Facebook to Release Their Own Smartphone (Maybe)

As far as I can find out on the InterWeb this has not been confirmed (or denied) by Facebook but over the last few weeks most of the technology sites have been buzzing about Facebook getting into the smartphone market. Depending what you read it seems Facebook have been employing ex-Apple and ex-Google people that worked on the smartphone projects at both of those organisations.

Other reports are saying that Facebook are talking to ‘manufacturers’ of smartphone components about buying components (e.g., screens, batteries, cameras, etc.).

If these reports are right then it could be that Facebook are rushing to design, develop, and release a Facebook smartphone before the Christmas buying season.

If they really are trying to get a smartphone to market by Christmas then one thing is for sure. They cannot possibly develop their own smartphone operating system in that time. Just could not be done. They could easily put together a smartphone in that time as all the components would be available. But a new operating system would take at least 18 months to design, code up, and test.

Or, maybe they have been working on a Facebook smartphone operating system in secret over the last 18 months? Not impossible—but very unlikely because it would have been very hard to keep it this secret for this long.

So if they are planning to release a Facebook smartphone then what operating system would they be looking at? Would the use Google’s Android smartphone operating system? Facebook and Google are not the best of friend's so maybe not. It is highly unlikely they would use Apple’s iOS because Apple just would not let them. So I can’t see that happening. Maybe they are talking to Microsoft about Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system? Unlikely but not impossible. I could even see Microsoft paying them to use it, or at least providing it to Facebook at a very low cost.

Or they could use one of the lesser known smartphone operating systems like HP’s WebOS or Nokia’s MeeGo (see picture above). If they do then there will be four smartphone operating systems to consider if you are looking at buying a new smartphone at Christmas.

Four Non-exercise Ways to Lose Weight

According to an article today in Forbes Magazine the following four ‘activities’ good ways to lose weight that do not involve any exercise—assuming you eat relatively normally but just don’t seem to be able to lose any weight.

(1) Sleep

Anyone who has had any serious weight loss counselling will not be surprised at the number one way to lose weight that does not involve exercising. I have certainly been told this as least twice by doctors in recent times. For the average person three hours sleep burns about the same number of calories as a one hour walk on level ground at a normal pace. A good eight hours sleep burns off as many calories as a two and half hour walk—every single night you sleep.

This is because the body has to use energy to maintain body functions while you sleep. Almost all body functions are working away while you sleep, especially your energy burning brain (which technically NEVER rests). Even muscles ‘at rest’ still burn off energy. Also your body has to maintain body temperature, which requires the burning of huge (relative) amounts of energy. This is also why some ‘diets’ recommend sleeping cool and not piling on the blankets or turning off the electric blanket. The colder you sleep, within reason, the more energy you body has to burn to maintain body temperature.

To get the best benefit from calorie burn-off overnight you should eat an early evening meal at least four hours before you go to bed that is low in carbohydrate and sugar content. If you MUST have a night time snack then make it sugar free, or as sugar free as possible (see next point). Then have a solid seven to eight hours of sleep.

Sadly the benefits of calorie burn off during sleep are negated if you do not get continuous sleep. So for someone like me that wakes up about four or five times most nights the sleep-time calorie burn off will not be as beneficial as it should be.

(2) Cut Back On Sugar

For people trying to lose weight sugar is your biggest enemy when it come to food. Not only does excess sugar get very easily converted to stored fat, consuming sugar will instantly—within seconds—stop your body from using energy reserves.

So if you did do exercise, like a 20 minute brisk walk or 15 minutes on your walker, and then you have a drink of commercial orange juice the sugar in the orange juice will instantly stop you body from drawing stored energy. It is like a switch. Sadly it then takes a long time (up to an hour) before you body goes back to drawing stored energy because the sugar takes a long time to be fully used.

(3) Vitamin C

A key chemical required by our bodies to convert stored fat into energy ready to burn is carnitine. Apparently vitamin C prompts the body to produce carnitine.

The best way to get sugar-free vitamin C is by low-dose vitamin C tables or low sugar fruits such at kiwi fruit.

The most effective times to take a vitamin C hit are during times of stress and first thing in the morning.

(4) Eat (Unsaturated) Fat

There are a few reasons why we need to eat fat. Firstly there is strong evidence that fat is a key component in how our body signals that we are full when we eat a meal. Hence if there is insufficient fat in the meal then the full bell never rings. So then we eat too much, generally consuming more sugar in the process.

Secondly, fat does not make us fat. Sugar does. But sugar will not ring the ‘full’ bell. You will get sick from sugar overload before the ‘full’ bell rings.

Thirdly, it takes fat to burn fat.

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So that is part of the theory on losing weight without exercising in the health section of Forbes Magazine today.

Now if only I could actually sleep for seven to eight hours a night. I used to when I was younger. I used to sleep for twelve hours on weekends. Maybe that is why I was a skinny teenager and young adult. Maybe I started to put on weight as I lost the secret to sleep. Could be . . .

Digitising My Photos: Part 1—Doing the Sums for Negatives

As I have mentioned in a couple of previous posts I am gradually working up to scanning my old photographs, both my slides (a.k.a. positives) and film (a.k.a. negatives). I realise this is a massive undertaking and I am still not 100 percent sure I am going to tackle it. But at least I can start the lead-up work, or as we say in project planning—the Front-end loading or FEL activities.

My base plan goes something like this:

1. Do negatives first.
2. Preview the negatives and work out which ones to digitise.
3. Digitise those selected (probably will take a year).
4. Do positives/slides second.
5. Preview slides and work out which ones to digitise.
6. Digitise those selected (probably will take half a year).

Step 2 above needs to be done because I cannot possibly digitise every negative frame that I have—and you will see why that is shortly. So I need to go through all the negative strips and work out which frames are ‘keepers’ and are to be digitised.

So in order to get some idea how many negative ‘frames’ I have I am going to have to go through them. As a start, on Friday evening my wife and I went through some of the boxes of negatives that we have stored away. The idea was simply to see how many wallets of photographs and negatives are in each box and then do some math to estimate the total number of frames.

After checking three boxes it seems the average number of wallets per box is 35. As I rarely ever used anything other than 36 frame rolls of negative it is pretty safe to assume that each wallet represents 36 frames. So that is going to be about 1,260 frames per box. There are 22 boxes that we can see on a casual check of the ‘junk room’—but there could be other wallets of negatives stored in some of the other of my photography containers. So I am going to assume a nice round 25 boxes of wallets. So that makes 31,500 negative frames.

From my research on the Web a medium quality frame scan (around 3,000 dpi) takes about eight minutes for the scanner to complete. If I were to digitise all 31,500 frames that would take 252,000 minutes, which is 4,200 hours, which would work out to 1,050 days if I spent four hours per day, every day of the week, scanning them. At about this point you are probably starting to see why I have a Step 2 in the above plan. Obviously I cannot possibly scan every negative frame. And this is just my negatives. I would still have all my slides (positives) yet to scan.

The plan is to preview the negatives and trim the number to be scanned down to about 20 percent or a fifth of all the frames—less if possible. Even then the scanning time alone is going to be 50,000 minutes (which is 840 hours or 210 days at 4 hours per day).

At this point you might be asking something like ‘how is he going to preview negatives?” You can’t hold negatives up to the light and see if they are a keeper or not, and you can’t assess them on a light-table either. The colours are reversed and there is the yellow/orange mask making everything look orange.

I have an idea how I might be able to preview my negatives and I will share that with you in the next post on this matter.

In the meantime following are a couple of pictures we found as we were going through the boxes we checked. This was obviously during one of my black and white phases (all us keen amateur photographers go through a black and white phase now and then). This is SCN’s older sister so that gives you some idea how long ago these were taken.

If you have no idea who SCN is then check out the category “SCN” on the sidebar.

Contractors are the New ‘Employees’—Only They Cost More

Back when I started work, which was about 45 years ago now, everybody who worked on the mine was an employee. Everyone. The truck drivers, the shovel drivers, the lube-truck operators, all the people in the workshops, the crusher team, all the electricians, the train drivers, all the administration workers, the surveyors, mining engineers, everyone. I know this because for a while I was the site Timekeeper and then later became the Paymaster. I kept the payroll books—and we had no computers then, they literally were books.

Everyone got four weeks paid annual leave (with a 17.5 percent holiday loading), accrued long service leave, paid sick leave of up to 10 days a year, were in the company’s prescribed benefits superannuation scheme, and participated in the annual tax-paid production bonus.

Forty five years later I am still working at a mining site. Whereas the one I started at was a four hour drive north of Perth, the one I work at now is a two hour drive south.

The big difference now in relation to the workforce is that, at best, only about a half of the people who work in the IM department are employees—the rest of us are contractors. When it comes to the actual mine workforce about 90 percent of the workers are contractors.

The theory is that contractors are ‘cheaper’ and provide a more flexible workforce (which is code for ‘they are easier to let go when they are no longer required’). Contractors are supposed to be cheaper because they don’t get paid annual leave, don’t accrue long service leave, don’t get paid if they are off work sick (unless they have their own sickness insurance), don’t participate in production bonuses (which these days seems to be paid twice yearly), don’t participate in stock issues, etc., etc.

To balance up for all the entitlements and payments that they don’t get contractors are generally paid about 30 percent more than employees for the same job function. The theory being that this 30 percent loading covers the employee benefits that they don’t get. Hence an IM Application Management Specialist as an employee would get about $85,000 per annum. For the same work a contractor would be paid about $430 per day (on a daily rate), which works out to about $112,000 per year if the contractor worked every working day.

This probably seems about right.

But then there is this other non-trivial layer of cost that has crept in over the last ten years or so when it comes to contractors. Most, if not all, contractors these days come through an agency or other company. This agency or company adds in a profit margin so they can make some money too. Depending on who is providing the contractor service this ‘margin’ (great term) can be anything from about 30 percent to 90 percent. Taking a mid-point of 60 percent that makes the $430 per day contractor loaded cost $690 per day or around $180,000 per annum.

Then you have super-contractors, otherwise known as consultants. In my line of work ‘consultants’ come from companies with names like Price Waterhouse, Accenture, IBM, Avanade, CSC, or Microsoft. With consultants the normal margin loading is up around 200 percent. So an IM Application Management Specialist Consultant would cost something like $1,300 per day made up of $430 going to the person doing the work and $870 going to the company or agency providing them.

The theory behind the massive loading charged for ‘consultants’ is that they have the combined knowledge and expertise of their company behind them. The view is that this back-up expertise that can be called upon by the consultant has a value associated with it. It is like you are not only paying for the consultant but you are also paying a percentage of the value of the ten or so experts he can call upon back at the ‘mother’ company; should they need to.

This is a great theory. The reality it that this virtual back-up expertise team rarely exists and in those few cases where it does it is rarely of any use.

My closing thoughts on this are that while using contractors in the workforce once seemed like a good idea I can see this turning around over the next few years. Especially in the white-collar and skilled workforce. Due to all the add-on costs contractors are generally now more expensive than they once were. In most cases they are now more expensive than having an entitled employee doing that job. In addition the contractor model has brought about workforces that are highly transient and a transient workforce brings with it added cost. Companies are now trying to keep workers with acquired knowledge, which is contrary to the contractor model.

Why Girls Sext

Answer: The Urge to Sext Naked Self-portraits is Primal for Females

Sexting is when someone texts with an attached image, or otherwise sends (maybe via e-mail), a sexy related picture of themselves to a person or persons. Statistics indicated that over 90 percent of sexting is done by females sexting revealing images of themselves to males.

The urge for females to sext males such images is not confined to the ‘common people’. Celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson, Vanessa Hudgens (see famous example picture), Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, and many more have been caught out sexting since the smartphone became everyone’s favourite technology toy.

Recent research, part of which is provided here at the Wired magazine Web site, delves into why it is mainly girls that do this. It turns out, like so many other things we do, that it is primal. It is something that has been encoded deep within female’s minds over tens of thousands of years.

To quote from the Wired article, which in turn quotes Madame de Stael (I have no idea who she is), “The desire of the man is for the woman. The desire of the woman is for the desire of men”.

In other words men lust after women and have done so since the beginning of time. This is something all (heterosexual) men know and understand very well. What is not quite as well known, to us men anyway, is that women get their excitement by being lusted after by men.

As the Wired posting goes on to point out, being desired by males is one of the most powerful turn-ons for women. It matters little whether she intends to offer the male(s) more; it only matters that males desire her and want her. The more common sexual fantasies of most (heterosexual) women reflect the desire to be sexually irresistible to males—to make males want them.

The theory is that it is this very powerful primal drive that causes girls and women to take, or have taken for them by someone else, revealing pictures of themselves to be sexted to males—to enhance the thrill of being ‘desired’.

There are a number (probably hundreds) of Web sites that trawl the InterWeb for sexting pictures that they can pull from facebook, flickr, and tumbr, etc. As well they encourage men (and boys) to send in sexted pictures from their girlfriends, or any other girls that have sent them sexts. Sites such as What Boys Want and 4Chan.

The problem with sext pictures is that the quality is usually pretty bad. Typically they are taken in low-light situations so there is a lot of digital noise (see the Vanessa example above). Often they are out of focus (errr, see the Vanessa example above). Generally, as the girl is holding the camera out to take the picture of herself, there is camera shake going on (hmmm, see the Vanessa picture above). Also the lighting is usually not balanced so you get a green cast from fluorescent lighting, an orange cast from incandescent lighting, or a blue cast from halogen lighting (yep, note blue cast in Vanessa picture above). Then the picture is often taken at an awkward angle as she holds the camera out at arms length (you guessed it, see Vanessa picture above). Finally there if often ‘flash-back’ from the mirror, if they are using the mirror technique (which Vanessa managed to avoid in the example above).

Someone should really tell these girls to buy a half decent compact camera and a tri-pod to mount it on. But I guess the problem then is getting the picture from the camera to the smartphone so it can be sexted. Hmmm.