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"As I made clear, both in the
preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that
global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious
discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which
there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why
many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely
accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples,
it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one:
a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only
a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to
infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning
meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases
are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director
not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that
piece of disinformation.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context:
I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more
carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse
gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It
was used in the film, through its context, to imply
that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that
therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which
are literally what I said, comes close to fraud."

The Killacycle used to be powered by spiral-wound AGM cells, but the producer went out of business.

Since then, it was repowered with A123Systems' LiFePO4 cells. It now does 0-60 in 1.5 seconds and the quarter mile in 8.16.

Electrics need not be slow, and their range is growing by leaps and bounds. The ICE has received its terminal diagnosis; the future is electric.

Uh huh...

That is how an entrepreneur thinks.

What is most important to Microsoft when making acquisition decisions? People are the most important factor in any acquisition. Microsoft looks for talented engineering teams with vision and passion and experienced management teams. Second is technology and IP that can add value to an existing Microsoft product. Third is the opportunity to acquire stand alone products for existing customers. Examples include Visio, Hotmail, and Vermeer. Another, more rare, decision point is the opportunity to enter whole new markets. Great Plains and PlaceWare are excellent examples.

How does Microsoft decide to acquire rather than build internally? This is the toughest question in any acquisition discussion. Microsoft has thousands of very talented software engineers that can build just about anything. How can you justify paying hundreds of millions or even billions for something a team of 30 engineers could build in a year or two. That translates to about $12M of development cost versus a huge acquisition cost. Technology is not the issue here. It is all about marketing channels, sales expertise, and market leadership in segments where Microsoft is not strong.

It comes down to this; if the company in question has a product that is squarely in the domain of an existing Microsoft product than the valuation is a small premium over the internal development cost. If the company has market leadership in a new product space or market segment than the valuation goes up significantly.

Entrepreneurs should remember this. The "barriers to entry" are most often market position, not technical brilliance. I have heard start-ups say "we have a two year lead on our closest competitor". In fact, I have said it myself at previous start-ups. I was wrong. Most technologies can be replicated by a talented engineering group within a year or less. Many times a similar technology can be licensed immediately and a new product shipped within months.

Many start-ups have failed by focusing too much on their technology and not enough on the value they bring to customers and the channels they use to service the customer. Many times the early innovator fizzles, and a "fast follower" comes in and makes all the money. "Microsoft will acquire my company"

We do have a two fold movement.

First.

The current inflation rate in rupees is 14+% ( 72/14 =~ 5) so indian programmers will be 100% more expensive in 5 years. They currently are about 1/3 the cost (with very low benefits compared to american workers).

The indian peasants are beginning to get pissed off by the inflation so increased taxes are likely.

Second-- the dollar lost 3.5% against the rupee in the last year alone. So the net inflation rate is roughly 18% (72/18 = 4!). So that mean costs for indian programers will double in only 4 years at the current rate.

Now- infosys reports that *many* companies are bidding for their workers. You might be getting the workers for 1/3 the cost, but if another company bids 50% of the cost, then you lose the workers.

Likewise, there are limits to growth.

http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspecti ves/2006/07/innovation_and_.html
"Leading firms like Infosys report turnover rates in the range of 10 - 15%, much more equivalent to what we experience in Silicon Valley."

10-15% ... Last year they had to HIRE 13,000 new employees just to stay at the same number of people.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1991783,00.as p
Some companies report 15% per year. Quality issues. Very high job hopping rates.

OTH, rumors run rampant where I am of the entire IT staff being replaced by indians. Which opens another can of worms. This company only sells products in the US. Will popular press about them dumping hundreds of americans for indian workers affect their ability to sell product here? It's unclear- folks frequently SAY it matters but then sneak in and buy the bargain anyway.

No, No, you're both wrong. This is /., the *real* issue is: "is the same government that earlier this year slammed open source software for being useless and buggy." DOH! WTF! "We begin bombing in five minutes."

Singapore is just another facist state. Switzerland has the advantage of being a far smaller country and a very small, homogenous and rich population.

Could you show examples of heterogenous populations with significant economic disparities where you have similar levels of safety and freedom?

From Google:
Zurich pop - 366,809
Singapore -- Population: 4,492,150 (July 2006 est.)
London -- Population: 7.5 Million (2005 Est.)

That's a BIG difference.

http://tonygoodson.typepad.com/tonygoodson/2005/12 /singapore_murde.html

From http://www2.mha.gov.sg/mha/detailed.jsp?artid=1302 &type=4&root=0&parent=0&cat=0
On Friday, Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam announced that every school will be patrolled by security guards and fitted with up to 12 cameras over the next few months.

Is there a market for super efficient cars that look like tampons with wheels?

Interestingly enough, Scott Adams talks about this very thing in his latest blog entry. In addition to throwing some humor in the mix, he shares your opinion about the look of available high(er) efficiency vehicles.

"As I made clear, both in the
preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that
global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious
discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which
there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why
many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely
accepted by the scientific community. "

Since the eighties, when Japan began to take over U.S. role on technology, and U.S. started to focus more on services, this was something predictable. Sometimes people forget that there is no way to be prosper doing each others laundry

A gallon.

http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/gasol .htm
http://www.fintrend.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/G asoline_Inflation.asp
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/04/gas oline_prices.html

My you are persistent. Your definition of a quick Google search and mine are obviously different. But I am an engineer and some of my Google searches can last a week or more. Anyway Half a page down results. http://www.switchgrass.nl/photo_gallery.htm These are comparatively small and that is a good thing.

Oh look, here is your greedy sons a bitches now. There is funding for 6 new Cellulosic Ethanol plants in the US http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/03/ doe_selects_six.html

Great ideas, but will be badly implemented. Trucking in stocks and ethanol out to everywhere. Small Local operations are better in the long run(IMHO). ONSite Production. I could site source after source of reports, studies conclusions of many smart people who have, you know, actually studied this area. But to what end? So you could cite the first 3 links of your Google search. I've already convinced me. and I don't need to reread it all to get the proper URLs to convince you. This thread started with your insistence that "subsidies and tariffs are stupid" and I've tried to explain why that is not so. Obviously I have failed. Pity, I thought I was getting somewhere. Even if the subsidies disappeared tomorrow it still turns a profit. Just not as much as quickly and not as attractive to investors. (They love that Government money)

If products aren't 'worth' what people pay for them, then the whole field of economics is complete nonsense

You were in on the PS3 Pricing meeting weren't you? Or you bought one?

> 'Worth' is obviously subjective as it is perceived value.

In this context $ price is not the only cost. If you reduce all but the $ cost by switching processes but keep the same product "fuel" it is a win-win situation.

I wish you luck, but I will remain skeptical until somebody stands up and announces that they are producing ethanol that is cheaper than gas.

Skepticism is almost always warranted and I applaud you for it. As long as you keep buying that gas that is already blended with 10% ethanol, I don't need you to be convinced. And if you get a FlexFuel E85 Vehicle all the better. Or better yet put this on your Christmas List.

E100 baby.

It was a pleasure discussing it with you.

Kathy Sierra (creator of the Head First book series) has a great blog and discovered some things about Face-to-face at SXSW this year and made a post about it.

"Software used to manage the design and manufacture of the 555-seat A380 at Airbus's Hamburg engineering center isn't fully compatible with that used at company headquarters in Toulouse, France, say current and former Airbus executives, including Charles Champion, who headed the A380 program until September. That's why hundreds of small changes to electrical wiring in the A380 snowballed into at least a year's delay in delivering the world's biggest passenger aircraft and $2.5 billion in lost profit."

now maybe he could get past the resume screeners and get a job at Google?

I find this to be another offshoot of the whole "nature vs nurture" thing. All of these things are partially biological (and thus uncontrollable) and partially learned. I think the problems come when people insist it's either one OR the other.

http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/whos_ fat_german.html

Have too!

Which photographs?

I would start with this:
http://rayrobison.typepad.com/ray_robison/2006/08/ al_ap_at_it_aga.html/
and
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=2211 6_Still_More_Photo_Staging_Identified&only/

Then you can read about the Red Cross Ambulance Incident here:
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/

Additional staged incidents here:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=2212 3_Green_Helmet_Admits_Staging_Photos&only/

Congratulations, grasshopper. You are on the path to enlightenment.

You have to immediately forget whatever you were told about specifications. The real world doesn't work that way, where you get elegant descriptions of exact useful functionality. You're either going to get 100 page documents with way too much detail and a laundry list of features that won't really get used, or what you have right now -- which is, basically, nada.

The key to fixing this is iterative development. You have to give people something to react to -- then you'll draw out their real needs. Start small, be prepared to throw a few false starts away entirely, and you can build up from there. You don't need the full eXtreme Programming bit of having a full-time customer advocate and specific two-week/three-week/whatever iterations, but those concepts are good ones to model your process on.

Try reading the Creating Passionate Users blog for suggestions on how to get people actually interested in your project. Once you do that, you'll get the feedback you need, and as you deliver on those suggestions, you'll build confidence from them that will give you the carte blanche you need to start dictating the evolution of this project on your own. Once you're "the goto guy" on "The Project", you're in the sweet spot and basically can't lose.

Number of annual cd sales is ~500 million. Watch as they increase prices by a buck to "cover losses due to piracy." 12.5M is chicken feed for these guys, and even if equally distributed is under 10c per person. Its a nifty de facto tax.

See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/03 /bill_hood.html Bye, Oliver

it's unlikely this would fly far in the US.

It might fly far enough to keep you in court for four years. In 2000, Ralph Nader's presidential campaign created a parody of the MasterCard "priceless" ads, which had been parodied in several other places previously without a peep from MasterCard. When the Nader ads came out, however, the company atttempted to block stop them from airing, though this was denied. (Interestingly, with the rather small campaign warchest Nader had, the ads probably got more notice than they ever would have if they just aired.) They also sued the Nader campaign and eventually lost... in 2004.

Here is a random assortment of links about the story:

http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/03/nader_w ins_pric.html

http://www.commondreams.org/views/091300-102.htm

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets002050.shtml

This sounds horrible. I find the idea of overriding another animal's free will very disturbing.

It's a funny video to show to your friends and test their visual perception.

I've found about it through growabrain: White Shirt Experiment

Here's the actual video (Java Plugin required)

... may be a good plot. See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /bugs_in_the_air.html Bye, Oliver

http://www.werkshop.com/. I just wrote about this today: DRM and legal music in Canada

First of all, the CEO of eMusic during the Napster Hearings was Gene Hoffman, and yes, he did agree with the court ordered injuction against Napster. Before he made that statement, he asked Napster to remove eMusic files from their index. He also asked that users who shared the songs be unbanned from Napster. Frankly, if I were selling unprotected music, I wouldn't call it "short-sighted" to ask another company not to let people give it away.

But eMusic wasn't just his company. Hoffman cofounded the company with Bob Kohn. Before that, both of them served on the board for Pretty Good Privacy. I know. Total "asshats".

Either way, the current CEO is David Pakman who has been speaking out against DRM since long before Steve Jobs did.

While I agree with boycotting companies for their beliefs and behavior (I don't buy major label music or anything Sony), I have to call bullshit in this case. eMusic provides distribution for many small record labels in a way that lets their users play the music whenever, and on whatever digital music player they want. They are priced fairly (I pay ~ $.18 a song). They have a good business model, and they're legal.

I'm sure it is possible to rationalize not paying for music no matter how it is provided to you. And if the option to obtain it for free exists, you certainly can take advantage of it. But criticizing a good company in a public forum based on outdated information to justify your refusal to pay for music only makes you look like an asshat.

See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /free_as_in_cuba.html Bye, Oliver

"It is a smaller community, but I would argue it is a more influential community"

Second Life is a ponzi scheme.

http://randolfe.typepad.com/randolfe/2007/01/secon dlife_revo.html
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/ 1319236

Money has an intrinsic value in the real world. Namely, that other people will give you goods and services in exchange for it.

except that usually there is not a fixed amount of game money.

See, in the real world, money is the medium of exchange for goods and services. But in the game world, realistically, goods (items) are the same as money.

... see my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /msapple.html Bye, Oliver

The police just has to find a terrorist who is stupid enough. See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /antiterrortroja.html Bye, Oliver

Sounds like pretty good value for money. It isn't often you can get a level of coverage comparable to the superbowl, for only $2 million.

Come by the Albuquerque Moodle Moot on Feb 16 to see how UCLA, Intel, The Open University, The Carnegie Foundation, etc. are using Moodle.

Moodle is simply the most flexible mature LMS out there, with a wide range of completely different formats for supporting different pedagogies built in, and it's relatively easy to build new interfaces to meet the specific goals of a particular institution.

For some of the best commentary on the Blackboard patent issue, see Al Essa.

http://technobabylon.typepad.com/tb/2007/01/can_mi crosoft_g.html

I agree, the punching issue is a pretty serious concern...

Here is Ajax.
The rest are immitators.

"slightly puffy like it's bloated, or slightly over-inflated"
well, that can be cute.

This happens all the time. Watch a documentary on evolution and you find biologists, zoologists, etc, saying things like "the Jaguar was made for the water" and "caribou decided it best to travel in groups." To me, this inexactness of speech warns of a possible inexactness of thought. If you're a strict evolutionist, it seems one should avoid words that connote intention or design. My honest take is that these folks see evolution as a kind of designer ala Richard Dawkins' "Selfish Gene." A bunch of algorithms manipulating matter towards survival. Of course, I don't see how you'd get Giraffe or Peacocks out of that. I would like to see someone take all the survival algorithms assumed to propel evolution and write a kind of simulation program. Just to see what you'd get. I'm betting on a world full of shoggoth. YeeHa!!

... after all that Zune and WGA etc. stuff. See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/01 /ballmers_tip_of_1.html Bye, Oliver

What he missed is the biggest reason to oppose net neutrality legislation ... any legislation is another step to the government fully regulating and controling the Internet.

I'm so glad the Libertarians showed up today. I was starting to miss them.

When are you guys going to start handing out Guns for Tots again?

See: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/01 /modern_mathemat.html Bye, Oliver

"or an associated terror group" so someone like anyone that doesn't like them.. i see

So, when it says "an associated terror group", instead of thinking of groups like Algerian Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat, the Monotheism and Jihad group in Morocco, or Jemaah Islamiyah, your mind turns to "someone like anyone that doesn't like them", by which I take it you mean, as is often directly stated when this line of thinking is presented on Slashdot, either Democrats or those further left who protest administration policy. In the process you are willing to try and blur the difference between thugs who engage in mass murder of innocent people as part of an attempt to force their extremist brand of religion on people around the world and loyal Americans with different views on some policy questions like preferring tax rates a few percent higher? What is wrong with you? You clearly don't "see".

Research grants all too often turn into corporate welfare programs. While the research is publically funded, the results are privately owned, and milked for every last possible cent. Read about the Bayh-Dole Act; there's some good commentary here which says what I'd say if I were more eloquent.

The price of your Sony Ericsson example is without the discount from your cell phone company for signing a 2 year contract. According to Macworld, "Apple has no plans to release a version of the iPhone without a service contract or one that is unlocked." The prices announced for the iPhone include a 2 year contract. As for the Windows Mobile phones, you're just wrong.

If you want a phone with a comparable screen resolution (480x640 compared to iPhone's 480x320), try the Neo1973 OpenMoko phone, available in February 2007, priced at $350 unlocked. (It even has a touchscreen)

Or you could just admit that people who buy Apple want to pay more than they have to for a computer/music player/phone.

The government has recognized this problem and is switching their e-forms client from PureEdge (now owned by IBM and called Workplace Forms) to Adobe Reader. They awarded a new contract to General Dynamics IT late last year (switching from the original integrator, Northrop Grumman) and will be rebuilding the whole thing while maintaining the existing form sets and whatnot. The new Adobe forms are scheduled to be available in early April; see this FAQ for more information.

I wrote about this whole thing on my own site and on my company's blog. It's been a major problem for some research universities in particular, who have a loyal Mac community. But I think Grants.gov's on the road to fixing it.

(Full disclosure: Our company was part of a bid to win the contract that was awarded to General Dynamics. Our team proposed a different approach that would have yielded the same outcomes but we're not part of the GDIT team.)

You are (not surprisingly) expecting it to make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is Roughly Drafted. This is the place where we heard that Windows has 48% market share, because it seems, puzzlingly, not to be hardware. And where we tried to prove that despite SP 1-4 being free, they really cost more than the OSX upgrades which cost $100 each.

Its a funny mixture of MacSpam and MacFud. Goodness knows why he keeps doing it. It is probably doing more to undermine the credibility and reputation of Apple and Macs than any of its supposed enemies....

http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/personal/in dex.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/15/fuzzy-tactics-arent -helping-the-mac-community/

There's been something fishy going on at nVidia for a while.

One is nVidia's policy that *they* don't support nVidia techology; the OEMs do. They tell you if you have problems to contact your OEM. Now Apple is a big company and could conceivably do this, but many nVidia cards are made by small OEMs who slap electronics on a board and sell it. Are they going to help you with a crashing nVidia driver. And when you follow the link on the nVidia to their OEM "support partners", this is what you get:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_support.html "Page not found"

nVidia has gone so far to shut down the feedback page on their website: It says "This module is still under construction." You really believe nobody at nVidia knows how to make a web feedback page?

There's a long running bug in nVidia drivers known as the nv4_disp bug. You'll be typing away on your PC, then suddenly your monitor goes blank. A few seconds later, your PC power down. This was happening to me and I though it was some perculiarity with my PC. It turns out, this is affecting a lot of people, and it has been around for many years. nVidia know about it (they mention it in passing on one of their forums), but haven't fixed it. Windows BSOD diagnoses it as an infinite loop "device driver programming error." Independently some skilled owners worked out it was a timing problem with how nVidia writes to an I/O register. If you're lucky this bug will hit you only once a week. If you're unlucky, several times a day. THIS HAS BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS, yet nVidia won't fix this damned thing!

Want to see how widespread the problem is? Google for nv4_disp. The owner of this web page says he's amazed how many hits this page gets, and theorises a lot of people are affected:

http://s13.invisionfree.com/nv4_disp/index.php?sho wtopic=10
http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2005/10 /stupid_windows_.html
http://www.computing.net/drivers/wwwboard/forum/49 55.html
http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/nvidia-nv 4disp-problem/
http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread27150-1.html
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread18930. html

The most frustating thing is that nVidia do everything they can to put you off. A "under construcion" feedback page. The fob-off to their partners, with a support page that doesn't even exist. Ignored e-mail. Ignored forum questions.

One solution is of course to buy an ATI card, but if you're paid hundreds of bucks for an nVidia card, what do you do? Does anyone know how we can make nVidia fix this damned thing?

I read the NYT article, and this is really not a new issue, is it? The iPod has had this issue, as did Apple's previous foray into cellphones (the ROKR and now the RAZR). The bigger challenge the iPhone faces is that, according to Steve Jobs, 3rd party developers won't be able to write programs for the iPhone without Apple's blessing and distribution channels. That's a product killer, given that the most popular smartphones already on the market (especially those running PalmOS and Windows Mobile) are tremendously extensible via 3rd party offerings. It's also a huge mistake. Having a phone that plays music isn't a revolution; it's a necessity these days. Heck, the phones that are being given away by the carriers can all play MP3s at least. Rather, anyone spending as much as Apple wants for the iPhone (even before locking in a data plan from Cingular) is going to want to do whatever he or she can imagine with the iPhone in all aspects of life, not just music or telephoning. That will require 3rd party developers. Apple should embrace 3rd party development, since it will sell many more iPhones, rather than the current strategy.

Personally, I was pondering how to make the business case for an iPhone at work until I read about the current 3rd party app limitation. As someone who's used the PalmOS for 10 years, I am *not* going back to one-vendor sourced apps. {Prof. Jonathan Ezor, PalmAddict Associate Writer}

I'm glad that Google watches the Web so that we don't have to fear anything. See my small cartoon. Bye, Oliver