• unresponsive UI
• terrible battery life
• “bad” apps easily leading to worse battery life or constant “force closes”
• fragmentation (hard for app devs to write once and get it to work well on all of the different kinds of hardware and OS versions + hacked vendor UIs)
• short window of hardware vendor support for major OS updates, typically much less than the typical 2 year contract (infographic)

The Motorola phone hardware was pretty robust (only minor dings after 2 years and I dropped it on concrete/asphalt more times than I’d really like to admit), but the software was just too awful. If you want a specific example, once I tried to call Amanda with my Droid. I was able to pull up her entry in my contacts, but then the UI went out to lunch and refused any input when I’d try clicking on the number I wanted to call or anything else for that matter. After a minute or so of poking it, I gave up, hit the power/sleep button, and put it back in my pocket. Ten minutes later, it finally got around to calling her from my pocket. I’m generally a fan of Google, but Android seems to have less polish on it than their usually “beta” web applications. When your solution to unresponsive software and poor battery life is to bump up the hardware specs every month (now with a 2 GHz dual core!), I think you’re missing the mark. Really seems like they need to take some time and work on optimizing the software to better suit mobile use than to just rely on Moore’s law to make up for clunky software.

• What You Need to Know About the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012 (Huffington Post)
• Explainer: understanding Sopa (great little animation from The Guardian)
• MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It (Popular Mechanics)
• How SOPA Creates The Architecture For Much More Widespread Censorship (TechDirt)
• The Myth That SOPA/PIPA Only Impact ‘Foreign Sites’ (TechDirt)
• SOPA Supporters Learning (Slowly) That Pissing Off Reddit Is A Bad Idea (TechDirt)

On an happier and only tangentially related note (GoDaddy – Go = Daddy), anyone who actually reads my excuse for a blog has probably noticed the complete lack of updates in over a year. Turns out being a Dad pretty effectively consumes all of your time, especially if you’re trying to keep up with Addy.

acgottlieb.blogspot.com

Surprise!  We’d been up to Vanderbilt for our last clinic visit before the planned c-section and had just finished our tour of L&D and were walking to the car to head home when baby Adelaide must’ve decided she liked the place so much she wanted to stay.  Amanda’s water broke and so we went right back in and now baby Addy’s here!  She was born @ 13:01 on the 17th and weighed in at a healthy 6 lbs 11 oz at 19 1/w inches.  Not bad for 4 weeks early!

Photos we’ve taken of baby Adelaide

“Cost of the building next generation of supercomputers is not the problem. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.”

That’s one thing that sometimes frustrates me when it comes to working with academics who want to get their own HPC system. For example, you may be looking at an annual facilities cost that’s say 10-20% of the original purchase cost of the system. It’s usually a whole lot easier to get funding from the fed or elsewhere for a 1 time big purchase than it is to get them to provide you with an annual budget for operational expenses. I’ve certainly heard horror stories of folks that went out and got a grant to buy a cluster and only talked to the university computing folks after it arrived to find out there weren’t enough data center resources (floor space, power, cooling) available to unbox the thing and turn it on. Then you end up in situations where they unbox a small handful of rackmount compute nodes and stuff one under each grad student’s desk in order to get something out of it. Not quite the cluster they were hoping for, but that’s arguably better than going back to the grant agency after a few years to tell them you haven’t published anything with the system you bought since you didn’t think to make sure there was a place to put it before you pursued the grant.

A more frequent pet peeve of mine is the end users that don’t understand why HPC storage doesn’t cost the same per TB as they can get from Best Buy. “But I just saw in their ad last week that I can get a 2TB drive for $100. You should give me way more storage on your HPC system than you do because it’s so cheap.” Right. Who cares about performance or scalability or reliability and BER. Certainly not them until they start complaining that the system is slow or demand to know why their data went poof.

So far I’ve been pretty pleased with it.  In general, integration with Google services is pretty solid (gmail, calendar, contacts).  There’s the Google Market for installing new apps, and there are lots of pretty good free apps.  At some point I’ll probably do some followup posts highlighting some of the apps I find clever/useful.  The SDK is readily available and more importantly you don’t have to hack the phone to install non-Market apps (such as those you wrote yourself).  So Google isn’t maintaining a chokehold on app distribution as Apple is.  There are some really neat features of the Android SDK/API (e.g., a barcode scanner app can easily export it’s scanning routines so that other apps may rely on them).  And of course there’s the added flexibility you get with multitasking support.  But there are tradeoffs that come with this freedom.

I’ve never owned an iPhone/iPod Touch, but I suspect Apple has easily done a better job when it comes to general polish and usability.  While a vanilla Android install seems pretty snappy (at least on the Droid), you can definitely bump into issues with responsiveness especially as you install more apps.  You can definitely see the appeal of Apple’s approach to a restricted hardware platform since you know how it will perform, what features it will have, etc.  Since Android runs on a variety of platforms, there’s no guarantee how fast a CPU, how much memory, how much storage, etc are available.  And since it relies on every manufacturer to manage OS ports for their devices, there’s no guarantee that new OS releases will make it to all phones (or in a timely manner).

As far as the Motorola Droid in particular, it’s been a pretty solid phone.  It’s got some heft to it, but feels more solid than heavy to me.  The screen is pretty fantastic, and call quality is good.  It’s nice having a standard headphone jack and microUSB connector instead of any vendor-specific nonsense.  Most of the time, I find myself using the on-screen keyboard (especially after downloading the 3rd party Better Keyboard app), but occasionally having a physical keyboard is nice (such as when typing up long emails, or funky passwords).  They’ve certainly made some sacrifices with the keyboard to keep the size/weight down (keys aren’t offset and they’re pretty flat without as much of the usual tactile feedback you’d like).

What I find most odd is their choice of the Dpad.  It’s pretty big and forces you to a smaller keyboard.  But it’s on the right side instead of standard left as you’d find on a video game controller.  Makes it a little awkward since there are some pretty decent game emulators out there (I’ve got NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators installed at the moment so I can play Zelda, Mario, Sonic, etc).  Not bad for a phone.

That was all until recently when they announced that they’d signed a deal to get access to some of Sony’s back-catalog (i.e., stuff that’s at least a couple years old), were eliminating all grandfathered subscriptions, and putting in a significant price hike for all. I believe just prior to this, you could get 50 tracks a month for $16. The new plan they plan on switching me over to as soon as my current annual subscription runs out is 35 tracks a month for $16. I can accept that they may need to cut back on plans like mine due to the incredibly low price per track, but such a drastic change makes me want to kick them to the curb as soon as my contract’s up and take my business elsewhere. Really seems like they should give existing subscribers the option to keep their existing plan (or at least the previous incarnation, before the recent hike) and restrict us to the indie labels. I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the major label stuff. As I said, if I wanted it, I’d go elsewhere. I came to eMusic for what made them different. But now that their wanting to be like everyone else. Guess I’ll need to find some place new to get my indie music fix.

CEO’s blog post and the ~1500 mostly negative posts about this