behave exactly the way they are supposed to, and that you still need to obey gravity (after all, it's the law; don't mess with it).

So, what went "wrong"?

Inverse square rule of gravity effect and a huge misunderstanding of mass and other things required to make anything happen. To put it simply - believe it or not, a black hole with a mass of one million metric tons is way smaller than an atom. The inverse square rule of gravity states that every time the distance from the object doubles, the gravitational effect of the object drops to one fourth. And, since the object in question is smaller than an atom, the drop in gravitational effect happens fast.
In fact, were the mad scientist to go stand in the middle of the room, chances are that still nothing would happen. There are vast amounts of "empty space" between atoms, and for even one atom to come close enough to the black hole to be consumed by it, that atom would have to be extremely unlucky - and that is where the train would stop; you'd be that one atom short in your body and would never be able to tell the difference.

Why are black holes usually depicted as "starkillers" then?

Well, our experimental black hole was too small to do anything. That doesn't mean that there aren't far larger ones to be found in the universe - there are. Interestingly, though. For a black hole to have any kind of effect, it usually needs to be huge (and by "huge" I really do mean bigger than massive ... our one million metric ton black hole just wasn't large enough, not by a far margin).
Let's take something a bit more sinister; a black hole with a mass of one sextillion (that is a number with one followed by 21 zeroes) metric tons. That would be roughly one sixth the mass of earth and if one were passing through the solar system it could have an impact on the orbits of the planets. Still however the chances are that such an object would pass through the solar system completely unnoticed. Interestingly - if that black hole were to pass by earth at a suitable velocity and distance, there are bigger chances that earth would make a satellite of it ... it has about the same amount of mass as our moon (and what a great opportunity for science that would be having our own largeish black hole to experiment with).
That "moon mass" black hole would still frankly be quite small. So let's go mythbusters and ramp things up a little - say... get a black hole 2 million times larger than the previous one. The mass of that thing would be roughly similar to the mass of sun. This means that if earth were directly in the middle between the sun and our black hole, we would possibly finally become the center of our solar system; sun and the black hole would start to revolve around each other with the earth stationary in the middle. Most likely all the other planets in the solar system would have a hard time to adapt to the situation, though.

And what does all this mean in practice?

Interestingly, even though we've already ramped things up multiple times, we are still talking about very small black holes here. I personally must admit that I am not too worried about the possibility of LHC creating black holes ... after all - even if it did, they'd go unnoticed in the big scheme of things :)

Laptop-DJ's conundrum: Mac-or-PC?

Many people, both online and IRL, often ask me whether I'd suggest laptop DJs to use a Mac or a (Windows-) PC and, more importantly, why...

I personally have been using both systems for multiple years; Windows-PCs since the 1990s and Macs since they started making them with Intel-CPUs. I've seen the best and the worst of both worlds. There is a ("best used for") time and a place for both of these systems, and I'm not dissing either one of them - in fact, I freely admit that you can DJ with both systems. However, as for the current state of affairs, my opinion is clear; for DJing, you should go with a Mac. As for the reason "why?", well - let's take a look.

System design objectives

This is something that generally is not considered by people deciding to get a computer, but it is rather essential. Windows is designed to be a workhorse for all sorts of activities from everyday Internet & office-use to gaming etc. whereas Macs are more targeted for professional work (granted, there are exceptions to this, but I'm just trying to keep this simple - even at the expense of oversimplifying things).

Windows is in underdog position here, since their software needs to run on every hardware environment imaginable. In the Mac-world, there is a distinct benefit that all of the hardware-configurations (I'm mainly considering laptops here, but mostly the same goes for desktop-Macs also) are pretty much controlled by the same company that is creating the operating system. This means that software developers only need to test their code in a limited number of hardware configurations - compared to Windows, where changing one component may have unforeseen repercussions. This naturally saves time and gives the developers a lot more time to streamline performance for just that limiter number of hardware instead of having to test and retest and redo all the tests performed previously after every change.

Furthermore, since the Macs are more targeted for professional - rather than "one-size-must-fit-all" - work, the system architecture of the built-in drivers is very different. It shouldn't come as a surprise that just like generic software development, the Mac has a benefit in operating system (and driver) development due to the mentioned differences in the way hardware configurations need to be taken into account.

And finally...

You should consider that at present, Macs are built with Intel-based CPUs and generic "off-the-shelf"-type parts. This means that Your Mac can always be a Windows-PC, whereas Your Windows-PC most likely will not be able to be a Mac (granted, there are many Hackintosh-projects to do just that - to enable running OS X on a non-Apple hardware configuration - but setting one up will usually require quite a lot of fiddling up).

So... like I said earlier, even if you can be a laptop-DJ on either of the systems, the most straight forward, easy and safe way to do it at the moment is with a Mac.