Mobile OS Showdown - iPhone, Android 2.2 Froyo : The Next Round

The mobile OS space has recently been flooded with a bevy of new devices and platforms.  Just a few years ago, if you wanted a smartphone, you basically had to get a WinMo phone or skip a bunch of smartphone features and go with a Blackberry.  These days you have Windows Phone 7, Kin, WebOS, Blackberry, Android and, isn't there one more?  Oh yeah, the giant pink elephant in the room, the iPhone.
In terms of usability by average users, specifically those people who don't like to spend most of their free time on forums trying to get their phones to do cool new things, the iPhone was king.  It was and remains the best designed device on the market.  It is also painfully easy to use (I have seen people who have trouble with Outlook do some amazing things with their iPhone).  Unfortunately, it also is an Apple device, with all that being an Apple device entails.  Like the Ford Model T, you can get it in any shape, color, size and price you want, as long as those all happen to be the ones that Apple thinks are best.  You also can get tons of apps on there, except the ones that Apple doesn't like and has turned down.  That is OK for 90%+ of the population, they can get their basic apps on a great device, supported by a company that stands behind its customers and they can use it on AT&T's network.  How cool is that? Well, I don't know about that last part, but the rest is pretty good.
I happen to be outside that 90%, I want my platform to be open.  I want to be able to develop apps for the device using any platform I want and I want the app store to only judge apps based on quality, not content (first amendment right to be annoying and all that).  Finally, I want the device I develop for to actually be a range of devices for all kinds of people.  Some should be sleek and cool for professionals and some should be cheap and colorful for teens and college kids.  The bigger the segment that can afford to buy the device, the better.
Oh, and I'd like Adobe Flash, because the modern web seems to have really sunk its teeth into this Flash thing and telling companies that they need to modify their web presence in order to work on your device is like going into every country in the world and telling them Democracy is better because we happen to use it and find it to be just so swell.  Unfortunately, just like in the real world, the web tends to have momentum, and getting it turned away from Flash and onto HTML5 and AJAX (or whatever Apple thinks CafeWorld should be rewritten in) will take time and we as consumers need to have a Flash patch to help us kick the habit instead of asking us to quit cold turkey.

That is the simple truth of it.  Transitions are needed in life and so too are they needed in technology.  When you move, it will take you a while to get used to your new place.  It will take a day or two to memorize where all of the light switches are and just where on the shower the hot water becomes scalding.  HTML5 is new, it is rough and we as developers need some time to get used to it.  While we do that, let's keep using Flash.
This is where Android 2.2 comes in.  At Google's I/O conference, they announced the official feature list of Froyo (version 2.2 of Android).  While I may get excited about Exchange support and some vague mention of 5X performance (5 times what and in what context), the addition of Flash to browsers is amazing.  Now, I too can waste time playing FarmVille in line (because I spend inordinate amounts of time in line apparently).

All kidding aside, this new update does have the potential to bring Android into the forefront of the Mobile OS market and more importantly, if Flash turns out not to suck, Google has their proverbial thumbs in their proverbial ears and say: "Nyah, nayh, na-nyah-na" to Apple.  And folks, let's face it, there's nothing better than one multi-billion dollar company fighting with another multi-billion dollar company in the same way that 5 year olds do on the playground.
So, let's see if Google gets the last "Uh-huh" or if Apple's emphatic "Nuh-uh" turned out to be correct. Stay tuned.

Employment: The Struggle for Life

I ran across this story earlier in the day and just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1267953/Job-seeker-Vicky-Harrison-commits-suicide-rejected-200-jobs.html

You should go and read the story in full since it is a powerful tale of the effects of an economic recession made all too real by its impact on the individual.

I do not claim to fully understand how the grading system works in England, but from what information I looked up, it seems as if Vicky Harrison was an average or an above average student.  She went to college and it did not work out and then proceeded to actively look for work over the course of 2 years and found nothing.  No job would take her after 2 years of searching.  The story also mentions that she applied to over 200 positions.

It is sad when an individual who is willing to work cannot find work.

Some people may say that there is always work available for a young woman who is down on her luck, but I do not believe that it is appropriate to second guess Vicky on apparent choice to not pursue professions that are available to all attractive young women.  I am of course referring to adult entertainment and escort services where work is always available.  That type of employment is frowned upon in most cultures and she may not have wanted to pursue such employment.  Again, I do not believe that it is appropriate for anyone to comment on this, so I ask that if you comment on this story, you simply do not comment on this aspect of it.

However, I feel that it is appropriate to comment on the situation of the world as a whole.  Experience opens doors and educations gives them a nice shove.  That is the way I view the world.  An experienced job seeker will generally have no problem finding a job.  If you are a proven worker who can make a positive impact from day one, companies will find someone to fire so they can bring you on if needed.

Education helps too, although not as much as the quality of an education is questionable from institution to institution and the actual amount of practical knowledge can vary greatly.  So, post-secondary education is a plus, but not always a deal maker.

I have found that overall, it is not your experience or your education that affects your chances for a job. It is your confidence and your ability to carry yourself.  I was technically completely unqualified for my current job.  But, I talked my way through the interview, the company had a position they needed filled quickly and were willing to give me an opportunity to shine or crash and burn and I made the most it through hard work and determination that no matter how overwhelmed I felt, that I was given a chance and was going to make something of it.

I hope that Vicky had the same attitude and frankly most people do on some level have that same attitude.  However, I am appalled at the fact that no one would even hire her to do menial jobs.  Frankly, if you have a high school graduate who wants to do menial work because they do not want to accept a government handout, you as an employer should think of it as an opportunity to allocate a miniscule amount of resources and use the opportunity to have that person work in your place of employment and prove themselves worthy of a higher position.

Overall, this story is just sad.  Sad for Vicky’s family, sad for her boyfriend and most of all sad for all of society.  Here was a woman who wanted to work, was willing to take any job and no one was willing to give her something to do.  We should all look at one another a little more closely and see the potential in one another before dismissing people who want to work.

War Economy: A Primer

War is an expensive business. Always has been, always will be.  You have to pay to train your troops, pay for their weapons, pay for their transport, pay for their food, pay their wages and then they can go out and get killed and all that invested value will be gone.

As technology advances, the costs of fielding an army also advance.  In ancient times, a fighting man needed a weapon, perhaps some personal protection and rations to subsist on while on campaign.  These days, the average fighting person needs the weapon, the protection and the rations, however, they also need transportation, medicinal supplies, cultural training, support personnel and a million other things.

The complexity of the supplies used in war has also increased.  In ancient times, armies could just bring livestock and grain with them and rely on the countryside they traveled through to provide anything they ran out of.  Looting has become a culturally unacceptable practice, so the amount of rations brought has increased.  The complexity of the ration has also increased.

It used to be that a can a baked beans would suffice for a meal, the meal would be eaten from the can and the soldier would just have to deal with it.  These days MREs contain dehydrated food, condiment packs, desert items, cutlery and even a chemical heating unit to provide the soldier with a hot meal.  I mean just look at the difference.

Note that there is a strawberry dairyshake powder packet.  Yeah, I’d like to see Patton popping open a C-ration and chugging a milkshake.

I am not saying the soldiers today are more pampered or anything like that, but you have to admit that all of this complex space age food costs more than a tin of meat and beans.

There is also the difference of weaponry, let’s compare a WWII era weapons with a 2010 era weapon.

What we have here is the M1 Garand, one of the best rifles ever used by the US Military. It was reliable, rugged and accurate.  Now let’s look at something a little newer.

This is the M4 Carbine, a modern rifle used by the US Military.  Frankly, holy shit.  Just look at all the shit you can bolt on to this damn thing.  And all this stuff actually works together.  Want a grenade launcher, a hollow stock, a sniper scope and a silencer, just go for it.  Yeah, again, lots of very expensive stuff.  And based on what some of my army buddies tell me, this thing is accurate as hell and if maintained properly, as reliable as anything on the planet.

You might be asking, where am I going with all of this?  Military spending has gone up, really up.  And it isn’t unreasonable spending mind you, you have to keep ahead of the other guy or he ends up with a bigger stick and ends up beating you up with it and you can’t stop him (or her, let’s be fair and balanced).  But how high of a level of spending can a country afford to have?

If history has anything to teach, then it is that as technology advances and the cost of maintaining a given military force outpaces the resources of a country, then that country must make cuts.  If the cuts are not possible due to military needs, then the country goes bankrupt.

The Roman West and the Byzantine East both show this at different times in history, but the result is always the same, you force the issue with spending that is not advisable and the entity doing the spending eventually falls.

So, the US Military can win any stand up, drag out fight, but the cost is so high that generations after the war end up paying for it.  You can win every war you fight until you can no longer afford to pay to go to war and you lose by forfeit.

Seeing without Seeing

So, I was reading random things online and stumbled upon this little story and it made me think.  Why do we sometimes drive home from work or play basketball or fill out a form and have so little memory of doing it?  Is our memory really that bad?

No, the story that I linked to above shows that when we see familiar pictures, it is almost like the visual center of our brain goes into standby mode and works from previous experience.  In computer terms, it would be like the Windows pre-fetch which puts commonly used files in an area of memory that runs faster so the things you do run faster than things you do more rarely.

My thought was this: If the visual center of our brain does this, is there any other part of our brain that works similarly?  Does a trained basketball player think less when shooting the ball at his home court since he has performed this action so many times before?  Does a racecar driver go faster on a familiar course because he doesn’t have to take so long to think about the dynamics of each corner?

If that is true, it does lend justification to the old adage of practice makes perfect and it provides the reason for people getting better with repetition.  They stop thinking about what they are doing since they already know the cause and effect.

You might be thinking:  Great captain obvious, we already knew that, so what?

If you consider the human mind in that way, then this idea should be used when designing educational systems.  Instead of having a high school basketball court be a smaller size than a professional one, they should all be the same size and use the same rules and as close to the same equipment as the professional ones (if we are to assume that the goal of high school basketball is to educate the players in the sport so that they can work as pro players).

Schools should teach what is current to the industry and accelerate past the basics and on to the practical education of students.  I am not saying that we should just dump students into real world situations and let them sink or swim, but a little more practical realism would go a long way toward preparing our students for the work life that they will follow.

For one, they should get used to the schedule of the adult employed worker.  They should be in school from 8 or 9 AM to 5 or 6 PM (as these are very common work hours) and be given an hour of free time around noon to eat or do work or whatever and an extra 2 15 minutes breaks throughout the day (again common work conditions).

Block schedules should also be implemented to teach students to keep track of their time in a frame of reference longer than 1 day.  In the real work world you might have weekly meetings, daily meetings, Monday-Friday meetings or just about any other combinations.  Classes should reflect this and should be constructed to reflect common workplace activities.  For example, a common practice is a scrum where team members go over what they have worked on and what they will be working on.  This can be done via a home-room system or something similar where you have to go and make some basic communications with an assigned group of peers to establish that concept of being accountable for your work getting done on a more immediate fashion than quarter or semester grades.

I personally think that reorganizing schools to be more like the real world will increase motivation of students and generally yield better results as a lot of the troublemaking that comes from students is a direct cause of lack of stimulation and a busy student won’t have as much time to go get into trouble.

Rigor should also be stressed, although we should not crush students under mountains of work unless it is to show that sometimes projects turn out to have heavy workloads.

I think that we should consider the fact that our students might be on auto-pilot and see what we can do to give them more unexpected stimuli to keep them engaged and increase the value of our educational system.

Book Suggestion: Bio of a Space Tyrant

 

Today, I’m going to start a semi-regular book suggestion series.  I have read many books over the years and while some are very well known there are some really great books out there that many people have not heard about and which are either out of print or not available in you local Borders or Barnes and Nobles (or whatever you may have close to your home).

The first suggestion I make is the Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony. This series was written in the 1980s and is a projection of the world at the time and some events from the last 50 years onto the canvas of the Solar System.  It is told from the point of view of small Hispanic boy who is a refugee and his eventual rise to power over as Tyrant of Jupiter.  This book series does take some liberties with common sense as the main character seems to have a ridiculous amount of luck, but aside from that, the books are very believable and well written.

The 5 books in the series are: Refugee, Mercenary, Politician, Executive and Statesman.  There is a 6th book released in 2001 which tells the story from another character’s point of view, but I consider that to be a companion book, not a book in the series.

You can find these at your local used book shops pretty cheap (I found all 5 for about $7 at Half Price Books, but you may not have the same luck).  I have read that there was a re-printing in the works.  I personally like the original cover art a lot as it really fits the books well, so I did not go looking for the re-printed version, but that is something to consider.

So, there we are, Bio of a Space Tyrant, my pick for a great and widely unknown series of books.

The New Meta-Biological System

These days worry has taken over a lot of people’s lives over the power of corporations.  They seem to gain more rights on a regular basis and can now donate as much as they want to candidates for the highest offices in government.  One might say, based on the record of the past, that a corporation with deep enough pockets can basically buy the government and have it pass the laws it needs to thrive.

Let’s take a step back and think about that last statement.  That statement treats corporations like a living breathing entity and most people would not think of inviting Microsoft or GE over for supper like you would you a friend or family member.

Which brings me to the crux of this entire argument: What constitutes life? If life can be viewed as some sort of carbon based entity that has distinct parts which serve different functions, has intelligence and a certain set of views and opinions based on information it has gathered over its lifetime (which is a really cold, but accurate definition of a human being), then corporations are alive.  Well, the big ones are anyway.

What do I mean by corporations are alive?  They are definitely carbon based.  They individual parts are people and people are carbon based so by simple transience corporations are carbon based.  There is also the constant talk of a corporation’s carbon footprint.  Most of the other carbon based life forms on this planet expel carbon as a bi-product, and so do corporations.

Large corporations have many divisions, each of which are super-specialized and which perform specific functions. This of the amount of specialization of HR or IT or janitorial services.  They cannot be switched out to perform can other’s jobs any more than a liver can pump blood or a spleen can take in oxygen and push it to the bloodstream.  If we consider each department of a corporation as an internal organ of a living being, then corporations are quite complex lifeforms.

Corporations also possess intelligence.  Now, some may argue that the intelligence comes from the individuals who work for the corporation, and that if the “bright boys” who come up with ideas and who manage corporations (note that “bright boys” is an old expression, not a comment on gender) were to leave then the intelligence would also be gone.  That is true, but some serious head trauma could probably render Albert Einstein into Forrest Gump.  So, if one perceives the intelligence of a person as coming from the arrangement of their synapses and the intelligence of a corporation from the arrangement of persons into teams, then the parallel is undeniable.

Finally, we come to opinions.  People have opinions.  Jeff Gordon is the best NASCAR driver, no Dale Earnhart Jr. is, NASCAR sucks. Obama is going to save the world, no wait, we’re all going to be communists, he’s the anti-christ.  I have heard these views expressed by people I know over the last few days and they serve as vivid examples of how varied the opinions of lifeforms can be on very specific subjects.

Certain corporations put environmental friendliness above all else, some pollute as much as needed and care only for profits, others yet do what they can while protecting their bottom line.  These seem like opinions to me.  Corporations learn from studies of other corporations, government laws and regulations and from personal experience.  This is similar to the concept of learning that individuals use and as such I think we can assume that corporations gain knowledge and form opinions just like all other lifeforms (they are just more efficient than the average NFL fan or literature buff).

Where does this leave us?  Have we created life?  Are corporations the next evolution of life in the universe?  Will we all just become numbered cells performing a menial task in the great machines that we have created?  Let’s stay away from the melodrama, but it does make one think.

This thought experiment does bring up an interesting idea.  In the past people were anchors and businesses were transient.  We come and go, we start businesses and they succeed or close.  But not anymore, businesses have now become too big to fail (or so we are told).  Corporations wield influence over congressmen and governors and hey maybe even presidents (I have no way of knowing one way or another).

I foresee a future where governments become less important than corporations and where governments exist to prop up and help corporations. 

This is not a bad thing or harmful, corporations, just like all living things do best when they take care of their parts.  If you have a cancerous lung, you get it removed, but if you don’t smoke in the first place, maybe you don’t get cancer in the first place.  In the same way, a car brand owned by a big car manufacturer might need to be shut down, but it would be best for the manufacturer if they manage the brand better so they can have more products to sell to a larger variety of people. 

We worry about corporations wringing us dry, but the truth is that those corporations end up shutting down since their customer base has been wrung dry.  The truly successful corporations find a price point where the consumers can continue to buy without ruining themselves (repeat business is the key to success today as in the past).

I for one welcome our corporate overlords and look forward to the day when I can work my way up to the synapse center of the corporate body (you know the part of the corporate body that receives the most resources like the brain does in the human body). I suggest that we all take a good hard look around us and not cling to old ideas more than we need to.  The future can never be stopped, it can only be fought fruitlessly. The Greeks learned this, the Romans learned this, the Byzantines learned this, the Han learned this.  But they all learned it through failure.  We should learn before failure comes and claims us like barbarians and revolutionaries raping and pillaging.

Why Healthcare Costs So Much

Medical costs are outrageous because people don't understand the concept of insurance. Let me break it down for you:
Insurance is at its core a pool.

Lots of people put money in and a few take money out. After all the people who needed to take money out have done so, what is left goes to the person offering the insurance and that's what they pay their employees and stock holders out of (think of it as their net revenue).
The problem with health insurance is that basically everyone needs to take some money out all of the time, which means that if the service was offered at the costs we had in the past, there would not be enough money to go around.

So, the insurance companies raise the cost of the service to make sure that there is enough money in the pool for all of the users and also enough left over afterwards for their own salaries and profit margins (which is why they offer the service in the first place, profit is not evil, it is what makes people offer goods and services).
The problem is that as it is structured now, preventative care costs money, so people don't use it. They prefer to just let their health slide and use the pool when they really need it. The problem with that is simply that if you were to add up the cost of the preventative care, it would not be as high as the cost of the emergency care. So, we should make preventative care cheaper or free (maybe not free, free always ends up with some fat chick beyond stomped to death in a Wal-Mart over some complementary toaster that comes with a TV).

The problem is that the insurance companies do not do anything to reward people for going to the doctor to get checked up or maintaining a higher level of health. They penalize the fat people. So, they use negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, insurance rates are not a "switch" and the American people are not toddlers, so negative reinforcement will not work here (I do advocate corporal punishement for young children where reason might not work).

What this bill should have done is encourage preventative care. Provide free preventative care to the really poor and they don't need to come in for heart surgery as often (I'm pretty sure you can have 1000 GP visits for the cost of every 1 open heart surgery).

Anyway, I just wanted to explain my thoughts on insurance.  If you share them or disagree, leave me a comment and we can discuss this further.