Droid X Vs. iPhone 4

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Engadget: Droid X vs. iPhone 4... hang out!

we'd really rather live in a world where Droid X and iPhone 4 hang out after work for drinks than one where they stab each other in their silicon hearts.

PC World: Droid X vs. iPhone 4: Spec Smackdown

the Android platform, which is quickly catching up by adding powerful devices and galloping software updates. ..... Processing Power Tie .... Display & Resolution Winner: iPhone 4 ....... Storage Winner: Droid X ..... Camera & Multimedia Draw ...... Apple's device has a front-facing video camera for video calls (a feature missing on the Droid X), and you can purchase, for $4.99, iMovie for iPhone, simply the best mobile video editor seen so far (and exclusive to the iPhone 4). ....... Connectivity Winner: Droid X ...... iOS vs. Android Draw (So Far) ....... the problem with the Droid X is that it won't ship with the latest version of Android (2.2) on July 15 ...... A cool trick the Droid X will have, one not yet available on iOS, is Swype, a system that allows you to enter data on the software keyboard without lifting your finger off the screen. Swype is the default data-entry mode ...... A notable feature now present on the Droid X is noise cancellation technology, which is supposed to improve call quality by blocking other sounds around you except your voice. The iPhone 4 has two microphones, one of which is used for noise cancellation, while the Droid X boasts three.

InformationWeek: Droid X Puts iPhone 4 On Notice

Motorola's new Droid X should give iPhone 4 shoppers pause. It has a bigger screen, better camera, and the Verizon Wireless network backing it up. ...... The Droid X's 854 x 480 display is fully capable of playing HD content. Do those extra pixels matter? ..... The iPhone's battery is, of course, not accessible. ..... The real advantage the Droid X has over the iPhone 4 is its network. I have been both an AT&T and a Verizon Wireless customer for years. I can say that in my experience, Verizon's network is simply better. That means fewer dropped calls and more consistent data sessions for the Droid X. ...... The difference between AT&T's $25/mo for 2GB and Verizon's $30/mo for 5GB is enormous. ....It costs just $200 with a new contract, and offers nearly everything the iPhone 4 does -- all on a better network.

BusinessWeek: Why The Droid X Won't Trump The iPhone

The 4.3-inch screen, the largest I've ever used, is nearly 25 percent bigger than the iPhone's. .... It can also do something cool that the iPhone can't: provide a Wi-Fi signal for nearby devices. ..... The Droid X's biggest advantage is that it runs on Verizon Wireless 

Video: Droid X Vs. iPhone 4







VentureBeat: Droid X versus iPhone 4

Nokia’s N8 due this fall will challenge everyone with its 12 megapixel, oversize-sensor camera hardware. ..... both phones have much better graphics performance than previous models. You’ll no longer tap and wait. Or swipe and wait. ......

PC Mag: iPhone 4 vs. Droid X vs. EVO 4G: Carriers Go to War

the iPhone's lack of expandability - neither a removable battery or an additional memory card; and its lack of support for Flash, which means that some Web sites (such as Hulu) don't work. .... The Evo 4G has a large 4.3-inch display, with an 800-by-480 resolution, and as a result, the phone is a lot larger than the iPhone 4. It has a variety of very nice features, including a front-facing camera for video conferencing and the ability to be used as a mobile hot-spot, sharing its Sprint connection with multiple computers over Wi-Fi. It also has an 8-megapixel camera, HDMI out, and a kickstand. But the standout feature is its support for the Wimax network, which is now available in a number of markets and coming to a lot more this fall.

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Parenting

I am supposed to be working on a few blog posts (To Iran, With Love (1)) for two of my favorite people in the tech community - Fred Wilson and Brad Feld - but I find my ways to procrastinate. I found myself on my Tumblr dashboard instead. Mostly I reblog, that is what I do on Tumblr. The editor in me comes out. So - hint, hint - I am a very good person to follow on Tumblr. Following me is like following 90 people minus the pain. And these 90 people are mostly active members of the tech community. So. Follow me, like Al Pacino says right before the best scene in my favorite movie Heat.



I came across an interesting post by KirkLove, on parenting. No, I don't know him, although he is a New Yorker. You are not supposed to know people on Tumblr. I personally know very few of the 90 plus people I follow on Tumblr.

But then I have never been a parent myself, although I grew up in a large, extended family environment - at the peak, I think perhaps four couples under one roof in a big house - and saw a l-o-t of parenting happen. That makes me an authority of sorts, I think. And that is not even counting the regular larger extended family get togethers - festivals, three day weddings - when you would have much noise and kids running all over the place.

New York Magazine: Why Parents Hate Parenting?

Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. ........ five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” ...... . “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.” ...... especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two. ...... “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” ....... According to Changing Rhythms of American Family Life—a compendium of data porn about time use and family statistics .......all parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. ...... the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy. ...... parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care ..... “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” ...... When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. ....... There was this idea we had about how things were supposed to be: The family should be dot dot dot, the man should be dot dot dot the woman should be dot dot dot.” ....... This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. ....... One of the reasons I love being with my wife is because I love the family we have.” ....... the war zone of adolescence ..... “Teenagers can be casually brutal.” ...... is the amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. ...... They were exhausted and staring at the television.” ..... Children may provide unrivaled moments of joy. But they also provide unrivaled moments of frustration, tedium, anxiety, heartbreak. ...... the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in (as opposed to how much stress they were under): Do you not feel like eating? Do you feel like you can’t shake the blues? Do you feel lonely? Like you can’t get going? Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts. ......... The least depressed parents are those whose underage children are in the house, and the most are those whose aren’t. ..... Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward. ..... Not one told him of regretting having children, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.

Thoughts? Parenting is work. Relationship is work. Marriage is work. You might as well skip out on the relationship too and go straight to watching more TV.

I once read about an article in some kind of an anthropology journal that suggested some cultures in Africa deal with adolescence way better than the US society does. There is something called emotional infrastructure.

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The Social Network: The Movie

The Social Network



TechCrunch: The Second Trailer For The Movie The Social Network Hits The Web





D8: Steve Jobs


Zuckerberg Has Stature

To Iran, With Love (1)

To: Brad Feld, Subject: Iran And Me (Digital Ninja/Commando)

Hello Brad.

And to continue with our conversation. I am absolutely loving the public nature of this. This is going to enhance my efficacy and my credibility when I get into the thick of things with Iran.

My Background

• I was the number one student in my class at the top school in Nepal for the seven of the 10 years I was there.
• Out of high school I became Vice General Secretary to a political party with two MPs, members of parliament. Someone who was a central committee member at the time currently is a cabinet minister in Nepal.
• I was Poet Of The Year 1995, International Society Of Poets, Washington DC.
• I got accepted to the University Of Chicago ("not for your numbers, but your actions and words") but the money part did not work out, so I went to the school in America that has the best financial aid program of any, second to none, not even Harvard, Berea College in Kentucky, the number one liberal arts college in the South.
• Within six months of landing as an international student I got myself elected student body president at Berea, first time in college history a freshman did that.
• In 1999 I was one of the founding members of a dot com - Chaitime.com - that was trying to be the premier South Asian online community. The company raised $25 million, round two, before succumbing to the nuclear winter. Rediff won the race.
• I was a volunteer with Dean 2004 in Indiana. That got Howard Dean's brother excited when he found out. Of all places, Indiana? My story might have played a small role in Howard Dean's "50 state strategy."
• I was one of Barack Obama's earliest supporters in New York City and got to know most of the top volunteers in all boroughs. (NYC Video: 10 Hours)
• Long Walk To Freedom: Just A Third World Guy Dazzled By The City April 2007
  
• Long Walk To Freedom May 2007
  
• Barack Has To Talk Much About His Mother September 2007
  
• Barack's Mother Makes An Appearance September 2007
  
• Give Me A Huge Rally In This City Before Summer Is Over September 2007
  
• The Largest Rally In US Presidential Campaign History September 2007
  

My Recent Work For Nepal: Highlights

• I was the only Nepali in the Nepali diaspora who worked full time for the democracy movement in Nepal that succeeded in April 2006. There were a lot of part timers who did great work.
• Madhav Nepal was leading the largest party in the country at the time. In February 2006 he was put under house arrest. A month later his brother living next door managed to get him online the wireless way. The first person he contacted was me. We chatted on Gmail Chat.
• January-February 2007 saw the Madhesi Movement, which was like the second phase of the April 2006 revolution, only more intense. This was with the goal of achieving equality for the Madhesi: I am a Madhesi. (Larry Ellison) Kind of like our own civil rights movement. Upendra Yadav was its most visible face. In July that year he was brought over to America, to Los Angeles where the Nepalis were having a convention. When he got off the plane, the first person he asked for was me. They took him to his hotel. He again asked, "Where is Paramendra Bhagat?"
• I had never met Madhav Nepal or Upendra Yadav in person before. And I had talked to each of them on the phone only once. But both of them felt the reach of my intense work. Almost all my work was conducted in the digital realm.
• Madhav Nepal is Prime Minister today. Upendra Yadav was Foreign Minister for about a year after the April 2008 elections to the constituent assembly.
• I had a phone conversation with Ram Baran Yadav around February 2005 when he had run away from the country and was in Delhi after the king took over power in a coup. Ram Baran Yadav is president of Nepal today, which is not like being president in America, more like president in India, or queen in England.

What Did I Do?

In short, I moved the ball at all key junctures. And I used digital tools. What balls did I move and when? What tools did I use? How could I repeat the success for Iran? How exactly would I do it?

I will tackle those questions and more in subsequent posts. And I will also explain why I want 20 VCs starting with you to put in 5K each of personal money towards this work, why I am not approaching some other crowd.

The reason you were not able to find much about my Nepal work when you did a search at my blog is because you conducted the search not at my Nepal blog, but at Netizen, my technology and business blog. I have three active blogs. (Democracy For Nepal 1661 posts, Barackface 926 posts, Netizen 690 posts)

And I do understand when you invest in a company you put in the money upfront. You don't dole the money out in monthly investments. But perhaps my language was not precise, and hence the misunderstanding.

My Nepal Blog

• April 2006 (100 posts)
• February 2008 (98 posts)

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Larry Ellison's Personal Life

Image by nee-nee-lee via Flickr

Larry's first wife left him because he did not work "hard enough." He would do just enough contract work to be able to pay his share of the bills. He has said he "screwed through my 20s." He went ahead and bought a boat. That sent the wife into therapy. She decided the choice was between going crazy and getting a divorce. She picked divorce. During the counseling before the divorce Larry promised to make "a million dollars," the first time he ever talked such big numbers. The wife laughed.

Larry's second wife left him because he worked "too hard." He got on the phone with the first wife and asked, "How does this work?"

Larry's third wife left him for a Harvard MBA. He sent an email to a friend: "Congratulations on getting and staying married."

Larry's fourth wife - from an "aristocratic" Kentucky family, his word - when it was time for her to leave, she had a choice between the family pickup truck and Oracle stocks. She picked the truck.

Somebody around this point described Larry's personal life a "train wreck."

The fifth wife refused to remarry saying her divorce was better than most of her friends' marriages. By now Larry was wealthy beyond imagination.

He has had a steady girlfriend since the late 1990s: Melony. Melony was engaged when he met her: at a mall. She did not know who he was. She feared he might be one of the "suites." Her fiance was an artist. Larry pursued her for over a year. Once he arranged for her and the fiance to show up for an event where Steve Jobs was going to show up. That was his "Melony strategy." Maybe Steve Jobs will impress you. She was a Mac user.

He has said about being a college dropout: "I could not have started a college, but I could have started a company."

About his many failed marriages and an eventual relationship he has said, "I needed to find me first."

Mideast Peace: Tech Industry Style
Oracle, Oracle
Larry Ellison
That StartUp Mentality (2)
Oracle, Oracle
Firing Founders: Mostly A Bad Idea
Rich People's Kids
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision

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