I’m Dumping my Mac

Mac has this little window that pops up for you to send helpful info to Apple whenever an application unexpected closes (“Your report will help Apple improve this software”). Here is the report I just sent to Apple:

I was reading something in Firefox and it just shut down. Actually, Firefox stalls or quits on me on a daily basis. I have almost never successfully shut Firefox down because it stalls.

I have decided to switch back to PC and give my Macbook away. I was hesitating on the decision at the Dell website, then Firefox crashed. That sealed the deal. (I restarted Firefox and then ) I quickly made the purchase.

For more more reasons why I hate Mac, click here.

How We Lost Our Mobile Edge

I first realized in 2004 that Asian mobile networks and services were leaps and bounds ahead of our own, especially in Korea and Japan. Even in China, where I was, it was incredibly simple to switch between mobile providers. A friend of mine recently returned to California from Korea and felt that she was in a third-world country because she couldn’t watch TV on her American cellphone. I’ve heard before the explanation that it is easier for cellular companies to profitably deliver high-speed cellular service in areas of extremely high population density like Tokyo or Seoul, but that argument should not matter in places like NYC, which is as dense and rich as anywhere else, or in Silicon Valley, the laboratory for many communications advances.

Walt Mossberg’s Free My Phone article has gone a long way in answering for me the longstanding question of why the U.S. is “the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.” This writeup falls into the category of articles that everyone is glad someone wrote because it successfully provides a unifying theory of why something is the way it is. The heart of why America has third-world cellular service is that the mobile carriers control the entire ecosystem of services and products. Verizon and AT&T and Sprint et al control what sort of phone you can use, how often you can change to a competing service, and how much you have to pay for almost every service you use on your phone – all of that on top of the only REAL service they provide, which is access to their voice and data networks.

Imagine if your internet provider also controlled what kind of CPU you could use, what kind of OS, network card, keyboard, mouse. They would effectively control everything “downstream” and, assuming there are three big ISPs, they could collude to spend less on improving the speed of their networks and focus on squeezing the maximum ROI out of their existing infrastructures. That’s essentially what cellular providers do, and that explains why we pay a lot of money for slow cellular networks with a minimal set of services. Crap!

The Wired writer who wrote 10 Reasons to Hate Cellphone Carriers must have read Mossberg’s article. All of his serious points fit into why these carriers constrain the cellular ecosystem, and he casts a few additional stones, such as the fact that carriers lock their locks and cripple their handsets to restrict what users can do with their phones. Verizon or Sprint or AT&T will actually take a RAZR manufactured by Motorola and lock out pieces of functionality. Again, can you imagine your ISP taking a screwdriver to your personal computer to constrain what you do on their internet network, or your state modding your car once you cross a state border? Our PC industry continues to fulfill Moore’s Law because it is a market driven by entrepreneurial capitalism of the kind that the mobile industry lacks.

This kind of top-down market control also hurts the development of mobile applications. Most mobile applications startups I’m aware of rely on deals with carriers. These app providers need to ingratiate themselves to this small pond of mobile carriers, who then call the shots on how much to charge for each application download, and even then these application providers gain access to only a percentage of the mobile consumer market (since each carrier effectively “owns” its customers).

It will be interesting to watch Sprint in the coming years with them developing a WiMax network and unlocking their phones. Assuming they implement successfully, guts should be rewarded.

Liberating Public Information

Carl Malamud is my new hero. This writeup about his current endeavor is definitely the coolest tech article I read this week. He is in the middle of building a freely available public database of caselaw, caselaw that WestLaw currently makes a profit re-publishing. Somehow, WestLaw is become the for-profit reporter of court proceedings, and that strikes me as
rent-seeking and ludicrous.

In America, public record should mean public record, like EDGAR for financial records. Speaking of which, that amazing and freely available public online database is another one of Malamud’s accomplishments. Actually, I had always taken EDGAR for granted since this is after all something we should be able to take for granted. But I was ignorant of the years of legal wrangling Malamud had to go through to set this up and of the two years he personally operating the database servers before he shamed the SEC into taking it over. While the SEC was complaining that it would cost millions and take years to implement such a service, one man is all it took. Wow! He also did the same with the Smithonian and with Congressional hearings, neither of which I have ever used, but I’m sure they are of equally high quality.

And soon hopefully we will also be able to take a freely available online database of caselaw for granted, one that is easy for anyone to use and has all the hyperlinked citations that lawyers are paid to connect. I wish I had come up something like that because it certainly is a worthy project for an advanced democratic society.

How We Lost Our Broadband Edge

As someone who prides in America’s technological leadership and generally despises rent-seeking, these three articles make my blood boil:
Part One of I, Cringely’s great writeup, Part Two, and Part Three

I have long wondered why internet (and cellular) networks are slower here than in Japan and Korea. Japan has 100-megabit-per-second (mbps) fiber-optic broadband internet for $14 per month while Americans pay $50 per month for 3-mbps. That’s $0.14 per mbps in Japan, in a country where everything else is more expensive, while we get far worse than $1.00 per mbps! And this is not because those Japanese telcos not operate at a loss. This should not be the case in the country that created Google and Cisco and the internet and cellular communications.

As I now understand it, we lost our telecommunications leadership because:

Reason One: Whereas other countries use telco infrastructure to provide internet, we use both telco infrastructure and cable TV infrastructure. That is much less efficient because that means that support “two completely separate and different technical infrastructures, two billing systems, two service departments, two head offices, two corporate jets.” Here is a case in which government enforcement of single standard adoption would have led to a much better economic outcome. And inefficiencies will continue to persist even as we transition to the faster fiber-optic because those newer networks will be exempt by law from sharing, meaning less competition.

Reason Two: We all got conned out of $200B. Between 1994 and 2004, the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates, accelerated depreciation of their network assets, and direct tax credits that added up to around $200B. As contracted between local telecom utilities and all 50 states and DC, they were supposed to build out fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks intended to bring bidirectional digital video service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecommunications Act had set the mandate for this build-out, but the details were left to the states.

Instead of 45-mbps bidirectional service or 20-mbps, we got nothing. I still remember the 1.5-mbps download and 128-kbps upload connection we had in those days. The telecoms played a good game of stiff-arming and bait-and-switching the everyone else, such as when customers were charged $1.00 per month per customer to support Bellcore, a research organization. When Bellcore was sold, the profits went to the telcos instead of returning to customers, and the $1.00 charge remained in place even afterwards despite that it no longer supported anything. (I usually don’t pay attention to all the random charges on my utilities bills, but I’m going to start.)

These should be industries in which competition precludes such expensive rent-seeking from persisting, but lack of standards regulation failed to steer industry trends away from systemic inefficiencies (reason #1) while lack of negotiating, regulatory, and legal capacity failed to hold the telcos accountable for delivering the goods (reason #2).

I am considering switching to Sprint next year when they roll out their WiMAX. They still might not have as good a voice network as Verizon, but I would be willing to reward them for having the guts to move technology forward rather than lay on their rent-sought laurels.

My other big telco question still remains unanswered though: How did we lose our cellular leadership?

Terms:
DOCSIS 3 cable modems
fiber-optic versus hybrid fiber-coax – I’m guessing hybrid is slower than all fiber.

The Last Straw – My Rant on Macs

When I bought my first mac last September, I was drawn to it because of its reputation for speed and stability and moreover because so many engineers I respect are mac addicts. The initial glow wore off quickly after just a couple of weeks. I noticed several things that are just ridiculous to me, including:

• It crashes all the time: Firefox, the one application that I use whenever I’m logged in, crashes on me often. I have almost never successfully closed Firefox on my MacBook – I have to force quit out of it just to shut my computer down. This is absolutely shameful. And Adobe hangs. And OSX freezes when I navigate around the file system. So much for a crash-free Mac.
• The most illogical file system: Speaking of file systems, this is the first time I have used a computer in which the file system I am navigating doesn’t reflect the real underlying file system, with the effect that nothing is where I think it should be. I will install applications and have no clue where they go. I can’t believe they hand out patents for this.
• Don’t mind those 1.3B people: Chinese character processing is absolutely horrid on my Mac. When I email friends in China, I never type in Chinese anymore because it was such a half-baked feature.
• Slow UI: I had heard so much about how the MacOS UI is so wonderful once you get used to it, and it is nothing but inferior to Windows. I’ve worked in investment banking where people are encouraged to operate without a mouse because aiming-and-clicking slows you down. I used to research companies online, build financial models in excel, respond to emails, and navigate between everything using ALT-TAB and Windows hotkeys and well-positioned folder Shortcuts. I can’t do any of that now in MacOS without using a mouse pointer. I couldn’t even ALT-TAB properly in MacOS before installing Witch, which Apple shamefully doesn’t include in its OS.
• Lack of software: I never realized how little software is written for Mac until I owned one. Microsoft Office is slow and unwieldy on a Mac. Google didn’t release a desktop package for Mac until quite a while after they released it for Windows. I was so excited to try the media software my friend’s startup had been working on until I realized it was only released for Windows. Gah, I can’t even play the classic video game I bought (Myth: The Fallen Lords) because OSX is not backwards compatible. Rather, it’s incompatible, like Apple and Chinese… or logic.
• Memory hardware problems: I had bought 2GB of RAM, but my MacBook has only ever registered 1GB. I sincerely don’t think I did anything wrong, and I can’t figure out why this never registered. I’m blaming Apple for this too.

But the last straw came when I tried to set up a Java project for a side programming project. I downloaded the source code, found the build.xml file, ran the build ANT task and failed to compile. There were several compile errors complaining that it couldn’t find Arrays.copyOfRange() and LinkedBlockingDeque, TimeUnit.HOURS and TimeUnit.MINUTES, and this normally is not a problem because these resources are in Java6, meaning that I simply needed to upgrade to Java6. I looked around and found that the latest released version of Java for Mac is Java FIVE. ARGH!!!! This was really the last straw that a computer company that prides itself on developer tools doesn’t even support the most recent version of Java. Thankfully, I was able to find a preview release of Java 6 for Mac, but the beta status of this product doesn’t exactly inspire admiration.

So I installed Java6 and turned my attention to editing the JAVA_HOME environment variable so that the ANT task would know where to find my newfound Java resources. After a few hours of reading helpful blogs like this and this and this and this, I finally found my way. WindowsXP allows you to easily set environment variables on the Control Panel. I would think that MacOX has something similar on its System Preferences panel, right? But NOOOOO!!!! I had to go download something that should have been included in the operating system anyway.

Is it really this ridiculous, or do I just have a knack for trying all the things Steve Jobs doesn’t think is important?

Now I can finally get started, but right now, this hilarious video shows exactly how I feel.

EDIT 12/14/07: Four months later, the saga ends and I am dumping my Mac.

Way to go, dad!

The International Space Station (click for pic I found on flickr) has recently been orbiting over my neighborhood. It’s incredible. Brightest thing I’ve even seen in the night sky other than the moon. I didn’t have binoculars or a telescope but I could swear that I could see some shape to the thing, which has four pairs of large solar panels.

It’s definitely a point of pride to be able to point up at that shiny thing in the sky and say, “My dad makes that!” Actually, there must be thousands of people working on that thing across the five partners: US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and Europe. The ISS is just chock full of technology, like “smart” chips and parts running embedded software so that astronauts and ground control can monitor everything that goes on. The station also includes sensors that rotate and roll the ISS so that the solar panels are always facing the sun! It doesn’t always make the front page, but the ISS is truly like something straight out of our imaginations.