Daily Curmudgeonry

I’ve moved technical posts to another blog. It’s under my real name; therefore, I won’t link to it from here. (then I wouldn’t be anonymous anymore!)  I might use this area to post misanthropic rants. It would be cathartic for me to blow off steam, but why would anyone else want to read that? To the 2 people who might subscribe to this blog, consider this a small contribution to improve your productivity. You’ll have one less thing to read now.

Apparently, Apple must sell unlocked iPhones in France. This is great, but it doesn’t matter much to Apple. From what I’ve read, Apple gets a kickback of ~$200 for every AT&T subscriber. Therefore, Apple makes $600 per phone ($400 for 8GB model). Rumor has it that Apple will charge 100 Euro more than the 400 pounds it charges in the UK. For Apple, that’s an extra $140, which makes up their loss on the kickback (though most people will sign up with Orange to get visual voicemail, preserving their kickback). Are any Americans willing to pay 400 pounds + 100 euros for an unlocked iPhone? That’s around $950 for the phone. That’s insane, especially when competitors will have cheap knockoffs next year anyway.

On The Charlie Rose Show, the CEO of Blackwater suggested that he could provide soldiers to help protect people in places like Darfur. Or his company could provide support and training for African Union and/or UN soldiers. US or UN soldiers could provide oversight and his men would submit to American legal jurisdiction should a few of his soldiers go nuts. I think this is a terrific idea bound to go nowhere.

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For some reason, I really focus on my work when I’m at a coffee shop. I’m considering a cellular modem at $60/month. The only problem is I don’t want to commit to a 2 year plan. I want to try it for a few months to see if I really do get stuff done. There’s nothing on cellswapper.com

There’s a simple philosophy of mind problem that says you can’t really know that other people are sentient beings. They could be Cylons or simulations in the Matrix. One answer is to assume they are like me by analogy: I have a mind, I think and react; they are similar to me, so they must have a mind, too.  I also assumed other people are as mentally capable and rational as me. So when other people arrive at utterly preposterous conclusions (e.g. intelligent design), I find it confusing. For a long time I racked my brain trying to find the flaw in my thinking. It took me a while to realize that most other people are stupid. Consider this: the average IQ is 100. An IQ of 60 - only 40 points lower - is considered mild retardation. My IQ is around 140, so 50% of the population appears to me to be mildly retarded or worse. It’s easier to accept other people’s stupidity if I recast the issue like this. It’s not their fault they were born with a handicap.

We need everyone to replace most of their light bulbs with compact flourescent lights to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, CFLs cost more than regular bulbs. An alternative is for the government to give them away at cheap prices and recover the expense with a tiny energy tax. Those who buy the CFLs will have a lower total energy bill anyway. Those who don’t buy them will pay a slightly higher bill. Problem solved.

I completely failed to explain to a group why I think C# 3.0’s pile of features are a poor design. Somehow people keep missing my point. Can you believe English is my first language? If anyone is reading this post, please tell me if this makes any sense to you.

Imagine how Anders, head of the C# design team, might think about the next version of C#. Ten different groups within MS propose 10 brilliant features to add to C# 4.0. Things like pattern matching, concurrency, transactional memory, assertions, categories, etc. Big, complicated, cool features. How does he decide which one to implement? Anders would think long and hard about which feature will have the biggest impact. He’ll choose 1 or 2 and the rest will get shot down. C# 4.0 introduces a few big new features, and this process repeats itself for version 5.0.

If I were running the C# team, I would resist adding any features to C# for fear of feature creep. Instead, I would tell all 10 groups to implement their features as libraries. They will grumble and complain, then they will build a prototype using some insane hackery to get around some limitations in C# and the CLR. I would study those gross hacks, not the features themselves, because that’s where they ran into a roadblock with the language. The goal of language design is to reduce the number of gross hacks needed to implement complex libraries. Because if I can fix C# so these guys can implement their 10 great features as libraries more easily, then I’ve magically enabled hundreds of groups outside MS to also implement their very complex features.

The changes I envision making to C# would be much more subtle than a giant feature like LINQ. I would tinker with some dynamic typing features, better integration with code generation tools, and maybe a way to use attributes within the body of a method (i.e. a parallel loop declaration above a foreach stmt). Small, subtle changes that would have wide impact on library writers, but not most programmers. I’m against adding feature X. Instead, I want to change C# so you can write feature X as a library. Does this make sense?

My car makes a funny sound; something about sticky valves. I don’t know much about cars, nor do I care to learn. If I ask a mechanic to fix everything, he’ll overcharge me because we have an information asymmetry, he knows more than I do. So how can I get my car fixed without getting robbed? This same problem pops up everywhere. How can I trust the treatment recommended by my doctor? How can I trust my financial advisor on retirement options? The problem is that I want to separate the diagnosis from the implementation. I want to get a trustworthy mechanic to tell me what’s wrong for a flat fee, then I’ll shop around for the lowest cost mechanic. This sounds like a job for the Internet. If we had a cheap & reliable source for expert second opinions, it would reduce the information asymmetry and, hopefully, reduce prices.

I rant this Javascript performance test in both IE 7 and Safari 3 for Windows. IE tooks 3454 ms, whereas Safari took 219 ms. The exact numbers don’t matter, it’s the magnitude of the difference that is shocking. Why is IE so insanely slow?

An article in the New Yorker mentions Hunter College Elementary School (HCES), which admitted only the very brightest kids and provided an excellent education. It turns out that the average IQ was 157. A study surveyed graduates from 1948-1960 to see how they turned out. They nearly all turned out to be good upper middle class professionals, but there were few exceptional people as was expected of such gifted children. Why not? The study’s author guesses, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” I’m no genius, but I completely agree with this sentiment.