Erdos Had The Number First

No Road Trips for Toyota’s i-unit

I’ve been researching this. It looks like the price point they are going for is near the $10,000 range. Holy crap, I say. If they could sell this for half of that, it would sell like there’s no tomorrow. Even with the 30 minute running time. I also looks like this would be a great candidate for a very small hybrid powerplant. That would fix the run-time issue. I think this thing is way better than the segway, if for no other reason that it looks more stable.

Getting Skittish About Skype

CAMPUS PARIAH
Some organizations are clamping down. Pharmaceutical giant Novartis (NVS ) in Basel, Switzerland, doesn’t let employees use Skype. Neither do Goldman Sachs (GS ) and German chemicals giant Degussa. A growing number of schools ban the technology, including Oxford University, the University of Texas, and the University of Minnesota. In September the French government recommended research personnel at universities and government labs avoid using Skype.

Ok, first pharma is a paranoid monster. They don’t let their employees use many of the instant messaging tools available.

Goldman, thanks to rule 17-4a (SEC) can’t let them use it either, because they can’t record it and store it on WORM drives for 7 years.

The fact that the French and Schools have banned skype has everything to do with economics and NOTHING to do with Skype. France Telecom has always been terrified of VOIP because they will lose their precious (and profitable) monopoly on phone services. The same with schools. Universities in the US
have a long tradition of making a boat-load of money on Long distance charging. Now, thanks to cell phones and VOIP, their cash cow is pretty lean. They’re not going to take that loss of revenue lying down.

Basically, this article is pretty much a shill for Cisco, Avaya, and SBC. “oooohh skype is insecure, don’t use it or someone could intercept it. No kidding? The same is true of ALL electronic communication. Risk is a continuum, just try to understand that Business Week.

5) A larger subscriber base gives Netflix more power to become HBO-like with content acquisition and production.

from Fool.com: Netflix [Post of the Day] November 22, 2005

Wow, it’s a great idea, but really? I mean, come on, HBO is able to do this because production costs are lower for them at the outset. They do not have to distribute their content on DVDs if they don’t want to.

But NetFlix would have to do a DVD release, and they would want to sell it, too. Region encoding would allow them to do international releases without it comming back to US markets but the important question here is WHY?

Netflix is not a content producer. They, like Amazon, are a logistics powerhouse. All of the New Companies are really just logistics masters. Amazon would not benefit from being a publisher of books. It’s not their thing. It’s not Netflix’s thing either.

Netflix isn’t HBO and they should not try to be. They ship movies. Focus, Nextflix, focus.

I hate to say it, but I think this (MIT suffers hubris over $100 PC idea) guy may have a valid point. I’m not sure that giving laptops to people is a good solution, just in general. I think what india has done with their satalight
system may be a better use of resources. Computing resources can be centralized, and lightweight computer equipment could even be run using the TV as a monitor.

One of the real problems is that this technology isn’t robust enough yet. They are talking about deploying it in regions that may not even have access to paper and pencil, let alone the tech required to connect one of these laptops up to a functioning network.

The first manager is dead. Druckers works changed my life. It’s funny to say that and not be, in any way, ironic about it.
Peter Drucker’s Monumental Legacy

He probably changed your life, too, and you don’t even know it. As the man who Changed Management, his work has probably done more to shape modern times than most. He wrote till the end. If I, at his age, enjoy a gram of the wisdom he possessed, I would call myself hppy.