In This Episode: Several examples of Google doing absolutely stupid things, like blaming content creators for what Google itself puts into their content. Plus: AMP pages, foldable phones, and is the “ISO Rating” setting on digital cameras “fake”?
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.
- Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
- Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
- Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, Randy talked about UEFI and how that was an unanticipated step in his upgrade to Windows 10. Kevin is making his old Atari 8-bit computer render SVG files. It works but it’s slow. So slow. And Gary launched his new iCloud Course and gives listeners a significant coupon for it (expires at the end of the week!)
- Randy brought up AMP pages, which led to a discussion by several of the hosts about Google doing absolutely stupid things, such as what Randy blogged about regarding ads, and Gary had his own incredible story.
- Companies are coming out with the first foldable phones (like this Samsung, and they are expensive. Will foldable phones be a tool for high-end users, or will they eventually be for everyone at a lower price?
- Leo found this discussion/video about ISO speeds in digital cameras interesting.
I enjoy listening every week (though Leo’s audio has been hit and miss recently). But I think that ISO discussion is wrong.
I believe ISO is a *hardware* gain before the ADC stage — if not, then software multiplying after the ADC would give very poor quantized data (imagine a 0-1000 range with low light giving values 1-10 and a *100 in software).
This is probably a better reference:
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foundations-richard-wright/astrophotography-understanding-iso/
Well, the article you link to by Wright loses me right up front by his claim that ISO has nothing to do with any sort of “International Standards Organization” since there’s no organization by that name. But “maybe they [the International Organization for Standardization] just rearranged the letters – right? Nope, not even.”
Wrong. The organization, based in Switzerland, is indeed called “International Organization for Standardization” …but with very many international organizations, its initials are not necessarily in that order: its Internet domain, for instance, is in fact ISO.org.
Why would they even consider doing that? They even say it explicitly on the very same page Wright links to: “Because ‘International Organization for Standardization’ would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO.” So, yes, indeed, they indeed did “just rearrange the letters”! and the “ISO” used by cameras indeed does represent that organization. Apparently Wright didn’t read the entire page.
With that out of the way, did Wright’s article about the concept of ISO debunk Iverson’s article (based on Northrup’s video) about digital camera ISOs being “fake”? I’ll just say that Iverson’s discussion is a lot more compelling.
It’s interesting. There have been a few counter-arguments posted (on YouTube as well) to the ISO is fake statement. I don’t know that ISO being software only implies a LOT of additional noise — beyond just the noise you expect from higher ISO. But it’s a fascinating discussion nonetheless.