GeekLimit

Security risks, threats from viruses, privacy invasion, lack of consumer protection laws and the many problems associated with may be far less real than many Internet users believe. That isn’t the point. It’s what they believe that matters.

That quote is from eight years ago. You’d think we’d learned our lesson…

The recent flap over MySpace is nothing new. We see it every time a new technology comes out, and the source is always the same: parents, special interest groups, and news outlets.

Parents

These fall into two categories:

those that have been convinced that there is a major problem when there really isn’t.

This is the group I hope most parents are in. The news outlets are to blame for the most part. After all, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. What better way to sell newspapers and advertising than to make it seem like there is an extreme danger threatening their kids? This, of course is evil. But there’s money to be had, so they do it anyway. Special interest groups aren’t far behind.

then there are those parents who want someone else to do their job for them

These are the parents I hope you’re not. Unfortunately, there are parents out there who really don’t care enough about their kids to be troubled in learning about online safety. Since they don’t have the time to teach their kids morals or responsibility, they’d rather just try to make the threat go away.

In a twist of irony, their unwillingness to be responsible for the education of their kids results in the kids never having the chance to develop their own sense of responsibility or morals. Unfortunately, these kids are programmed to go astray; after all, ‘if they shouldn’t be doing something, surely someone would have kept them from it…’ Hopefully these parents will realize that it’s easier to teach their kids to drive the road of life, than to try to pave a road in front of the car…

Special interest groups

These mostly appear to be:

terrified parents with some money or political clout who forgot to do their homework
polititians who want to look like they’re doing something so terrified parents will vote for them

one is trigger happy, the other manipulative. ‘nough said.

News Outlets

Some of these guys aren’t as bad as you would believe:

If you look at stories about online danger in the last 10 years, some of them have been trying to steer parents into education. What’s interesting is that they usually have stories every 8 months or so advocating the co-education of parents and students, often suggesting they go online together and talk about safety. Kudos to CNN and a few others.

Then there’s the rags and soundbyte hunters. Again, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. The good news is that people are learning that they can get their news elsewhere, besides the few companies that control nearly all news outlets. Kudos to all of you who refuse to be spoon-fed what your opinions should be.

Further Investigation

Finally, if you’re one of these people who still is gung-ho about going after MySpace, like you were about video games two years ago, like you were about chat rooms four years ago, like you were about the internet six years ago, and like you were about the internet eight years ago, please do everyone a favor:

Back up eight years and start educating yourself on the proper way to use technology with your kids. (article is from 1998, but it’s good to go back to when the paranoia started)

Anyone ready to place bets on how long it will be until people start asking for the Gov. to get rid of the Child-Food-Processor ™ that is MySpace?

Which OS are You?

(Just pray you don’t end up as Windows Me)

So I was checking out one of Scoble’s posts with a video of a recent party on Rocketboom.
Apparently he gets a little “naked” to promote his book, ‘Naked Conversations’. Wish I had known that BEFORE I clicked on it.

Check this out – I kid you not!
The entire rocketboom broadcast was playing fine. About 2 or 3 frames into the shirt-taking-off of Scoble, GAAH! BROWSER CRASH!

I’ve never seen this error before. I’ve heard of ‘breaking the camera, but geez! (click screenshot to enlarge)
Apparently, Firefox is looking out for me and my sensitive eyes… What I want to know is, when did I install the ‘NSFW’ extension?

In an act of IT-helpdesk-based gluttony for punishment, I tried to replicate the issue. Regrettably, the video was able to play in its entirity the second time.

There is a war going on right now, in the streets of the United States. The outcome of this war will determine the future of this country for the next hundred years. Chances are good that you’ve heard about it, but have no idea what it means. Details are scarce, but let me fill you in on some details.

Electrons in Wonderland

Priuses and Patents. Hydrogen Hummers and Homemade Hybrids. These are the weapons being waged. At stake? The privilege to be paid to fuel America’s need for mobility. The future of transportation in the US is obviously electric, whether it be in a hybrid vehicle or 100% electric vehicle, this is unavoidable. But ever wonder why hybrids really aren’t taking off that fast? After all, this technology has the potential to save Americans billions per year, while significantly lessening the strain on our environment. As it turns out, the issue is money, of course.

The batteries in electric cars (hybrid or electric) need to be very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that we need to use very powerful nickel metal hydride batteries. NiMH batteries are the same as the ones in your TV remote, but obviously a bit larger in vehicles. However, if these batteries are able to be so strong, why is it so hard to make an affordable electric or hybrid-electric car? The answer, it seems, is in a clash between two massive corporations. And into the rabbit hole we go…

Ovonic Battery Company is the leading developer of advanced materials for NiMH batteries. After all, this makes sense, as Stanford Ovshinsky founded the company in the 1960 for NiMH development. Ovonic is a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, who currently holds the NiMH patent. ECD makes commercial and transportation NiMH batteries via it’s spinoff copany, Cobasys. Cobasis is a joint operation between ECD and ChevronTexaco.

Uh, what?

That’s right, the 125-year-old petroleum company has a substantial stake in the production of commercial-grade NiMH batteries. You might be asking yourself what a company that has spent billions on an industry to serve you gasoline might want with the manufacturing arm of the NiMH patent holders. The answer is easy: to keep you buying gas. You’d better believe that ChevronTexaco would rather have you fill up with gas than recharge an electric car with a solar panel while you’re at work, or with a few dollars of electric while you sleep.

A new hope from the land of the rising sun

Panasonic thought they’d partner with Toyota and make a fortune bringing in the new era of transportation with vehicles like the Toyota RAV4 EV. This was a ‘normal’ car with a 100 mile range. It was relatively affordable and cost a fraction per mile of its gas siblings. Since it could be set to charge while you sleep, you’d never know the difference, except for the missing tailpipe, gas door and extra cash on the wallet. In addition, they would easily cruise at 80 mph. I know all of these things because I’ve driven one. They were sold in the US for a very short time, and several exist, despite attempts to have them erased from automotive history. My family was lucky enough to find one at the end of its lease, and it happily powers around in the mountains of Colorado to this day. For a vehicle that costs nearly nothing to maintain (no coolant, oil, gas, ignition, emissions, etc.)and an original MSRP of about $17,000 (most sold for over MSRP – now they sell for $40K with 30K on the odometer), one could make the argument that this is the ideal vehicle for most people.

Counterstrike

So what happened? As it turns out, to have an electric vehicle come close to the performance of a gas vehicle, you need a powerful battery. A NiMH is the only type that is powerful enough to get to the 80 Amp/hour range to provide good performance at an attractive price. (An amp-hour is defined as “constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2×10–7 newton per meter of length.” In English, this means it measures how much and how hard electricity is being shoved down the pipe. For the RAV4 EV, Panasonic found they would have to make a battery rumored to be as high as 85Ah. They made this battery for Toyota and implemented it successfully in the RAV4 EV.

Unfortunately for Panasonic, Toyota and automotive progress, Panasonic wasn’t supposed to make batteries good enough for vehicles. Cobasys, of which Chevron is a 50% stakeholder, limits the Ah of commercial NiMH batteries when someone requests a license to their NiMH batteries. Although the Ah limit numbers are confidential, the limits have been leaked to be in the range of 10 Ah, and only to be used (and only suitable for) hybrid-electric applications.

In 2003, Cobasys sued Panasonic for making the electric car batteries instead of the hybrid batteries and eventually won $30 million in late February, 2006. The advent of the electric car had been successfully blocked, and as the RAV4 EV’s disappeared from the dealership lots, people attributed it to a lack of interest or failure of the vehicle to be a workable commuting vehicle. The inability of Panasonic to offer replacement batteries for these vehicles looked like it would send them to the scrap heap within a few years when the batteries needed to be replaced. Or so we thought.

The new kid on the block

You may have heard about President Bush visiting Johnson Controls recently to have a look at their Lithium Ion batteries. Li-Ion is a battery like NiMH, but gives off more power in a battery of the same size, and are much lighter (which becomes very important when the battery has to move itself around in a vehicle). In addition, Li-Ion batteries don’t ‘go dead’ as quickly when you use them, and can survive a lot longer than NiMH when being constantly charged.

In the past, Li-Ion batteries were only used in cell phones and laptops for good reason. Li-Ion costs just as much as NiMH to manufacture, but due it its construction is prone to a 30%+ failure rate. When you are making AA batteries for a remote or a cell phone battery, it hurts to throw away every third battery, but due to the power gains and weight savings, it is acceptable. Laptops are at the edge of this compromise, as they can’t live without Li-Ion due to their weight and power requirements, and the battery costs too much to produce. Since the alternative is no laptops, manufacturers compromise by using lower-powered (and lower performance) parts, and charging more for a laptop, due to the cos of throwing away one $100+ battery for every two produced. About $50 is added onto the other batteries to compensate.

In an electric vehicle system, a Li-Ion battery of sufficient power would be somewhere in the range of $3000. A much better cost solution would be NiMH, but we already know why that won’t happen. So what is the big deal with Johnson Controls rolling out a new Li-Ion battery for gas-electric hybrids? They’re starting to find a way to make Li-Ion cheap enough to work.
In late September, 2005, Johnson Controls built a new $4 million research facility dedicated to developing Li-Ion batteries for Hybrid and Full Electric vehicles. The new facility is sponsored by $14.4 million from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium, a group of companies consisting of DaimlerChrysler, Ford and GM, along with the US Department of Energy (the “Big Three” manufacture basically every car not made in Japan). Note the absence of anyone interested in preserving the gasoline-based infrastructure.

The next two years, 2006-2008

It will be interesting to see where we go from this point. We seem to be on an electric car breakthrough wih new battery technology that isn’t controlled by a dominant petroleum company. The idea of the electric car being weak is shattered by this Lithium-Ion 180-mph prototype sportscar. It appears as if President Bush has expressed a dedication towards advancing large-scale Li-Ion battery development in the US with his support of our main research lab. For everything people say about Bush, this may well be one of the things he is most remembered for: eliminating our dependence on foreign oil and electric vehicle technology.

What can you do?

If people only knew how hard Cobasys has worked to keep the gas flowing to you and the money flowing to them. (And the emissions flowing to the environment). The best thing you can do is to get the word out. Link to this post. Write about it. Tell your friends. Write the people who represent you in government and tell them you support Li-Ion and Electric Vehicle technology in the US. You support budgeting that will give the Johnson Controls battery lab what they need to make an easily-manufactured Electric Vehicle Li-Ion battery. You need to tell them these things yourself. Gasoline companies have invested millions in lobbyists, whose sole goal is to perpetuate our addiction to gasoline.

Finally, do all of these things for yourself. Even if you don’t care about the environmental effects, do it for the money you’ll save on gas and complex gasoline-powered vehicles. Do it because it’s the right thing to do. Do it because you’re a Technocrat.

This won’t be a war fought with guns at the expense of soldiers. This will be a war fought with patents and corporations, meant to continue a source of revenue for companies that believe in purchasing political power.

At stake is the right to use the best solution possible to solve one of the world’s greatest problems.
—

I’ve made as best an effort as I could to verify the historical facts from sources close to the action. Due to the confidential nature of many of these events, it has been extremely rough putting them together. If you have any information or corrections, please let me know. My main goal is to get the information out and have it be as accurate as possible.

Interesting argument on the Scobleizer today on RSS feeds and the reasons behind full or partial text feeds. THis actually is a big deal as far as traffic is concerned, so I thought I’d throw in my two cents:

Jeremy Wright had this to say:

Traffic doesn’t equal readers. RSS subscribers don’t equal traffic.

FYI Jeremy, I just asked wordpress how hard it would be to map a second line on the traffic graph for RSS pickups. If you want it too, hit the feedback button and ask for it. I love the idea of being able to graph Web views vs. RSS pickups. (I realize that there are problems here, like people who have their reader set to update every 5 minutes, so there would have to be something to distinguish between unique hosts…)

..but getting to the matter at hand, he also had this to say:

The reason you want full text RSS feeds is so you don’t have to visit a site, after all.

I agree. I just went and changed my feed to full text due to that comment. Here’s why I had it in partial though:

The web-based readers NEED to have partial text, IMHO. Otherwise, with one post, you completely push out any other post a few page-downs from the bottom of the screen. I’ve been trying really hard to keep as many posts on the main page as possible. Compare this to my older posts that were imported from Blogger that I haven’t fixed yet. There is no way anyone is going to scroll past the ‘don’t get ripped off on a laser printer’ post on that page to see the rest. I’d much rather be able to give them 5 snippets that fit on a 1024×800 screen, rather than one monster post and hope they’ll scroll down to see the other 5 monster posts.

Based on these reasons going on over on the Scoblizer, I really think the way to go is to do partial text on the web, and full text on RSS. In this way, you tailor your content for the medium, as they are both very different.

Most people do full text on RSS, and full text on the web posts, which IMHO is pretty painful to the web viewers with all the scrolling they have to do to look at more than 1 or 2 posts.

As far as money making is concerned, that’s not what I’m interested in, but it seems that partial posts are indeed a good way to con people into loading up an ad-loaded page. Give them just enough text, them make them go to the site to see your ads and get paid.

Of course, Ozh makes a good point, in that the RSS aggregation sites will have an easier time indexing if you do full text RSS, which may get you more interested readers.

In the end, it’s all up in the air as to what will be the most profitable using RSS and Web publishing. Until more people use RSS, it’s not going to be clear, as there just isn’t enough data to go off of. In the meantime though, you can follow my suggestion of partial web posts and full rss feed to make it easier for people to get your work…

So my friend just had me help him buy a laptop from Dell (he had an Employee Purchase discount), and I’m helping him set it up. It’s a Dell XPS M140 with Windows XP Media Center Edition. What would you consider an ‘essential application’ for him? Now, before someone chimes in with the ‘OSX’ or ‘Gentoo’ comments, think about what you would recommend to someone other than yourselves, possibly your mother or first-time computer user. You’re still on the mac/linux thing. OK, he wants to leverage his investment in Win32 software. (ok, stop with the ‘Wine‘ already)
I’m thinking the following:

A VirusScan utility. Preferably something like Symantec Antivirus or other application that comes on a CD. Costs money, but so does a hijacked box. I can’t recommend Norton, I’ve seen way too many machines destroyed for it to be a coincidence… haven’t been impressed with the free offerings, but the last time I tried was about 18 months ago, and haven’t had a reason to test since then…

A browser. Firefox. Possibly with Google toolbar (for the spellcheck, he’s a blogger also) and StumbleUpon (we all get bored) Got any other killer extensions?

An email client / RSS aggregator. Thunderbird 1.5, but I would set him up myself. I’ll be writing a post later on the annoyances of Thunderbird, and how once you get them sorted out, it rocks! (default settings are counter-intuitive, though – what’s with putting my sig underneath the inline reply text???) The RSS is a nice addition. It’s an easy-to-use tech that most people have never heard of.

Spyware protection. Spybot Search and Destroy with TeaTimer and IE. Update the def’s and scan, WinXP MCE had a few red flags out of the box…

Productivity suite. He had a free copy of Office XP through his graduate program, but otherwise I’d advise people to use OpenOffice. A few days ago I completely uninstalled Office XP (my org’s standard). Only annoyances so far are difficulty graphing in Calc. Definitely set it up to save as Microsoft file format by default though, otherwise no-one else will be able to open your stuff. (for now. When the next version of office natively supports the open office standard, wait 5 years fr everyone to upgrade, then switch the defaults back…) If they don’t already have Office, install OO and go spend the $373 they save on a new __________? Multifunction printer? iPod? 7 day thermostat and light bulbs? (ok, shameless, nerdy plug) $20 donations to each of the free softwares listed here?

PrimoPDF. This free utility will allow you to make anything printable into a pdf file, no adobe products needed. (except viewer).

What else? I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Post your suggestions with the URL’s. Save Google some bandwidth. (That last one is a joke, obviously)

In additon, you’ll want to make some tweaks to the OS, of course.

Hello all, hope you enjoyed your weekend!

Continuing on in my series, I’ve taken a few suggestions from Robert Scoble and tried to expand on them to make a full-featured how-to on blog improvement. I’ll continue polling other leading bloggers and posting how-to’s based on their suggestions, but today we’ll look at Scoble’s tagging suggestion:

Another way? Steph Booth taught me this one: tag often. Tag frequently. Tag better. In WordPress.com your categories are also tags. Don’t worry about using too many tags. The more tags you use, the more likely someone will find you in a search engine.

This is a new concept for me, since I’m new to WordPress (moved from a very basic blog at blogger). One of the reasons I moved from blogger was for the categories wordpress offers. Categories/tagging in a blog can take two very different approaches. I’ve done both, so I’ll try to summarize them:

Intentional Discovery

If you have a look at the screenshot of this blog before I started improving it, you’ll notice that the category structure was very different. This was a direct result of my writing style. I tend to tackle some larger-than-normal topics on this blog, and I has been trying to keep the different ‘part 1′, part 2′ topics organized on blogger. This ended up being a mess, so I moved to WordPress and basically used the categories as a table of contents for my content. This method of organization ensures that people will quickly find what they are looking for. Unfortunately, people who read your blog most often will not know what they are looking for. In this respect having ‘a great roadmap’ of your blog isn’t nearly as helpful as you would think, since the bulk of visitors aren’t looking for an exact post, they’re looking to browse a genre (category) of posts.

Accidental Discovery

old structure:

• Free Money
• At Home
• Automotive
• Tomorrow’s Solutioproven
• In the home
• In the ocean
• On the road

This was okay, or so I thought. But after watching WordPress’ analysis tools, I found that people who wanted the ‘free money – at home’ category were missing out ‘Tomorrow’s solutions – in the home’ postings. They were obviously interested in tech for the home, so why not give tme both? Sure, the would no longer get exactly what they were looking for, but as I mentioned before, most people don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

So the key seems to be: get an idea of what they want in general, and throw everything you’ve got at them. I don’t neccessarily like this method, as it is much less precise, but tfor.Sobers speak for themselves: my visitors are staying longer and visiting more posts now, since I am giving them a winecessarily based loosely on what they want,lesstead of narrow offering tailored to their wishes. In the end, I hope that visitors come away with more than they were looking for.

As you can tell, I’m still on the fence about all of this, but the results show that the second method produces more traffic by far, so it’s hard to argue with that. Thsi is why for.Astegories listed above are now organized as:

• Automotive
• Free Money
• Home Tech
• HowTo
• Marine Tech
• My Projects
• Renewable Energy

In addition, each post now belongs to multiple categories, instead of being in its own (i.e. an electric motorcycle post is in the ‘Automotive’ and ‘Renewable Energy’ categories instead of the ‘On the Road’ category under ‘Tomorrow’s Solutions’. In this way, that post will get exposure to people interested in both Automotive and Renewable Energy, instead of people interested in just ‘Tomorrow’s solutions on the road’.

Conclusion

Hopefully this explains how to use the “shotgun approach” to get more posts exposed to your audience, while at the same time giving them something close to what they’re looking for. The method is somewhat less precise/organized than what this IT guy would prefer, but it seems to profoundly increase the number of posts that get viewed, so I view it as a ‘neccessary evil’.

Continuing in this series, I have been dissecting the suggestions given to me by Robert Scoble on his blog, and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

To recap, I had a lot of good content, but the blog itself looked a little drab [screenshot], and I wasn’t advertising my content as well as I could have.

I’ve already gone over the first suggestion, and added a few common-sense suggestions of my own. (then again, it took a second look for me to realize it, so maybe not that common)

Here I’ll take a second look at what can be done about another powerful promotional tool: personalization. To quote Scoble,

Another thing? Dan’s title tag is boring. You need some personality! Look at Darren Barefoot’s title tag. Lots of personality and gives me some sense of who Darren is. Oh, and his blog’s design sticks out too. Different. Clean. Personal. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that smile? Yeah, WordPress.com makes it hard to change the template right now (Matt Mullenweg promises that’s changing soon, but in the meantime you can get ready by doing the other things — come up with a better title tag, write better headlines, work on finding interesting content that’ll help you stick out of the crowd on search engines and memetrackers.

An unlevel playing field

Darren’s site is pretty customized, and after looking high and low for ways to customize a WordPress blog, I don’t think there is one. It’s not ‘pretty hard’ like Scoble says, it’s ‘pretty impossible’. Right now, you’re limited to using one of a very few templates that have customization in their control panels, and that’s it. I agree that customization would be ideal, but for those of us who don’t have an in with wordpress.com, you’re out of luck. Coincidentally, a quick look at the source code for Scoble’s blog shows that his WordPress customization is definitely some sort of special arrangement. Score one for Blogger.com. I like WordPress’ tagging feature, though, so we can make do for now…

In the meantime, compare the current site to the screenshot. I added a little human element on the ‘what is a technocrat?’ page and in the ‘Hall of Fame’ and ‘Links’ sidebars. It gives it a little more flavor as to who I really am, and how much it means to me that people read my stuff. (explained on the ‘what is a technocrat?’ page)

‘In the meantime’

come up with a better title tag

Gotcha. And I agree on that one. My Blog’s title was boring. I just hadn’t been able to think up a better one. Then I was called a technocrat by a co-worker. Wasn’t sure if they meant that in a derogatory way, (later they admitted that they meant it as a compliment) but after looking it up, I liked it! (I hadn’t heard the term beofre, which I guess is surprising since it’s supposedly common…?)

So I got the new name. I’m definitely a technocrat by the definition of a person who “…supports the control of technology for the benefit of humanity.” I also try to post at least one meaningful article per day. So, ‘The Daily Technocrat’. Appropriate and different.

write better headlines

…like ‘Deconstructing Scoble’? I realize it probably is a little inflammatory, and might seem like I’m going to be breaking down Scoble in these articles. In a way, I am, and the title is describing exactly what I’m doing. I also am aware that it might imply controversy, which there is a small amount, I suppose. My past headlines were (for the most part) pretty dry, but accurate. I guess I do need to spice up the title, if I want them to get to the actual content.
The main point is that it gets people in the door. If they read the article, who cares if it wasn’t exactly what they thought it might be. The title is accurate, and if they get past the first paragraph, they’re interested in improving thir blog, and I’m happy to offer my own insight, extrapolated from Scoble’s suggestions. In the end, they might not get what they thought, but probably something that will provide quite a bit more value, hopefully. If it was the dual-meaning title that got them in the door, then so be it, I’m glad they read it for the possible benefit to them.

work on finding interesting content that’ll help you stick out of the crowd on search engines and memetrackers

I’m thinking this was a general suggestion (albeit a valid one) since I try very hard to come up with original, interesting content. The reason I try so hard is because I’m sick to death of every blog being a mirror of Slashdot, Wired and CNN! If I want CNN, I’ll go to CNN, I’m coming to your blog for you. If you don’t have anything to contribute, wait until you do. You’re much more likely to capture an audience posting a great post every 3 days or so than posting 10 times a day on something that a million other bloggers are posting on. You have great ideas, don’t bury them in a pile of filler posts.

Eventually, I might run out of things to post seriously about, but the worst thing I could do is to compensate by filling in the spot with a goofy post. I already have enough of those…

In a way, you should find this encouraging. By coming up with original content twice a week, you’re probably in the top third of all bloggers, quality-wise. The bottom two-thirds are the ones doing the me-too latest-news posts, or the play-by-play-of-my-adolescent-life blogs. Congratulate yourself with a trip down to the corner.

Speaking of which, have a great weekend everyone!