The Decline of America - long distance interconnect pricing

The NYT tells us a little bit about the games phone companies play to extract money from the crazed interconnect payment scheme

... some enterprising phone companies, aided by local regulators, have taken to encouraging entrepreneurs to set up businesses that attract lots of inbound calls. Those include the free conference calling services, free fax lines and telephone pornography. The phone companies rebate some of the high call termination fees they receive to the companies running these services...

So revenues generated from gaming the interconnect system can be used to subsidize phone porn to attract incoming calls and generate interconnect fees.

Now AT&T wants Google Voice to connect to these services so they have to pay up too.

Well, at least now we understand the business model for those flaky free fax send services.

This looks bad enough on the face of it, but, naturally, I think it's worse than it looks.

This kind of institutionalized lunacy is the kind of thing you expect to see in a senile nation. It's of the same cloth as medical bills that have little connection to value delivered or insurance payment received.

If we can't deal with this kind of crap, we ought to invite a more energetic nation to take over our operation.

Google Searchmash

Browsing my Reader feeds, I came across one that was last updated in 2006. The very last post read - "Searchmash, an experimental site started by Google. Uses Ajax and some other web2.0-ish features."

I'd never heard of searchmash, so I tried the 3 yo link to searchmash.com. It still works.

Today it reads ... "searchmash has gone the way of the dinosaur".

Techcrunch as a Nov 2008 article on the demise of searchmash. Looks like Google used it as an unbranded lab for a while, before they transitioned to their current "lab" strategy.

Now you know.

Sorry.

My current iPhone wish list – as of OS 3.1

Now that we’re well past 3.0 it’s time to update my prior personal iPhone wish list.

Some of my past wishes have been met, but other items have been on my personal wish list for years (ex. “old”). This time around I’m excluding issues that are clearly AT&T problems (ex. tethering). So this is a wish list for Apple.

They’re in rough order of declining priority …

1. Multiple Exchange Server (ActiveSync) accounts
2. External keyboard support (old)
3. A Calendar API so 3rd party apps can get at Calendar data and manipulate it. (old)
4. Google Voice App authorization
5. Location sharing via Google Latitude
6. Standard synchronization API for 3rd party desktop apps use of USB connection (old)
7. Fix the Calendar note field so it can fit a standard travel itinerary! The iPhone needs a text field that can manage longer notes – especially Calendar and Contacts. (old)

#4 is a novel entry since it doesn’t require any software development. Apple has blocked an App from use with the iPhone because it interferes with Apple’s current revenue (SMS, long distance) and because Apple fears Google.

I’m mildly hopeful about 1, 3 and 7.

Unfortunately 2, 4, and 5 all threaten Apple’s revenue plans, so, in the absence of regulatory pressure, Apple won’t help us.

I can’t guess why Apple won’t do #6.

Campaign Finance Reform - The Publicly Owned Politician

Another day, another multi-million dollar bribe to a senator somewhere. It's hardly even newsworthy any more.

Of course such bribery is only the tip of the proverbial berg. The massive lobbying against health reform is more typical. This is money to get the "right" people elected.

It reminds me of my 1999 proposal to start buying and selling politicians on the open market (this was before the crash of 2000) ...

Campaign Finance Reform: The publicly owned politician

... Campaigns need money. Powerful people need good things. Both needs can be satisfied by transforming politicians into publicly owned corporations. After meeting standard accounting requirements, a politician would be sold through an IPO. The usual futures and options markets would develop. Standard reporting and accounting regulations and SEC enforcement would apply. Cheaters would be delisted, and thus be effectively removed from future campaigns.

There are several advantages to this approach:

1. There are no constitutional issues.
2. It's very simple.
3. It's honest and transparent.
4. It would bring in so much money that other forms of funding and bribery would become irrelevant. Federal, and some state and city politicians, would be all multi-millionaires.
5. We would not need public financing of elections. Politics would no longer be limited to the wealthy.
6. The market would demonstrate a politicians' commitment to his/her owners through the share price. This would be visible for all to see.
7. At election time voters would know what a politician stood for, by knowing who the major shareholders were.
8. Politicians would no longer need salaries or pensions.
9. Politicians would not need to spend all their time raising money -- bending laws, and selling their souls in order to get elected. They would be available to govern.
10. Corporations and wealthy individuals would be able to buy and sell politicians more efficiently. Efficiency is good for the economy.
11. Powerful individuals and corporations would have their necessary control of the political process.

I'd buy a share of Franken.

iPhoto - Apple's stupidity burnz

Size of typical JPEG image in iPhoto '09: 3.5MB

Size of identical image when exported at "Maximum" quality JPEG: 6.9MB

So why did the size of this JPEG image double when it was exported?

 

There’s only one possible explanation. In order to do the export iPhoto is first decompressing the image, then re-compressing it using a 99% or near-lossless JPEG algorithm. This doubles the image size while degrading image quality. (You can’t improve the quality of a JPEG image by recompressing it.)

In older versions of iPhoto the app simply copied the image. Now iPhoto behaves like Aperture.

I suspect this back-asswords behavior is related to a surprise of a few months back, when people who thought they were archiving their images to MobileMe learned that Apple's "full resolution" was in fact a high-quality JPEG (about 97% compression). iPhoto was presumably doing a similar decompression/compression cycle on upload to MobileMe. (Supposedly this was "fixed". I'm skeptical.)

Apple's heading for a fall.

Update: If you export as "Current" you avoid the perverse "maximal quality" degradation. Apple should have made "maximal quality" JPEG the same as "current" for images that are already JPEG.

Photo sharing – a vast generation gap

My son’s 5/6th grade camping outing was about done, so I offered to do a class picture. They lined up well, and I zipped off about 15 shots with my fancy Canon lens and dSLR.

Then all the kids ran forward, asking for pictures to be put on their camera. I know the teacher wanted to get going, so I declined. After all, it would be easy to share my fancy picture.

I knew as I said it that I was wrong, but I didn’t know I was twice wrong.

Firstly, I was wrong because I’ve had lots of personal experience that photo sharing doesn’t work – with the one exception of Facebook. I’ve put thousands of photos on Picasa, SmugMug and my own servers, but I think the vast majority have been neglected. Very few, if any, have ever been downloaded for personal storage.

There are too many hurdles for traditional image sharing to work. Only geeks like me can manage downloading images and storing them in photo libraries. Beyond the software issues, a surprising number of families have barely functional computers (XP virus infested typically) and either no net service or one that’s effectively out of order. Lastly, there’s a personal element to acquiring an image – a sense of ownership and obligation that a shared image lacks.

Facebook is different – images I share there are viewed – but only by Facebook users. Very few of the parents or teachers of our 5th and 6th graders do Facebook.

I knew that much, but it wasn’t until the bus ride home that I learned there was another dimension of incomprehension.

I watched a 5th/6th grade girl share her pictures. She held up her camera for all to view. Not surprising, except these weren’t pictures from the camping trip. She had what seemed like years of pictures on her camera. She flipped through her camera album as though she was playing the piano, effortlessly zooming, panning, and navigating a large image collection.

For her, her camera was the photo library and the camera back was her display. She can’t do anything with a shared digital image – except perhaps take a picture of the screen displaying it.

I wonder what she does when she finally hits image 2,000 or so, and fills her 4GB SD card? Probably deletes those she’s less interested in, gradually evolving a set of 2,000 very high value images.

No backups of course, but this generation seems comfortable with ephemera.

Next time, I won’t pretend anyone else will be able to use my picture.

* They seem nothing like 5th grade boys. “Mainstreaming” special needs children is relatively straightforward compared to educating boys and girls together.

The Cloud is slow (so's my phone)

I've a habit of counting seconds whenever my machine doesn't respond instantly.

Quite often, when I do anything with the Cloud, even Gmail, I get to 10 before I can work. On my 3G I get to 5-10 for internal apps, 10-40 seconds for web apps (Emily's 3GS is at least twice as fast).

On corporate SharePoint I don't bother counting, I go for coffee.

I sometimes mourn for those few bright moments when I used a 386 with single tasking DOS 3.1. I've never had any environment so instantly responsive. Sure, you couldn't do much, but you could do a little so quickly.

We know from Google's research on their Search screens that, even if users don't perceive something as slow, even small delays decrease their use. I suspect most users don't realize how slow our modern computing environments are, but it must take a psychic toll all the same.

A billion dollar infographic - terrific

The Billion Dollar Gram (via Gruber) is a sensational infographic from a visualization site (Information is Beautiful).

There are some stretches. The 'worst case' cost of the US financial crisis to US Government only makes sense if you include sub-employment GDP Gap as a cost (which it is, but most don't include it and that's a hit for the US as a whole rather than the Feds). Also the New Deal vs. 2009 bailout doesn't account for the US of 1930 versus a vastly larger and richer nation. Between population and economic growth the US economy is probably at least 20-50 times bigger than in 1930.

I did like $465 to "Feed and educate every child on earth for 5 years" vs. $316 - Bribes received by Russian officials.

Are you getting enough out of iPhone Map.app?

It may have more features than you realize:

iPhone and Google Maps: Go to here -- just drop the freakin' pin ...

.... Today, when I was switching from Map to List view, the "Drop Pin" button caught my eye. I'd ignored it for a while. What the heck did it do, anyway?

Riiiggght. It drops a pin on the map. It seems to leave it there, after the first time I did this the button changed to "Replace Pin". I didn't see a way to "Undrop Pin" -- maybe once you put it on any map it's bound to a map forever.

You can move the Pin around, bookmark it, get directions to it, etc...

We need product documentation like "Power User tips and things longtime users tend to miss".

A world without AIDS?

I was in medical school when we learned of Haitian men and San Francisco gay men with strange skin lesions and odd pneumonias.

We learned a lot very quickly, but none of it was very good. By the late 1980s to early 1990s many people, myself included, expected vast numbers of deaths in Africa.

Over the past decade though, the tide has slowly turned, until today I read ...

BBC NEWS | Many more receiving HIV therapy

... Testing is the gateway to treatment, and in many areas facilities providing this service increased by about 35%, noted the Towards Universal Access report which looked at 158 countries.

'An Aids free generation is no longer an impossibility - the elimination of vertical transmission is in sight,' said Jimmy Kolker, head of the HIV/Aids division at UNICEF....

Recent glimmers of hope on immunization, and confirmation of the protective effects of circumcision must also be contributing to this new optimism. Perversely, the impending extinction of our fellow primates will also reduce exposure to HIV reservoirs.

Great credit must go to all of those, African and otherwise, who fought for the widespread dissemination of treatment to impoverished nations against great skepticism about its efficacy and the fears of drug manufacturers.

This is not, of course, the same as curing AIDS. This is about preventing transmission of the virus within the human population, until transmission is so rare that the disease is effectively eliminated.

I expect I'll live to see it happen.

iPhone 2014 – what will it be like?

Brinna’s brother has an mobile, so she wants her iPhone now. If we stick with the Junior High rule, that means 2014.

So what will the iPhone of 2014 be like? Will it vote?

I bet it will be a lot like the iPhone of 2009. Mostly better, in some ways worse. That’s the way things usually go after the first mad sprint of a real breakthrough.

MacOS Classic had some serious issues (esp post-multifinder with stability and TCP/IP support), but eighteen years later OS X is not an immensely better OS. It’s mostly better, but there have been significant regressions too. The real shocker was the transition from the command line to the very first Mac.

Equally dramatically, digital cameras went from near worthless to 5 megapixel SLRs in just a few years. Since then, however, progress has been gradual.

So it’s reasonable to expect the iPhone-equivalents of 2014 to follow the same incremental path.

We will see more speech UI development and some workable speech-to-text input. We will probably see better support of external displays, and we may even see a 1992-PalmOS-style external keyboard. Laptops will be squeezed between netbooks and iPhone-equivalents. Augmented reality apps will be mainstream, and we’ll have more bandwidth.

Otherwise, pretty much what we have now.

Which is really an amazing statement about what Apple has done to the mobile industry.

When OS X truly sucks: screen sharing

I tried OS X screen sharing again today.

I do this every few months, to remind myself how badly OS X screen sharing sucks.

Yeah, I'm on Leopard, but from all I read Snow Leopard takes OS X remote control from extremely lousy to really lousy.

It's painful for a Mac user to remember that Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (similar to Citrix remote desktop) is about ten years old.

Microsoft (Citrix?) used to have some serious skills.

Update: Speaking of Apple senescence, I remember when the OS could 'remember' the location of files stored on a server and mount the server on demand. Now if I click a shortcut to a network folder I get "A volume failed to mount". Once upon a time I'd get a login.

That capability was lost in the last few years of OS X development, one of several dumbing-down changes to the OS.

Google Apps - vote for your favorite feature

Apple's problem is that Steve Jobs decides what we need. Microsoft's problem is that it should have been split into several competing companies ten years ago. Google's problem is that they combine Attention Deficit Disorder with a mystical belief in the power of the metamind.

The best we poor geeks can do is mix and match and try to keep our data liberated.

With Apple bitching on Discussion Groups can sometimes help -- the secret is to get a long thread going.

With Google you can look for one of their periodic attempts to survey their customer base, such as this suggest a feature for Google Apps poll. Give it a try! Note, however, you can't vote to "Burn Google Sites to the Ground and Start Over".

And Microsoft? Despair is recommended.

Update: Some related posts

• I, Cringely - The People’s Republic of Google
• Blodget on GmailLand: The Threading model alone condemns Google
• Stross on Microsoft and Apple

In Our Time - The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth

In the 2003 In Our Time explored the cultural history of war: BBC - Radio 4 - The Art of War.

During the programme, one of the guests mentions Karl Pearson an early 20th century social Darwinist and "Professor of Eugenics" [1]. Pearson praised war as the engine of racial fitness and national progress. If not for war, it was said in Pearson's time, "the weak shall inherit the earth" [2].

These memes are with us still, though in the west they are rarely explicit.

[1] Those of us who did med school stats may remember the "Pearson distribution". Same guy.

[2] It's not clear from the discussion if the phrase came from Pearson, but I suspect it was a common usage of the time. Not for the first time I wish there were more IOT transcripts. The "After Our Time" wiki has @50 IOT transcripts, but the blog and wiki was only active for a few months in 2007. Among those few transcripts, incidentally, are early programmes that have been lost, including one featuring Stephen Jay Gould.

Update Feb 17, 2010: The Lost Episodes are now online.

The problem with software (an ongoing series)

How’s this …

We know how to make quite good applications with small teams and 3-7 year lifespans.

We don’t know how to cost-effectively make equally good applications with large teams and 10-30 year lifespans. The costs rise as some power function of lifespan and team size.

We may need different corporate structures to create these applications.