New York Times vs. Tesla

When a New York Times article is disputed for accuracy, you would hope a paper of that standing would ensure than any claimed factual errors are  either refuted or owned up to. But no. Public Editor Margaret Sullivan’s response to some very strong claims by Tesla CEO Elon Musk does neither. It contains an admission that the writer was sloppy on the details, but throws out an unsubstantiated allegation that Musk’s counter-attack was “sometimes quite misleading”. On what details? I would really like to know. And I am sure a substantial number of NY Times readers would also like to know.

All this is in response to a drive a New York Times writer, John Broder, undertook in Tesla’s top of the range Model S that apparently was a test of the utility of Tesla’s Superchargers, extra-fast charging stations designed to ease the pain of charging batteries on a long trip.

At issue is the factual accuracy of Broder’s report, amounting to a claim that he deliberately set Tesla up to fail.

Let’s be clear where I stand on this.

I am unconvinced of the case for the electric car. Its ideal use case exactly matches that of public transport or (in clement weather) a bicycle: relatively short-range travel in an urban area.

For long trips, an electric car has a severe disadvantage in needing long recharge stops (the Better Place solution, still a work in progress, of swapping batteries may fix that, but it requires battery standards to avoid outlets having to keep a wide range of different ready-to-use batteries).

Another big drawback of electric cars is the high cost of replacing batteries especially in an older car. While there are some ideas to mitigate that including leasing batteries or including cost of replacing the batteries in Better Place-style battery swaps, this is a problem not addressed currently on a systematic basis.

On the plus side, even when using dirty energy, the efficiencies of electric motors are so high compared with internal combustion, you generally come out ahead on emissions, and an electric motor’s full torque from zero speed puts it far ahead of internal combustion. And battery replacement aside, service costs are way lower for electric.

My concern is with journalistic integrity, not a desire to hype electric cars. What Tesla has done is magnificent but is only a small step on the road to cleaner energy travel.

Still unanswered: why claim incorrectly to have crawled at 45mph to conserve energy, and why claim incorrectly to have turned the heat down?

NY Times: ball in your court.

How to get something lost in the mail

In December 2012, after installing some RAM upgrades I bought for my Mac from a US dealer, I found one was a dud, and organized to send it back (along with a couple of used parts for which they would give me a rebate).

After about a month, I realized my package should have reached its destination. It hadn’t. I contacted the South African Post Office because their tracking site showed it had reached the last step in South Africa in two days. Their customer service person told me I should try to track it in the US. This I thought would go nowhere, but no, the USPS tracking service accepted my South African tracking number.

Now it gets interesting.

The prejudice people in this part of the world have is that it must have been stolen or lost in South Africa. Here’s the log of where it’s been in the US:

So it reached the US within three days of posting. Good so far. But why was it bouncing around between facilities in New York?

I asked the recipient if they could check, and they were told an enquiry had to be initiated from the originating post office. That, I thought would lead nowhere.

Again, I was wrong – at least in getting started. My local post office could not have been more helpful. The postmaster tried to find out more through their internal systems and when he couldn’t, helped me set up an enquiry. Some of the paperwork involved doing an affidavit via my local police station, a reminder of indifference to service from some parts of South African society.

But anyway, my enquiry is in the system. And maybe at some point my package will surface. Or be declared lost so I can claim on the insurance.

Maybe it’s not a huge plus for South Africa to have a friendlier, more efficient postal service than the US. But it’s great to be better sometimes.

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Follow-up

On 30 April, I received notification from the US supplier that the package had arrived, nearly five months after I put it in the mail, and most of that time it was lost somewhere in the US postal system. As if to erase their embarassment, the USPS tracking site now only shows movements in the package’s final days, once it had somehow migrated from New York to Illinois.

Whether it’s been in Illinois or New York all that time or somewhere else will now doubt never be revealed. All I know is the USPS is capable of extreme incompetence. And possibly extreme embarrassment. Sorry USPS goblins: your secret is exposed on this page. Here is the latest tracking information as of 30 April 2013:

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Finale

I visited my local post office and the postmaster checked with his tracking department. They put in three requests spaced roughly a month apart to trace the item. The last on 24 April was a final request that, if not satisfied, would have resulted in paying me compensation (I insured it; it turns out the postal service is very optimistic that things will eventually turn up, and this time they were right). Magically, four days later the item appeared and took one more day to get delivered.

What’s really wrong with Apple?

Despite the huge tumble Apple has taken on their share price, the reality is they are doing well on most measures that count, and exceptionally on some. Take for instance the way they have pushed Samsung to second place in the US cell phone market in the last quarter of 2012. Samsung has a vast range of phones including some very cheap entry level models, whereas Apple only has premium models. This is like Mercedes-Benz pushing Toyota or VW into second place.

Here’s a much bigger story of decline.

Dell is buying back its shares and going private, while pretty much scaling back on manufacturing.

Anyone following this story will no doubt have seen numerous reminders of Michael Dell’s advice to Steve Jobs: close Apple and give the money back to the shareholders (repeated in the article I point to above). Apple right now could buy Dell for cash and still have $100-billion left in the bank. For now it seems that Apple had the right business model all along, it was just poorly executed until the Jobs revival.

Next year, we could have a different theory of the universe.

My view: Apple does some things right, other things wrong. They could still have a major stumble if one of the competition gets a major thing Apple is missing right, whereas they are all trying to do better than Apple at the minor things and missing the big picture.

Next year, we could have a different theory of the universe.

Microsoft Surface: a precision-engineered kick stand, I ask you: what major problem does that solve? Microsoft has designed a laptop you can’t use on your lap and is selling it as a better kind of tablet.

Many of the arguments about what Apple is missing revolve around minutiae, like the absence of this or that port, or this or that hardware or software feature deemed so essential that the Apple product will surely fail if one of the competition remedies the defect. One of the competition remedies the defect, and sinks without trace. How often have we been told some Apple product would be a success if only it had a USB port, could use SD flash cards, or could receive FM radio? Products like Zune that supposedly met one or more of these needs litter the trash heap (or, better, the recycling bin).

If any competitor is to get serious traction, they need to focus on finding something major that Apple is missing or getting wrong – and finding a product or niche is not enough. You need also to find a fundamental flaw in their business model that stops them taking on your new idea.

All these other things excite geeks, not people who just want something that works and don’t care about technology.

Of course Apple did get things badly wrong in the past. In the late 1990s, they almost went broke.

The original Mac OS did not have a proper kernel, so it did not implement memory protection or true multitasking, meaning one program could take over the machine if it went awry, destroying data of other programs or requiring a hard reboot to get the machine back under control. In the late 1980s, I told someone from Apple that they already had a solution. At the time, Apple had a version of UNIX, called A/UX, that included a way of running Mac apps in a compatibility layer called Blue Box. I proposed that they give up on their own operating system project that eventually became the disastrous Copland project, and create a new Mac-like interface on top of UNIX, with Blue Box for old apps. No, they said. UNIX was way too heavyweight for ordinary users. At the time, A/UX only ran on the top of the line Mac II (with a wicked fast 16MHz Motorola 68020). I tried to explain that they didn’t need all of UNIX, just the kernel, and the application layer could be a version of the existing Mac application layer, but they insisted it wasn’t possible. Nearly 10 years later, Apple bought NeXT, and the resulting new Mac OS, called Mac OS X, was pretty much what I proposed. You may argue that the entry level Macs of the day didn’t have hardware to support a proper operating system with memory protection, but that’s very short-sighted. By 1991, System 7 was launched with virtual memory support, requiring a hardware memory manager (though still without protection, since that would have required a major rewrite of many applications that relied on accessing a single common memory).

Where Apple went wrong in this whole exercise was taking focus off their key strengths: usability and clean integration between multiple hardware and software components. Design of an operating system kernel is secondary to this focus. Once they reverted to their traditional strengths, they recovered fairly quickly (in the process also addressing another of my criticisms, a complex product range no one could understand).

Apple went badly wrong because they took their eye off the ball, and wasted huge amounts of money on something that no one but a geek or hard-core computer scientist would care about, a highly innovative operating system kernel.

So if anyone is to seriously dent Apple’s dominance of their key markets, what it will take is a clear understanding of the important things Apple does well and the important things they do badly. Identify the latter, and address them, and you’re in with a chance.

What options are there? Here’s a few hints. Apple’s serious weaknesses are not in areas like ports, memory expansion or kickstands. So what are they then?

I do think Apple has some serious weak points, and I’ve been right on these things in the past. So what do I think Apple’s real problem is (or will be if someone sees it and exploits it)?

Sorry, I’m tired of giving my ideas away for free. If you have a serious amount of money to invest, let me know.

Limoncello almond poppyseed cake

Here’s another of my occasional culinary forays, my adaptation of this recipe for a wheat-free cake:

• 4 eggs, 3 of which separated
• 2 tablespoons limoncello* (limoncino) or zest of 3 lemons
• 1 tablespoon poppy seeds
• 100g brown sugar, split into halves
• 170g almond flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• icing sugar (powdered, for Americans) to decorate

Whisk the 3 egg yolks with one whole egg and half the sugar until smooth and light. The trick here is to keep one egg whole so the mix is less likely to collapse compared with whisking all 4 egg whites separately.

Thoroughly mix the baking powder and almond flour. Add the limoncello (or lemon zest), poppy seeds and sweetened egg yolks, and mix thoroughly until smooth. Aside from adding flavour and texture, distribution of the poppy seeds is a good indicator of whether everything is thoroughly combined. For the alcohol intolerant: the alcohol should all cook out.

Whisk the 3 egg whites until very frothy, then gradually add the rest of the sugar, while continually whisking. Stop at the soft peak stage (the mix just holds its shape when you lift the whisk). Some tricks of the trade: use an unlined copper bowl, and whisk the egg whites at room temperature. Egg white is hard to aerate from cold, and a copper bowl makes whisking much more effective and more stable without additives like vinegar or salt.

Incorporate the egg white into the almond mix slowly at first, until you’ve added about half the egg white, then gently fold in the rest so you don't flatten out all the air.

Put a disk of non-stick baking paper in the bottom of a spring-form cake tin, and butter the sides. Slide the mix in and bake in a 175°C oven for 30 to 35 minutes (checking at the end that a skewer comes out clean).

Cool the cake on a rack, baking paper down.

When the cake is cool, ease off the baking paper and decorate with a little icing sugar (put about half a teaspoon in a strainer and smack the side lightly to spread it evenly; this is best done just before serving as the cake is quite moist and will absorb the sugar).

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*Edit: I used 4 on my first try but it came out a little too lemony.