Members of Congress are now considering a bill that would establish minimum noise levels for all hybrid and electric cars. Two students from Stanford have created a system that uses speakers mounted behind the wheels to project a vaguely motor-like sound towards pedestrians in front of and behind the vehicle. A simple computer is used to direct the sound, for example, increasing the volume in the left speakers when making a left-hand turn.
I was nearly hit by a hybrid while biking through a parking lot once. He didn’t see me, and I somehow missed him. I took a quick look around before making a turn, but since I rely heavily on ambient noise as backup, I didn’t hear him either. Hybrids are damn near silent, and I was lucky we were both moving at proper parking lot speeds.
General Motors Corp., struggling to return to profit amid record gasoline prices, said it will close four truck plants, make more small cars, and may drop its Hummer brand of large sport-utility vehicles.
An analyst from the Automotive Consulting Group quoted in the piece says “It is significant, but this is a late reaction to changing market dynamic. The plans really should have been in place a number of years ago.” I couldn’t agree more.
18 of GM’s next 19 vehicle introductions will be cars and crossover wagons, including the 100 percent electric Chevy Volt. I’m pretty jazzed about that car myself, though if Jessi and I move to Chicago like we’re hoping this summer, I might not need a car at all.
To make sure all the facts are in order, you should probably see our official announcement at Ars Technica. Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, and its Wired Digital unit will now oversee all Ars business. This is the same unit that runs Wired.com, Reddit, WebMonkey, HotWired, and the company’s other sites. Note that we are not owned by Wired Magazine or Wired.com, we simply work under the same umbrella as Wired.com and will be competing for some of the same stories.
The great thing about this is that Ars is maintaining complete editorial control. In fact, Ken Fisher, Ars’ CEO, is moving from Boston to Chicago next month to head up one of our two new offices. We’ll be gaining a lot of Condé Nast’s resources, however, which means more stories, more writers, more in-depth, more awesome.
This is pretty exciting, especially since I’m still in my first year at Ars. The site will be 10 years old next month, and it’s great to see its founders and editors rewarded so well.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of good people doing amazing things, but those people are like a horse that has been handicapped out of the race with the baggage of Microsoft old. They are putting up a good fight to be seen and listened to, but it’s a hard [sic] ask. Microsoft is clearly a company that is changing, the only remaining question is will the whole organization transform into the new Microsoft quickly enough to survive the rapidly changing way companies and individuals interact with technology.
I know Microsoft’s a massive beast, but I am increasingly being convinced that Ballmer is one of its largest problems. I know competition is healthy and all, but the way the guy handles himself in public is more akin to a full-of-himself jackass bully on a grade school playground than an intelligent, reasonable CEO. He often spouts on record a sort of egotistical shit you would expect to find only in the bowels of digg comments. Another good quote from Riley sums this up:
Steve Ballmer at keynote two made fun of Apple products, joked about Apple’s market share, and constantly justified Microsoft’s position based on its domination of the market. No serious talk about moving forward, improving the end user experience with Windows…as long as Microsoft has the dominant market share the rest doesn’t matter much to Ballmer.
You typically can’t blame an entire company’s behavior on a single individual, but I’m beginning to wonder if Microsoft is an exception. Perhaps Ballmer’s bullish, frothing-at-the-mouth, dominating, and blindly competitive nature is attracting all the wrong people to all the wrong positions at the company. In this new period where the attitude of “anything but Microsoft” is spreading not-so-slowly but steadily throughout the world, perpetuating Ballmer’s behavior—or simply allowing it to continue unmediated—is precisely one of the things that is not helping the company right now.
Hooray! Not only does the monthly subscription get cheaper (though it should simply be free), AT&T will offer two hours of free WiFi each day to users before they need to pay $3.99 for additional chunks of time, or of course ante up for a full subscription. AT&T broadband customers also get a free subscription to the 7,000+ hotspots already in place.
Brilliant, brilliant move. T-Mobile couldn’t have sucked any worse at coffee shop wifi, unless they hired someone to kick customers in the pants when they walked in the door. T-Mobile’s subscription plans were $40/month on a monthly basis (no, not a typo), $30/month if you sign a frigging one-year contract, and $20/month if you’re a T-Mobile phone customer, or a Starbucks (and probably T-Mobile) employee.
Those prices remained the same for years, probably since the service debuted. While completely free WiFi would arguably bring in more coffee-slugging customers, AT&T’s ideas are a welcome change to a painfully stagnating service. Starbucks says the market-by-market rollout begins in Spring 2008.
While watching Futurama tonight I finally realized how funny it is that Bender begins dating the Planet Express ship when it gains a female consciousness. At one point, Bender begins singing to the ship the lyrics of “Daisy Bell,” a song made famous in the technology world in 1962 when physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr made an IBM 704 computer synthesize and sing it. The event has received a number of respectful call-backs throughout pop culture, such as HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Big Weld in Robots, and of course, the genius that is Futurama.
Dale Dougherty at O’Reilly Radar on how traditional journalism still hasn’t adjusted for the innovations that online media have brought:
When I pick up the paper, I don’t know if or how today’s story picks up from yesterday or the day before. I know the journalist can’t assume that people are familiar with the story and have been following it for days so the story must be repeated.
Dougherty cites a post by Scott Beale at Laughing Squid in which he’s covering Burning Man. Instead of writing post after post after post, Beale has updated his initial post a whopping 24 times (as of this writing) with various changes and new pieces of information. Dougherty prefers this method, and I agree, because it provides a far more coherent, digestible timeline of events.
Thanks to the efforts of Mike Rose, TUAW has started up a weekly Talkcast powered by TalkShoe where a few of the bloggers hop into an audio + text chat room and we have a roundtable discussion of current Apple events. Readers are invited to join in to listen and chat, and we usually have an Ask TUAW portion of the show where we field questions from a few of them live on the air. Mike usually hosts, but he took tonight off so I had the reigns and it was only our 4th episode, but things are going really, really well. We’re gelling more as a team doing live audio (c’mon, we rarely ever meet face to face, let alone speak over audio; we’re a telecommuting company/blog) with every episode, and the readers really seem to be digging it.
At the end of our more recent shows, after we stop recording, we open up the lines and let everyone who is able to audio chat to let it rip. Of course with all these people there are the occasional false starts, but on the whole it’s a fun way to talk to the readers and hear some of their zany stories that top a lot of the stuff we get even over the tips line. It’s really, really cool, and I’m having one of those “damn I love my job” moments coming down from the experience right now. We have some great ideas on how to improve the show format and what to talk about, and I’m really excited for next week’s episode. You should swing by and join us - watch TUAW next week for details, as we might (or might not) be switching up the show time to see if more folks can make it.
