Quick Hits: September 2009

I’ve been a bit busy lately (did I mention I got rear-ended yesterday? now comes the fun part where I have to go and get the car fixed and get a crappy rental). So here is a rundown of some interesting news bits I’ve seen over the past few days…

Green

GM’s Volt test driver speaks out: I’ll save you the trouble of reading it – no hard performance data included, just “everything is in line with what we expect” and “we’re pleased” wiggle words (wiggle statements?). The skeptical person I am wants to believe that things are going great but I want hard numbers (or to get my hands on it).

Mercedes-Benz to build Volt-ish Vehicle: MB has revealed more information about their Volt competitor, the BlueZero E-Cell Plus. Its somewhat similar to the Volt, however their battery pack is larger (100km/62 miles all-electric range) plus a small 1.0L three cylinder turbo engine to generate power after the battery is depleted. Its an interesting trade-off; 62 miles is a long way to drive in one day, Argonne national labs estimates that about 83% of all drivers drive less than 60 miles per day (its “only” about 70% for 40 miles). Its a small four door car like the Volt, though since it carries the MB name I’d expect it to be far more expensive that the already premium-priced Volt. Limited production is scheduled for 2010.

Garbage to Ethanol: A company called Fulcrum BioEnergy based out of California is planning to build a plant east of Reno, NV to process 81,646 metric tons of garbage into almost 40M liters (10.5M gallons) of ethanol per year by 2011. They had a successful pilot run, and are now ready for the big time (well, as big as these things get right now). They expect to be able to produce ethanol at $1/gal and not worry about competing with food-based ethanol. 10.5M gallons of ethanol is enough to replace about half a day’s worth of gasoline but looking towards the future, dramatically reducing consumption and non-traditional sources of fuel are required.

Tech

Ryan isn’t too happy with Newegg: The Intel G2 SSDs that were announced last month (and were then immediately put on hold because of a serious firmware issue) haven’t been in stock lately. Newegg, who has had stock of the drives, raised the price of the $239 80GB SSD up to $499, then later that day pulled it off the website. Ryan points the finger towards Newegg, but I’m not entirely ready to jump to that conclusion. Remember that between Intel and Newegg like Distributors, and to quote a famous movie, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy“. I remember back to the Intel launch of the Q9x50 Penryn chips. Intel had a bit of a hard time pushing the chips out the door in quantity, so what happened? Distributors jacked up the prices and e-tailers like Newegg and Tank Guys (where I ended up purchasing my chip from) had to raise their selling prices so they didn’t have to sell the chips for a loss, and I cant blame them.

Ars Technica reviews OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard: A superb 23-page review. I cant really sum it up other than to say set some time aside, and go over it, even if its only a few pages a time. It took me three separate sessions of sitting down to read it to finish it all (then I got to the end and saw 9 pages of comments and said “that’s enough!”).