The Red Monkey

I am – Hercules!!

TV By The Numbers has a fascinating look at how the first seven weeks of Jay Leno’s second try at “The Tonight Show” compares to Conan O’Brien’s first “Tonight Show” try.

Seven weeks in, Leno is doing no better than Conan.

Seven weeks in, Leno is averaging a 1.0 in the 18-49 demo while David Letterman averages a 0.8. These are precisely the same numbers “The Tonight Show” and “The Late Show” were pulling seven weeks into Conan’s “Tonight” tenure.

(And if one averages the first seven weeks, we see Conan’s 18-49 audience during that period was far bigger than Leno’s.)

The chart also reminds us that before “The Jay Leno Show” started last September (at week 16 into Conan’s run, I think), Conan won the 18-49 race against Letterman every single week last summer.

Only after “The Jay Leno Show’s” arrival as Conan’s 10 p.m. lead-in did Conan begin losing to Letterman in 18-49 for the first time.

Find TV By The Numbers’ highly illuminating chart here.

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Foreign Service Institute’s Extensive Language Courses Are Available Free Online

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute teaches foreign languages to government diplomats and personnel for duties abroad—and it’s courses are available online, for free. Which means you can access audio, texts, and tests in 41 different languages.

The FSI Language Courses web site isn’t actually maintained by the U.S. government itself, but the materials developed before 1989 are within the public domain (whether all of these materials came before then is not clear). Some languages contain more materials—for instance, the three texts on Sinhala isn’t going to beat the giant course on French anytime soon. For the most part, most major languages have student texts in PDF format, and audio in MP3 format which you can later put onto your music player. The courses also feature tests to see how well you’ve covered the material. In some cases, “headstart” courses for certain regions in the world are also available.

The only major language not covered is English, which makes sense. The site is a little reminiscent of old-school language learning, but the resources are ridiculously extensive. As a native Vietnamese speaker, I didn’t find the section archaic at all. Adios, Rosetta Stone.

FSI Language Courses

Send an email to Erica Ho, the author of this post, at erica@lifehacker.com.

Hit the link for the full lowdown from Engadget.

Geek Love: His and Hers Star Wars T-Shirts

For the couple that wants to seal their love like a smuggler in Carbonite comes this matching set that captures the most romantically bad-ass exchange in all of scifi.

My lady isn’t quite geeky enough to sport these in public with me, but if you’re heading to Orlando this August for Star Wars Celebration V with your like-minded significant other, perhaps you’ll want to pick these up.

(Via Agent M)

Send an email to Marc Bernardin, the author of this post, at marc@io9.com.

Spy Shots: Viper SRT10-powered Dodge Challenger caught in public

by Zach Bowman (RSS feed) on Apr 23rd 2010 at 12:28PM

Dodge Challenger SRT10 – Click above for high-res image gallery

We had nearly forgotten about the Dodge Challenger SRT10. It’s not that we don’t love the idea of forcing the 8.4-liter V10 from the mighty Dodge Viper into the nose of Chrysler’s muscle car, it’s just that cars built for SEMA typically have a shelf life shorter than an unpeeled banana. So it came as some surprise when our keen-eyed spy shooters happened to spot the roided-out 600-horsepower Challenger cruising around public streets.

For whatever reason, the car had been let loose from the company test center, and was spotted doing ridiculously pedestrian things like parking in lots and obeying traffic laws. You know, instead of leading high-speed pursuits from one gas station to the next or making entire warehouses of tires weep for their tortured brethren.

As much as we’d love to stroke your crazed dreams of a production Challenger SRT10, the truth probably has more to do with the fact that some lucky soul managed to sneak the car past the suits at HQ for a quick run around town. Still, with the Viper singing its swan song and a few shelves of V10s lying around and looking forlorn, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a limited production run of the Challenger SRT10 that would send both the Chevrolet Camaro SS and the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 into fear-induced convulsions. Hey, it doesn’t cost us anything to dream.

Gallery: Dodge Challenger SRT10 Spy Shots

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Filed under: Aftermarket, Spy Photos, Coupe, Budget, Performance, Chrysler, Dodge

Tags: Challenger, Challenger SRT10, Challenger SRT10 Concept, ChallengerSrt10, ChallengerSrt10Concept, Chrysler Spy Shots, ChryslerSpyShots, Dodge, Dodge Challenger SRT10, dodge challenger srt10 concept, Dodge Challenger SRT10 Spy Shots, DodgeChallengerSrt10, DodgeChallengerSrt10Concept, DodgeChallengerSrt10SpyShots, Spy Shots, SpyShots, SRT10

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I often wonder if plumbers reach a point in their career, after cleaning clogged drain after clogged drain, that they begin to hate plumbing. They hate pipes. They hate plumber’s putty. They hate all the tricks they’ve learned over the years, and they hate the need to have to learn tricks. It’s plumbing, for goodness sake: pipes fitting together and substances flowing through them. How complicated can it be?

I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?

I provide computer support all day every day to “users”. I am not one of these snotty IT guys who looks with scorn and derision on people who don’t know what an IRQ is. I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to “use the computer” so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!

But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve.

Computer error messages are worthless.

What sparked this current round of ire was a user’s inability to check for Windows Updates. Windows Update, the program, starts up just fine. But clicking on “Check for Updates” results in an unhelpful message that Windows Update could not check for updates. A meaningless error code is presented to the user, as if he’ll know what to do with that. There’s even a helpful link that says “Learn more about common Windows Update problems”. The list of suggested problems includes a variety of other meaningless error codes, but not the one that this user received. The Windows Event Log, which I know how to access but the user does not, contains nothing instructive. For a normal user, this would be a dead-end with one of two options: ignore the problem and hope nothing bad happens in consequence; or try to repair the operating system using some half-baked recovery method provided by the computer manufacturer or the Windows install disk (assuming they have one).

Another user I support has had nothing but trouble with Adobe Acrobat. Trying to open PDFs from within his browser fails spectacularly. Either the links simply never open, or they open a completely blank page, or Internet Explorer renders an error page suggesting that there’s a network problem! The user can right-click and “Save As” the links to get the PDFs, and I’m thankful that this user understand how to right-click at all, such that he has a viable workaround to the problem until I can find the root cause. But many, many users do not know what the right mouse button is for.

I pick on Microsoft a lot, because I think they do a lot of things fundamentally wrong. But plenty of other companies are just as guilty of bad design, bad implementation, and bad communication with their users. Google’s Chrome browser is cute when it says “Aw snap!”, but that leans the other way in terms of uselessness: it doesn’t give the user any better idea of what might be wrong, and users are left to feel helpless, powerless, and stupid.

Even when things go right, users are left to feel powerless and stupid. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through EULAs, no one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And then they end up with four extra toolbars in their browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the user in any way and which they user doesn’t actually want. And they don’t know how to get rid of them.

Computers don’t make sense.

There’s an awful lot to be said about the simplicity and usefulness of installing software on Mac or Linux. In the latter case, you simply drag a file to your Applications folder, and you’re done. Linux package managers do all the heavy lifting without any user intervention. If a Linux program requires additional libraries, the package manager finds them and installs them automatically. In both instances, I can install new applications in a fraction of the time it takes to install something on Windows.

Removing software is another cause of much consternation for users. Again, Mac and Linux make it pretty easy most of the time. Heck, on any Linux system I can enumerate all of the packages installed in seconds with a single command from the package manager (or click of the appropriate button using a GUI for the package manager). But in any Windows machine — even a brand new one with top-of-the-line hardware — it requires long minutes to enumerate and display the installed software; and to make things worse the “Add and Remove Software” control panel item doesn’t actually show you all the installed applications. And removing any particular piece of software is not always a clean operation: cruft is left behind in the filesystem and the registry (don’t even get me started on my loathing of the Windows registry!).

Speaking of filesystems, why is it that a SQL database can find a specific record in a database of millions of records in a fraction of a second, but finding a specific file on your hard drive takes minutes? I’m sure there’s some very real reason why filesystems are so unfriendly to users, but I’ll be darned if I can explain it to any of my users.

Computers are too complex to use.

Average folk might take a “computer class” which instructs them on a few specific tasks — usually application specific (How to use Microsoft Word), as opposed to task specific (How to use a word processing program) — but when experiences diverge from those presented in the class, the user is not well equipped to deal with the situation. How does one interpret this new error message? How does one deal with a recurring application fault?

The pace of change in the computer industry works against users. The whole color-coded ports initiative was a great step toward end user convenience, but that’s not enough when users now need to know the difference between VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort. A lot of the computers that are coming into my office have all three video ports, and the monitors support multiple inputs, leaving users to wonder which one(s) they should use when setting up their PC. I’ve had multiple calls from really smart graduate students who couldn’t figure out how to connect the computer to the monitor. Sure, it’s an easy joke to make fun of these situations, but it’s a damning indictment of the computer industry as a whole, if you ask me.

Like Nicholas, I’ve never had a malware infection on any computer I own; but I’ve helped lots of people — users I support professionally, and family and friends — recover from malware infections. Can you imagine your mother-in-law being able to find and follow these instructions for removing malware? Or worse, knowing about and responding to a botched antivirus update from your AV software?

Computers fail spectacularly, taking all our data with them.

Hardware and software companies know that we use our computers to store information that is important to us. And yet backing up data to keep it safe is still a gigantic pain in the ass. Lots of “enterprise” backup software exists to try to protect us from computer failures (hardware, software, and user errors), and a host of “consumer” solutions vie for our consumer dollars; but frankly they all suck. Why do we need third-party software to protect the investment we’ve made in our computers? Users don’t buy backup software because they don’t expect their computers to fail.

It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — digital photo archives, MP3 collections, and video — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred bucks for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred more bucks to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them *bam* your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data.

Sure, some computers come with redundant disks, but most consumer-level RAID is a fragile mix of hardware and software, further complicating the setup. Why haven’t reliable, low-cost RAID solutions reached the mainstream yet? Why don’t end users have better access to useful things like snapshots, or ZFS yet?

And what about all the little failures that end users can’t possibly begin to detect or diagnose, like bulged capacitors on their mainboard, or a faulty video card, or wonky RAM?

Computers are overwhelming.

The mind-numbing number of computers available for purchase at any retail establishment right now is enough to cow even the most stalwart bargain shopper. How is a layperson to proceed in the face of row after row of meaningless statistics? Will that extra 0.2 GHz make a demonstrable difference in their use of the computer? Will it give them an extra six months, or even a year, of useful life? Why should a normal user even care about the number of bits in their operating system?

The Laptop Hunters tried to help people find the right laptop, but Sheila’s $2,000 HP isn’t necessarily the best pick of the available options, is it? Sure, AMD is simplifying its brand. But is that enough to really help people find the best product for their need? Will their branding refresh make any difference at all when there’s still five or ten seemingly identical systems on the shelf at the big box retail computer store?

I hate computers.

I know my little rant here is like shouting at the storm: there’s a huge, lethargic industry making gobs of cash on the complexity of the computer era, and there’s little capitalistic incentive to change the status quo. These complaints aren’t new. Many of them have been made for the past quarter century. We try, in our little way, to highlight some of the deficiencies we perceive in the industry as a whole, but that’s about all we can do from here. What are you doing about these problems?

Maybe I’ll become a plumber…

Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism

by Jerry Taylor

Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute.

Added to cato.org on April 23, 2003

This article was published in the New York Sun, April 22, 2003.

Earth Day (April 22) is traditionally a day for the Left — a celebration of government’s ability to deliver the environmental goods and for threats about the parade of horribles that will descend upon us lest we rededicate ourselves to federal regulators and public land managers. This is unfortunate because it’s businessmen — not bureaucrats or environmental activists — who deserve most of the credit for the environmental gains over the past century and who represent the best hope for a Greener tomorrow.

Indeed, we wouldn’t even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America — like much of the Third World today — had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher “quality of life” issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn’t be rich without capitalism.

Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law.

Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute.

More by Jerry Taylor

Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don’t lie. How do we explain this?

The obvious answer — that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not — is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene.

Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it.

Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank.

This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter.

Property rights — a necessary prerequisite for free market economies — also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they’ll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details).

Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today.

Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined.

Finally, the technological advances that are part and parcel of growing economies create more natural resources than they consume. That’s because what is or is not a “natural resource” is dependent upon our ability to harness the resource in question for human benefit. Resources are therefore a function of human knowledge. Because the stock of human knowledge increases faster in free economies than it does in socialist economies, it should be no surprise that most natural resources in the western world are more abundant today than ever before no matter which measure one uses.

This is not to say that government regulations haven’t had an impact or aren’t occasionally worthwhile. It is to say, however, that free markets are an ally — not an enemy — of Mother Earth. The Left, accordingly, has no special claim on Earth Day.

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Hot damn, people. The mother of all Dell leaks just dropped into our laps, and the absolute highlight has to be the Lightning, a Windows Phone 7 portrait slider. That’s right — a portrait slider. The renders on these slides look slick as hell, but they’re no match for the spec sheet, which looks even better: 1GHz QSD8250 Snapdragon processor, WVGA 4.1-inch OLED display, AT&T and T-Mobile 3G, five megapixel autofocus camera, 1GB of flash with 512MB RAM plus 8GB of storage on a MicroSD card (non-user-replaceable, we’re assuming), GPS, accelerometer, compass, FM radio, and full Flash support including video playback. Release date is pegged at Q4, so this is obviously a WP7 launch device, but here’s the real kicker — other slides in the deck indicate this thing is getting an upgrade to LTE in Q4 of 2011. Are we stoked? Yes, you might say that. Check out all the slides in the gallery below, and stay tuned — this storm of leaks isn’t nearly over.

Fox Kills The Torchwood Revamp. Not Surprisingly.

When we heard that Russell T. Davies was working on a U.S. version of Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood for Fox, we were as doubtful as everyone else that Davies’ brand of queer subversiveness would fly here. And we were right.

According to a statement from BBC Worldwide:

BBC Worldwide Productions and the FOX Broadcasting Company have mutually agreed not to progress together with a 13-episode serialized ‘Torchwood’ format. We are currently in discussion with several interested networks.

The BBC’s Jane Tranter insisted to the Hollywood Reporter that the U.S. Torchwood still isn’t dead, and the show, which would reportedly still star John Barrowman as alien-fighter Captain Jack Harkness, is still making progress.

But you don’t need to worry about the BBC trying to create a U.S. version of parent show Doctor Who. Says Tranter: “It may well be confusing to have a British Doctor and an American Doctor at the same time. There is only one Doctor, so I don’t see that happening.” [THR]

Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.