Razor blades are to razors as BLANK are to fuel cells?

Reports of impending retail sales of fuel cells fill me with hope that we'll all have limitless and cheap power from fuel cells soon. Then maybe the ubiquitous AA battery could one day have an alcohol or water powered equivalent, one that never needs to end up in the trash and therefore eventually rotting in a landfill.

However it starts me thinking - batteries are wonderfully profitable and even rechargeable ones have a pretty limited lifetime that will have you coming back for more within a year or two. For instance laptop batteries seldom retain close to full capacity for more than two or three hundred cycles - maybe a year for a heavy battery user. After that you're down to maybe 50% and even a good 4 hour battery is getting close to the point where you'd consider tossing it and shelling out for a new one. And oh how expensive those batteries are - you're lucky to get even a low capacity lithium-ion battery for under $100, many will top $200! That's a nice little earner for someone, rather like selling razor blades for $1 each or ink cartridges for $50 each.

Okay, the laptop battery maybe not quite as egregious as $1 razor blades - I'm sure the profit margin is nowhere near as high, but batteries are certainly the Achilles heel of a laptop which could otherwise last many many years without an dime spent on new hardware. In fact I have a seven year old P4 800Mhz laptop kicking around that works fine except for the battery - a new one would cost more than the laptop is worth. Part of this is because for whatever reason no two laptop batteries seem to be alike because manufacturers never could agree on a universal AA, AAA, C, D (whatever happened to B batteries?) style standard.

But the cynical might also say that having custom batteries for each laptop not only optimizes space utilization but also gives the manufacturer a) a way to make an extra $50 to $100 on every new battery, and b) by keeping a monopoly on replacement batteries lets them keep prices high and hence encourage people to just buy a new laptop instead of a new battery. After all if a new battery is $200 and a new, faster and better laptop is $400 or $600 then hmmm, maybe I wont bother replacing that battery more than once, if that.

So what I want to know is, if fuel cells come along how are they going to maintain that model? If we can all go to the hardware store and put some isopropyl alcohol that's a buck a quart (or whatever) and keeps our laptop going for a month or several where is the incentive for manufacturers to make fuel cell power units a) cheap, or b) long lasting - both of which will hurt them profit wise. For a long time now fuel cells have been touted as the magic cure for laptops that will give long off-power usability and hence dramatically increase the utility of the little beasts. That in theory should boost laptop sales and encourage everyone to pull out a laptop on a long distance plane flight.

Somehow I think its going to take a third party mass producer of these batteries to achieve that dream because manufactures like Samsung or Toshiba will want to keep fuel cells power docks rediculously expensive by restricting supply to very high end systems. It could be five or ten years before they are even approaching affordability for your average low end laptop user. And airlines will try very very hard to have them outlawed for as long as possible so those deep pocketed business travelers will not want to buy them. As we all know a cup of alcohol is far more dangerous than the first class drinks cabinet full of liquor, and thousands of pounds of aviation fuel. Isn't it funny that airlines never caught on that lithium-ion batteries might potentially be dangerous until they actually started exploding? The fact is that any high density energy storage device has that potential, bet it lithium-ion, fuel cell or shoe bomb. But then when we are still fretting about cell phones causing a plane crash (supposedly) its no wonder there is still disinformation and FUD floating around the airlines business.

Personally I think its time we went low tech and need to get laptop power down far enough that you can power it from a simple foot pedal (like an old fashioned sewing machine) or hand crank. At that point we can all have as much power as we want so long as the airline keeps giving us food and air. Oh, I forgot - they already stopped the free food part and would probably like to charge extra for the air too. I'm sure they could find a way to bang foot power generators too, inspite of the fact they could probably save a few lives by reducing deep vein thrombosis - otherwise known as "economy class syndrome".

IE7 installer woes cured

I had previously been unable to install the IE 7.0 beta on my laptop due to an unexplained error. When the final version came out I held off trying to install it on my laptop, but none of the other computers I tried had any problems at all. So tonight I thought I'd bravely try once more and of course it still failed.

After many more Googling attempts I finally found someone who had experienced similar problems and found it was a registry permissions problem. Several other pages had said the same but usually pointed the finger at anti-virus software - I'd already uninstalled mine (Grisoft AVG) to no avail. Fortunately this site directed me to look in the updspapi.log file (which lives in your Windows directory) for a more detailed error. Examining mine revealed the error message:

Setting registry value HKU\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\1806

So I pulled up regedit and tried to modify the value for that entry and it worked. Bummer!

So I thought about it some more and decided maybe it wasn't actually the current user but one of the other users that IE was messing with. So I looked at HKEY_USERS and tried that entry for each. After several goes I discovered that I couldn't modify either the DEFAULT user or the one called S-1-5-18 which is the local system account. So I went in an clicked at the top of the registry hierarchy for each of those users, pulled up the permissions and added full permissions for system and administrators (I actually made them inherit those permissions which achieved the same effect). Then I verifeid that I was able to change the 1806 entry in the IE zones, rebooted and tried the install again (for about the tenth time now).

Fortunately this time it worked and my Internet Explorer is now just a wee bit more secure and a wee bit less sucky than it was before.

The only question that remains in my mind is how on earth did my registry permissions get screwed up like that in the first place? This is the very first time I've ever modified a registry permission so I can only assume at some stage I installed something that did, and after uninstalling it the permissions never got reset. A lot of posts mention ZoneAlarm as a culprit for causing IE7 installation failures - maybe it was that since I did have it installed at one point but well over a year ago and I vaguely recall some kind of uninstallation problems.