Why you don't want to open a coffee shop

If you've ever wanted to open a charming little coffee shop with moderatly priced beverages, allow Slate magazine to disillusion you. Writer Michael Idov takes us on his personal odyssey of opening (and closing) one of those doomed little businesses that you wonder how they survive as you walk past on the way to Starbucks. The econonmics of it are brutal:

Coffee was a different story—thanks to the trail blazed by Starbucks, the world of coffee retail is now a rogue's playground of jaw-dropping markups. An espresso that required about 18 cents worth of beans (and we used very good beans) was sold for $2.50 with nary an eyebrow raised on either side of the counter. A dab of milk froth or a splash of hot water transformed the drink into a macchiato or an Americano, respectively, and raised the price to $3. The house brew too cold to be sold for $1 a cup was chilled further and reborn at $2.50 a cup as iced coffee, a drink whose appeal I do not even pretend to grasp.

But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don't get me started on people with laptops.

Windows Metafile Exploit Workaround

There is a nasty Windows security vulnerability in the Windows Metafile handler that can cause any Windows machine to become infected via an email attachment or browsing to a web page. Until Microsoft releases a patch, Security Now has simple directions to disable Metafile handling.

All versions of Windows from Windows 98 through ME, NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 are known to be vulnerable, and a large and rapidly growing number of malicious exploits (57 at last count) are already circulating in the wild. They are being actively used to install malware and Trojans into user's machines. Viruses and worms are expected to appear shortly. Although NOT a complete solution, Microsoft has recommended temporarily disabling the automatic display of some images by the operating system and web browser. This can be done, as detailed below, by "unregistering" the "SHIMGVW.DLL" Windows DLL. THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE SOLUTION, but it significantly lowers the risk from this vulnerability from web surfing.

Inside Amazon.com

Business Week has an interesting walk-thru of the Amazon.com order fulfillment center in Nevada. People used to say back in the bubble days that anyone could start a Amazon.com competitor in their garage. It wasn't really true back then and it certainly isn't true now - for example, the $25 million dollar sorting machines - Amazon has certainly spent a lot of time figuring out how to organize merchandise so that it can packaged efficiently. The Sisyphus Award goes to the people working the gift wrapping station:

My 2005 in Photos

P.S. I stole this idea from Chris Gulker

Minority Report - British style!

People (ok, me!) complain about the erosion of civil rights in the United States but at least there is a debate. Britain is a different question - I was floored by the following:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years. Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years. The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

The theory is that this will be used to track criminals and, yes, terrorists. And speeders. And people who drive too slow in the fast lane!

via jwz

Full Metal Blog Podcast

To bolster the Full Metal Blog media empire, I present the Full Metal Blog Podcast. Now, I'm too lazy (er - I mean busy!) to read the contents of this blog so I'm relying on Feed2Podcast to do the heavy lifting. It uses text to speech software to convert the blog entries for this blog (or any other RSS Feed) to an RSS feed with mp3 enclosures. The speech quality is better than you probably expect - unless your expecting HAL from 2001 in which case you'll be sorely disappointed. To subscribe in iTunes, select Advanced / Subscribe to podcast... menu item and enter the following URL:

http://www.feed2podcast.com/podcast/76435692.xml