All posts by sneaker

Thought -- caught in the act!

Bailouts vs. Bankruptcies

A friend of mine just sent me a link to the following article: Former Merrill exec gets $25 million for doing nothing; buys co-op – BloggingStocks. The article talks about one particular Merrill Lynch executive who walked away with a $25M golden parachute after being on the job for a very short while.

Here’s a pretty awesome deal: Work for Merrill Lynch for a few days until it’s acquired by Bank of America Corporation (NYSE: BAC) and receive a $25 million golden parachute.

Now, I realize that the BofA takeover of Merril Lynch was a firesale more than a government bailout, but the article did make me think more about the issue of could this happen in a bailout? Since a bailout doesn’t go through the bankruptcy process, companies cannot invalidate their sometimes ridiculous employment contracts to avoid situations like this. This is one of the reasons why I dislike the bailout process as opposed to a structured bankruptcy.

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Rants and Raves

iPhone’s Achilles’ heel: lack of background processing

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In August 2008 I switched to using the iPhone 3G (courtesy of a bad move by T-Mobile). I’ve now had the opportunity to use the phone for several months. In a lot of way the iPhone is a phenomenal device. It’s the first device to truly usher in the era of hand-held computing. Besides the great design and UI of the iPhone, what is even greater yet is the AppStore. The Appstore became the catalyst for finally loosening (and hopefully) breaking the stranglehold that carriers had on devices and software applications that could be developed on the handsets. It has opened up a whole new segment for iPhone application development and spawned a whole new sector for creativity and entrepreneurship (whether these can be successful businesses of not remains to be seen and can be the subject of a whole blog post in itself).

Apple's iPhone 3G

However, the iPhone as a device has some severe limitations. Limitations, which remind me of the launch of the Palm VII approximately a decade ago. Yes, it was 1999 and the web was abuzz with the coolest new wireless handheld available then, the Palm VII. The Palm VII was a non-multitasking device, like the iPhone.  Right there is my biggest gripe with the iPhone — that the OS doesn’t support multi-tasking and background applications. I understand that this was done for managing the battery life of the device, but the iPhone’s inability to run background tasks prevents it from being used for several rather unique applications.

Location-based services become a whole lot more interesting when they can actually notify the user depending on the users location. I’ve had the Loopt application on the iPhone since the day I got the iPhone. However, an application like Loopt is completely wasted on the iPhone since it cannot do background notification. In addition several tracking and logging applications presently cannot be built/used since they would require exclusive use fo the phone, require that it is on all the time and would totally drain the battery on the iPhone. One rather intriguing application fo the iPhone would be monitoring personal safety (especially in the case of the elderly). There are companies that are building customer devices for doing this and their custom devices have a lot less capability than an iPhone has today. If only the iPhone would allow for background processing for it to monitor the accelerometers and sensors periodically it could be used for this immensely useful task. These are just two examples, but there are several more.

Apple has promiseded that it will provide push notification for the iPhone soon, however, push notification for the iPhone is not sufficient. For the iPhone to be a truly capable platform it will eentually need to provide background tasks and still be able to manage battery life. Conceptually this doesn’t sound like a impossible task. What does make it complicated is the ability for application developers to write applications that could be battery hogs. To overcome this Apple should put together a system that provides users with a “energy efficiency” score for applications and allow auditing to identify any applications that are being battery hogs. The battery life of the device should be a resource that can be managed.

The future of the Palm platform was crippled by many things, but in my opinion, Palm lost the battle when they couldn’t release an OS update for their devices for several years. The OS is a key component of the device and without a proper OS, the usability and future potential of the device is compromised. I sincerely hope that Apple realizes that having a more or less single tasking OS for the iPhone is not the right strategy and they need to address this issue in order to ensure the viability of the iPhone as a platform. Otherwise, it too will go the way of Palm.

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News

Blogging 2.009

I have had a rocky relationship with blogging over the years. There have been times when I have been blogging actively and others when I have taken down the site altogether. Thinking back, I launched my personal website back in 1996. The original site was at sneaker.pc.cs.cmu.edu and then moved to www.sneaker.org when I got my own domain. Back then I used to have a section I referred to internally as  ‘Sneaker’s Log,’ on the front page where I posted periodic news and updates. Looking back at it now, I guess that could be considered my first blog, except that was well before blogging as a term ever became popular.

I stopped writing here a while ago, and only had a few sporadic posts over the years. However, I’ve still been actively reading various blogs and sharing posts on my Shared Items on Google Reader and as of late also been more active on Twitter (@manukumar).

For 2009, I hope to make a return to blogging more often and resurrect this site. I won’t make any promises, and I don’t really do resolutions, but here’s looking forward to post more often in 2009. Happy New Year!

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Rants and Raves

T-Mobile customers here is your chance to get an iPhone without early termination fees!

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T-mobile just made a bad move. They sent out a notice (unfortunately, I don’t have mine handy at the moment, otherwise I would scan it in here) saying that they will be raising their incoming and outgoing text message rates from $0.15 per message to $0.20 per message.

I don’t have an SMS plan on my T-mobile account — basically because it annoys me that carriers charge so much for text messaging. It is the cheapest part of their service and they rake in the money with it. TechCrunch had an post about this as well.

Well, since I am under a contract with T-Mo, but they changed the rates on me, I called them up and told them I would like to terminate my contract with T-Mo since if they want to increase my rate, then I should have the option to cancel my contract. The customer service rep directed me to their cancellation/retention department. There I spoke with the agent and she informed me that I have until August 18th to change carriers. As long as I change carriers by August 18th and transfer my numbers over to a new service by that date, then I would not be assessed the early termination fee!

So for any other folks out there on a T-Mo contract, the SMS rate change may be your ticket to get out of the T-Mo contract and switch to an iPhone (or anything else) you may want to. I hate AT&T just as much as anyone can, but since Apple extended their exclusivity on the iPhone, I guess Mr. Jobs leaves me no other choice but to give in to AT&T if I want to get with the times.

Anyhow, your mileage may wary on getting out of your T-Mo contract, but feel free to post in the comments and let me and others know how it goes. I’ll update this post depending on my experience soon.

Update: The cancellation worked successfully. An early termination fee was assessed and I had to call up T-Mobile once again to complain about it and then they took it off.

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