Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Pricing Success But Still and Abject Failure
Nissan announced today that their first all-electric vehicle, the Leaf, will be priced around $25,000. While it’s certainly adorable and conceptually desirable, the Leaf, along with similar plug-in electrics, will continue to be an automotive failure.
Electric cars are best suited for urban environments, where slower speeds and short distances make optimal use of the car’s power system. However, the majority of residents in cities live in multi-family homes and apartment buildings without convenient access to charging stations. Suburbanites, who are much more likely to have access to power, simply place too much strain on the car’s energy system, discharging the battery much faster and likely before the end of the day.
Until the infrastructure is in place to allow city residents who park on the street to charge their cars, electric vehicles will never find a major place on the American roadway.
[From Nissan prices its first electric car, The Leaf, at roughly $25K - washingtonpost.com]
Update: The $25,000 figures includes a $7,500 tax credit. The car will sell for closer to $33,000 without the credit.
Outgrowing Arduino
For about a year now, I’ve been playing with the Arduino prototyping platform to learn about embedded programming. After a year, however, I think the time has come to say goodbye to the Arduino and program my microcontrollers directly.
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The Future of Computing
Today, Apple released its punchline-inducing “iPad” tablet device. Designed to be something between a smartphone and a laptop, the iPad is perhaps the most hyped device of the last couple years. Whether it will be a game changer is yet to be seen, but it is certainly a shift away from traditional computing for sure.
I will not mention the iPod anymore; if you want to do that, read one of the many Apple fan sites for ad nauseum iPad coverage. Instead, I want to describe what I believe is the future of computing.
Just one word: integration.
WordPress 2.9.1 released
WordPress updates to version 2.9.1, fixing some minor bugs. Now is the time to update.
After some tweaking with my hosting company, I can now use the platform’s automatic updater. Saved me several steps!
Windows to Add Mandated Browser “Choice Screen” in March 2010
The European Commission details the new, compulsory “Choice Screen” browser selection update to Microsoft Windows. From the Press Release:
What is the Choice Screen and how can people get it?
Microsoft has agreed with the European Commission to offer Microsoft Windows users a Choice Screen giving them an easy choice about which web browser they want to use.
The Choice Screen will be provided to those European Windows users (currently more than 100 million) who have Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer set as their default web browser.
Until now, Microsoft has provided its web browser together with its Windows software, whilst the main competing web browsers generally have to be downloaded from the internet. This means that often other browsers do not get installed on consumers’ computers.
The Choice Screen will take the form of a Windows update. The update will be installed automatically for users who have opted for automatic installation of updates via Windows Update so they will not have to do anything to get access.
The Choice Screen will be available from mid-March 2010.
This would have been more effective if mandated before Microsoft launched Windows 7, but I guess it’s better late than never.
Green My Tank
The Economist is reporting on the US Military’s tactical need for “green power” war machinery. Not to save the environment, but to “unleash us from the tether of fuel.”
In Defense of $5,000/MB
“AT&T is dead.”
Well, it’s not dead, but the Wall Street Journal claims that we should be making plans for the funeral. According to the WSJ, AT&T is holding onto an obsolete, monolithic business model that is neither supportive of their customer nor fostering of technological advances. The chief complaint: the extremely high cost of wireless data transmissions.
As an iPhone user, I know how much AT&T is charging. And while my service uptime is pretty good, the cost is the same as my home internet plan, which is faster and not capped.
What if, however, those costs are not too high after all. Wireless data does not fall under public utilities per se, but it does represent the fastest growing segment of both internet access and mobile communications traffic. Both the lack of competition and consolidation of the market have attracted the attention of the Congress and antitrust regulators. For regulators and consumers alike, the question becomes, “are we getting what we pay for?”
OS Nostalgia and Disappointment
Ten years ago, when I was starting my computer science training, I was a major fan of OpenVMS. OpenVMS, of course, will not run on my laptop, so I needed a solution to run on my standard-issue laptop. Linux was still in its infancy, especially on laptop hardware, so I began to play around with other operating systems. Eventually, a friend of mine turned me on to an operating system called BeOS. Superfast to boot, BeOS was based around a microkernel and a strong graphical user interface (“GUI”) design philosophy.
Today, the original BeOS project is defunct. A group of dedicated enthusiasts are working to bring the project back under the new name of HaikuOS. While Haiku continues to be as fast and lightweight as the old BeOS was, I can’t help but think that the GUI is stuck in the distant past.
After I overcame my nostalgia for BeOS, I started thinking that GUI operating systems have not done much to evolve in the past 25 years.
