Walking quickly on a brisk Saturday morning Farmer’s Market (cold wind) last week, we stopped to make a purchase. I asked the vendor how he was holding up in the cold? “If I didn’t do this, I’d have to get a real job”. “I’m great!”
Daily Archives: October 20, 2004
Silicon Valley School District Cuts Salaries by 5%
Facing a budget crisis, California’s Silicon Valley school district has resorted to cutting salaries of teachers and other employees by 5 percent.
This is one of the problems that can arise when districts become too dependent on rising property taxes (Silicon Valley has a number of empty office buildings, due to the dot com crash).
More Code in Your Car
More than one-third of the cost of GM’s automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the amount of software loaded into a typical automobile is skyrocketing, Scott said. Cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, but this number will jump to 100 million by 2010, he predicted.
The emergence of the automobile as a platform for software developers will mean that a much broader range of software will be used in tomorrow’s cars. Remote diagnostics software, media players, even database software all will run on automobiles at some point, he said. “I can’t think of software ? that isn’t going to run on the vehicle.”
I think we’re already north of 100 million lines of code. BMW and others have baked Windows CE into their cars. This ill advised move has introduced a legion of bugs and challenges to our once reliable cars. I believe the automakers are better off creating very simple, purpose built software, rather than extending Windows….
TV’s go Dark
In the middle of a scene, the TV turned off.
For 10 seconds, Li kept looking, waiting, not blinking through his glasses. At last, he left his stool, trashed his plate and emerged into the cool autumn night.
Leaving, he passed 48-year-old Mitch Altman, who was twiddling a matte-black plastic fob on his key chain. Altman’s blue and purple hair reflected the pizza shop’s neon, and he was smiling excitedly.
“We just saved him several minutes of his life,” he said.
Li agreed. He said he didn’t care that the TV was gone, even though he had been watching the show.
Altman’s key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.
I think this is great. I’ve never understood the need to put TV’s absolutely everywhere….. Ken Lonnquist comes to the rescue with an appropriate
mp3 – Time Vacuum!