• You must be a Time Warner customer to use the service.
• You must be a RoadRunner customer to use the service (RoadRunner is the brand name for TWC’s cable modem service).
• You can only use this service at the specific IP address of your RoadRunner account.  You cannot be at the Starbuck’s down the street. You cannot be at your neighbors house that also has TWC and RoadRunner but a different IP address.  You cannot be traveling to a hotel in a far off city.
• TWC’s terms of conditions on their service already allows me to plug as many TVs into my cable feed as I would like. I can have a TV in every room and closet in my house.

Evidently, some networks don’t get it. They won’t let me have a TV called “iPad” in my house.  I can plug a TV made by Mitsibushi or Sony into my living room but I cannot stream that same content to my iPad.

Therefore, if my wife wants to watch an evening soap opera such as “Desperate Housewives” I cannot go into my living room and watch the Discovery Channel. To make matters just as bad (so that ABC doesn’t get a break here), we cannot do the reverse and have her watch Desperate Housewives on her iPad while I hog the TV in the family room for Discovery.  Instead we have to record one of the shows on our DVR and watch it later.

Let’s build on that last point. Instead of watching live TV that forces me to sit through commercials, the content providers are forcing me to record the show on DVR where I am certain to fast forward through the commercials.  So by enforcing this rule that costs them no money, they make less money.

RANT: TO ALL OF THE CONTENT PROVIDERS ON TIME WARNER CABLE, WHY DON’T YOU THINK JUST A LITTLE BIT BEFORE YOU MAKE A STUPID RULE THAT HURTS YOUR ADVERTISERS AND YOUR CONSUMERS AND COSTS YOU ZERO MONEY!

Below is the email from Time Warner Cable explaining the situation.

TWCable TV App For iPad

View Web Version

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1. The generic private message
2. Preemptive Disclaimers
3. Abuse of carbon copy
4. The Soft Opt-In
5. The Random Cause Invitation

Number 3 is most interesting as so many people violate the simple rule:

Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.

Have you ever violated the principle of #3?  I know that I have and I know that I get at least 5 work emails a day that violate this rule!

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First, a bit about myself. I hate taxes. I know that I need to pay them. I know that I make a good living (not from this blog mind you) and I need to pay into the system more than some others that don’t work as hard as I work. I get all of that.

In general though, I don’t want to pay taxes and I definitely don’t want to pay MORE taxes. I would much prefer that the federal, state, and local governments do a better job of using my money wisely. I would also appreciate that my money is not transferred to someone that won’t work (strong distinction from “can’t work” and “can’t find work”). In fact, if an adult WON’T work then I am perfectly comfortable with that adult starving to death and dying. Probably my only regret in that scenario is that my tax dollars will likely have to go to bury his sorry body. I realize that this isn’t a very Christian attitude but, frankly, God gave that adult man or woman 2 legs, 2 arms and a brain to use to work – not to live off of the generosity of others.

Now, back to the President’s proposals. I just don’t get it. Something doesn’t make sense. According to CBS News:

President Barack Obama will call on Congress to pass new tax breaks that would allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their new capital investments through 2011, the latest in a series of proposals the White House is rolling out in hopes of jump-starting economic growth ahead of the November elections.

An administration official said the tax breaks would save businesses $200 billion over two years, allowing companies to have more cash on hand. The president will outline the proposal during a speech on the economy in Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday.

I understand that part on a simplistic level. It makes perfect sense to me that if businesses don’t have to pay taxes on capital investments, they will be able to justify more money (the original money plus the tax money they didn’t have to spend) on capital investments. They might even spend more money on that as the internal return on that investment would be a little bit better without the tax overhead. This would potentially mean more purchases of goods by businesses which, in theory, would spark more jobs to be created.

However, according to the Washinton Post:

Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn’t want to spend it hiring anyone.

Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. And as several major firms report impressive earnings this week, the money continues to flow into firms’ coffers.

This means that the businesses are doing well, even if people are not doing well. So the President’s message is that we need to give these rich businesses an incentive to have them spend the money and that incentive will be taxes. I guess that makes sense. How about doing the reverse though? Why not tax them on the cash that they leave laying around and don’t invest? That way the US coffers don’t go down but actually might go up if they don’t spend it AND we get the benefit of increasing capital expenditures.  In fact, we might get MORE business spending with my plan. Why not heavily tax any cash that is in excess of last year’s cash reserves for the company.

It gets a bit more confusing. When it comes to people, the President feels the exact opposite as he does on businesses. He is fully okay with taxing a person more if they make more money. He wants to increase taxes on those that make a certain amount ($250K seems to be the magic number right now). This is exactly the opposite of what he is doing for businesses. For people he isn’t incenting them to spend more money to jumpstart the economy, he is simply taxing them for making more money. 

If a person last year made $220K and then had a great year and made $275K, the President wants to sock it to that enterprising citizen. He wants to charge him more for the right to be a US citizen and live in this great land. That 25% increase is going to drive that individual to pay a much higher rate of income tax. But not the company that is in the same city as the individual. That company has increased its cash by 25% (according to the article cited above) and it is receiving a tax break, not a tax bill.

How about a similar offer to people, Mr. President? How about you say that you don’t have to pay taxes on anything that you buy that generates manufacturing jobs in the US.  Buy a car – get a tax write-off for your down payment.  Buy a house – get a tax write-off for your down payment. Replace the windows in your house – no taxes on that money.  Buy a pizza – that isn’t taxable either. Even your latte at Starbuck’s should have no taxes if you treated people like you treat corporations. Buy a TV or computer manufactured in China though and you pay income taxes. Sorry Best Buy and Apple – you get screwed in my plan but not really since it just remains status quo for you. The people that benefit are the people that live within the borders of the land of the free and the brave.

Like I said above, I don’t like taxes. I know that there has to be some taxes because I want to have those brave soldiers that rescue ships that are attacked by pirates. But how about a little common sense and fair play when it comes to the tax burden.

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Now with products like the Kindle and the iPad (and the several others that have come on to the market that will likely fail), we have either arrived at or have become very close to the age of the digital book. It seems quite unlikely that the cost of the ebook reader will go dramatically higher over time and it is more likely that the cost of a good quality ebook reader drops below $100. The price maybe goes to under $50 if the ebook reader can be successfully locked into one type of proprietary book format that locks the reader to one type of store (so that the store can subsidize the cost of the reader in return for future book sales).

Crunchgear recently ran an article with the prediction of the end of paper book.  It is a good article and worth reading.

Here are my predictions:

• within 5 years most (more that 51%) students will not be required to buy paper based books at their college.
• within 5 years I give it 50/50 odds that ebooks with an ISBN number exceed the sale of paper based books with an ISBN.
• within 10 years, I give it 90/10 odds (meaning I would take a 10:1 bet)

The risk in my argument is there may be a rush to non-proprietary standards. Unlike the music industry where it was quite easy to take a CD and convert it to a musical file (and thus was born MP3s and Napster), it is quite difficult to convert your paper based book to an electronic version. So the strength of a non-proprietary standard is not in place. This means it is in the interests of the book industry to lock everyone to their proprietary standard and give away the reader so that they can control the sales of books. I think that Bezos says he gets 10 ebooks from every Kindle, if he can make the math work to get enough ebooks per Kindle to offset the cost down to $50 then he would be fool to not do that.

The recent dropping of the price of the Kindle are a perfect example of giving away the reader to sell more books. Jeff should hire a bunch of marketing guys from Gillette so that he can learn about razors and razor blades. The low cost of the razor is offset with the refill of that razor. He could also hire some folks from HP/Brother/Lexmark as their printer market is also driven the same way.

If the standards become ubiquitous, it is difficult for the books to offset the cost of the reader. The manufacturer of the reader must sell the reader for greater than the cost of manufacturing.  This is not true of the book readers on the market today. Nearly all book readers on the market today can open only one store’s books and therefore there is a symbiotic relationship between the success of the store and the success of the device.

The flip side could also be true. I could see Steve Jobs doing the reverse tactic that may be even more effective. Jobs is in the business of selling computers (although that is arguable considering the amount of money that the iTunes store makes on music). With books, he has the ability to change the argument since there are no ebook MP3 equivalents. He could say, “Buy my reader (iPad) and I will give you 20 ebooks for free out of this limited list of 250 ebooks.” If I was an author and Steve came to me and said, “Let me have your ebook for $1 royalty and I will make it one of the 250,” I would jump at the opportunity. For Steve, this would be a cost of $20 but for the buyer of the iPad, this would be a benefit of $200 to the user. I am not sure that Bezos can make the same deal since his real job is to sell books, not to sell Kindles (which is why his Kindle software sits on so many other platforms). Bezos wants to make the reader proprietary so that he personally can sell more books and his competitors like Barnes & Noble can’t compete with him on selling books.

Steve Jobs should be pushing for the creation of standards and he should be giving away his ebook format to anyone that wants to use it.  Then, he can beat his fellow reader manufacturers and making an insanely great reader – something that his company is uniquely setup to accomplish.

Interestingly, the publishers of books have more to fear from Amazon then they do from Apple (unlike the music publishers). Amazon is sitting at a perfect point to lock up a commanding portion of the market and dictate terms to the publishers. Apple on the other hand will have a much more difficult time in doing to the book market what it did to the music market (by making the iPod the King Kong of music players). While the iPad has the ability to be the commanding presence in the emerging tablet market, it is not nearly as well positioned to be the commanding presence in the book market. There are rumors of an upcoming iPod Touch that is an inch or so larger than the current format so that product may be the horse to ride in the dominance of the ebook marketplace.

For a lover of reading and company strategy, the next 5 years are going to be very interesting. Will my prediction come true? Eventually, I am certain of this, it is really the timing that is in question. I am also certain that my ability to start a company that would ride this wave is probably gone. It will now be fought by multi-billion dollar corporations like Apple, Amazon and the various book publishers.

BTW, if you want to know more about Timm Martin, the founder of the company that I referred to above, check out his blogs on technology at DevTopics and CSharp411.

PS to Steve Jobs: Steve, if you are reading this article and are willing to include a book that I write in each iPad and pay me a buck for that book, please call me!  I will have the book written within a month!!  Heck, I might even get it done for 50 cents!

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This is a little frustrating. I get the antenna being affected by my hand but this proximity sensor problem is just bad engineering (either software or hardware).

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I say “revised” because AT&T and Apple screwed up and missed my first delivery date.  The unit was supposed to ship on July 2 but they updated their date on July 3 to say that it was going to ship a week or so later. I was upset and I called Apple – the very polite and professional rep apologized but couldn’t change the ship date. He did give me a bumper as a consolation gift – good thing too as it turns out.

Like others on the web, I can easily see a degradation of the signal by holding the phone with my left hand.

I wanted to create a video of my experience. Unfortunately, I now understand why most of the videos on the web are so poor – it is really hard to record this experience due to the relatively small signal strength indicator, the very reflective screen, and the fact that you have to physically hold the phone in order to see the problem – you can’t just lay it on a table.

So this post turns into me saying “me too” which, I acknowledge, is pretty boring.

I have slightly larger than normal hands. I also used to be an athlete and my hands are very strong. Due to this, it is quite likely the pad of my hand below my thumb, is larger than most people.  According to the site, we live in INTERESTING TIMES (thanks for the image), this muscle group is the Adductor pollicis, Flexor pollicis brevis, and Abductor pollicis brevis.

When I hold the phone in my right hand, the signal strength is full bars. When I switch the phone to my left hand (still standing in exactly the same place), the number of bars drops over the course of about 5-10 seconds. It drops to virtually be flat line.

I don’t need to hold it tightly, the phenomenon happens in a very lose grip. In fact, my grip can be so loose that if I rotate my hand, the phone will fall out (I did this over a sofa to prove it to myself). I know that other bloggers have suggested that you need to hold it with a death grip, “Kung Fu” grip, or in an awkward Twister style contortion. This appears to be implying that it is inconvenient to hold the phone in the offending way. This is not the case for me, it is a casual grip in the most natural holding position possible. I am assuming that this difference could be the size of the pad of my hand, as I said above.

I have no idea if this will cause a dropped call.  I haven’t had the phone long enough for this to be truly tested.

I know that Apple says this is a software bug. This is pure spin and, forgive my vulgarity, it is pure bullshit. Even if the code was misrepresenting the signal strength in the bars, it is still changing that representation with the position of my hand. This means that it is not software related by environmental.

So, am I so upset that I am returning the phone?  No! It is still the best phone on the market and definitely the best phone on the AT&T network (I am forced to be on this lousy network due a corporate contract with my employer). I will probably have to enclose the phone in some kind of case, something that I have not done for the previous phones that I have owned. I don’t like cases as they exaggerate the size of the phone in my pocket.  I will try to find the thinnest case that I can find.

The iPhone 4 is a dramatic step forward in usability and speed compared to my old iPhone 3G. It is wicked fast and responds to my touches and swipes with a level of fluidity that I would never have expected. It is simply a joy to use.

Members of my family own the various Android phones. They currently are envious of my new iPhone 4 and if the iPhone 4 was available on the Verizon network, they both would trade in their Android phones for a new iPhone 4.

I know that Apple is holding a press conference tomorrow and supposedly this issue will be discussed.  I await their honesty with baited breath! My opinion of Apple for perpetuating this spin has dropped considerably. They should have owned up to it already and I am disappointed that they tried to play the spin game. I can almost guarantee that there were some engineers at Apple that knew that the ‘software bug’ ploy was bullshit (there are news reports that this may be true).  If I can come to the conclusion in 3 minutes of testing, surely they could have come to the same conclusion after a day or two of testing.

While I couldn’t do a video of my own, CNET did one that was pretty consistent with what I was trying to do. They have better production tools than I own. The only difference is that I wanted to hold the phone with my left hand, show the degradation, and then switch it to my right hand to show it pop back up.  They say in their video that it takes a minute – my testing shows about 5-10 seconds.

UPDATE:
I just saw this on the Wall Street Journal:

Apple engineers were aware of the risks associated with the iPhone 4′s new antenna design as early as a year ago, but Steve Jobs liked the design it so much that Apple went ahead with its development, said a person familiar with the matter.

The company kept such a shroud of secrecy over the new phone’s development that the device didn’t get the kind of real-world testing that would have exposed such problems in phones by other manufacturers, said people familiar with the matter.

Apple’s iPhone 4 has been dogged by reports of antenna-reception problems since its launch last month.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369311876558240.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

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But, is that really the fix? No.

All wireless devices need antennas.  If you are as old as I am, there is a chance that your first mobile phone was a “bag phone” or a “car installed phone”. These phones were massive and required a car or, at least, a briefcase to carry them around. The towers were so far dispersed that you needed a BIG antenna that was putting out mega-wattage to reach them. Putting that antenna up to your head would almost certainly turn your brain to scrambled eggs in a couple of weeks or so. These monsters were also analog and all you could do was talk on them (no texting – how in the world did we survive?).

Technology continued and the infrastructure improved. More towers and better communication technology developed. Analog turned to digital and everything got smaller. Also, people got tired of that stupid stick coming out of the top of their phone so the designers put the stick inside the phone (and not on top).  However, there is one thing that didn’t change – the physics of transmitting energy through the air still requires an antenna. The unfortunate thing is that the bigger the antenna (within reason) the better reception that you get. So Apple did good by putting the antenna into a metal strip that surrounds the phone.

If you are old enough, you may remember “rabbit ears” on your TV set. My job as a young brother was to stand beside the TV and hold the rabbit ears in the perfect pose so that my big brother (who would beat me up if I didn’t comply) could watch ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”. My body touching the antenna improved or hurt the reception of the TV based on where I touched it and how I stood. I stood in some pretty awkward positions in order to avoid my brother’s wrath.

So, when you hold any mobile phone with the antenna carefully hidden inside, your sweaty hands and your big old head are affecting that antenna to some degree. With the iPhone 4, you are making physical contact with that antenna so you are more likely to affect the signal – that is simply physics.

Apple is changing their software so you will be less aware of the issue and stop your damn complaining. They aren’t fixing the root cause; they just don’t want you to be aware of the problem anymore. This is the nature of spin – nothing really changes but your “perception” of the problem is different. If you don’t like it, take the phone back and buy an Android (which has the same problem just not as noticeable).

The issue is even more aggravated because the iPhone is only available on AT&T’s lousy network. Any time you screw with that signal, you will have problems. Since you so rarely have a good signal from AT&T, losing a little bit because you have sweaty hands and are touching the phone in it’s “special parts” just adds frustration. Apple would solve a lot of these problems by just signing a deal with Verizon.

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Let’s face it – there should be no such thing as “too big to fail.” Most of us work for companies that are not in that category. If our employers screw up and the company goes down the tubes then we will individually hurt and perhaps the micro-economy around that company will hurt a bit but for the most part the US GDP won’t even see the speed bump. This is the way that it should be – screw up and fail then just pick yourself up and get on with life.

“Too big to fail” simply stinks of a type of monopoly. I know that monopoly prevention is usually about consumer rights and price gouging, but is this that far from where we are now? Isn’t consumer price gouging exactly what we just went through with the TARP program?  I know that my taxes feel like I am getting gouged! This is especially true when I know that I am paying way too much in taxes and that still doesn’t cover what the US government spends! If it is a choice between taxing me more and the US Government (and the state governments) spending more, than I know the choice that I want to make – cut the damn spending!

So what is my suggestion?

The FDIC was nice enough to give us a list of banks here. The first thing that I see is there are some BIG banks! How can these not be monopolistic when they are that much larger than banks that are ranked just 10 places below them.  We need some sanity here.

1. No bank in the top 100 largest banks can be larger than double the size of the next smallest bank.
2. No bank in the top 100 largest banks can be more than five times larger than a bank that is ranked 10 spots below it.
3. No bank in the top 100 largest banks can be more than ten times larger than a bank that is ranked 20 spots below it.
4. No bank in the top 100 largest banks can be more than twenty times larger than a bank that is ranked 40 spots below it.
5. The top 100 banks combined size cannot exceed double the combined size of the banks ranked 101-500.
6. No FDIC insured bank can have more than 10% of its ownership by a non-US entity.

Yes, I know that the title of this article only says 5 rules but the list has 6 rules. The last rule is simply to reduce our banking exposure to undue influence by foreign nationals. We need to realize that our banking and financial systems is just as much of a strategic US asset as our defense contractors. We want the decisions of our strategic institutions to be governed by good business intentions and not the political aspirations of a foreign body.

Because of all of this re-arrangement, we would have to do this with plenty of warning. I would suggest that the law wouldn’t take effect for 5 years after signing to give the banks time to adjust. Also, in the first 5 years after the law is in effect (years 6-10 after signing), the penalty should simply be a 1% fine for the amount of out of compliance the bank was in e.g. if a bank was too large by $1B than the fine would by $10M. After the first decade, a bank would be taken over by a government agency to accelerate their divestitures, existing management and board of directors would be fired (and forbidden to run a bank for 10 years), and then new management would be installed by the shareholders.

There would also need to be a grace period of perhaps 3 years if banks ranked lower than the bank in violation decreased their size by more than 10% in a year and that caused the non-compliance. We cannot punish one institution due to the acts of another. However, we can require them to adapt to the current situation within a reasonable time, I suggest 3 years.

What would this do for the financial institutions?

The first thing that would likely happen is that the banks below 500 would likely start to get bought up pretty rapidly by the banks that are 101-500.Also, the top 100 banks would start to divest portions of their business to other banks (or create new entities) so that they could balance out. It definitely would mean that the top 10 banks would get smaller relative to the next 20 banks. That is the point, they would no longer be too big to fail. While we wouldn’t want them to fail, we also wouldn’t be on the hook as taxpayers to fix their screw-ups.

With the built-in delays and grace periods, it would probably take 20 years to get to a better balance. That is okay. In the words of some great philosopher: haste makes waste. It took us several decades to get the current mess that we are in and if we try to adjust too quickly, we will screw it up.

I know that there will be a lot of nay-sayers that think this won’t work or some other way will work better. I am sure there are good ideas out there but any idea that still concentrates wealth in the hands of a dozen corporations is simply not a solution to the core problem. Those suggestions are only to take care of a problem that presented itself already – in other words they are a band-aid to an existing cut. My suggestion is that we know that injuries and mistakes will happen in the future (banks will always fail) but let’s not get in trouble as a nation because of the problem.

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I am just aghast at how stupid these companies are. Current reports are that they didn’t install an “acoustic switch” on the well. From NewsInferno:

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded last week was not outfitted with a safety device that might have prevented the massive oil spill now nearing the U.S. Gulf Coast. The device, known as an acoustic switch, is a last-resort protection against underwater spills, and is required by regulators in Norway and Brazil. Unfortunately, the U.S. has no such regulation for oil wells operating off of its shores.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, an acoustic switch is a remote control device that a crew can use in an attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down a well that’s damaged. The switch is meant as a last resort, as the primary shut-off systems almost always work on wells when they are out of control. It can be triggered from a lifeboat if an oil platform has to be evacuated.

According to the Journal, U.S regulators did consider requiring the acoustic switch on offshore wells, but drilling companies resisted because of its cost, and questions about its effectiveness. To be fair, the switches have never been tested in real-world situations, only simulations. U.S. regulators also maintain they are prone to causing unnecessary shutdowns.

Are these guys just plain stupid.  Didn’t they see Jurasic Park where the pessimistic mathematician, Ian Malcolm, talks about if something can go wrong then it will go wrong?

BP AND ITS KIN SHOULD HAVE BACKUP SYSTEMS FOR THE BACKUP SYSTEMS THAT ARE BACKING UP THE BACKUP SYSTEMS.  IF THEY DON’T HAVE 6 FOOLPROOF WAYS OF TURNING OFF A BROKEN WELL THEN THEY SHOULDN’T DRILL!

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It must be private, never go public. There will be no upside investors other than me and the employees. . . . I hope we can pull it off under those conditions because I would be thrilled to lead another group of smart engineers, without all the crap that goes into running a company today. I just don’t want Congress telling me how much I should be paid or firing me. I want to pretend I am back in the 1980s again.

Scott McNealy – co-founder of Sun Microsystems

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