The GM EV1, previously known as the Impact, was an excellent electric car. They were never sold, but GM dealers leased a lot of them and the people who drove them absolutely loved them. No stopping at gas stations ever. It accelerated like a bat out of hell. It had aerodynamic swoopy lines without looking like a dorkmobile. Even the maintenance was less because regenerative braking partially recharged the batteries at every stop rather than wear out brake pads. It was a convenient and easy to use transportational appliance. It dispelled the industry adage that insisted that a recharging infrastructure would be needed before electric cars would be popular. Most people drive a lot less than 100 miles a day, making the EV1 a fun and practical commuting car.
But GM eventually revoked the leases, took back the cars and announced that electric vehicles were a dead technology. They were instead going to focus on the long term goal of building hydrogen cars. This coincided with George Bush and Dick Cheney announcing similar long term US government hydrogen power research goals. Look at the funny monkey. It's no secret that Bush & Cheney have strong ties to the oil industry. This is about maintaining the foreign-oil-consuming status quo, dressed up to look like hydrogen fuel progressive thinking.
Hydrogen power sounds nice, but there are some huge fundamental problems. We have better solutions that work now, and the government is opposing them instead of advocating them, because oil is king. If logic ruled, we'd redirect a good chunk of the money we're spending to fight terrorism and wage war in the Middle East and spend it on alternative energy research and development instead. The US should be a clean energy exporter. As long as we're addicted to Middle East oil, we will continue to have problems with balance of trade, terrorism, and a growing imperialism that fosters resentment in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, the far thinking Japanese car companies are making a good profit selling efficient and ecologically sound hybrid cars in the US. The free market system works, even when it's the victim of government intervention. Much as I dislike partial solutions, I've got to admit that hybrid cars make sense now, and are a good stepping stone to more efficient fuel cell cars in the near future. My next car may be a Toyota Prius. And given the US market pressures, there is a lot of work going into making large hybrid SUVs.
I'm much less excited about the Dessault aircraft plant building electric cars than I am about Toyota automobile manufacturing building a four place aircraft. And Honda is building a good aircraft engine, instead of the 1940's era tractor engines still used on light planes. In one stroke, Cessna, Piper and Beech will be completely irrelevant in that relatively small market. After that, maybe the persistent dream of the flying car will finally become a reality.
Apple does their homework before they release something
Apple was hammered by their loyal customers quite a bit last year. Black Cider ripped them a new one for widespread problems with the logic boards in the iBook, and made even more bad press for them by exposing their attempt to convince everyone who complained that they were the only ones having problems. The "screw through the apple" Black Cider T-shirts at MacWorld received a lot of press attention.
Meanwhile, the Neistat brothers distributed a hilarious video protesting the 18 month life of the nonreplaceable battery in the original iPod, forcing Apple into emergency spin control mode which resulted in a $99 battery replacement policy to avoid bad press during the launch of the iPod Mini.
Overall, the past year has seen the devout Apple crowd stand up on their hind legs and protest for a change. I think that's a good thing, even though I also think Apple designs innovative and high quality products. If they were starting to slip a bit, vocal consumers put them back on track, and that's good for everyone. A lesser company would have remained in denial while trying to cling to their shrinking monopoly (and here I'm definitely thinking SCO, Microsoft, RIAA, etc.)
IIRC, robot dudes at MIT proposed a sort of Mars Ball several years ago. The outside was a solid ball, the inside had a flywheel and a mechanism to clutch the spun-up flywheel to the outer ball. It had a great ability to store energy and quickly exert that energy, it benefitted from gyroscopic stability, and the clever yet simple drive system forced the outer ball against the wall of a crater to produce a normal force that increased traction. I seem to remember it being able to jump 30 vertical feet up the side of a crater wall. With nothing protruding from the uniform spherical surface, it seems unlikely to be trapped by any Martian surface feature.
This heavier version could stop, anchor itself, dig in the dirt, play with a chemistry set, look at stuff under a microscope, whatever.
Yahoo indexed the pages a little less than a month ago. I checked Google and there were no hits on my search phrases. Then I checked Yahoo and it had lots of highly ranked hits. Then I took down the site, although Yahoo still has a cached version.
And, yeah, I could have used a robots.txt file to avoid indexing. I didn't because I thought there would be a real product long before the site was indexed without me submiting it. Yeah, right. Other work appeared that buried me for several months.
I am completely uninterested in renting music by the month, for all the obvious reasons. However...
The primary justification for buying my Karma 20 MP3/OGG player was books-on-CD from the library. I missed reading, and now I can "read" a book while driving on the boring interstate or doing menial labor (not programming or engineering). In fact, I'm ripping and encoding the last CD from Jon Krakaur's Under The Banner Of Heaven as I type this. Listen once, and I'm done, which does make sense for a monthly rental. I'd gladly skip the trip to the library and rent a single use MP3 for a buck or two. Saving me the time to shuffle CDs would be worth it.
Of course, all the DRM and DMCA crap is far too much hassle to be worth using. The artists need to be compensated, but making it almost impossible to enjoy their work is not the solution.
I like the idea of putting the control back in the hands of the artists, regardless of whether it's a book-on-CD or music. Pay to download works. I have used PayPal to quickly send a few bucks to various humor websites if I liked the content. Ubergeek is a great example. I also donated $20 to a Multiple Sclerosis charity website in the UK because I liked the novel breast bearing approach that was used to solicit donations.
A few dollars for a download, paid directly to the artist is a lot better than the raping they get from the RIAA.
I made a couple of websites to test some web authoring software, and to help define a potential product I wanted to develop. I never submitted them to any search engines. Several months later, I started getting quite a bit of email inquiries, even though the website clearly stated that a product was not yet for sale. I quickly took the sites down to avoid advertising vaporware.
I assumed Google had finally indexed the sites. Nope. It was Yahoo. My sites were listed high on the first page for several likely search strings. That would be good if I was actually selling a product.
I don't mind the way Google sells Google AdWords, as long as they continue to index just about any page and have very broad coverage. The advertising rates are very modest compared to other types of ads, the ads are very well targeted, with brief, tactful and informative text. No trees are killed, and the ads are clearly seperated from the non-advertised search results. They seem to be everything that weasel spammers claim to be but aren't. I like the Google advertising approach, both as a potential advertiser, and as a Joe Sixpack web surfer who sometimes looks for weird non-commercial stuff, and sometimes wants to find a place where I can buy a product. In fact, I'd very much like some way to tell a search engine that I want to buy something or I don't, and get relevant search results.
Yahoo would do well to exactly copy the Google approach to search engine advertising.
The US Air Force has been using Provigil to allow pilots to stay awake for 24+ hour long missions. They need to be alert for midair refuelings at night, not sleepy or wired on speed. Three days without sleep is apparently no problem, and there are none of the caffeine or amphetamine jaggies. It works on a completely different (but not yet fully understood) mechanism. Still no word on the long term effects, but prescriptions are skyrocketing.
Given our obsession with cramming more life into our lives, sleep seems like an obvious source of extra hours. I'm waiting for this to be the abused drug of choice for geek entrepreneurs. What geek doesn't want more time for projects? Search for Provigil and you'll find numerous Google ads for sleazy online pharmacies that would like to help you get more into your day the modern chemical way.
My productivity enhancement is less chemical. Some caffeine in Mt Dew (is 9 a day too many?), and some electronics. I ignored the MP3 craze for years, then finally gave in recently and bought a 20 GB Rio Karma so I could record library books-on-CD and listen to them while I work on the more mindless stuff.
I've been reading too much/. lately and my productivity has been in the toilet.
I'm running QuickBooks Pro 2000 under CrossOver (the commercial version of WINE) in Xandros Linux, derived from Debian stable). The user interface is a bit ugly, with some of the buttons almost completely hidden and no online help, but it otherwise works as it did in Windoze. The critical accounting data is secure. Printing checks and invoices is not a problem.
Other versions didn't work but QB Pro 2000 does. CrossOver should put more effort into supporting QB as a critical application that prevents businesses from adopting Linux. I don't care if it runs IE or MS Office. All I need is QB and OSS.
I'm looking forward to a native Linux port of QB, but CrossOver emulation is good enough for now.
I switched my small business to Linux 14 months ago and it's been great.
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But GM eventually revoked the leases, took back the cars and announced that electric vehicles were a dead technology. They were instead going to focus on the long term goal of building hydrogen cars. This coincided with George Bush and Dick Cheney announcing similar long term US government hydrogen power research goals. Look at the funny monkey. It's no secret that Bush & Cheney have strong ties to the oil industry. This is about maintaining the foreign-oil-consuming status quo, dressed up to look like hydrogen fuel progressive thinking.
Hydrogen power sounds nice, but there are some huge fundamental problems. We have better solutions that work now, and the government is opposing them instead of advocating them, because oil is king. If logic ruled, we'd redirect a good chunk of the money we're spending to fight terrorism and wage war in the Middle East and spend it on alternative energy research and development instead. The US should be a clean energy exporter. As long as we're addicted to Middle East oil, we will continue to have problems with balance of trade, terrorism, and a growing imperialism that fosters resentment in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, the far thinking Japanese car companies are making a good profit selling efficient and ecologically sound hybrid cars in the US. The free market system works, even when it's the victim of government intervention. Much as I dislike partial solutions, I've got to admit that hybrid cars make sense now, and are a good stepping stone to more efficient fuel cell cars in the near future. My next car may be a Toyota Prius. And given the US market pressures, there is a lot of work going into making large hybrid SUVs.
I'm much less excited about the Dessault aircraft plant building electric cars than I am about Toyota automobile manufacturing building a four place aircraft. And Honda is building a good aircraft engine, instead of the 1940's era tractor engines still used on light planes. In one stroke, Cessna, Piper and Beech will be completely irrelevant in that relatively small market. After that, maybe the persistent dream of the flying car will finally become a reality.
Apple was hammered by their loyal customers quite a bit last year. Black Cider ripped them a new one for widespread problems with the logic boards in the iBook, and made even more bad press for them by exposing their attempt to convince everyone who complained that they were the only ones having problems. The "screw through the apple" Black Cider T-shirts at MacWorld received a lot of press attention.
Meanwhile, the Neistat brothers distributed a hilarious video protesting the 18 month life of the nonreplaceable battery in the original iPod, forcing Apple into emergency spin control mode which resulted in a $99 battery replacement policy to avoid bad press during the launch of the iPod Mini.
Overall, the past year has seen the devout Apple crowd stand up on their hind legs and protest for a change. I think that's a good thing, even though I also think Apple designs innovative and high quality products. If they were starting to slip a bit, vocal consumers put them back on track, and that's good for everyone. A lesser company would have remained in denial while trying to cling to their shrinking monopoly (and here I'm definitely thinking SCO, Microsoft, RIAA, etc.)
This heavier version could stop, anchor itself, dig in the dirt, play with a chemistry set, look at stuff under a microscope, whatever.
And, yeah, I could have used a robots.txt file to avoid indexing. I didn't because I thought there would be a real product long before the site was indexed without me submiting it. Yeah, right. Other work appeared that buried me for several months.
The primary justification for buying my Karma 20 MP3/OGG player was books-on-CD from the library. I missed reading, and now I can "read" a book while driving on the boring interstate or doing menial labor (not programming or engineering). In fact, I'm ripping and encoding the last CD from Jon Krakaur's Under The Banner Of Heaven as I type this. Listen once, and I'm done, which does make sense for a monthly rental. I'd gladly skip the trip to the library and rent a single use MP3 for a buck or two. Saving me the time to shuffle CDs would be worth it.
Of course, all the DRM and DMCA crap is far too much hassle to be worth using. The artists need to be compensated, but making it almost impossible to enjoy their work is not the solution.
I like the idea of putting the control back in the hands of the artists, regardless of whether it's a book-on-CD or music. Pay to download works. I have used PayPal to quickly send a few bucks to various humor websites if I liked the content. Ubergeek is a great example. I also donated $20 to a Multiple Sclerosis charity website in the UK because I liked the novel breast bearing approach that was used to solicit donations.
A few dollars for a download, paid directly to the artist is a lot better than the raping they get from the RIAA.
I assumed Google had finally indexed the sites. Nope. It was Yahoo. My sites were listed high on the first page for several likely search strings. That would be good if I was actually selling a product.
I don't mind the way Google sells Google AdWords, as long as they continue to index just about any page and have very broad coverage. The advertising rates are very modest compared to other types of ads, the ads are very well targeted, with brief, tactful and informative text. No trees are killed, and the ads are clearly seperated from the non-advertised search results. They seem to be everything that weasel spammers claim to be but aren't. I like the Google advertising approach, both as a potential advertiser, and as a Joe Sixpack web surfer who sometimes looks for weird non-commercial stuff, and sometimes wants to find a place where I can buy a product. In fact, I'd very much like some way to tell a search engine that I want to buy something or I don't, and get relevant search results.
Yahoo would do well to exactly copy the Google approach to search engine advertising.
Given our obsession with cramming more life into our lives, sleep seems like an obvious source of extra hours. I'm waiting for this to be the abused drug of choice for geek entrepreneurs. What geek doesn't want more time for projects? Search for Provigil and you'll find numerous Google ads for sleazy online pharmacies that would like to help you get more into your day the modern chemical way.
My productivity enhancement is less chemical. Some caffeine in Mt Dew (is 9 a day too many?), and some electronics. I ignored the MP3 craze for years, then finally gave in recently and bought a 20 GB Rio Karma so I could record library books-on-CD and listen to them while I work on the more mindless stuff.
I've been reading too much /. lately and my productivity has been in the toilet.
Other versions didn't work but QB Pro 2000 does. CrossOver should put more effort into supporting QB as a critical application that prevents businesses from adopting Linux. I don't care if it runs IE or MS Office. All I need is QB and OSS.
I'm looking forward to a native Linux port of QB, but CrossOver emulation is good enough for now.
I switched my small business to Linux 14 months ago and it's been great.