kzeise.com | Kai Mo's Musings on Software, Copyrights, and other stuff

The Future Car

04. May 2013 · Categories: Politics

While everybody talks about electric cars as the important development in cars, the real revolution stills goes largely unnoticed: the self driving car. At the moment we only see electronics making driving safer and more comfortable, but there is a huge change lurking once fully autonomous driving will be possible. It will mean self driving taxis that will be cheaper to use than owning your own car. It would allow us to organize transportation based on three elements:

a mini car for say two people, limited to 60km/h (40mph). It has limited storage for short trips or some shopping, and is a lot lighter than a typical car as its low speed means much less risk.
a transit car for 8 people, with larger storage, optimized for hour long trips. It is longer than cars today, and this allows it to be very aerodynamic. Because of the efficiency of sharing and the safety of autonomous driving it travels at 160km/h(100mph) on most roads. You even get a nice tray to get some work done, complete with high speed Internet access, but without a toilet it is not really suited for long distances.
High speed trains/planes will be used for the real long distances. And with transport to their stations now easy to do, much more people will use them.

All are autonomous and have an integrated reservation system coordinating the sharing of transit cars. A typical journey starts by telling your phone where and when you want to go. After selecting the best option, you hop into a mini car that will bring you to a transit station, where you change into a transit car, which will bring you close to your destination, where another mini car will deliver you onto the right doorstep. You might have to wait for maybe five minutes for a car, or for longer journeys up to 20% of the travel time, but when you book early, you can have a reliable reservation to plan on. There is some choice in balancing the travel time with the number of people sharing a transit car, but given that you can use the time quite efficiently for work or relaxing, not many people choose quicker journeys.

Car manufacturers should be scared. While individual cars will not die, they will become a pure luxury item. They will be much more expensive than using taxis: the shared transit cars are not only much more fuel efficient per person, but their purchase price will be amortized over more than 100000km driven per year. This means a huge drop in units sold, and production concentrated on a few taxi models with large runs.

But it will also affect our demand for highways. The sharing will greatly reduce traffic, and the ability to safely coordinate all vehicles would allow overtaking even on normal roads, and make the ones on the highway much more efficient. So the reduced demand will cause us to wonder why one would have ever needed five lanes per side.

iOS Parental Controls

12. April 2013 · Categories: Apple

Parental Controls are still very broken in iOS 6. They should enable a quick and easy way to control what children can use on their devices, but are hampered by a complete lack of support for the multi use nature of the device.

no password is needed to activate controls, so if you forget you can get partially locked out of your own device
no reasonable option for IAP exist, you want password free updates and caching in the App Store, with the password caching stopped when you switch out of the store. And asked every time for IAP.
no global read only switch for your data and permissions.
no page based access control: you really want to have creative and consumption apps separate, so your kids could spend hours playing with GarageBand, but only half an hour each day with games.
no restrictions sets, so that you can easily change between different usages.

As it is, I suspect the best solution is to have one game free iPad for each children, and a pure games iPad shared with maybe the parents. But this looks pricey.

When Will Electric Cars Become Affordable?

03. April 2013 · Categories: Politics

Electric cars are something that many want to replace the combustion engine ones, but they are currently still quite expensive. Tesla provides for their models a very good indication of the cost for the battery: the upgrade from a 60 kWh battery to a 85 kWh costs $10000, meaning that the base battery sets you back $24000. They limit the warranty to 125000 miles, so the battery cost is 19.2 cents/mile. A modern combustion engine will do 40 mpg, so have a fuel cost of 10 cents/mile, while charging will still cost around 4 cents/mile. This means that in order to be competitive, the battery cost must come down to around 5 cent/mile, roughly a fourfold improvement. Given that battery technology advances at roughly 5% to 7% per year, it will take about 25 years for batteries to become competitive as a car fuel source.

At the same time there is a different application that could have a lot more impact: the electric bike has become a viable option for short distance transport, with the huge advantage of being so much lighter and thus inherently more efficient. Most importantly it promises to make the bicycle an option even in hilly terrain. It would only need to see enough bike lanes established to become widely adopted, and we might not only save money, but also improve our health.

Apple and Racketeering

01. April 2013 · Categories: Apple, Politics

We repeatably see people racking up incredible charges on in-app purchases on iOS, sometimes even into the thousands of dollars. (Not that other systems are immune, they are simply too unattractive now)

Many of these titles use mechanisms that are explicitly designed to exploit gaming addiction, and as with every other title they have been approved by Apple, sometimes even promoted by Apple. As such Apple is actively colluding in the exploitation of gaming addiction for their own benefit, the well known 30% cut from the App Store.

The consumable model for freemium games is actually a reasonable approximation of a software rent model, but to make this work, it must be controlled better to ensure that it is close to impossible to rack up insane charges:

Consumables should be either directly time related (the classic subscription), or there must be a hard limit to how much in game currency you can buy per day.
In app purchases must be separated between permanent buys, and consumables. Ideally every single in game currency purchase should need to be confirmed with the account password.
Apple should set a 50$ per month limit on in game currency purchases. Raising the limit needs to incur a cool off period of a day, after which you need to reconfirm your raise before it starts. We can also stipulate that such a raise can no more than double the limit, and include the do not raise answer (accepted with no waiting period), which would force you to trigger a new request with a fresh wait should you change your mind. As a further bonus, the limit could start to lower itself automatically again, for example when less than 25% of the limit was used in a month, it would halve for the next month.
Apple should add support for upgrade pricing as well as trial periods to decrease the incentive for freemium.

With these changes implemented it should become nearly impossible to go broke accidentally, it would even include a pretty powerful break for people becoming addicted, and intentionally racking up the bills. Until these are implemented, there are ways to help immediately:

Every single in app purchase must be confirmed with the account password.
Apple should implement a wait period before an in-app purchase can be repeated. This should depend on the sum spent, say a day for up to 10$, a week for up to 50$ and a month for anything even larger, with in game currency purchases limited to at most 50$. Since all purchases go through Apple, this should be possible server side. But if technically impossible, Apple needs to force publishers to implement those, and remove any offending titles from the store after a grace period of a month.

I do not understand why there are no fraud prevention measures kicking in when such large purchases are being made. Spending more than a hundred bucks a month on games is such a rare occurrence that the extra annoyance of verifying them with the purchaser would be more than compensated for by the removal of bad surprises for other people.

Also I do believe that it is in Apple’s long term interest to start removing the worst in-app offenders from the store. The brand Apple is based on the presumption that they filter out the bad stuff to keep things simple. And not acting will undermine our trust in their curation, giving us reason to leave.

Using Web Services

21. March 2013 · Categories: Software

We are seeing a lot of software move to the cloud, and sold as a service. This leads to a lot of uncertainty when we need that software for a mission critical part of our business. It generates a lot more lock-in than shrink wrap software, because now you not only rely on the vendor for updates, but to keep it running every day.

The problem I found is that the service providers give you heart warming stories about how much they care about you, but once you look into their terms, they absolve themselves of any responsibility to the maximum extent permitted.

As such you will need to somehow get some guarantees that the service you depend on will remain. I believe the most important ones are:

Price and service stability

You want the provider to be unable to jack up prices after the fact, and to keep providing the service you rely on. You will need to make an allowance for adjustments in line with inflation and input costs, but otherwise your price needs to be fixed forever.
Data ownership

You need to keep the full ownership of any data you entrust to them. It must be easy to export, and the data may not be used for any additional uses apart those necessary to serve you.
Liability

You depend on the service to be available and your data to not be stolen. You preferably should not have to worry about because it just works. But to ensure that the provider has an incentive, there should be a significant financial penalty should it screw up. Currently this is not possible, so the next best thing might be to buy independent insurance and use the rates to compare vendors.
Service backup

Should the service go out of business, you will need to have a viable backup. The easiest way is to use open source software, so others can take over. But this might not provide you with the best solution. In this case the contract needs a similar protection: Should the company stop offering the service, and no other company will take over the complete contract, it must provide the software and the source code with a license that allows you to host yourself, for no additional compensation.

Android and Google

15. March 2013 · Categories: Apple, Software

Google has a problem in that Samsung is making more money by selling their phones than Google is making overall, all while much of the basis of that success is Android, provided by Google to Samsung (and others) for free. The strange part is that Google actually has a comparative advantage in producing software, so what are they going to do to ensure higher profits from their creation?

The license for Android would allow Google to stop distributing new additions for free, they have already put some popular apps under their thumb. On the other hand Samsung is working hard to replace them with their own versions to provide differentiation. Google has already published quite a lot of code, the question is whether there are enough improvements remaining, and whether Google can do them with sufficient superior quality to regain ownership and profitability for Android.

The problem is that Google’s past generosity (ignore the Java theft for a moment) has put them into a difficult middle position. The latest Android is more than good enough for webphones, those basic smartphones for cost conscious buyers who do not want much more than a web browser, Facebook and a camera. And on the high end side it has Apple to innovate against.

Their best hope is that the future will move towards the cloud phone, where they have a lot of experience.

Brauchen wir eine Batterieverordnung?

15. March 2013 · Categories: Politics

Mit dem Siegeszug der mobilen Computer kommt auch der Vormarsch der fest eingebauten Batterie, um die Geräte noch kompakter zu machen. Da viele dieser Geräte inzwischen gut genug sind um auch für mehrere Jahre mitzumachen, gibt dies ein Problem: Wie bekomme ich dieses Verschleißteil gewechselt?

Hier ist die Industrie leider viel mehr darauf bedacht, einem was Neues zu verkaufen, anstelle das Alte in Schuss zu halten. Ich denke nicht, dass ein Verbot fest eingebauter Batterien die Lösung ist, statt dessen wird es Zeit, einen Tauschservice vorzuschreiben:

Wenn der Tauschservice mehr als das Gerät selbst kostet, ist ein Hinweise fällig: Dieses Gerät enthält eine fest eingebaute Batterie. Daher wird es spätestens in 3 Jahren nur noch Schrott sein.
Ansonsten ist der Preis des Tauschservices zusammen mit dem Gerätepreis zu benennen.

Dies sind dann der Tauschpreis,die benötigte Zeit für den Tausch, sowie die Zeit/Zyklen, bis ein Tausch notwendig ist. Als einheitliches Tauschkriterium sollten 65% der Designkapazität dienen; sollte die Batterie früher schlapp machen, ist der Tauschpreis anteilig zu kürzen. Um dafür zu sorgen, dass die Tauschzeiten realistisch sind, wird Schadenersatz pro überzogenem Werktag in Höhe von 5% des Gerätepreises fällig.
Dieser Tauschservice ist für alle Geräte bis 10 Jahre nach deren Verkaufsstop anzubieten. Er kann auch länger angeboten werden, spätestens mit seiner Einstellung ist jedoch eine Anleitung zum Akkutausch zu veröffentlichen, auch hat der Anbieter dann eine kostenfreie Lizenz für Nachbauten zu erteilen.
Der Preis für den Tauschservice ist im Rahmen der allgemeinen Lohnkosten als auch Batteriepreise konstant zu halten.

Why the Mac is bouncing back

06. March 2013 · Categories: Apple

When we consider what caused Apple to make the Mac successful again, there are a couple of theories. For John Gruber, it is the superior quality, Mike Arrington points to the Internet as the great leveler, and Dave Winer chimes in with lack of malware. All of these are important factors, and they allowed for a lot of consumers to switch to the Mac.

But I believe that we underestimate the importance of the Intel switch with the corresponding Windows compatibility. It is what has allowed many people to opt for a Mac without giving up on their legacy software, especially for programmers wanting to try out iOS. There is a huge saving in complexity if you need only one computer, and so the ability to run all but the most graphical demanding Windows applications in a virtual machine in parallel to Mac programs is a huge bonus.

I believe this has greatly accelerated the supply of iOS programmers, and this halo effect together with the Mac App Store had quite a positive impact on the supply of native Mac apps.

Maximizing Fuel Efficiency

18. February 2013 · Categories: General

In the saga about the NYT Tesla drive one of the problems was the advice given to maximize fuel efficiency: Do not engage cruise control, but travel with short burst of acceleration followed by unpowered coasting.

This advice is actually correct for petrol powered cars. It is based on the fact that petrol engines have peak efficiency when running at roughly 90% torque, and are quite a bit less efficient when under partial load (especially compared to diesels). This means that the improved efficiency under acceleration more than compensates for the increased air friction caused by driving uneven speeds. Actually it is optimal to have the gears in neutral during coasting, and you need to keep the bursts very short, ideally keeping your speed within a 5 to 10 km/h band. It is quite obvious that this is a very stressful way to travel, and modern fuel injection techniques have narrowed the efficiency gap.

But for an electric car this is counterproductive since electric motors have a much more even efficiency, and the uneven load is poison for the battery: The higher the current you are drawing from a battery, the lower the total amount of energy you get. So it is best to draw current as evenly as possible from the battery, and avoid strong acceleration.

Is Apple Doomed?

21. January 2013 · Categories: Apple

With the rise of the at cost phones and tablets from the Android camp, Florian Müller wonders whether Apple is doomed unless it can impose a lot of differentiation through the enforcement of patents.

Apple has two important advantages compared to the Android camp: the app store and the great quality of the hardware. The app store is important for serious use, as you need good applications to get some work done on the device. This is still a very strong point for Apple. Even though Android is catching up in the number of apps available, they are not yet catching up in app quality. And this is not surprising as the Apple App Store is still making developers a lot more money than they can on Android. Add to this that it is much easier to support the entire Apple ecosystem, and I do not see that Android will be catching up soon.

The hardware quality is a different advantage that is very difficult to overcome for the competition. This is not that cannot build them, but that they lack the DNA for tasteful design. Apple in addition has huge margins which they can use to innovate while the competition gets slowly starved off funds. Many people regard them as overpriced, but apart from the iPhone they are not selling at a huge premium, in fact their large economies of scale allow them to price their offerings quite competitively. Their relatively high prices are the result of a refusal to skip on quality, and it leaves them in a pretty good position as the high end tech brand.

The opening Android has is almost exclusively by price, and it is only in phones where the large margin of the iPhone leaves Samsung an opening to compete at the quality end of phones. Everyone else needs to reduce product quality to be able to undercut Apple, and this is a huge problem. The only individual phone that has even come close to iPhone sales levels is the high end Galaxy S III, which is only a bit cheaper, and I believe this shows that phones are cheap enough that people are willing to pay a premium to get the best possible experience.

Apple might eventually be forced to reduce their 50+% margins on the iPhone to a more reasonable 30%, this would correspond to a price drop from 700$ to 500$. The Nexus 4 was priced at 300$, without LTE though, so the question is whether Apple could maintain a 150$ premium on its phones. I believe that many people will prefer a higher quality handset that lasts well for one more year, for the same total cost, to repeatably replacing junk. Also we must not forget that phones are cheap, that the premium for an iPhone is only about 300$, or 12.50$ per month for 24 months. This looks like a very reasonable price to pay for getting the best experience for a device you use hours every week.

The real problem that can break Apple is the web revolution, which causes nearly everybody to move their data into the cloud as a convenience to ensure that all our different devices have the same data, as well as to facilitate better sharing with other people. Apple will always be at a disadvantage here as their way to make money is to create the best devices, and their instinct is to restrict their services to users of their devices. Google has much better web service offerings and Apple has so far not been able to provide something matching. Ironically, even Microsoft is much stronger in web services than Apple. In general, iMessages is their most successful web offering, but the app store is really breaking at the seams, and should be rewritten.

There are similar problems with the iCloud offerings, they seem to not work right all the time, with the risk of data loss. Also they are not very useful for collaboration.