Blog – Page 78 – Paul Schreiber

hybrids in Wired

But the marketing department knew that only a special customer would pay $20,000 for a compact car. Specifically, someone with a master’s degree, a six-figure income, and a fondness for composting.

Oh well, I’m 0-for-3 on that one. :)

japanese movies

Any movie that starts with 50 japanese schoolgirls jumping in front of a speeding train is by default messed up.

back in the day…

Gerald Weinberg talks about what it was like to be a real programmer:

A San Francisco oil company, which couldn’t accept the coast-to-coast turnaround time, requested an IBM machine of its own (at a cost of roughly $20 million) to run an application that blended oil from its distillation towers everyday. According to Weinberg, performing the blending optimally based on that day’s oil prices was worth about $1 million a day to the company. Weinberg wrote the program for them, becauseâ€”like nearly all large companies at that timeâ€”it didn’t have a programming staff. “When you bought a machine from IBM,” he explained, “you got me with itâ€”free.”

Buying a machine wasn’t a simple proposition, however. “You had to justify to IBM that you were a worthy user,” said Weinberg. “Sure enough, they turned down this order because the [blending] calculation only took less than an hour a day. I found a problem with the program, and by the time I fixed it, it was taking eight hours a day.”

easter bunny attacked

boy attacks easter bunny at mall.

Tim Hortons goes south

The Globe and Mail notes Tim Hortons’ expansion in to the US. Still: none in California.

The Economist on MGM v Grokster

The Economist, fresh off their SemaCode scoop, rips in to the music industry’s legal “strategy”:

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industryâ€™s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industryâ€”consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.