Mark Byron

Electric Avenue

Here's an interesting piece on an electric car some MIT folks are working on.

The team's goal is to build an all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts, which includes a top speed of about 161 kph, a family sedan capacity, a range of about 320 kilometers and the ability to recharge in about 10 minutes. They hope to complete the project, which they chronicle on their blog, by the third quarter of 2010.

The one drawback that I can see with the electric cars we have to date is that they take a long time to recharge. That's OK if you're going from home to work and back and can recharge overnight, but what if you want to take one of those on the road? You're out of luck unless you can swap out car batteries like you swap out propane tanks; if the car batteries had a user-friendly method of replacing them like a current battery, one could see gas stations have a battery-swap business to cater to long-distance travelers.

However, if you can charge a battery in 10 minutes, not only might truck stops offer recharging stations but restaurants might offer them as well. Gas stations might charge a set amount for a charge, but restaurants might use them as a loss-leader like WiFi is today; get your car recharged as you recharge.

The current technology requires 350KW of juice to recharge things that quick; they need to borrow the MIT power plant to get that kind of voltage. Not everyone has a power-plant at their disposal, but if they can get that down to more manageable levels, we might have the makings of a car that could put the gas station out of business by about 2030.

Let Your Mouse Fingers do the Walking

We had our local phone books delivered today, which is a waste of paper for my household. With broadband cable, we're far more likely to look something up on-line than thumb through a phone book. Google Maps will do a far better job than a phone book of listing available stores of a certain type and will include phone numbers along with locations.

It's interesting what the Web has done in many areas. Wikipedia and other web resources have made conventional encyclopedia obsolete, or at least not worth the hundreds of dollars to buy. The World Almanac used to be a yearly buy, but most of that information is a Google away these days and up to date at that.

What reference books has the Web banished from your bookshelf (or got them collecting dust) and what books still get used even with the Web?

Google Perplexed

I was thumbing through some old posts this evening, and found this 2004 piece on Google's IPO. Let's get some good Chianti ready, since I'm going to have to eat these words big time.

If Google has net income of $125 million and is expected to have a market capitalization of $20 billion, the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio would be $20,000m/$125m or 160.

To put that into perspective, the average stock these days has a P/E of about 25. Eventually, Google will stop growing faster than the economy and settle in as a normal company. At their current market capitalization, they'd have to raise their net income to $800 million to get to a P/E of 25. How will Google do that? Will they get six times the traffic? Three times the traffic but double the profit margin?

...

No, I'm not dissing Google, it's still my search engine of choice. It's sorta like making Michigan a 60-point favorite over Northwestern; they'll win, yes, but I don't think the Maize and Blue would cover the spread. Google's good, but it's not going to cover that 160 P/E point spread.

Well, fast forward to the 2009, if you will. Google now has a PE of 25, 24.81 as reported by MSN Money. Google blew past that $800M target in 2005 and made $4.2 billion in 2008. It may well have leveled out its growth, but has done so with a market cap of $104 billion. Google's wound up tripling in price since its IPO, even after the tanking market of the last half-year.

Google is the 20th biggest company on the US stock market as we go to press. GE, Coke and Toyota are 21,23 and 24, to show the company they're hanging with. Not bad for some computer geeks going to town with a search engine.

Little Techno Wows

There are a lot of modern technologies that make life better in small but significant ways. Here are a few that are sinking in this evening.

• Flash drives. A gig of data in your pocket for less than $25. Instead of holding a pouchfull of floppy disks or CDs, you have a small critter that fits on your key chain and slides into a USB port. Last term's PowerPoints? There. PowerPoints from my Warner Southern days? There. Black Scholes spreadsheet. There. Capital Budgeting spreadsheet. There. Resume (if I want to apply for something else, but I don't)? There. Gag formula PowerPoint for our retreat skit. There, and with a half-gig to spare.
• Skype. Eileen was video-phoning her sister this morning... in Zambia... for free. Cool.
• Cell Phones. Eileen's in the den calling one friend in Midland while I'm trash-talking another about the Midland High-Dow High game going on this evening, all with free long distance. Then, we call my sister to wish my niece a happy birthday... while they are on vacation in Orlando. Cool.
• YouTube and other video streams. Highlights, speeches, music, comedy, all free.
• Internet stock trading. I've never set foot in a brokerage, yet I have a portfolio going; I even got a proxy request for the shareholders meeting of one of my stocks yesterday via e-mail. It doesn't keep the market from tanking, but it even brings a perverse pleasure to see my new portfolio get decimated by this market.

All those things are things we take for granted, or close to for granted. However, they're all things that would seem sci-fi a decade ago.

What other things should we be counting our techno-blessings for?

A Wii Bit of a Logistical Problem

I was impressed with the Wii gaming system that my niece and nephew got for Christmas and went looking for one this weekend after Wiis showed up in a Circuit City flier in the Sunday newspaper. In CC's case, they had 33 units per store that get allocated first thing Sunday morning; the store opens at 10, but vouchers are handed out to the first 33 people in line as of 9AM. People then can come back when the store opens and use their voucher until noon.

Best Buy works much the same way, as I understand; you line up when the units go on sale, usually Sunday morning. Sundays are often when store sales periods starts, often meshing with when their fliers go out in the Sunday paper.

There's a problem with that distribution system; it tends to exclude folks who spend Sunday mornings at church. When we have a 9AM first service and a 10:30 Sunday school class, it's impossible for us to work in that setting without blowing off church, and if a gaming system is more important than church, you're priorities are a bit warped.

If you're in a multi-service church without Sunday School classes, you might be able to pull that off, snagging the machine at 10, then hustle over for your 10:30 or 11AM service. It;s even easier for the members of churches with Saturday evening services, leaving Sunday morning free.

The funny thing is, stores may well be doing that on purpose. Who's more likely to be an obsessive gamer, church goers who refuse to play hooky or the rest of the population? Probably the latter. Who's going to be more likely to buy more games for their new system once they purchase them? Probably the latter.

There seems to be a shortage of Wiis, of much longer standing that you usually see in a hot tech item; after a year or so, you'd think that Nintendo would have cranked up production. However, there is no shortage of accessories and games, which the stores will want to maximize sales of. If given the choice between selling to a casual fan who will buy a few games and a rabid fan who'll buy lots of games, your profit-maximizing point will be to find a way to get it in the rabid fan's hands.

Christian gamers can get to Midnight Madness things that launch a lot of new techie stuff, but Sunday morning releases are one way to screen them out, at least with the casual ones who aren't going to screw up their Sunday morning to get one.

PS--I Don't Get It

Sony's PlayStation 3 launched today; in the custom of the day, they had midnight launches for the coveted critters.

Sony is sure to rake in millions of dollars in revenue on Friday alone, with some 400,000 units expected to be available one week after an initial launch in Japan. Depending on the size of its hard drive, each PlayStation will sell for $500 or $600.

But Sony is expected to lose money initially on each sale of the PS3, which in addition to playing games, can surf the Web, download video and music and play movies with its Blu-ray high-definition disc drive. The Blu-ray player and other components have run up production costs, dragging Sony's game unit into a deep loss for the year to March.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm a bit lost as to why these game boxes are flying off the shelves for $500, when you can get a whole brand-new computer system for less. It might be the hi-def Blu-ray stuff that will make pictures a notch crisper than before. There's even a scalper market developing.

Even John Edwards, the former senator and VP nominee, caught the PS3 bug and was after one for his kids; one of his staffers did a major faux pas in heading to Wally World for the ex-senator while he was in the middle of a Wal-Mart bashing campaign.

It's interesting that Sony claims to be losing money on the systems. They might make their money on the games; once they've locked into the PS3 system, they need to buy PS3 games.

Honest, I Was Looking at Stars, Honey

NASA's going to fix the Hubble telescope. There was a question as to whether they'd use a shuttle mission to fix the Hubble given the problems they've been having with the shuttle, but they've decide to go ahead.

The servicing mission should extend Hubble's orbital lifetime to at least 2013, by which time Nasa will be getting close to launching a successor: the James Webb Telescope.

The next question from the right side of the Peanut Gallery is "What kind of chipmunk-unfriendly things will the James Webb Telescope be looking at?" No, no, not that James Webb. This James Webb, who was NASA administrator during the 60s and left this mortal coil in 1992, not the NC-17 rated author and Senate candidate.

Krystal Red Persuasion

Here's an odd place to be blogging from; a Krystal restaurant off of I-75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga at 11PM. I'm making one last stab at Florida teaching (more as things develop), and stopped to fire off a resume to a prospective school in Lakeland (who I talked to at an Ohio rest area this afternoon) while downing some of their White Castle-wannabe gut grenades for a belated dinner.

That's an odd mix; a decidedly down-scale burger joint offering WiFi. You can see Panera, catering to an intelligentsia crowd, offering it, but this is weird. WiFi has either jumped the shark or entered into the mainstream.

[Update 10/5/06 Krystal's about as old as White Castle, so the wannabe crack might not have been called for. As Kevin noted, it's likely that WiFi has gone mainstream; the old-school sports bar near our apartment has it now as well.

Since I've made this post, I've been good for a couple of "Krystal Red" Google hits a day. There's something called that in Europe, since most of the people looking are European,  but I can't quite figure out what. Could some of the folks Googling in enlighten me? Try to keep it clean, for I fear it might not be all that edifying.]

A Short History of Overclocking

This post on "overclocking" one of those dreaded low-flush-capacity toilets (nod to Ogre) got a knowing chuckle from me.

Back in late 90s, I owned a computer store, and one less-than-kosher trick of the trade was to overclock a CPU. Some chips could run faster than there posted speeds, and many an geek would try to see how fast they could get a chip to safely run. For many years, I had a machine that had a Celeron 266MhZ overclocked to 400MhZ. It's not illegal in and of itself (selling a 200 overclocked to 300 as a 300 would be), but it throws the CPU warranty out the window.

Back in my computer days, the hardcore computer innards geek's site was Tom's Hardware Guide; they taught the fine art of changing the jumpers on the motherboard, hot-wiring CPUs designed to avoid overclocking (it became a cat-and-mouse game between Intel and the geeks), and adding heat sinks and cooling fans.

I haven't been back to Tom's in a while. Among a number of interesting things, here's a pictorial history of the CPU.

Eat Your Heart Out

This is how to blog. I'm in Munn Park in downtown Lakeland, where it's 77 degrees and a light breeze. The park's lit up with a holiday light display and I'm WiFi blogging via SurfLakeland. For those of you having to fight off the latest snowstorm, my heart goes out to you.

WiFi Blogging

We just switched over from a cable modem to DSL today. One of the perks that the local phone company threw in was a DSL modem that worked both on Ethernet (so we could hook up both my dad's computer and mine) and as a wireless modem. In addition, they threw in a WiFi modem card for my laptop.

So far, I've not seen any difference between DSL and cable. I'm writing this from my laptop. It's not quite "wireless" since my battery's acting funny and I have to have the laptop plugged in to work. It might be that I haven't used the laptop in over a month and the battery needs a long recharge.

The advantage of having a third Web-ready computer is that Eileen and I can be on-line at the same time, or Eileen can be using the desktop for word processing while I go online. Also, the couch is comfier than the chair I got at the computer desk.

One Benefit of Academe-

-you get to lower Microsoft's next dividend by buying MS Office at half-price. I'm blogging from IWU's main library after swinging by the Marion campus bookstore to pick up an academic version of Office Pro; when I went by Best Buy yesterday, they had plenty of the standard academic version available, but none of the Pro with Access. It's still on the low side of $200 but less than half of the sticker price.

You're supposed to use it for academic purposes only. The ministry I'm getting an Access database ready for has GED and skill training as its key focus; is that fudgably academic?

For that matter, is this blog an extension of my academic life? Will I get in trouble for spell-checking stuff in Word? Inquiring minds want to know.

Does it Come With Punchcards?

People in schools and libraries should take note of this; HP just launched what's essentially a mini-mainframe, a Linux-based PC that can be shared by four users (hat tip to Rand Simberg).

Most of our modern computers have more power that we need for most mundane tasks. Right now, I've got five IE screens up, one for the article in question, one for the TTM site, one showing Bloglines and another with the BBC News frontpage and finally the Typepad one that I'm typing this up. It's not taxing the 256MB memory or the ~1GHz chip. Goose the memory up a tad and having four people work on it at the same time isn't a stretch.

Right now, we're envisioning a computer lab for the skill-training ministry that's currently in the planning stages; such a 441 beasty might be good for that setting. We're more likely to be using free corporate hand-me-downs; most Win98-era machines are just fine for surfing the web and running MS Office applications.

However, for other settings that will have to pay for their tech, this looks like a good option. As the first of its class, the $400/station seems a bit high and might get knocked down a notch once Dell and Gateway enter the field. The one downside is the Linux base, which limits the software availability. Oh, for a good W98 emulator.

Anti-Spyware Bleg

One of our homegroup members was asking me whether I knew of any good, inexpensive (yes, "pick one of the two", I know) anti-spyware software packages. He's a college student, so have mercy on his budget if you can. He's using a dial-up account, so the messages that spyware sends eat up more bandwidth than he'd like.

Any information from the Peanut Gallery?

The Gmail Kicker

This Orlando Sentinel piece has more lowdown on Google's new Gmail; it isn't an April Fool's prank, but it will go through your e-mail and post ads with that in mind. For instance, if Gmail notes that I'm planning a trip to the Columbus area, it'll post ads playing up Columbus stuff. If you don't want Google's computers snooping through your E-mail, this won't be for you.

The maximum E-mail size is 10 Meg; that can still let you send some good pictures through.

The Virtual Hard Drive?

Josh thinks that this is an April Fools hoax, but there are wide spread reports that Google is about to launch a free e-mail service called Gmail to rival Yahoo and Hotmail's free services; here's the BBC piece I first saw.

The too-good-to-be-true part is that they're giving almost a gigabyte (1000MB) of storage space in the rumored package. If that were true, I'd dump my Yahoo account in a New Yawk minute. That would allow people to e-mail pictures with a lot more ease. When coupled with broadband connections, it would limit the usefullness of compressing files into .zip format. It also would allow you to e-mail yourself files you wanted to access wherever you are, creating a virtual hard drive, especially if you couple the mondo storage space with a search capability.

We'll see if someone's yanking our chain.

Moving into the 21st Century

We finally entered the 21st century and got Eileen and I cell phones last week. I made my first mobile call an hour ago to Eileen back in Winter Haven; she was getting her hair cut and called me back. Once we're done notifying all the people who have our old land-line, we're junking it. We don't make a lot of daytime calls, so the all-you-can-eat nighttime and weekend minutes coupled with a 1000min/month mobile-to-mobile tranche (that covers mother-in-law, sister-in-law and my sister as well as the two of us) covers most of our needs; we're gambling on the 400/month anytime minutes being sufficient.

When you combine local charges and long distance charges, the pair of cell phones is cheaper, plus it allows you to call anytime, anywhere. I don't have to worry about being stranded in the middle of nowhere like I did back in September when my car died at 10PM halfway between Melbourne and St. Cloud; now I can be the Good Samaritan and offer my cell-phone to someone else, like the guy who stopped about 10:40 that night, or have a quick way to call AAA.

Next on the new-tech list; a scanner. My new printer has a scanner-copier built in, and the whole shooting match came in under $100; it was only $20 more than the grunt Dell printer. I haven't played with it yet, but I'm sure I'll find a good use for it shortly.

Planned Obsolescence

If they could ever use a usable Win9X emulator for Linux, this would be the time; Micro$oft is abandoning Win98 as of January-"The news also means that Microsoft will stop producing regular security patches for Windows 98 which could mean problems for firms that use it extensively. "

When computers are routinely replaced every three or four years, this level of quick retirement doesn't cause too many headaches, but how many technology systems are planned to become obsolete within six years? How many TVs would be sold if you needed to get new software to run it every five years.

That's one of the advantages of open-source software; stuff doesn't go out of print quite as easily. This quick obsolecscence may make Linux more attractive in the years to come.

Dells and Cells

My old home computer died last week; one of the nice things about having a laptop is that I could bring that home from my office and have it serve as a temporary home computer, albeit one that was four times as fast as the old one. It was interesting to see how much quicker a 1.2GhZ machine loaded off of Road Runner cable compared to the old 266MhZ desktop. Very slick

The old beast gave up the ghost sometime in the night Wednesday. I hopped on Dell and Gateway's web sites (my Gateway laptop's served me well, but I'm flexable) and found the better deal at Dell. Without express shipping and at Christmas, I got the machine in 48 hours; I had it sent to me at school, and got a call from Warner’s mailroom Friday morning. It took them less time to ship it than I did to set it up. I wasn't brimming with ambition, so the machine stayed in the box until this evening. 2.4GhZ. 40 Gig hard drive. 256 Meg of RAM.

When I got my old machine in ‘99, the 128 Meg was kick-butt, the 4 Gig hard drive was respectable and the 266 MHz (overclocked to 400, don’t try that at home) processor wasn’t exactly the bottom of the barrel.

My new bad boy is ten times as fast and has ten times the hard drive, and it’s Dell’s El Cheapo entry-level model. Moore, Moore, Moore. How do you like it? Very much. It’s even slicker on the Web than my laptop, which flew low.
_____

Big-time bleg here-I’m looking to get a cell as well as a Dell. When Eileen and I get back from Christmas, we’re going to junk the land-line and go strictly cell-phone. We’re leaning towards Verison, since my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and sister all are on Verison and there’s a generous tranche of Verison-to-Verison minutes, so Eileen can chatter with her girl-kin to her heart’s content.

Bleg-What physical phone to use? I’m clueless about what’s good, bad and ugly in cell phones. Suggestions?

Cape Crusaders

Eileen and I took our Thanksgiving Wednesday to go up to Kennedy Space Center, about a two hour drive from Winter Haven. Having been but a tyke during the 60s, I don't remember much of the Mercury and Gemini flights. One of the interesting factoids that came into my memory was that most of the early Apollo guys were also on Gemini stuff; somehow, the fact that Neil Armstrong had been in space before Apollo 11 hadn't registered.

There was one funny point for me; in a movie on the Apollo program, they played a longer clip that I'm used to seeing of the Kennedy speech launching the moon race at Rice U. in Houston

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...

I had to laugh at the Rice-UT line; IIRC, Rice was the lapdog of the old Southwest Conference, much like Northwestern (pre-Gary Barnett) was the doormat of the Big Ten.

The tour of the complex was interesting, getting close, but not too close, to the shuttle launch pads, driving along the crawlways where they haul the shuttle from the big Vehicle Assembly Building out to the pad. There was an odd combination of awe at the scope of the place with a certain tacky mundaneness. Watching the launch pad area, with liquid hydrogen on one side of the pad and LOX on the other, pointed out the fact that a launch is a controlled explosion.

Up to Code

If you get today's Fox Trot piece, you've been blogging too long.

Jason should have used italics rather than bold, IMHO, but that's a bit nit-picky. Kudos to Dr. Wiseman for showing me a dead-tree version just now.

Google Fun

A couple of fun ones from today. I'm #1 for Twinkie Diet (otherwise known as the Minnesota out-conference sked) and #5 in a Mexican search for globos de Eeyore. I did talk about anti-globos and Eeyore in the same page.

Google Trojan

I wondered why I was getting Google hits while I couldn't get on. There was a trojan that wound up sending all Google-related hosts to their site; the site was quickly shut down, leaving a "cannot find server."

I overheard something about this while channel surfing on the way home from church on Kim Kommando's show. I was feeling lousy and headed home early, feeling a bit guilty about bailing on the LifeChain event this afternoon, but God must of wanted me to hear the "Digital Goddess" and clear up the problem.

Design Bleg

Any Typepad vets out there? The left column seems to start too high, cutting off the bottom left of my banner. How do I correct that?

An Answer to a Bleg

Lee Ann Millinger points to the Michigander's blog (the state uses Michiganian as the official adjective, but as a native of the state, I like Michigander. I'm partial to the old cartoon goose bumper sticker-"I'm a Michi-gander"), who has this bleg

How do I get stuff to indent? I'd like to set off my poems and writings I am commenting on, but I'd like to save italics and bold for emphasizing and clarifying my own words. Also, where exactly do I insert comments into the blogcode? Help help.

You get that neat effect with "blockquote." Just put <blockquote> in front of your text and </blockquote> behind it. You can nest them, too, being able to double-indent the stuff your sourse quote blockquoted.

Another good trick to have in your bag of tricks is a link to an HTML character set like this one; that will give you codes for characters that aren't on your keyboard, or ones you want the computer to take literally as opposed to being part of the HTML directions. For instance, I had to use character 60 (less than) and character 62 (greater than) in the last paragraph to get it to print <blockquote> without it taking it as a command.

As far as comments are concerned, there are a number of free commenting services that are at least worth the price. YACCS is a popular one that I use. It does tend to go AWOL from time to time, as it did earlier this afternoon. Moveable Type, for the more adventurous among us, comes with fairly robust comments built in.

By the way, Tim, if you included an E-mail address, you might get more responces to blegs. I didn't see one there.