Dave Edstrom's Catalyst Edstrom Photons-Electrons

I am growing tired of answering the question, "Dave, why don't you have an iPhone yet?"

First, do I think the iPhone is amazing technology?  You bet.  Do I think Steve Jobs is an absolute genius?  Without question.  Is Apple a great company?  Yes, they are an amazing company.  But, let me list what Apple should do for the iPhone if they want me as a customer (yes, I realize that Apple does not care if I am a customer :-)

1. No cut-n-paste.   Are you kidding me?  When friends tell me, "Dave, you just don't understand the Apple lifestyle."   Yes, I guess that is true.....   When I hear on podcasts that Apple is researching the best methods for implementing cut-n-paste,  I just have to laugh.   If this is true, let me give you a hint, go ask the folks at Palm, they have it figured out.
2. No removable storage. It is very handy to have the ability to remove a SAN disk.
   
3. Not all apps can take advantage of the horizontal mode.  This is ridiculous.
4. The battery is not removable.  Yes, the most recent updates help, but Apple is not there yet. I want the ability to carry a second battery with me.
   
5. It should be a reliable phone.  If I had a dollar for every time a friend said to me, "hey, I am using my iPhone so we might get dropped and I will have to call you back", I would have enough for at least a dinner out :-)
   
6. The iPhone is simply too proprietary for me and I believe that it stifles the amount of innovation we would otherwise see with the iPhone.  Yes, Apple does a great job with ease of use and overall experience, but I prefer freedom.
7. The idea that Apple will "brick" your phone is just repulsive to me.
8. I want real keys to type on, not a picture of a key.  Yes, I know this dates me :-)
9. The App Store has so many rules on what type of app it allows that, IMHO, it stifles true creativity and true competition.   Checkout this article at the New York Times titled:  Apple's Capricious Rules for iPhone Apps
   
10. No Java for the iPhone.  Hopefully this might change someday....
    
11. No voice activated calling.
12. You can not record video.
13. I do love the features of the G1, but have not gotten one yet.  The Palm Pre sounds VERY promising as well.
    
14. NO MULTI-TASKING   THIS WILL SERIOUSLY LIMIT THE i-Phone
15. I will keep my old Treo 650 that just works great as a phone and basic PDA with a limited browser, until there is something that is at least as good as the G1.

If Apple addressed these, would I buy an iPhone?  In a femto-second.

 Thanks to Neil Groundwater, long time friend, mentor and Unix legend, who sent me this fascinating article called A gift or hard graft? written by Malcom Gladwell.

The premise of the article is:

"This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours."

Gladwell discusses the great amount of time that  Bill Joy invested to hone his programming skills:

"According to Joy, he spent a phenomenal amount of time at the computer centre. "It was open 24 hours. I would stay there all night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in those years I was spending more time in the computer centre than on my classes. All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class at all, of not even realising we were enrolled.""

Gladwell tells a great story of Bill Joy at Berkeley:

"In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' "."

The legend of Bill Gates and the amount of time is well documented.  What is not well documented is just how hard and long The Beatles worked.  I was always under the impression that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were just pure musical geniuses and it just easy.  Gladwell corrects this perception:

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

The article ends with a very interesting point about the importance of being born in the years 1954 or 1955 with great summary of Sun's founders:

"By the way, let's not forget Bill Joy. Had he been just a little bit older and had to face the drudgery of programming with computer cards, he says he would have studied science. Bill Joy the computer legend would have been Bill Joy the biologist. In fact, he was born on November 8 1954. And his three fellow founders of Sun Microsystems - one of the oldest and most important of Silicon Valley's software companies? Scott McNealy: born November 13 1954. Vinod Khosla: born January 28 1955. Andy Bechtolsheim: born June 1955. "

Now I know where I went wrong in life, my parents waited four years too long to have me :-) 

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson writes a very interesting article this morning dispelling the age old myth about the origins of the phrase"May you live in interesting times"

I nearly forgot, Happy Thanksgiving everyone....

One of my three sons wrote a paper on Voting Machines that briefly discusses David Chaum's logical approach to this challenge.

Below are three paragraphs from my son's paper.  I am posting this not because I am just trying to fill up my blog :-) , but the three paragraphs below do clearly and concisely state a logical approach to voting machines.

"A new more reliable voting machine has been developed by David Chaum, in which you physically type in the name of the  person that you are voting for.   When your choice is confirmed 2 receipts that look like a random scatter of squares print out, although you only take one. The other receipt drops down into the machine, and it is stored, in case your vote needs to be recounted. Your receipt is specific to the card you didn't choose, and the candidate you voted for is saved from being lost. I felt this was an ingenious idea to keep people's votes from being left out and made it fairly easy to recount them. You can even check online by typing in the serial code on the receipt into a web site to find out if the person you wanted to vote for got your vote. I like the idea of a receipt that is merely an encrypted card; it doesn't tell people who you voted for, but it is simply used to verify that the vote that is cast belongs to that specific card.

These voting machines can affect our system of democracy in both expected and unexpected ways. The obvious way is the technical errors; despite what we would like to believe, machines are not perfect.  They do break down, and they can make mistakes. While it does reduce the human error of physically losing a paper vote, it creates a whole new set of possible errors, such as casting a vote twice, not casting it at all, or even casting it for the wrong candidate. This could cause the wrong person to win an election that maybe should have gone to the other candidate. This would certainly affect our democratic election. Such problems on national scale would not go unnoticed and the proper actions would be taken to correct the problem, but the few who do experience these problems probably never know it. The lack of a paper trail means we are putting our vote into something that we cannot physically see or touch, and this can frighten most people.

This leads to another unseen impact the machines have on democracy: people's willingness to vote.  In the states where only machines are allowed, a person with very little confidence in the credibility of these machines, may feel so inclined as to not even show up to vote on Election Day. This does not apply to everyone, but I'm sure it is very possible. This is why I feel the best solution is to get the most reliable machines to cast our votes in election, but always provide paper to the people who want it."

Sometimes the most clear, concise and compelling statements come out of the military.   My current favorite from The Pentagon is:

A vision without resources is called a hallucination.

I was at the Sun Office in Irvine, CA a few weeks ago and they had a 1982 Sun-1 in the lobby.  Below are two photos I took from my cellphone.

As Wikpedia states:  Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA. The Sun-1 systems ran SunOS 0.9, a port of UniSoft's UniPlus V7 port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, with no window system. Early Sun-1 workstations and servers used the original Sun logo, a series of red "S"s laid out in a square, rather than the more familiar purple diamond shape used later.
The first Sun-1 workstation was sold to Solo Systems in May of 1982.^[1] The Sun-1/100 was used in the original Lucasfilm EditDroid non-linear editing system. 

 As I have first personally heard Scott McNealy say, "the first serial number was 15 so customers did not think they were getting one of the first systems."

Something cool to check out is the SUN Workstation Architecture, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Forest Baskett, Vaughan Pratt, Stanford University Computer systems Laboratory Technical Report No. 229, March 1982

Another interesting tidbit of Sun history that I learned at the 25th anniversary of Sun Microsystems at The Computer History Musuem was that Vaughan Pratt was the person who designed the famous Sun logo.

As Wikipedia points out, the Sun logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word "sun"; it is an ambigram

Below is my /etc/motd on my Solaris 10 Toshiba notebook.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it,
when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager
and unsatisfactory kind it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you
have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

        Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
        Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.

This video at YouTube is a must watch if you believe,as I do, in the importance of quantifying challenges.  If you want to watch the narrated version, go to this video.

   

 
The great part of Unix lore can be captured in the buttons. 

I am not sure the 1983 USENIX button would be allowed today :-)

                    Thanks npg