Intellectual Ore

Much hype surrounds today’s launch of the 3G iPhone by AT&T, but what does it cost?  The minimum one can pay, as a new AT&T customer: $199 for the phone, plus a two-year contract for $69.99/month.  Over two years, a 3G iPhone customer will pay $1878.96 rock-bottom, but once taxes, “line charges”, “universal service fees”, AT&T’s $36 “activation fee”, “municipal recovery charges”, text plans ($5/month for the privilege of putting some 28,000 bytes of data onto AT&T’s network), and other upgrades are considered, it’s going to run at least $3000 over two years.  Is this phone really worth $1500/year?

My cell phone reception at home is terrible.  I can’t make calls in my room, and even when the phone shows it’s connected to my carrier (T-Mobile), incoming calls get routed to my voice mailbox.  Yuck.

After hunting down an RJ-11 cable, I connected my room phone last night.  I had to make a call to Citigroup over a charge on my credit card, and when the rep tried to sell me a “Citi Personal Loan” I didn’t need, I just said, “Thanks, I’m not interested”, and judiciously slammed the handset back onto the phone’s base.  There’s something incredibly satisfying about that, slamming down a phone to end a call, that you just don’t get with a cell phone.

Anyway, GrandCentral is awesome.  It’s a (sort of) new service where you can pick almost any area code in the country, and they’ll give you a free phone number in that area code.  After you get a number, you can make it ring all your phones simultaneously, no matter where you are.  This incredibly useful service lets me hand out one phone number, and no matter whether I’m at home, on the go, or at the office, I’m sure never to miss a call.

Over the past year, I’ve debated the idea of ditching my cell phone.  After using a landline phone for the first time in a while as part of my job at Goldman Sachs, I realized just how much I’ve given up by converting to an all-mobile existence.  For one, the ergonomics of landlines phones take mobiles to the cleaners.  Landlines don’t have to be made to fit in a pocket, so they can be made as large as they need to be, without a tradeoff between usability and “fits-in-pocket” factor.  The buttons on landlines are large enough that I don’t have trouble pressing them.  Unlike cell phones, landlines never miss my keystrokes or lag when I press the buttons (Windows Mobile is terrible with this).  There are no dropped calls, “signal quality” is perfect, no “I lost my phone!” Facebook groups, no low batteries, no annoying contract-mongering, hour-on-hold cell phone companies, no junky piece-of-crap subsidized HTC handsets made by junky piece-of-crap manufacturers (e.g. “High Technology Corporation”) that don’t even put their name on the handset (did you really think your carrier made phones?), and no “early termination fees” when your carrier decides to relocate a tower and you can’t even get service.

So I’m really thinking about ditching my cell phone altogether for GrandCentral+several landlines.  That way, when some poor fool at Citi who hates his job as much as I hate talking to him tries to push more of the “credit crack” with the same enthusiasm as a dealer on the corner with half a bag left (you want to fight the real war on drugs?), I can judiciously slam the phone down to cut him off; pressing the “end call” button on a cell phone just isn’t the same.

I think there’s a sweet spot for an individual’s level of connectivity in the workplace.  The location of the sweet spot depends on a variety of factors:

• Job function: people whose job it is to communicate with others (sales, marketing, management) need to be more connected than individual contributors doing creative work (scientists, architects, engineers)
• Personal preference: how connected an individual wants to be, likely to align with job function (a person’s temperament probably influences what they enjoy doing)
• Overall level of concentration required to get work done

It seems a lot of firms, especially Wall Street firms, believe that more connectivity is necessarily a good thing.  Up to a point, I agree, but I think information is like food: there’s an appropriate level of consumption, and both underconsumption and overconsumption are harmful.  The character of “information problems” in leading-edge organizations is rapidly shifting from scarcity, to overabundance.

Today, I saw a group of four people out to lunch at Pax on Broad St.  Two of them couldn’t make it through a 30-minute lunch without checking their BlackBerries (”CrackBerries”).  If I was having a conversation with someone and they took out a BlackBerry, I’d be pretty offended.  Frankly, I’d want to rip the BlackBerry out of their hands, throw it as far as I could, and summarily punch them in the face.

For about a year now, I’ve been hosting my own private DokuWiki installation on a server I’ve got at home.  After using it to collaborate with a future roommate about apartments, and to plan a trip, there’s no way I’m going back.  And the best part is, I’ve even got Stephanie to use it for her stuff, too.  Says my friend Colin: “You guys are a high-tech couple.”

This awesome image, courtesy of NASA, shows the Martian sunset.  It was recently photographed from a exploration vehicle on the Martian suface.

I used to read Slashdot (”Slash”, sometimes “./”) a lot, but I don’t read it much anymore. I think it had to do with the corporate brainwashing I got while a Microsoft intern In any case, its legacy is still alive and well in the distributed systems community: to get “slashdotted” is to have one’s site loaded to the point of failure, presumably from legitimate traffic, making for the ultimate “screw case” in DDoS filtering.

Slashdot is world famous. A roving random distributed denial of service attack before which web, network and systems administrators alike quake and have terrible nightmares about. — Slashdot user “Colin Smith”, quoted in Wikipedia on “slashdotting”

Agriculture.

While driving back to Urbana, I had a discussion with my friend Kurt about whether prostitution can rightfully be called “the world’s oldest profession”. I pointed out that agriculture predates a lot of things, including the introduction of money (by a lot), but the silver bullet came when one of us realized that there is a point, sometime in history, labeled “the invention of agriculture”, when humans switched from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists. We agreed that people have probably been fighting over sexual partners longer than food, and left it at that.

It’s interesting to me how all the hand-wringing over energy prices has cascaded into food, and its use for energy production. As any physicist will tell you, all Earth’s energy ultimately derives from the sun; the closer one gets to that source, the more energy is available. Hence the reason why many of the largest animals (pandas, giraffes, etc.) are herbivores: there simply isn’t enough energy higher in the food chain to support their enormous energy needs. I, for one, am proud to attend an institution where some of the world’s best economists, engineers, and agriculturists cooperate daily to solve the policy and technical challenges inherent in a topic as complex as food security.

Last Friday, I succumbed to consumerism and purchased a new MacBook Air. I opted for the less-expensive version with the platter-based hard disk (not solid state).

The good:

• Battery life. With moderate use (50% brightness, display flipping on and off during inactivity), I’m getting close to 6 hours of life from a single charge. Especially considering the size of the battery, I’m thoroughly impressed.
• Superior industrial design: Apple’s designers pulled out all the stops on this design, and it shows. The device has a small fold-down compartment that exposes a single USB port, 3.5mm audio jack, and external video port. The rubber feet underneath the device are just tall enough to leave about 1mm of clearance between the fold-down port bay and the table upon which the computer sits. Likewise, the MagSafe power adapter has been re-engineered to leave a similarly small gap between laptop and tabletop. The adapter also has a tiny two-color LED which glows amber for “charging”, and green for “charged” — nice.
• OS X. I’ve really come to appreciate Apple’s operating system: the platform where commercial and free/open-source software can peacefully coexist. I became really fed up with Gnome’s rough edges over the past year; the marriage of the BSD Darwin kernel with the Aqua window manager is absolutely sublime.

The bad:

• The price. Even with educational pricing, the machine cost over $1800. People say it’s a ripoff given the specs, but they’re pretty reasonable, actually: 2 GB of RAM, 80 GB HDD, and a specially-engineered Core 2 Duo.

Interestingly, Apple is starting to look a lot like an old-line consumer products company. UNIX, in general, has long embraced the idea of “separation of policy and mechanism”; provide the software as a “mechanism” for accomplishing some task, but let the user define the “policy”, that is, how the mechanism is to be used. As Miguel de Icaza has commented, separation of policy and mechanism “makes Unix suck”, because most people don’t want to fiddle around with policy, they just want a system that works out of the box, period. As “the only vertically integrated manufacturer left”, Apple (unlike Microsoft, ISVs, OEM PC manufacturers, etc.) has complete control over what they sell. OS X is about 80-90% other peoples’ work, and 10% their own, but that little wedge of innovation makes all the difference. In a way, Apple is a lot like IBM: both companies realized open-source software is in many ways “good enough”, but still rough enough around the edges to build a viable business around selling a cleaned up, polished version of something you can mostly get for free.

I’m a fan.

Last Saturday, I attended the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NAICS) Invention to Venture. The conference featured food, networking, and six presentations on technology commercialization. Whereas many conferences talks are of the form “I’m from x, it’s y thousand miles away, and we did z”, I2V’s message was strongly local: “My name is Joel, I work at First State Bank on Neil St., and I originated a loan to help CU Aerospace ramp up production yesterday.” Even after living CU for five years (albeit with interruptions), I was pleasantly surprised by the robustness and depth of the area’s business community. We’ve got a flourishing community of high-tech startups, many sources of capital, and a deep pool of research talent at the University of Illinois. Just today, I got a cup of coffee at Cafe Kopi on Walnut; while walking the alley by Coyboy Monkey, I was surprised by how many people were outside behind Aroma and Pekara, enjoying the day. (I’ll return to the topic of urban development in CU soon).

Some thoughts from I2V:

1. Invention != Venture (Jeff Holden, Pellago). Many great ideas are not great business ideas. As an engineer/grad student, I’m often stereotyped as “someone who doesn’t understand business development”. Despite my conscious attempts to defy the stereotype, I do sometimes fall into the trap of seeing the world through the eyes of a “builder”, as opposed to a “buyer”. (Incidentally, I think this dichotomy elegantly summarizes the differences in the way engineers and businesspeople are inclined to approach problems, and that understanding the difference is key to effective communication between the two camps.) Oh, and I wouldn’t do Jeff’s great talk justice without mentioning his BBQ Test: “When thinking about whether you could start a business with someone, ask yourself: ‘Is this person someone I’d like to talk to, if we were at a barbecue together?’”
2. Benefits, not features (Curley Lee). Which has more appeal to a customer: “This car has remote keyless entry”, or “Imagine yourself in a rainstorm, with an umbrella. You want to open the door. Would you rather fuss with your keys, rain pouring on your head, or just press the button?” The key difference is personalization; features are mere properties of the product (and they get people thinking about price), while benefits communicate the features in a way that is specific and relevant to the customer.
3. Land Grab vs. Ben and Jerry’s. This particular distinction belongs to Joel Spolsky, but it manifested itself at I2V as the difference between a “lifestyle business” and a “high-growth business”. VC’s don’t really want to talk to you unless you drink the high-growth Kool Aid; unfortunately, I’m not sure that I do. (That Jeff Holden used to work at D.E. Shaw with Bezos probably gave the conference more of a land-grab feel, as Amazon is basically the archetype of that model).
4. Tech push vs. market pull. You can start a business by observing that something is “missing” from the market, or take an existing product and figure out how to leverage it to solve a new problem. Both ways are valid, and each has strengths and weaknesses.
5. This is kind of antagonistic, but I’m going to say it anyway. Curley Lee was a car salesman, and he was damn good at what he did, but do we need salesmen if we sell good products? I think the fact that domestic cars have historically had terrible quality contributes toward the “used-car salesman” stereotype as someone that’s trying to peddle stuff you don’t want/need. Do the best products (think iPod) need salesmen, or do they sell themselves?
6. Do we need other people’s money? These guys can explain this one much better than I can; I’m interested in the role of capital in the 21st century. Does entrepreneurship necessitate huge piles of capital anymore, assuming it ever did? If my friend Mike’s experience is any indication, the answer is a definite no, but maybe I’m looking through “lifestyle-business”-colored lenses. No matter what my biases, I still think “getting big and then getting profitable” is really stupid - organic growth (profit from the very first sale on) seems to make a lot more sense.