Unsolicited Input

Obama Is...

2012-02-04T14:19:00.000-08:00

Obama is socialist and anti-rich, but also guilty of bailing out the banks and car companies.

Obama is Muslim, but also guilty of his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying "God Damn America!"

Obama is the food-stamp president, but Romney's not worried about the very poor because they have safety net programs... such as food stamps.

Obama is responsible for the bad economy and joblessness, but Bush is not responsible for not preventing 9/11.

Obama is responsible for the deficit due to spending too much, but Republicans don't contribute to the deficit by cutting taxes.

Obama is elitist, but sides too much with the poor.

Obama is connected to terrorists, but ordered the attack on Osama bin Laden anyway.

Obama is weak because he "leads from behind" in Libya, but is too radical and unwilling to compromise with Republicans.

Obama is gutting the military, even though the military budget of the past three years were US$794 billion, $848 billion, and $904 billion, respectively.

Obama is the worst president ever, even though he took office in the most severe recession since the Great Depression, with unemployment having shot up from 5% to 8% (and going) in the previous year, and the collapse of the housing bubble that was powering much of consumer spending. Oh, and two unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, and unfunded prescription drug benefits. But anyway, worse than the two-term guy who left him this mess.

How do you people get these straight in your heads without it exploding?

The Case for a Strong Federal Government

2011-12-20T21:36:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of discussion on states' rights, particularly in the Republican primaries. Their targets vary from time to time, but the EPA and minimum wage have both been mentioned.

Here's the problem: the United States is a free trade zone. That means California cannot place tariffs on goods imported from Michigan or Alabama, and vice versa.

If environmental protection becomes a state domain, then companies that do pollute will all move to the least-stringent state, and still sell their products all over the US. A company in a stricter state will generally not be able to compete. Minimum wage also works in a similar way, as low-wage states take jobs from high-wage states. In other words, it is a race to the bottom.

The United States is also a free travel zone, so Arizona cannot deny entry to a New Yorker, and so on, which means the issue of universal health care also requires a strong central government. If one state subsidizes health care while another one doesn't, then sick people will go to the state with cheap health care, unfairly raising costs for everybody there. Just require the sick person to establish residency, I hear you suggest. The problem is that this shuts the door on people who move legitimately, but happen to be sick. In other words, each state must continue to provide whatever benefits it provides to citizens who depart for another state, at least for the duration of the residency period at the new state, or you'll have a (perhaps intolerable) gap in coverage. This is clearly a horribly messy situation that a nationwide coverage system can mitigate.

But you're free not to buy goods from polluting low-wage states, you say. The free market will take care of it, you say. How's that working for Chinese goods? Besides, the market is only a solution after the damage is done, and with things like carcinogens evident only after decades of exposure, punishing the polluters in the market is cold comfort. Worse, how would you like to travel halfway around the country to sue a polluter, while dealing with cancer?

Put simply, things that don't naturally obey borders require a central government. Pollution is not a state issue, because water flows from state to state, and the air is blown from state to state. Wages and other manufacturing costs are not a state issue, because we are all required to accept your products into our state. Communicable diseases. War. Long-Distance Transportation. Wild Habitat Conservation.

The US Federal Government may indeed be bloated, I'll freely grant. But unless you want to end free trade and movement among states, think twice about gutting the parts that require putting national interest above those of one or two states.

Wanderlust

2011-11-23T18:50:00.000-08:00

I left Taiwan at age seven, and lived in the Philippines until I was 22, when I moved to the US. I lived in three different places in Taipei, three in the Philippines, two in Maryland, and two in California. So I think the longest I've ever stayed in one place is the eight or nine years in Mandaluyong, and the eight or nine here in Fremont.

Over the past few years, we thought it was probably time to buy a house, and started to save up for it. But on this previous vacation, an urge that had brewed for a couple of days came rushing out while we cooled our heels outside the Tate Modern museum in London, watching the Thames and fighting jetlag. An urge to leave it all behind and start over somewhere different.

I've always liked vacations for their time-warping quality. I feel like the whole world continues to move along its path while I've detached in observation, as if I've become timeless during those few days. This one was a bit different, and is probably mixed in with some mid-life crisis of sorts. I've long thought that aging was best represented as a narrowing of options, in the sense that as a child you could be almost anything, but as you go to college, graduate, and move from job to job, your path becomes more and more defined over the years. At some point, you are basically the one thing that you are, until the end. So this might really be an urge to fight nature, to create paths that are as wide as they were when I was young. A way to put off stagnation, decay, and therefore death?

I'm actually pretty happy with where I am, and I'm probably too responsible to actually do anything about it, yet the wanderlust tickles.

High

2011-11-23T18:25:00.001-08:00

I'm tired of hearing Republicans complain about taxes being too high. What exactly is the magical percentage at which it isn't too high? Rick Perry wants 20%, Herman Cain is infatuated with 9%, but why not 8% or 2% or none at all?

I get the feeling that the Republican voter pictures the government as a Scrooge McDuck of sorts, hoarding all that tax money into a giant safe. In reality, every dollar collected is spent, in fact on top of taxes we borrow some more dollars to spend. Thus, taxes are not too high, they are by definition too low because we are incurring more debt every year. They might be spent on things you don't like, which is what we should be talking about instead.

Now, in many ways, government spending actually saves you money. If we each have to buy guns to defend our homes, it'll probably cost more than setting up a good police department, and probably won't even work that well (remember the wild west? really want to live like that?). Ditto for fire protection and various public works like roads, pipes, and bridges. Just imagine if your only way to get to work involves driving on a private road: how much do you suppose the owner's going to charge?

Other kinds of expenditures have a more indirect effect. The strong (and very costly) US military ensures the free flow of petroleum to fuel our economy. They deter foreign invasion, which provides a predictably safe environment for businesses to invest. All of that is worth money, but how much, exactly? If we cut the defense budget by a billion, what would it cost us indirectly? What about ten billion or a hundred billion? The same analysis can and should be done against each of the big expenditures.

In other words, there is no magic percentage to taxes or spending, and "too high" can only be true if you calculate it relative to what you're getting back. So let's talk about what government programs aren't worth the money instead.

Percentages

2011-10-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

Percentages are making waves these days.

There's the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is upset that 1% of the country controls so much of our resources. There's the backlash, the 53% who are upset that 47% pay no taxes (federal income taxes, to be precise). There's Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan, which are three different percentages in one!

But there are plenty of truths hidden by these numbers. The top 1.5%, which is about 1.7 million households, make over US$250,000 a year. But not all of them are lazy fat cats sucking on our economic blood. Especially at the lower end of that scale, there are people who do real and relevant work. Similarly, 47% of Americans are not just lazy welfare queens who overextended their credit and are hoping for government to bail them out. Many of them work very hard and many of them wish they had work. The 9% national sales tax also hides a truth. Adding even 1% tax to the poor in this economy is a tremendous hardship. The truth is, once you reach a certain level of comfort, the percentages don't mean nearly as much anymore. If I have to pay thousands more in taxes, I might forego a vacation, perhaps delay buying a house, perhaps buy a cheaper car, none of which seriously affect my way of life. The truth is that I "lose" more than thousands just selling my Apple stock at the "wrong" time.

Are some things so egregious that they disgust me? Absolutely. My capital makes gains literally without me doing anything, and realizing those gains into cash requires a few mouse clicks. Why should those gains be taxed at a lower rate than salary? Yet, should we tax doctors and lawyers and owners of small businesses a lot?

Does it make sense that some people would have less money if they actually found a job? Absolutely, we should fix that nonsense, so we're not paying people to stay home. Are a few having too many children just to collect aid money? Sure, let's fix that.

But the very definition of "poor" is that you don't have enough money for what you need. Taking money from them either in the form of new taxes or decreased benefits means that they have to lose something else that they need. Since unemployment is already at 9%, they're not likely at all to find good jobs, even if you think taxing them would encourage them to seek jobs. So they fall further into poverty, credit, and perhaps even crime.

So look beyond just numbers. There are real people behind them that defy such simple categorization. Saying that it's 99% versus 1% or 53% versus 47% implies that there are only two kinds of people among 300 million Americans, which is just wrong.

Absolutely

2011-09-18T14:26:00.001-07:00

Here's the thing, conservatives: let's say we take US$1 more in taxes per year from every millionaire in the country. Do you honestly think they would change their job-creatin' investments in any way whatsoever? Surely not, since even middle-class people would not really complain (or even notice) losing a dollar a year. Some of us lose more than that just miscalculating a tip for a waitress, or just forget to take it out of our pants before washing.

Guess what? There are actually ten million millionaires in the US, and we've just cut the deficit by US$10 million. You care about the deficit, right? If so, you should be intrigued by my idea of reducing the deficit with no pain whatsoever.

Now, the other extreme is obviously bad. If we took most of what rich people earn, indeed they'll find some way to avoid it, perhaps by moving elsewhere. But surely there's some small amount that we could increase their taxes to help reduce the deficit, without them even really noticing? We can reduce the deficit by a billion dollars by taxing each millionaire a mere US$100 more. That's a bit over US$8 a month, not even three fancy coffees. Do you really think that would stop them from "creating jobs"?

The opposite in the political spectrum is true: if we paid a dollar less per recipient of Social Security, we'd save a good chunk of money (about US$60 million). If we cut too much, they'll be endangered.

Now, you might say that a billion here or there isn't a lot of money, compared to the trillions in debt. That's right, and the debt needs to be addressed by big (and probably painful) solutions, but why not cut a billion here or there anyway?

So let's stop saying that taxes absolutely cannot be raised, and benefits absolutely cannot be reduced, and instead find a balance that shares the burden like a united country should.

Dumberest

2011-09-16T23:27:00.001-07:00

Close on the heels of my earlier post about conservatives who refuse to think more than a little, here are some recent examples of mind-numbingly simple logical errors they make.

As Dahlia Lithwick points out in her Slate article, conservatives believe that government can't do anything right. Not health care, not social safety nets, not protecting the environment. She also points out that despite all that, they believe that government can administer the death penalty just fine. Governor Perry of Texas claims to have never lost any sleep over the executions of 234 people. Whether or not any of them have been wrongly put to death is one thing, the more and immediately obvious problem is the total lack of doubt. How can the government be so inevitably bureaucratic and inefficient, yet make no mistakes on death penalty cases?

The other exception that she didn't write about is Defense. Somehow there isn't even a penny that should be cut from the over six hundred billion dollars spent on Defense. How can it be that the Pentagon runs with perfect efficiency, while no other department can run with even just an acceptable level of inefficiency?

If you think that's bad, their blind faith in tax cuts goes all the way into lunacy. The actual cost of the Bush tax cuts is not easy to calculate accurately, but suffice to say we're talking trillion. The tax cuts took effect in 2001, and completely failed to prevent the economic meltdown in 2009. The US$787-billion stimulus that conservatives called a failure? About a third of that was in tax cuts, so if the stimulus was a total failure, clearly tax cuts are a big part of that failure. More than a trillion in tax cuts failed to prevent the meltdown, and another US$218B in tax cuts "failed" to revive the economy. The latest round of tax cuts from the inane debt limit deal? Well, the first thing it failed to prevent was the downgrade of the US credit rating. When exactly are these tax cuts supposed to do anything?

You think corporations need cash? Apple Inc. alone is sitting on over US$76 billion in cash (or cash equivalents). If it's not spending that money, why would giving Apple another few more billion dollars change anything? If you understand anything at all about how banks work, you'll understand that the reason your savings account pays about 1% right now is because they have plenty of deposits compared to loans. There's plenty of money ready to be invested, if only there was something worthwhile to invest in.

The same Governor Perry also said that the verdict is still out on human causes of climate change. Ignoring the broad consensus among scientists for a moment, Perry's stance is foolish. Government leaders must act on incomplete information all the time. If he had some information the day before that terrorists were planning to hijack planes on 9/11, is he going to take no action until he gets complete and irrefutable intelligence on which buildings they plan to crash into? Of course not, he should do what he can with the best available information. Remember this is also a person who wants to dramatically cut social security now, even though it can probably still pay out 75% of benefits until 2085. Why is that verdict somehow "in"?

But Michele Bachmann takes this to her own level. She actually retold the story of a girl apparently suffered mental retardation after receiving a vaccine. Even the most cursory understanding of science should tell you that an anecdote has no meaning, because just because one happened after another does not mean there's any relationship between the two events. (In fact, it's quite hard to conclusively prove that one thing caused another.) Yet this woman - who has some non-zero chance of becoming president - believes this anecdote told by some random person she doesn't even know. She is completely unqualified for any position requiring judgement, because she has no way of telling what is reliable information and what isn't.

So, no, while I'm not at all pleased with many of his policies, President Obama doesn't really have to worry about losing my vote.

Dumb and Dumber

2011-09-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

Two companies notorious for their lack of direction want to get together. They are not without talent. During my short stint at Yahoo! I gained respect for the mundane task of serving bytes, because when you have six hundred million customers, even the easy is hard. I've been a client-side developer for much of my career, and we scaled by selling more units of phones or iPods or whatever. The server side of things is complex, and people who can do it well (by virtue of you not hearing of disasters) are not to be sneered at. Apple has been a juggernaut this decade in seemingly all things, but many of its few failures have involved building servers.

Saving Yahoo! and AOL is actually simple: Decide a direction, brutally remove everything that doesn't fit along that direction, and concentrate your remaining resources on being the best at it. That is, simple to say, not simple to do.

Thinking Ahead

2011-09-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

I don't actually have a problem with conservatism per se. In many ways, I believe government should be minimal. My problem with conservatism in its modern incarnation is that it seems filled with people who are unable to think even a little bit ahead.

For example, they want to kill Social Security. Yes, it's flawed by design, requiring a base of workers to support retirees, and can fail spectacularly when demographics shift wildly such as when the baby boomers retire. However, killing Social Security does not make the seniors vanish in a puff of smoke, they just become poor. Some of them may be forced to sell their homes and move in with adult children. That means housing prices will plummet, and your spouse's mental health (and perhaps marriages) may be at risk due to increased stress. Some of them might sacrifice luxuries like travel, but some of them might have to sacrifice necessities like medicine. So it's one thing to say we should kill Social Security, but you should think a step ahead, and about the kind of country we want to have.

Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance all require similar thought. Would a poor person whose kids are sick just watch them die, or would he perhaps try to make that money any way he can? If enough of them do, would we need to build more prisons and hire more prison guards, at public expense? When they can no longer afford to live in a house, where will they live? That's right, they'll be on a street, perhaps even on your street. We would need more police officers to shoo them away. And unless we change our laws, emergency rooms still have to treat them, which happens to be the most expensive and least effective way of dealing with disease.

Conservative sacred cows like Defense are no different. If we shrink our standing army as the liberals want, that means a lot of young men and women will have to look for other jobs. Many of them carry trauma from wars, many of them are not highly educated. What jobs do we offer them, with an unemployment rate of consistently over 9%?

This isn't to say we can't or shouldn't cut government. This is to say that doing it drastically will have many side effects that are easily predicted, if we actually thought before we acted. Compared to the effects of raising taxes on the rich, it's downright unbelievable that Republicans still have any support.

Christian by Redefinition

2011-08-13T20:25:00.001-07:00

Do Christians not realize that they can't interpret the Bible whichever way they like? Take Michele Bachmann, for example:

What submission means to us, if that's what your question is, it means respect. I respect my husband. He's a wonderful, Godly man and a great father, and he respects me as his wife. That's how we operate our marriage. We respect each other, we love each other, and I've been so grateful that we've been able to build a home together.

She's referring to Colossians 3:18, where the key verb has variably been translated to "submit", "subject", and "place yourself under...authority". Any of the translations mean something very different than "respect", and Bachmann is either saying that these Bible translators are all wrong and that she knows the intention of God better, or that God has a vocabulary problem and says "submit" when He means "respect".

The obvious probability is that the Bible had been perverted in ways big and small to serve the interests of those who wrote it. That doesn't really affect its Big Meaning, but literalist Christians often have to go to these extreme stretches of mental gymnastics to face this. Instead of acknowledging that early Christians might just be sexist, they instead commit crimes against the English language.

On Expertise

2011-08-13T13:47:00.001-07:00

Scott Adams makes an interesting point about being suspicious of people who appear certain in their knowledge or beliefs.

His mistake is confusing the experts who actually know their stuff from somebody who's merely sure. The world has become very complex, and we trust our lawyers to know the law on our behalf, our doctors to know our bodies on our behalf, and a lot of other experts to do their specialized jobs so that we don't have to try to understand it all. Modern society is a co-dependency of specialists, and what makes it all work is the trust inherent in delegation.

Now, even Einstein was famously wrong, and we are right to set up environments where experts can work without conflicts of interest, but in the end we trust the imperfect experts and make imperfect decisions, because they're still better than the layman's.

This fallacy has permeated everywhere. From politicians who label various scientists and institutions are "liberal" or "conservative", as if that's supposed to matter, to the anonymous Internet writer who has to start his sentences with "I hate Apple, but..." This is a noxious atmosphere in which political correctness of the worst form trumps actual expertise.

On Software Patents

2011-08-06T15:18:00.001-07:00

Here's the thing: if your company's strength is execution, then you don't need patents. In fact, you don't like patents. You want to be able to freely copy other people's ideas, execute better than they can, and come out on top.

However, if you believe in the strength of an Idea, then you need patents. Companies that are far more concerned about their reach than about money (such as Google, let's be blunt) will copy your idea. Google seems to have an internal sense of the extent of tasteful copying, and its engineers are certainly talented enough to innovate, but there are many other companies with neither the talent nor the shame.

I'm not talking about silly ideas like one-click purchase. What I'm saying is that if you think there are even a handful of great ideas in the past few decades that are worth protecting by not requiring its inventors to also be excellent executors in order to profit, then you need patents, and you're talking about patent reform, not its wholesale abolishment.

The current system clearly doesn't work. A software engineer is supposed to be familiar with most patents, at least those in his/her area of expertise, yet the sheer volume of granted patents makes this impractical. Since patents are not written in some rigid language (lawyerese is rigid by normal standards, but not at all by computer standards), it is not currently possible to use some tool to determine if your code infringes on any patents. Worse, trying to learn if you do infringe and failing to find anything can open you up to "treble damages" later in court, so the instructions I've been given at every job is to not look at all. This completes the failure of the patent system, because if I'm not allowed to look at other people's patents, I'm not "standing on the shoulder of giants" and so on.

Thus, starting from scratch, the system must have the following attributes:

Patents must be few and far in between, at most 3-4 per month, so that professional software engineers can be expected to keep up.
Patents must be effective long enough to give the inventor a significant market advantage, but not be so long as to stall progress. In the tech world, this is probably somewhere between 3 and 5 years.
Due diligence must not be punished by extra fines. A well-meaning company must be able to document its patent search to show this.

This means a student is expected to know of as many as 240 valid patents upon graduation, and obviously many more expired but still useful ones.

Basically, I'd like a world in which a person with a great idea can make money without having to successfully run a business. I suspect these are very different skills not often found in the same person.

AA+

2011-08-06T12:12:00.001-07:00

Apparently some faceless accountants just downgraded the the credit rating of the United States government. Frankly, that doesn't bother me too much. The US government hasn't exactly been a shining example of fiscal responsibility, not because it borrows a lot, but because of why it borrows. Going into debt for infrastructure investments and going into debt for wars are likely to have very different financial outcomes. This probably means that robotic institutional investors are no longer allowed to buy US debt, and probably means that interests would go up. That may not be such a bad thing in the long term: cheap credit is tempting, and we really ought to be more careful about going in to debt.

What truly worries me is that we're not investing in the future. As a nation we're tightening our belts and have lost hopes and dreams, as if we're merely waiting for death and hoping the money doesn't run out before then. The baby boomers might be forgiven for thinking this way, but it's time for the next generation to mentally take charge.

Tea Party Dictators

2011-07-29T21:29:00.001-07:00

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the "apples-to-apples" difference between the Reid budget (US$912 billion cut) and the Boehner budget (US$917 billion cut) is about US$5 billion over ten years, which is about a third of a percent of the national debt. Neither one even comes close to a balanced budget (the 2010 deficit alone is over a trillion dollars), much less the surplus that we need to pay down the debt. So where exactly do the Republicans get the gall to claim moral high ground in keeping the budget low?

In their religious fervor for small government, the Republicans and the Tea Party in particular have forgotten one crucial thing: we are a democracy. Regardless of whether their political views are correct or wrong, about half of the country disagrees, and we get the same vote per citizen as they do.

You want your political views to lord over ours? That's called a dictatorship. In a democracy, we compromise just enough to get the laws we like passed, just as Barack Obama weakened his health care bill to make it palatable to the right edge of his party. Bills that have no chance to pass the Senate or be signed by the President are just wastes of taxpayer money. If they stay on this road, they would not only ruin our credit, they could very well ruin our democracy itself.

Three Republican Lies

2011-07-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

One, that cutting taxes for the rich will result in investment and therefore create jobs. This is so obviously false it's not even funny. Go look at the yield on your savings account, and I'll be surprised if it exceeds 2%, which doesn't even keep up with inflation. In other words, not only are you not earning interest, you're paying the bank to keep your money. This also means that banks just can't lend out enough money to pay you good interest. Any rich person with a good thing to invest in would've already pulled all his money out of the banks to invest.

Two, that the debt limit is an immediate problem. The fact that treasury bills also pay only tiny interest right now means lots of people want to buy it, which they wouldn't without some confidence in the long-term soundness of the US economy. The debt itself is a problem, but not something that suddenly needs to be solved by August.

Three, that the debt can be paid down by cutting taxes. The math is very simple: when you have a debt and ongoing spendings, the debt can only be paid down if you have a surplus, and it's not enough to just lower the deficit. In other words, Republicans are saying that we must cut spending until we have a surplus (because they refuse to raise taxes), but they're also trying to cut taxes at the same time, which creates even more deficit.

The debt is US$14 trillion. The deficit is US$1.5 trillion. To get a US$500 billion surplus to start meaningfully paying down the debt (and even then we're talking decades), we must find US$2 trillion a year in decreased spending or increased taxes. Since the Republicans not only will not increase taxes, they want to decrease it, so we're talking about more than US$2 trillion in spending cuts every year, and the cuts better not come from the US$600-billion defense budget.

What will happen when you cut most of this US$2 trillion from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? Do you imagine this won't force seniors to become financially-dependent on their children? Do you imagine this won't force poor people into desperation, some perhaps even into crime? Do you imagine this won't send sick people who can't afford treatment to their deaths? It's clear to me that the less painful way is to make up some of this gap with increased taxes, on the rich.

Why should the rich pay more taxes? For the simple reason that they are, by definition, the ones who benefited the most from our deficit spending all these decades. Lots of programs can be audited to decrease waste, but to think you can brutally cut benefits on the poor and elderly (which merely shifts the national burden instead of solving anything) and at the same time generously lower taxes on the rich to result in a budget surplus is simply cruel.

Hitting the Ceiling

2011-07-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Why is there even an argument about the federal debt ceiling in Congress? The debt is an inevitable consequence of more authorized spending than there are taxes or fees to pay for them, not something that the executive branch created. In fact, the law that limits federal borrowing is in direct contradiction to the budget bills, which is why the debt ceiling has been raised over and over again.

The Republicans who are making an issue of the debt ceiling are either idiots who don't actually understand that they've already required the government to take on this debt, or playing politics with the credit-worthiness of the United States.

Want to control the debt? Work on the budget.

...

Earlier, Rep. Paul Ryan had proposed replacing Medicare with a voucher system for seniors to go find their own medical insurance providers. Since seniors are the least desirable demographic to cover - because they actually need health care - it's laughable to think that any insurance company would take them on.

Laughable, of course, unless there's some sort of federal law requiring them to, such as the Affordable Care Act. You know, the one Republicans call "ObamaCare" and want to repeal.

...

Update: The Economist has joined in with a scathing indictment of Republican politics:

It is because the vast majority of Republicans, driven on by the wilder-eyed members of their party and the cacophony of conservative media, are clinging to the position that not a single cent of deficit reduction must come from a higher tax take. This is economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.

Gay Marriage in New York

2011-06-25T18:17:00.000-07:00

I'm firmly of the belief that marriage - particularly the "sanctity" of such - is not the business of government, much less of the US government that is specifically banned from establishing religion. But if a man and a woman can get the government to recognize their bond, so should two men or two women. Good for New York, more work to do in California.

Challenging the iPhone, Part III

2011-03-26T13:02:00.001-07:00

Wow, it's been nearly a year since I last wrote about this. Time really flies.

Today there are two giants in the smartphone arena: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The market shares don't tell the full story, because other players with significant market share are in decline.

First, the Android dilemma. In many ways, this is a parallel of Microsoft Windows, which is why many observers are predicting for iOS the same fate as MacOS suffered against Windows. The main difference between Windows and Android is that Google doesn't make the bulk of its money from direct licensing, instead relies on advertising revenue, so it can afford to give away Android to manufacturers.

However, observers should also remember names like Gateway, Compaq, E-Machines, Packard Bell, et cetera, and ultimately IBM itself, which all fell to the wayside. It's hard to compete in a crowded market unless you have something unique to offer, such as Intel's CPU, or Microsoft's Windows OS, which is why these two are the big winners of the bloodbath. This is also why while the Android handset unit sales have overtaken iOS, Apple still takes home the bulk of the profits. If you're Motorola or Samsung or HTC, you know that competing on hardware alone is a race to the bottom, but you don't have the software capability to build something unique and desirable on top of Android. Android giveth, Android taketh away.

The other interesting thing is that Google has delayed the open sourcing of Honeycomb, their tablet-enhanced version of Android, because they admitted to taking shortcuts and don't want it used on the phone form factor. I find that entirely believable, and this may be the first external sign of some strain on developer resources inside Google. It also means that some significant effort will go towards unifying code for the two form factors instead of new features this year, slowing their heretofore breathtaking pace at least somewhat.

Microsoft has now shipped Windows Phone 7 to what appears to be some critical acclaim but lukewarm market success. It's had to pay Nokia US$1 billion to make handsets, which is the reverse kind of relationship that Microsoft would prefer. Nokia wasted years dithering among three or four possible challengers to iPhone, only to realize that none of them would catch up. I'm not hopeful that partnership with Microsoft will change anything. Oh, and I was right about the KIN: it turned out to be a footnote, pulled from the market after just weeks.

RIM bought QNX shortly before I wrote the previous post on this, so I'm a bit surprised I didn't mention it. Since then, RIM has announced plans to ship a tablet called the PlayBook that runs a version of QNX. However, it suffered several apparent schedule and spec changes and feature additions, most recently the inclusion of an Android compatibility mode. The chaotic SDK situation (five separate ways to write PlayBook apps) will make developers leery of committing to the PlayBook, and will diffuse their internal developer resources. While the Blackberry brand may help them sell to the enterprise market, the confused story will probably cost them in the consumer market, doomed perhaps by substandard ports.

Palm hasn't really done anything that is externally visible since the HP purchase. Presumably some time was lost to restructuring and replacing lost employees, but HP has announced that webOS will soon be used in a tablet, phone, and apparently be shipped with new PCs. Unfortunately, nothing will be available before "summer", which is quite a long time away in this market. I still think webOS is dead.

As for the iPad, Apple sold nearly 15 million of them in 2010, and has just started to ship iPad 2 to apparently warm reception. Earlier it also started shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone for Verizon to what seems to be disappointing demand according to some reports, although sales figures are not available.

To summarize, this market is still astonishingly vibrant. iOS and Android are now the two giants to contend with, while Microsoft/Nokia, RIM/QNX, and HP/Palm have started to consolidate in a bid for third place. I don't think more than one of these three will ultimately survive, and while the safe money is on Microsoft because of its resources, HP just might pull off something if the slowness back to market is made up for by serious innovation forward.

Diplomacy

2011-03-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton's State Department should get a medal for the feat they pulled off. The Arab League unanimously asked for a no-fly zone over Libya, while China and Russia - two veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council traditionally leery of international interventions - took a step back and abstained to let the resolution pass. This is perhaps the biggest diplomatic coup for the US since President (George H. W.) Bush's State Department put together the coalition against Iraq in 1990, and this one did not involve the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state, merely the threat of genocide by Gaddafi against his own people. These diplomats probably saved the US taxpayers billions of dollars in war expenses that other countries will now shoulder, not to mention American lives that are not risked.

Predictably, President Obama's critics couldn't just hand him a victory. People who were calling for a no-fly zone two weeks ago suddenly would not have intervened, people who had no trouble paying literally a trillion dollars (not to mention thousands of lives) to invade and occupy Iraq suddenly worried about cost, and people who championed unilateralism and exceptionalism now wanted consultation. Obama is simultaneously criticized as indecisive yet unwilling to slow down to consult with a congress at its most bitterly-divided state in recent memory.

But more importantly, the signal is that America isn't going to always show up in force anymore. Europe is now expected to keep the peace in its neighborhood, and since that includes northern Africa we can only assume it'll also include eastern Europe. South Korea and Taiwan should be taking careful notes right now, and seriously considering the possibility that the US isn't going to go all out for either of them.

Get Real

2011-03-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

The House of Representatives has now gotten into the idiotic pattern of renewing government three weeks at a time. I don't work for the federal government, but anybody can easily imagine the chaos and low morale caused by constantly imminent threats of shutdown. Republicans think government is inefficient, but they're making it worse by making it difficult for even well-meaning people to do real work.

As far as I understand, even the most ambitious Tea Party politicians want "only" to cut about US$100 billion from this year's budget. This is a very big sum, but only a drop in the bucket of the US$14.2 trillion that we already owe, and not even a substantial slice of the US$1.2 trillion deficit. In other words, what we're witnessing is merely disruptive posturing. They complained that the health care bill was passed with too little discussion, yet they are wiping out substantial parts of agency budgets with far less thought, but not touching the truly costly programs.

Here's the problem. Even if you could erase the 2010 deficit with a magic pen, there's zero possibility that removing that sum from the economy would have no impact. Federal employees by the hundreds of thousands would lose their jobs. Houses would have to be sold or foreclosed. Wages in private industry would be depressed by the increased competition. These conservatives refuse to understand that we're talking about US$1.2 trillion of spent money, and even if we all agree it's wasteful (and we don't) doesn't mean cutting it abruptly is the right solution. Quite simply, a federal employee you lay off will soon be receiving unemployment benefits, so you would not see the savings you initially imagined. Worse, somebody you lay off or is laid off indirectly because of these cuts might commit a crime and end up in prison, costing all of us even more. People don't just vaporize when you cut their budgets.

Worse, since this is deficit money, nobody gets to pay a penny less in taxes without the government going into deficit again. So not even the ridiculous trickle-down theory (where rich people invest their tax savings in business, thus benefiting workers) can possibly apply.

What the Republicans need to do is grow up. The federal government didn't get this fat in a day, and it's dangerous to try to trim it down in a day. Government can grow and shrink depending on what the people think its role should be, but letting it grow for decades and cutting in one stroke is a shock that this economy probably can't take. What they need to do is to actually evaluate each agency, starting with the biggest spenders, but starting with next year's budget. What we need is a plan that gradually shrinks government over the next few years until we have a surplus, and actually pay down the debt. Right now, I see Democrats with little willingness to tackle the debt, and I see Republicans willing only to slash programs they already don't like, regardless of its share in the deficit. Either way, fighting over three weeks of government at a time is not what I would expect most Americans elected and pay them to do.

Tax Credits for Hybrids

2011-02-05T18:57:00.001-08:00

I was doing taxes, and decided to see what credit I'd qualify for if I bought a hybrid. Turns out a certain car model only gets a credit for the first 60,000 sold to their first owners, so popular hybrids are usually not qualified anymore. Here's the list of model year 2011 cars, their MSRP, and the respective credits:

BMW Active Hybrid 750i, $102,300, $900
BMW Active Hybrid Li, $106,200, $900
BMW Active Hybrid X6, $88,900, $1,550
Cadillac Escalade Hybrid (2WD & 4WD), $73,840, $2,200
Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid C1500 2WD, $50,735, $2,200
Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid K1500 4WD, $53,540, $2,200
Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid C15 2WD, $38,340, $2,200
Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid K15 4WD, $41,490, $2,200
GMC Sierra Hybrid C15 2WD, $38,710, $2,200
GMC Sierra Hybrid K15 4WD, $41,860, $2,200
GMC Yukon Hybrid C1500 2WD, $51,200, $2,200
GMC Yukon Hybrid K1500 4WD, $54,010, $2,200
GMC Yukon Denali Hybrid K1500 4WD, $61,360, $2,200
Mercedes Benz ML450 Hybrid, $55,790, $2,200
Nissan Altima Hybrid, $26,800, $2,350
Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid, $67,700, $1,800

As I have called out in boldface, only one of these qualified models sells for under $30,000. Why are we giving tax breaks to people who are buying $100,000 cars? Does anybody think that someone who buys the BMW 750i is even going to notice the $900?

Spoiled and Stupid

2011-01-30T12:28:00.001-08:00

For too long, the US government had been allowed to spend more than it made in taxes. Deficit spending per se isn't wrong, but borrowed money needs to be invested in things that will elevate society as a whole, or it will ultimately become more expensive than just taxing. Obviously, decades worth of borrowed money did not increase revenue enough to pay back the debt, and worse, it gave the taxpayers an unrealistic expectation of services for the price they actually pay in taxes.

Well, the house of cards is coming down. California's new governor Jerry Brown is facing a US$25 billion deficit, and he is now proposing to cover half of that in painful cuts, and the other half with increased taxes. Tea Party winner Edward Mangano of Nassau County in New York kept his campaign promise and repealed an unpopular home energy tax on his first day in office. Now, the Nassau County Interim Financial Authority has seized control of the county's finances, because he is $176 million short. Still, the US Congress is nowhere near an agreement on whether to raise taxes to pay for the services (we're really just talking about four or five things that make up 75% of the budget) or to severely cut into those. There is no other way. Math doesn't care.

The core problem is not Democratic or Republican, but that the American people don't want to pay for the government services they want to keep, and are not smart enough to realize that the politicians either don't know, don't care, or are lying about this.

From Simmer to Boil

2011-01-27T21:55:00.000-08:00

Looking at Tunisia and now Egypt and Yemen, I can't help but think that decades of American and European foreign policy that values stability over freedom and fairness had a hand in it. Since 1979, the US gives Egypt an average of about US$1.3B a year in military aid, and another $815M in economic aid, for some $50B in all. It's hard to say how much, but surely this money helped the government keep a lid on dissent.

I don't mean to point fingers. It's extremely difficult for any president who is in power for four or eight years to do anything other than keep the lid on for the duration of his office. The nature of democracy means that no administration can really commit future administrations to thirty- or fifty-year projects, such as the kind of broad education and outreach that would slowly move a country from tribalism or feudalism or monarchy towards a moderate and free society. Because it is so hard, we simply don't try, and make peace with the men who can keep the lid on for a few years.

Inevitably the pot boils over. Once in a while it happens in an almost orderly manner, such as in Taiwan and South Korea. Once in a while not much blood is shed, such as in the Philippines. But many times we see civil war, such as in Vietnam, Iraq, and other places. The problem when this happens is that the people and their leaders are often unprepared for the power-sharing that is core to democracy. Taiwan was ridiculed for having legislators who fight with their fists in congress, yet it was remarkably civilized compared to many other examples that involve assassinations and car bombs. The people were suddenly asked to be in charge of their nation, and expected to vote wise and peaceable people to lead them. But that of course doesn't just happen overnight.

While the Bush doctrine of imposing democracy is lunacy, we also can't just keep doing nothing until a strategically-important country suddenly explodes in revolution. It's tempting to just pay attention to the "hot spots" like Iran and North Korea, but when it happens we're trapped between our words praising democracy and our deeds suppressing it when inconvenient. We would never invade Egypt or Pakistan or Yemen, I hope, but we need to make front and center a foreign policy that does not tolerate inaction towards democracy. Yes, you can move cautiously, but if you don't move the money must dry up.

We can't very well help suppress the Egyptian people, but if the government they want is fundamentalist Islam, we don't really want that either. We should've changed their minds before it got to this, by helping to educate their people that ours really is the better path. The diplomatic coup of the century would be if we could get Europe, Russia, and China to all enforce this principle, but if they won't, we'd still have to do what we can with the power we still have.

The Slow Death of Software as a Product

2011-01-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of simple business models. For example, at Apple we make things that we sell for money. The better we serve our customers, the more likely they'll buy another one later. This isn't the case at Openwave, where the users are usually our customer's customer's customer, nor is it at a company like Yahoo!, where "monetization" is actually a word, and more pertinently at a company like Google.

Google makes many useful services available for free. I use Gmail and Google maps, this blog is powered by Google's Blogger, and I like Sketchup. They have, as far as I can tell, acted ethically despite being so powerful. Except for some no-win situations such as the episode with China, they have generally done right by their users.

However, all of this is possible because of their infinite income from search advertising. Because no other branch really needs to make money, Google manages to attract many bright and idealistic engineers to turn out these wonderful freebies. Many projects they take on, such as Google Earth and Google Books, are of a scale that is difficult to imagine just a decade or two ago.

But the way I'm writing this must lead you to expect the other shoe to drop.

Unfortunately, despite their best intentions, Google also is a distorting influence on many markets. Just because Google can afford to give things away for free doesn't mean that competitors who don't have their infinite search advertising revenue also can. Android is an obvious example. While Apple is unlikely to license iOS, and Palm probably wouldn't have either, Microsoft very much wants to license Windows Phone 7. Yet WP7 must now contend with a free and very competent alternative in Android. Now, it's hard to feel bad for Microsoft, which has it's own cash spigot in Windows and Office, but think about a small company. If Geoworks was around today, how might it compete with Google?

I believe Microsoft launched the first such cannonballs. By giving away Internet Explorer, it made it impossible for Netscape to sell its browser. Opera is probably the only browser that charges money today, but it has only a few percent of the market. This makes no intuitive sense. A modern browser is easily a few millions of lines of code, as complex as anything else installed on your computer, yet it cannot charge money for the effort.

Now, you might say that open source software has the same issue. Yes, it does, and the zero-price browser has much to do with Mozilla. (WebKit grew up with Apple, Nokia, and now Google support, so I won't count it despite its KHTML roots.) However, for whatever reason, free software simply hasn't taken hold in many places. Linux has not really made it on the desktop after two decades, for example, and Microsoft isn't really losing sleep over OpenOffice.org. I'm not going to try to imagine why right now, suffice to say commercial software can still find ways to compete in many realms with free software.

Competing with company-backed free software is a different thing. Apple's backing has made WebKit the number one mobile browser, rendering other mobile browsers like Openwave's mostly irrelevant. Google has made it nearly impossible to sell web-based mail or maps. This is not good for the software industry or its practitioners, because it accelerates the path to monopoly, and thus the reduction of competing solutions. Put bluntly, the only software engineers that will be needed are those who work for infinite-money companies doing this as a hobby or sideline.

This worries me a little, because I'd really rather build software as a product instead of something that attracts advertising or whatever other "monetizing" mechanism they come up with.

Time to Call the Bluff

2010-12-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

(written early last month on Facebook, pasting here for posterity.)

The government's fiscal problems is actually pretty simple math. It spends a certain amount, and takes in via taxes a certain amount. If tax revenue is less than spending, there are only three solutions:

One, raise taxes. In reality, this is not impossible. A family that makes $100,000 can pay an additional $1,000 in taxes. This is about the size of a cable TV bill, and is not a tremendous sacrifice if you believe in the programs you are funding. (A very big if.)

Two, borrow. This of course adds to the deficit, which the future generation not only has to pay back, it has to pay back with interest. Unless you're investing in something that will increase future revenue greatly, borrowing is not usually a good idea. Note, however, that interest rates are really low right now, so it's relatively easy to make good on the investments.

Three: cut spending. You can't talk about cutting spending without first looking at where the money has been going. About three-fourths of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Defense, Unemployment, Medicare, and Medicaid, and even if you cut the rest of the government (which includes everything from NASA to meat inspectors to veteran affairs, by the way), the government will still be in deficit. Thus, it is factually impossible and therefore irresponsible to talk about spending cuts without touching the top five.

Now, the reasonable thing to do might be to do a bit of all three, so that you don't borrow so much, raise taxes by too much, or have to cut spending (and therefore services) too much. To refuse one of the three solutions means you have to rely more on the other two, this is just simple math.

Unfortunately, Republicans in the House will refuse to raise taxes or borrow more, which leaves heavy cuts in spending as the only option on the table. On the other hand, I don't think they dare to cut any of those popular programs, particularly the ones that benefit the older voters who support them.

President Obama should propose a balanced budget that includes severe cuts in all five areas. We are engaged in a war and a half, not to mention a financial crisis that hasn't really ended yet. It's time for some pain. Democrats need to face up to the fact that they cannot fund all these programs without the Republican votes that they can't get, and cut as intelligently as possible. There isn't another option*, until voters allow the government to choose at least one of the other two. It is futile for Democrats to try to make ends meet with both hands tied behind their backs, thanklessly trying to save people from themselves, so the lesser of two evils is to cut them while you have the White House and Senate.

Or, perhaps, the Republicans are just bluffing. If they don't like Obama's balanced budget, they can propose an alternate balanced budget.

* No, tax cuts will probably not increase revenue. There's not even any guarantee that the tax savings will be spent by its beneficiaries in the US (or even spent at all), much less result in future revenue. Remember, lowering the tax rate means the corporations need to do fabulously well for the government to collect the same taxes back.

A Hierarchy of Sins

2010-12-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI recently stated that while prostitution is immoral, there is something of a first step to respecting life if a prostitute who is HIV-positive uses a condom to avoid infecting another person. The Catholic Church quickly issued a clarification that this does not mean condoms are okay for contraception.

The important thing is actually not condoms here, but the understanding that not all sins are equal. Prostitution is seen as a sin, sure, but when compared to knowingly infecting somebody else with a fatal disease, the Pope made a moral decision. This is, believe it or not, somewhat extraordinary for this painfully rigid institution. Usually they just make a list of things that are immoral, and never bother themselves with the implementation details. The Church typically would've just said "don't be a prostitute" without wondering how one who had to enter that profession might stop being one. Instead, what the Pope said was essentially, "if you must be a prostitute, at least wear a condom."

This has remarkable parallels in other issues. For example, the Church considers abortion and contraception (in general) to be immoral. That's a fine stance in abstract, but the result is unwanted children, poverty, even crime. If a teenaged girl becomes pregnant, having the baby will usually change her life in a pretty devastating way, which is why people are tempted to abort.

While a sensible approach might be to preach abstinence, but teach the sinful option of contraception in order to avoid the even more sinful option of abortion, the Church is anything but sensible. It fears any sin so much that it immobilizes itself into impracticality. As such, the Church is part of the problem instead of the solution. Imagine if the police prevented you from saving a drowning child, because the pool is closed and you'd be trespassing.

Now, I don't know if this reflects a new understanding of the world, but one can hope. The Philippines is one country that would benefit greatly if the Church applied this principle.

iWoz

2010-06-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

Finally read all of iWoz, the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, designer of the Apple ][ personal computer. Many of the anecdotes in his life were already familiar to me, but what stood out for me was how several of his proudest hacks were completed under extreme time pressure. It seems like the human brain has something akin to adrenaline that lets us think quickly and clearly when pressured, and I think all experienced engineers would've called upon this well at one point or another.

I do envy those who were in the Valley during those heady days, though. While there are still wildly innovative things to be done in this industry (I think the era of intensely-personal computers like the iPhone is just beginning), it's nearly impossible for a couple of friends to pull it off from nothing. Just a few years after 2000, the main goal of many start-ups already shifted from striking it rich by invention to getting bought out by a Yahoo! or Google. The iPhone App Store briefly brought back the excitement that a one-person outfit could hit it big, but bigger companies are no longer as lumbering as those of Woz's day.

Bye, Floppies

2010-04-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Sony is apparently one of a few remaining manufacturers of the 3.5" floppy disk, and they'll stop production next year. Floppies were an important file transfer mechanism when I was in college, and I remember my copy of Windows 95 was in floppies. CD-ROMs overtook the floppy as a delivery mechanism in the late 90's, so it was relegated to transferring small files from computer to computer. The PowerMac G4 that we bought in 2002 or so no longer had a floppy drive, as networking took that final use case. I think USB flash drives served that purpose for some, but I don't even have one of those in the house.

Of course, no discussion of the 3.5" floppy would be complete without mentioning AOL, which shipped out tons of those before they switched to CD-ROMs.

Challenging the iPhone, Part II

2010-04-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago, I predicted that 2010 would be an interesting one for iPhone competitors. The year's not over yet, but let's revisit anyway.

Google's first strike, the G1, doesn't seem to be talked about much anymore. These days it seems to be all about the Nexus One or the HTC Incredible. Aside from hardware fragmentation I predicted, we're seeing some signs that manufacturers are not really interested in updating already-sold phones to the latest Android releases, and Google is releasing them rapidly. According to a GSM Arena article, there are only about 18% of users running version 2.0+, while 54% are running 1.6 and and another 28% are running 1.5. This is a big headache for developers, and the open nature of Android hurts Google here. Worse, brand new phones are still being sold with version 1.5 on it, which can disappoint less tech-savvy customers.

Palm was, simply put, squished between Apple and Google, and may not last the year. There are still good people working there, and I imagine they'll be lapped up by Google. What happens to Palm's patent portfolio as a mobile device pioneer will be interesting, but I don't think we'll see an angel investor pump more money to let Palm keep pushing. I think either they'll be purchased and repurposed, or have to close down. I think WebOS is dead.

I identified the iPhone App Store as a strength, and it continues to be, with I think some 180,000+ apps. In fact, it's beginning to be the opposite problem of separating the wheat from the chaff. What is debunked beyond any doubt is that Objective-C would be a significant obstacle. iPhones continue to sell very well, and whether the iPad will spread developers thin or attract even more developers remains to be seen.

Microsoft has announced that it will ship Windows Phone 7 later this year, supposedly a rewrite to support multi-touch and other features now expected of smartphones. But in a typically-Microsoft fashion, they first will ship a couple of Danger phones called the KIN, which I'm guessing will not be compatible with Windows Phone 7. It's hard to know what they're thinking, but I'll predict that the KIN will be a footnote.

Blackberries continue to sell well, which is one area where I seem to be quite mistaken. I had predicted that they'll be forced into a massive software rewrite, but they have resisted that so far. However, some surveys show that over 70% of Blackberry users want an iPhone or Android phone next, which should make RIM very nervous.

Nokia seems to have done well recently, but frankly I don't even know what their marquee phone is. I think I'll remain skeptical until they just hop on Android and concentrate instead on hardware.

I think what we'll see for the rest of the year is Apple maintaining a good lead as Google consolidates the "others" in the pie chart to close the gap. I'm going to predict that RIM will not have a happy 2011, and we'll see what Windows Phone 7 will bring.

[Palm has indeed found an angel, and lives to fight another day! HP has announced that it will purchase Palm for US$1.2 billion and continue work on WebOS. This is excellent news, and I'm quite happy for them!]

Praise for the iPad

2010-04-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

"Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?"

- Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times

"One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker's Guide that humankind has yet devised."

- Stephen Fry, Time Magazine

"At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of."

- Edward C. Baig, USA Today

"I found the iPad a pleasure to use, and had less and less interest in cracking open my heavier ThinkPad or MacBook."

- Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal

"a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests."

- Xeni Jardin, boingboing.com

"the Apple iPad is a very convincing debut. And it will undoubtedly be a driving force in shaping the emerging tablet landscape."

- Tim Gideon, PC Magazine

"The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine."

- David Pogue, The New York Times

"What can the iPad do? In a word, it can simplify computing."

- Noah Kravitz, The Huffington Post

"prior to our iPad's arrival she said she didn't understand why anyone would want or need an iPad. Now she just keeps saying, 'No, you can't have it back.'"

- Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus, Houston Chronicle

"After playing with the sleek tablet for much of the last week, I have no doubt that the techies were wrong and Steve Jobs was right."

- Omar Wasow, the Root

"the experience was stunning. It’s a nearly flawless device. And the iPad beats even my most optimistic expectations."

- Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

Two Possibilities

2010-01-31T00:29:00.000-08:00

I have to come to one of two conclusions about Republicans, based on their incredibly solid opposition to every major policy initiative from the Democrats in the recent years, but particularly after Obama took office.

The first one is they are unpatriotic. This conclusion supposes that at least some Republicans actually agree with the Democrats enough to vote for those bills, but do not because they are more willing to see Obama fail, even if it means the country fails along with him. Or, they are more afraid of their party leadership than they want to see the country move in the right direction. It is otherwise impossible for 41 Republican senators to always vote "no" on important issues, when even they would admit the status quo is unbearable. If they were patriotic and reasonable, surely they would rather accept an imperfect bill to inaction. Although I cite this as the first conclusion, I don't actually believe it to be true.

The second one is that they are without exception politically quite a bit to the Right of the country as a whole. In the Senate, which is already a body that gives disproportionate weight to the more conservative inner states, 59 Senators can still be found to support the Health Care Reform Bill. This number is conclusive proof that the political center of the country must be somewhere among those 59, and not among the 41 Republicans. (Put another way, Republicans represent only the most conservative 20 states, which have relatively small populations.) One would've expected that the most right-wing Democrat would be somewhat to the right of the most left-wing Republican, if both parties are to have some claim to the political center.

It is the second conclusion that seems more plausible. The Republicans do not only lean Right, they have left the center entirely. When Senator Reid watered down the HCR bill to pacify the right wing of his party, the resulting bill satisfied no Republican enough to defect. So if we are to reject the conclusion above that Republican Senators are all unpatriotic, then they must sincerely believe that Reid's concessions are not enough. If they do, however, then all 41 of them are to the right of Senator Nelson, who is pro-life, endorsed by the NRA, supported Justice Alito's nomination, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and voted with Republicans on bankruptcy reform, environmental protection, stem cell research, and so on.

If so, it means that the two major parties are politically disjoint, which is a dangerous situation. It is increasingly hard for Obama to believe that any Republican will sincerely work with him, rather than set a trap to embarrass him. If none of them can be brought over either because they are unpatriotic or because they are ideologically too far away, the country is going to suffer.

Make Them Walk

2009-09-12T10:46:00.001-07:00

We just got back from a wonderful trip to a couple of national parks in southern Utah, and the way each ran things got me thinking. Zion and Bryce Canyon both receive millions of visitors each year, and both provide a shuttle bus into the park's attractions. However, there are differences:

Zion simply bans private vehicles during the summer peak season. Bryce Canyon's shuttles are not mandatory.
Zion's shuttles run until about 11:00pm. Bryce Canyon's end at about 6:00pm, which during the summer is before sunset, a most popular time to see the park.
Zion's shuttles pull up right next to attractions. Bryce Canyon's park farther than the private vehicles.

Riding a shuttle bus has inescapable disadvantages over driving. I can bring more things (water, food, change of clothes, etc.) in my own car that I would have to carry around in a backpack for the bus. Even though buses are 6 or 8 minutes apart, that's still longer than just getting in the car and driving off. That's why it's important to offset these disadvantages, in order for people to use the shuttle.

Zion's mandatory policy is obviously the easiest way to achieve this, and a ranger told us they saw more wildlife just three days after the mandatory shuttle service was instituted in 2000. However, even if you don't want to force people to take shuttles, you should make it advantageous to take the shuttle. For example, the shuttle should take you closer to attractions than cars can. Make them walk. Run the shuttle through sunset, because you actually have a view point called "Sunset Point"!

We saw the same thing flying back to Oakland. The ground transportation roads to the airport are separated into three lanes, the closest one for private car drop-offs and pick-ups, the second for taxis, and the third for buses (including the AirBART bus that connects to the BART rail system). This is completely backwards, if you're trying to encourage the use of more efficient public transportation. The AirBART and other public buses should take me closest to the door, right off the curb. Private shuttles can take the next lane, and private cars and taxis should be farthest.

Now, this is not about punishing private cars. This is about allocating a scarce resource (walking distance) in a way that encourages desirable behavior. As long as it's more convenient to drive, people will do so.

On Gay Marriage

2009-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

The issue of gay marriage is really quite simple, and I don't really understand why so many people have hang-ups over it.

Imagine, if you will, that somebody establishes the Church of Gay People, which is entirely legal under our Freedom of Religion. The CGP institutes for itself a sacrament of marriage, which is also legal because nobody owns those words. Their marriage, of course, is only between two men or two women. So far, this probably falls under most people's idea of "none of my business".

Now here's where the CGP gets frisky. It begins to lobby the government to make its definition the only legal one! Heterosexual marriages would no longer be recognized if they are successful. Now, straight people don't really need to worry, because we probably outnumber gay people greatly. However, the point is that the CGP's claim is logically no stronger nor weaker than that of any other religion, differing only in the number of believers. Why should the government be in the business of deciding which religion's marriage is the proper one? Put another way, if you don't want your definition of marriage to ever be nullified by government (which you probably already do not trust, given the demographics), you shouldn't oppose a gay person's definition of it either.

The sanctity of your marriage stems from your love and faith, not in the least bit because a government bureaucrat stamped your paper. In fact, I dare say that even if the government got entirely out of the business of marriage (strike "married" from the tax forms, etc), your marriage could still be sacred and happy.

Which means what the opponents of gay marriage are trying to do is to use the government as a tool to force non-believers to conform to their religious views. Stop that.

Not Holding My Breath

2009-03-11T22:26:00.001-07:00

Apparently some quixotic soul is trying to pass a reproductive health bill in the Philippines, and I just spent a few minutes reading through the arguments on a Facebook group opposing the measure.

The one big thing that so many people miss is that the government is not the keeper of morality. It has practical problems and must use practical solutions, or things break. Under this umbrella there are a few sub-points:

The Philippines may be a "Catholic country", but not all Filipinos are Catholic. Thus, any attempt to write Catholic beliefs into law must be done with the utmost care.
Many modern laws may well derive from biblical teachings or law, but not all. For example, most of the Ten Commandments are not law. The first three definitely aren't, and would grossly violate the separation of Church and State. Depending on the country, adultery may be a crime or just a reason to allow divorce. The two last ones about coveting do not generally break laws. In other words, at least half of the Ten Commandments are not civil law! Catholic (and other religious) laws form a higher requirement for human behavior, but is not necessarily appropriate as civil law.
The government itself does not follow biblical laws. It does not stone gays to death as prescribed, for instance. It maintains a military whose sole purpose is to kill people. Some countries also have the death penalty.

Thus, it should be quite clear that while Catholic beliefs on key definitions (such as when "life" begins) form an important basis for discussion, they should not be unquestionably accepted. Just because a law doesn't force somebody to become a good Catholic doesn't mean it's a bad law.

The second big thing is letting perfection become the enemy of good. Yes, I think everybody would like a world where all pregnancies are planned and eagerly anticipated by able parents. I don't think even the staunchest defenders of women's rights enjoys hearing about an abortion. The problem is, if not contraception (or abortion), what is the alternative? This is where many "pro-life" people end their discussion and avoid looking you in the eye.

(I particularly enjoyed a certain Charles Francis Decangchon's insane litany, concluding that the woman must have been either too "promiscuous" and deserves the child, or should've turned her husband in for marital rape. The utter idiocy of this view point is actually hard to believe. In the first case, it's almost saying that becoming pregnant is punishment for "promiscuity", which totally ignores what might happen to this poor unwanted child served up as punishment. In the second case, he's suggesting a poor pregnant woman get her husband sent to jail in a country that doesn't even allow divorce. What if the husband is the sole breadwinner? How many women have actually been able to use this legal protection? These are transparently the thoughts of an out-of-touch and decidedly upper-middle-class mind, in which dogma can afford to overlook the actual problems on the ground. A real government can have no such luxury.)

Clearly, what the Philippines or any other real country needs are imperfect laws that strike a balance between the problems it solves and problems it creates, not head-in-the-sand arguments that end up doing nothing. However, only when everybody in the debate is willing to accept these two points above can there really be a discussion on the finer points.

Tax Scare

2009-01-31T19:34:00.000-08:00

Somehow I manage to scare myself every year by counting my stock options income twice while doing taxes, which I did again minutes ago. So let this be a reminder to former co-workers: Apple already includes your stock options income complete with withholdings, right on your W-2 form.

In other news, I'm starting to wear incredibly expensive shoe insoles in the hopes of correcting my slightly flat feet. My feet had been limiting me to about 5 miles per hike, and I start compensating for the soreness underfoot by somehow stressing my calves out, too. It's not bad in daily life, but I certainly won't mind being less tired at the end of the day. It'll take some breaking-in as it remolds my feet, so we'll see how well this works in a few weeks.

Challenging the iPhone

2009-01-13T23:54:00.000-08:00

Shortly after the iPhone burst onto the scene, there was a rush to copy its innovations. However, these had mainly been superficial imitations, such as adding a touch screen onto software that doesn't really support touching, or simply ripping off the Springboard user interface. Some of the worst copycats couldn't even scroll a photograph smoothly across the screen.

Obviously, it's not easy to compete with the iPhone in 2007 or early 2008. The thing is a technical marvel, cramming what is essentially a ~500 MHz processor computer into a thin box the size of a palm. This power in turn allowed it to run desktop-class software like the game-changing Mobile Safari.

But it's no longer 2007, and we're beginning to see real competition arrive. Unlike the first wave of copycats, these are big, thoughful competitors who had the chance to analyze the iPhone's hardware and software, as well as observe the market's reaction to it. They are definitely not to be laughed off like the initial bunch of wannabes.

Google struck first with the G1. I've played with it a bit, and my impression is that it is more of a prototype board than a production phone. It has a keyboard, a touch screen, and a trackball. Unfortunately, this means that the Android developer would probably have to deal with a variety of different input devices when phones with different hardware arrive. The software seems a bit less responsive than the iPhone. However, Google has very good people who know everything I know and then some, so a "1.1" software release in six months or a year would be well worth watching for.

Palm - which I considered working for after Apple - threw its hat into the ring last week. The Pre looks like a nice device, but not being actually market-ready suggests they have some serious work left to do. I'll probably try hard to get my hands on one to play with. Less obviously than Google, Palm also has very good people right now, and they're actually in charge.

One advantage that Apple continues to hold is the App Store. While third party applications for phones is no news, most of them are painful endeavors. (To borrow an expression from JBQ, you know you're in embedded systems when the tools are lousy.) I've dabbled in Symbian, Windows Mobile, looked briefly at BREW, and of course Geos-SC, and they were all just annoying for various reasons. Although Objective-C is an unfamiliar programming language for many, it is a real desktop-class development environment, and there are some serious apps being released for the iPhone.

Android's allure to third parties is theoretically better than Apple's. Google opened up everything, in stark contrast to Apple's annoying secretive stance. However, if Google is not able to restrain its device manufacturers to produce common handsets that Android programmers can target broadly, then Android may in reality fragment into multiple platforms because some Android software would not work on various Android phones. Apple has internal discipline to enforce this, Google doesn't actually make the phones.

Palm's problem as Number Three is to convince people to develop software for it. The iPhone OS and Android are both good development environments, but making big software is still no picnic. Palm's chicken-and-egg problem is that you can't sell phones without apps, and you can't get the apps unless you sell lots of phones. The iPhone overcame this awkward stage in a time when the PalmOS and Windows Mobile were both dated and stagnant. Palm would have to do it against an attentive Apple and Google...

...which brings us to Microsoft. There's no question in my mind that Microsoft is developing an answer to the iPhone OS, if not directly to the iPhone. They have some internal experience in small mobile systems with the Zune, but it wouldn't surprise me if a separate team was assembled to meet this challenge. I think the question is whether they try to improve the Zune platform, or dig out the old source code of Windows NT 4.0.

I don't know much about BlackBerries, but I get the impression that they are stuck with a software or hardware platform that will not be able to run something like Safari smoothly. If so, they're in trouble. Rebuilding your platform at this important juncture is very dangerous, just as Netscape proved by ditching their version 4.7 code base. Not biting the bullet, on the other hand, would make them just like the PalmOS that was used well past its prime.

At this point, I don't think that 2009 will be a year of serious threats to the iPhone. However, 2010 might be very interesting.

RIP, VHS

2008-12-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

Distribution Video Audio, Inc. is the last big supplier of VHS tapes, and they are done with the product. The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was "A History of Violence" in 2006. Introduced in 1976, this gives it an impressive run of about 30 years.

Because we grew up in the Philippines, the dominant video format for many years was actually Sony's Betamax, even after the VHS conquered the rest of the world. The two formats were similar in terms of features and faults: you had to rewind the tape after viewing; the player may eat the tape; magnetic tape was fragile; the cassettes were bulky; and the video quality was poor (and degraded with age).

Good times.

Secret Ballot, Public Count

2008-12-14T13:15:00.001-08:00

A cooperative election official in California allowed the re-scanning of ballots, and provided the images to the public for analysis. Add some donated programmer time, and what we find is that the official election machines dropped 197 of 64,161 ballots (0.003%) because of a software bug. (If that doesn't sound like a lot, remember that it would extrapolate to 304,356 votes in the 2000 presidential elections when Al Gore's popular vote advantage was merely 539,947.)

I don't have intimate knowledge of these machines. If you scanned the ballot into a giant image and then tried to sort out which boxes were filled, then it would be a challenging programming task. However, if you have specialized equipment that could detect if a box at a given position is filled or not, as I suspect the official machines do, then counting votes should be a pretty trivial exercise. Computers have been adding one to a running total correctly for many decades now.

"Secret ballot, public count" really should be the way to go.

...

An unrelated note from the article gave me a chuckle:

Trachtenberg said before the launch they had trouble getting the scanner to work with their Linux scanning program, but contacted M. Allen Noah, administrator of the SANE Project (the open scanning protocol known as Scanner Access Now Easy that works with Linux), who advised them on how to make it work.

Ah, good ol' Linux. You make it so easy.

On Confrontation

2008-12-13T20:07:00.001-08:00

One thing that's always impressed me about the American System is its confrontational nature. There are two big political parties, neither able to destroy the other any time soon. There are three branches of government, and not even a President Bush could really say no to the Supreme Court. There is a prosecutor like any other country, but also a defense lawyer, whose job - get this - is to side completely with the accused whether guilty or innocent. These confrontations would not be possible if they were taken personally, instead of understood to be your opponent merely "doing his or her job." In fact, I think underlying these systems is the belief that it's better to be correct than nice. (Not being a nice person, I really like that.)

One facet of this system that has failed miserably, however, is in the financial regulation area. It's pretty clear why: the bankers are far more powerful than the regulators. The former flies in personal and corporate jets and dine with politicians, the latter wear beige overcoats and shiver in the wind. Okay, maybe my stereotypes are not so good, but it's time the balance of power is restored to this very important confrontation.

Backing Up

2008-12-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

I've sometimes thought about printing out digital data in some sort of bar code onto paper as a long-term solution for backing up personal data:

Good quality paper lasts a long time in proper storage.
Modern laser printers can produce crisp images cheaply. An ink-jet printout would be less crisp, and also more susceptible to moisture damage.
Error-correcting codes can be embedded, to help recovery in case of damage to the papers.
Redundancy is tedious, but possible. You can photocopy the entire stack of paper.
Retrieval is slow, but the technology required is not likely to disappear. The best case is a scanner with a sheet feeder, the worst case is a digital camera.
No reliance on computer interfaces that quickly become obsolete.

Add to this a cleanly-written, open source implementation of an encoder and particularly a decoder, I think the data can last for decades. Open source is critical because any future attempt at retrieval should not be dependent on old computers or operating systems. Hell, print the source code along with the data!

This is of course not an original idea. Old computer magazines used to come with pages and pages of game source code for eager young readers to type in, but later also came with these bar code strips to ease data entry.

The big problem is probably data density. If we print the data bits at 50 dpi, then a letter-size sheet of paper can store 187,500 of raw bytes per sheet if we leave half an inch of margin on all sides. This means that a terabyte of data would require 5,727 sheets of paper, or less than 12 reams (which should cost about US$60). Printing them out on a Lexmark T642DTN today (45 pages per minute) would take just over two hours. My printer can only go 20 ppm, so it'll take nearly 5 hours to print. The toner supposedly prints 2,500 pages, but that's probably text pages, so let's say 1,000 pages instead, which adds about US$180 of toner expenses. You might be able to get error correction and compression to cancel each other out, so I won't bother computing that.

But if permanence is really important, this may not be an entirely bad idea. Our photo library, last time I checked, weighs in at about 6 GB. However, if we excluded some of the redundant pictures and scaled the resolution down a bit, this solution could be in the ballpark.

Why not just print out the pictures on archival photo paper, you say?

Pondering RAID

2008-11-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

As I think I've mentioned before, my first hard drive was 20 MB in size for what was then a small fortune for a kid, so every so often I like to check what the current prices are. I'm also looking at options to optimize Mabel's Mac Pro, which is running its eight cores at only about 50% efficiency while rendering in Final Cut Pro. It'd be fun to put together my first RAID.

Looking at the mainstream SATA drives today on pricewatch.com:

2.09 GB/USD - 2 TB
11.77 GB/USD - 1 TB
10.42 GB/USD - 1 TB with 32 MB buffer
12.30 GB/USD - 750 GB
11.72 GB/USD - 750 GB with 32 MB buffer
8.31 GB/USD - 640 GB
11.11 GB/USD - 500 GB
8.93 GB/USD - 500 GB with 32 MB buffer
9.30 GB/USD - 400 GB
5.73 GB/USD - 350 GB
8.00 GB/USD - 320 GB

Looks like the sweet spot is at the 750 MB to 1 TB area. A 1.5 TB or 2 TB RAID-0 set-up (for about US$200) could probably have served the entire University when I was a wee lad. Good times.

Public Service Message

2008-11-23T00:07:00.000-08:00

A recent New York Times article makes an excellent point: in this economy, where many retailers are at risk of bankruptcy, it's prudent to spend any gift certificate or gift card you receive immediately. There is no standard procedure for handling gift certificates (which are essentially debts) if the retailer enters bankruptcy protection or just shuts down, so if you have friends like mine, you're not going to get a gift certificate worth going to court for.

Too Stupid to Fail?

2008-11-17T17:47:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that it's easier if the government just make a list of companies that can be allowed to fail. It would be a shorter list.

The US automakers made their choices: they continued to build big SUVs and trucks, and the market is now punishing them for it. They then put even more eggs in the same basket by overestimating the demand for these trucks and SUVs when they were returned from lease agreements. Their entire business model hinged on continued demand for SUVs and trucks, which history has shown to be hugely vulnerable to a rise in gas prices, nevermind a recession.

Can somebody explain where we draw the line at which a company that made stupid decisions can fail? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping the common workers even of failed companies, but why should Circuit City be going into Chapter 11 while GM still hopes for rescue?

Can we at least legally require such a company's officers (say, vice president and above) to put on their business cards and résumés: "Partly responsible for failure of [company name]" in no less than a 16-point font for the next ten or 15 years?

Pinko

2008-10-30T22:02:00.001-07:00

Why is it that when some people mention "socialism", the image they conjure in their minds is some 18-year old who won't go find a job, instead of some blue-collar worker who gets sick?

The idea behind socialist policies is that there are some events in a few people's lives that almost nobody can adequately prepare for entirely on his or her own. Yes, there will always be people who abuse the system, but that suggests reform instead of tossing the whole idea.

What a Stupid Thing to Say to Me!

2008-10-23T17:41:00.000-07:00

Speaking of being detached from the Real World,

Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that "a flaw in the model ... that defines how the world works."

Alan (may I call you Alan?), you're nearly thrice my age and almost certainly much smarter than I am, but even I knew that a "bank" makes no decisions and therefore cannot act in its own "self-interest." Instead, bank executives act on the self-interest of... bank executives.

Your model is not just flawed. It is hopelessly naïve. You actually assumed that corporate leaders are, as a rule, going to be responsible stewards of the organization? Where have you been?

The American Delusion

2008-10-16T15:00:00.001-07:00

One of the most amazing things that the Republicans have managed to achieve is to fool their supporters into voting as if they were rich. Instead of voting for middle-class tax cuts, they imagine themselves to be millionaires (or at least, for "Joe the Plumber", somebody who will make more than $250,000 a year someday) with estates to leave their children. This is why they worry about the "death tax" and other money that they haven't actually earned. Or will ever earn.

Let's say you make US$300,000 a year. That income easily puts you in the top 1.5% of the population. In contrast, a US$1,000,000 loan at 5.75% interest over 15 years will require about $99,650 a year. In other words, you can afford a mansion in Joe Plumber's Ohio (or, in the Bay Area, still a pretty nice house) and still have about a hundred grand a year to spend on everything else. Obama proposes to raise the taxes for income above $250,000 by 3%, which means you have to pay US$1,500 more in taxes.

If you ever make US$300,000 a year. Is that really a big amount of money for somebody who makes more than 98.5% of the US population? That's about a fifth of what you pay for your million-dollar house in a month.

Another blind spot that people have is that they think that wealth is linear. It isn't. If somebody making US$50,000 is getting by with US$5 McDonald's meals, a person making a million doesn't necessarily have to spend $100 a meal. They might get the $200 cable TV package that has 5,000 channels, while you pay $40 or $50 for your more modest choices. They might fly first class for US$5,000 a seat, while you fly in cabbage class for $500. Few of these expenses actually differ by the same factor as income! In other words, a reasonable millionaire will have far more money left by percentage than somebody making far less, and are therefore far more able to shoulder a bigger percentage of taxes.

So stop worrying about taxes on the kind of money you will probably never earn anyway.

Just Like Old Times

2008-09-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

I'm getting the Sunday night dread of going to work tomorrow, a really juvenile feeling I don't think I've had since high school.

This job makes me feel young again, eh?

Leadership According to Bush

2008-09-26T23:53:00.001-07:00

This is how he dealt with 9/11 and the current financial crisis, probably the two most significant events in his two terms:

1. Wait for things to become really bad.
2. Claim that nobody could've foreseen the problem.
3. Ask for a blank check to fix the problem
4. Reject any oversight or review. Just trust me.

Remember the tax cuts that were supposed to trickle down to the middle class? Something's trickling down all right. I love how the government that Republicans claimed could not be trusted to run a national health care system must somehow be trusted to fix Wall Street.

Bailout

2008-09-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

Thing is, I actually believe the government when they say that some financial institutions have gotten "too big to fail" and must be bailed out if we want our economy to survive.

Problem is, I'm not hearing much about how to prevent this from ever happening again. There are two obvious paths:

1. Prevent companies that are too big from ever failing. This requires effective and heavy-handed government regulation, which I'm not a fan of.

2. Prevent companies from getting too big. Break them up into smaller companies that can be allowed to fail, and let the market work as it should.

Otherwise, even US$700 billion is just a band-aid.

Small World

2008-09-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

An old classmate from grade school just got moved into our bullpen. (A bullpen is a big cubicle where they try to cram more than one person in.)

It's bumping into each other again against this kind of odds (over two decades later, half a world away) that truly reminds me to try not to be too nasty to people.

oneConnect Ships

2008-09-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

oneConnect is an instant messaging client and social network aggregator built around an address book, and we just shipped the iPhone version. It's available on the iTunes Apps Store.

You know you want it.

Triaging Bugs

2008-09-06T13:26:00.001-07:00

Towards the end of a software project, management's role becomes one primarily of triage. This is a delicate balance between schedule and features/fixes, and should not be undertaken with a one-dimensional analysis. For example, "it's just a small feature" is not justified. "There's still time" is also not justified. In fact, "this bug is really bad" is also not justified, much less "this will make the product better."

Take a look at the picture below:

Here I am evaluating a bug report on two axes: frequency and severity.

Starting from the top left corner, a bug that is severe but almost never happens is extremely expensive to fix. It will be hard to figure out what went wrong, and hard to figure out that the fix is the correct one. In fact, it's also entirely possible that introducing the fix for this extremely rare problem causes a more common problem to occur.

In the bottom right corner, we have bugs that almost always happen, but don't really bother anybody. Fixing them will make the product better for a lot of users, but they wouldn't be too angry if you didn't.

The top right corner is where you want to focus your engineers: the bugs that are really bad and occur frequently. "Really bad" usually means crashing, hanging (which is like crashing, as far as the user is concerned), or data loss.

The bottom left corner, of course, are bugs you don't really want to spend much time on. The bugs are not bothersome, and don't occur frequently.

Clearly, where to draw the curves are a matter of judgment and experience, but the important thing is to internalize that this decision must always consider more than one dimension. In fact, I left out an important third dimension: risk of fixing versus not fixing. Many fixes can end up as bad or worse as the bug it was trying to fix.

Six?

2008-08-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

Eugenia reviewed an MP3 player on her blog, and said among other things:

"there is no documentation to tell us how to create and use the right formats the e-book, tel-book and video player. I tried both as WMV v8 and XViD at small resolutions/frame rate/bitrates, but nothing worked"
"there is a buzzing noise when the audio interface is up or you listen to low-volume music"
"it took minutes to copy a few songs over, much slower even than USB 1.1. Battery life is pretty low too, just 4.5 hours"

and in the end gave it a grade of 6/10.

Based on this review, I would say that it fails at its two primary tasks (playing audio and video), and performs poorly on an important secondary task (transferring audio and video). Six is a passing score, not meant for an audio player in 2008 that has a "buzzing sound" or a video player that an experienced geek and reviewer like Eugenia can't figure out how to use at all.

Could It Be?

2008-08-25T00:23:00.001-07:00

I've long referred to Fremont as a culinary wasteland, but over the past two weekends we tried Carino's and Dickey's Barbecue Pit, and both turned out to be pretty good. I had pasta and italian soda (yummy, free refills, and you can pick another flavor) at Carino's and a rib (comes right off the bone like it should) platter at Dickey's.

Kitten Update

2008-07-27T12:54:00.001-07:00

Oh, and if you're wondering about our kitten, we tried a lot of things. We bought kitten milk replacement and tried to feed it with a little bottle. I didn't want to touch the kitten or risk a scratch, so I handled it with rubber gloves. It might have had a bit of the milk, but the little thing struggled mightily.

In the end, we just weren't sure that the mom was feeding it, so Mabel brought it to the Nine Lives Foundation in Redwood City.

Safety Net

2008-07-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

The Bush government is now issuing all sorts of bailouts to financial institutions that have made horrible decisions during the housing bubble. That means US taxpayers will pay for all these mistakes.

The concept of a "safety net" is to prevent an acrobat from plunging to his death, not to prevent him from falling. People who bought houses they couldn't actually afford, similarly, shouldn't be rendered homeless, but neither should they be allowed to keep their houses. That's an injustice to people like us who were prudent, at times when buying a house at any price seemed to be a no-brainer.

The home buyers need to pay. They should not be saddled with crippling debt, but should lose their houses. The banks need to pay. The executives should be fired publicly, and bonuses they received during the bubble should be returned. The investors need to pay. Perhaps next time we'll learn to examine what it is we're investing in.

Anything less and no lesson will be learned.

Meow

2008-07-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

There's a palm-sized black and white kitty in the backyard. Its mother is a gray feral cat. The mother goes away once in a while, perhaps in search of food, and the poor kitty would whine a bit.

We're not really sure if we should intervene. It's not cold and doesn't seem to be immediately dangerous for the kitty, and we don't want to spook the mother into just abandoning the kitty.

And There Was Light

2008-07-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

The iPhone application store opened today. There are at least three applications, "Flashlight" from ExactMagic (US$0.99), "iBlackout" from Signs Studios (US$0.99), and "QuickLight" from Ken Torimaru (US$0.99), which turn your iPhone screen into a flashlight basically by drawing white all over the screen.

Pathetic. Apple seems to be trying to pad the total number of applications by allowing these worthless things to take up space in the store.

And if for some inexplicable reason you really want something like this, look for "Light" from Erica Sadun, which is free.

On Not Being Stupid

2008-04-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

Good news is I just hired my first employee.

Bad news is that his name is already in some HR database, and "the system" wouldn't let me enter another employee with the same name. I had to ask him for a middle name before I could proceed, but not before being told that it would cost millions to fix this, and that it doesn't bother most people.

Programmers, please use your brains just a little bit while designing database schemas that would cost "millions" to fix. A person's name is not a unique key, period. Not allowing a second employee with the same name - two different people can even have the same middle names, by the way - is infuriatingly stupid.

...

Oh, and one more thing: don't underestimate how popular some names can be. On an old version of ICQ, the "search user" function only returned the first 40 matches. If you have a name like mine, not being in the first 40 means that I can't be found at all.

Under My Dictatorship...

2008-04-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Federal Reserve recently committed US$30 billion to save Bear Stearns from collapse. Since that's partly my money, I feel I have the right to make some demands.

I want the Board of Directors and every officer from Vice President and above to be permanently barred from the financial industry and government employment. They are heavily involved insiders who are either utterly inept, knowingly took unreasonable risks, or lacked the moral fiber to blow the whistle (or even the minimum self preservation instinct to distance oneself) before it was too late. Whichever is the case, I sentence their careers to death. Find another job elsewhere. You're highly educated, have some money, and probably already white. You'll be fine, except for your golden parachute, which is null. And void. And Moot. And Academic.

I want all other employees to take a pay cut. If you were stuck on a mountain because of your own foolishness or ignorance, you usually have to pay for the helicopter rescue. The same way, the people are taking 20% of your base pay (and all of your raises and bonuses) to help defray the costs of the bailout. You get to keep your job, but you may not seek employment elsewhere in the financial industry for the next two years if you decide to quit.

Or we can just pretend none of this ever happened, which is what we seem to be doing.

Win?

2008-03-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

Recent elections in Taiwan are usually much ado about nothing, because the democracy hasn't really progressed to issue-oriented politics, and the two major parties have no real differences in domestic policy approaches. What separates the "blue" from the "green" is their respective attitudes towards China and unification, which is a false issue because virtually nobody in Taiwan actually wants to decide just yet.

Anyway, the KMT won back the presidency in dramatic fashion today, capturing 58.45% of the votes. It's not instructive to look back at 2004, because that was an odd election involving an assassination attempt on the sitting president, among other things. However, if we look back at 2000, the KMT had just splintered into two because of squabbles over who would run for president, and ultimately captured 23.1% and 36.84% of the total vote.

Here's where it gets interesting, because the total of those two numbers is 59.94%. The 2000 KMT had sent up a charmless candidate, while the splinter party was formed by a popular ex-governor. One would expect that centrists would be disappointed by the bickering and look elsewhere. One would also expect that excitement over the first real shot at unseating the long-reigning KMT would skew the count somewhat. In other words, the total "blue" vote in 2000 should be somewhat lower than their true support levels.

Coming back to 2008, the ruling DPP is reeling from bad economy and multiple scandals implicating top party figures. The candidate they managed to put forward is not nearly as charismatic as Chen was in 2000 (who was a former opposition defense lawyer and former mayor of Taipei with great approval numbers), while the squeaky-clean Ma from the KMT is probably the most charismatic (although I personally find him a bit too slick) political leader they ever put forward. China has also realized that any move it makes only helps the DPP, and kept a very low profile throughout the election cycle. Put another way, the situation could hardly be any more favorable for the KMT.

Yet it lost about 1.5% of the total votes compared to 2000. What's going on here? A real shift in demographics?

Either way, it's healthy for Taiwan to switch things around every so often.

Logic, Logic Everywhere

2008-03-01T00:17:00.000-08:00

President Bush wants Congress to pass a law to retroactively provide immunity for telecommunications companies that are accused of handing over customer records to authorities without a warrant. His rationale is that private companies should not be penalized for cooperating with government.

I agree completely, except for two small bits:

One, I don't hear how he's planning to punish the government officials who may have abused this cooperation. If the telecoms cooperated in good faith yet constitutional guarantees to privacy were violated, then I want heads to roll. What government official or lawyer said this was okay?

Two, these are not poor little private citizens who don't understand the law. These are behemoth corporations worth many billions of dollars, and more importantly, have legal departments. I have no sympathy if you have a legal department and break the law. Fire your lawyers (or the company official who ignored their advice) and face the music.

...

In other news, I was listening to NPR and Ralph Nader was on. Because he had refused to pull out of the presidential race in 2000 (presumably so Al Gore would win), a caller held him responsible for all the problems caused by President Bush, including the war in Iraq. It boggles my mind that people can be so stupid. If, between event A and event B lies a person's will, then the person who caused event A cannot be held responsible for event B. In this case, the will of President Bush to launch a ridiculous war. If we take this dumb logic to its conclusion, you might say that if not for Nader, Gore would've won and would not have made the film Inconvenient Truth, and then earth would be destroyed. Nader may have hurt America, but really he saved the planet!

A New Chapter

2008-02-24T23:47:00.000-08:00

Most people who would bother reading this probably already know that I've left Apple. It was a difficult decision, but I start with Yahoo! in a few hours, and it's objectively a better position for me in several ways. Emotionally, it's hard to leave the company you dreamt of working for by the time you bought your first computer.

I'll be managing a team to work on one of Yahoo's mobile applications, working for my former boss. This will be an interesting challenge, doing an entirely new job for an entirely new company. I'm not excited in the kid-waiting-for-Christmas-morning sense, but I do look forward to finding out how I'll fare in this world.

Inertia

2008-02-20T22:11:00.000-08:00

It seems that every year somebody proclaims that it is the Year of Linux on the Desktop. The curious thing to me is how so many technically-inclined people miss a basic grasp of human behavior: we don't fix what isn't broke.

First of all, let me say that I know the name "Linux" refers to the kernel, and I know what that is, thank you very much. Now let me use the name to refer to one of many Linux distributions like normal people do.

Just as Linux installation grew from the painful dozens of Slackware floppy disks in the early nineties to the slick "live CDs" today, and the "Linux desktop" went from the likes to twm and fvwm to KDE and GNOME, Windows had not stood still. In fact, Microsoft succeeded on two very important fronts: it improved the home version of Windows and made Windows 2000 and XP far more stable than Windows 95 and 98 ever was, and it trained millions of users worldwide to accept massive defects that resulted in computers infested with malware.

If you listen to Linux advocates, they usually start with some form of "if only." If only Windows wasn't pre-installed on virtually every computer sold today. If only Word and Excel and Photoshop were available on Linux. If only web authors weren't so stupid as to design their pages only for Internet Explorer. These are all true, and all serious impediments to Linux adoption, but nonetheless all miss the point.

Which is that people don't change anything unless there is significant pain, or significant gain. Many Linux users had enough of Windows 98 and switched, just as many today have had enough of Windows malware and switched. However, the pain of an operating system so unstable you can hardly get any work done is very much greater than the hassle of having to use anti-virus software. On the other hand, the shiny MacOS X and stellar industrial design brought many to leave Windows for the Mac.

The "problem" is that if you're a normal home user running Windows XP on a 2-year old PC, you have almost no reason to do anything, including "upgrading" to Vista. Everything you want to do runs decently, even if a malware or two is preventing you from using your machine's full power. There's not enough pain to take the risk of switching.

Thus, it's not about OpenOffice.org doing everything Microsoft Office can do, or GIMP doing everything Photoshop can do, although it's important. Why would I switch - and risk losing data and time - to have equivalent applications? What would really get people to switch is to have clearly better applications than Word and Excel and Photoshop, so that it's obvious what you gain by switching. Like it or not, Microsoft controls the pain knob of Windows computing, and all Linux and MacOS can offer is the gain.

Apple's Keynote application is an example of something that's visibly better than its rival PowerPoint. The two other applications in the iWork suite, Pages and Numbers, are less visibly so. The iLife suite of applications blow away equivalent versions bundled with Windows. These are the sort of examples that Linux on the desktop needs, and why merely copying Windows and Windows applications will not achieve the goal.

It Has Begun

2008-02-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

When I started using my iPhone, I quickly realized that the Big Deal was not actually the phone, but the Safari browser. I found that I could and would actually surf the web on it, especially if under Wi-Fi coverage. I became pretty convinced that if the mobile Internet promise was ever going to materialize, this may be the best shot yet.

Google now reports that it sees 50 times more searches from iPhones than any other handset. Ladies and gentlemen, the mobile Internet revolution is here.

Ends, Means, Whatever.

2008-02-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh, who was allegedly involved in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the UN compound, was killed in a car bombing in Damascus.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, among other things, that:

One way or another he was brought to justice.

Wait, I thought it mattered greatly how a person was brought to justice. Such as with a fair trial where he is afforded a chance to defend himself?

Tortured

2008-02-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said that he would not open a criminal investigation into the CIA's use of "waterboarding" in interrogations. His reason is that the CIA relied on a Justice Department opinion that said it was legal, and therefore should not be subject to criminal prosecution later as political winds or opinions change.

I can see the logic in that. Basically, the government consulted its lawyer and decided that something is legal. The problem is that this hypothetically means an Attorney General can essentially allow the government to commit any crime it wants to simply by saying it's legal. If the Justice Department provided incorrect legal advice, I would not like CIA grunts who followed it in good faith (after all, they're not lawyers) to be punished later for it. On the other hand, I do want to see the people who misinterpreted the law punished for being wrong, and if they were maliciously wrong, be held criminally liable for their opinions.

If the lawyers don't want this sort of responsibility, then they should talk to somebody whose job it is to interpret laws, and whose opinions are shielded exactly from this sort of hindsight. They're called judges.

Citizenry

2008-02-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

I lived abroad for most of my life, so I was never eligible to vote in Taiwan. Yesterday, I cast my first vote, as a US citizen. The experience was rather mundane, on the order of filling up paperwork at the bank. The polling place was a three minute walk from home, so of course I drove there like any self-respecting American would. (Okay, so I was on my way out to meet Mabel for dinner.) The polling place was set up in a small office of the seniors apartment, and had a staff of three or four. There were perhaps six "voting booths," really just small plastic stands with a folder standing on each. The ballot itself was reminiscent of an SAT questionnaire. The whole process took just a few minutes, and upon exiting a poll worker asked if I wanted to feed my ballot into the machine myself. I declined and let her have the honor.

Rats

2008-01-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates agrees with me.

I've mentioned privately to family and friends that I thought capitalism as we know it has a really big problem: it maximizes profit. Not just "makes a decent profit." Not even "makes a killing." Maximizes. The modern corporation basically only decides to leave a penny on the table because it would harm their public image and future profits if they took it. Many times, they don't even think that far and take it anyway.

Maximizing profit means that everything else is secondary and almost accidental. While taxes are part of civic duty for an individual, it is no different than any other expense for a corporation to minimize, and therefore there's nothing wrong with spending $100,000 to lobby for a $1,000,000 tax break from the government. It means that AIDS drugs cost just as much in Africa as they would in Europe and America. We're not individually as naked as Gordon Gecko's "greed is good," but that's basically what we do as a collective.

The problem is that we're really bad at judging what is maximum profit. Maybe it's saving 20 million lives from AIDS in Africa and allowing them to become rich enough to buy Viagra later! This kind of math is just too hard and requires too much foresight to be practical. Also, CEO's don't get to take credit for profits that the company makes after he or she leaves the job, so why sacrifice today's profits for tomorrow's bigger ones?

Gates says, "Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don't fully benefit from market forces," which is exactly where I think we need to be. There's no justification for a corporation made up of individually moral people to be amoral or immoral. The twin mission doesn't have to be helping the poor, it could be preserving the environment or any other concrete cause.

This is not a charity or non-profit, by the way, just one that's not single-mindedly trying to optimize for profit. Profit is still important because that's what keeps the twin mission going indefinitely. It will judge itself not only on profits and loss, but on the social impact it has on the world. Its owners - which in this age refers to mutual fund managers and individual shareholders as well, not just a few tycoons - must share this mission.

I think that'd be nice.

Old Fart Time

2008-01-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

I just sold an old computer on craigslist, which got me thinking of all the computers I've sold before.

Our first computer was a fake Apple ][+ (with lowercase modification!). It had 64 KB of RAM, 1 MHz MOS Technology 6502 CPU. We could afford one floppy drive, but had to hook it up to the family TV. We eventually bought a green monitor, an 80-column card, and a Z-80 card. Pretty sure we sold this one to somebody in the end.

The second computer was a PC clone, with a 10 MHz NEC 8088-2 and 1 MB of RAM, and a turbo button to switch between 4.77 MHz and 10 MHz. I can't remember what happened to this one. I think we replaced parts piecemeal until we ended up with a 33 MHz Intel 80386 with a 20 or 30 MB hard disk and a VGA monitor. I sold that to a student just before leaving Manila.

For grad school, I bought an 66 MHz Intel 80486 laptop with 8 MB of RAM and 512 MB of hard disk. To call it a laptop was kind, because it weighed nearly seven pounds. I didn't have enough money to get more RAM and a color display, so I settled for a 256-shades-of-gray display that looked more like 3 shades of gray. I ran Slackware Linux on it, and it had just enough RAM to run X and nothing else. StarOffice was impossibly slow, so I had to dual-boot back to Windows for word processing. I eventually broke the laptop somehow, probably because I kept opening it up.

We replaced that with a 350 MHz AMD K6 computer, with I think 128 MB of RAM and 10 GB of hard disk. I later overclocked it to 400 MHz, and decided to do a burn-in test, which was a bad idea. I replaced the motherboard with one bought from a Geoworks fire sale, and this computer is still around, but unused.

Then we bought our first Mac, which is a 733 MHz Power Mac G4. This eventually got pretty souped up, with WiFi, Bluetooth, extra hard disks, extra USB ports, and even a TV tuner card. This served us for several years, and I sold it yesterday.

Our main computer is now a dual core 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM, which finally let us break through to the GHz/GB world. Because of Mabel's video editing needs, it has a 150 GB drive internally, a 500 GB external drive, and a 320 GB Time Machine backup drive. Add that 120 GB external drive that's just sitting around, and we have over 1 TB of storage in the house.

So in about 20 years:

CPU: 1 MHz to dual 2 GHz superscalar, let's say at least 4,000x better.
RAM: 64 KB to 2 GB, 32,000x better.
Disk: 140 KB floppy disks to 1 TB hard disks, more than seven million times better.

That's quite something, isn't it?

Do Not Taunt Unhappy Zoo Tiger

2008-01-02T22:53:00.000-08:00

A tiger killed a young man and wounded two on Christmas Day at San Francisco Zoo. According to CNN, the police are now investigating whether the tiger was attacked or taunted.

Why would that possibly matter? What we have is a zoo that is unable to keep its animals inside the displays, which it must do regardless of the nature or amount of taunting. They failed at that job, and should be prepared to pay for the resulting damages. If the negligence was to a criminal extent, then those responsible need to be charged and punished as well.

Who cares if Tatiana, the poor (it was later shot by police) 350-pound Siberian tiger, was taunted or not?

On Handling Errors

2007-12-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

I don't like to create accounts just to leave comments in other people's blogs, so I answer them here. The Catty Critic asks about error handling when writing code, and the rule (my rule, the rule, same thing) is surprisingly simple (and probably unoriginal by now):

Don't attempt to handle errors you don't know how to handle. You'll only mess things up.

Her specific question is about a subroutine that was passed a value it wasn't prepared to handle. The only correct way to handle this error is to write code that patches the caller code to make sure it doesn't happen again. This being next to impossible, the next best thing is to alert the programmer to fix it - by crashing or some other spectacular failure.

Let me repeat: handle only errors that you expect and know what to do with. Don't pretend you know what to do with every little thing that may potentially go wrong. Because that's my opinion.

Good Thing!

2007-11-13T12:10:00.000-08:00

A sure sign that you are a third world country is when high officials have to do very tedious things. For example, following an apparent bombing at the congress that killed a congressman, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines had to order the authorities to hunt down the perpetrators, and directed government doctors to help all the victims now being treated in various hospitals.

Good thing they have a president. Otherwise the police would just watch when congress is bombed, and the doctors will just gaze sympathetically at patients.

Sakura Wars Figure II

2007-10-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

This is Iris Chateaubriand, another figure from Sakura Wars. The figure is much smaller than the one of Shinguji Sakura, so the gloved hands are not molded as well. The arms also don't fit very well in their sockets, for some reason.

Spared the Knife

2007-10-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

I had been reading a book called Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry by Stephen Klaidman. The book digresses a bit too much for my taste, but his documentation of two doctors who performed hundreds of grossly unnecessary heart operations was just bone-chilling.

I was also supposed to be undergoing oral surgery to have my wisdom teeth removed, and since my consultation was over a year ago, they required me to get a fresh one before the operation. The surgeon looked me over, and said that I didn't need it. I didn't have major problems (such as pain or decays) with them, and I am apparently in a 15% segment of population with enough jawbone space to hold them. He decided that the loss of chewing surface wasn't worth the gain, and sent me home, turning away at least a couple of thousands dollars for the clinic.

Wow.

Are You Old?

2007-08-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Compact Disc turns 25 today. Its creator Philips estimates that 200 billion have been sold worldwide. At 1.2 mm thick each, this means that if you stack them all up they'll form a plastic cylinder 240,000 km high, quite a bit more than halfway to the moon.

But more importantly, if you remember the CD as a new thing, ha ha, you're old.

Why United Is Doomed

2007-08-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

So for no real reason at all, I gave United Airlines a chance when considering an upcoming trip. Here's what it thought was a good idea when I allowed it to consider all San Francisco area airports:

It wants me to fly from San Jose to Los Angeles, and then back to San Francisco. SJC, for those who don't know, is 33.8 mi (54.4 km) away from SFO, perhaps 45 minutes' drive in moderate traffic.

What if I just catch the SFO-TPE flight like a sane person would? Well, avoiding the idiotic 6-hour-long SJC-LAX-SFO side trip will cost me US$44 more.

Brilliant.

iPhone

2007-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

The iPhone starts shipping today. I warmed up to it slowly, but it really is a pretty awesome product. Ratatouille also opens today, and Mabel and I hope to catch it tonight.

Oh, and Brent, if you still had a job, maybe you'd be able to afford a real iPhone, too. Pffft.

Some Cheese With That?

2007-02-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

Shaquille O'Neal just became the seventh player in the NBA to have scored 25,000 points and grab 10,000 rebounds, but his team still lost the game to the New York Knicks, 93-99. After the game, he lamented, "I am kind of disappointed in myself because if I make free throws I'd be at 30,000 rather than 25,000." O'Neal has attempted 9,826 free throws in his career and missed 4,642 of them.

I'm a pretty bad basketball player, Shaq, but even I know that unlike many things that life deals you, free throws are something that you can dramatically improve with practice. So stop being a baby, and go practice.

Star-Spangled

2007-01-26T18:24:00.000-08:00

We went to the naturalization interview on Wednesday. We arrived early, but I lined up at the wrong entrance so ended up one minute late upon check-in at the reception desk. And then waited for maybe 45 minutes for a short interview, in which the most difficult part (no, really) was writing my name in cursive letters. You see, I haven't really written in cursive for nearly twenty years (I blame Lindsley), and the two signatures didn't really look alike.

No matter, we passed (actually, aced) the test and will become US citizens when we swear in next month. To celebrate, we had dimsum at Yank Sing. Somehow I don't really feel American yet, whatever that's supposed to feel like. My colleagues tell me now I can be partially blamed for everything.

Absolute and Relative

2007-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Something I just realized while looking around for reactions to the iPhone. Geeks are appreciative of history, and therefore are concerned about how innovative a new product is over existing ones. Normal people are more concerned about whether the new product meets a certain absolute threshold of quality, usability, price, and other factors. If it does, they'll buy one even if it's just 2% better than existing ones.

Geeks see it as a mere 2% better than existing alternatives. Normal people see the existing products as 1% below their expectations, and the new one as 1% above.

The iPhone Cometh

2007-01-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

The iPhone was announced today at the MacWorld keynote, so I was looking around for reactions. On applenova.com I find this gem:

I surf the web on my 1 inch ms smartphone now, and it works fine.

If it did I'd still be working for Openwave. I didn't have much to do with the iPhone, though.

Money!

2007-01-08T19:16:00.000-08:00

According to dnScoop, tampinco.com is worth US$874! Let's see what some of my friends are worth:

lesterama.org	US$24,345
squeedle.com	$1,463
yellowpan.com	$1,300
montanezdeluna.com	$991
taiwanmilitary.org	$684
satine.org	$629
villegasonline.com	$501
queru.com	$330
stoutmire.com	$157

Tom is the man!

Complete Your Classes

2007-01-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

One important feature of C++ and other object-oriented languages is the grouping of code and data into "classes" or "objects." They have language structures that allow a user-created type to behave just like a built-in one, but it requires that the writer of the class fill in all the blanks.

One such blank in C++ is the copy constructor. It is the responsibility of the writer of the class to provide one, even when you cannot imagine when it will be needed. If you don't, then somebody who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the class may have to write one later, and that's where mistakes are easily made. There are probably a few exceptions (a singleton, or a class for which a shallow copy will do, would certainly be exempt), but have a better reason than just laziness. Forcing your users to peek into your class to figure out how to make a copy of it destroys the whole point of encapsulation, because your class is no longer a black box that just works.

New Car

2006-12-13T23:52:00.000-08:00

We settled on this in the end:

with side airbags and, of course, iPod connectivity added. The dealer actually had one with my exact specs on the lot, and the only thing I made them change was the hubcaps. It's not particularly powerful, but it's my commute car so price and fuel economy were far more important to me. The ride is pretty smooth, and the seat rides much higher than the Corolla's. The only weird thing was that all the instruments are on the center console, which takes some getting used to. I wanted a hatchback partly because it gives us a more squarish cargo capacity, unlike the Corolla's deep rectangular space.

Mabel will continue to drive the Corolla, and we do need it fix it up a bit. But after some 128,000+ miles up and down both coasts, the trusty old buddy will finally get some rest.

Credit Report

2006-12-09T20:53:00.000-08:00

Before buying the car, I figure I should check my credit report. Turns out that the three major credit reporting agencies have a site where you can ask for a free report each year. So I try it, and Experian tells me that I have a mortgage, addresses in Flushing, three social security numbers, and I think eight names - one of which is Chen.

It's not very hard to get this corrected once you call them and tell them sternly what they need to do. However, I'm really troubled by how readily they combined accounts. From what I can tell, if there are two people with somewhat similar names and somewhat similar social security numbers, they assume a typographical error and combine the information of the two people into one account. Despite the risks of identity theft (I was given the credit history of two other people), they do not check before they combine accounts.

So check your credit report today. Better yet, change your name to a long, random word.

States I've Been To

2006-11-23T01:45:00.000-08:00

Found the link on Lino's blog. Here are the states I've been to:

create your own visited states map

There should be a prize if I manage to connect them coast-to-coast.

Sweet Dreams

2006-11-17T22:55:00.000-08:00

I can no longer remember why, but somebody gave me a red nano. And then I woke up, and the first thing I said to Mabel was "oh, that was a dream?" Funny thing is, it sucks to no longer have an iPod that I didn't really want in the first place (it's not hard to get your hands on one where I work) and never actually had. Humans are funny.

Would You Like Fries with That?

2006-11-13T13:33:00.000-08:00

There's a McDonald's along my way home, and I noticed that under the golden arches outside they have a sign that says "Over 99 billion served." This leads me to call for all of you to eat more hamburgers, because for some reason I'd like to see them reach 100 billion.

Fast food burgers are bad for health, so I won't be participating in earnest. But all of you who don't care should eat more.

That's Not a Tag, Stupid

2006-11-10T18:03:00.000-08:00

Tagging is all the rage, but few people actually understand what it's for. It's easier to explain what it's not. It's not the identification of key words in an article. To take a recent Slashdot front page as an example, here are some of the tags applied to various stories:

"New Mono 1.2 Now Supports WinForms" - mono, itsatrap
"History To Repeat Itself With PS3?" - no, ps3, yes, ps2, sony
"Microsoft's Patent Pledge 'Worse Than Useless'" - microsoft, itsatrap, patents, opensource
"Preview of Vista On Old Hardware" - vista, windows, hardware

Why are these examples of awful tagging? Because terms like "mono", "ps3", "microsoft", and others are already in the text and can readily be searched by a machine. "no" and "yes" are even dumber, because they are not meaningful terms to look up later. The list of items you will find tagged "yes", for example, just aren't related enough to be useful.

Now, what's a good tag? A story like "Solar Power Becoming More Affordable" was tagged "science", which would be useful if the article wasn't otherwise classified by section. The article is not likely to contain the word "science", and a future user of the tags might well be looking for science stories. In this case, it was in the Science section, so even a tag like "hippiecrap" would be more useful. Similarly, an article like "Microsoft Interested In More Linux Deals" tagged "embraceandextend" makes sense.

The point is to intelligently relate an article to its meaning in a few words. The point is to do something a machine cannot. So don't be stupid.

Is It Fast Enough So We Can Fly Away?

2006-10-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

We were trying to spend some money last Sunday, and started at the car dealership to look for a small commute car for me. We had our eyes on the Toyota Yaris, the Scion xA, and the Honda Fit. We started with the Toyota/Scion dealer, and the test drive with a somewhat feeble salesman went okay. It doesn't feel anemic, which is about as much as you can hope for with a small car. Satisfied with the car, I was ready to do some numbers to see how much the options I wanted would cost.

Understandably, the salesman was steering me towards the cars they had on the lot. But the last time I bought a car was nearly 11 years ago, so I'm in no mood to compromise. We were standing outside, I was motioning him to go inside and show me some paperwork, when he asked if I was prepared to buy the car right then. "No," I said, explaining that I would not be making a decision until I saw the Fit. I'd already driven a xA rental car, so I didn't need to test it. "Why do you need the price then?" he demanded. I was a little dumbstruck, and Mabel was beginning to fume behind me. We stood outside the dealership and argued for a few minutes, and he just refused to sit down and work out the prices with me. That man turned out to be the assistant manager or something.

Now agitated, we crossed the street to the Honda dealer, and told them that we'd like to test drive the Fit. Oh, no, they told me. They only get an allocation of one Fit a month, put a US$2,000 mark-up on it, and don't let anybody test drive it before buying. The final cost of the Fit would approach US$20,000, and you can't test drive one. What a way to run a business.

And then we went to the mall in hopes of upgrading our cell phone. That didn't quite work out the way I thought it would, either.

No Time!

2006-10-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

A recent time.com article begins like this:

"The scandal involving Mark Foley, the Florida congressman who resigned last Friday after the discovery of lurid e-mails and instant messages he sent to teenage congressional pages, has the potential to reshape the election landscape. It was the latest blow in a bad week of news for Republican congressmen getting ready to leave town to campaign - following a congressional report linking the White House to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and showing dozens more contacts with him than the White House had admitted, and a book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward strongly suggesting the Administration has mislead the public about the Iraq War. The Foley scandal could well be the most damanging of the three. Woodward's book, even with all of its details about Administration infighting and blunders in Iraq, reinforces a notion most Americans already hod, that the war in Iraq isn't going well. The Abramoff revelations, too, simply added more specifics to bolster what Americans already think: that congressmen are too close to lobbyists."

In a hurry, I see.

New to You

2006-10-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

We scanned, edited, and finally uploaded some new old pictures.

Babel Fish

2006-09-16T00:34:00.000-07:00

While searching for reactions on the new Korean font I put into the iPod, I had to rely on Babel Fish to translate for me. Most of it was gibberish, but this one is poetry:

It sees the photograph which comes out from the iLounge...
The black the thought where the reverse side is the best...
Oh it is in agony. Black black black

It is whore.

How I Spent My Summer

2006-09-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

Mostly on this, and then a few more weeks on this. Believe me, it was much harder than meets the eye.

Best Fortune Ever

2006-08-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

Hotter than Hot

2006-07-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not actually whining about the temperature this time, although it is hot. Note how the current temperature is higher than any of the daily highs. The correct way to write this code would be to use the forecast highs and lows, but replace those numbers with actual measured temperatures if they are exceeded.

Hot Damn!

2006-07-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

It was unbearably hot today, and if only for the air conditioning I didn't mind having to work on a Saturday so much. We have a short corridor between the two wings of our building, and it felt like walking into an oven crossing from one side to the other. Here's a screen shot. 83°F isn't so bad, but note that it's nearly 9 pm. It hit triple digits earlier in the day.

Incentivize

2006-06-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom used this word several times this morning in a radio interview. It is used to mean "to provide incentive to," and I have heard several business executives use it, so there's probably no stopping it becoming a real word.

It's wrong on so many levels, though. First of all, "motivate" is a perfectly good word. Secondly, the "-ize" suffix means "to turn into", which is why "victimize" means "to turn into a victim." When an employee or citizen is "incentivized", they are not being turned into incentives! As with "motivate," which comes from "motive," the word should at least be "incentivate" if we really must have it.

Later, Newsom also used "incent," which apparently means the same thing. Both words are now in the American Heritage Dictionary. Sigh.

Suffer the Heatwave

2006-06-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

It hit 91°F today in Fremont, and 95°F in Cupertino. First time this year I decided to turn on the air conditioner at home.

Yesterday, however, Nick Swisher hit two home runs in Colorado, the second one in the top of the 9^th inning to tie the game. He also scored the winning run on a Bobby Kielty single after getting walked in the 11^th inning. These are the only three runs the A's were able to score in the entire three-game series.