Category: outside

It looks like there may be a biodiesel boom if things go well. I’m so amazed with the concept of biodiesel. Who would have thought that you could power an automobile from something derived from plants? I guess the people who wrote Back to the Future III knew, but that was just science fiction, haha.

Anyway, more diesel cars are being offered in the 2004 sales year than any year for quite a long time, and standard diesel producers may start using biodiesel as an additive to help reduce emissions. Biodiesel can be mixed with standard diesel in any ratio and it still works. Amazing!

Anyone who uses email regularly probably already knew this, but it’s official: spam is now two-thirds of all email, and in the US, it’s 83% of all email. Ouch! At my company, we already use blocklists to reject something like half of all email that hits our servers, and our customers are still pummeled with spam in their inboxes. Email used the be one of the relatively ‘easy’ Internet services to offer, and now it’s quickly becoming one of the hardest. If you happen to be a customer and are wondering what we are doing about it, rest assured that we are working very hard on some stuff to help ease the pain.

According to some new research, it appears that most of the dinosaurs that went extinct may have died within minutes to hours of the asteroid collision with Earth. The collision may have generated as much energy as 100 million megatons of TNT warming up the atmosphere enough to incinerate or roast unprotected life.

An ongoing technology project to create the US Military of 2010 is doomed to failure, or at least doomed to not meeting its time and financial goals and creating a lot of substandard technology. This seems to be part of a theme I’ve been noticing lately. Technology is supposed to be all about taking steps forward while minimizing any steps backward, but in our excitement to achieve what we think of as ‘the future’ we are pushing things ahead in a way that may be resulting in the steps back being greater than the steps forward. When you’re talking about a cellphone, that just means disgruntled and annoyed customers. When you’re talking about the military, that means disgruntled and dead soldiers. This gradual unraveling of our technological advantage may just become the undoing of the United States itself, but I wouldn’t be so bold as to make a claim that grand, haha.

Anyway, it’s interesting that all of this is happening in the first decade post ‘The Year Two-Thousand’. I think that means my old rantings and ravings about the importance of the turn of the millennium may have had something going on.

Author Shelley Jackson has written a short story and is publishing it through a series of 2095 tattoos, each one a single word and on a single person. People from all over the world are helping to publish the story and no one yet knows what the story is about or even more than a few words of it. The author plans to share the finished story only with the participants. It sounds like a publicity stunt to me, but I still think its awesome.

The RIAA has asked the FCC to consider imposing a set of broadcast flags on digital radio. Digital television already has similar broadcast flags. The flags are intended to prevent end-user from recording and distributing the digital signals over the Internet. Any device sold in the US would have to conform to the rules and would be required to behave in a way dictated by someone other than the owner of the device. This could potentially prevent digital radio from being recorded at all. If you had high hopes of being able to record digital radio programming to take with you on the road, your bubble may have just burst. I love how the future keeps entering our daily lives and is never as good as it seemed like it was going to be. We’ll have more access to more movies, music, radio, news, porn, etc than ever before… but we won’t be able to do what we want in the way we want with any of it. Fantastic.

Verizon is building a nationwide fiberoptic network to offer video and television services as well as high speed Internet connections at speeds of 30 Mpbs. They have to do it to compete with the cable companies that are now starting to offer VoIP phone service over their cable lines. If Verizon pulls it off, along with the other phone companies, this could mean great things for us home users.

Apparently hybrid cars don’t actually get the great gas mileage the EPA ratings indicate. Angry car-owners are holding their fists up in the air to the car companies, but the car companies claim it’s a side-effect of out of date testing methods employed by the EPA. Still, you don’t hear the car companies mentioning that when you go into purchase a hybrid.

On top of this, something like half of all the energy consumed and emissions generated by a car are during its manufacturing process. Buying an old Volvo is probably better for the environment than buying a brand-new hybrid. Still, every little technology step in the right direction is worth supporting in my opinion.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation has helped a 9 year old boy with Leukemia create a computer game featuring a hero that battles cancer cells. Eric Johnston of LucasArts volunteered to help make Ben’s wish come true and the result is now available for Mac and Windows. Sounds like an all-around great thing to me.

AMD sold more desktop processors than Intel for the week ending April 24th, with 52% of that market. It’s thought to be the first time that has ever happened. AMD already gave Intel something sour to chew on with their Opteron 64 bit processor and now they’ve managed to become more than just a little competitive in desktop cpu sales. All of this is without the help of Dell, too.

Geeks everywhere are no doubt watching all of this with keen interest…