Marco.org

In search of a wireless router that doesn't suck

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:40:54 EDT

Consumer wireless routers all suck. I don’t care if they’re by Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, or Belkin. Recommendations online are useless: everyone has had a $40 router die from one of these companies, so they switched to a rival’s $40 router that hasn’t died yet in the 2 weeks that they’ve had it, so they think it’s great, until it dies 8 months later and they switch to the next rival’s $40 router. And so on. (Even Apple’s $150 routers seem no more reliable, on average, based on user reviews after more than a few months — except that they cost more to replace.)

Routers suck because they’re extremely commoditized devices that need to bring nontechnical people very impressive capabilities and shield them from from the complex networking problems behind the scenes, yet still sell at Wal-Mart for $40 and include enough of a margin to offer tech support over the phone to your crazy great aunt with all of the cats who plugged a phone cable between the WAN and LAN1 ports and pushed the standby button on the DSL modem and can’t figure out where its USB cable plugs into the router because you set up the last one for her but you now live 1200 miles away and would really rather spend your Friday night having fun instead of talking her through it for 4 hours before finally giving up because her “screen’s half blue” and telling her to call Best Buy sometime before 8 months from now when this router dies and she has to repeat the process.

So I understand why the $40 routers suck.

I’m willing to pay more for better equipment. An ideal router for a heavy internet user should:

Never overheat or require arbitrary resets
Be able to saturate the bandwidth of the fastest modern home broadband connections (up to 50 Mbit down with FiOS)
Include an 802.11g or 802.11n access point
Have enough CPU power to maintain reasonable wireless throughput even when using encryption
Support modern conveniences such as UPnP, NAT-PnP, DDNS updates, and a high number of port-forwarding rules
Have a web configuration interface that makes common tasks relatively straightforward (Cisco fails this one miserably)
Not be ridiculously large, draw a lot of power, or require a fan (this rules out most Linux/BSD router distributions that run on old computers)

After a night of research so far, I can’t find such a device available at any price, although I’d like to keep it below around $350 (seems like a lot of routers that almost do this are around that price or less). But there are a few options that might come close.

Business-class routers

Also called SOHO routers or VPN routers, these are higher-end routers (that usually don’t include a wireless access point), usually for $200-400. But many of them are just the same awful consumer-level hardware with a few business-friendly features added, such as advanced VPN capabilities.

Examples:

Cisco 851 (or 851W with wireless). Seems almost perfect, except that the Cisco configuration process is an absolute nightmare for even simple arrangements.
Linksys RV042. Just a router, so it needs a separate wireless AP. User reviews indicate that it has a pretty high dud rate and it needs a factory-performed battery replacement after about a year.
Netgear ProSafe VPN line. Very mixed reviews indicate that this probably isn’t any more reliable than their consumer ruter line.

Pros: Low power consumption. Reasonable cost.
Cons: Configuration complexity. Often requires separate wireless AP. Those with built-in APs almost never support 802.11n. Potentially no more reliable than $40 routers.

Using internet-connection sharing on my computer

My computer has two Ethernet ports and an 802.11n card, so it can be the router for the rest of the network. (This is what I’m doing in the meantime while I figure out what to replace my awful Linksys router with.)

Pros: Never overheats or crashes. Excellent performance. Easy setup.
Cons: Requires my high-power computer to be running constantly. Limited configuration options. Drops the entire network’s connection when I reboot or want to use Boot Camp. Entire security burden rests on my computer, which is fairly exposed to the world.

Linux/BSD router on an old PC

Many special distributions offer nice router functionality if you have a spare PC lying around, including m0n0wall, pfSense, and SmoothWall.

Pros: Never overheats or crashes. Excellent performance. Excellent configuration interfaces and capabilities. Cheap if you already have an old PC.
Cons: Requires an old PC, which I don’t have. Needs a lot more power and space than any other option. Fan noise.

Linux/BSD router on an embedded computer

You can install those same packages on special embedded PC boards optimized for small size and low power usage, such as those by Soekris and PC Engines.

Pros: High performance. Shouldn’t overheat or crash. Excellent configuration interfaces and capabilities once the OS is installed. Small. Low power. Bonus geek points.
Cons: Not very cheap. Too many choices with little guidance — hard to choose the right hardware. Requires a lot of time to build it yourself and install the software. Unknown long-term reliability.

Just keep buying $40 routers

Certainly the most economical option: just keep buying new $40 routers whenever they die. This is the option I’ve chosen for the last few years, and is what I’ve recommended to friends.

Pros: Cheapest, even over a reasonably long term. Smallest. Lowest power.
Cons: Unreliable. Having to crawl under my desk every few days to reset them. Bad wireless performance with encryption. Usually very ugly and full of unnecessary LEDs.

Now what?

I’m leaning toward the embedded-computer-m0n0wall option, but not very strongly. Having to set up port forwarding and UPnP on the Cisco 851W scares me. I could keep buying $40 routers, but then the problem is never really solved.

Is there anything I missed here? Email me.

Update 1

I mentioned the Apple Airport Extreme in the first paragraph. I appreciate the recommendations, but user reviews (and my own personal experience in an office full of them) seem to indicate a pretty average failure rate compared to every $40 router out there.
I know about the Linksys WRT54GL, the version of the popular WRT54G capable of being flashed with third-party firmwares such as DD-WRT. I had one of these a while ago, and while it did have plenty of great additional features, it didn’t help the unreliable hardware at all — it overheated and crashed just as frequently as the stock firmware.

Update 2

I got a lot more strong recommendations for the Apple Airport Extreme from many tech experts, including Ars Technica’s David Chartier. It was tempting, but there are just too many people reporting the same crash/require-reset problems that plague the $40 routers. If it were anywhere near that price, I might be willing to take the risk — but not for $180, a price approaching the far-more-reliable options.

After considering everyone’s (excellent) feedback on this and weighing a few decent options, I’ve decided to go with this embedded system with pfSense. (I learned that m0n0wall doesn’t support UPnP.) I may regret the complexity of the initial configuration process — I’m hoping that it comes with reasonable defaults and I won’t actually ever need to connect a null-modem cable — but after the basic setup, it looks like everything’s available in the (very nice looking) web GUI. This probably isn’t an option that non-geeks should ever consider, unfortunately. (But I really doubt that any non-geeks are still reading by this point.)

In a week or two, once I’ve had time to set it up and use it for a while, I’ll update again with my experiences so far.

Review: RiffTrax

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:00:00 EDT

In a nutshell, RiffTrax are the MST3K guys ripping on recent movies you have actually heard of. Buying two of them now has not made me an expert by any means, but it has let me draw a conclusion.

They’re really good. And they’re definitely worth the $1-$4 each. You obtain the DVD on your own (rent, buy, steal, whatever), then go to RiffTrax.com to download an MP3 file of the commentary. If you’re watching the movie on your computer, you can have the commentary sync up automatically, otherwise you start them at the same time and there are periodic checks to make sure they’re in sync. (Every 20 minutes or so, a voice on the RiffTrax MP3 says a line of dialog at the same time as a character in the movie. If one is ahead of the other, pause it for a few seconds to let the slow one catch up.)

Humorwise, RiffTrax are on par with MST3K: there are 5-6 truly gut-busting observations per movie, several dozen really good chuckles, and a fair number of “yeah I guess that’s funny” moments. It feels like renting some very funny friends to rip on movies for the evening. I can only speak for “Independence Day” and “The Matrix” (so far), but the RiffTrax definitely improved on the original. The website’s selection isn’t everything you’d want to watch, but there are plenty of movies to pick from and you won’t run out anytime soon.

Another plus: instead of paying to download the file only once, the files are added to your account. You can download them multiple times, to multiple computers. This makes a huge difference if, say, you watch a movie on your computer and then later decide to go sit in the living room and watch it through a different device there. Or you can load the RiffTrax onto an MP3 player with headphones so nobody else knows why you keep laughing. Whatever floats your boat.

I give RiffTrax an enthusiastic two thumbs up. Pricewise they’re right on, they are funny, and they only take a few minutes to download and set up (assuming you have a reasonable Internet connection) so you don’t have to pick a movie hours ahead of when your friends come over. Definitely worth a try.

Hating Sarah Palin

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:00:00 EDT

Sarah Palin is a divisive figure. It’s true. Nobody knows that much about her—but everybody has strong feelings one way or another. Her appeal to the conservative base is easy to understand, but why does she draw more ire from the left than Biden or even Obama draw from the right?

Some are saying the left is reacting out of fear. Others think the left is employing some vast and concerted smear campaign. Some say this is just latent sexism rearing its ugly head. While all these explanations may have some truth, they miss the biggest factor: Palin brought the left’s rage upon herself when she deliberately mocked and dismissed both its values and its hopes. The left hates Sarah Palin because she is mean.

Why does the right love Sarah Palin?

The positive feelings from the Republican base are easy to understand. She symbolizes a delightfully mythologized image of America where the small-town good people with their hard work and moral fiber are contrasted with the bad guys and their atheism and/or transcendent evil and the flaky cosmopolitan liberals who want to blur the line between the two.

The view is as attractive as it is simplistic—and Sarah Palin promises living proof that the dream is alive and maybe even achievable if we all hope hard enough.

I know, I’m simplifying things for the sake of rhetorical clout. But that’s exactly the appeal of Sarah Palin. She offers a story about small-town values and common sense—and those who don’t appreciate it’s simplicity or its rhetoric can atleast appreciate its clout.

What is Palin facing?

To start with, there are the rumors. Obama faced a similar set of rumors—but they did not appear as quickly nor were they believed so widely.

To some extent, the rumors are inevitable. Palin is suddenly in the spotlight and hasn’t been available to the press to dispell or explain some of the spottier moments in her short record. Unlike the Obama rumors, the Palin rumors seem to have roots in the truth. Palin did not actually ban books—but she certainly asked whether she could ban books. Palin may not have cut funding for whatever she allegedly cut funding for—but she did veto funding increases for some causes that were important to a lot of people. And the blogosphere abhoreth a vacuum, so the information Palin has been reluctant to provide has been replaced by rumors.

But it goes beyond a willingness to believe rumors. The left has practically lost its ability to engage McCain on his policy proposals (or lack thereof) because it is blinded by dislike for Palin. The McCain campaign may be correct about the quantity of attacks on Palin—but it is wrong on their origin. I think the willingness to lable Palin as everything from a crazy fundamentalist (which may or may not be true—but is neither proven nor out of the main stream of conservative politics) to a duplicitous loyalty freak (which similarly may or may not be true—but surely she’s no worse than the Bush administration) are all efforts to rationalize a gut dislike. Where does it come from?

Why the vitriol from the left?

Popularity for Palin on the right could explain suspicion of Palin on the left. There are knee-jerk reactions in politics—and some of the dislike could be attributed to this. But comparing the right’s distrust of Obama to the left’s outrage at Palin. There are a few possible explanations.

The explanation offered by the McCain campaign is that this is some sort of vast left-wing conspiracy orchestrated by the Obama campaign to malign Palin. This is ridiculous. The statements coming from the actual Obama campaign are mostly positive to neutral toward Palin. The best evidence McCain and crew can marshall is that Obama used the idiom “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.” It’s a thoroughly neutral phrase—and one McCain used to criticize a Clinton proposal—but that’s the best McCain could find. If there’s a vast smear campaign, it’s not organized by Obama.

Some have suggested that the left has just been looking for an excuse to be mean. Maybe the Republicans with their small-town values are just kinder people in their less reflexive reactions to Obama and Biden? I think this too is a red herring. First, human nature does not significantly differ based upon party affiliation. The left’s reaction to Sarah Palin is not terribly different than the right’s reaction to Hillary Clinton. In both cases the dislike seems to transcend rational disagreement.

Perhaps this is sexism, then? But in that case, we would expect similar dislike for other prominent women in politics or government. Condaleeza Rice doesn’t get this anger. Oprah got little worse than grumbles when she endorsed Obama. In fairness, Geraldine Ferraro was essentially asked to go away quietly when she started talking this election cycle—but that had more to do with what she was saying. Some of the attacks can be explained by sexism—but I think there is a better explanation.

Palin’s convention speech was petty and mean

Between the lack of record and the lack of media availability, there is very little to actually know about Sarah Palin. Her introduction to the country was sudden and carefully scripted. Most people know only what she said in her speech to the Republican National Convention. But that one speech was enough to earn the wrath of the left. It fired up the base—but it alienated and angered the rest of the country. In one short speech, she managed an incredible number of attacks—all of them incredibly dismissive of those who disagreed with her. By purporting to speak from and for common-sense, and “good people,” she insinuated that those who disagreed with her were either dumb or bad—and people reasonably took it personally.

She suggested that habeas corpus and other constiutionally protected liberties were stupidly coddling people who wanted to attack the country.

By extolling the virtues and toughness of small towns and their values, she attacked the virtues and values of those who choose not to live in small towns.

She derided community organizers as people without “actual responsibility.” It’s unclear what aspect of community organizing she didn’t consider a “responsibility” but the flippant dismissal of those who dedicate years of their lives trying to alleviate crushing poverty helped Obama raise $10 million overnight.

She mocked Michelle Obama’s statement of newly discovered pride in her country.

She mocked Harry Reid by saying Reid’s dislike of McCain was enough of a reason to vote for McCain. I’m not a big Harry Reid fan, but come on, the guy isn’t even in this election.

She mocked the set at Obama’s convention speech. Okay, fine, you don’t have to appreciate Obama’s set—but is that really what you want to dwell on? Maybe this sort of thing is important to people—but its’ just an aesthetic. It’s like going after a candidate’s tie. It’s just petty.

She mocked Obama’s supporters, alluding to the McCain campaigns increasingly aggressive suggestion that those who support his opponent are brainwashed or vacuous or otherwise beneath rational thought. Apparently, they’re not the people she’s running for office for.

But much of this is standard convention fare. You don’t have to like it—but it’s politics, what are you going to do? It’s not going to change unless somebody takes a radically different approach to politics, tries to build as large a consensus as possible, and listens to those who disagree, genuinely trying to understand and respect their perspectives. Sure, that sort of candidate might suddenly make politics appealing to people who’d been turned away or disillusioned, but with the Presidency at stake, who would want to try something unconventionaly like that, except, perhaps… Barack Obama.

That’s where Palin went too far. She didn’t limit her criticism to Obama’s policies. She made it personal—and millions of Obama’s supporters were watching, wondering what this new heroine of the GOP was like. For those of us attracted to Obama’s supreme efforts to avoid pettiness and nastiness, this unexpected and acerbic mockery hit too close to home. And to make it worse, Obama won’t hit back. Sure, he’ll call her out when she skews the truth or accuse her of playing divisive political games, and strongly disagree with her views, whatever they turn out to be. But Obama won’t attack her personally. He will remain respectful. Repeatedly attacking somebody who she knows will not respond in kind makes Palin look vicious, nasty, and unpleasant.

Palin is not making enemies because of her policy or her background. A McCain advisor recently said that this election is about personalities. Palin’s personality is, in a word, mean.

On community organizers and prisoners of war

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:00:00 EDT

A number of people seem perplexed by what Obama did in his years as a community organizer and why that experience would be relevant to the Presidency. A few on the right, including Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin, have tried to capitalize on this uncertainty by mocking this experience. As a result, over a 130,000 people donated a total of $10 million within 24 hours of Palin’s speech. Some people understood what community organizing meant and were justifiably outraged.

To understand community organizing, you need to understand poverty. This is not the sort of poverty that wonders how it pays the bills at the end of the month or how to pay off credit card debt. This is the sort of poverty that has no expectation of paying off the bills or ever getting out of debt. This is the sort of poverty where things most of us take for granted—like literacy or a work ethic or fathers or heat or legal jobs—may be missing entirely. This poverty goes beyond a lack of money into a lack of empowerment.

This level poverty will seem alien to some, and most of us are more comfortable telling ourselves it doesn’t exist, or that if it exists, it only exists in far away places we shouldn’t feel responsible for. I almost feel bad saying that it’s real and it’s here. It’s like telling a kid there’s no Santa Claus.

A friend of mine told the story of getting to know a little five-year-old boy in a part of D.C. that the tour buses don’t go. The kid was one of a handful that had apparently mistaken the house she and her friends lived in for a youth center. (“Easy mistake when you consider how many board games I travel with.”) One day he told my friend that he and his mother would be moving on soon. Surprised, she asked where they were moving to. The kid explained that they had no food left and soon they would be “moving on.”

What do you say to the kid whose mother has apparently given up all hope and resigned herself to death by starvation? Obviously, start with, “Here’s some food.” But the food is really only the symptom. All those canned-food drives and days in the soup kitchen have had an impact. Nobody needs to starve to death in America. The underlying problem is that the mother has apparently given up hope for anything other than death by starvation. The answer my friend gave may capture the heart of community organizing. “You have neighbors who will help you. Nobody is going to pass on.”

Even when many social structures have broken down, a community remains. It may just be a group of mothers—or grandmothers—trying to hold things together. The fathers may be missing or incarcerated. Apartments may be as likely to have cockroaches as to have heat. Sure—there are laws about habitability—but many people don’t have the self-advocacy skills to see them enforced. The sense of disenfranchisement is so high that the government may be viewed as an intimidating and unapproachable monolith.

Community organizing tries to empower these community ties so those growing up in the community see an alternative to the gangs. The organizer will help people write letters to their landlords requesting repairs and advise them on what to do if the landlords refuse. The organizer will encourage people to come to city council meetings that discuss issues that will affect their community. “Empowerment” is perhaps too strong a word. Perhaps “enfranchisement.” The community organizer seeks to give that forgotten lower class the same political voice the middle class takes for granted. If a community organizer does his or her job properly, you will not hear about the organizer—only about the community.

It’s the sort of cause that brings to mind the story about the man walking along the beach after the tide, throwing starfish back into the sea. The other man told him he was wasting his effort fighting the entire ocean on behalf of the starfish. There will always be more stranded starfish—and his efforts won’t make a difference. The first man throws another starfish back into the ocean and answers, “I made a difference to that one.” Ultimately, the forces working against the community are likely to be too much for one person to deal with. Successes are few, incremental, and incredibly important to those they benefit. If a community can prevent a sewage treatment plant from moving in next door, the world may not notice, but they sure will. Enabling and connecting local churches, small businesses, and other community organizations can empower local leaders who will gradually improve the community—or at least slow its decline.

As might be expected, most of Obama’s victories as a community organizer were community-level victories. There were frustrations. He brought his own approach to community organizing—advocating attention both to larger goals and to the immediate project. He remained committed to the goals of community organization, but occasionally sought to reform some of the methods.

How is this a qualification to be President?

Some people have been asking how this prepares somebody to be President. Community organizing does not give anybody serious executive experience. It does not give you experience in foreign policy or macroeconomics or national politics. Nobody looks community organizing as a logical launch pad for Presidential ambitions. I can see why some of Obama’s detractors see this as something to mock—but they are wrong to do so.

Obama’s time as a community organizer is analogous to John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war. Obviously, they’re very different situations—but it’s not immediately clear what one does in either situation that would qualify one to be President. Yet both shaped the character and reveal the values of the candidate. In both cases, what the candidate did is less important than what the candidate learned. Nobody asks McCain what he accomplished as a POW. Nobody asks who he led or what he learned about foreign policy during this time. If they did, they would be missing the point. In refusing a chance to go home out of order, McCain proved his willingness to put principle before himself. Obama did the same when he chose community organizing over more lucrative opportunities. McCain understands the sacrifices demanded of soldiers sent to war. Obama understands the complexities of urban poverty. Both are important things for a President to know.

For those who just don’t care about poverty or how people other than themselves and their immediate friends and family are doing, community organizing is a hard sell. But for those with a heart for poverty, or those who truly care about the least of their fellow citizens, this is a critically important credential. Obama surrounded himself with some of the neediest people in the country and understands their problems. Even if you disagree with his policies, you should respect this experience and knowledge.

Why is a President who understands poverty important?

We’ve seen the consequences of leaders who do not understand the problems facing the country. It leads to expensive programs that accomplish next to nothing. Most Americans, like me, would support programs that would actually significantly reduce poverty and its causes even if it meant a significant tax increase.

Of course, it wouldn’t mean a tax increase because drastically reducing poverty would drastically reduce crime, which would drastically reduce the amount we’re paying to incarcerate 1% of our population. But so far, we have not seen a government program we think has a real chance at actually reducing poverty because most of our leaders don’t understand poverty. They may understand the pressures facing the middle class, but they are unaware of anything below that. So while I would happily support an effective program, if the money is just going to waste, I can find a better use for it. You cannot reduce poverty if you don’t know what poverty is. Obama understands poverty.

Why is mockery of community organizing so inflammatory?

When Giuliani and Palin mocked community organizing, they were speaking from ignorance to ignorance.

Some of their backers have taken the criticism a step further. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, James Taranto contrasts the community Obama worked in with that of “normal Americans.” He suggests that those living in subsidized appartments with broken plumbing needed to “call a plumber” to get the toilet fixed. First, as anybody who has ever lived in any kind of apartment knows, keeping the toilet and other fixtures in good repair is the landlord’s responsibility—whether the landlord is a private individual or a government entity. Secondly, if you can afford to pay the plumber, what are you doing living in subsidized housing? In part, it may be ignorance people find so offensive.

But these attacks go past ignorance. It isn’t hard to figure out what a community organizer does—and most people who are discussing community organizing should have at least had the minimal diligence to read the Wikipedia article. The mockers are suggesting that working with the unempowered and impoverished is not valuable. It implies not only that they do not care about the poorest of the poor but that they believe those trying to help them are wasting their effort. The mockery is not a criticism of the methods or the efficacy but a criticism of the very value of the task.

When I last checked, we were supposed to have a government of the people, by the people. This means all of the people. Obama has the background to know what is needed to address poverty, what will help, and what will be a waste of resources.

What separates Obama from the past 30 years of pricey and mediocre social programs? Obama understands what he is dealing with. He worked with it directly as a community organizier. He saw first hand both the successes and failures of government policy. If Obama ultimately decided he could serve the country—all of the country—better as President than as a community organizer, I agree with him.

Curing RSS addiction and continuous partial attention

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:30:28 EDT

I came across this article by David Goodman in my Technorati search feed for Instapaper, where he discusses his feed addiction, the “continuous partial attention” it fosters, and his transition to consuming longer content:

Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.

Thanks for the great article, David. I faced many of the same issues as you with obsessive RSS unread-clearing, and I realized I was spending more time skimming short content and headlines than truly reading anything.

The disconnect

The nature of the feed reader, especially when loaded with many high-volume feeds such as Engadget or Digg, encourages you to keep going and skimming and clicking endlessly to “keep up”. When I’d come across a long article in this state, I’d skim over it, not really reading it or getting any value out of it.

I’d also have a lot of time, since I commute on a train for 90 minutes each day, to read long content — I’d just never have any at that moment, because I would have already skimmed through everything at my home and work computers.

The fundamental problem is the disconnect between when we find good content and when we actually want to read it: these occur at completely different times in our day and in completely different contexts.

I made Instapaper as a tool for myself to bridge the disconnect: I mark long articles with the Read Later bookmarklet and continue through my RSS skimming. Then, when I’m on the train every day or waiting somewhere, I read the long articles.

I had much more elaborate plans for what I wanted Instapaper to be, so I didn’t release it. I used it myself every day for about 3 months before showing it to a few friends who finally convinced me to release it. (And after optimizing it for its current functions, it became far better and more successful than the original idea would have ever been.)

Feed overload

I then made a few changes to my RSS habit that made it much more manageable:

No more high-volume feeds. (I haven’t missed a thing.)
No more feeds for which I read and enjoy less than half of the content.
No more blogs about blogging.
No more list posts (“top 8”, “17 reasons”, etc.).
No more sites whose content is mostly aggregated from elsewhere instead of original.

And most importantly:

I no longer attempt to read long articles on my computer.

That’s an important one because I realized I was never really concentrating at the computer. There are too many distractions. Non-geeks, especially those over age 40, figured this out a while ago: they’ll print articles to read them. On paper. You know, that flat white stuff that comes out of those big machines in your office that everyone always seems frustrated with. Ah, forget it. Just trust me that reading long content on a computer sucks.

Now, I’ll go to the couch and read articles in the Instapaper iPhone app even when I’m home and could just as well use my computer. The iPhone’s single-tasking interface helps a lot here: there’s nothing else to do except read. There’s no new-feed-items notification. There’s no new-email alert. Nobody calls me, so that problem solved itself. (If people love calling you constantly, try Airplane Mode. Tell them you were underground or in the shower. Or tell them you just switched to T-Mobile.)

It’s a big shift for a feed addict like us, but it’s a huge improvement. I have far more time in the day to be constructive instead of skimming hundreds of fluff headlines. And when I do read articles, I actually read them without skimming. Their content sinks in. I’ve never read as much meaningful content as I do now.

My favorite App Store review of Instapaper is by Alex Bain:

This app actually makes me a better person ★★★★★

All day long I get emailed interesting-looking but lengthy articles from friends, and I never chip away at them,b/c I’m at my desk working. Later on, these same articles (typically from The New Yorker, The Slate, or maybe just a fascinating but wordy blog post) would be great fodder for a plane or subway ride, but they’re unavailable b/c I’m offline.

This solves this problem, and it does so gracefully. It strips away the cluttering ads, flash, and comments and leaves you with what you were interested in to begin with: the content. It also compacts the images for faster loading over EDGE.

Give this a try. What do you have to lose?

That’s the best possible endorsement I could get.

iPhone-app price deflation

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:17:19 EDT

I’m seeing a disturbing trend in the App Store: many independent developers are reacting to the dysfunctional price-commenters by significantly dropping the prices of their non-free apps.

Many popular apps that launched at $10 are now $5-7. Some have been cut down to $3.

Numbers

The iPhone is a big market, but we’re talking total sales for a decent paid app in the thousands or low tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. Hypothetically:

An app sells 5,000 copies.
It took one developer 4 months to make, followed by 4 months of updates and support.

After Apple’s commission and an approximate 28% income tax rate, that’s worth $25,174, or $3,146 per developer-month in after-tax profits. That’s a decent living for an individual. But that’s if the developer charges $9.99, the seemingly de-facto price for high-quality paid apps when the App Store opened.

But if the app’s price drops to $5.99, the total take is $15,094 ($1,886 per month). Not bad, but not able to replace your day job. Any good developers capable of coding a good iPhone app (that people are willing to pay for) can probably earn at least twice that in the job market.

At $1.99, the take is $5,014 ($626 per month). That might give you a nice rainy-day fund, but at this price, app development looks a lot less worthwhile to good developers. Making, maintaining, and supporting an app takes a lot of time. When you already have a day job, it’s hard to justify spending your little remaining time so you can maybe make $626 per month (if your app actually sells that well).

If app developers can’t make a competitive living selling high-quality apps, they’re not going to just accept less money — there just won’t be many high-quality apps.

Elasticity

I’d guess that demand is fairly inelastic, and the difference between paid and free probably doesn’t matter much whether the app is $5.99 or $9.99. As discussed in The Penny Gap, the hard part is getting people to pay at all:

Most entrepreneurs fall into the trap of assuming that there is a consistent elasticity in price [….] The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.

Once you’ve convinced people to pay for your app, are that many people going to decline to buy it because they want to save $2-5?

I really hope that this deflation is a temporary fad: an ill-guided response to the price-commenters in the App Store who are unlikely to stop complaining until the price reaches $0.

Cloudy promises

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:03:42 EDT

Amazon S3 was down for 8 hours today. (So was SQS, but nobody seemed to care. I guess there aren’t a lot of loud, public-facing SQS users.)

This should make a lot of companies rethink their reliance on Amazon Web Services or any significant architectural requirement that they can’t control. Some things to think about:

What if your entire site depended on SimpleDB, and it had an unscheduled 8-hour outage a few times per year?
This happened through a Sunday afternoon. It didn’t matter as much for most customers because most U.S.-targeted sites have low traffic on the weekends. But what if it was down for the 8 hours that cover an entire Monday EST workday? (It only missed by about 20 hours.)
What if Google App Engine goes down and your app is hosted there?
If you had to completely dump and replace your reliance on any single infrastructure provider, how long would you be down? How much code would need to be designed, written, and tested? What infrastructure changes would you require, and how quickly could you get what you needed?

That last one’s interesting because there isn’t a drop-in replacement for many of these services. It’s not just a matter of pointing your app at a different set of servers — you can’t, for instance, run a compatible backup instance of S3 or EC2 on your own infrastructure.

The cloud

Part of the promise of “cloud” services is that you don’t have to worry about their infrastructure. In theory, these services should tolerate individual failures transparently — you should never have to worry about one of S3’s servers dying and losing your files.

But this isn’t the first time that AWS has had major, service-wide downtime. Individual hard drives and servers can indeed fail without us noticing, but if a system-wide problem occurs such as a software bug, a cascading overload, or a natural disaster hitting a datacenter, the entire service is affected. Instead of one service failing, all services are taken down and all customers are affected.

The promise of the cloud is flawed. It’s a leaky abstraction. We’re sold on the idea of a bulletproof, hands-off service that we’ll never need to think about and that abstracts away the petty vulnerabilities of individual servers. But in reality, the cloud itself is still running on a bunch of individual servers, and it’s still built and operated by a bunch of fallible humans.

Language and the hemophiliac, liberal heart

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:00:00 EDT

You ought to be careful what you say these days. If you ask some of the louder conservatives, they will explain that a careless word will trigger the descent of the infamous P.C. police who have made careers out of being offended. Free speech is under assault, they will say, and good-intentioned people who slip and say something dumb are vilified when the whiny, self-righteous liberals leap to the defense of some thin-skinned voting block with a persecution complex. Meanwhile, it is politically acceptable to say horrific things about any group traditionally to the right of center. This sort of hypersensitivity, the right argues, chills meaningful dialog.

The loudest voices on the left (who may indeed be guilty of self-righteousness) will answer that words can be hurtful and destructive. They will complain about the shocking disregard the careless speaker has for efforts to bridge some of the greater divides in society. They may demand the resignation and demonization of the offending party and explain that such hateful expressions chill meaningful dialog.

Ultimately, the shouting match between the How-Dare-Yous and the Grow-Up-Already does drown out any meaningful communication. Usually the truth is somewhere in the middle. Whatever was said probably was probably more ignorant and less vitriolic. It probably was carelessly harmful, though not intentionally hurtful. It may have highlighted or heightened some existing or perceived animosity.

The numbers show that we still have some pretty stark divides in the country along racial, gender, and economic lines. Without pointing fingers, we can agree that this is a complex problem. When a problem is rooted in perception and assumption, it is, in essence, a language problem. Poorly worded, careless phrases can cause significant harm. Connotations people may be unaware of can invoke and enforce a nasty history of exclusion from and rejection by the mainstream. While the intent may be harmless or humorous, it may vividly reinforcement assumptions of who is Us and who is Them.

In a less politically charged atmosphere, it is obvious that careless statements can have damaging effects. If a corporation’s spokesperson said something disparaging about a branch of the company or an unreleased product, it could devastate employee morale or send the stock price plumetting. The company would get a new spokesman. Sure, the spokesperson has free speech—but the spokesperson is also responsible for the consequences of her words. The spokesperson may be a good, well-intentioned person—but she’s a horrible spokesperson.

Of course, we don’t have a national stock price. But we do have a nation. As a nation is a group of people bound together by common goals, common history, and a common identity, divisive speech does nothing less than splinter and divide the nation. I do not for a second want to suggest any coercive restraint on speech—particularly as free expression and a flourishing marketplace of ideas is one of the defining elements of America and Americanness. I would, however, emphasize that the reason we treasure free expression is because words are powerful. They can tear the nation apart.

Fortunately, they can also bind it back together. That slip or poorly chosen word is a big deal—and it is counter-productive to deny it. But accidents happen, particularly when people are careless or unaware of what is at stake. The relevant inquiry after some much-maligned mistake is not who to blame but what to do next.

Wrapping up the Democratic nomination

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

It is, at last, finished. At least, most people understand that after a long, hard-fought race, Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination. Most of the holdouts should come around when Hillary formally concedes on Saturday. Unfortunately, there are still a few rumors and loose ends that should be sorted out so nobody goes into the general election with the wrong impressions.

Toward the end of the race, the facts got a bit muddy as both campaigns tried to put a bright face on the situation. Unfortuantely, with all the competing messages, some of the facts got confused. In the end, people will decide on their own who to vote for in November—but I would like to make sure they have their information straight.

Did Barack Obama steal the election with superdelegates and insider support?

No. While the majority of the superdelegates ultimately backed Obama, Clinton led the superdelegate count until well into May. Obama didn’t catch up until after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. The late deciders broke to Obama when the decided he was clearly going to be the winner.

If Michigan and Florida delegation had been seated with full voting rights as determined by their unsanctioned priamries, would Hillary have won?

No. If Florida’s delegation had a full vote, Clinton would gain an additional 19 votes. If Clinton had been awarded 55% of Michigan’s 128 delegates, and Obama had been awarded none (rather than the 29.5 the DNC gave him), Clinton would net about 100 delegates. (This scenerio would be insanely generous to Clinton because it assumes Obama got no support whatsoever in a state Jesse Jackson won in 1988). Because Obama had a lead of 127 pledged delegates, Clinton would still be behind in pledged delegates.

Did Hillary Clinton win the popular vote?

No. While the pledged delegate count is probably the best metric for popular support, a lot of people are interested in the nebulous and problematic “popular vote”. The biggest question on what to do with the popular vote is what to do with Michigan and what to do with states that did not report a popular total. There are, however, very good estimates of who voted how in those states that did not report a popular vote total—so the most inclusive estimate would use this. In Michigan, where late polls suggest Obama had as much or more support than Clinton, Obama was not on the ballot. Clinton won 55% percent of the vote. Nobody, or “Uncommitted,” won 40% of the vote. Write-in votes for Obama were thrown out. If we want to count Michigan, we should count the “uncommitted” votes for Obama. While a minority of the uncommitteds might have wanted to vote for Edwards, the 27,694 discarded write-in votes, the 20% of Clinton supporters who indicated in exit polls that they would prefer to vote for another candidate, and the disenfranchised Obama supporters who voted in the Republican primary or just stayed home should more than make up the difference. By counting as many of the votes in as many states, Obama narrowly but definitively wins the popular vote.

Was Barack Obama’s campaign financed by giant far-left celebrity donations?

No. It is true that Obama has broken fundraising records—but he follows campaign finance laws like everybody else. The guy who cut my hair told me he’d heard that Oprah donated $100 million to Obama’s campaign. Apparently he believed that Obama’s remarkable fundraising success came from a few big donors who somehow bought the primary process.

Under federal election law, the maximum donation to a political campaign is $2,300. Since the primary and general elections count separately, there is a maximum individual donation of $4,600. By law, any donation over $200 is public information, so you can check to see where all the donations came from. Oprah, for example, donated $2300 to Obama’s campaign. Obama raised over $264 million. Over half of that came from donations under $200. The donations came from over 1.5 million people. His fundrasing report was so massive that it broke Excel 2003.

Did the press and the pundits pressure Clinton to leave the race prematurely?

Not really. As Obama said, Clinton had a right to run as long as she wanted to. However, as early as mid-February, it became clear to anybody who did the math what was going to happen. The media may have sounded the death knell for her campaign before all the votes were cast, but if anything the extreme focus on states Hillary was likely to win helped the campaign continue long after victory became impossible. As primary contests go, the race was extremely close—but Obama still won comfortably.

Was Hillary Clinton more electable than Barack Obama? Will Obama lose to McCain?

Probably not. Polls suggested that both Clinton and Obama would beat McCain. Clinton does better in a handful of prominent swing states—but Obama does better in more swing states. Obama is also competitive in states like Virginia and much of the mountain west. November projections are premature at this point—but it looks like Obama is at least as well situated to win as Clinton was.

Did Hillary lose?

It’s better to say that Obama won. Hillary ran a very strong campaign. She was a very strong candidate. It was very close. A year and a half ago, I thought nobody would be able to beat her for the nomination. While there are always what-ifs, I think it is pretty clear that Clinton is the strongest non-Obama candidate the Democrats have put forth since… well, Clinton. None of the other contenders were even in the same league. Clinton had immense support and a massive number of votes. Obama just had more.

Old Media is choking on New Media

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:28:00 EDT

I’ve been following politics pretty closely the past few months, and I’ve come to some conclusions about the media: there is not enough information on the Internet, blogs are too filtered, and instant communication hurts the distribution of information. This may surprise a few people.

My parents, knowing I’ve been something of a political junkie, frequently ask whether the lack of a connected television is difficult for me. What do I do during election night if I don’t have pundits in a box shouting at me? Of course, most of my information is coming from the Internet. Watching the pundit is a lot like reading a political website—except that you can’t skim the television. You can’t skip block quotes you’ve read elsewhere. You can’t cross-check anything that looks suspicious. If you want a specific bit of information, like what precincts in which county have reported, the Internet is a great place to look for it.

Unfortunately, the political reporters know this as well. While waiting for a campaign event, they are likely to be checking Blackberries to see the latest buzz on the gaffe of the day. The old media reporters are getting their cue from new media writers on what is worth pursuing. New media, in return, is getting most of its information from old media. Information (by necessity) removed from its context in one story gets further removed from context in another story. After reading political blogs, reporters ask candidates what is important to the arm-chair politicos rather than what seems relevant to the country or what nobody has asked before. Then, since communication is functionally instant, the loop repeats itself. Worse, since it’s easy to spend a large amount of time scanning many websites for little new information, there is not a lot of time left for actual reporting.

I like to imagine it wasn’t always like this. I like to imagine old newspapermen in their newspaperman hats would spend their downtime looking for a story by talking to people rather than browsing the Internet and trying to get in on a story that’s already been told. The Internet has great amounts of information—most of it repeated and respun multiple times. But it has nothing compared to the actual world. Rather than staring fixedly at a Blackberry, my mytho-newspapermen might have interacted with other people waiting for the same event and tried to get a sense of what they cared about and what was important to their community. If they wanted to see what other reporters were working on, they would have to wait for the next morning’s paper. They would be more influenced by their own judgment and hard work than the collective noise of their particular corner of the Internet.

In all probability, this rugged and uninfluenced reporter is a fiction. Worse, I probably got the image from a movie—so it’s not even my own fiction. And, in truth, the Internet is a great communications tool. But with all the glitz and appeal of new technology and new modes of transferring information, we can easily forget that good communication requires craft rather than volume or repetition. Good investigation requires time and subjectivity, both of which the Internet can steal.

I think this is part of the major harm of the Internet. It’s not web-addiction or cyber-bullying or MySpace stalkers or any of the other old, sensationalized problems-that-hurt-your-children translated into a new age. Rather, the harm is the difficulty we have sorting out what is productive and what is distraction. Whether it is a ball and a stick or a mouse and a keyboard, we’ve always had ways to waste our time. The Internet blurs the line between productive work and outright procrastination. This problem is solvable. Hopefully, in the next few years, we will sort out when it is time to disconnect from the web and experience the wide world.