Detail Blind Consumers

Unless you dismiss all sources of media, it is hard not to have seen some sort of advertisement for Dell's new Inspiron Notebook series. Dell's new notebooks come in what seems like a thousand different colors well its only 8 so called "vibrant colors". Yet where are the stats for this damn notebook? All the ads want you to chose a color to meet your personality, even Dell's website goes to great length to make a flash window to help you find the optimal color that will help express yourself. Dell's most recent catalog hides the stats in a small removable booklet within its center pages. Even on their website, on the Inspiron page only a few details are listed: Bluetooth, webcam, wifi, blueray. Well, blueray is nice yet what kind of processor is going to process all that blueray data? After digging deeper into this Dell conundrum I found the Dell Inspiron notebook series sport (by default, without any customization) an Intel Core Duo 1.5 GHZ or in the two cheaper models an AMD Athlon 64 2X Dual-Core 1.7 or 1.8 GHZ processor. That sounds decent yet chugin blueray data... I would have liked something with more muscle. Oh wait! no blueray, only DVD/CD combo drives come with the basic models. Then why the heck on the main Inspiron page they list blueray right above the prices of the various models? If you look closely there is no blueray drive that comes with the basic packages nor webcams nor bluetooth. Yet maybe that stuff doesn't matter to the average Dell consumer, how could it matter? The damn thing comes in 8 vibrant colors.

pay-as-you-go-has-got-to-go

Both Microsoft and Google have released pay-as-you-go software subscription services. Google has released "Google Apps Premier Edition" for $50 a year you get, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Start Page with more space (10gigs), no adds, 24/7 assistance and many more small perks. According to arstechnica.com Microsoft has started testing subscription based software in South Africa, Mexico, and Romania. $15 a month can get you use of Office 2003. In an industry that is all ready hurting due to piracy is a pay-as-you-go business plan going to work, or are most companies and schools going save money by purchasing old copies of Microsoft Office at a discounted price and using it until it is obsolete. Or are other open source ideas like Openoffice going to catch on with major companies and education institutions? In a world full of subscription based technology (internet, TV, Tivo, cellular service, electricity, netflix) is there anymore money left for the consumer shell out at the end of the month for the most up-to-date Microsoft Office? Or does the consumer just care about getting the cheapest deal at Newegg.com?

Oil Vs. Ethanol

With record high prices at the pump, more and more people are starting to look at alternate fuel sources. Ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol or grain alcohol, it is a flammable, colorless chemical compound is being looked at as a realistic alternative. Ethanol is produced by fermenting and distilling starch crops that have been converted into simple sugars. Feedstocks for this fuel include corn, barley, and wheat. Can you imagine being able to grow your own fuel? This is what scares major oil companies into trying to pass legislature to slow down the process of making ethanol cars and fuel readily available. Some people say the Ethanol is a net loser and will make little profit thus making it pointless to produce, yet new technological breakthroughs have made the production of Cellulosic Ethanol (produced from a great diversity of biomass including waste from urban, agricultural, and forestry sources) easier, cheaper and profitable. Right now on the east coast of the U.S., gas stations are making E85 available at the pump. E85 is a fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol and just 15 percent gasoline. This is a small step forward yet still leaves us dependent on oil, which is a source of energy that you can't just grow more of when it runs out.

More Links:
http://www.ethanol.org : American Coalition for Ethanol. ACE is the grassroots voice of the ethanol industry
http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/ : The Alternative Fuels Data Center is a vast collection of information on alternative fuels and the vehicles that use them
http://www.e85fuel.com/index.php : National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition
http://www.gm.com/company/onlygm/ : GM's Trendy Ad campaign for E85, They like to call it "going yellow".

Sony's Betamax Redux: Betaray

Sony has announced that on March 23 they are going to roll out the entertainment industry's next medium, Blueray. (Here is more info on Blueray and HD-DVD). Sony will release Blueray players with 8 blueray titles: "50 First Dates," "The Fifth Element," "Hitch" and "House of Flying Daggers." The real question is why? The fifth element was filmed (not in high definition "HD") in 1997, is the quality of the original source worth bringing to blueray's HD standards?. And how bad to you want to watch 50 first dates in HD? Most think that there needs to be a new medium other then dvd that can hold HD quality data to be played on the growing market of HD LCD and HD Plasma monitors. Making the consumer pick between Blueray and HD-DVD complicates the market, no one wants to go out and spend $350 on a sony Blueray player only to find out that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy is only going to be released on HD-DVD. Lets hope sony does not create another Betamax.