Category: Uncategorized

Folks:

Staring out at the dirty slush piles in Cambridge I am thinking it would be nice to go to the beach. Twenty years ago when people asked what good Internet commerce would be I gave them the example of a Web-based travel booking site. Here’s how I said that it would work….

Inputs:

• where you live
• when you want to go
• what kind of vacation you want to take (beach, learning, hiking, skiing, whatever)
• rough price range

The system would then scan the airline and hotel databases (which existed back then though they weren’t Web-accessible in the first years of the Web) and find a place that

• you could get to on a non-stop flight for a reasonable cost
• where hotels were available at a reasonable cost on those dates

I touted the advantages of my system: “Instead of you just picking a handful of places that you can think of, possibly overlooking some where hotels and flights are practically empty, the system will search all of the possibilities.”

Did anyone ever build my fantasy travel booking/searching site? If not, why not?

Folks:

I’ve been reading about the proposed merger of Comcast and Time-Warner (example from The Guardian). Comcast is the monopoly Internet supplier here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They provide a sluggish service that no tech enthusiast in Romania, Latvia, Israel, South Korea, or Japan would pay for (see Figure 15 in this Akamai report). If they have enough money to pay investment bankers, management consultants, etc., wouldn’t they be better off improving their service in order to compete with Time-Warner and Verizon? Could it really cost more to offer Latvian-grade Internet to American consumers than to merge two cable monopolies?

[Alternatively, if Comcast can’t figure out how to deliver Latvian-grade services to Americans at a reasonable cost, maybe it would make more sense to merge with a Latvian cable/phone/Internet provider?]

Related: This BBC article on broadband costs worldwide; it turns out that Latvians pay very little for their luxurious Internet service.

Folks:

I’ve been watching some of the Sochi Olympics on television. They don’t talk about any of the athletes having trouble sleeping, getting food, or getting to the events. All of the technical infrastructure seems to be working. In the lead-up to this Olympics there were all kinds of articles (example; one about homeless journalists; one comparing Putin to Hilter) about what a disaster they were going to be. What if anything is going wrong in Sochi? Is there any evidence that the overall festival is running more or less smoothly than previous Olympics? The only negative that I have seen as an American TV viewer is a surprising number of empty seats at events such as figure skating (potential explanation but the most obvious one seems to be that these Olympics are being held far from any population center, e.g., a 25-hour train ride from Moscow or two-day drive).

A friend pointed out an NPR story titled “1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says”:

In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that “The universe began with a huge explosion” and only 48 percent said “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”

Just over half understood that antibiotics are not effective against viruses.

As alarming as some of those deficits in science knowledge might appear, Americans fared better on several of the questions than similar, but older surveys of their Chinese and European counterparts.

In other words, Americans are, from the perspective of NPR reporters, woefully ignorant. But at the same time NPR talks about employers’ unwillingness to hire certain Americans as though it were a problem that could easily be solved with simple top-down directives from Washington, D.C. (example story).

Is there not an inconsistency here? If we are as ignorant as NPR says we are, why would employers be lining up to hire us, even with the pressure that NPR considers appropriate for politicians in Washington, D.C. to apply?

Related: August 8, 2010 posting asking whether unemployed = 21st century draft horse

I lent out a Sony a7R and 35mm and 55mm lenses to a friend who is a very accomplished conventional DSLR photographer. Here’s what he had to say…

I was very excited to try the Sony having been impressed by the overwhelming flood of positive reviews and sample images. At first touch I hated the camera. Coming from a Nikon DSLR, I found the layout confusing and nothing worked the way I thought it should. I couldn’t adjust the focal area without digging deep into the menu. The front and rear dials, which I thought should control aperture and speed respectively, didn’t seem to do anything, and all the photos I took were out of focus. I tried reading the manual, but this was akin to following the instructions of an autistic pedant. The manual mentions every dial and menu option without ever explaining how to use the damn thing. I found some intelligible comments and reviews online and eventually was able to configure the camera enough to make it somewhat useable without too much head-scratching (and slapping).

If your subject is willing to stand still you will be hard pressed to find a better pairing. Set the camera to aperture-priority, open the lens as wide as it will go, ignore ISO, and have fun. If your subjects are mobile 13-month-old boys, load your gun and shoot yourself.

The sample images below were captured in RAW and imported into Lightroom, mainly for slight cropping. Portrait: 1/250 f2.0 ISO 800. Black and white: 1/60 f1.8 ISO 1250.

Requiring insurers to pay for lots of mammograms is one of the features of Obamacare so presumably this billable procedure is going to become more popular here in the U.S. A new study, however, shows that the billions of dollars per year (NPR estimates) that Americans spend on mammograms is mostly wasted (New York Times).

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a woman who turned 40 and had her first mammogram. The doctors found something that looked unusual and they told her that there was a significant chance that it was cancerous. I said “Doctors can’t understand basic probability. If you’d had a mammogram last year and the one this year showed something different then they might be correct. But given that this is their first look, the probability of a real problem is vastly lower than the number that they citing. I would wait a couple of years and let them do another one and see if anything has grown. Then let them cut you open.”

The woman accepted the advice of the top physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital and let them cut her open, removing a portion of her breast tissue for a biopsy. They found nothing but left a scar a substantial bill for Blue Cross.

DxOMark.com continues its cruel exposure (so to speak) of Canon’s image quality weakness relative to Nikon and Sony.

Their direct comparison of sensor performance among three entry-level SLRs shows that Nikon crushes Canon in dynamic range, color sensitivity, and low-light performance.

Below are two photos from brunch today. One was taken by a friend with an iPhone 5s. The other by me with an admittedly rather bulky standard camera (Sony NEX-6 with Sony/Zeiss 16-70mm lens). The light level was fairly similar, on opposite sides of a table. It was fairly bright by indoor standards, with a lot of window light reflecting off white walls.

As you can see, the camera phone picture, despite having come from a state-of-the-art phone (iPhone 5s), is painfully noisy (“grainy” as we film dinosaurs might say).

I can understand the rage for thin and light phones but with more than 7 billion people on the planet I would think that there would be a market for a thicker heavier phone that could deal with indoor photography more gracefully. Samsung has tried in this area a few times (e.g., this Galaxy S4 Zoom camera) but somehow consumers aren’t buying.

[If you’re curious to see more photos with this fairly new lens, I’m building up an examples folder. At first it seemed as though the lens would be unbalanced on the small and light NEX-6 body but I have gotten used to it.]

My question actually relates to Java frameworks for Web development, but I didn’t want to put such a contentious topic in the headline.

Some friends and I are building a Facebook app (like Will Ferrell in “The Other Guys”). Most of the work is likely going to be in JavaScript but we do need to generate some pages from a MySQL database management system. We’ve settled on Java as the server-side page script language, mostly because we want something that people will still understand 10 years from now.

That leaves us with the question of how to program in Java. Much of the code that I’ve reviewed using frameworks and towers of abstraction has been extremely inefficient and hard to debug/change. Generally the organizations who invested in those Java-based systems would have been better off with VB.NET or PHP. The cool kids tell me that the Play frame is what is hip right now. But watching http://vimeo.com/58969923 I can already see some horrifying SQL practices from the auto-generated SQL, e.g., using a string data type as a primary key instead of an integer and a lack of not-null constraints to the point where it was possible to put a row into the database with no information at all, other than the primary key. The video also shows coding in Coffee instead of JavaScript, which seems like a bad idea for maintainability. Is there any guarantee that Coffee will be popular a few years from now? Generally the amount of machinery to generate a “hello, world” page seems excessive, though perhaps the Play framework makes more sense for complex applications?

What do folks who are using Java on the server like? And do these frameworks at the end of the day actually save time compared to old-school Java Server Pages?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

One of the perks of being a software patent expert witness is that one gets to visit Wilmington, Delaware, where the Federal District Court hears disputes between corporate titans. Walking and driving around the empty blighted downtown it occurred to me that it will likely be decades before most parts of the city could be revitalized as a place where people would voluntarily live. Without a sufficient core population of people with at least a middle class income there is no way for a supermarket to thrive. Without an array of businesses, there is no practical way for a middle class person to move into Wilmington and have the kind of city living experience that is available to a resident of Boston, San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C.

[Note that due to Delaware’s niche in providing a safe legal home to America’s corporations and banking services, plus presumably a reasonably efficient city government, Wilmington is not nearly as blighted as Detroit, for example. Middle class people commute into work here every day, but they also go home at night, resulting in a dead downtown.]

Our governments (federal, state, and local) spend a huge amount of money and energy helping poor people to stay poor in cities such as Wilmington. We provide free housing, free medical care, free food, etc. Our society also spend a lot of money to bring poor people to middle class areas, e.g., in Massachusetts where the state mandates a certain percentage of “affordable” housing in every town. and where children from poor areas rides buses, sometimes for two hours each day, to attend schools in richer areas.

But once a city falls below a certain level of prosperity it often seems to get stuck. Nearly all of the locals are now poor. There are few of the services available upon which middle class families would depend. The tax base shrivels to whatever percentage of federal Welfare transfers can be harvested by the local government, e.g., taking a percentage of Medicaid spending through a property tax on a doctor’s office.

For an attempted quick break-out, why not offer 10 years of free housing to the first 5000 families willing to move back into a blighted city? The conditions would be that the family must have at least 1.5X the median household income of the state and send their children to the same schools that are available to other city residents (i.e., public schools, charter schools, and private schools if a voucher program is in place). That critical mass of 5000 families would be sufficient to support the range of businesses necessary to attract the next 5000.

The success of cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, et al., proves that middle class Americans want to move back into the cities. The continued failure (in terms of desirability for middle class residence) of cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, Wilmington, et al., proves that middle class Americans don’t want to move in by themselves.