Finally two all-electric car that do not look like a gunnysack or costs an arm and a leg.

The first - the Nice MyCar - designed by Italian design house Giugiaro and build in HongKong will be available in the UK from this fall.

Click on the image below for the link

Some details on the Nice MyCar:

• Price: about USD 18,000
• Speed: 40mph max
• Range: 60 miles max
• Charge time: 5 hours
• Battery type: AGM Lead Acid (maintenance free)

This two seater coupe (removable roof version also available) is zero-emissions and for Londoners that means no road tax or congestion charges. Nice Cars estimates the running costs at around 2p (4ct) per mile.

Click on the image below for the link

The second - the Micro-Vett Fiat e500EV - launched at the currently ongoing British Motor Show is an all-electric version of the successful new Fiat 500. There is no delivery date and price yet. It will also be available through Nice in the UK but produced to order by Italian electric vehicle specialist Micro-Vett. It comes with the full range of Fiat 500 options including air conditioning and full Fiat warranty.

Some more details on the e500:

• Price: POA
• Speed: 60mph max
• Range: 75 miles (city)
• Charge time: TBC
• Battery type: Lithium-Ion Polymer

More information:

Nice Cars web site
British Motor Show web site
Motor Authority has an image of the Micro-Vett engine for the e500.
Micro-Vett web site

Slovenian blogger and OpenStreetMap contributor Igor Brejc who is also the author of the Kosmos rendering application has described how to turn OpenStreetMap maps into 3D. There is a set of images plus a video (link below) providing a first impression how these maps look like in 3D.

Click on the image below for the link (multimedia)

More information:

Igor Brejc description and images on the process used. Have a look at the comments as well for additional information and other potential tools.

Yesterday Sen. Barack Obama held a speech in Berlin and 200,000 were listening in enthusiastically.

For those who want to get an impression how 200,000 people look like from the viewpoint of the speaker we found an excellent shot at Flickr.

Note that the image only shows the front rows of the crowd (more than 100m long).

Bonus question (Where is Waldo): How many cameras did you count in this picture (You will have to use the original size image).

More information:

The shot at Flickr (login for the full-size image)

Friday, July 25th, 2008, is the 9th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

From the Sysadmin Day site:

“…A sysadmin is a professional, with complex skills, ethical challenges, and a daunting job. Many, if not most, people find computers difficult to use, and sometimes they’re unreliable. Being a sysadmin doesn’t absolve someone of dealing with unreliable computers. Oh, one can dream of such a day, but the opposite is true; no one sees more dead computers in a day than a sysadmin. No one sees them doing truly baffling things, and no one has more stories of computers failing, acting possessed, or even catching on fire…”

More information:

SysAdmin Day web site
Thinkgeek’s Gifts for Sysadmins page

Risk advisory firm Maplecroft has published a “Climate Change Risk Report” looking into the vulnerability of 168 countries to the impact of climate change. The study does not review the severity of the threats in general, but instead evaluates the ability of each of the countries to adapt and withstand potential change.

The report includes a vulnerability index and comparable country scorecards with risk indices, risk indicators, maps and graphics.

Not unsurprising the developed nations with solid infrastructures and broad funding possibilities come out in the top league. Canada scores best followed by Ireland and the Scandinavian countries. One unexpected outcome is Uruguay, coming in ninth, before countries like the UK (12th) and the US (13th). The Comoros, a group of islands off the east coast of Africa scored worst and 8 of the 10 lowest scorers are African too.

Maplecroft offers the study as a tool to “…help government and company decision-makers ensure climate change vulnerability is included in planning and strategy as well as to assist in mitigating the impacts of climate change…”

More information:

Report info
Press release (Business Wire) at Reuters
Maplecroft’s Word map showing the results of the study (You’ll also find maps from other studies at this link)

One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine

While reports that online porn sites offering free access when the visitors enter the right response to a Captcha secured entry field have been around for a while (see for example BoingBoing 2004 ) with recent rises in spam originating from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts the discussion on that topic is on again.

Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” that are within these relay attacks defeated by visitors to the intermediate (porn) site are seemingly often used to create free users accounts with online mail services in the background. And these newly created account are later the source for sending out spam that in many cases can not easily filtered out (which admin would blacklist the Google-Mail-Server).

We have recently seen that a similar approach is also used to create user accounts on software development sites like sourceforge etc.

Click on the image below for the link (blog post)

Thorsten Holz has put a short video on his blog to demonstrate the technique. He also warns users not to go to the original (porn) site as the HTML contains a malicious iframe.

More information:
Thorsten Holz’s Honeyblog
Roaring Penguin on captcha cracking

If you want to find out how much time of this summer is still left have a look at the Summermeter.

It tells you in percent of how much of this summer has already past. With 58% already passed, a pessimist might say soon you’ll leave home when its dark and come back when it’s dark again.

In some countries they make the best of it - in Finland for example - the whole country goes on leave during the month of July and all cities are basically deserted besides a (very) few unlucky people who have to remain to keep some essential functions going. Hospitals for example delay all not immediately essential operations into the the time after July.

The Finnish like their summer breaks so much that even between opposite political parties a sudden agreement / consensus takes place to the extent that ministers from different parties are standing-in for each other. One minister might take on 3-4 ministries for a week so that the others are able to go on holidays. Newspapers and TV stations during this month are creating their (reduced) program by relying almost completely on interns.

Click on the image below for the link

It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.

It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.

While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.

They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.

So far so good, sounds all nice and positive - a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.

So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!

Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and that you want to make up for what went wrong. At least in our definition that’s how “partners” behave towards each others. Otherwise it will be just a continuation of (money/) “jobs for the boys“.

But first things first:

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The essential difference between Socialism and Capitalism - simply explained.

Click on the image below for a larger version

via: subtire.com