Smalltalk with James Robertson

It'll be interesting to see whether this pizza tests as good as a run of the mill Dominos:

Get ready for Let's Pizza, a pizza vending machine that promises to deliver a piping hot pizza pie made from scratch in less than three minutes.

Just to be safe, no one tell the mayor of NYC....

Technorati Tags: food, pizza

It's things like this that make me think we would be better off with no patent or copyright law, compared to what we have now:

A Colorado man says Apple’s smart cover for the new iPad and the iPad 2 violate his 2005 patent for a “Portable Computer Case.”

That doesn't mean that a complete absence of copyrights and patents would be a good thing; it simply means that things are so bad now that a complete free for all would actually be an improvement. What should really be done is a full repeal of copyright and patent law, with a reset to whatever existed after the first set of laws passed at the founding of the Republic....

Technorati Tags: stupidity, patents, copyrights

There's been a lot written about "the death of retail" lately, but I think this analysis really gets to the heart of the matter:

As people get richer, and goods get cheaper, and consumers become more interested in the total buying experience (all things that Virginia documents) it may be that the appeal of Big Box stores -- whose approach consists of giving you far less service in exchange for lower prices -- may decline, and the appeal of old-fashioned specialty stores, where the salespeople know their products, and their customers, may come back.

Big Box stores are competing with Amazon (et. al.). There's no way to win there; having no retail space and no floor staff will always be cheaper (regardless of what happens with sales tax disputes). If you know what you want, and are willing to forgo service, there's just no need to ever visit a big box store. I think that spells trouble beyond Best Buy; ultimately, I suspect stores like Wal-Mart and Target will have trouble, too.

I wouldn't be surprised to see retail bifurcate into smaller, "high value" shops and online (low price). That doesn't leave a lot of room for the big box outfits.

Technorati Tags: shopping

I'm not surprised by the failure of the Volt:

GM, which is based in Detroit, announced to employees at one of its facilities that it was halting production of the beleaguered electric car for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees.

I suspect that the production shutdown will be more prolonged than that. Electric cars are a luxury status item, not a useful transit option. Why do I say that? Well, consider: if you live in the suburbs, the range problem makes them highly impractical. If you live in the city, where that's less of an issue, there's the charging problem. Where, pray tell, do you charge one for the multiple hours you need if you usually park it on the street?

Hybrids make perfect sense to me; pure electric vehicles? Not so much. They've been "the car of the future" for a century now, and they'll still be "the car of the future" for a very, very long time.

Update: To clarify - yes, the Volt has a gas tank, so it has the range of a regular car. The fact remains though: the battery is an expensive brick for most people. If you live in the city and use street parking, you'll never get to charge it. If you live in the suburbs, you'll only get to charge it at home (and based on the charge time using a standard 110 outlet, never enough). This car solves no problems, but it sure gives the owner new ones to deal with.

Technorati Tags: volt

I have to say, I'm not surprised by the news that the head of McKinsey was engaged in unethical behavior. Not because of anything I know about that company; rather, because of what I saw years ago at ParcPlace. Here's what Walter Russel Mead has to say, in part:

That a criminal could win the trust of so many of the ‘best and the brightest’ in philanthropy and business chillingly demonstrates the moral and intellectual vacuum in the corporate world. Years of excessive payment for executives, okayed by go along to get along boards of directors, a culture of entitlement and a lack of personal character and strong moral codes have created a dead zone at the core of American life.

That took me back. Recall PPS back in the mid 90's, spiraling down under the management of Bill Lyons. His leadership was clearly flawed; he deserved a swift boot out with something along the lines of "and don't let the door hit you on the way out". However - that's not how it worked out.

He, like many execs, had a golden parachute. I don't recall the number now, but when he left - failure in his wake - he took a tidy sum with him. At the very least, that represented a complete failure on the part of the board. He was hardly the only guy to walk from a failure with a huge check; such golden parachutes are common. At the upper ranks, it's quite common for failure to be well rewarded.

But why? Why do boards do such things? Because it's not their money, and everyone is pals, I guess. Something is very rotten in the way a lot of boards and executive suites work together when failure is so regularly rewarded.

Technorati Tags: management

Wow, it turns out that Stallman is a bigger ass than I thought he was - and I've never thought all that highly of him to begin with. He needs to go watch this video - it's only 11 seconds long, but I expect that he'll need to repeat a few thousand times for it to sink in.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, arrogance

Sad news tonight - Steve Jobs has died. I guess it's not a huge shock, given that he stepped down from Apple a bit over a month ago. It seemed pretty clear that running Apple was what he wanted to do more than anything else, and he only left when the universe intervened.

There's a huge hole in Silicon Valley with his departure, and, in my opinion, in the world in general. I'd go so far as to say that Steve Jobs brought more joy to more people than just about anyone. He'll be missed.

Technorati Tags: apple, steve jobs

Wow - we just had an actual earthquake here in Maryland - house shook, startling us all. According to the USGS, it was a 5.8, centered in Virginia

It was noticeable here - a few things fell, and the whole house vibrated - I felt it on my concrete steps leaving the house during it. Short - only lasted something like 30 seconds, but very startling for this part of the country. I see tweets saying it was felt as far north as Toronto, so I hope it's not a precursor to the New Madrid fault waking up...

Update: This was pretty big news - front page of Drudge right now. USA Today has an update stream.

Technorati Tags: earthquake

Anyone reading this blog knows that I'm an electric car skeptic, and this Wired article about how "chargers are coming" doesn't change that. Consider this, near the end of the piece:

So the cars are coming. The infrastructure will follow. There’s no way of knowing at this point just what it will look like, but it almost certainly won’t look like the fueling infrastructure we’re using now. There are nearly 160,000 gas stations in the United States. We simply cannot match that, EV advocates said, nor do we need to. EV advocates say we need to move beyond our habit of driving until the tank is empty. Driving an EV means plugging in at night and topping off when you can during the day. It’s called “opportunistic charging,” and it is second-nature for EV owners.

I've been doing that with laptops for years, and it's not terribly enjoyable. Second nature or not, it's still a pain to wander around looking for a plug. It would be more than a pain to add an hour to a trip because I had to hunt for a plug. Sure, airports are adding plugs, and the thought is, car chargers will proliferate the same way. Here's the problem, as I see it, taken from personal experience:

I travel to Dallas regularly now. My morning commute (hotel to worksite) is usually in the 18-20 mile range (Grand Prarie is kind of a hotel desert). That's well within the range of an EV you say, so renting one should be a no brainer. Except... I drive out to visit my sister once a week when I'm there, and that's a 70 mile round trip. That starts getting to be a problem range-wise, especially when you factor in the need to run AC full blast for many, many months in the Dallas area - the normal range of an EV is going to drop like a rock when you have to run AC constantly. Sure, I can plug the car in at her house, but: am I expected to make my stay a few hours longer than planned just so that I can drive back to my hotel? What if I need to drive to the local Apple store - I have Apple Care, and I could have a transient issue crop up. That's not a short haul, either.

Now consider urban driving - especially given the new urbanist desire to have less parking, and to have whatever parking there is be street parking. How do you charge in that situation? Retailers are going to start happily adding charge stations in the parking lots? For one thing, see this article about Costco. For another, consider what services like Amazon are already doing to big box retailers - margins in retail have always been slim, and I expect the only change in that space will be negative. Borders will not be the last, or only, big box vendor to get hammered out of existence by online shopping.

I could be wrong, but I see EVs as a niche application. For urban (or near urban) dwellers who need to drive a little, they might make sense (then again, a Smart Car makes even more sense for that need).

Technorati Tags: electric car

Today's entry in the ongoing TSA idiot files:

The airport's north terminal was evacuated and shut down for about two hours Wednesday after X-ray screening workers spotted the science project in a carry-on bag, the federal Transportation Security Agency said.

This is what happens when you replace judgment with rigid rules, and don't allow anyone to actually think. It's like the zero tolerance policies at schools, but for the rest of us....

Technorati Tags: travel