Wired has a great article demonstrating how broken the US government is right now. $17 billion is subsidies for big oil and they managed to scrape together $30 million to help support the development of viable plug in hybrids.

It is absolutely ridiculous. The government needs to view the goal to move off expensive, disappearing oil as a new “moon race” and for once dump some serious money into it. Of course most of it will be wasted, but the 10% that is not will likely result in some amazing technological breakthroughs that might make a difference. Our options are electric cars and hydrogen and we should be pumping billions into both programs on an annual basis.

Oh yeah, how about a proper program to invest in public transit. Now that would be something I’d vote for.

I’m generally a fan of Wikis. They allow a wide audience to contribute their knowledge in an easy to consume way. That being said, Wired Magazine needs to give up on their “How-To” wiki as it is really lame.

As a confirmed iPhone addict, I was clicking refresh merrily yesterday on three or four major gadget blogs during the Apple Developer Conference keynote to see what amazing new stuff the iPhone 2.0 was going to come with.

On the whole, I cannot wait to get my hands on one - even just for the 3G service as EDGE is painful at the best of times. So I’ll be ordering one (hopefully online as I hate standing in lines) on July 11 just like a lot of other people.

I love my Apple products but generally hate AT&T so that is the only downside to what has become my favorite gadget. The fact that they are going to make me sign up for a new plan to upgrade is annoying enough, but the fact that they are going to raise my rates and steal all my rollover minutes is worse. Maybe they’ll improve the wireless coverage at 24th and Park in New York City as right now it sucks. Verizon, no problem but AT&T nada.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira over at Profy says it well. Love ya Apple but AT&T is like the creepy uncle who everyone wishes would just skip Christmas all together. I’m hoping playing MonkeyBall while sitting on the runway, in coach, sipping my $5 bottle of water and waiting for my damn plane to take off is worth it.

Michael Arrington is a member of the cult as well.

I have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. On one hand it is a great resource just chuck full of seemingly accurate information. On the other hand it has become so prominent in Google rankings that its pages normally hold the first or second slot on any single word search. This, in my opinion runs the risk of drowning out other great sources of information as there is a certain bias towards clicking the first result returned by Google. Plus everyone automatically links to Wikipedia so it is a self fulfilling prophecy. In 10 years the web will consist of social networking sites and Wikipedia (!).

I also have an issue as some of the major pages are edited by editors/dictators who rarely let anything get added to the page and control links out like they are gold (which they are due to the PR of Wikipedia pages - but still). It is almost as if Wikipedia is becoming no better than any other Encyclopedia as for the large majority of topics it is essentially a closed system.

That is why I love sites like the Uncyclopedia. It is nice to see someone poke fun at Big Brother.

Although I haven’t done as good a job as articulating it as Profy in the post “How Web 2.0 is Killing Software Development“, I totally agree with the premise put forth in her writing. It is time for the engineers, computer scientists and information architects to take back software development.

While on one hand the ease of putting up a website has led to a wide range of interesting new gadgets, it really hasn’t led to much real innovation. I see startups every day that have put up poorly designed, poorly architected and completely unusable sites that won’t scale and have to be held together with duct tape (Twitter anyone?).

This is not software engineering. Scaling is not something you add later but rather something you build into the application from the beginning. Usability isn’t something to deal with post A round but a key part of the design - from version 0.5. Systems should not be in Beta for their entire life.

Software is the only place where engineers throw together things, toss them at the wall and see what sticks. It is a shame we all cannot learn from our peers who design physical machines, bridges, buildings and other systems that are never in “Beta”. Or for that matter, from the folks who build telecommunication systems, banking systems, trading systems and other mission critical applications that, while they still suffer from the challenges of software engineering, are intended to be stable from day one.

Maybe it is time for online development to grow up.

I logged into my Google Analytics account this morning and was presented with the following notice:

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System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

We sincerely apologize for this processing issue and are taking every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future. For more information, please read through our common questions.

The Google Analytics Team

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The Gods of Internet not only had an outage in which they lost data, but some of that data was not recoverable! I guess running a 24×7 system is hard even for the masters and their thousands (millions?) of servers. Mind you it wast just Analytics but still…

The moral of this story…everyone has outages and they are really hard to plan for. The thing that bugs me is that even after a decade of investment in Internet technologies, it is still nearly impossible to build a self healing system without massive expense (and even then). Maybe we need to take a break from all the “cool” things that are being developed by all the startups in the space and invest in hardening our infrastructure as it is pretty creaky (as Comcast recently found out).

With all the chatter these days about the high price of oil and gas, the impact of global warming on pretty much everyone and the general destruction of this planet we call home, I thought it might be valuable to point out the most obvious way to make a major positive impact as I just don’t see it talked about enough.

It is pretty simple and will have an effect way beyond solar panels, wind power, more insulation in the attic, energy efficient appliances and the continuously talked about and never available electric car. It is even cooler than Google’s biofuel buses.

Are you ready for it? Simply stay home. Commuting to work has got to be one of the most ridiculous concepts in today’s broadband, highly connected, 24×7 online environment. As someone who hasn’t had a real office job in seven years and has built two companies in that time yet never paid a dime in office rent, I can assure you that it is completely possible to stay connected with a global team of people, accomplish great things and never wear pants. All this wonderful technology we talk about and blog about allows you to do it with ease (and actually rather cheaply). And the environmental numbers speak for themselves.

Plus, you get to see your kids grow up. I highly recommend it.

It would seem that Michael Arrington has a thing for bashing TheFunded.com. His post today was overwhelmingly negative but I actually disagree completely. TheFunded is a great resource for early stage companies to get a handle on the good VCs and the bad VCs out there (and there are plenty of both). As a founder, the one thing you have very little of is time and to waste it chasing a fund that is never going to invest is nearly the worst thing you can do. It can take your company down if you don’t watch it.

Now I’m not usually a fan of online reviews as they tend towards either very negative or very positive and hence uselessness but in this case the network on TheFunded is rather specialized (only CEOs need apply) and having watched postings there for about six months, I can say that for the most part the experiences being shared are spot on based on my own experience pitching for money.

I’m a fan even if TechCrunch isn’t.