Month: August 2005

nemetschek and autodesk

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i am a nemetschek vectorworks customer, and for the longest time have been waiting for the nemetschek companies to start sharing their technology portfolio.

one compelling reason autodesk is a strong industry leader, is they leverage their entire software library and sister companies. autodesk acquired both discreet logic, maker of 3DS max and combustion, along with revit technology corporation and their revit application. when they exhibit, at the american institute of architects or other tradeshows, they show all their applications and a great workflow moving though the entire product suite. i hope nemetschek follows this trend, using allplan, vectorworks, and cinema 4D to make a fantastic suite than can compete with any autodesk offering.

i am interested in taking cinema 4D and vectorworks combined to generate human scale animations and presentations. i talked with maxon at the siggraph 2005 exhibition, and was told that each business arm of nemetschek operated independently, so much duplication of effort instead of collaboration. so autodesk rules the day with a great suite, and maxon, nemetschek north america, and nemetschek AG wither on the vine.

end of privacy

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we have no place to hide. the company (VNU) that owns nielson media research and other information gathering systems last month bought IMS health for 7 billion dollars.

IMS health collect data from pharmacies on what drugs people order and consume. now a more complete profile of buying trends will be developed to track your habits. this information will be supplied to the government and to the highest bidder. we are living in a “total information awareness” world. do we like it?

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

cruise with the devil

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in our country of many travel opportunities, often people enjoy a cruise on a luxury ship. if only they knew that most cruise lines do not pay a single cent in taxes, pay there employees in the neighborhood of $1.00 a day, and overall conditions are akin to a third world nation. take a listen to a recent interview on KPCC with kristoffer garin about his new book:

Devils on the Deep Blue Sea

SAN prices dropping

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it’s amazing, but in the next three to six months the cost of storage is going to drop again, especially managed storage. using direct attached PATA or SATA drives is OK for the individual user, but when you get your multiple workgstations online, and the 120 GB storage capacity is all of a sudden 2048 GB, and the data is mission critical, so you require redundancy, recovery, and backup, the puzzle gets more exciting and often times very expensive.

apple answered this management problem with its Xserve RAID and Xsan solutions, but at costs approaching $2.50 a GB, it is quite expensive. i have found SAN products starting around $0.50 and the infrastucture is not fibre channel (FC), but well understood gigabit ethernet (1GbE), so instead of $10,000 on equipment, you can spend $500 and get near similar results (instead of FC protocol you use iSCSI).

these types of topologies are just starting to appear from netgear and dlink, and i’ll be ready for them.

terrorism here to stay

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now that terrorism is coming home, first nairobi, then new york, then kabul, then baghdad, and now london it won’t be long until we are all dodging bullets and bombs. wait, i already live in los angeles, where little girls are being shot by SWAT snipers, and gang bangers are shooting senior citizens. i already live in a terrorist community where on a good year 2000 folks are murdered, but now the threat may come from across the seas or across national boarders.

we all need to learn what is means to become a true muslim (arabic for one who surrenders) to learn what makes most of the world tick (including me). no, don’t study in a religious school in jalalabad , but learn some of the jargon of the jihadist and of the faith walks of others. like women in islamic nations who wear headscarfs. these garments are called a:

hijab

now in the conquered nation of afghanistan, they wore a special headscarf called a:

burka

so now we’ve all learned something. the people of mid asia (india, pakistan, afganistan) wear burkas, and the egyptians, saudi arabians, and moors wear hijabs.

mobile will save fuel?

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motorola started demonstrating the next generation of mobile devices:

it might take a year before these phones make it into the wild, but it sounds exciting to maintain your own mobile phone tower in your home, video around the house, and ubiquitous communications throughout the planet.

on top of wireless, chevron started a new ad campaign basically saying the era of cheap (free) oil is over, and we need to move towards alternatives to the carbon-combustion economy. what that solution will be is not developed (fusion, solar, wind, etc.), but the CEO calls to all people of the world to make their part to save, conserve, and move beyond petroleum (catch phrase for BP). chevron is even adopting a new (at least for me) catch phrase, “human energy.”

if you do a google.com search for green building, you’ll find greenconcepts.com as the fifth link. i’ve positioned greenconcepts.com to grow by leaps and bounds, and it will move into the web application space by the end of the year. now, juggling two companies may lead to a few sleepless night, but i’ll have to take it easy, letting these two enterprises grow organically, and just let it happen.

stuck with a gas guzzler

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in terms of a mode of transportation, i much like the subway and diesel trains of los angeles. the red line, blue line, gree nline, gold line, orange line, and metrolink run on time and on target. they are highly reliable reproducible forms of transportation. i know within a factor of 8 minutes when i’ll arrive at wardlow station in long beach, pasadena convention center, or los angeles convention center. how to get to the subway station is another matter. if the subway takes 20 minutes, getting to the subway station may take 60 to 80 minutes, which blows any advantage of the subway.

as much as i assumed by now i could easily buy a solar powered car (all electric) by 2005/2006, this dream of mine cannot be realized in the USA. in japan and in europe i could get something, but americans love their SUV’s and SUT’s. that’s all the big three auto makers offer in north america. so now i am considering a city car with these minimum features:

    automatic transmission
    air conditioning
    driver and passenger front airbags
    driver and front passenger seat-mounted side impact airbags
    overhead front and rear side curtain airbags
    driver knee airbag
    electronic stability control
    traction control (TRAC)
    anti-lock brakes (ABS)
    electronic brake-force distribution (EBD)
    tire pressure monitor system
    daytime running lights (DRL)
    front seatbelt pretensioners with force limiters
    driver and passenger 3-point seatbelts
    anti-theft system with engine immobilizer
    fuel economy above EPA 35 MPG
    under 7 tons annual greenhouse gas emissions

the only cars that i know of the meet most of these requirements:

    MINI cooper
    scion xB
    scion xA
    scion xC
    honda civic
    toyota corolla
    chevrolet cobalt
    saturn ion
    nissan sentra
    honda insight
    toyota prius
    mazda 3

china on my mind

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i love china!

over the course of ten years, millions of north american jobs have migrated to china, along with employment opportunities in europe, western asia, and south america. trade sanctions dropped and now chinese imports are not at record levels, but unbelievable levels. with a state controlled currency, plentiful workforce, and a growing middle class, world capitalism at its best has made a communist country the vanguard to the world. the ports of long beach and los angeles teem with activity, as electronics, foodstuffs, furniture, and clothes flood in as rusted cars, cotton bails, and other raw resources return to the land where everything is made.

in a 2005 interview with bill gates, the question posed was if any company gave gates some trepidation and competition. his answer was microsoft feared no single company (not apple, IBM, HP, etc.) but he had much concern about the china inc. laboratory. we are getting killed by chinese innovation. unfortunately, we cannot turn back time, and this is the new world order. the 20th century may have been the american century, but the 21st centruy will become known as the chinese century.

a recent movie i saw, ying xiong (hero), directed by yimou zhang of shi mian mai fu (house of flying daggers), da hong deng long gao gao gua (raise the red lantern), and ju dou fame told the tale of the unification of china some 2000 years ago. it was a spiritual movie, with fantastic fight pieces and excellent story. china has always been the apex of society historically, and over the last half century, have been building and developing for this moment and this time. the beijing olympics in three years will only cement this relationship that china is the center of the world.

i hold out some hope that the USA will continue to supply the world with weapons of mass destruction (military industrial complex), lively motion pictures, and electronic entertainment, and maybe a print author or two, but it was nice while it lasted.

we’re all on the titanic, on this time racing towards the bottom. all must take advantage of our new partnership with china, but wisely. as real earnings plummet for the bulk of western civilization and unemployment will continue to rise, every penny must be well spent.

so in this new climate, that i am gearing up to enter for the next 30 years, the only thing i have to offer is my creativity, honesty, integrity, and God given abilities to absorb new information, teach, and share. this is the foundation to cloak media.

shopping for bargains

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when changing or starting a business, an inevitable expense is buying more stuff to make thinks work faster, do thinks better, or just learn new stuff. be it new software, new hardware, new clothes, or whatever, for the start-up it’s easy to go wild and buy with abondon. i did this when i started green building concepts, but i learned my lesson in 1997, and will never do that again. i only buy something that i need for the next 30 days, unless it a birthday or Christmas gift for somone else.

here is my strategy on gettng great deals: never buy at retail prices. now this does not mean i only buy from ebay or overstock, but i always wait until what i’m getting is on sale, on clearance, or just after some mail in rebate. it may seem stupid to wait for a rebate, but i consider it an investment in the future, that will pay with interest in abour 8 to 12 weeks. and i always get my rebate, because i follow the directions on the mail in form. if it says original receipt, that’s what i put. if it calls for red ink instead of black, that too. if it calls for two UPC’s i made a copy. whatever the form says, i follow to the letter.

the best trick i’ve found in processing rebates is always to use a #10 business envelope, computer addressed with a USPS bar code for easy computer delivery. also, if the UPC is small, i tape it to a strip of paper so i will not hide inside the envelope. for all i know these rebates are processed in india or canada, so you have to send them for the long haul.

my second tip for bargains, is using the web. i search the sites:

fat wallet
slick deals
tech bargains
deal news

before i buy anything. this is a result of an article i read in november 2004. one of the largest consumer electronic dealers in the USA, best buy, made some statements in the wall street journal that some of it’s customers only buy things when they are heavily discounted and the company is losing money. they called these special customers, some 20% of its base, “devils.” they warned about the above sites that share coupon codes and discount strategies. i am one of those customers who buys only when something is free or close to it. good luck to you getting back at the man.

end of HTML editors

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i read with a grin the release of adobe dreamweaver 8. i’ve already completely transitions to the new media publishing systems that both wordpress or mambo offer. these web applications, based on open standard mySQL and PHP, offer tremendous advantages to any adobe breeze application, or say even adobe golive application.

where HTML or XML editors are going is away from the world wide web, and to the handset, where i don’t know of any 3G or 4G backend applications. i’m sure at the upcoming CTIA wireless IT and entertainment 2005 conference at the end of september 2005, they’re be all kinds of new applications, but until then maybe that might be the singular use for golive or dreamweaver. now adobe flash will continue to reign as a front end to a database or image server, but what good is a non bookmarkable file format (.swf)? i cannot usually even read a flash based webpage, since the fonts are hard coded into the elements, and i run my display at something larger than the designed 1024 x 768 resolutions (i’m usually at 1600 x 1200).

sites have become to complex to administer or author using text based tools. the web is about information, and both mambo and wordress offer a idealized platform for collaboration and sharing, unfathomable a few years ago.