Category Archives: Toys

Curiously, they don’t even bother to mention fuel economy

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The excellent HowStuffWorks.com folks have a bit up about the Bugatti Veyron, a million-dollar supercar to end all supercars. A few fun facts:

  • It boasts a W-16 engine that produces 1,001 horsepower.
  • It’s good for 250MPH.
  • 0 to 60? THREE seconds.
  • 14 seconds is a pretty good quarter mile time; in 14 seconds, this car is going 180MPH, and has left the quarter quite a ways back.

It’s good to know that these things exist. The article doesn’t mention a curious fact I know to be true of other Bugattis: they run on aviation fuel, not regular gas. The folks who used to clean my car had one on the lot a couple years ago, and the owner gave us the tour; it was essentially a track toy, but the aviation gas wrinkle meant that when he took it to Dallas, for example, he had to either trailer it or caravan with a truck full of fuel.

That’s the sort of thing that makes my air-cooled German pile of foolishness look practical, I tell you. It may burn oil and require absurd maintenance, but at least I don’t have to go to airports for gas.

In which we discuss the efficacy and fidelity of various MIDI ringtone translations of popular songs from myt610.net

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She Blinded Me With Science
1980s synth-pop makes the leap quite well, which is really no surprise because I’m reasonably certain 21st century phones are better synths than 1980s keyboards.
“Hawaii 5-0” theme
Shockingly good, but probably only because it’s so cheesy.
Dust in the Wind
No. Just no.
“Law & Order” theme
Despite an obvious surplus of free time on someone’s behalf, this one sucked, too.
Frankenstein (Edgar Winter Group)
Oh, yeah.
Get Yer Freak On
Certain persons have made it known that they don’t like the fact that this is the ring my phone emits when they call.
Sweet Home Alabama
Awful. Terrible. Cheeseball central. But it’s staying, if only to attach to Brad.
Relax
See “She Blinded me…”, supra.
Another Brick In The Wall
I’m keeping this if only to use when teachers call me.
Edmund Fitzgerald
Even “Dust in the Wind” was better.
Aqualung
Worse than “Edmund”.

Sony’s tail is wagging the whole damn dog

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Sony used to rule the world in personal electronics. We all remember that (if you don’t, you’re too young to read this site, sonny). In the digital audio world, though, they’ve been a complete also-ran, if even that. The reason, say some, is their holdings in entertainment: the music industry folks at Sony won’t let them release something simple and good like an iPod because they fear digital audio and buy into the music industry’s line that it’s downloading, not crappy artists, that are destroying the label system.

Consequently, they keep trying to sell consumers on devices that play only Sony’s own proprietary format, and that impose DRM restrictions on music you already own (i.e., you rip your CD to play on your Sony device, and there’s a limit to what you can do with that digital file; no such limit exists with virtually any other music format as long as we’re talking about music you rip yourself from CDs).

Now, if we looked at Sony’s bottom line and saw that the entertainment lines of business were contributing some huge chunk to Sony’s net profits, this could conceivably make sense (well, maybe not; it’s probably better to make no digital player at all than to make one as widely ridiculed as their efforts have been). But that’s not the case: Sony Electronics is the 500-pound gorilla on the balance sheet, so by rights they ought to be working their Walkman-era magic on the whole market space. But they’re not. And it’s not changing, either. (More here and here.)

I don’t understand what drives firms with a history of good products to suddenly create unrepentantly half-ass products, but it’s certainly bewildering (see also Motorola; Nokia came on the scene with a dramatically better product when the world was shifting to digital cell phones in the late 90s, and Motorola has done essentially nothing to counter the Finns’ momentum. A V60 is within a rounding error of a mid-nineties flip-phone in terms of user experience, for crying out loud, and it shows in Motorola’s dwindling market share.)

Of course, the government isn’t the only entity that lies

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Airlines are almost as bad. Since 9/11, they’ve pounced on the “must have ID” thing as if it were an edict from the FAA, when in fact it’s no such thing. All the 9/11 terrorists had ID; ID does nothing to increase safety on planes. What it does do is enable airlines to crack down on the resale of unrefundable tickets.

Given all that, it comes as no surprise that the prohibition on some electronics has essentially no basis in reality, either.

Dept. of Stuff We Wish Our Mother Hadn’t Thrown Away

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Sam’s Toybox is a compendium of all the neat ephemera we had in the seventies and eighties. As we are ubergeeky here at Heathen Central, we remember things like this quite fondly; it was with just such a kit that we learned a brutal secret: all electronics are powered by smoke, and when that smoke escapes, you have to play with something else, and pretend nothing happened.

Dirty Harry would get one, except I’m pretty sure his ancient wrists wouldn’t take it.

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Smith & Wesson has introduced a brand new pistol, the Model 500 S&W Magnum, that reclaims its former title as manufacturer of what Inspector Callahan once called “the most powerful handgun in the world.” Of course, that was more than a quarter century ago, and inflation has taken old. This new beast produces about three times the muzzle energy of that scourge of San Francisco “punks.” Now, I reckon, they’ll need to be that much luckier.

Seriously, though, the sheer engineering challenges here had to be fascinating. The article — from Popular Mechanics, not the gun press — goes into some detail on those points, and it’s pretty interesting.

This is really damn cool.

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SawStop is a system that allows a table saw to figure out the difference between wood and your finger, and stop the blade in FIVE MILLISECONDS if it notices the latter. As they say, that’s difference between needing a band-aid and needing a hand surgeon. Amazing.

As it turns out, Gates may not be COMPLETELY evil

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Some months ago, I read story in the auto press about how a guy in California was finally able to get permission to US-certify Porsche’s legendary and ultra-rare 959, the supercar never legal to drive here. Only 226 original production cars remain from ’87-’88, plus another 4 built from parts in ’92. Quite famously, Bill Gates is said to have had one imported that he couldn’t drive legally. Rumor has it that Ralph Lauren has one, too, that’s illegally titled as a conventional 911 Turbo. This is a car that introduced all sorts of amazing features only now trickling into the “regular” Porsches, and that boasted a then-stunning 400+ horsepower, all-wheel drive, and an absurd SIX speed transmission.

Well, Gates must’ve noticed that he was in fact the richest guy around, because as it happens it’s Microsoft money that was behind the project to upgrade-and-certify the 959 (the logic for the upgrade boiled to to “well, we’re doing so much anyway, why not make it exceptional again?” on the grounds that 450 HP just isn’t that exceptional anymore).

Autoweek has a great story on this, if you go in for that sort of thing. The final result, though, is a “new” 959 turning 600+ HP — for the low, low price of, well, just about half a million dollars. For a used car. But damn, it’s a 959, and 15 years on, it’ll still run with the best of them.

But Gates? Your software still sucks.