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I figure that most people basically use their computers nowadays to surf the web, and read and send email.
Some do some programming, photography, and other less common things, but the vast majority generally facebook, shop and read email.
Yet every few years you have to buy new hardware so you can keep doing these things.
Just the same rant really, that if people would write better software, everybody could save a lot of money.
Put speed limiters on strollers so even if it gets away from you and starts rolling down a hill, it won’t ever go so fast that you can’t easily catch up with it.
I made sshh downloadable. You can read about it here.
Or download it here…
http://deadpelican.com/sshh_release_I_20090814.tar.gz
Or the prebuilt cygwin windows binaries…
I spent a lot of time this weekend doing research to buy parts for a new machine.
One thing I realized is that people are stupid. Even technical people.
Specifically I’m talking about the overclocking crowd. Now I’m all about getting as much for your money as possible, but there are LOTS of people on newegg who complain that they overclock chips and they don’t work.
I don’t know if this is how it works anymore but in the good old days, intel or whoever would build a chip to the best specifications that it could, then test it. If it tested reliably as a 3ghz chip, it was sold as a 3ghz chip. If it only tested reliably at 2.5ghz, it was sold as a 2.5ghz chip.
Now in the days of quad cores, I can see where it would be hard to build a chip where all four cores tested reliably at 3ghz, which is why those chips are so much more expensive than the 2.8ghz for example. So people buy the 2.8ghz then try and overclock them and complain when they don’t work.
Do they not understand what’s going on? If it didn’t test reliably at a higher speed, then it’s not going to work reliably when you try and use it at that higher speed.
That’s why you pay more for it to go faster.
If you take your Chevy volt and try and go as fast as a Ferrari, it’s not going to work, the volt wasn’t tested reliably at ferrari speeds. That’s why you paid less than a Ferrari.
The other day I was going to work and I remembered I didn’t have much gas in my car. The little low-gas warning light was already on when I started the car.
It’s got one of those little computer things that tells you how much gas mileage you’re getting and how many miles it thinks you have left in the tank.
It said I had 57 miles left, the drive to work is 35 miles, I figured I could make it. New car there should be no sludge at the bottom of the gas tank….
So I figured I should drive nicely. Now the little computer thing has to go by how much gas is in the tank and your driving pattern to determine how many miles you have left. I don’t know how far back in my driving history it goes to gauge but it’s more than today’s trip.
When I first got the car, I drove it nicely (since it was still in its break-in period) and I got it to say I could get 400 miles to the tank when I just filled it up. I figured that was pretty good. But obviously that was pretty non-fun driving, especially for z4.
So I drove to work, got gas, reset all my computer settings, and went to the office.
Starting to drive home I noticed that it said I had 472 miles left in my tank. Not bad I thought, it must have remembered my driving style on my drive to work. Let’s see if I could get it to 500.
Well, as the miles clicked by the number went up, and I eventually got it as high as 512, and that was after having driven 20 miles or so, so I should be able to get at least 530+ miles out of a newly full tank.
The mpg computer said I was getting 41.5 mpg.
A BMW z4.
Now of course this isn’t entirely fair. I had the windows open, the A/C off, it was all highway, manual transmission, and I think the trip from work to home is, on average, downhill (though there are plenty of up hills on the way.)
So my question is, if BMW can make a sports car that can put out 250 hp, that can still (if you try very very hard) get 41 mpg, why does EVERY OTHER CAR suck by comparison?
And it seems to me with a smaller engine and a lot of tweaking to force you to drive like I was driving, LOTS of cars should be able to get in the 30 mpg range, not just the mini.
So what gives? How hard is it to make a car 10-20mpg more efficient than the going rate now?
You can forget all the hybrid stuff, and spend your money better on tweaking a known good platform.
I just don’t get it.
It seems unfair to the Olympic sponsors, the direction women’s volleyball is going in.
Every time the olympics comes around, the women playing volleyball wear skimpier and skimpier outfits. There’s nowhere for the sponsors to display their logo.
They’re going to have to start tattooing the players soon.
So I was at the hospital for a few days while our first baby was being born.
And I noticed something really interesting.
This is the new pepsi logo.
This is the new pepsi logo upside down.
It says isded.
I had a thought today.
Google is the undisputed king of search, it’s impossible to imagine anybody unseating them.
How could they, you’d have to do better than google at searching among other things, (mostly advertising, I suppose) and be cheaper, which unless you’re planning on giving money away for searching on your website, you’re not going to be. (Those .com days are over, sadly.)
But I noticed something. While I was writing my iphone application and I kept trying to look up reference for the api and other things I had a really hard time finding information in google because mac gets such a relatively small percentage of the development market.
But more importantly: google failed. And where they failed, somebody else can succeed.
So indeed it is not impossible to unseat the king (I mean it never has been, it just takes time) but here,
we can see an instance of a crack in the glass.
It will be a long time before the industry shifts away from what google does best and have them also be too big to be nimble about catching the next wave, but it will eventually happen. But maybe just maybe you can already see the shimmer start to fade.
Then again I’ve been saying the shimmer has been fading since they said “we’re not evil.” Please.
I find that one of the best things about reading my bog, is that I agree with everything I say. I can’t find any other bog where I agree with even half of what the other person has to say.
So I just read this article about this company called a better place, where they’re going to make money not by selling electric cars, but building and servicing the battery trading and recharging infrastructure.
Brilliant, I say.
But some of the premises are not.
Despite what anybody says, it seems to me that burning fossil fuels to make a car run is more efficient (or rather, less inefficient) than burning fossil fuels to create electricity to be transported over lossy power lines to be stored in a battery (the transfer of which also loses energy in converting to a chemical storage mechanism) only to be reconverted back into mechanical energy to make the car go.
It’s just simple physics.
But oh, they’re smarter than me, they’re going to take advantage of cheap electric rates at night to charge their batteries, and sell the power back to the grid during the day.
Maybe nobody knows this dark little secret, but the reason power is cheaper at night is because nobody’s soaking any of it up. Guess what. You start drawing lots of power at night, the electric company is going to start raising the rates at night. There goes your business plan.
Am I the only one who sees this? Maybe it’s just me.
The only way I can see electric cars even slightly working out is if you have a fleet of electric trucks parked at some huge dam. You charge the electric truck’s batteries (and the batteries they’re carrying) from the dam, and you transport the batteries to electric filling stations where the batteries are traded and brought back to the dam. It sucks, but at least there’s no fossil fuel emissions.
The problem is, there’s only so many dams in the world, people get upset when you want to dam up their river. People flip out when you want to put up wind farms, and let’s face, solar isn’t here yet, and it takes up a lot of surface area for the amount of power you get, and it only works in the sunny dry places.
Now some people point out that electric cars are a win, you just have to change your definition of winning.
If the goal is reduce car exhaust emmissions in urban areas where cars sit and idle all day, yes, electric cars are a win. But if you think you’re actually creating fewer emmissions overall (remember the loss in converting and transporting electricicty here) you’re terribly mistaken.