More rants of a dead man

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.

Of course it is, you just have to decide what you mean by better.

Open source has its uses, but like everything else, it’s not the answer to all problems.

But this one thing did occur to me this morning: turnaround time on bug fixes.

If you have a software company with enough infrastructure to handle bug reports from customers and are paid service contracts to fix them, the company has incentive to fix bugs.

There’s no equivalent in the open source world except scratching an itch or possibly, the guy who wrote the code with the bug in it might be a little embarrassed about it and go in and fix it.

But I’ll take the paid way any day

So now I’m wondering if anybody has ever done a study on if open source software is actually better or worse off in terms of bug fixes. Maybe the initial quality is better, because open sourcers aren’t generally trying to beat competitors to market.

So it would be hard to compare, but I find it hard to believe the bugs get fixed in open source land faster and more completely than they do in the paid world.

And I’m not even sure of mozilla counts, they’re getting paid.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Web 4.0 is already passe.

A few weeks ago I was in traffic court to see about playing that little game of reduce-the-fine.

The judge was very up front and clear about how the game worked. He explained that there was another employee of the government who would call your name, ask you to walk outside with her, offer you a deal, and it would most likely be in your best interest to take the deal.

Then he said, this is not a money making scheme.

I somehow managed to restrain myself. This guy was obviously a wise and intelligent guy, he made no story or issue about what was going to go on in his courtroom. We were all playing this game, and this is how it goes.

But then he flat out lied to everybody by saying this was not a money making scheme.

There is a $85 surcharge that new york state tacks on to nearly every ticket and summons it passes out.  Does the state feel the need to extra-punish us? Or does it just want more money.

I am reminded of a time a few years ago when I was getting off the exit of a highway and there was a checkpoint. You know, where the cops look at the inspection and registration of every car looking for expiration problems.

He took one look at my car and pulled me over.

He pointed out the my registration had expired. Interesting, I thought I very distinctly remember going to the dmv website and renewing my registration and paying. But I looked at the sticker in the window and sure enough it had expired.

So I got a ticket.

It seems to me this is a money making scheme. If the nice police man really wanted to help, he might have said “Your registration has expired, is everything okay?” And we could have discussed the situation, and I would have thanked him for pointing out the problem to me.

In fact what had happened, was I used a state government website to renew my registration. The state government either failed to mail me the new registration sticker or the federal government’s postal system failed to deliver it to my house. Either way, I did everything right, the government’s system failed, and for this, I get fined $60.

Of course you can say it’s my car it’s my responsibility to make sure everything is in  order, and I agree it is. I will take responsibility (the issue of being forced to register my car is another matter entirely) for my actions. But did they have to fine me or could they just have pointed out to me the problem so I could take care of it.

No, this is not a moneymaking scheme.

If anybody’s looking for reasons why the revolution has failed, here’s a good example.