Suissa.ca

David,

I was listening to you on CBC radio here in Edmonton on Friday discussing in a segment the idea of taxing vehicles based on how many occupants they have… I have also thought of this and wonder how someone in a V10 7.6L four door truck with two people total could possibly pay less people tax than someone in a 599cc, or .6L, Smart car by them selves…?

I really thing that some form of combination or revision of the type of yearly ’shaken’ the Japanese have would be a better way to tax the carbon emissions of a vehicle… The wonderful, ahem, clean air emissions testing done in Ontario does squat… Perhaps if, like in Japan, the driver of any vehicle with, lets say a 5+ litre engine, was confronted yearly by a $2500 licence fee for the privilege of polluting the air, perhaps they would think twice about all that wasted space and metal they haul around all day.

If we have the technology to digitally capture a licence plate and send a speeding ticket to a driver, or a bill for toll roads, then why is it that those tolls can’t be ‘tuned’ for the specific type of vehicle…

On the basest of levels you can compare these two cars… A dodge Viper and a Smart for two… Both are two seaters, both have very little trunk space, both get you and one person from point A to point B with lots of people looking at you… but should both be taxed equally under any emissions legislation?

So-called “Circuits in Plastic” (CIP) technology is making your nasty unrecyclable circuit board a thing of the past.  Professor David Thiel and MadhusudanRao Neeli at the faculty of engineering and information technology at Griffith University in Brisbane are set to shake up the computer and electronics industries by discovering a way to make circuits out of plastic.

“The circuit board is a plastic sheet in which all components are placed in divots,” Thiel said. “The conductor is screen-printed into a thin cover sheet which is then thermally bonded to the circuit board.”

I for one am looking forward to this product being widely available in manufacture.  I figure once they get the manufacturing to a point where circuits of a reasonable size can be created, portable electronics will be the first to really benefit from this.  Just imagine not having to buy a new cell phone every time you dumpy our in the toilet, or digital watches which are truly water proof, or cameras that you can actually use underwater.  I think this type of technology has implications far beyond just simple circuit boards.  I can see it used to wire cars or other transportation where short circuits would be a thing of the past.

CIP aim to be more environmentally friendly than traditional circuits as they can be made from recycled plastic, don’t contain any hazardous substances, and since packaging is part of the base circuit board there is no need additional packaging material.

How cool will this be used in actually packaging with e-ink paper… The package could be more fun than the product it holds.

Well I’ve done it. I have moved to Linux. Well, almost. You see, I can’t use 3D Max or Illustrator on Linux and they are two of the programs I have to have on my system. Other than that, I am done with Windows for good this time. So what is the big deal with moving to Linux? Why doesn’t everyone move over? Well, this is where we seem to get into the standard objections. What if I have to send a file to someone? Isn’t it really hard to run Linux? Won’t my computer not work with everyone else’s? Will my camera/iPod/printer/ you name it work on Linux? Linux won’t run the newest programs or hardware.

Linux used to be hard to use, all those command line entries, sudo this, apt-get install that, but not any more. Linux has come as far forward as Vista has gone backwards. You don’t worry about viruses, applications that mess up your system, or updates that come too late to protect your computer. All these are Windows problems. I’m not going to give you a step by stem on how to install and use Linux, well maybe I will later, but not now. Suffice to say, there are loads of Linux distros or distributions to choose from which tend to scare people away. I suggest you go to Ubuntu, download the latest version and use Nero on your Windows computer to burn an ISO CD. Pop it into your hard drive and try Linux right off the disk. Yep, that’s right. Right off the CD you can try out Linux, see what it is like, how it is the same or different. If you don’t like it, just pop it out and stay with Windows.

Most of these excuses, and I call them excuses are false. Think about what you use your home computer for. Really? Be serious. Think about what you really use it for. Email. Surfing the web. The occasional word document… Ah, your taxes… Saving your pictures, music, video. All of these you can do on Linux as easily as you can on Windows. You can still send files to people. Granted, you do have to use the Save As option and usually select a windows format so your recipient can open the file. And by doing so, you can still open it on your Linux system just by clicking it. You see Linux doesn’t care if it is a Windows format. It just opens it. If you write a word document in Open Office Writer and save it as a Microsoft Word document, anyone you send it to who uses windows can open it and is none the wiser of your elite computer skills.

I’ll be honest though. It is different. It takes a bit of getting used to, the same as relearning how to judge the length of your car when you buy a new one and you are in a tight situation. But you do get used to it quickly. And, you get bragging rights. I have been using Open Office for a couple of years now and have been a user of Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird Mail for years on my Windows computer. Open source, or free programs are nothing new to me, but, Linux as a full time desktop is. I have used other operating systems on and off over the years way back before windows I used Dr.DOS and have occasionally put Linux on well out dated computers. This though is the first time I have had it on a new computer that was my main system. In the past, Linux on an old computer made it faster, gave me great performance gains on a toy system. This time on a newer computer it is really fast.

My brother in-law came to me the other day and asked me if I could help him reinstall Windows onto his year old Toshiba laptop that he uses for work. I offered to put Ubuntu Linux on it instead. It took about 2 hrs to install it, update it, connect to his wireless Internet, get connected to his windows network at home for file sharing and add the free programs so he could do everything he needs to do. All this was done in a very familiar Windows style environment with a few mouse clicks and a bit of text entry. I had to select things like his user name and password… tough stuff that. Great thing is that when he goes to the library, or coffee shop and uses their unsecured wireless network, he doesn’t have to worry about anyone hacking his computer, or getting viruses on line.

I have asked my brother in law to keep me up to date on how he enjoys the system and I will be posting updates as they come in. He is a great test subject as he would be considered a casual computer user. I will also be posting my own experiences with Linux as a desktop system and as a whole home automation server as I get it installed in our house. If you think you might be interested in trying it out, there is loads of get started information on the net that is easy to understand. Below I have put a few links to get you started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://www.ubuntu.com
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall

Hmmm… Think about this for yourself.
Given that all the US car companies are rushing out vehicles with astounding MPG and new shapes, platforms etcetera, begs the question as to if we be concerned for quality of design and engineering?

Consider only months ago they were complaining that building fuel efficient cars, in their large car size range, would be something that could push them over the edge of profitability.  Yet now in record time they seem to be releasing new cars almost on a weekly basis.  How can an industry which for years which told us that a platform takes 4 years to develop and test and hundreds of millions of dollars all of a sudden pop them out in record time.  Even recently 18 months was the bare minimum to bring a new model on an existing platform to market.

Something is rotten in the State of United.

Beta release.  It has been talked about over the last few years almost exclusively in relation to software.  A company designs a piece of software, sends out a ‘release candidate’, then later, releases a patch to finalize the product.  Or in the more modern case, they just never release the final product.  Only never ending patches, upgrades and versions.  This does offer them the ability to not have to have accountability for a faulty, unfinished product… “It’s a Beta.  It’s not finished yet.” or, “We are doing on going ‘in the wild testing’” all of which are well used terms.

We do find that there are two main kinds of Beta releases.  The first, has a set of features, which get subsequent upgrades with new features added and/or patches for the existing features.  The second, that has all the features included, but has certain features which have their abilities turned on at a later time.  We tend to see this type more often as a ‘trial version’ or ‘limited functionality trial’.   This you see in a basic version of Apple Quicktime, where ‘Pro’ upgrade is needed to access certain abilities.  Sometimes, these features are just hidden completely from the interface but if you could run them, they would work just fine.  This was the case with the ‘hidden’ flight simulator in Google Earth.  It was fully there, but you couldn’t access it’s functionality from the drop downs.

This Beta release business model has managed to quickly move from the confines of pure software to that grey area between software and hardware.  That place where the software which is Beta is responsible for the actual functionality of your hardware.  The drivers.  Firmware updates which increase, or expand, hardware’s features.  We see this all the time in computer hardware.  Mostly in processors, or graphic cards.  Through your computers BIOS you can overclock your CPU, make the hardware run faster.  You do tend to see it more overtly in graphic cards where the supplier actually releases an OC video card, or over clocked version.  In the hardware, there is nothing different between the OC video card and the regular version except that the instruction set tells it to run faster.

Now it is interesting to think what happens when we transpose this to mechanical products.  When we start to purposely under perform our offerings in order that we can boost performance later with a simple BIOS style upgrade.  I’m not talking about playing it safe and leaving room for wear and tear, or out of specification misuse from a safety stand point.  I’m talking about designing and building a product where we make it to perform at 110% but only allow it to perform at 90%, and then upgrade it to 100% later.  This psychologically goes to make the customer feel like they are getting something for free.  Makes them feel like the company is giving their old purchase a new lease on life.

Imagine if you buy a new car that has the actual ability to get 4L/100km and do 0~100km in 5.1 seconds with 250HP.   The thing is, they tell you that it only gets 5L/100km and does 0~100 in 6.1 seconds with 200HP.  So here you are with a detuned car and no clue that this is the case.  Now what if the company manufacturing the car releases a patch, or an upgrade that improves your vehicles fuel consumption and acceleration?  Well if you paid for the technology up front but didn’t know the real capabilities, then there is no cost to the manufacturer only a benefit of customer satisfaction.

This could become an interesting trend with lots of new questions to be asked.

Is it ethical for a company to do this?  What would be the backlash should one be found out?  Would it adversely effect a company’s brand image?  Do we as designers and strategists start to design overall solutions to this line of thinking?  Or, do we stand fast and oppose it should it be raised by other departments as a business model?  On one hand we could just play the Beta card.  “It was detuned to fit within ‘at the time engineering and testing parameters’, but after further testing, we found we could safely change the parameters within the current hardware configuration”.  On the other hand, as designers, we aim to make things usable and therefore beautiful, so retarding usefulness detracts from the beauty of our art.