Drag Reduction

February 2007: Will orbiting junk rule out space travel? (Ars Technica) February 2009: Orbiting...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:40:46 -0400

February 2007: Will orbiting junk rule out space travel? (Ars Technica)

February 2009: Orbiting space junk heightens risk of satellite catastrophes (Ars Technica)

April 2009: Space Junk Forcing More Evasive Maneuvers (Wired)

This sounds familiar…

"The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available."

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:36:21 -0400

“The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available.”

- Jeff Zucker, President & CEO of NBC Universal, on Hulu

(Hulu rocks, by the way.)

Blocking the Box

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:17:48 -0400

Blocking the Box:

New York City Traffic Enforcement Agents, you have my enthusiastic support.

GPS for airplanes

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:30:13 -0400

GPS for airplanes:

How is it, I ask you, that airplanes did not have GPS before? Is it possible that it only recently occurred to someone that this might be a good idea?

Reopen Last Closed... Hm.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:22:00 -0400

This is random, but I’m puzzled.

Upon request, Safari 3 will happily either “Reopen Last Closed Window” or “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”. I use these a lot, particularly the latter.

Strangely, neither function works with a window aimed at Google Reader. Try it:

Open Google Reader in a new window.
Close that window.
History → Reopen Last Closed Window is… grayed out?

And then,

Open Google Reader in a new window.
Quit Safari.
Launch Safari.
History → Reopen All Windows From Last Session, and you will find an empty window where Reader ought to be.

Odd.

Update: Both functions work fine with Gmail and Google Calendar, in case you were wondering.

Infinity is just a concept

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:57:02 -0400

From a piece in the New York Times on the staggering amount of garbage in the world’s oceans:

“Trash is clogging the arteries of the planet,” [said Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of the N.O.A.A.]. “We’re beginning to wake up to the fact that the planet is not infinitely resilient.” For ages humanity saw in the ocean a sublime grandeur suggestive of eternity. No longer. Surveying the debris on remote beaches like Gore Point, we see that the ocean is more finite than we’d thought. Now it is the sublime grandeur of our civilization but also of our waste that inspires awe.

Funny how essentially every environmental problem humanity has ever faced (read: caused) — deforestation, endangered species, waterway contamination, global warming, etc. — was a result of treating some aspect of the environment as infinite until discovering that, in fact, it wasn’t.

Makes me wonder,

How long until we finally admit that this is not a good assumption?
How many other environmental systems, similarly treated, are well on their way to running-out or filling-up?

How many IRS agents does it take to...

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:25:00 -0400

From a recent Times post on the unsurprising complexity of IRS collection procedures:

Between 2002 and 2007, the I.R.S. sent more than 83 million first notices over about $444 billion in taxes. By the end of fiscal year 2007, $79.3 billion was collected, the report said.

That’s roughly 1 first notice per thousand delinquent dollars collected (not counting the various other higher-order ‘phases’ in the charming flowchart).

I’m wondering what the ratio of dollars spent to dollars collected would be here, and the GAO is apparently wondering the same thing. Economics suggests that they are operating at the point where the marginal cost of more-aggressive collection exceeds the marginal return, but no one can really say where that point is because the IRS is also suffering from a serious “lack of agencywide cost-benefit data and related performance measures”.

Government efficiency and accountability at its finest.

Spaces & Window Layering in 10.5.4

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:18:45 -0400

10.5.4 was released yesterday, and Spaces window layering is still broken.

Sigh.

Focusing on Price and Missing the Point

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:57:56 -0400

In a piece of mediocre commentary (hat tip: John Gruber), Michael Rosenwald of the Washington Post attempts to put the low low purchase price of the upcoming iPhone 3G into perspective.

He works hard to explain how and why $200 seems so shockingly cheap compared to the previous $400 and original $600 price tags. (Behavioral economists apparently say that it is because $200 is, in fact, much less money than $400… and it’s way less than $600.) Nice work, Michael, that’s super enlightening.

Unfortunately, the man skips right over the actual issue. Says Mr. Rosenwald,

Of course, it will cost me an extra $10 a month in AT&T service fees, thus wiping out any gains, real or psychological, over the two-year contract period. [University of Chicago Economist Richard Thaler] said we tend to “underweight” these costs because they are off in the future. “There will be people who crunch the numbers, but the people who fall in love with the phone right away won’t,” he said.

I’m not saying this isn’t true — everything we’ve been reading says that it is exactly true. I’m just saying, Apple makes good products. And Apple is known for selling those products based purely on their quality — c.f., Apple’s iPhone ads. The message isn’t “this is how sexy you will be if you buy this phone”, it’s not “this is how smooth you will be if you buy this phone”, and it’s not “this is how many friends you will have if you buy this phone”; the message is, “check out this amazing phone.”

Apple should not be fooling people into buying the iPhone 3G — it’s beneath them.

Apple, iPhone 3G, and Honesty in Marketing

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:40:00 -0400

As you no-doubt have heard, there’s a newer, faster, cheaper iPhone on the way. Not just “faster” and “cheaper”, in fact, but says Apple: “Twice as fast. Half the price.”

This, friends, is a big fat lie — it may well be twice as fast, but the iPhone 3G is not half the price of the original iPhone. This is not a point I intend to argue — it is not news. The up-front purchase cost of an 8 GB iPhone 3G is $200 lower than that of an 8 GB original iPhone, but AT&T will be hiking the cost of the data plan and (supposedly) making us pay for formerly included text messages, the upshot being that the Total Cost of Ownership (purchase price plus monthly fee times term of contract) of an 8 GB iPhone just increased by $160.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that Steve Jobs got up there on stage and said “half the price”. The big deal is that Apple’s tagline for the new iPhone says “half the price”. The big deal is that none other than the New York Times says “Apple Aims for the Masses With a Cheaper iPhone”. And it’s a lie: the money gets paid out differently, sure, but someone who could not afford the original iPhone can’t afford this one either, and Apple is trying to fool them into buying it anyway.

I don’t care that the new iPhone is more expensive (OK, I care a little); I don’t care if AT&T’s 2x charge for 3G vs. EDGE data is justified; and I don’t care if the total cost of an iPhone 3G is now more in-line with other 3G smartphones. What I care about is that Apple won’t stand up and admit it. Why do they insist on selling the iPhone 3G as cheaper when it’s obviously not, and why is everyone OK with this?

Let’s just face it, Apple: this whole thing is sleazy, and we expect better.

Update: AT&T has officially announced rate plans for the iPhone 3G. No surprises: $10 price increase from the 2G data plan, and text messages are no longer included. Also, they used the word “iReady”. For real.

They're simple machines - they didn't know any better

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:59:00 -0400

They're simple machines - they didn't know any better:

Was Indiana Jones really worth it?

The Economics of Environmentalism - Links

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:19:08 -0400

Much as we might like to think that environmental awareness should be enough to make people change their habits, the real driver of change is economics.

Making a point that I’m sure had been made many times before and has been made many times since, Wired claimed back at the end of 2005 that high gas prices were good for America because they pushed more research money (and interest) toward alternatives. Fast forward to today — we haven’t seen that $5 gas yet, but already there are signs that the economics of high gas prices are getting things done. Three articles in the past two days:

… and this is just a small selection of automotive impacts.

So the next time you want to affect sweeping social change, forget the appeals to morality and good-conscience — just hit people in the wallet.

Google & Address Book Sync in 10.5.3

Thu, 29 May 2008 10:09:00 -0400

So one interesting new feature of 10.5.3 is that it apparently enables syncing of the Mac OS X Address Book with one’s Google Contacts. This is great, but there is some funny business…

Are you one of those people who find that no matter how hard you try to keep your contact info organized, it always winds up scattered all over?

Yes — tell me more!

We’re happy to tell you that starting today, it’s easier to sync up your contact lists. The Address Book application in Mac OS X 10.5.3 now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with Google Contacts. [Emphasis added.]

Uh… only iPhone users? What does syncing my Google Contacts with my Address Book have to do with my iPhone? What, only iPhone users would be interested in having access to their contacts from any computer at any time? Au contraire, iPhone users already have their entire Address Book on-hand at all times. They are probably even less excited about this new feature than other people.

But wait, there’s more!

To try it, go to the Address Book menu, choose Preferences, and then check Synchronize with Google. It’ll ask for your Google account and password, then automatically update your contacts every time you sync your iPhone. [Emphasis added.]

So you’re telling me that if I change something in my Address Book and then want to have that change reflected in my Google Contacts (or vice-versa), all I have to do is… sync my iPhone? WTF? I ask again, what does syncing my Google Contacts with my Address Book have to do with my iPhone?

Funny business, folks — I smell some behind-the-scenes negotiations between Apple and Google, and it smells suspiciously like… .Mac.

Update: Ars has the scoop on hacking a regular iPod plist file to enable syncing for those without iPhones, evidence that this really is an arbitrary restriction. It’s unclear when exactly syncing will happen, but perhaps when said iPod is synced with iTunes?

Spaces & Window Layering in 10.5.3

Wed, 28 May 2008 15:44:00 -0400

According to Apple’s release notes,

[This update] resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.

But no, it doesn’t. Starting with two empty spaces, try this:

Launch iTunes in space 1. iTunes is now active (“has the focus”) in space 1.
Switch to space 2. With no open windows, Finder becomes active in space 2.
Switch back to space 1. Guess who still has the focus, even with no open windows in space 1? (A: Finder.)

Now try this:

Go back to space 1 and launch Safari.
Open another Safari window (now you have two in space 1) and move one of them to space 2 (via whichever of the various ways of doing this is your favorite).
Go back to space 1 and make iTunes active.
Switch to space 2 — Safari takes the focus, because there are no iTunes windows in space 2.
Switch back to space 1 — guess who still has the focus? (A: Safari.) Guess who is now covering up your iTunes window? (A: Safari again.) Guess who didn’t fix the window-ordering bug? (A: Apple.)

And I was so hoping, too.

This post resolves an issue in which claiming to have fixed something but not actually fixing it makes the author very grumpy.

Actually, no, it doesn’t.

PS Submitted to Radar back in February, 5743904 and 5744015. Closed as duplicates shortly thereafter.

Rare Meat & Wet Feet

Mon, 26 May 2008 12:54:00 -0400

Rare Meat & Wet Feet:

This is the podiatrical equivalent of discussing barbecuing with an epidemiologist.

Not recommended.

Speaking of gas prices

Fri, 23 May 2008 15:00:00 -0400

James Duncan Davidson, telling it like it is:

The price of oil and gas may fluctuate down again in the near future, but if it does, it’ll come back up and go even higher. It’s a simple story of demand meets supply of a finite resource. [ More… ]

You don’t have to be an economist to understand that concept. A few-month break from the federal gas tax may sound like “relief”, but best enjoy the current prices while you can. Boo hoo.

Hat Tip: Dan Benjamin

They didn't want your lot anyway.

Mon, 05 May 2008 14:54:00 -0400

Recently asked to name “a credible economist” who supports her plan for gas-tax relief, Hillary responded:

Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.

And that, folks, is how you roll an opportunity to make some sense into not one, but three more points down the hole.

(For those keeping score: −1 for failure to express a rational argument, −2 for the insultingly colloquial tone.)

Well played, Hillary.

Hat Tip: Justin Wolfers.

-1 for Hillary

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:36:00 -0400

Gas-tax relief:

Voters buy gas, support paying less for it;
John McCain knows this, wants votes; and
Hillary Clinton wants in on that action.

Clue that a proposed economic initiative is a bad idea:

Economists think it is a bad idea.

Barack Obama says: don’t be stupid.

A Note on Back Issues

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:18:00 -0400

In a past life, the DR was powered by Blogger. Posts from that era still haunt Blogger-land. Some are good, some are not.

If, for whatever reason, you want to dust off some of the old material, here are a few respectable entries:

And this one too, just so that you don’t think that everything in there is about word-use. (Just the good ones.)