Wotta Revoltin' Development

    
     General Motors has decided to suspend the manufacturing of the Chevrolet Volt. The reason is that sales have been so slow that the manufacturer has a three month backlog of inventory.
     Even though the Volt has been named Motor Trend's 2011 Car of The Year, the public has been slow to embrace it.
     A Forty Thousand Dollar price tag for a 4 seater is most likely the reason. Even though the US government gives a 7500 dollar tax credit it is still out of the price range of most.
     What is really sad however is the way the public has ridiculed GM and has taken a perverse pleasure in watching the Volt's Detroit-Hamtramck plant close down for five weeks temporarily laying off 1300 workers.
     While it is true that the motoring public could get more bang for the buck with a Ford Focus, GM was not wrong in forging ahead with an electric vehicle.
     Like a lot of innovations, the electric vehicle will take some time to catch on.
     The internal combustion engine only has a thermal efficiency of 20% at best. That means that only 20% of the energy used from burning gasoline actually makes it to power the wheels. The rest is lost though heat which is dissipated through the radiator.
       An electric motor can have an efficiency between 80-90% of the ratio between the electrical input power and the shaft output power.
       The electric power grid that will power these new vehicles once they become more affordable is much more efficient than millions of individual internal combustion engines which rely on gasoline to run.
      When color television was introduced in the early 1960's there were not many households that could afford to buy one. They were expensive and the picture quality was not very good. Often the end user had to get up and readjust the color many times during the viewing period. By the 1980's black and white televisions were only used as security monitors and portable televisions.
      In the very near future there will be a change in the sales of automobiles from gasoline to electric. As battery technologies improve and the price of oil increases there will be vehicles made that will be 100% electric, charging stations will be everywhere and the motoring public will see the electric vehicle as a clean, efficient and economic means of transportation.
    

Eye See

     I got a new pair of bifocals yesterday. It was long overdue since I couldn't read and walk at the same time and my face had turned into a permanent scowl caused by incessant squinting.
     It had been apparent that I had been left behind in the smartphone department because it was too much of a hassle to deal with eyeglasses to navigate the tiny screens. My fingers are also too big for the tiny keys of most keyboards.
     The next step in this evolution will be to try contact lenses. Even contact lenses come in bifocals. The doctor that performed my eye exam told me that he wears them himself. This from a guy who could get the laser treatment if he wanted. (What does he know that the rest of us don't?).
      Maybe after that I will be walking around with an iPhone sending text messages and using all the latest apps. Somehow I doubt it.

A Blog About Blogs

     In a classic episode of Seinfeld , Kramer writes a coffee table book about coffee tables. I am writing this blog about blogs.

     In Blogger there is a "Next Blog" feature in the top menu bar. It will connect you to a random blog. If you were so inclined you could browse dozens of blogs written by perfect strangers. I guess I expected to find mostly teenagers writing about the social aspects of living in Anytown USA but was surprised to find that the majority of blogs are written by people over the age of 30.

     Most of these were family oriented. People posted pictures of their kids or their latest vacation. I suppose this is a good way for people to stay current with their friends and relatives as long as they don't mind the whole world looking in on what they have been up to.

     I had hoped to find at least one thought provoking blog out of the twenty or so that I perused. Alas, this was not the case. What I found was that the majority of them only had a few entries and were outdated by more than a year. I guess in our ADD society most people didn't find blogging as much fun as they thought it would be and soon lost interest. Or maybe they just moved on to Twitter where you can write short sentences about what you had for breakfast.

Outsourcing Part 2

     The Department of labor announced that 100,000 call center jobs that were once outsourced to foreign countries will return to the United States.

      There are a few reasons for this. Most of them are financial (big surprise).

     The call center employees in India are making 10% more money than a year ago. Their managers are doing even better. People in the United States are willing to work from home for less money than what they were used to. It is no longer cost effective to ship these jobs overseas.

     
     Call centers in India are now outsourcing call center jobs to Africa and Asia where wages remain low. The quality of these employees are as low as the wages that they are paid. I would like to think that businesses are realizing that consumers are losing patience with dealing with customer service reps they cannot understand that come to them through a connection that is less than clear.

Web 2.0 - Here to stay?

    In the mid 1970's after the first energy crisis the national speed limit was changed to 55 MPH. In response to this, motorists began to use CB radio to protect themselves against police radar traps.

    It was an anonymous wilderness where people had nicknames called "handles" and had a whole lexicon of slang expressions. State Troopers were "Smokies" in CB lingo.

    The craze was around for five or six years, so much so that in 1977 the FCC increased the number of channels reserved for CB from 23 to 40. When the cell phone gained popularity CB radio began to fade away.

     The phenomenon known as Web 2.0 contains a lot of the features that attracted people to use CB Radio. Blogging and social networking use the same kind of anonymous forum that CB Radio users  wandered about in during the 70's. People can use an alias instead of their real name and there are the cute expressions like LOL and IMHO that pop up in this medium.

     Will blogging and social networking become an integral part of modern life or will it be replaced in a few years by the next big thing?

Apocalypse Now

     In Data Communications there is a scenario known as the Apocalypse of Two Elephants.Andrew Tanenbaum makes this observation. "You have two humps of activity: the business requirements lead innovative activity. And then you have the standards that vendors attempt to implement which follows the innovation. The second elephant, always has to tail the first. And the second can never get up to or with the first, because it always has to follow its tail. And you are fundamentally dragging the standards from behind."

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      I have been studying Moore's Law for a number of years now. Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. This is a fact at Intel.

       I have come up with my own scenario called the Apocalypse of Two Turkeys. This says that no matter how faster computers get and how much RAM and storage space and bandwidth they have, there will be applications developed that will gobble up all the computing resources.The hardware industry is driven by the software industry.

    

The Ex-File

     I have a digital Rolodex file that I have been keeping since I got in the IT business. It has the contact information for every company or individual that I have done business with for the last 16 years.

     Recently I had the opportunity to review the entire file of which there are over 200 entries. The majority of companies are long out of business. Companies like Comp USA and Leading Edge are gone.

    I could not find a single person that was still with the same company. Some of these people have been added less than a year ago.

    In the United States people change jobs at an alarming rate.Businesses show no loyalty towards employees by having massive layoffs if the company has a bad quarter. As a result, employees will work for a competitor if the price is right.Companies will terminate an older employee in favor of a younger one who will work for less money. 

     All the tacit knowledge possessed by these employees walks out the door on a regular basis.

     It remains to be seen how adversely this brain drain will affect American companies as a large segment of the population reaches retirement age. Will corporate America implement Knowledge Management systems to try and keep some of this tacit knowledge before it is lost forever? How effective will this be?