iPhone vs. Windows Mobile: Reflections on why Windows Mobile has been such a dud

Ouch. It's rare to read such a harshly honest review of anything ...

iPhone alternative for the cheap, patient user - Geek Guide - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

After my wife got an iPhone, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of having a handheld device for phone calls, taking photos, e-mail, Web browsing and other minor computing tasks.

Since I'm cheap (and a family plan for two iPhones starts at about $110), I was excited to pick up a refurbished AT&T 8525 for $200 in late July. For an extra $20 a month on top of my wife's iPhone bill, we have a pool of 550 minutes for phone calls and I can use the device's WiFi to access the Internet (AT&T wanted another $40 for unlimited data service through its network).

With the phone's slideout keyboard, I looked forward to the device boosting my productivity.

My excitement about the phone soon turned sour. The phone's Windows Mobile 5 operating system and user interface is garbage compared to the iPhone. And unlike the iPhone, which was easy to setup, I spent hours trying to set up the WiFi...

Jeff hates his 8525, largely due to the limitations of Windows Mobile 5. I suspect Windows Mobile 6 is little better. If he needed Outlook integration (PDA functions) as I do, he'd probably have had better things to say about WM, but this review is significant because he's comparing media-phone functionality. In that domain it's easy to see how the iPhone would trash the competition.

This is also the first discussion I've read that talks about family use of the iPhone. I'm waiting for the first true family users to realize that iTunes (esp. on Vista and OS X) is configured for a single user, not multiple users ...

Lastly, the silence about Windows Mobile, and its many, many name and branding changes over the years, has always made me suspect there was something very wrong with it. Paired up with Outlook/Exchange, it was good enough to cause Palm to self-destruct, but it seems that was just about all it could do. Blackberry squashed Windows Mobile like a bug.

Why has Windows Mobile been such a dud? Was it because each device manufacturer (for many years) had their own version and they, not Microsoft, controlled the user experience? Was it a deep architectural flaw? A business problem? Microsoft's incompetence? All of the above?

Canine cognition - at last, respect

Ten years ago I was a bit frustrated that dogs weren't getting much respect as a fascinating species*. Co-evolved with their human symbiotes, they likely altered human evolution even as they evolved at a terrific pace. Fantastic phenotypic plasticity, extreme variation in aging rates ... this is an animal worth understanding (affectionately, of course).

Now canine studies are everywhere, including a German institution specializing in canine cognition ...

Canine Smarts: Behavioral Science Turns to Dogs for Answers - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - New...

... For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. 'Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered,' says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig."

Border collies in particular, and working dogs in general, have been found to be unusually smart. Interestingly, changes in dog rearing practices may be elevating demonstrated canine IQ. Dogs are being raised more like children, and they're getting smarter as a result.

Dog owners are eager to demonstrate the brilliance of their canine masters. Of course a smart dog is not necessarily an unalloyed gift; our Kateva is brilliantly subtle at stealing food and is almost never caught in the act.

I wonder how far they'll go ...

* Many animals show up in science fiction stories -- but never dogs. Apparently they're left behind on earth. The one noteworthy exception is Vernor Vinge, who did a wonderful job of imagining a world of sentient dogs (of course they were supposed to be some dog-like alien critter rather than the human canine, but we know what he was up to).

Asymmetric Polygamy: the problem of the leftovers

Marginal Revolution discusses the economics of polygamy, though in fact they're really talking about polygny (one male, multiple female). The discussion was triggered by a NYT story on the abandoned teenage males surrounding a pseudo-Mormon cult.

Humans have often practiced polygyny (with rare polyandry), but polygyny is rare in technological societies. I'm sure sociologists have theories about why this might be so, but it's interesting to speculate about how the leftover male problem changes over time.

Leftover males have to be eliminated -- or they'll cause problems. The least disruptive way to eliminate them is probably through continuous warfare. At some point in the development of human cultures I wonder if war started to get more costly, at the same time that the value of the males increased, such that it became too expensive to have leftover males ...

PS. Many people worry about China's current leftover male problem. Polyandry in China would help restore the critical balance ...

Update: I fixed my typo in the title. (was assymetric)

Why can't we manage botnets?

The Storm botnet has been in the news lately ...

Storm botnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... The Storm botnet, or Storm worm botnet, is a massive Storm worm driven botnet that is estimated to number in the 1,000,000 to 50,000,000 range of infected computer systems. It is estimated to be more powerful than some of the world's top supercomputers. The botnet, or zombie network, is comprised entirely of computers running Microsoft Windows as their operating system, the only operating system which can be breached by the Storm worm. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 computers alone are being used just to help propagate and spread the worm; 1.2 billion virus messages have been sent by the botnet including a record 57 million on 22 August 2007 alone.

Wikipedia reports claims that 25% of Windows PCs are part of a botnet. I assume the real number is maybe 5-10%, but of course that's way too many.

I haven't been able to figure out if it's possible to determine which ISP is transmitting botnet packages. I understand it may be hard to track them to the source machine, but if it is possible to track them to the ISP then the obvious next step is to begin decreasing the level of service of packets from responsible ISPs. That would translate to unhappy ISP customers, which would force ISPs to address the problem.

How could ISPs address the problem? I can think of a few obvious things an incented ISP could do:

1. Discount costs for computers that aren't involved in botnets: machines running Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X. This would encourage migration to non-participating machines.
   
2. Work with antiviral vendors to deliver an XP/Vista solution that alerts an ISP to infection, so they can respond to it
3. Develop technologies to track botnet traffic to individual machines and send staff to service them or terminate traffic.

If we incent ISPs to deal with this problem they will. If we don't, they won't. End users also have insufficient incentive to avoid bots (otherwise they'd buy Macs or stop using the net), but they may also lack the capability to manage the problem. So we need to incent the ISPs first, then they'll incent the users and provide solutions.

Update: clarified last sentence.

Mind expanding books: a list

It's easy to be ready for the future -- just read a certain kind of science fiction. No, not Asimov, rest his soul (my fave: The Gods Themselves, for its take on the generation gap). Nor Ellison, he wrote about people and horror, noteworthy but different. Not LeGuin, she wrote about sociology.

No, these days, the memetic fiction to read is produced by a handful of writers who often have credentials in the sciences. Whatever the outward appearance, there's a core set of ideas that are better developed and more persuasive than any effort at traditional futurism. These writers often try hard to imagine what humans will be like in very different environments or with very different abilities.

Read this gang, and nothing will surprise you. I've put a sample of books together in one place for your mind-expanding pleasure: Amazon.com: "Mind expanding fiction". Warning -- don't read these all at once. I suggest starting with vintage Vinge (superficially less radical) or Iain M. Banks (superficially conventional) before tackling Egan or Stross. Excessive consumption by an unprepared reader may result in explosive cranial decompression.

Oh, and yes, they all take a stab at resolving the Fermi Paradox.

Update 4/26/10: Current names on the list, in alphabetic order with one exception...

Greg Egan: Egan goes first because he's 90% mind blowing. He's the straight whisky and black espresso of mind expansion. Don't start with Greg, you need to work up to him. It can be hard to find his books [2], they are a bit too demanding to stay long in print (mind expansion is not a commercially optimal strategy). Incandescence, for example, walks the reader through the derivation of neo-classical orbital mechanics in an environment where general relativity is personally relevant. It also obliges one to think of the relationship of individuality to the hive and the historical peculiarity of renaissance.

Charles Stross: One of my favorite writers, like any mind expander who's going to be commercially successful he balances novel ideas with character and plot. Of this list he's probably the most story-driven and least idea-driven -- which of course can make him very readable. Halting State is one of his most idea-centric works.

Greg Bear: Greg has largely moved on to the more profitable thriller/horror genre, but his early works (Eternity, Eon) earn him a lasting spot on the list.

Iain M. Banks: Iain is the gateway drug of mind expansion. Some his culture books seem like mind candy, but they're laced with the hard stuff. Soon you work your way to Consider Phlebas, Feersum Endjinn and Matter.

Robert Sawyer: Despite an atypical sympathy for deity, he definitely pushes the envelope.

Stephen Baxter: An excellent introduction. Evolution is astounding. [2]

Vernor Vinge: Like Banks and Stross he's relatively approachable. Another great place to start.

[1] Here's hoping eBooks will one day be a friend to writer and reader alike.

[2] Update 8/23/2010: One of my favorite scenes in Evolution concerns sentient spear using dinosaurs. Baxter makes a great case for a sentient, warm blooded, raptor-with-digits dino. In the story they hunt their primary prey to extinction - with obvious consequences. I thought that was quite original, but today I read Asimov's "Day of the Hunters" (1950) published in "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" (1975). It's a less sophisticated version of the same story! Asimov was gem.

Fossett: is this the same search everyone gets?

The lost wealthy adventurer Steve Fossett is getting such an intense search that it's turning up wrecks never seen before...

ABC News: Old Plane Wrecks an Ominous Sign

...The intense, weeklong search for aviator Steve Fossett has turned up no sign of his plane, but it has revealed a graveyard of other small aircraft that have crashed sometimes decades ago in the rugged, concealing landscape of western Nevada. Search teams have spotted nearly one uncharted wreck a day since the search began Tuesday. To some, that is an ominous sign of how hard it will be to find Fossett...

I sure hope they find Fossett, and that he's alive. I do wonder, though, would a 60 year old black man get the same search? Military planes, satellite images ...

Update: This reminded me of the search for James Gray, also a wealthy man, sailing alone, who received a very impressive search effort including extensive coast guard resources. Mr Gray's disappearance remains a mystery (Wired has a comprehensive article on that search.).

Amazon's Flexible Payments service

This is the best explanation of Amazon's new payment system I've read ...

Mobile Opportunity: Impact of Amazon Flexible Payments Service: Computing as a utility

... FPS is a web service, meaning it's a set of online APIs that the creator of a website or web application can use to perform tasks. What FPS does for you is billing -- you can use it to accept payments for something you sell online. Basically, you transmit the customer's info to Amazon, and they take care of the credit check, credit card processing, billing, and so on. They send you the money, less a percentage cut that they take. That's not at all revolutionary. PayPal and Google Checkout offer the same thing already. Amazon's cut is about the same as PayPal -- about 2% to 3% of your revenue, depending on the amount of business you do, plus 30 cents per transaction.

Google is a tad cheaper, plus you get AdSense credits for using it. (For more information on FPS, there are good articles here and here). What impressed me about FPS is its flexibility. Amazon says you can set different payment terms for every customer, set up subscriptions and multiple payment schedules, manage a store in which you pass payments from a customer to your suppliers, set up either pre- or post-payment systems, and most importantly you can manage micropayments down to a couple of pennies per transaction ..."

Mace talks about the other implications for online commerce -- it's well worth a read. Google checkout is not available internationally, so if Amazon can extend this outside the US it could be a real winner -- esp. for selling software. It's a big deal because, like Google Checkout, it seems to work around the high transaction costs that credit card companies charge, thus allowing small charges to be cost-effective.

Forgotten things: dial phones, record players, rust

Boomer geezers often talk about the things their children don't recognize, such as dial phones and record players. Actually, our children know those. They had childhood toy dial phones, and their preschool used a record player.

What they don't know is rust. I knew rust very well. In my childhood my father drove an ancient 1965 Valiant held together, honestly, by multiple layers of duct tape. Yes, the apple does not fall far, my father was a bit of an eccentric. Every so often we'd have to add new layers of duct tape, as gaping holes appeared along the top front sides of the Valiant.

Rust was everywhere in my world, but it's rare in our children's world. Cars don't rust. Plastics don't rust. Even their metal toys barely rust. Rust is passing into history...

Cruelty of the young, or how to tell you're a geezer

Every so often, I wipe out. Flip, bump, spin, skid, slide, etc. Bright red road rash patches here and there (looks worse than it feels). It's bad enough, but invariably there's some young whipper-snapper who, despite my gray hair being under a helmet, instantly calls out "Sir! Are you hurt?!" in a terribly anxious voice.

Hmpp. Bad enough I've botched a move, but there's no need to remind me I'm a Geezer. The young are cruel.

Shared music, shared ringtones, iPhone - uh-oh

Despite all chatter about iTunes and DRMd iPhone ringtones nobody seems to have caught on that Apple is going to make it very, very, hard to share a family music library. Apple is has the same goals as NBC -- eliminate sharing of music and videos among family members. They're just much smarter about it (so much for Jobs anti-DRM message!).

The problem is that an OS X music library belongs to a user account. So do the contacts, phone backup, DRMd ringtones, etc.

So what happens if two people in a family both have an iPhone? They need to sync within their user account. That means they can't share music, because only one account can own the music library.

There are workarounds, but they're awkward, unsupported, and Apple can break them at any time. I've posted a few times about this topic, this 2005 post is the most extensive.

Senator Klobuchar and cell phone contracts: America, bow before Minnesota

It's hard to believe, but Minnesota wasn't always the coolest state. I confess when I lived on the coasts I didn't really know where it was, and when I moved here 15 years ago the twin cities were only beginning the ascent to greatness. Now, of course, the coasts bow down to us.

Klobuchar is one of ours:

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) today unveiled legislation aimed at empowering the 200 million cell phone customers nationwide to make informed choices about a wireless service that best fits their needs and their budget. The Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 will require wireless service providers to share simple, clear information on their services and charges with customers before they enter into long-term contracts; a thirty-day window in which to exit a contract without early termination fees; and greater flexibility to exit contracts with services that don’t meet their needs.

Of course I have to take some credit here, because I'm sure my senator was inspired by a Jan 2007 post of mine:

Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies (Jan 2007)

...The bottom line: If you don't want to change your contract expiry date, you go to a Sprint store and pay full price, or you buy a used phone on eBay or Craigslist. I'm told some Radio Shack stores will sell used phones, but I distrust the quality there. I have a visceral distrust for eBay, so it's Craigslist or list price.

Lastly, looking over the scam I first documented above, I'm thinking Amazon's a part of the deal too. In other words, they sold out. Well, it's not the first time.

The next time a politician hits me up for a donation, I won't ask them about healthcare reform or global warming, I'll ask them if they'll vote to require any cellphone vendor to accept a compatible unlocked phone.

Ok Amy, send me another request for a donation.

Dang, I really thought he was dead

Google News: The Bin Laden stuff

Honestly, I figured he was dead. For an egomaniac he was awfully quiet.

Does this guy take longevity lessons from Castro? If all the atheists of America claim to convert to Islam would that make him happy?

No, I didn't think so.

Virginia moves to eliminate the father

On the one hand, I'm comfortable with the idea of eliminating males, though it is a bit of a slippery slope. As bad as human males are, human females are not necessarily qualitatively better.

On the other hand, I do hold my children's hands when we walk, and since they're all adopted, Rebecca Odor would be very suspicious ...

Moving On - WSJ.com

... This summer, Virginia's Department of Health mounted an ad campaign for its sex-abuse hotline. Billboards featured photos of a man holding a child's hand. The caption: 'It doesn't feel right when I see them together.' More than 200 men emailed complaints about the campaign to the health department...

Virginia's campaign was designed to encourage people to trust their instincts about possible abuse, says Rebecca Odor, director of sexual and domestic violence prevention for the state health department. She stands by the ads, pointing out that 89% of child sex-abuse perpetrators in Virginia are male...

Really, Rebecca, let's just eliminate fathers altogether. These half-way measures will never suffice.

Are all smartphones bad?

A journalists had a bad Treo experience, and decided to turn his investigative talents on an interesting question -- is there such a thing as a good smartphone? Despite his avowed non-geek credentials, he has some interesting comments ...

The Case of the Subpar Smartphone - New York Times
September 8, 2007
By JOE NOCERA

My Treo died.

It happened about three weeks ago, and I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. I bought a Treo 700p in early January and have had buyer’s remorse pretty much ever since.

The 700p, of course, is a member of the Palm smartphone family; it’s the one that uses the Palm operating system (the 700w uses Windows). I chose it because I was a longtime user of the Palm Pilot, and had all my data already stored on the Palm application on my computer. In other words, it was the kind of completely rational technology decision we nongeeks tend to make — and then, sadly, come to regret.

Practically out of the box, my Treo froze on a regular basis. I could never get my Gmail account to sync with the Treo, and had to use the Web to retrieve e-mail — which required the patience of Job. It had all sorts of weird glitches: sometimes it raced around the menu while I watched helplessly; at other times, it would switch from one application to another for no reason. It would ring randomly. By June, it was shutting down completely two or three times a week, even in the middle of phone calls, and then powering back up again.

Maybe, I thought, I’m just unlucky. Maybe I’ve bought a lemon, in which case I should try to get my carrier, Verizon Wireless, to replace it. You know how it is, though: life kept getting in the way, and I never got around to it.

But I also think my avoidance was due to a darker, more painful thought: maybe Treos were simply lousy devices. ... Maybe I was a fool to assume, as I clearly had, that just because Palm had once made great products, it was still making great products.

Then my Treo died, and that gave me my answer. What killed it was, of all things, a software upgrade from Palm...

... Then came the hours of working with the valiant Verizon technical support guy, as he struggled to get my [new[ Treo up and running. There was the software that refused to work. The continued difficulty of synching with Gmail. The “soft resets.” The frustration. The constant refrain of “Let’s try that again.” And finally, after everything was more or less up and running, the painful realization that the new phone was almost as problematic as the old one had been...

... It’s hard to make a good smartphone — so hard, in fact, that no one really has it right yet [jf: almost right, but wrong. See below]. BlackBerrys are great at e-mail, but the phone is barely adequate and its Internet abilities are not very good at all. The Motorola Q crashes almost as often as the Treo. The Apple iPhone is terrific for music and media, but lousy for e-mail and phoning.

Part of the reason has to do with what’s called the “form factor.” For marketing reasons, everybody is trying to cram all these complicated features into ever-sleeker, ever-thinner boxes, while also adding longer battery life, and so on. Invariably, smart phone designers have to make compromises that mean some functions don’t work especially well...

... On the one hand, believe it or not, the company is still using the same operating system it used when it was churning out Palm Pilot, which, please recall, had no Internet, no e-mail and no telephone. [jf: wrong. It's the same name, but the old apps are running in emulation - they're slower now than they were ten years ago!] ...

I'm chopped out most of the article where he's definitely wrong, though I left in a few of his goofs. Really, he needs to talk to some old geeks with (some) memory. Even so, he's exposing a market problem that deserves attention.

He's right that today's smartphones fall short (though I suspect he's exaggerating the iPhone's flaws), but he's quite wrong that it's not possible to build a great smartphone. The Samsung i500 appeared to be a very good phone when I had it, but in retrospect it was a fantastic phone. There's never been anything like it since it was discontinued about 3 years ago; those who have working i500s coddle them. I gave mine to my wife when her old phone died, and I've suffered ever since.

Since the Samsung was a great phone, and it ran the Palm OS, why is the Treo so unreliable? Ahh, well, the Samsung ran the original PalmOS, the one with Graffiti One. That OS was written by cyborg infiltrators from the 32nd century. Shortly after the i500 came out Palm was essentially destroyed from within (Microsoft gave a push or two) and it's never recovered. The Treo runs a botched descendant of the original PalmOS that's held together by bailing wire.

That eliminates the Treo, but it's also true that every non-Palm smartphone OS, to date, has been unreliable or has placed disabling demands on the phone, or both. The old PalmOS was designed to run fast on a hamster-powered CPU, so the i500 was positively capacious. All of today's OS's ask much more of the host phone.

We'll see if Apple can break this trap, but I wouldn't look for anything from Palm. Their secret genius took his stock options and ran ...

Blah, blah, quantum entanglement, yawn, hacking reality, zzzzz

I'm almost caught up with modern physics, but it's taken a toll.

It's started my reading a few months ago when I realized I'd fallen hopelessly out of date, but I'm now only a few chapters from finishing Greenes latest tome. Alas, between Gribbin and Greenes, I'm a broken man. Modern physics is so consistently and cumulatively weird that a steady diet has eliminated my critical capacity. No wonder science fiction writers feel beaten down -- no work of fiction can be as mind-bending as today's physics. It's enough to make the idea that we're all living in a simulation seem comforting by comparison.

Which is to say that latest proof that the universe is every bit as weird as predicted is a bit of a yawner ...

'Spooky' science points to quantum internet - Internet - www.itnews.com.au

Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of 'quantum intuition' ...

The scientists used light to establish an "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped one metre apart in separate enclosures...

... David Moehring, the lead author of the paper who performed the research as a University of Michigan graduate student, explained that the most important aspect of the experiment is the distance between the two atoms.

"The separation of the quantum bits [qubits] in our entangled state is the most important feature," he said.

"Localised entanglement has been performed in ion trap qubits in the past, but to build a scalable quantum computer network (or a quantum internet) the creation of entanglement schemes between remotely entangled qubit memories is necessary."

The researchers used two atoms to function as qubits storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process.

The atoms, which were actually ions of the rare-earth element ytterbium, are capable of emitting two different types of photons of different wavelengths.

The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom.

By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fibre-optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms.

Professor Monroe explained that the fibre-optic thread was necessary to establish entanglement of the atoms. But the fibre could be severed and the two atoms would remain entangled, even if one were "carefully taken to Jupiter"...

I wasn't being entirely supercilious. My reading suggests this is a perfectly prosaic result, indeed anything different would have been shocking. The reason the paper was published is because of the experimental genius required, and perhaps because it suggests new ways to build a quantum computer.