Under a Gibbous Moon

Recently, on Twitter, I responded to Anil Dash’s rather acerbic comment (which her promptly rescinded, no doubt under duress when when Apple’s stormtroopers kicked in his door) on how Apple periodically likes to make their products incompatible with everything else. I commented back about how my Bose Sound Dock will not charge my iPod Touch.

Thirty-four minutes later, I was contacted by Bose Service who stated that they had seen my tweet and wanted to help. I figured what the hell. I figured that they were maybe handing out adapters to fix the problem (either for free or a small charge) but no, after a little back and forth I found this out.

So here I am, stuck with a less functional sound dock with my only option being to spend $99 to “fix” it or just buy a new one. Ya, thanks but no thanks.

I would like to add a note that I don’t just a problem with Bose (though I am severely disappointed with their “in ear head phones” that only stay in when you sit perfectly still”) on this but also with Apple. It takes real disdain to hand out licenses to make third party accessories and then fuck them over like that.

In this case, Apple screws over the accessory maker who then screws over their existing customer base. Like they say, shit rolls down hill.

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A new article from Wired showcases the 2011 Ford Mustang which comes standard with a 305 horsepower V6 and has an EPA rated highway mileage of 31.

One of the first comments struck me as interesting.

Posted by: fletc3her | 03/4/10 | 4:50 pm |

I think it’s great that the auto industry is starting to improve mileage even in sports cars and muscle cars. But, I do wonder what the actual day to day mileage of one these cars will be. If you push the car to get the advertised 0-60 speed then you are not going to get the advertised mileage. Less powerful cars force the driver to drive efficiently simply by virtue of not having enough horsepower to waste a lot of gas.

He says that less powerful cars force the driver to be more efficient because it simply does not have the power. Apparently he believes that an increase in horsepower necessitates a drop in fuel economy. It is true that they tend to be highly correlated but vehicle performance is more complicated than that.

For a brief primer, horsepower is a measurement  of work with work being force expended over a distance. The next big engine measurement is torque. Torque is a measure of instantaneous force and typically refers to a twisting action, in the case of an internal combustion engine, the crankshaft acting upon the input shaft of the transmission.

Torque is then multiplied through the gears in the transmission (or divided in the case of an overdriven gear). It is then multiplied one last time in the rear differential before being divided by the wheels (think of them as really big gears).

The power output of the engine varies with engine speed, torque reaching its peak before horsepower. When these peaks are reached varies from engine to engine but it is the gear multiplication that picks up the slack at low engine speeds.

The reason that this is important is that the engine is most efficient when it is producing the most power. This is why mileage in the “city” is always worse than “highway”, you are constantly running the vehicle through the lower and less efficient RPMs. An excellent example is watching the black smoke on a diesel from a stop. Diesels are very inefficient at low RPMs and the momentary black smoke is cause by a lot of unburnt fuel. Physics also comes into play, with regards friction and momentum (it takes a lot of energy to move a vehicle from a stop than it is to just keep going).

This brings me back to my earlier point about “forcing efficiency”. Smaller displacement engines (four cylinder and even smaller six cylinder) have very high power peaks four, five, and even six thousand RPMs. The little power that the engine does produce does not actually come into play for a long time. As stated earlier, this is overcome through the use of aggressive gearing. This has the dual purpose of multiplying torque and spinning up the engine faster.

The interesting thing about this, is that the smaller engine (in a similar weight and shaped vehicle) is working harder than a larger engine would. It uses less fuel simply by virtue of having a smaller displacement.

This comes back the Mustang mentioned in the beginning of this post. It (and the new Camero) are part of a new breed of small displacement, high power engines. While this is not a new trend (think of when the Mustang dropped the 5.0 for the 4.7). it has been accelerating due to rising fuel costs.

This extra power, gives you the ability to motivate the vehicle with less effort (fuel) which is why you are now seeing amazing performance in vehicles with mileage ratings once associated with compact cars.

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This is a fascinating article, I am fairly certain that very few people have been so completely wrong about so many things in such a short period of time. While, in the comments section, many, many, many people have piled upon the author for this work, I personally have thrown back my memory to that prehistoric time, 15 years ago…

The Internet circa 1995

It was around this time that I saw my first commercial for the Internet. It wasn’t for any specific company (that I can remember) nor did they seem to be selling anything. The scene was at a rather quiet house party. The lights were low and a couple were talking in one corner he hands her (or vice versa) a piece of paper on it with his/her email address on it (a what!?). The tag line of the commercial was that one day our email address would be more important than our phone number. (continue reading…)

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After watching the Google Buzz controversy play out over the last week or so, I can honestly say that I am completely confused.

I signed up on Buzz the day it became available in my Gmail account, which was, I believe, the day after launch (and definitely before the shit storm started). When I did so it was quite explicit about what was going on and what it was going to do. It even listed who would be listed me following and gave me the opportunity to edit this list (which I did).

From reading much of the fury around the internet, it seems that my experience was totally unique. Apparently everyone else had Buzz just load up on its own and suddenly steal their identities and head for Vegas.

Now, admittedly, if you started up Buzz and clicked through the first couple of screens, you could be unpleasantly surprised.

I personally believe that much of the confusion comes from the fact that the Buzz icon was placed into the Gmail menu whether or not you have activated it, leading people to believe that was automatically activated.

This simply could have been handled by placing it in the text menu at the top of the screen where the various Google services appear even if you are not currently signed up for them.

Could this have been handled better by Google, certainly. Is the internet’s response to it radically overblown, yes.

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I’m certain that by now we’ve all heard about the spat between Amazon and Macmillian Publishing over the pricing of eBooks. If not, Macmillian demanded the right to set the price on their eBooks to whatever they felt like and Amazon wanted them capped at $9.99. After an ugly back and forth, Macmillian won.

But this isn’t about that. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Macmillian trying to see what the market will bear with regards to newly published eBooks. What I find far more interesting is how eBooks will bring new life to a different market, low demand and out of print books.

Printing books is an expensive business. There’s the cost of paper and covers, ink and binding. After all that, they have to be shipped to the point of sale. All this means is that for anything to get published, a certain demand must be anticipated. This goes not only for new books but also for older ones. Today’s best seller is tomorrows bargain bin special.

Eventually, and this will vary from title to title, nearly all books will reach the threshold past which it is unprofitable to distribute them in print form. At that point the book falls out of print. It doesn’t mean that there is no longer a demand for this particular title but that merely that there is not enough of it to justify the expense of printing it. This cost is referred to as marginal cost. The beautiful thing about eBooks, though, is that the marginal cost of each eBook is essentially zero dollars.

This means that there is no reason to not have any title on the shelves, since it doesn’t cost money to keep them there. This opens up a whole new world of specialty books, one hit wonders, and former best sellers that would otherwise be difficult to find or would require a very expensive limited run from the publisher.

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