Special Interest Group on CRAP

For the last few months I have been carrying two smart phones:

1. Motorola Droid on Verizon
2. HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile

I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call.

The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself using the virtual keyboards more and more, and I also find myself using voice input more often. Voice input used to be pretty miserable, but lately I have noticed a dramatic improvement in the precision. The resolution is slightly higher on the Droid screen, but it’s not a huge difference (480×854 vs 480×800). Both screens are stunningly good, particularly compared to the iPhone, which has a pretty mediocre screen. The speaker on the Droid is dramatically better, though some people might find it weird that I sometimes listen to podcasts through the speaker instead of using headphones. Sometimes I put it on speakerphone and set it on the table – the sound is very good through the speaker on the Droid.

The Nexus One has a few advantages as well. It’s thinner and lighter than the droid. It has rounded corners that make it pleasant to hold. The processor seems slightly faster, though this may be the software release that they are running. It lacks the physical keyboard, but I don’t seem to miss it as much as I thought I would. It is supposed to eventually get a car dock and a home dock, but I haven’t seen them yet. The home dock is apparently $45, which I concluded was too expensive. The trackball is very nice, and I use it all the time – in fact the droid sometimes feels clumsy to use because of the lack of a trackball.

The big difference for me has been the networks. I have been finding the T-Mobile network to be pretty marginal, but I’m not sure if it is a physical problem of the Nexus or a software problem in Android or simply that the network is lacking. Note that I haven’t made any attempt to measure network coverage over a large area, and you should be very careful of people saying one network is better or worse than the other. People tend to use their phones in a very few areas and draw conclusions about coverage over the entire USA, which is clearly misguided. All of the mobile networks have strong areas and weak areas. The verizon network won’t work at all in most parts of the world. I find that 95% of my phone usage is at home, a work, and in a hotel. In all of these places I usually have Wifi, so the mobile network is largely irrelevant there. With all these disclaimers, I am uncomfortable saying that the Verizon network is better than the T-Mobile network. When I travel to Europe, the Verizon Droid will be incapable of making or receiving phone calls, so it will stay home.

So which one would I recommend? The Droid, by a slight margin. On the other hand, my employer is paying for the data plan, and the answer might change if I was paying for the data plan, because frankly I doubt that I would buy a data plan – I’d buy an unlocked Nexus and use APNDroid to turn off cellular data access.

Would I recommend them instead of the iPhone? The iPhone is clearly a good phone, but I haven’t had a chance to use one at great length. I sincerely despise iTunes, which is one reason why I could never tolerate an iPhone. I find a lot of the value from a smart phone in the applications, and I find nothing lacking in the Android applications. People talk about having 100,000 applications on the iPhone but only 20,000 on Android, but that seems like a completely ridiculous comparison. It only matters if the 20 applications that you really want are available on the phone you want. If you are already an iPhone user, then you have already had your head bent to the Apple way of doing things, so it’s unlikely that you will be happy on an Android phone. I’ve observed a discussion among iPhone users who complain about differences, but almost all of the complaints are that things are done differently, rather than things can’t be done. The two phones offer very similar feature sets, but you should never expect things to be exactly identical.

I wonder what phones will look like two years from now!

• Web apps
• iPhone apps
• Android apps
• now Kindle apps

Whatever happened to Windows apps?

During my lifetime, there have been several major paradigm shifts in computing.

• The personal computer
• Graphical user interfaces (mouse and windowing)
• The Internet
• The World Wide Web
• Laptops (they started out as computers called “luggables”)
• 802.11 wireless networking

Each of these brought tremendous change to the ways that we think about computing. One of the reasons why I started working on Android is because I see mobile computing as being as big a paradigm shift as any of the previous ones. We have a ways to go in this, held back in large part because of the cellular providers, who still have their heads wedged where the sun does not shine. It’s still going to be a huge change on how we interact with computers.

It’s always sad news when someone you know dies. Regrettably, Sam Roweis died last night, apparently by taking his own life. It is always difficult to comprehend the situation that could lead to this, and my heart goes out to his family and friends. I had the pleasure of working with Sam on the Google Listen project, and he was always a wonderful guy to talk to. He shall be missed from this earth, but not forgotten.

It’s odd that Facebook was blocking post of a link to this. For the humor impaired, this should be recognized as satire.

I went back to look at the spam that is sent out by ACM trying to get me to buy a membership. It turns out that it is sent out on the 11th of each month, right on schedule. I guess that means there is a cron job someplace that is firing off these things. I wonder if any of the mechanism design people have analyzed the data from this spam to see how effective it is. What metrics would you use to judge effectiveness, given that it continues to build up long-standing animosity among a few people like me?

This is a supposedly reputable “scientific society” whose sole purpose seems to be to lock up publications behind a pay firewall and spam potential members to encourage them to join. These clowns even throw in a “Free World Clock Calculator”. Is that the kind of professional society you want to belong to?

Here is the latest spam. I am posting it in the hope that it will encourage spammers to spam them.

We have an important chance for you to join ACM, including a world clock calculator, if you respond at:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

As a member of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, you will have access to a host of career-enhancing benefits including the newly re-launched “Communications of the ACM” magazine, the most trusted source on advanced computing.

Essential reasons to read “Communications” each and every month:

* News, analysis and insights from the computing world’s leading authorities on the cutting edge of technology
* Balanced and accessible coverage
* Broad and in-depth technical analysis
* Serious and insightful commentary
* Access to an active global community of computing professionals
* Full, real-time, website access to additional content, tools and resources

ACM members are raving about the fully redesigned publication:

“A must-read from cover to cover”
“More articles relevant to my work and interests”
“A top scientific journal”
“Quality technical content”
“More engaging”
“An exciting layout”
“A vastly better magazine”

Learn more about all of the additional benefits of ACM membership, including access to thousands of online books and courses, by visiting:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

I hope you will take a moment to consider how valuable an ACM membership and “Communications of the ACM” magazine can be to your career!

Sincerely,
Lillian Israel
Director of Membership
ACM
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Just think if the Internet had been designed by the telephone companies:

1. We would have four different internets, with gateways that restricted what could flow through them.
2. You would have to buy your computer from your ISP, and you couldn’t switch ISPs and keep the same computer unless the remainder when you divided the MAC address by four was equal to the remainder when you divided the third octet of your IP address by four. (did you get that?)
3. Packets between ISPs would be billed at the rate of $125/megabyte if they carried email.

I’m hoping to see some of this change during my lifetime.

The impending demise of geocities.com reminded me of an event from 2004. In that year a former colleague named Larry Stockmeyer died from pancreatic cancer. I remember thinking at the time that those of us who knew him would always have our memories to appreciate his humanity and his intelligence. Other computer scientists need to rely upon the scholarly literature to preserve his scientific legacy. In spite of its many failings, the scholarly process still functions pretty well at this.

As science has evolved, we have adopted an informal tradition of putting our research papers on the web, often using free services to do so (e.g., our employer). It’s good to see that Larry’s old page on www.almaden.ibm.com is still around, but Larry also put many of his papers up on a geocities site as well. I remember at the time he died that his geocities page probably wouldn’t last forever, so I quietly made a copy of it on my own site, just to preserve his legacy a bit longer. Now that geocities is finally going away, it reminds me that science (particularly theoretical work) is destined to outlive almost all technology, and it is only through a community of scientists that we will properly curate our work. As my small part of it, I’ve exposed Larry’s original home page on the cstheory.com site.

Followup: the query [site:geocities.com "theoretical computer science"] on google reveals that there are quite a few pages on geocities that are concerned with theoretical computer science. I doubt that many of them are very important, but only history gets to decide what is important in science.

A few years ago, my daughter became suddenly ill with abdominal pain and I had to take her to a doctor. I have relatively good health insurance through my employer (since I’m American that is my only viable option). The rules of the plan were:

1. Go to primary care physician
2. If primary care physician refers you to an in-network specialist, then it will be covered.

In case of a true emergency (e.g., spurting blood), you can bypass this procedure, but the case should be clear cut.

Seems simple enough to me, and it’s a means for insurance companies to control costs by using a lower-cost physician to screen problems in a medically competent manner. I followed the rules, and the primary care physician said that he strongly suspected appendicitis and referred her to a nearby in-network surgeon to do further screening and possible surgery. He had her admitted to the hospital across the parking lot from his office, where she spent 24 hours but was ultimately released (she turned out not to have appendicitis).

The surgeon was probably annoyed by this since he didn’t get to charge his big fee for the surgery, and when he issued his bill a month later, it was for about $800 more than what the insurance+deductible would cover. When I called the insurance company, I was told that his contract with the insurance provider did not allow him to charge more, and that his acceptance of the referral constituted an agreement to whatever the insurance company would pay. I therefore refused to pay the excess to the doctor.

The surgeon’s office continued to send us bills for the excess charges, and after a couple of months started making constant phone calls to my home. I stood my ground and refused to pay, explaining it to the office manager that they were in breach of a contract that gave them the referral. The surgeon’s staff eventually referred it to a collection agency, causing it to show up on my credit reports. I stuck to my guns and refused to pay, and eventually they simply stopped trying to collect.

The dynamics of the marketplace were apparent to me at the time. The doctor wants as much money as he can get, but he can’t get patients without agreeing with an insurance company to get new customers. The insurance company doesn’t have any incentive to help me enforce the contract, and I’m not a party to that contract. They simply ignored the problem. I had no way to shop for a doctor, given that my daughter was in intense pain and might have a serious condition. The marketplace basically failed to exercise any cost controls, and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the insurance company. They offered me no assistance in enforcing their contract with the doctor, and they took no punitive action against the doctor since the following year he was still listed as an in-network doctor. They behaved rationally, because they had no incentive to do so, either through regulation or through market forces.

So for those of you who tell me the marketplace works to control health care costs, please explain what market mechanism would work here. I concluded at the time that insurance companies need more stringent regulations, and I still believe it. Either that or a public option.