lines in the sand

Google and New Coke

Google made a change to their news reader this week to meet the competition: it became more like them.  A few years back, Coca Cola tried this by making its flagship beverage taste more like Pepsi.  The result, you may remember, was nearly disastrous. 

When I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a couple of months ago it was because Google was different in some ways I liked.  It showed me pretty much everything I wanted to see and and didn't hog much of the screen with stuff I didn't use.  Then a couple of days ago they gave us a new and improved version of...Bloglines?!  I wasn't as upset as Coyote, but with less to differentiate it from the alternatives, it certainly has reduced its hold on me .

To Google's credit, they avoided Coke's mistake of making fans switch cold turkey.  It took Coke a few weeks to reinstate "Coke Classic", but with Reader still in beta, Google stills lets us use the original interface if we prefer.  If enough of us decline to use New Reader, maybe they will rethink it.

There is a precedent.  Like a good geek, I often order pizza online.  One night last year I logged on to Pizza Hut and got a screen telling me they had just "upgraded" their website.  To use it, I would need IE or Netscape as well as Acrobat and Flash.  I composed an email to Pizza Hut while I waited for Papa John's to deliver dinner.  A couple of weeks later I tried again and the old Firefox friendly interface was back.   It has worked fine ever since.

I only hope Google pays as much attention.

Sight of the day

Atlantis and ISS against the sun, just after undocking.

HT Jay Manifold

Greg Mankiw, Sisyphus and Me

It's neat to find that I have something in common with Greg Mankiw. I, too, did a paper in college on Albert Camu's Myth of Sisyphus, and can identify with both of them.  I may not have Harvard's EC 10 class for a pulpit, but ask anyone around me how often they've heard the phrase "life is about trade-offs."

Do You Have Your Ticket?

Commercial passenger-carrying space flights draw closer as
Blue Origin gets a permit .  The pack is getting pretty big:

...competitors include Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane Kistler, PlanetSpace and Masten Space Systems, as well as a Russian-American venture involving Space Adventures, Prodea and the Russian Space Agency, among others. All these players have been looking toward the 2008-2010 time frame for the start of passenger service.

With the involvement of people like Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen and Anoush Ansari, perhaps the lasting legacy of the dotcom balloon will be affordable space travel.

Lower Prices = Less Greed?

The Philadelphia Inquirer explains the obvious.  If gas prices go up because of Oil Company greed, they must go down because of their generosity, right?

HT John Weidner

Anakin Schwarzenegger

Maybe he hasn't succumbed completely to the Dark Side.

Now this...

Our offspring all live in California and sometimes we discuss the relative hazards of their earthquakes and our Florida hurricanes.  At least with the storms, we have plenty of warning.  As I mentioned before, we just returned from the beach, meaning Siesta Key, which is one of the closest points of land to what happened this morning.

May have to rethink this location, location, location thing.

Moonset at the Beach

I spent the past week at the beach trying to get some sun, but the best thing I brought back was a few pictures of the moon.

Wednesday night I couldn't sleep.  About four in the morning I looked out the window and saw the moon beginning to reflect on the Gulf of Mexico.  I grabbed my camera, ran out the door, ran back in the door, put on some shorts, ran back out the door down to the beach.  Over the next two and a half hours, I took about seventy shots (love digital film!), of which this is my favorite.

I've posted a few others at Weather Underground.

Atlantis and I Return to Work

Atlantis is back at work and so am I.  I've been at the beach for the past week and arrived home this morning just in time to retrieve JD from the cat hotel and take this picture.  I was standing in the street in front of my house, just north of Orlando, and most of the view was obscured by clouds, but did get a quick peek.

Listening to the communications, I kept hearing phrases like this is nominal, no deltas on that, or no need for OMS 1, which is all engineer talk for "about as perfect a launch as possible."

The replay on NASA TV had some of the best views ever of Prandtl-Glauert condensation clouds formed by a shuttle.  They have a couple online now, here and here, and the shots from the tank camera are pretty cool.

Google vs. Gutenberg

Barbara Krasnoff has this article at InformationWeek that takes Google to task for daring to venture into Project Gutenberg's territory:

...when I saw the recent coverage of Google's new venture to offer free book downloads, I bristled. Most news stories about the service tout the revolutionary aspects of the project, which "makes it possible for people to store books on their computers and make copies" rather than simply read the text online.

Neat.

Except that Project Gutenberg has been doing the same thing since before Windows--or even DOS--was a glint in Bill Gates' eye.

I presume that a few years back she would have wondered why those guys were building a search engine when we already had Yahoo.  Or, for that matter, why Yahoo built one when we already had Archie (that was non-commercial, like Gutenberg.)

I left her the this comment:

If Google, or anyone else, chooses to do something that someone else is already doing, so what? Google started out as a repackaging of what Yahoo and others were already doing and the marketplace decided their new package had merit. The market will decide about Book Search, too.

Google's approach is not necessarily a replacement for Gutenberg, but an enhancement that allows more to be preserved than just the words (yes, even the yellowing, dogeared parchment.) In many books, illustrations matter, and, as your associate, Laurie Sullivan, implied, layouts and fonts are part of "book art." PDF preserves that better than plain text.

As for commercialism vs. volunteers, I wonder where aviation would be today if the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss had chosen to fund their development of transportation technology with contributions rather than sales.

If the market does declare Google the winner, that doesn't mean Project Gutenberg is dead. After all, there are still plenty of other search engines, too. It's silly to demand, as another commenter suggests, that anyone who offers a new choice be expected to take over funding the old one "if they really care."