fffff.at slaps a GPS tracker on a Google streetview car so you can follow it: a first step in reverse-engineering that particular algorithm.
Tag Archives: car
FIRE, Detroit, GOP, Microsoft
[FIRE = Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate]
MOFT:
At Microsoft, we see a future full of potential. We're working to expand the possibilities for computing every day, by continually improving and advancing our current products and embarking on fundamental research that paves the way for tomorrow's breakthroughs.
Microsoft has revealed that Windows 7 will offer an optional, downloadable Windows XP virtual machine to provide full backwards compatibility.
Eight years behind Apple and three years after Apple dropped support for Classic.
Before, Microsoft could claim that Windows 7 would be at least as compatible as Windows Vista. Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications. [emphasis in orig]
The point isn't MICROSOFT SUXXX0RS!!! AAPL ROOLZ!!!, though if you had to boil it down to four words those ones are much closer to true than to false. Rather, the problem is that Microsoft is the Detroit of software. It makes big, ugly, dangerous, resource-hogging crap, and its “success” is based on...its “success.” Vast sectors of our economy, from enormous enterprises to mom-and-pop shops, desperately depend on its continued dominance; and when it collapses, they—and we—will be screwed. It was hardly obvious that falling real-estate values would materially contribute to the sudden collapse of Detroit; and it’s far from obvious what will topple Microsoft.
We will be soon releasing the beta of Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate.
“Ultimate” is right up there with naming an OS after the year of its release.
Upcoming UI innovations to look forward to:
This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad.
Keep rocking that floppy disk icon, Microsoft.
See also: “As Estonia goes, so goes the world,” “Blowback for dummies,” “MS’s homeland security strategy,” “Judge to Ballmer: ‘GIVE IT UP FOR ME’,” “Missing from the stimulus bill.”
Sign of the times
under economics, finance, neighborhood, trend
An email from a car dealership:
SATURDAY, [MONTH] [DAY], 9:00am–3:00pm
Use our lot to Spring Clean your Attic, Garage, Barn or House!
SELLERS
Spaces & Tables available for $10/unit fee with all fees donated to
[CAUSE]PRE-REGISTER FOR YOUR SPACE & TABLE
Call [DEALERSHIP] at ###-###-#### and ask for [NAME], [NAME] or [NAME].Setup Starts at 7:30am
THIS TAG SALE WILL BE VERY WELL PROMOTED, PEOPLE WILL BE TALKING!
*NO DEALERS, RETAILERS OR ENGINES REQUIRING FUELBUYERS
With over an acre available for selling, we're expecting a HUGE
assortment of tag sale items to browse and purchase.Click here to contact us for more info.
LOCATION
[PLACE + CONTACT INFO]
In areas where the downturn is decades old, the slow transmogrification of differentiated retailers into used then related then barely differentiated junk shops is a marker of hopelessness.
Finance allegory #1
under economics, government, media
Shades of Lehman, toxic assets, and stress tests:
And, of course, Detroit.
Worse living through lack of chemistry
under media
FT:
The crisis in the car industry has led to a global shortage of a chemical solvent used for everything from checking the mould level in a chocolate bar to ensuring a tablet of aspirin is safe.
Acetonitrile (a/k/a cyanomethane, methyl cyanide, ethanenitrile, ethyl nitrile, methane, cyanomethanecarbonitrile, ethanonitrile, acetonitril, ethane nitrile):
Prices have spiralled. Few companies will say what they pay but the consensus is an eight-fold rise since last year on average. One European public sector laboratory says it now pays €80 ($100, £74) a litre for acetonitrile compared with €4.80 early last year.
All-American hobby
under art
“Phourlorn Motor Speedway is a custom, professionally built 4-lane routed track. Can be changed from an Indy-style oval to a road course in about 15 minutes due to a lift-out straight away section. Completely detailed and sceniced to resemble a real race track”—including what seems to be a beer-soaked racing fan rudely interrupted in a portapotty by a track official and paparazzi:
Homebrew Jurassic.
Motown’s greatest hits
under energy, environment, standards, trend
GM CEO Rick Wagoner “referring to GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler,” in the FT (Simon+Guerrera, “GM Chief Defends Reliance on SUVs,” 6 June ’08; liberated version here).
Is it the US manufacturers who are stupid? I don’t think so. You have to recognise that the consumer makes the call here ... and we are reacting.
So how does Detroit “react” when consumers stop buying cars?
Roger that
under military, neighborhood, urban
Kaplan, “Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas,” theatlantic.com (Sep ’06):
But the Predator, especially as it is improved, may also interfere with decision making. As one pilot told me: “No general will want to attack something without visual confirmation from a Predator. It’s the old story—by the time you have all the evidence, it’s too late to affect the outcome.” Rather than expanding the opportunities for operations, the Predator could end up restricting them, even as we fight enemies who have no compunction about waging total war.
Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ’08):
Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol—the cornerstone of urban policing—has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.” [p. 93]
(Moskos via marginal revolution)
National energy stragety
under energy, finance, government
Wald, “Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund,” NYT (29 July ’08):
Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday. The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.
TiReD: President of the American Public Transportation Association, William W. Millar, says the obvious: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the way to go.” WiReD: Visa cash advance pays Mastercard bill!
Priceful.
A day late and a dollar short
The NYT:
To put this in perspective, the difference between a [Ford] Focus and an F-250 over five years is $60,000. The annual pretax income of a typical family in this country is also about $60,000. So choosing a F-250 over a Focus is like volunteering for a 20 percent pay cut.
Of course, the same math applied when gas was cheap and this kind of comparison was progressive rather than regressive.
Refractory turn on red: RTOR, CAFE, SUVs, UPS
Right-turn-on-red (“RTOR,” in some circles) was introduced nationwide in the mid-1970s as part of a broad, national fuel-saving strategy in response to the “Arab fuel embargo” of 1973–74 (context here). The goal was to save gas by minimizing idling.
In a tribute to former Senator Dale Bumpers, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said:
The above discourse clearly references the actions of only one man—Senator DALE BUMPERS, Democrat from Arkansas. He is the U.S. Senator responsible for “right-turn-on-red,” his first legislative victory and one for which, I am told, he received devilish teasing from a colleague who warned that “many people might want to drive straight!”
(Bumpers’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention it.)
Dr. Allan R. Hoffman (Senior Analyst in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of US DoE) has written a short, sharp memoir about federal efforts to reduce US oil imports: “The Origins of CAFE”—Corporate Average Fuel Economy performance standards (enacted into law as Title V, the Energy Policy Conservation Act, 1975)—in the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society of 2007 Oct, 36.4). Two excerpts, the first hinting at the origins of the SUV, the second at the SUV as “Edsel 2.0” (a phrase unknown to Google—isn’t the analogy obvious?):
One:
Another issue that arose was how to deal with luxury car fleets that were unlikely to meet the standards. Some quick calculations determined that the amount of gasoline at stake was small, and I recommended that we let the luxury car purchasers pay the civil penalty for non-compliance and leave it at that, recognizing that we couldn’t fix all the problems in one bill. Of course, we were subjected to considerable lobbying on all sides of the fuel economy issue, including one day when Lynn [Sutcliffe, General Counsel, Senate Committee on Commerce] and I met with supporters of the legislation in the morning and strong opponents of the legislation in the afternoon. Our end-of-day conclusion was that we must be doing something right.
Two:
A final piece of history: about a year after the legislation was signed into law, I ran into the chief lobbyist for one of the automobile companies in the U.S. Capitol. He pulled me aside, told me he would never say this publicly, and expressed his opinion that the legislation had “saved his industry.” That may or may not be true (many in the industry would strongly disagree with his statement), but those of us who worked on CAFE can take pride in helping the country move forward after the oil embargo. The legislation achieved its goal of improving new car fuel efficiency, but, unfortunately, by reducing the cost of driving it stimulated VMT [average vehicle miles traveled] increases which partially offset the possible fuel savings. This is a lesson for the future.
A systematic survey of RTOR: “Following more than 25 years of intense political debates”—which suggests that cultural driving habits might be just as entrenched as industries or national-scale regulation—the Ministry of Transportation of Quebec (MTQ) commissioned a study, published in 2002, “aimed at either adopting or rejecting the RTOR once and for all.” The paper (Dominique Lord, “Synthesis on the Safety of Right Turn on Red in the United States and Canada,” 2002) took into account ”safety, traffic operational improvements, and other characteristics ... based on information gathered from various agencies in the United States and Canada.”
In 2006 (or so), UPS started to use GPS/GIS info in designing its delivery routes to minimize left-hand turns. A factsheet (“UPS Experts Offer Tips for Better Gas Mileage”) says:
Avoid left turns. UPS routes are designed to avoid left turns. We have learned that idling waiting to turn left wastes gas. Not to mention the cars idling behind you waiting for you to turn. It is also safer to avoid left turns since you reduce the number of times you turn across oncoming traffic. [emphasis added]
It took UPS over thirty years and an organization-wide digitial initiative (“Package Flow Technologies: Innovation at Work”) to catch up with a freshman senator. But where did he get the idea from?