Image via Jalopnik.

Pros:

• The blunt nose is great.
• I like the bold, strong, straight lines in the design, like the window sill. Good, brawny design elements, befitting an SUV.

Cons:

• Front clip looks like a Dodge Durango. Not a bad looking truck, but…
• Front clip is exceedingly busy with design elements compared to the rest of the vehicle. Its like it was created by a completely separate design group, that was hired from Mitsubishi’s Lancer team.
• From the A-pillars back, its not really distinguishable from a Q5 until you hit the tail lights.

“Critical to Ms. Mayer’s turnaround effort is infusing fresh blood and ideas into the company by buying creative start-ups and integrating them into the company. So since she took over last July, she has been on a splashy shopping spree, spending tens of millions of dollars to acquire six start-ups.” [The New York Times]

Mayer’s acquisitions, as compiled by the NYT, read as follows:

• OnTheAir: An online video service
• Snip.it: An online bookmarking tool
• Propeld: Location based-app maker
• Jybed: Social recommendations
• Stamped: Mobile recommendations
• Summly: Text summation

Here’s what jumps out at me about that list: its a dog’s breakfast, just like Yahoo!’s product shelf. At  a time when contemporaries like Google are actively paring back products to execute on a focused vision, Yahoo! is spreading itself thinner than ever. And why not? Yahoo! hasn’t had a clear focus or a decent vision for a decade. The result is a continuous stream of poor resource allocation decisions that allowed for investment in travesties like Yahoo! BUZZ and Yahoo! Pipes, while Flickr and Del.icio.us died on the vine.

So: I would have a lot more confidence in Mayer’s stewardship of Yahoo! if she had gone further than the limited product pruning she did early on and had spent time thoroughly re-trenching Yahoo!’s product shelf around a few simple themes. Not all investments are cash or stock; sometimes the best investment is just time. Time to figure out what Yahoo! is supposed to be, and time to unite the company behind being excellent at whatever that is.

Nonprofit startups: on.wsj.com/WxPBHB

— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 29, 2013

Twitter – as I understand it – still approves a card before before it goes into production, so they can still do quality control. But at the end of the day, anyone can create a Twitter Card for their content and submit it for approval, via https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards.

So – my suggestion to Apple is that if they really want to drive widespread adoption of Siri, they should open it up via a card-like system where providers of different services can submit voice-based interactions for approval and rollout. For instance – the new iOS 6.1 apparently includes the ability to purchase movie tickets via Fandango – why can’t all manner of other similar transactions, from purchasing subway passes to time on a parking meter, be Siri-accessible? Apple doesn’t have the resources to voice-automate every transaction in our modern-world, but the companies that provide each of those transactions certainly do, and have the economic incentive to do so – if Apple lets them.

Among the 505 transactions examined from April 2005 through November 2011, fewer than 20 per cent could be fully tracked and documented — and 61 per cent had no documentation at all explaining the reason for payment.

The auditors report they found “no evidence of due diligence in the use of public funds” by the band, and conclude they were unable to determine if the funds were spent for their intended purpose. [Winnipeg Free Press]

That makes it pretty clear that its time for change – in Ottawa, and on reserves. Every part of the system is broken, and doing nothing but wasting tax payer dollars and perpetuating bad outcomes. The #idlenomore protesters need to demand accountability from the Federal Government — but also from their own leaders.

Update: Another article in the National Post tells the story pretty well:

Nothing in the CBC report, or in Ms. Arsenault’s year-old report, suggest that Ms. Spence or the people around her are stealing money. Instead, they collectively present an image of a massively unproductive, high-cost, sociologically infantilized and dysfunctional welfare state, run by poorly trained and educated locals who have little political legitimacy and no tax base — all of it overseen by an Ottawa bureaucracy that is itself beleaguered and only semi-functional. [National Post]

Now, I have to visit my doctor to get a new prescription, which is a waste of my time, my doctor’s time, and taxpayer dollars. I understand the notion of enforced reviews for say, oxycontin, or a drug for some kind of acute treatment, but to require a doctor to rewrite a prescription for my case seems like bad policy. Is this a Manitoba thing? Or a Shoppers Drug Mart policy? Or what? Aren’t pharmacists supposed to be able to prescribe maintenance drugs already?

In the meantime, I’ve fixed the error, so you can now join LinkThing without any ridiculous hiccups. I’ve also significantly beefed up the “Introduction to LinkThing” that walks you through the basics, and explains some of the key features.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, LinkThing.co is a place where you can bookmark websites, and then search, sort, organize, and share your bookmarks very easily. Usually, bookmarking happens in your web browser – but browser bookmarks don’t follow you from work to home and back, aren’t very searchable, are a pain to organize, and don’t make it easy to share things.

Please feel free to peruse the “Introduction to LinkThing” -  If you’re new to LinkThing.co, hopefully this gives you something to get started with, or if you’ve never heard of LinkThing – perhaps you’ll give it a try! If you have any questions, reach me on Twitter at @rodedwards, or via email at rfj.edwards@gmail.com.

Desktop and tablet use cases are different and complementary, and attempting to cram both into the same OS creates lousy experiences for either. To put it another way, a traditional desktop (be it Windows 7 or OSX) and a tablet OS work together to give users a complete computing package. Each gets used at different times and places depending on the setting and task at hand. Key thing here is that each will have clear cases where it is the best option (i.e.: tablet for Netflix, desktop for web development).

What Windows 8 has done is muddied the waters between tablet and desktop OSs, and created something that’s the worst of both worlds. Now, tasks that are clearly “desktop” oriented (like web development) are a pain in the ass to do, because they’re saddled with tablet features.

Apple gets it. They have clearly delineated lines between mobile and desktop. And, they’ve done a good job of identifying the parts of the mobile experience that can be integrated into the desktop environment without compromising its utility (App Store, Siri). Windows 8 is equivalent to Apple discontinuing OSX and putting iOS on all of its desktops – which I don’t think anyone could ever imagine Apple doing.

What Microsoft could have done is created three pillars of OS: phone, tablet, and desktop. They could be integrated via Microsoft’s suite of online services (SkyDrive, etc.) and run on the same kernel while retaining the interface elements that make sense for each.

I think at some level, Microsoft knows all of this already. That’s why there’s a ridiculous Windows 7 Desktop App in Windows 8, in which the vast majority of my applications run. Shouldn’t the inclusion of this have been a big warning flag? Maybe it was. Microsoft had some notable executive turnover immediately after the Windows 8 launch.

The most frustrating thing about Windows 8 is that when you’re not fighting the user interface to try and get things done, it appears to be a great product: its fast and stable, and apparently has lots of under-the-hood improvements that make it a technologically superior product to Windows 7. All of that is lost on me, however, as I’m just generally annoyed by the whole thing.

The internet can’t get enough of the Instagram TOS saga. XKCD has chimed in, but they’ve gotten it wrong. Instagram users do indeed pay for use of the tool – not with dollars, but with attention. Instagram could monetize this attention with advertising, but just because they have chosen not to, doesn’t mean that users aren’t giving Instagram something in exchange for the service. Its the implicit agreement that underlies basically any content-based business.

So XKCD suggests that Instagram is entitled to do as it pleases with user’s content because users aren’t giving them actual dollars. I’m not sure if XKCD is being naive, or if the joke is so meta that I’ve missed it entirely.

WHOA. Yeah. Its a gleaming chrome-skinned hover train from the future-past, called the Aerotrain, that was designed and built in France in the 1960s and 70s as an alternative to maglev technology [Photo: Wikipedia]. I stumbled upon this gem while researching “the worlds longest bridges and things.” The Aerotrain traveled on elevated monorail tracks – one of these test tracks, at 18 km long, merits inclusion on Wikipedia’s longest bridges list. Even though the Aerotrain/Hovertrain concept was abandoned in the mid-seventies, the test track survives to this day, abandoned and overgrown:

[Photo: Wikipedia]

Here’s the prototype from the shot above in action, and below, a later version in action on what looks to be the long test track:

[Photos From Teladyne Exploration]

Now, check this out: someone, relatively recently, <i>turned it on</i>:

[Photo: aerotrain.fr - lots, and lots, and lots of pictures there]

So apparently, the prototype is still intact and functional enough to fire up the ol’ turbines and generate an ass-load of smoke.

The Aerotrain, it seems, was rather successful…

In 1976 after testing rocket engines the Aérotrain  hovercraft’s final version used a modified liner induction engine which showed exceptional performance in test runs, exceeding speeds of 245 miles per hour. The Aérotrain set a new rail speed record with each test run. With less up front cost and virtuly no track maintenance involved it was less expensive to build, operate and maintain than its contemporary alternatives.[IllianaRoad.com]

…but died on the vine nonetheless due to a lack of political will, funding, and the death of its lead engineer. Eventually, France committed to the TGV high-speed rail infrastructure that it uses today, and that was that. It got far enough along that the government of France wanted to start getting children comfortable with the concept, though:

Now – lest you think that was the end of the line for the Aerotrain – fear not! Tune in next time for the long, convoluted, equally paleofuture-cool “Aerotrain comes to America!” Teaser: you can visit the American hovertrain experiment in Pueblo, Colorado (below: holy crap, there it is!). More to come!

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Note: if the maps don’t show up, refresh the page.

This one is in Bangkok – somehow I managed to miss it while I was there. Or maybe I just passed under it – this elevated highway, the Bang Na Expressway, travels over Bangkok itself – not a body of water or whatever – for 54 kilometers.

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How about New Orleans? The Lake Pontchartrain causeway is around 39 km long. I’ve set this map to start zoomed in, dead center on it – start zooming out, and you’ll see how long it is. Its also neat because it is laser straight.

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54 and 38 km are nothing to laugh at, but China’s scale always tends to dwarf things – check out the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge – all 168 elevated kilometers of it – you can trace it for hours in Google Maps, over highways, towns, cities, rivers, everything. This is a high-speed rail line, incidentally – those are tracks, not lanes for cars.

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OK – this one’s cool. Its another Shanghai-area elevated line, and its only ~30k, but its a maglev train line, which is neat, and Google Maps happened to capture one of the maglev trains pulling out of (or maybe into?) the futuristic looking station.

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Final entry – the Confederation Bridge linking mainland Canada to the province of Prince Edward Island. Its only 13 km long, but pure patriotism merits its inclusion. Its also notable that it has a $4 pedestrian shuttle!

While pedestrians and cyclists are not permitted to cross, a shuttle service is available. The shuttle service was free of charge prior to 2006, but the shuttle service has charged C$4.25 per pedestrian or C$8.25 per cyclist since January 1, 2006. The fare is only applied when leaving Prince Edward Island (i.e., westbound). [Wikipedia]

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For more long bridge goodness, Wikipedia has a conveniently awesome list.