Tuesday, May 27, 2003

A few days ago I posted a negative comment on Bloki - a potentially interesting tool that has elements of blogs and wikis. I should have made it clear that this is based on my testing it with Safari and Caminio on Mac OS X. There are issues with those browsers. If a future version of Bloki works well with my browsers I'll give a review. At this point it looks like something that Windows users should try (or folks who use Mozilla on the Mac). 5:18:39 PM     Paul Krugman writes on the neo-conservative scheme to turn America into a Texas or a Mississippi or something even worse. He stresses that those in charge are neither crazy or conservative. 6:55:13 AM     Over the past year we've visited several amateur gas turbine sites. Here is a most impressive project by Andreas Petzoldt. Rocket belts have been around since the mid 1950s when Wendell Moore played around with hydrogen peroxide thrusters. A major problem with the old Bell (Aerospace not Telephone:-) rocket belts was its fuel consumption - 15 to 20 seconds was the maximum flight time. They were extremely impressive (I saw one fly at the Montana State Fair when I was a kid) - pure sound and steam. Watching them on TV or in movies does not do them justice. It turns out the design was developed further giving it 30 seconds of flight time. The American Rocket Belt Company made about $25.000 for each appearance in movies, superbowls, the Olympics and other large events. A bizarre lawsuit seems to have shut everything down. But back to the original rocket belt ... In the late 60s Bell sold the design to Williams International (the outfit that makes gas turbines for cruise missiles and probably an interesting investment these days). The Army asked for a one man device for urban warfare that could go into buildings and caves (hmmm ... 30 years ahead of its time). Williams made one with a small turbofan with counter-rotating everything to prevent torque roll. They later built a small platform called the WASP (Williams Aerial Survey Platform). I wish Mr Petzoldt luck, but this is a very difficult, not to mention dangerous, game. 5:48:56 AM     So you are thinking about self publishing that book you are working on ... a short guide. 5:48:37 AM     On the subject of publishing - the NY Times did an article on photoblogging and largely got it right. There is so much hype when it comes to blogs these days... 5:48:24 AM     This is very amusing. When Verizon first announced their improvement in DSL bang for the buck, most analysts dismissed it as cable has already won in their playbooks. Now we have a recognition that the phone companies may be serious and this may impact their profits, but may be good for their service bundles. The game isn't over (yet) .. Canada and Korean have well over 50% broadband penetration and the US is around 22%. It will be expensive to compete, but Verizon is already installing substations to move their footprint out. Two friends have switched from ComCast broadband (which has some problems in Central NJ) to the 1.5 Mbps Verizon DSL service and report that performance is generally better (except on middle of the night downloads of huge files) and customer service is much better -- oh yeah - the email servers work too:-) For $30 to $60 a month people expect high levels of service. I'm very happy with my Optimum Online service, but that seems to be the bright spot among broadband providers.. Their email service is poor (I use a third party for most of my email, so it doesn't matter) and tech support isn't very good, but the basic service is worth the price. What the business reports miss is that the cable guys see broadband as a cash cow to help fund their digital set top box push towards video on demand nirvana. The financial assumptions I've seen for VoD makes me think that cable companies and their stockholders are in for a very bad wake-up. I'm also guessing that the cable guys are going to have to improve their broadband service quality and price structure. If I was in a ComCast/Verizon or TW/Verizon region, I'd go for Verizon at the moment. ___ It is interesting to note that in many areas it is still difficult to get cable or dsl access. Two friends in Silicon Valley are out of DSL range and no cable service is offered. Another friend in San Francisco is unable to get cable and the DSL backlog is over a month. Real competition would be a good thing. 5:48:05 AM

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