A couple years ago I heard some University wonk talk about the future of the electric grid, and the dude had a couple amazing ideas that I was just reminded of as I read about the latest electric cars being shown at the Detroit Auto Show.
Imagine you had a plugin hybrid or electric vehicle. Every night when you get home, you plug it in so it is fully charged for the following day. Now imagine that your car was plugged into your house in such a way that when there's a blackout, your home's electricity could temporarily come from the battery in your car! Sort of like the UPS' we attach our computers to in order to insulate them from the instabilities in our electrical grid. Neat, eh?
It gets better. Imagine your car was a hybrid and its engine could keep the battery charged while it's supplying the house. Now you can avoid the dark for at least as long as your car has gas! And, if you so chose, you could even feed ("sell") any excess power back into the public grid, potentially also helping your neighbor keep the lights on.
Now, let's scale the idea. Imagine that lots and lots of your neighbors had the same setup and imagine that you all have some deal with the power company that they can, during a severe power shortage, automatically start your engines (or at least start drawing power from your batteries) to help avoid brownouts. The grid becomes a self-healing distributed network of energy producers!
Having one's car battery act as a store of energy is also very enticing to those folks who simply want to become independent from the grid. I've, on several occasions, investigated adding solar power to my home. Since solar power is obviously time-of-day dependent (just like wind), most solar home owners can't really go "off-grid" because they need a way to keep the lights on at night and adding batteries to a solar installation is a large added cost. In most states, the power company is required to buy your daytime excess electricity, effectively becoming one large-ass battery for your solar installation. So that is fine - most of the time. If there happens to be a blackout during the night, you're out of luck. Electric/hybrid car batteries can provide this grid independence!
The above can all be done today - all the technologies exist. Neat, eh?
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The Most Honorable Professions?
I grew up thinking that the most honorable and desirable professions were those which contributed the most to society. To me, this included artist, doctor, engineer, lawyer, police officer, scientist, and teacher. Many of these careers required years of often expensive education, so I thought the high pay in these professions was justified. I thought everyone around me believed the same things.
It was this belief - and an intense interest in computers - that led me into an engineering career.
Fast-forward 20 years. I still think that the most honorable careers are those who give back the most to society. But my list has changed. While I still think highly of artists, doctors, engineers, and scientists, my list now excludes lawyer, police officer, and...teacher. Why?
Lawyers
Growing up in Germany, I thought of attorneys as people dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals accused of committing crimes. Civil law suits (where individuals sued one another over some perceived wrong) were a rare thing. So, there weren't that many lawyers - it was a pretty "exotic" profession which required *many* years of learning beyond high school. Then I came to America - home of 95% of the world's lawyers with only 5% of the world's population.
Why are there so many lawyers in this country? Americans don't appear criminally more inclined than folks in the rest of the world. The answer is obvious: a system of law that encourages litigation. In the U.S. there is no risk to suing someone: if you feel wronged by your neighbor or, more likely, by some corporation, simply hire a lawyer on "contingency" - if the lawyer convinces a jury (which can be swayed by emotional appellations rather than facts), he gets 30% of the damage awards; if he does not, you walk away with no costs. Such a system encourageed a new breed of greedy lawyer: the "ambulance chaser" - an individual who finds citizens that have been bodily (or mentally) harmed and convinces them that another individual or, more profitably, a company is to blame and needs to be sued to compensate "the victim" for the incurred damage.
Why do we have such a system of law? I have not researched the subject, but I suspect the answer lies somewhere in Americans' individualism. We have always prided ourselves on our ability to succeed on our own and have always had a healthy apprehension towards "the man". Initially, "the man" was the British Empire. Then it was the government (maybe because it taxed us excessively) and companies (because it took advantage of its workers). A system of law developed which was geared towards protecting individuals' rights. For instance, unlike most other european courts, where cases where decided (and damage awards given) by one or more judges, in America, we're allowed to be judged by a jury of our peers. I imagine this was deemed a good idea in the early days of the nation because judges were likely to side with or be bought by "the man". This solution was a decent one in the early days of our nation, when the laws themselves were simple and the types of cases brought in front of juries were as well. But today, the jury system no longer works well: although jury members still try to be just in their determination of guilt, they're too often swayed by emotional appeals and their traditional dislike of "rich corporations" when deciding damage awards. So why haven't we changed the system? Well, because the folks that decide these things, congress, is swayed by a very large, very-well connected lobby: lawyers.
And that is why the law profession, at least in this country, has become a dishonorable one: instead of helping to improve society, it is slowly destroying it.
Police Officers
Unlike the law profession, my view of the police had taken on a negative slant before I ever set foot on American soil. As a young lad, I saw the honor in police officers protecting the citizens from criminals - I saw them as the catchers of the bad guys. As a teenager, I began to see other sides: police officers as blind tools of government (e.g. to squash - sometimes violently - peaceful demonstrations) as well as uneducated/racist police officers abusing their power.
But my view of the profession was not cemented until I came to the U.S. It is here that I experienced police officers' "selective" administration of the law: whoever said "justice is blind" obviously has never been a resident of New Jersey, where police officers regularly cite civilians for traffic violations that they, themselves, violate (ever experienced a NJ State Trooper passing you at 90-100mph without siren or lights - obviously in pursuit of a donut, rather than a bad guy?); where police officers rack up "overtime" while during their regular work hours they sit parked in parking lots, texting and chatting it up with their friends; where most police officers somehow arranged themselves six-figure incomes (276 out of 316 police officers in Edison, NJ, make over $100k base salary!); where police officers stuff their last year before retirement with overtime because their pension is based on their last year's salary (there are many cases of police officers with six-figure pensions when during their careers, they never earned more than half that!); where police officers are found to have committed crimes with the knowledge of their colleagues (the "Blue Wall of Silence").
While I totally understand that most police officers began their careers with the same noble goals for which I admired them as a child, the level of corruption within today's police departments convinced me to take the profession off my "most honorable" list.
Teachers
This is probably the saddest case of all, because I still very much admire the profession. How can I not: teachers have prepared me for life and I still greatly admire most of them. But I just don't respect the profession anymore. And I'm not even sure why!
When I grew up, teachers were deeply respected people. Not only did they seem to have great knowledge in their respective fields, but they also exuded professionalism and authority. I remember several of my early teachers always caming to work with a shirt and tie. And I remember several teachers disciplining misbehaving kids - and parents apologizing to the teachers for their child's infraction.
Again, fast forward 20 years. The teaching profession is not very respected. Why? There are many reasons: under educated and/or under-motivated and/or over-paid and/or corrupt teachers, parents who have abdicated their parentel responsibilites, forcing teachers to spend time parenting rather than teaching. But, most of the blame, I think, belongs with the "business" of education: administrators, unions, and politicians who, through their corruptness, made the educational system a bloated, inefficient mess.
Under-educated teachers. It is difficult to respect an English teacher who can't spell or write a grammatically correct sentence or a science teacher who espouses outdated theories. I have encountered such teachers - and not just once.
Under-motivated teachers. I think everyone has experienced the occasional teacher who just seems to be biding their time until retirement. The kind of teacher that prefers to show videos and self-study activities over actively teaching. The problem is that these types of teachers are no longer rare. Due to tenure rules, it has become next to impossible to fire even grossly under-motivated or ineffective teachers. They just stay on the payroll, under-educating our children.
Overpaid teachers. Although over-compensation is much more prevalent on the administrative side of the education system, the allocation of pay among teachers is grossly unjust. Instead of rewarding good teachers and punishing bad ones, pay is allocated purely by seniority: the longer you stay in the system, the higher your pay - even if you're a lousy teacher. Worse yet, when there is an occasional layoff due to budget issues, tenure rules dictate that the least senior teachers are let go before the more senior ones - again, without regard to teaching performance. The result is an inefficient school system: too many highly paid teachers and too few good ones.
Corrupt Teachers. The fact that tenured teachers are next to impossible to let go, gives the teacher power. Some become corrupted by it. I have heard many horror stories, but a recent one sticks out as particularly egregious: there's a tenured math teacher in one NJ township who somehow managed to get her recently-graduated son hired as a substitute math teacher in her school. To help her son out, she regularly calls in "sick" or takes days off in order to give her son an opportunity to substitute for her! There are so many levels to this corruption it's hard to comprehend. There was nepotism getting the son hired; there the total lack of morals on the teacher herself; and there's the continued consent of this activity by the school's administration.
Parents, too self-absorbed with their careers and wealth-accumulation or fighting for financial survival (because taxes are high when you have to provide for the salaries of 25-30% of the population in public employ),
have too little time left to be parents for their kids. Children who aren't taught respect, values, and discipline by their parents need to now be taught these things exclusively at school. This, of course, means less time is spent on academics. The parents, of all people, then blame the teachers for not teaching enough.
Finally, the whole educational system in this country is bloated and fraught with corruption, nepotism, an cronyism. I won't go into the gory details here as I have blogged about it in my April 2010 blog and the corruption is well documented in the film "The Cartel: Education + Politics = $", but suffice it to say that through "guilt by association", this corrupt and overbloated system reflects extremely poorly on the teaching profession.
I still respect and admire individual teachers, but the corrupt nature of New Jersey's educational system has left me wondering how honorable the overall profession is. Even if most of the misdeeds outlined here are perpetrated not by teachers but by the administrators in the educational system and politicians, how can truly honorable teachers stand by and allow them to happen?
It was this belief - and an intense interest in computers - that led me into an engineering career.
Fast-forward 20 years. I still think that the most honorable careers are those who give back the most to society. But my list has changed. While I still think highly of artists, doctors, engineers, and scientists, my list now excludes lawyer, police officer, and...teacher. Why?
Lawyers
Growing up in Germany, I thought of attorneys as people dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals accused of committing crimes. Civil law suits (where individuals sued one another over some perceived wrong) were a rare thing. So, there weren't that many lawyers - it was a pretty "exotic" profession which required *many* years of learning beyond high school. Then I came to America - home of 95% of the world's lawyers with only 5% of the world's population.
Why are there so many lawyers in this country? Americans don't appear criminally more inclined than folks in the rest of the world. The answer is obvious: a system of law that encourages litigation. In the U.S. there is no risk to suing someone: if you feel wronged by your neighbor or, more likely, by some corporation, simply hire a lawyer on "contingency" - if the lawyer convinces a jury (which can be swayed by emotional appellations rather than facts), he gets 30% of the damage awards; if he does not, you walk away with no costs. Such a system encourageed a new breed of greedy lawyer: the "ambulance chaser" - an individual who finds citizens that have been bodily (or mentally) harmed and convinces them that another individual or, more profitably, a company is to blame and needs to be sued to compensate "the victim" for the incurred damage.
Why do we have such a system of law? I have not researched the subject, but I suspect the answer lies somewhere in Americans' individualism. We have always prided ourselves on our ability to succeed on our own and have always had a healthy apprehension towards "the man". Initially, "the man" was the British Empire. Then it was the government (maybe because it taxed us excessively) and companies (because it took advantage of its workers). A system of law developed which was geared towards protecting individuals' rights. For instance, unlike most other european courts, where cases where decided (and damage awards given) by one or more judges, in America, we're allowed to be judged by a jury of our peers. I imagine this was deemed a good idea in the early days of the nation because judges were likely to side with or be bought by "the man". This solution was a decent one in the early days of our nation, when the laws themselves were simple and the types of cases brought in front of juries were as well. But today, the jury system no longer works well: although jury members still try to be just in their determination of guilt, they're too often swayed by emotional appeals and their traditional dislike of "rich corporations" when deciding damage awards. So why haven't we changed the system? Well, because the folks that decide these things, congress, is swayed by a very large, very-well connected lobby: lawyers.
And that is why the law profession, at least in this country, has become a dishonorable one: instead of helping to improve society, it is slowly destroying it.
Police Officers
Unlike the law profession, my view of the police had taken on a negative slant before I ever set foot on American soil. As a young lad, I saw the honor in police officers protecting the citizens from criminals - I saw them as the catchers of the bad guys. As a teenager, I began to see other sides: police officers as blind tools of government (e.g. to squash - sometimes violently - peaceful demonstrations) as well as uneducated/racist police officers abusing their power.
But my view of the profession was not cemented until I came to the U.S. It is here that I experienced police officers' "selective" administration of the law: whoever said "justice is blind" obviously has never been a resident of New Jersey, where police officers regularly cite civilians for traffic violations that they, themselves, violate (ever experienced a NJ State Trooper passing you at 90-100mph without siren or lights - obviously in pursuit of a donut, rather than a bad guy?); where police officers rack up "overtime" while during their regular work hours they sit parked in parking lots, texting and chatting it up with their friends; where most police officers somehow arranged themselves six-figure incomes (276 out of 316 police officers in Edison, NJ, make over $100k base salary!); where police officers stuff their last year before retirement with overtime because their pension is based on their last year's salary (there are many cases of police officers with six-figure pensions when during their careers, they never earned more than half that!); where police officers are found to have committed crimes with the knowledge of their colleagues (the "Blue Wall of Silence").
While I totally understand that most police officers began their careers with the same noble goals for which I admired them as a child, the level of corruption within today's police departments convinced me to take the profession off my "most honorable" list.
Teachers
This is probably the saddest case of all, because I still very much admire the profession. How can I not: teachers have prepared me for life and I still greatly admire most of them. But I just don't respect the profession anymore. And I'm not even sure why!
When I grew up, teachers were deeply respected people. Not only did they seem to have great knowledge in their respective fields, but they also exuded professionalism and authority. I remember several of my early teachers always caming to work with a shirt and tie. And I remember several teachers disciplining misbehaving kids - and parents apologizing to the teachers for their child's infraction.
Again, fast forward 20 years. The teaching profession is not very respected. Why? There are many reasons: under educated and/or under-motivated and/or over-paid and/or corrupt teachers, parents who have abdicated their parentel responsibilites, forcing teachers to spend time parenting rather than teaching. But, most of the blame, I think, belongs with the "business" of education: administrators, unions, and politicians who, through their corruptness, made the educational system a bloated, inefficient mess.
Under-educated teachers. It is difficult to respect an English teacher who can't spell or write a grammatically correct sentence or a science teacher who espouses outdated theories. I have encountered such teachers - and not just once.
Under-motivated teachers. I think everyone has experienced the occasional teacher who just seems to be biding their time until retirement. The kind of teacher that prefers to show videos and self-study activities over actively teaching. The problem is that these types of teachers are no longer rare. Due to tenure rules, it has become next to impossible to fire even grossly under-motivated or ineffective teachers. They just stay on the payroll, under-educating our children.
Overpaid teachers. Although over-compensation is much more prevalent on the administrative side of the education system, the allocation of pay among teachers is grossly unjust. Instead of rewarding good teachers and punishing bad ones, pay is allocated purely by seniority: the longer you stay in the system, the higher your pay - even if you're a lousy teacher. Worse yet, when there is an occasional layoff due to budget issues, tenure rules dictate that the least senior teachers are let go before the more senior ones - again, without regard to teaching performance. The result is an inefficient school system: too many highly paid teachers and too few good ones.
Corrupt Teachers. The fact that tenured teachers are next to impossible to let go, gives the teacher power. Some become corrupted by it. I have heard many horror stories, but a recent one sticks out as particularly egregious: there's a tenured math teacher in one NJ township who somehow managed to get her recently-graduated son hired as a substitute math teacher in her school. To help her son out, she regularly calls in "sick" or takes days off in order to give her son an opportunity to substitute for her! There are so many levels to this corruption it's hard to comprehend. There was nepotism getting the son hired; there the total lack of morals on the teacher herself; and there's the continued consent of this activity by the school's administration.
Parents, too self-absorbed with their careers and wealth-accumulation or fighting for financial survival (because taxes are high when you have to provide for the salaries of 25-30% of the population in public employ),
have too little time left to be parents for their kids. Children who aren't taught respect, values, and discipline by their parents need to now be taught these things exclusively at school. This, of course, means less time is spent on academics. The parents, of all people, then blame the teachers for not teaching enough.
Finally, the whole educational system in this country is bloated and fraught with corruption, nepotism, an cronyism. I won't go into the gory details here as I have blogged about it in my April 2010 blog and the corruption is well documented in the film "The Cartel: Education + Politics = $", but suffice it to say that through "guilt by association", this corrupt and overbloated system reflects extremely poorly on the teaching profession.
I still respect and admire individual teachers, but the corrupt nature of New Jersey's educational system has left me wondering how honorable the overall profession is. Even if most of the misdeeds outlined here are perpetrated not by teachers but by the administrators in the educational system and politicians, how can truly honorable teachers stand by and allow them to happen?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Values
Yesterday I was driving home, listening to NPR and Bloomberg (listening to NPR marks me by some as a liberal and listening to Bloomberg, I suppose, as a conservative...or at least a capitalist :-), when I came across a segment on notable deaths of 2010. Among them, Alexander Haig, former secretary of state under the Reagan administration. Now, normally, I would have not paid it much heed - since I'm not a fan of Ronald Reagan (I guess another mark in the "liberal" column) - but NPR played an excerpt from an interview with Haig in 2002, in which Haig said something very interesting and unexpected regarding the fall of the Soviet Union and Marxism:
I thought this was particularly insightful: he separates the values inherent in the two ideologies (socialism vs. capitalism) from the economic systems that grew out of those ideologies. The "free market" (put in quotes, since the recent government bailouts make it abundantly clear that our markets aren't that "free" after all) just happened to be more efficient than the state-run system the Soviets created in their Marxist pursuit. It says nothing about the values underlying the two ideologies. Haig, himself, said that the jury is very much still out on that.
So what exactly are our values today? What do we stand for? I don't know. Do you? A likely answer might include some of the values enshrined in our Bill of Rights - e.g. the freedom (to do various things). Everybody remembers values that "give". It is much less likely that the answer might include Constitutionally enshrined values that involve personal responsibility: e.g. the responsibility to vote - i.e. the responsibility to be involved in the democracy that gives us those freedoms.
Today, the U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, most capitalist economies in the world) has become an economically divided country: the "haves" own more than ever and the "have nots" own less than ever before (the statistic I heard is that 5% of the people own 80+% of all the wealth & property in this country - staggering, isn't it?) And things are getting worse, rather than better: the politicians who make our laws increasingly ignore the "have nots" - since they don't make campaign "contributions" or have lobbyists wining and dining them or offering high-paying jobs after their political careers are over; the "have-nots" also don't vote much (they're either busy holding down two jobs or are just content to be entertained by TV or the latest techno gadgets - if I were of a paranoid bend (ok, so I am), I might suggest that TV/sports/entertainment/the lottery are a tool of the elite to keep the masses docile).
What is the root cause of these problems? It's greed. Although greed is great as a motivator (thus the success of the "free market"), unfettered it can be limitless and, ultimately, lead to corruption. So, unless you're a communist or socialist, we need to find a balance that takes advantage of the motivating aspects of greed but, at the same time, holds it at bay at the extremes. How much wealth should a society bestow on a minority without harming the majority - to incentivize the majority to join the minority? Unfortunately, nobody in the US (and, to a lesser extent, in the rest of the world) seems interested in achieving a healthy balance.
So is the only real value we can demonstrate today greed?
Think about it the next time you admire a baseball player "earning" hundreds of millions of dollars or a CEO who gets a multi-million dollar bonus for "right-sizing" his company; the next time a banker gets rich while getting bailed out with tax payer money; the next time you decide to watch a TV show rather than investigate or vote on the issues facing your government; the next time you hear a politician lie through his teeth to get re-elected.
Think about it.
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness. And if you look back at a lot of our problems today, it's the direct product of that baloney about the new world order and why Marxism collapsed. It wasn't that their values were defeated by our values; it was our system that defeated theirs, the market economy.
I thought this was particularly insightful: he separates the values inherent in the two ideologies (socialism vs. capitalism) from the economic systems that grew out of those ideologies. The "free market" (put in quotes, since the recent government bailouts make it abundantly clear that our markets aren't that "free" after all) just happened to be more efficient than the state-run system the Soviets created in their Marxist pursuit. It says nothing about the values underlying the two ideologies. Haig, himself, said that the jury is very much still out on that.
So what exactly are our values today? What do we stand for? I don't know. Do you? A likely answer might include some of the values enshrined in our Bill of Rights - e.g. the freedom (to do various things). Everybody remembers values that "give". It is much less likely that the answer might include Constitutionally enshrined values that involve personal responsibility: e.g. the responsibility to vote - i.e. the responsibility to be involved in the democracy that gives us those freedoms.
Today, the U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, most capitalist economies in the world) has become an economically divided country: the "haves" own more than ever and the "have nots" own less than ever before (the statistic I heard is that 5% of the people own 80+% of all the wealth & property in this country - staggering, isn't it?) And things are getting worse, rather than better: the politicians who make our laws increasingly ignore the "have nots" - since they don't make campaign "contributions" or have lobbyists wining and dining them or offering high-paying jobs after their political careers are over; the "have-nots" also don't vote much (they're either busy holding down two jobs or are just content to be entertained by TV or the latest techno gadgets - if I were of a paranoid bend (ok, so I am), I might suggest that TV/sports/entertainment/the lottery are a tool of the elite to keep the masses docile).
What is the root cause of these problems? It's greed. Although greed is great as a motivator (thus the success of the "free market"), unfettered it can be limitless and, ultimately, lead to corruption. So, unless you're a communist or socialist, we need to find a balance that takes advantage of the motivating aspects of greed but, at the same time, holds it at bay at the extremes. How much wealth should a society bestow on a minority without harming the majority - to incentivize the majority to join the minority? Unfortunately, nobody in the US (and, to a lesser extent, in the rest of the world) seems interested in achieving a healthy balance.
So is the only real value we can demonstrate today greed?
Think about it the next time you admire a baseball player "earning" hundreds of millions of dollars or a CEO who gets a multi-million dollar bonus for "right-sizing" his company; the next time a banker gets rich while getting bailed out with tax payer money; the next time you decide to watch a TV show rather than investigate or vote on the issues facing your government; the next time you hear a politician lie through his teeth to get re-elected.
Think about it.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
My Ideal Cell Phone
It is the season of wishing, so I'm going to add my wishes for the perfect cell phone :-)
My iPhone has been my single most enjoyable and useful device purchase ever. That says a lot. And it's despite the device's shortcomings (in order of annoyance level):
With this in mind, what would a cell phone bring to the table in 2011 to move me to buy? Here's my wish list (in order of importance):
My iPhone has been my single most enjoyable and useful device purchase ever. That says a lot. And it's despite the device's shortcomings (in order of annoyance level):
- no Flash support
- mediocre reception and voice quality
- tight control over application market (which keeps users from being able to buy MP3s directly from competitors)
- dependence on iTunes software on desktop (can't update software over the air; can't even synchronize with iTunes software over the air)
With this in mind, what would a cell phone bring to the table in 2011 to move me to buy? Here's my wish list (in order of importance):
- Quality Design and Material. If I'm going to plunk down $500-600 (or $200-$300 under contract) for a new cell phone, it should not exude cheapness by being made of cheap, reflective plastic. That's the area where Apple has always shined and other devices - even with better hardware feature sets - have always failed for me. An aluminum body with a "hefty" feel would it for me. Throw in some gorilla glass to prevent screen scratches and I'd be ecstatic.
- A higher resolution, slightly larger screen. The iPhone 4 with its "retina display" certainly has the pixel resolution I want, but the 3.5" screen is really too small to let the user take advantage of the resolution - at least when surfing the web. A 4" screen at 1024x800 pixels would be nice.
- Flash support. No matter what Mr. Jobs tries to lead the huddled masses to believe, Flash-based web sites are not some 'fringe" that can be ignored. There are lots of good web sites that I can't get information from because Mr. Jobs declared Flash technology as not worthy for his i-devices. Either Apple changes its stance (either by including it in iOS directly or giving the users the option to install it somehow), my next phone will not be an iPhone (yeah, I can hear Apple quaking in its boots - the mighty Tom is threatening :-)
- Front- and rear-facing cameras. The rear-facing cameras should be at least 5-megapixel. If the manufacturer could give it an optical zoom, I'd be thrilled - I could finally ditch my separate point-and-shoot camera. I realize that with the typical 10mm thickness of phones these days, that may be difficult, but perhaps they can accomplish it by making that part of the phone a bit thicker.
- Over-the-air purchase & management of media as well as "sync"ing. I've always bought all my music through Amazon (thanks to Apple's proprietary AAC format that used to be DRM encumbered). Recently, I've started buying e-books from Amazon as well. I can buy & manage my e-books via the Kindle application (and the browser), but I can't do the same with my music. Whenever Apple updates the system software, I have to get out the cables, start up iTunes, and synchronize that way. That is practically medieval in this day and age. Common, Apple, if Android can do this over the air, you can too! If my laptop is on, there should be a one-click ability to backup/sync the cell phone with the laptop. Both devices have wireless and, in the case of the Mac Book Pro, bluetooth. There's no excuse for not allowing this to happen without pesky wires.
- HDMI Output. These days, every TV comes with HDMI. I'd love to be able to share the music, photos, and videos on my cell phone with my family by simply connecting it to the TV. The cell phone could become a rudimentary media server! I already have Netflix streaming on my iPhone. Why not let me show it on the TV?!
- Printing. Have you ever felt the need to quickly print out a contact or a google map or a coupon or a boarding pass while on your cell phone? It doesn't happen often for me, but when it does, I *really* need it. I don't know what the state of printing in the Android world is, but my iPhone can't do it. Apple recently came out with "Air Print" - but, as usual, it's something Apple-proprietary and only works with certain newer model printers. I want printing on my iPhone, but I'm not going to buy a new printer just so I can.
Well, these are the things *I* would look for in a new phone. Right now I don't see a phone that has all these features. The new 'Optimus 2x" from LG seems promising - it will have HDMI output, looks well-built (although I'd have to hold it to be sure), and will have Flash support and non-proprietary media management, thanks to it running Android 2.3. We shall see.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Experiences with iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, etc.
We're a gadget-happy family. My wife and I have iPhones as well as Dell and Mac Book Pro laptops, respectively. She also got an iPad as a gift from me last September. And she gave me a Kindle a month ago. My daughter has a Dell laptop and iPod Touch.
My wife used to watch a lot of foreign-language web sites and movies on her little iPhone. It was killing her eyes! So a few months after the iPad came out, we got it. I had resisted, hoping that a decent Android tablet would show up in September (the rumored Galaxy Tab) because I absolutely hated the fact that Flash isn't available on either the iPhone or iPad (Jobs has done an excellent job snowing people into believing that Flash isn't pervasive - just try visiting any car web site without Flash - you'll get a very limited experience...or none at all). But, alas, when the Galaxy was finally announced at the end of that month, the price of it seemed outrageous - $600+ for a "me too" device (granted, it included 3G - but we didn't even want that)! So we got the iPad. My wife loves it.
Here are some of the pros and cons of the iPad relative to the other devices we own:
My wife used to watch a lot of foreign-language web sites and movies on her little iPhone. It was killing her eyes! So a few months after the iPad came out, we got it. I had resisted, hoping that a decent Android tablet would show up in September (the rumored Galaxy Tab) because I absolutely hated the fact that Flash isn't available on either the iPhone or iPad (Jobs has done an excellent job snowing people into believing that Flash isn't pervasive - just try visiting any car web site without Flash - you'll get a very limited experience...or none at all). But, alas, when the Galaxy was finally announced at the end of that month, the price of it seemed outrageous - $600+ for a "me too" device (granted, it included 3G - but we didn't even want that)! So we got the iPad. My wife loves it.
Here are some of the pros and cons of the iPad relative to the other devices we own:
- - As mentioned above, the iPad has become THE go-to device when it comes to quick web surfing or movie watching (heck, we even watch HGTV on it - we have no Cable TV :-).
- - For quick "web lookups", we still use our iPhones - there's just no substitute: the phone is always on our bodies and that convenience overcomes any benefit of a bigger screen - in this scenario.
- - Reading is a mixed bag: I prefer the Kindle by a long shot: it's much lighter and less eye-straining (the latter seems to be a subjective thing - my wife doesn't find it eye-straining at all; but she doesn't read for hours on end either). Also, the weight of the iPad is a definite detriment in this use case. After holding it for a few minutes, it gets heavy *real fast*. You end up resting it on your lap - if you can. My wife was trying to read with it lying bed one night and held it up to her face on its end - it tipped over and left a significant dent in her nose :-)
- - For light web-surfing - i.e. just visiting web pages you go to on a daily basis, the iPad can't be beat (provided one of your regular web pages isn't Flash based). Just like the iPhone, the web browser is a joy to use. Others have mentioned "pinch-to-zoom" as some big thing - it isn't. The best part is the "double-tap-to-zoom" - Safari then zooms to the column you double-tapped on - great for reading news sites (I think it probably does some intelligent zooming based on the HTML tags).
- - For heavy surfing that includes editing & posting comments or blogs such as this, laptops are amuch better choice. I'm writing this on my MBP and I can't imagine how long it would have taken to peck out the same comment via the iPad's on-screen keyboard.
- - Since we've had the iPad, we've gone on two car trips, including hotel stays. We don't use it much in the car since we got the wi-fi only model (the iPhones do just fine when my daughter gets bored), but in the hotel room, it's a nice substitute for the outrageously expensive movies the hotel rents (Netflix on the iPad is great for this)...provided the hotel has free wi-fi :-)
- Muscle Memory is seldom mentioned in reviews: if you already have an iPhone/iPod, going to an iPad vs. Android is going to be a ZERO learning curve. Android may be easy to use too, but you will still have to learn "the Android way" of doing things - your iPhone "muscle memory" won't help you at all. Sounds like nit-picking? Maybe - but for some, learning yet another user interface is not something they want to invest time in. That's what "first mover advantage" gets you: people bought the iPhone first - and now they're more likely to buy iPads (well, also because Apple was the "first mover" not only with the iPhone, but also with the iPad!)
Some final thoughts: Apple has done a fine job integrating their systems and devices. Until I recently switched from Ubuntu (on a Dell laptop) to a Mac Book Pro, I always bitched about how annoying Apple's iPod and iPhone were - everything required iTunes - which, of course, is not available natively on Linux (I had to start up a Virtual Machine with Windows just to start iTunes and download my newest Amazon-purchased MP3 onto my iPhone!). But now, with my MBP, it's actually quite easy (although I still think that Apple should allow over-the-air updates of the iPhone as well as allow competitors such as Amazon to sell MP3 directly to the device - the former might still happen, but the latter never, I suspect). So, if you already have Apple devices and are thinking of a tablet purchase, I think the iPad is a natural choice. If you're already an Android phone user, an Android tablet is the best choice. If you are in neither group or don't really care about one UI over another, I would also pick an Android tablet. The Android UI is getting more and more polished with every release and in terms of functionality, Android has already surpassed the iPad (e.g. Flash support, cameras front and back). Android tablets, unlike Apple products, will also become cheaper due to there being competition among Android vendors.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Will There Be A Double-Dip Recession?
There is an interesting (but depressing) editorial by Mortimer Zuckerman in U.S. News & World Report regarding the sad state of the Western European and US economies. In his article, Mr. Zuckerman paints a particularly bleak picture of the US's debt burden because our children are not being educated - despite the US spending nearly twice what other countries spend - and will not be ready to take on the ever increasing debt that our and previous generations have left them through our irresponsible spending habits.
The author makes his point by way of the forecasts made by a German mathematician and philosopher of the early 20th century, Oswald Spengler. Mr. Spengler had an intersting view of the rise and decline of western civilization and it closely mirrors what I have been thinking for a long time - I shall have to delve into Mr. Spengler's works to see what else he has to say.
Anyway, the article is highly interesting. I recommend it highly.
The author makes his point by way of the forecasts made by a German mathematician and philosopher of the early 20th century, Oswald Spengler. Mr. Spengler had an intersting view of the rise and decline of western civilization and it closely mirrors what I have been thinking for a long time - I shall have to delve into Mr. Spengler's works to see what else he has to say.
Anyway, the article is highly interesting. I recommend it highly.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
How To Excite Employees - Or Not
Today we received a second round of stock options. As before, I was disappointed by the size of the grant. I asked others in the group how they felt about it and got a range of responses: while one person was indifferent, another saw any option grant as "found money" and, therefore, didn't care about its size. Another developer felt like me: the grant was so small, it was useless as an "incentive": if the company were to have an initial public offering or get sold, the executives of the company would make out like bandits, while the employees will see no lifestyle-affecting windfall.
That got me thinking: what makes software developers come to work every day? What motivates them? The two obvious motivators are money and fear (of loss of employment). What about things like the desire to learn new things? The need to socialize and be with like-minded people? Who are the people in these groups? How does a company address these somewhat diverse groups to achieve greater productivity?
The Money Motivated. Let's face it, most of us fall into this category to one degree or another. Some of us are motivated by the almighty dollar because we need it to afford a certain lifestyle. Others see it as a measure of success or appreciation by the company they work for. In small companies, where there is little or no chance for titular advancement (another way a company can show appreciation), monetary rewards can become the only meaningful measure of appreciation.
The Fearful. While some are motivated by money to afford a certain lifestyle, others are simply happy to have a job. They need the job to put food on the table, to make the mortgage payment, or to pay for the children's college education. And they're afraid of the prospect of having to look for another one.
The Curious. There are some folks who work at a company because the company allows them to learn and/or explore new things. These are typically people who may have become academics if it were not for their lifestyle choices (i.e. they like expensive thing) and the scarcity of academic jobs.
All but a few lone wolves have the need for socialization and interaction with other like-minded people. When people are happy with the people they interact with, they're motivated to stay. When dread coming to work because of who awaits them, they want to leave.
What can the management of a company do to "incentivize" these diverse groups to be more productive?
Pay More. Unfortunately, many small companies - especially in these economic times - may have difficulty increasing salaries or paying hefty bonuses. When direct renumeration is not possible, a company can incentivize its employees to work harder by offering stock options - i.e. the promise of a large "payout" in the future in lieu of salary increases and bonuses in the present. But as you can see from my introductory complaint, allocating option grants can be a tricky thing: if you give employees a generous grant, they'll be happy, but the costs to the company may be high or there may not be enough shares for future allocations/incentives. If the grant is perceived as stingy (or unfairly distributed between workers and executives), the grant becomes meaningless as an incentive tool.
Provide A Good Workplace. An environment where people can freely interact with one another, where new ideas are welcomed, and where the workers are given enough leeway to be innovative can be a great motivator to many employees. If, in addition, the company makes visible attempts at providing the employees with the tools (computer, comfortable chair, etc.) to make them more productive, employees will be happier and more productive still.
Do Nothing. Some companies (typically those that have no vision and/or are just hoping to be acquired by someone and/or are ruled by bean counters) may decide to do just that. Productivity gains are not a top priority. The self-confident money- and curiosity-motivated employees eventually leave, leaving only the fear-motivated and the timid. The departed are replaced by new employees who know little of the product and are, therefore, less productive and the old-timers are expected to pick up the slack. Or not.
If you're an employee, where do you fall in the spectrum? Is your company successful at making you happy and more productive? If you're an executive at a small company, have I captured the essence of your predicament? If not, comment with your thoughts!
That got me thinking: what makes software developers come to work every day? What motivates them? The two obvious motivators are money and fear (of loss of employment). What about things like the desire to learn new things? The need to socialize and be with like-minded people? Who are the people in these groups? How does a company address these somewhat diverse groups to achieve greater productivity?
The Money Motivated. Let's face it, most of us fall into this category to one degree or another. Some of us are motivated by the almighty dollar because we need it to afford a certain lifestyle. Others see it as a measure of success or appreciation by the company they work for. In small companies, where there is little or no chance for titular advancement (another way a company can show appreciation), monetary rewards can become the only meaningful measure of appreciation.
The Fearful. While some are motivated by money to afford a certain lifestyle, others are simply happy to have a job. They need the job to put food on the table, to make the mortgage payment, or to pay for the children's college education. And they're afraid of the prospect of having to look for another one.
The Curious. There are some folks who work at a company because the company allows them to learn and/or explore new things. These are typically people who may have become academics if it were not for their lifestyle choices (i.e. they like expensive thing) and the scarcity of academic jobs.
All but a few lone wolves have the need for socialization and interaction with other like-minded people. When people are happy with the people they interact with, they're motivated to stay. When dread coming to work because of who awaits them, they want to leave.
What can the management of a company do to "incentivize" these diverse groups to be more productive?
Pay More. Unfortunately, many small companies - especially in these economic times - may have difficulty increasing salaries or paying hefty bonuses. When direct renumeration is not possible, a company can incentivize its employees to work harder by offering stock options - i.e. the promise of a large "payout" in the future in lieu of salary increases and bonuses in the present. But as you can see from my introductory complaint, allocating option grants can be a tricky thing: if you give employees a generous grant, they'll be happy, but the costs to the company may be high or there may not be enough shares for future allocations/incentives. If the grant is perceived as stingy (or unfairly distributed between workers and executives), the grant becomes meaningless as an incentive tool.
Provide A Good Workplace. An environment where people can freely interact with one another, where new ideas are welcomed, and where the workers are given enough leeway to be innovative can be a great motivator to many employees. If, in addition, the company makes visible attempts at providing the employees with the tools (computer, comfortable chair, etc.) to make them more productive, employees will be happier and more productive still.
Do Nothing. Some companies (typically those that have no vision and/or are just hoping to be acquired by someone and/or are ruled by bean counters) may decide to do just that. Productivity gains are not a top priority. The self-confident money- and curiosity-motivated employees eventually leave, leaving only the fear-motivated and the timid. The departed are replaced by new employees who know little of the product and are, therefore, less productive and the old-timers are expected to pick up the slack. Or not.
If you're an employee, where do you fall in the spectrum? Is your company successful at making you happy and more productive? If you're an executive at a small company, have I captured the essence of your predicament? If not, comment with your thoughts!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)