Isegoria

Wal-Mart is testing two new hybrid trucks and two new alternative-fuel trucks:

• A full-propulsion Arvin Meritor hybrid that will initially operate in the Detroit area. This dual-mode diesel-electric hybrid is believed to be the first vehicle of its type;
• Fifteen trucks operating in Buckeye, Ariz. distribution center near Phoenix, will be converted to run on Reclaimed Grease FuelTM, made with the waste brown cooking grease from Walmart stores. In addition, the remaining trucks located in the Buckeye distribution center will operate on an 80/20 blend of biodiesel made of reclaimed yellow waste grease;
• Five Peterbilt Model 386 heavy duty hybrid trucks with diesel-electric hybrid power systems developed by Eaton Corporation and PACCAR, that will be based in Dallas, Houston, Apple Valley, Calif., Atlanta and the Washington/Baltimore regions and;
• Four Peterbilt Model 386 trucks and one yard truck, which operates only on the distribution center property, will operate on liquid natural gas. These trucks are part of a partnership with the Mojave Air Quality Management District and will operate out of the distribution center in Southern California.

I’m not sure how they’re measuring it, but they plan on doubling fleet efficiency by 2015; they’ve already improved it 25 percent from their 2005 baseline.

Electric Motorcycle Promises 150 MPH:

Mission Motors unveiled the bike, dubbed Mission One, at the TED conference and said it will begin selling them next year for $69,000 apiece. Although several electric motorcycles have been announced in recent weeks, Mission Motors sticks out because its 12 employees have worked for Tesla, Ducati North America and Intel, and the bike they’re building could set a new benchmark for EVs of all kinds.

“As a motorcycle enthusiast and engineer, I knew I could combine my passion for motorcycles with my passion for innovation and create a motorcycle that truly sets a new standard in the perception of electric vehicles,” company founder and CEO Forrest North said at the Mission One’s launch.

The prototype, wearing bodywork designed by Yves Behar, was designed entirely in-house by Mission Motors. Power comes from a 3-phase AC induction motor and a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery the company claims delivers 150 miles and recharges in just two hours at 240 volts. That climbs to eight hours at 120 volts.

Top-shelf hardware includes Ohlins suspension at both ends, four-piston Brembo brakes and Marchesini forged wheels. The components — and the claimed 150 horsepower — put the bike on par with hardcore sportbikes like the Ducati 1198. That’s exactly what North had in mind.

“With Mission One, we’re writing the next chapter in motorcycle design, delivering a new riding experience without sacrificing performance or design in a zero emissions vehicle,” he said in a statement.

I don’t see why the makers of an electric vehicle would want to emphasize top speed, when their real strength is off-the-line acceleration.

Microsoft’s primary failing, Cringely says, is technical arrogance:

Some of this is native and some is a vestige of Redmond’s long association with IBM. Taking the IBM connection first, let’s look at something current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in my 1996 PBS documentary, Triumph of the Nerds:

“In IBM there’s a religion in software that says you have to count KLOCs (pronounced KAY-lock), and a KLOC is a thousand lines of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it’s sort of a 10 KLOC project. This is a 20 KLOCer. And this is 5O KLOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS/2, how much they did. How many KLOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them — hey, if we have — a developer’s got a good idea and he can get something done in 4 KLOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he’s made something smaller and faster, less KLOCs. KLOCs, KLOCs, that’s the methodology. Ugh!”

While Microsoft learned a lot from IBM, this whole KLOC-orientation and associated ass-backward reward scheme repulsed them because it led to bloated code. So just like a child who grows to ultimately emulate or rebel against parental examples, Microsoft shunned the KLOC and embraced the power of tight code. And though it might surprise you from looking at their current product lines, they still do.

The way a company that prides itself on tight code can build something as floppy (in every sense) as Windows Vista is because Vista is simply too big for any one Microsoft executive or engineer to understand in detail. So they embrace the idea that piling lots of chunks of tight code somehow won’t turn into a huge steaming mass of not-very-tight product. But it does.

But wait, there’s more! Somehow this mistaking fat for muscle became institutionalized at Microsoft through a unique group of people called Program Managers or PMs. This is a Microsoft invention intended to make their products more useful and elegant, yet in practice the PMs do just the opposite.

Program Managers at Microsoft are the advocates for software usability. They link (or are supposed to link) to the rest of the company development, usability and testing. They write specs and try to optimize the user experience, though with only limited success.

The bloated development, test, and PM teams across the company are a sign of Microsoft’s obsession with technology and all things technical. There aren’t nearly enough usability engineers, designers, writers, editors, and other people who worry about how usable the software actually is. In other words, like the people who run the feature teams at Apple.

A Microsoft designer once said that the biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft was that at Apple designers usually owned the product features, while at Microsoft, PMs always own the features. And most of the PMs at Microsoft are highly technical, often with computer science degrees. This is considered a good thing, by the way, but it isn’t good at all. It means the PMs tend to lean in favor of the developers just as management leans in favor of the developers, too. So in most cases where usability goes head-to-head with development, usability loses. And so do users.

The answer for Microsoft is not to blindly copy Apple because Microsoft will never BE Apple and will never have a Steve Jobs as boss. The answer is to adopt a similar product design philosophy to Apple’s with the focus squarely on usability.

This will not happen EVER with the present culture at Microsoft.

Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses — not as terminators, but as docile stock pickers:

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.

All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.

“It’s a major game-changer. There’s no question about that. You can increase productivity immensely,” said Michael Levans, editorial director for a group of supply-chain trade magazines like Logistics Management. “The Zappos guys claim that from the moment you put your order in and it is submitted to the time the box is on the dock and ready to be put on a truck is 12 minutes.”

The robots, which in the largest distribution center currently number over 500, are built by a small company called Kiva Systems (no relation to the microfinance outfit). In total, they’ve installed more than 1,000 bots at a dozen warehouses and are growing quickly. By the end of this year, they expect single locations to have systems with 1,000 of the machines.

Dreamed up and executed by old M.I.T. buddies, these teams of retail robots presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer science theories into practice.
[...]
Kiva robots are different: They’re both autonomous and networked.

What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called “pickers” in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.

“Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse,” Wurman said.

The system adjusts to the nature of the products and workers, too. In a typical setup, the humans are placed around the edges of the room. As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. More popular products end up around the edges of the warehouse while more obscure products, like those acid-washed bell bottoms, end up buried deep in the stacks. The self-tuning nature of the system creates big efficiencies.

“We find that it’s two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse],” said Wurman. “A big chunk of the benefit comes from the fact that we’ve eliminated all of the walking.”
[...]
Kiva robots don’t look anything like a human or try to perceive the world through humanlike senses. They don’t use sophisticated visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that’s stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.

That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse.

Watch the little orange Kiva robots at work at Zappos’ new warehouse:

It’s accepted within Web 2.0 circles that rapid prototyping followed by rapid iteration — experimentation — beats thorough planning. Paul Buchheit, formerly of Google, calls this communicating with code:

We did a lot of things wrong during the 2.5 years of pre-launch Gmail development, but one thing we did very right was to always have live code. The first version of Gmail was literally written in a day. It wasn’t very impressive — all I did was take the Google Groups (Usenet search) code (my previous project) and stuff my email into it — but it was live and people could use it (to search my mail…). From that day until launch, every new feature went live immediately, and most new ideas were implemented as soon as possible. This resulted in a lot of churn — we re-wrote the frontend about six times and the backend three times by launch — but it meant that we had direct experience with all of the features. A lot of features seemed like great ideas, until we tried them. Other things seemed like they would be big problems or very confusing, but once they were in we forgot all about the theoretical problems.

The great thing about this process was that I didn’t need to sell anyone on my ideas. I would just write the code, release the feature, and watch the response. Usually, everyone (including me) would end up hating whatever it was (especially my ideas), but we always learned something from the experience, and we were able to quickly move on to other ideas.

The most dramatic example of this process was the creation of content targeted ads (now known as “AdSense”, or maybe “AdSense for Content”). The idea of targeting our keyword based ads to arbitrary content on the web had been floating around the company for a long time — it was “obvious”. However, it was also “obviously bad”. Most people believed that it would require some kind of fancy artificial intelligence to understand the content well enough to target ads, and even if we had that, nobody would click on the ads. I thought they were probably right.

However, we needed a way for Gmail to make money, and Sanjeev Singh kept talking about using relevant ads, even though it was obviously a “bad idea”. I remained skeptical, but thought that it might be a fun experiment, so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!), copied out all of the ads+keywords, and did a little bit of sorting and filtering with some unix shell commands. I then hacked up the “adult content” classifier that Matt Cutts and I had written for safe-search, linked that into the Gmail prototype, and then loaded the ads data into the classifier. My change to the classifier (which completely broke its original functionality, but this was a separate code branch) changed it from classifying pages as “adult”, to classifying them according to which ad was most relevant. The resulting ad was then displayed in a little box on our Gmail prototype ui. The code was rather ugly and hackish, but more importantly, it only took a few hours to write!

I then released the feature on our unsuspecting userbase of about 100 Googlers, and then went home and went to sleep. The response when I returned the next day was not what I would classify as “positive”. Someone may have used the word “blasphemous”. I liked the ads though — they were amusing and often relevant. An email from someone looking for their lost sunglasses got an ad for new sunglasses. The lunch menu had an ad for balsamic vinegar.

More importantly, I wasn’t the only one who found the ads surprisingly relevant. Suddenly, content targeted ads switched from being a lowest-priority project (unstaffed, will not do) to being a top priority project, an extremely talented team was formed to build the project, and within maybe six months a live beta was launched. Google’s content targeted ads are now a big business with billions of dollars in revenue (I think).

Of course none of the code from my prototype ever made it near the real product (thankfully), but that code did something that fancy arguments couldn’t do (at least not my fancy arguments), it showed that the idea and product had real potential.