Yesterday, Google announced Nexus One. It is truly great phone; I have been using mine for almost a month and I'm more than happy. All other phones, including iPhone 3GS, feel very slow in comparison. Though I won't go into detail about features - I suggest to check out review on TechCrunch.
More interesting for me is that Google is tackling the issue of cellphone contracts. Nexus One is being sold only unlocked; you can get the discount on the phone price if you sign up for 2 year contract, but you will still be free to use you phone wherever you want.
Most cellular operators try to do their best to acquire new customers and tie them to long-term contracts. In US and many Western countries, they found a venue to do this: subsidized phones. The operator buys the phone for $600, sells it to you for $200 - it pays you $400 indirectly - for the pledge that you will pay them $2800 over two years (prices taken from AT&T/iPhone). Sure, it's a great deal for operators, and in many cases good deal for customers (though not with Nexus One). There are two big problems, though.
First: even though you, as a customer, realize that operator will be willing to pay several hundred for you to become their customer, you are severely limited in receiving this bonus; you have to choose among the phones on their shelves. I wonder why; I guess many people would be happy to lock themselves in for 2 years in exchange for hard cash (though I personally would prefer contract freedom). So if you choose the phone which your operator doesn't sell (which in my case was almost always the case during last ~7 years), operator keeps your bonus.
Second: if you are lucky enough to have your phone of choice offered by your operator of choice, you will get it with insult included - simlock. Selling simlocked phones is completely pointless - it doesn't affect the monthly bill, which is to be paid for X years anyway (unless ETF is paid). It is annoying and very limiting for the customer, and can become expensive if he travels (he'll have to pay roaming or buy a new phone abroad). It is insulting, since selling simlocked subsidized phones every 2 years suggests that I can get along with the same phone for 2 years (since it will be quite difficult to sell).
I have never bought simlocked phones. I don't think I've ever used one phone for longer than a year. And before coming to Switzerland, I have just heard something about operators being nasty, but didn't experience it first hand. You know, with all grand difference in economics and market between Switzerland and Belarus there is one area where Belarus is miles ahead - cellphone contracts.
In Belarus, you sign unlimited contract which you can cancel anytime without any ETF. There is minimum monthly payment for the service, but you are free to stop paying whenever you want, and cell operator will just stop the service after some time; and if you resume paying, they resume the service. In fact, I am still under contract on Velcom in Belarus (I visit Belarus for a few days every several months); every time I leave the country, several days/weeks later enough unpaid debt accumulates so they turn off the service for me (and they stop counting, so I don't pay for the time out of service); and when I arrive next time, I pay off the debt and the service resumes immediately.
In Switzerland, the situation is bad. It's in fact even worse than in the US. You can only sign yearly renewing contract; it means, you have to stay with operator for 12 months or you get to pay high ETF. And next year, it automatically renews for 12 more months, unless you cancelled it in writing at most 60 days before first year ends. How nice is it, huh? You still can get your "bonus" in form of simlocked discounted phone, though. Or you can go to prepaid, but there is not a single prepaid plan in Switzerland with data included or affordable. And there is no competition, since all three mobile operators behave the same.
I really hope that Nexus One and subsequent phones will improve things. If data-hungry phones will be sold unlocked, the operators will have the incentive to provide either nice prepaids with data or flexible contracts to lure the customers. And if the best phones will be sold unlocked, it should give incentive to other phone manufacturers to push for "never-to-be-simlocked" models.
And we can dream of the better world (hopefully in a few years), when the phones are never simlocked, you are free to switch cell operators whenever you want, and operators reward you for loyalty instead of paying you for privilege to handcuff you.
UX (User Experience) in software made major leaps since 1990s. Back then computer users needed to be quite tech-savvy, and nowadays pretty much everyone can figure out what to do.
But there is one area where UX deteriorated significantly. It's installing and updating applications. I still remember the time when to "install" something I needed to stick a floppy into FDD and press "Enter" in Norton Commander. But now too often I have to spend 5 to 30 minutes to run a program.
Especially bad it is on Linux, even though some Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have grown to be almost casual desktop systems. There is quite big paradigm difference between Windows and most Linux application installation. On Windows, if you need to install a new app, you are supposed to go to the app's website, download installer executable and install it. In Ubuntu (from now on, I will focus on Ubuntu distro instead of Linux in general since I have more experience with it), you are supposed to use Synaptic or command-line apt-get to get the software from repository. Repository vaguely resembles smartphone application catalogs such as Android Market, where you can find most applications for the platform; the biggest difference, though, is that while on smartphones developers submit their apps and updates to the catalogs, on Ubuntu distribution maintainers take care of new software and updates. Another difference is that while every smartphone platform has one major repository regardless of version of the handset, every version of Ubuntu has its own separate software repository, which in general case only has the software versions that were released prior to that Ubuntu release (and only maintenance updates are getting into older repositories).
The result is horrible - you are either stuck with old version of the application, or have to jump through hoops set up by app developers to get the newer version. Here are some of my worst experiences in the quest for the newest versions.
- Openoffice.org. My work desktop has only OpenOffice.org 2.4 available in repository, so I have to go to the website for the 3.1 version. I click "I want to download" and a big button "Download now!", which gives me 175Mb file OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz. The fact that it is archive rather than normal Ubuntu .deb installer is already suspicious. I double click it and see bunch of files:
I can vaguely guess that "setup" is executable file here, so I should extract this stuff somewhere, go to terminal, change file permissions, and run this script. Probably many other OpenOffice users won't really figure this out.
I go back to OpenOffice.org website and see that they gave me "OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 for Linux". Folder "RPMs" shows that they didn't pay attention that I use Ubuntu, the system that prefers .deb packages to .rpm; also, they gave me 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I go to "Other versions" and download "Linux 64-bit DEB" package (which they should have given me in the first place). Alas, it's again .tar.gz with myriad of files and "update" (but no "setup") file in the root.
- Psi. I've just installed the newest Ubuntu 9.10 at home, and wanted to set up my favorite IM application - Psi. The repository (while being the newest) had only version 0.12, while the website already has version 0.14. But unfortunately, the Psi developers rely so heavily on the repositories maintainers, that they do not even offer Linux binaries for new versions at all. So the only solution is to download sources and compile them, which is complete non-starter for most users. I compiled them and installed, but now the Psi launcher on the task panel has generic icon, because the authors either didn't include the app icon in the sources package, or hid it too well.
- The crown for the funniest update check goes to VLC media player on Windows. Every time I open a movie to watch, it pops up a question "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?". I click "yes" and proceed to watch a movie. After I close VLC, and open a new movie, it asks "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?" again! There is no button "Yes and never ask me again". And, funnily, the installed version of VLC is still 0.9.9, and somewhere on my hard drive there is a distributive of 1.0.3.
- The crown for the most difficult install goes to OpenTTD. While they provide a normal .deb installation file, installing it with a double-click is not enough; to launch the game, you need to download two more separate archives, and spend some time figuring out where to extract the files from them.
These are just the most recent annoying examples. There are much more. E.g. if you happen to use Ubuntu Hardy (the latest LTS release), then you are stuck with Firefox 3.0, while FF 3.5 is available for a long time already, and for the web browser being up-to-date is absolutely crucial. Ratio of Linux software that is distributed in haywire way, making every user to spend 10-30 minutes on figuring out installation, to the software that is installed in one click, is staggering. Windows software has its own problem of updates - most of Windows software never checks for its own updates, and the apps that do check are doing it in the most possibly annoying way (remember Java, Adobe Acrobat and Apple software updates).
I can only be happy that more and more of apps that I use are on the web, where installing and updating are non-issues, and my tool for accessing them, Chrome, is always up to date.
In the last weekend of summer (at least summer as we understand it, that ends on the 31st of August), we flew over Switzerland in a small 4-seater Piper plane. During this trip I filled up 8Gb card with ~600 photos, and since then I am enjoying the process of filtering, cropping and geotagging.
So, here is a little teaser. More photos coming, to the blog and to the Picasa album.
Brugg, AG
Aarau AG, Rohr AG, Rombach AG and Aare river
Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant
Sempachersee, Sempach LU, Sursee LU
Zugersee, Cham ZG, Rotkreuz ZG, Zug ZG
It seems that plane photo trips became my summer tradition - in 2008, I also took a few photos of Alps from above.
The biggest and most prominent lake of Belarus, Narač, strikingly closely resembles a heart.. and its winter photo resembles a broken heart.
It's no surprise that local folklore has very touching tales about this lake's origin - about a hero killing a dragon, and a heart-shaped lake signifying his love to the girl that he saved from the dragon.
This lake stays my favorite, and huge variety of Swiss lakes can never hope to reach this level.
Today, Map Maker was launched for European countries: Albania, Belarus, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. If you don't know what is Map Maker and what's possible with it, check this post about Map Maker graduation and this video
This is very exciting for me, since it means that my hometown of Minsk can be properly mapped finally, and I myself can take part in it. Also it signifies the first official launch of the Google product translated professionally into Belarusian; before today, there were only volunteer translations for search and few other products. Even though these professional translations needed a bit of checking and adaptation to the real product :).
I write more detailed about the launch in my Belarusian blog; if you read Belarusian, check launch announcement and first advices. More posts are coming there soon.
I am reading now "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Somehow I managed to not come across this book earlier in my life, and so far (~50% complete) I feel that this is the most important and worthwhile book. This is a book about Capitalism vs. Socialism, or about Reason vs. Stupidity, or about Strength vs. Weakness and so on.
There are many quotes that are worth sharing, but this speech seems the best.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia.
"Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
This book is for me the second pillar of books about socialism / communism. First book is "1984" by George Orwell, which was emphasizing political and personal sides of socialism. "Atlas Shrugged" is speaking about economics of socialism. These books are more worth to me especially because I was born in socialist country, and up to this time Belarus still has too much socialism left in everything. They should be a warning to those westerners who have never experienced socialism first-hand, to understand well what they might be voting for in the elections. Interesting, that Ayn Rand could write this book specifically because she is Russian. She was born in Czarist Russia in 1905, which was pretty much capitalist; survived 9 first years of post-revolution years, when communists destroyed pretty much the whole economics of the country by seizing factories and all production from those who was capable of running them; left to the US in 1926, lived through Great Depression, World War II and post-war rise of American economics. Ayn Rand published "Atlas Shrugged" in 1957. The only thing that seems wrong in the quote above is about gold. "Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold" - in 1971, Gold standard ceased to exist because it was limiting possibility of creating wealth in the world. Everything else holds true even 52 years after. Thanks for this book, Ayn. I still have 550 pages to read :).
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About Me
Ihar Mahaniok
Software Engineer at Google.
Information geek.
Originally from Minsk, Belarus.
Now living in Zürich, Switzerland.
ihar@mahaniok.com
@mahaniok on Twitter
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My posts or my opinions don't necessarily reflect the position of my employer.
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