In the great race to fix our energy systems, industrial scale algae production of oil is one of the potential major big fixes. No need to change the distribution infrastructure or end use machines, just turn petroleum from something you extract from the ground to something you make industrially. Companies seem to have already cracked the genetic code to manufacture green petroleum so why aren't we popping the champagne corks and churning out millions of barrels of the stuff already? The problem is one of scale.
What we haven't solved is how to make industrial scale vessels that make the stuff in quantities that matter in a commercially efficient way. These vessels, called photobioreactors, expose enough individual bacteria to sunlight that you maximize production while minimizing unexposed volume. Another problem is vessel fouling which gets worse as you increase the surface area of the vessel.
For an amateur observer like me, that's interested in seeing secondary markers, the articles on photobioreactors generally don't even cover what the relevant units of progress are and how close any particular design is to the magic point where you can start popping starter cultures in them and prepping for oil production. That's an unfortunate sign of disorganization, though it's not clear if that's the fault of the scientists making these things or the journalists reporting on them.
After reading this tale of upcoming solar cooling, it seems obvious that we don't have a clue as to major non-anthropogenic inputs into our climate. Were we to drop the political fight to change global industry and arrest the entry of the third world into the first world, we might just instead have enough money to fund and deploy a global thermostat that could adjust effective solar input by a combination of mirrors shifting extra sunlight towards the earth and shades blotting out undesired solar radiation.
It would be a multi-decade project and we'd need some sort of decent formula to decide how to *set* the thermostat but it would have the distinct advantage of short-circuiting the acrimonious debate by changing the shape of the anti-coalition. The new anti-action coalition would be shrunk as we would have one single discrete project that could be dialed to change its effects from subtracting warmth to adding warmth within the course of a day.
In short, it could mean that the costs of early mistakes wouldn't be borne for generations but rather for weeks or months, a much more acceptable solution.
HT: Instapundit
What if we combined Kiva's fundraising with the US military's CERP funds to create a mechanism where US citizens could support units by providing little work projects to create jobs and do the reconstruction work that is inevitable in any war? Unit commanders would have money at their disposal that did not rely on the budget process and control who got money and when so we wouldn't be funding our enemies. The local population would get faster reconstruction and help in giving idle young men something constructive to do. And patriotic civilians would get something concrete that they could do to help the war along and bring the military home faster with a victory.
Could it be done in Iraq? There's no reason why not if we're going to stick around long enough for the infrastructure to go through. The infrastructure would largely be Congressional permission to do this sort of thing. The software and aid infrastructure is already largely in place. The only thing beyond legislation is the logistics of giving the funders regular feedback that their donations meant something.
Tim Wu is wrong when he says the iPhone is not revolutionary, though he's right when he's in CYA mode in the last few paragraphs:
Sensitive to this point, Steve Jobs claims to have left some room for developing iPhone applications. The iPhone, as we said already, is a miniature Mac, and comes with Apple's Safari browser. Developers will be able to write Web-based applications that will work on the iPhone via the browser.
...
If you're an optimist, the more intriguing possibility is that Apple's iPhone is a Trojan Horse. The iPhone is fatally attractive to AT&T, since it gives the firm a chance to steal tens of thousands of new customers from rivals like Verizon. But Apple may be betting that, once it has its customers, they'll be more loyal to Apple than AT&T. With its foothold in the wireless world, Apple may be planning to slowly but inexorably demand more room. If iPhone 2.0 is a 3G phone that works with any carrier and supports third-party apps, then industry power will begin to move away from the carrier oligopoly and toward Apple and other Silicon Valley firms. Now, that would be a revolution.
Apple knows full well how marginalizing it is to take over too much of a business. The Macintosh has gained its second life because Apple has fully embraced technologies that are in common use and good enough to fulfill their technology dreams. The last uncommon hardware choice for Apple is in being a market leader in embracing Intel's BIOS replacement, EFI. Everything else is stock PC parts, albeit optimized to emphasize unusual traits (silence over speed, heat efficiency over speed, aesthetics over cost).
Apple has lock-in on the iPhone because creating a small browser that fits in a phone and has sufficient market and mindshare that web developers will test their pages on that platform is incredibly expensive. Only Apple can do it because only they had the foresight to bet their web client platform on small footprint software. Both Mozilla and IE have to be cut down to make them fit in phones and that means that developers have to test "regular" IE/Mozilla and their cut down versions.
And the browser/server combination is enough to stoke a revolution. The third revolution, the one where everybody's going to notice, is when the cost of the phones goes down to such an extent that for the same introductory price point you can also host a web server. With that, you can run apps even without a cell signal, even in disaster conditions. Government demand will likely drive that, both civilian and military.
The second revolution is going to be the ability, sometime in the next year or two, to put an alias on the home screen, a tiny little text file that will allow you to kick up safari so that those user generated applications that are coming down the pike will have screen equality with the regular applications that ship with the iPhone. With that, Apple will have essentially gone and created Microsoft's nightmare (the one they killed Netscape over and tried to kill Java and Google over) of a web OS that allows you to do what you like outside of the base OS.
Nobody outside the technogliteratti are going to care that poking the icon on the screen launches safari which launches the app, just as nobody cares when that same chain happens with Java or Flash applications. For the rest of us, that's going to signal the opening of the iPhone and I guarantee you that the functionality is already there, just as the functionality to do all the neat iTunes add ons that have been added was mostly there at iTunes inception.
Democrats killed, on a party line vote a coal to liquid fuels mandate. Now I'm not too fond of government mandates, thinking that the government would do well to stay out of the question of what fuels other people should be buying. If they want to promote the use of certain fuels, they can buy it for their own use (something that the DoD is testing right now). Democrats are nearly uniformly in favor of alternative fuel mandates and plenty of them have provided lip service support for the technology. When they had an actual opportunity to vote for the mandate, they turned their back on it in favor of increased reliance on foreign energy.
Hypocrisy, your name is Democrat.
It's just a single line in this Business Week article on Peabody Energy Corp but it is key to understanding our likely near-mid term energy future. "Boyce also hopes to build cutting-edge plants to turn coal into a liquid and a gas—a move that has the potential to open up big new markets." Liquid coal is another way of saying Fischer-Tropsch conversion and that means that petroleum's major potential competition, coal is taking a major leap forward into reality.
Tanking up with domestic coal instead of imported oil is an attractive proposition, one that's going to set major political impulses (Domestic energy! Clean energy!) against each other. Bring on the popcorn and three cheers for Peabody Energy.
Glenn Reynolds notes the availability of OMB's earmark database. He also complains that one cannot search by member. What he doesn't note is that OMB has generously made screen scraping unnecessary by putting the data into CSV file and allowing private entities to do the datacrunching themselves. I don't have the $$ to put up a server to do this though if push came to shove I'd probably have the skills. No doubt somebody will. It would even be possible to create a community around the earmarks to get at the ultimate achilles heel of congressional attempts to obfuscate whose feeding at the trough. For members to get the benefit of earmarks they have to tell their constituents about them, to brag that this or that project was "brought home" by the member. In order to gain the advantage of the franking privilege, such communication really needs to be district-wide. Once you have porkbuster volunteers (preferrably multiple ones) covering every congressional district, the congressmen and senators themselves will spill the beans.
These methods can be evaded by the member using his own money for postage in bragging but that dilutes pork's positive effect on reelection and even paid communications are going to be unreliable at maintaining anonymity. For all my present problems with the Bush administration's competence, this is certainly good work and well thought through. Nobody can protest that the data's being released in CSV format and all the deadly analysis work (so far as porkers are concerned) is going to be done outside the political system. Nice.
I'm headed back to my old habit of trolling the bottom of the TTLB ecosystem and I found this gem talking about an open source car. I found the car conceptually interesting but impractical but the one comment to the story at the time talked about open source cola which seemed a little more possible. Googling found PDF instructions. Even for something as simple as cola, you end up with danger warnings that are downright scary. Do not try this at home with the kids as you may lose one or two of them. As the instructions note "Cola is a harsh mistress, and she is quick to anger."
Indeed.
I suspect from these two examples that the fears of Open Source taking over manufacturing are largely overblown. Fortunately, I'll probably live to see whether I'm right.
Traffic light remotes already exist of course, for decades. The purpose of these little gizmos is to ensure that emergency vehicles get green lights speeding them to their urgent destinations. Early systems were rather primitive with zero measures taken to ensure that nobody else was using the system or that the system was not being abused by legitimate users for illegitimate purposes.
Enter the information age. What if the system was made more sophisticated? What if you were able to have a two tiered priority system. Emergency vehicles would override all, of course. Fires wait for no man and heart attacks are just as merciless. But what if you made a secondary access that allowed you to bid who got a longer light, within limits? Every light could become a billable opportunity, a little auction for the municipality. The infrastructure for payments could be piggy backed on to the highway tolling systems like E-ZPass or I-Pass with a super transponder/transmitter that would empower you to speed you on your way at the cost of a few pennies per stubborn traffic light.
The establishment of a two tier system would create a serious incentive protecting the emergency vehicle codes because you could get what you really want (faster travel) legally while the money involved would increase the penalties for violating the system. I would imagine that taking a picture of all vehicles using the emergency vehicle codes would be an effective way to avoid that sort of cheating.
Working poor people would often be outbid on these auctions and would sometimes travel slower as a result. They would benefit, though, from the revenue coming into the city. Unlike red-light cameras, traffic light auctions would be progressive in nature while the benefits would randomly accrue to the ordinary joe who is driving next to the Lexus.
One of the great raps against the blogosphere is that it is very weak regarding orignial reporting. There's no inherent reason for this other than the tools needed for that sort of thing have not been developed to a usable level. But what is that toolset?
As an experiment, I'm going to try and figure that out.
UAV fuel cells are starting to get deployed. It's one more sign that the fuel cell revolution is not just hype.
Now back to my hiatus (riiiight....)
I'm fascinated by future technology switchovers. Roaming around the net you can see the future coming and calculate when it's going to arrive. Here's something from the DOE lead me to a bit of calculation on when we're going to start switching our lighting fixtures.
How long will it take before we see energy-efficient, cost-competitive, white-light products on the market? DOE's SSL R&D plan spans 20 years (2000-2020), and includes three components: Core Technology Research, Product Development, and Commercialization Support activities. The good news is that tremendous progress is being made, faster than originally anticipated. Researchers have already improved the efficacy of white LEDs to approximately 50 lumens per watt, almost four times more efficient than incandescent sources. Costs are still high, but continue to drop significantly, from approximately $250/kilo-lumen in 2004 to around $50/kilo-lumen in 2006 (based on manufacturer estimates for volume purchase). For comparison, conventional light sources (incandescent, fluorescent) cost around $1/kilo-lumen.
So we've got a huge drop in costs, 80% in the past two years so light bulbs with LEDs are only 50x more expensive than conventional light sources. That's neat stuff but it seems like we're still a very long way away from LED lights. But there's more:
[A] 75-watt incandescent light bulb typically produces about 1,000 lumens and costs less than $1. The problem is, it only lasts about 1,000 hours and only converts about 5% of the electricity it consumes into light (the rest is wasted as heat). A comparable CFL is 5 times more efficient, lasts 10,000 hours, and costs less than $5. ... Unlike other light sources, LEDs don't typically “burn out;” they simply get dimmer over time. Although there is not yet an official industry standard defining “life” of an LED, the leading manufacturers report it as the point at which light output has reached 70% of initial light output. Using that definition, the best white LEDs have been found to have a useful life of around 35,000 hours (that's four years of continuous operation).So that LED lightbulb lasts 35x a conventional incandescent and 3.5x a fluorescent bulb. All of a sudden we're looking at needing to drop LED prices by 30% from current, not 98% in order to start seeing a significant market shift. That looks like a reasonable near future event and something to keep an eye on. With lumen per what ratings double what can be produced by incandescent lighbulbs and none of the flicker or color problems of fluorescent bulbs, LED lighting will likely be welcomed by the public and lead to less energy use.
This was supposed to be a comment on Donald Sensing's site in response to this article on getting off oil but the comment won't post right so I'll put it here.
Currently, GM has the Sequel, a hydrogen based car that gets an equivalent of 39mpg with <10 sec 0 to 60 times and a 300 mile range. While selling those cars here might not defund Al Queda as much as it will defund Hugo Chavez, if they can be made attractive in other markets, oil sheikh governments will have a significant bite taken out of their income flows. Whether this is a good thing or not is another debate.As long as I'm here, you might want to take a look at US DOE hydrogen manufacturing R&D targets which currently predict that we're going to have <$3/gge (gallon gasoline equivalent) from hydrogen manufactured on site via electrolysis in the 2010 timeframe that those GM vehicles are going to start coming off the manufacturing line.
We've got a startlingly good transition plan, I think. We seem to be hitting our numbers and in the 2010-2015 timeframe we're likely to see the fruits of this.
Posted by TMLutas at 02:05 PM
Gas to Liquid (GTL) processing of various fuel stocks to liquid motor fuels is currently economical. The investment needed to build large plants is slow going because the unpredictable energy market could leave investors holding the bag. What's needed is a big purchaser willing to make a long term purchasing commitment. In steps the US Air Force.
In short, they're testing to verify that the new fuel will work well on their current engine stock and not require expensive retuning. Once that's demonstrated, long-term contracts can be signed justifying the expense of plant building. Once an initial plant is built, it's much less risky to increase capacity and pull in additional customers.
The popularization of new technology can often come on the back of government purchases. Here's hopeing we don't get burned.
Can you imagine if you could engage people, have them sign a petition, film their reasons why and send them a clip of themselves a week prior to the election? I think that it's obvious that there is an entire class of applications for politics to take events and make sort of a political time capsule for them to open up in the month or three prior to the election when it's time to remember. Of course somebody's going to try to patent this so consider this post "prior art".
Currently, politicians have established a cycle. They do the hard stuff early, let the outrage flow freely, knowing that most will forget by the next election. It's just a basic fact of democracy. There's no reason why modern technology shouldn't leave that little politician's trick alone.
Special Operations Forces are making the move from batteries to fuel cells with weight savings over batteries, being quieter than generators while giving off no fumes being important factors leading to the switch.
The usual progression is from SOF to general military use and then to civilian use as soldiers don't see why they can't have the same gear on the construction zone that they had in the battle zone (as appropriate).
Jonah Goldberg is willing to pay more for an aisle seat. He wants the airlines to change their ticketing practices. Instead, maybe he should talk to these people instead? Why shouldn't the guy who has booked early get the extra $5-$20 to sacrifice his comfort?
It's becoming clear that the Internet needs a new killer app. Recent data is pointing to a bit over a third of US households being simply uninterested in current Internet offerings. The glory days of ever increasing household penetration seem largely to be at an end with only 2% of the holdouts planning on getting service this year which means that at that pace, it'll take ~18 years to achieve full penetration.
It's clear that if the US is going to get fully wired up, something other than the web is going to have to be the driver. Yet so many people today think that the Web is the Internet that there's going to have to be some serious retooling of public perception before another killer app is going to be able to take over for the Web.
Maybe the adoption of IPv6 will allow for a rebranding. Supposedly there is a USG mandate to deploy by 2008 so explaining that retooling might allow for a new perception of Internet usefulness to take hold. The ability to deliver rock solid audio and video at decent frame rates should probably entice a few more people to take the plunge. High fuel prices will likely bring some in just to take advantage of telecommuting.
In the end, there will be a few who just decide to drop out, just like there are a few households that do not have TVs. I should know, I used to be in one of them...
As I speculated earlier might happen Apple is going with Intel's next generation EFI. This quite likely means that buying a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 in 2007 will permit you to install that OS on non-Apple hardware. All that need happen is for Dell to implement their EFI systems for Vista the same way or a way compatible to Apple so that a little firmware adjustment will allow OS X to run.
There are some neat things that Apple's ported over from its previous firmware system OpenFirmware to EFI. Target Disk Mode is one of them. I can plug in a laptop to a desktop with a firewire cable, hold down the T key and turn it on. It boots as a hard disk. This makes it very easy to recover data on a heavily virused disk because the compromised OS doesn't run at all. It's just another new disk available to the admin system. I hope that Windows will be supporting that too when Microsoft gets around to releasing Vista.
Clayton Cramer picks up an interesting meme. The idea is to move from testing blood alcohol levels to testing actual driving performance. Much good analysis ensues but he misses a trick. These tests will really come into their own when drive-by-wire cars are the norm and cheap HUDs come standard. This is because you can pull over and test yourself, in your own car. Long haul truckers will likely have mandatory impairment testing periodically and black boxes not under their control sending the reports back to either their employers, their insurance company, or the relevant state authorities.
Drive-by-wire cars are likely to come into their own when the internal combustion engine goes goodbye, being superseded by an alternate engine. If the hydrogen fuel cell enthusiasts are right, that'll start to come about at the end of the decade. HUD displays for cars are just starting to come out now in high end cars so that's likely to filter down into the main fleet over the next 5-10 years as well.
The federal government could take a proactive stand by allowing states to move to a performance based system instead of a BAC level system and still qualify for highway funds. That legislation will then put the idea on the agenda of all 50 state legislatures.
I really can't see anybody protesting against this. Do you claim that you can drink and drive and the current standard is unfair? Prove it by passing a functional test and may your liver have mercy on you.
Reading this story on blowing colored bubbles was really entertaining, heartwarming, and inspiring. It also pointed out something that I hadn't thought about for some time, the unique value of the ephemeral. I first thought about this upon reading the history of the sticky note and finding out how much of a revelation it was to work towards an adhesive that wasn't too sticky. Colored bubbles are a similar story.
The original inventor could figure out how to make colored bubbles but his bubbles would stain. On his own, the best he could figure out was something that was washable. The random chaos of bubble landings quickly demonstrated that washable just wasn't good enough for moms. Color had to disappear without effort. The solution created an entirely new class of dyes and colored bubbles turned out to be just the door opener in an enterprise that should be changing our aesthetic world starting in 2006 and for the rest of our lives.
We spend so much of our effort inventing things that will last longer, create lasting value, be a permanent monument to this or that. What if we've been missing an entire world of the ephemeral? What if looking at ordinary things and asking how to improve them by making them temporary is the great overlooked opportunity of our time?
Somethign to think about...
Glenn Reynolds asks:
But what I'd really like is a wireless printer that will show up on any laptop in range, and print from any laptop in range, without having to load any software or drivers. That way guests, etc., could use it with a minimum of fuss. I don't think that's even possible with current operating systems. Am I wrong?
What's really fun is the legal conundrum that you've set up. Setting up a system as a public service like this is supposed to be impossible. Let's say that somebody randomly came up to Glenn Reynold's front door, got a signal, and printed an advertisement on Glenn's printer. Right now, that would be a pretty stiff crime if the printer owner didn't want that print to happen but it would be just fine if the owner was ok about it. There is, however, no recognized way for the guy at the front door to examine the open network and determine whether he can use the network resource or not. You've essentially got a property that isn't posted against trespass but there is no reasonable way to knock on the front door without risking some pretty severe legal penalties.
It seems that the cost of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cell use has just dropped by a significant degree Instead of 2000C, water only has to be heated to a temperature of 1000C. This means that we'll be able to significantly lower the cost of cracking hydrogen via its most plentiful, easily handled source, water. Everybody who has been complaining about how hydrogen is too expensive to use as a storage medium for energy just got sent back to the blackboard.
HT: Worldchanging
Apple jumped off of NuBus when PCI overtook that less used standard, it jumped off of SCSI when IDE overtook SCSI for small computer use, and now it's doing the same for its processors as the heat profile of Intel chips actually is looking better than PPC. Wow, reasonable engineering decisions like this is going to make it really tough to sustain the "Apple is a cult company" meme.
One of the really good thing about Apple's hardware is that it used a reasonably sophisticated firmware system, IEEE-1275 or Open Firmware. One of the unresolved issues of the coming new hardware designs from Apple is whether they are going to continue using IEEE-1275 (and thus keep Mac OS X only for their own hardware) or they are going to also shift over to Intel's BIOS replacement, EFI which should mean that any competent EFI geek should be able to make hardware that OS X will run on. That's a big deal because it would mean that Apple sees more profit in shipping $129 boxes of OS X consumer and $999 boxes of OS X server than in shipping Xserves PowerMacs, iMacs, etc.
If this is the case, this is a huge announcement to the entire PC industry that they've been commoditized and the Dell model of cost reduction is king. Apple's exit from hardware would mean that innovation is dead as a business model for major PC manufacturers. The only point of competition would become in software and services.
It seems to me that combining the open source movement with classroom instruction would create a great deal of real world progress. Imagine a coordinated initiative that recruited software engineering class instructors to structure their classes in such a way that they solved real world problems for real world OSS projects. The students are there, writing code, but the code they write is actually submitted for real world use.
If it's good code, they will actually be able to say that they have real world experience on their resume. Their code was considered by their peers to be good enough to put into production use. This would give these students a real leg up in the job market over students who did not participate in such structured coding projects.
For the professors, it would be challenging to restructure each class to solve a new problem but it would also be invigorating and free them from the risk of students passing the answers from one class to the next. Since the problems to be solved would change, the code generated by each class would be useless in solving the next class' assignments.
There are literally tens of thousands of incomplete projects out there in publicly accessible repositories. This source of labor could be used to help finish a great many of them.
Michael Williams brings up the idea of eternal web hosting charities. Given current hosting realities, it's realistic to assume you need about $10 a month and the cost is only going to go down. At $120 a year, your web thoughts and projects could stay up forever with a maximum starting capital investment of $12,000. That's likely going to be within the reach of most people so look forward to seeing that as a menu item in your death planning discussions.
Donald Sensing's thoughts about how easy it is to total your car led me off in a different direction. The cost of getting into an accident needs to go down. At a certain point, the value proposition for a large segment of buyers will be in getting the same performance out of a $500 airbag instead of one that costs $1000 not in making a $1000 airbag that is ever so slightly better than the previous year's model.
I can see that 3D printing is likely to be big in repair shops of the future.
I'm going through Ars Technica's Tiger review. The first thing that surprised me (in a good way) shows up on page 5, launchd. This really shows the benefits of Apple arrogance and anal retentiveness as applied to longstanding Unix world problems.
Launchd does just that, it manages startup of the various system services in a unified fashion instead of the "patch on top of patch" system that Unix has lived with for decades. As somebody else described it late last year "Launchd is kinda init, mach_init, xinetd, cron, System Starter (seems very nice indeed, drop XML files into a dir saying I want to receive network connects on this port, start at this time, when load is so low etc)". Launchd is represented in the article as an open source project but I couldn't find it. It should be available as part of Darwin, though so the fact that it's not listed separately is not very important.
The absolute arrogance of thinking that you can swim against the tide and change something that basic and functional to the operation of Unix and get enough people to go along with you is breathtaking. It's also a core differentiator and competitive advantage of Apple.
I've pretty much written off TV after the adoption of IPv6 (coming at the end of the decade courtesy of the US Army's mandate for its vendors) as QoS makes time sensitive Internet transport reliable and easy. It might not take that long though. BitTorrent's ability to dramatically lower bandwidth costs has allowed The Strand to be offered for $0.99 an episode instead of the $4.99 conventional stream/download solutions would have priced out at. Those extra $4 in costs spell the difference between an interesting failed experiment and a new revolution in episodic video (EV) distribution, formerly known as the TV series form.
Supposedly, you can't use a macintosh but it's WMV formatted and I'm downloading it now. I'll write later whether it plays straight off, or I had to doctor it.
Microsoft has announced that it's entering the TV market to provide IPTV a TV over IP solution for large manufacturers. The idea is to provide some sort of unified solution that provides a trifecta of Video/Data/Voice solutions and high margin value added services.
Microsoft seems to be aiming this at over the wire TV instead of over the air TV but it's unlikely that such a device would succeed without over the air capability. We'll see. Such a big undertaking isn't going to get out of the lab (for technical development)/conference room (for the business negotiations) for a few years. In any case, we're unlikely to see it fully flower until IPv6 rolls out at the end of the decade to provide a sound transport method that provides reliable Quality of Service (QoS) and standard security (IPSEC).
Imagine an idea tag. Whenever you put an idea in an article, you would surround it with the tag. The tag would have all the parameters of the idea inside the tag. What are the parameters of an idea? I'm not sure of all of them yet but they would include constraints, confidence levels of overall truth, and all the other little voices of doubt and hedging that we all have, but usually don't include.
Once an idea tag is promulgated, the problem then becomes how do you parse it and properly represent the parsing. That's another post.
I just came across a great description of podcasting the phenomenon of doing radio over the net in downloadable files that you easily transfer to your iPod or other music player. It lays out the groundwork for the current state of the field as well as its potential to become a commercial force as threatening to broadcast radio as weblogs are to print media.
One thing that didn't come across in the article is the potential commute productivity enhancement that this could provide. Imagine a script taking your unread email, having your computer read it, make sound files out of each email, and loading the files onto your iPod so you can listen to your emails while you drive. You can process the information while driving without any more distraction than talk radio would generate (and yes, boys, this paragraph's prior art for patent challenges down the road).
Reading off text is old hat for Mac customers (the capability has been embedded in the OS forever) and there are plenty of good programs on the Windows side to do it too. You just have to figure out how to make .mp3 files and not your speakers be the output device.
Daniel Drezner talks about IT weakening terrorism. The cell phone and radio transmitter are the local heroes here. Cell phone SMS messaging is apparently bagging an awful lot of Iraqi terrorists. The problem seems to be on the back end. Since it's going from one cell phone to another, there's no way of identifying good informants who provide meaningful tips on a repeat basis and ones who are cluttering up the system with noise, possibly on purpose as a low risk way of hindering the forces of order.
Convergence will eventually merge the whole thing into one system, with Internet enabled 3G/4G phones providing lots of killer apps like democracy education, the ability to find a job, the ability to make social and political connections in a profoundly disconnected society, but the cell phone has one major advantage. Having one is just wanting to make a call. It doesn't mark you as a stooge for the occupation. You don't have to distribute them. You just have to keep the towers up.
Todd Zywicki writes about the curious backwardness of much constitutional law analysis regarding commercial speech. Apparantly most of what's out there doesn't reference the most important economic works in the field of advertising analysis.
There are a few things that struck me. First, the analysis is crude because the opinions are largely black box. You can't easily ask "what are the economic theories that underly each of these opinions" and get a summary. You should be able to. If nothing else, law school students, in their yearly analysis of these cases could come to reasonable conclusions about the source of the economic theories of these opinions. In fact, they probably already do but nobody's actually distilling that intellectual work and populating a standard database with it.
If such a thing were done, you could then take the results back to the economists and find out how much of our constitutional analysis of commercial speech is based on fundamentally flawed economics. If most of it is, the chances of the Supreme Court reviewing new challenges to the status quo goes up. The chances of getting district and appellate courts to ignore stare decisis rises too.
On the other hand, if a lot of the analysis is based on articles which themselves are based on sound economics, there really is no problem. The difficulty is that with all that yearly wasted analysis going on in law school classrooms, we really can't tell which case is more true.
OK, time to eat crow. Yes, the low cost mac is here. It's a decent machine which has all the long-term implications that Evan Kirchhoff was talking about. The only kicker is whether Apple loses money or makes money on each unit and what's their margin.
There is one thing missing at the intro, a nice USB KVM unit. There will be people who want to swap back and forth between their Windows box and their Mac box, perhaps networking them together over ethernet (it would be really spiffy if Rendezvous could take a simple ethernet cable link, and make Windows shares show up for the Mac).
Evan Kirchhoff ups the ante on his previous Apple speculation, claiming the new, headless Mac at $499 is now at 75% speculation and provides supporting evidence. Unfortunately for Kirchhoff's predictive batting record, there are two long-known Apple corporate traits that militate against the rumor being true. First, Apple has a highly aggressive (many say viciously vindictive) legal department. Apple has always liked suing people, especially over IP violations. They've also had a long-running feud with rumors websites, especially those who won't take down inside info stories that were illegally disseminated. The problem could be as simple as the following quote from the original Think Secret story "The new Mac, code-named Q88, will be part of the iMac family and is expected to sport a PowerPC G4 processor at a speed around 1.25GHz."
If there is a Q88 hardware project that even vaguely resembles that, the above quote is probably the fruit of an inside leak. Apple security could even have discovered the leakers and those might be most of the rest of the John Doe defendants.
Now Q88 might, or might not, be destined for release. You have to remember that Apple has publicly released Darwin for x86, a complete OS, and is widely expected that they have an internal development project with a completely running Mac OS X operating system based on x86 maintained in parallel with their PPC version. That version will never see the light of day unless the PPC consortium dies, something that is highly unlikely with the birth of the new Power initiative. Q88 could be a similar internal project. Q88 could be a project that's exactly as described but to be released at a $599 price point. Both would seriously peeve Apple for good reason.
The major negative effect for Apple is that expectations of a Q88 release will be built into Apple's stock price and non-release or release at a higher price or with lower capability configurations will all mean a hit to Apple's shareholders in the next two weeks. Every time that happens, the desperate anti-mac people (John Dvorak, please call your office) get revved up and the Apple brand takes an outsized hit that they have to work very hard to recover from.
The further rumor of a new Office software suite can also be coming out in many different ways (and it's been widely anticipated for some time). Apple has already struck a major blow by providing .doc file support as a system service. I would expect that this would continue to be improved. I also would not be surprised to find (at this conference or some other) an announcement that replicates the Safari (KHTML) rollout where an open source office application like KOffice gets a major UI upgrade and a version rolled out that is heavily integrated with Mac OS X.
As for Apple stockholders in 2010, I would want Apple will be a more diversified company and to have improved positions in all its segments, including personal computers. I would expect that Apple's consumer outlook will put it far ahead in the race to create home servers, a high margin business that can get rolled into the mortgage for housing. A complete system would require a house LAN and room terminals that would be at least as capable as today's PCs.
You don't need any secret knowledge to predict such things, just some technical understanding of Apple's current offerings as they've unfolded and the logical continuation of current trends. Apple's Rendezvous, Airport, Xsan, Xraid, and Xserve products all have potential applications in a (wireless) wired home initiative and even some of the lesser knowns such as OpenDirectory are probably not just attempts by Apple to assault the corporate purchase gates. When Apple can find a good partner in the building trades to make that sort of deal, they will as it will be highly lucrative to get clumps of a hundred servers here, two hundred there for entire upscale subdivisions. That's the kind of thing that will not only build their brand but will also increase their ability to sell further service offerings into from hardware service to Internet watch filters.
Evan Kirchhoff takes a stab at divining Apple's future. He analyzes one of those rumors that never die, "the cheap Mac". He gets pretty much everything right until the end when he should have just said that it's a false rumor but he breathes life back into the dead and gives it a 50% chance of being true. It's just not so and I've seen this rumor come up so many times that it's obvious that it's not.
First of all, if Apple wanted to drop the entry price on its computing technology, it would much more likely pair with the new IBM initiative to promote their Power line of chip products and create a $299 satellite computer with a tiny flat screen that would run cut down versions of OS X specially tuned for the "digital dashboard" applications to be rolled out in 10.4 and fitting into a home network. The problem with a $499 computer isn't that it's too cheap for Apple but that it's too expensive.
Apple has garnered plenty of expertise in how to take over market segments by being the low price producer. Try competing with Final Cut Pro, Xserve, or Xserve RAID on price. You can't without getting out of the brand name space. Price out a 50 person workgroup with simple file and print needs using Mac OS X Server v Windows Server. Licensing costs drop the Mac OS X price far below the Windows one.
Whenever Apple has decided to win a segment by entering the low end for that segment, they have always dropped their prices down to crush the competition, never, ever meeting the low cost provider. This rumor would meet the low cost providers. That means it would not only depart from the old "high price, high chic" Apple of the past but also the new Apple "category killer that crushes on price" present.
If Apple goes low, it'll go low in creating a new category, say something in the iMac G5 form factor but wall mountable with a 9" lcd screen that will automatically hook up to mama Mac and provide you with dashboard computing functionality where you want it. Buy a 10 pack and put one in every room in the house (and yes, there will be a ruggedized version for the bathroom). Microsoft can't follow because it doesn't make the whole widget. The x86 clone makers can't follow in Windows because the Microsoft tax won't let them. The Linux folks could follow but won't succeed in the space because the 9" wall mount form factor will highlight user experience, an Apple strength and a Linux weakness.
Now this isn't a rumor. I'm just providing a prediction based on what people want, computing where they want it, when they want it. It will appear when the hardware is ready. Apple's laid the foundation for this sort of thing over the past couple of years, just as they've laid the foundation for their push into the enterprise that you'll see in the next 5 years.
The Pentagon is planning to create own kind of Internet 2, a battlefield network capable of seeing everything, knowing everything. Now I can see a practical reason for the Army's insistence on IPv6 starting in 2009. IPv6 is a new addressing system that has the address space needed to handle all those new network nodes this new military net will have.
This isn't just of interest to the military but will likely drive the entire civilian worldwide Internet to convert over to IPv6. Even if this new milnet is hermetically sealed away from the Internet, the Army has made it clear that it wants to contract with ISPs who provide IPv6 and those ISPs will, in turn, have that service for their civilian clients as well.
But contrary to the warfighting concentration (to the point of exclusivity) in the NYT article, this will be revolutionary for nation building/peacekeeping as well. Crack off a segment of addresses, create a DMZ zone and you end up with the network backbone for a civilian networking infrastructure. Add language appropriate simputers and you're in Sys admin heaven.
You want to change people's psychological connectivity with the world? Give them an instrument that gives them vital information like how to get a job, where to get food or medical aid, curfew rules so they won't get shot, and alongside that education in how to become a free citizen and not a subject, ways to register their needs and wants and structural aids in how to organize to get them, connectivity to military intelligence, news from around the world, the possibilities are broad and far ranging.
By the time that the GIG starts rolling out, chances are that simputers will have both significantly advanced in capability (they're currently being built on top of a 206Mhz ARM chip running GNU/Linux) and drop in price. You can get 1 unit at retail for $240. No doubt bulk purchase gets you a better price though a solar charger (4.5 volts) and wireless net connector drive costs right back up. If 5 years from now the platform can handle voice, we've got a real winner.
HT: Thomas PM Barnett:: Weblog
An awful lot of websites out there depend on Microsoft technology to function correctly even though the same functionality could have been put in place in a platform neutral way. Unless you're getting paid to do so, there's no legitimate company interest in doing so. What you are doing, in fact, is exposing your company to the financial risk of redeveloping your website in the case of Microsoft losing market share without any conceivable upside to benefit your shareholders.
Up until now, this has largely been a theoretical problem. Microsoft's Internet Explorer sits atop the browser heap with a dominant 90% user market share. But security problems and a slowdown in new development of the IE technology base means that there is an opportunity out there, one that has recently been taken. Firefox is a very good browser. It's impressive, innovative, and has reached version 1.0. So all the executives who have swallowed the MS developer's koolaid will, in the next months and years, be confronted with a new round of web site expenditures, expenditures that are required because customers will be using Firefox and demand support for it or they will shop elsewhere. Once business starts taking a hit, that seemingly simple technology decision to embrace vendor lock-in of the dominant worldwide player will start to look dumber and dumber.
Will they learn for the next round of technology expenditures? I hope so but I'm not confident.
Nature has picked up a paper(pdf) by the Oswald brothers published in the journal Accountancy.
I can't recall the blog I first read describing the paper but it looked fishy enough to write and protest that the numbers weren't right. Jim Oswald did respond and his response made it very clear that whatever they were talking about, they were not talking about the hydrogen economy as most people conceive of it.
1. The calculations are for hydrogen burned in internal combustion engines (ICE), not hydrogen fuel cells. Virtually everybody views the hydrogen economy as a fuel cell economy with hydrogen run through the cells to directly create electricity, not burnt in cylinders that drive pistons, that turn a wheel or drive a generator.
2. Like all other ICE type motors, hydrogen ICE are limited in efficiency as they are Carnot heat engines. At realistic temperatures, fuel cells can have 3x the efficiency of ICE. This means that even with hydrocarbon created hydrogen, you lower pollution with hydrogen as everybody except the Oswalds in this scenario look at it.
3. The Oswalds deliberately and artificially narrowed the available sources of hydrogen to nonpolluting sources that are commercially viable today with no technological progress allowed for, nor any thought to how rising petroleum costs would make other sources of hydrogen become viable as energy prices rose.
4. Energy is lost in transportation with the shorter you go, the less you lose. Hydrogen is likely, on average (and certainly for the US & UK) to be produced closer to home than our current oil supplies. This effect is unaccounted for.
When all the constraints and fudges are made explicit and clear, the Oswalds' paper is a somewhat useful teaching tool to drive home the point that a totally clean hydrogen economy is going to be hard work. But that's not how Nature interpreted it and it's not how most people will read it who know nothing but the buzzwords of a "hydrogen economy". While the Oswalds are honest enough to freely admit their constraints when asked, they're not doing their duty to the truth in bludgeoning even science journalists to get the story right about the narrowness of their actual claims.
Here's a neat bit of technology, a corrugated box that lets you get from high point a to the ground via autorotating cardboard rotor blades. $300, easy to assemble, the CoptorBox doesn't require much training to assemble and drop.
HT: DefenseTech
Usually, I get bright ideas for technology when I'm away from a writing implement but this article inspired me especially the following section:
Another problem is the poor state of water pipelines in many communities, allowing leakage, and contamination.
Well, imagine a pipe fixer, it's powered by waterwheel. As water circulates in the pipe, the machine gets juice. It creeps along the pipe system checking for leaks. Where it finds a leak, it either reports in or fixes the leak itself. since these pipes last an awfully long time, our robot repairer doesn't have to move very fast.
It looks like the US is going to get its first retail hydrogen fueling station later this year (other articles put the time frame at September/October this year). Retail filling stations are important because they are the basis for the necessary infrastructure shift to end the age of oil. With a filling station available, not only will vehicular fuel cell applications get a boost but people in the immediate area who want to use fuel cells for other applications can potentially fill up with the hydrogen version of a gas can, relieving them of the need to get their own hydrogen source and reducing the infrastructure spending needed on other fuel cell applications.
I'm looking forward to seeing hydrogen pumps pop up locally as the technology rolls out. GM is partnering with the USPS to deliver hydrogen fuel cell powered mail delivery vans. Since the USPS does not maintain fueling stations for their fleet, retail hydrogen pumps will quickly be followed by hydrogen mail vans, providing the pumps with guaranteed revenue.
As pumps get deployed, we're likely to start getting into that heady area where the small inventor, the tinkerer gets involved in a real way. Once they can get easy access to relatively cheap hydrogen, who knows what ideas will bubble up from our collective creative impulse?
Space elevators have been a recurring feature on this blog because it's the sort of disruptive technology that can upset an awful lot of pessimistic predictions about the future. If you can knock two zeroes off the cost of lifting a pound into orbit, many things change, from realistic energy from orbit to space manufacturing, to military implications, cheap, safe access to space changes an awful lot. This isn't even counting the inevitable spinoffs of large scale carbon nanotube production at the strength levels necessary to make the cable and beamed power systems to energize the lifters.
The Liftport Group has long listed April 12, 2018 as their target launch date for a space elevator but now Dr. Bradley Edwards is predicting that it will only be two years to develop carbon nanotube fiber strong enough for the elevator ribbon. That's a real milestone to watch. If the ribbon appears in that time frame, I'd say that it's time to stop scoffing at the possibility and time to start thinking through the consequences of this disruptive technology because it's going to happen.
John Cole couldn't think of a legal, moral use for an invisibility cloak. That kind of bothered me and as I was reading another article on the subject, a completely above board use came to mind. Translucent walls would make an excellent improvement in the eastern christian iconostasis.
Another use will be in the fashion world. One thing that is not made very clear in most articles about this technology is that the realistic image projected out does not absolutely have to be what is on the other side of the body. Imagine images that subtly enhance the body image that you would otherwise project. That will be the subtle end of the spectrum but combine this technology with a punk rock sensibility and the sky's the limit.
Steven Den Beste get's enthusiastic support on energy from Reverend Sensing. Unsurprisingly, I disagree:
If exposing the fallacy that conservation would be enough is all that SDB were doing, I would join you in cheering him in his efforts. Unfortunately, that is not all that he's doing. He also attacks the idea of creating new sources of energy both as additions to and replacements of oil on any significant scale. This has several bad effects.First of all, it is inaccurate. We are fast approaching a crossover point where our current energy creation and use infrastructure is going to be significantly changed. SDB's essays are not consistent with this coming reality. GM does not make a habit of seriously considering pie-in-the-sky solutions for its car platform powerplants, nor do major oil companies rush to rebrand themselves on a whim. Have you noticed lately that everybody's an energy company now?
If SDB is right, we might as well elect the "realism" candidate this November, John Kerry, as there are hard engineering limits that make spreading liberty to the 3rd world (and thus a free market hungry for energy) impractical and destabilizing for us.
Fortunately, SDB is wrong on this issue. He realizes the magnitude of the task but fails to understand that people are meeting the challenges. It's a hellishly complicated and difficult thing, to remake an energy infrastructure. By giving the false impression that it's not merely difficult, but impossible, SDB has turned himself into a nattering nabob of negativism.
This whole energy innovation thread that Steven Den Beste has written about reminds me of a very basic principle in innovation. There are two kinds of innovation, incremental and disruptive (revolutionary). Incremental advances are the most common. You take your vacuum tube and you make it 3% better. A disruptive or revolutionary technology would be replacing vacuum tubes with solid state transistors.
In the world of incremental technology, SDB's pessimistic world view about the possibility of feasible radical advances is just good sense. Nobody is ever going to build a
But there is another world, the world of disruptive technology. It's a world where science fiction turns into science fact because where the author talks about beanstalks made of "unobtanium" a japanese electron microscopist turns unobtanium into carbon nanotubes one day in 1991. And all of a sudden the race is on to realize the high strength potential of this disruptive advance in material science. All of a sudden a hundred boyhood tales from pulp science fiction are no longer mere flights of fancy because material science has caught up.
What I think is missing in the optimists' presentations is in defining their "unobtaniums". If you don't understand that you're really asking for a miracle, you get the idea that making these things happen is just a matter of time. It's not just time but time plus disruptive advances. How much better does energy capture + energy transmission efficiency have to get before solar power satellites become commercially feasible? How low do you have to have sunny location land prices before a terrestrial mirror solar station become practical?
Something complex, like novel energy forms, might well require several different disruptive advances. Solar Power Stations require a revolution in lower launch costs, significant increases in collection efficiency and better orbit to ground transmission efficiency, for example. Core taps require radical improvements in drilling technique both in the ability to drill deep and to drill cheap.
Such advances might be coming from any of several different fields. Laser drilling seems to be the best hope for core taps and that's largely come from impressive work done by defense contractors researching SDI missile defense systems. The oil extraction industry sees laser drilling as a way to improve speed and thus efficiency in deploying very expensive drill platforms.
A few hundred years ago, it would be ludicrous to even try to keep track of all the miracles you need. But, as I've noted before, the rate at which disruptive technologies occur has been accelerating for centuries and it's no longer unrealistic to think that there will be enough new disruptive inventions in our lifetimes to start keeping more formal track of the impractical dreams of today.
Let's take flying cars for instance. We currently have at least Posted by TMLutas at 04:13 PM
The idea of the end of the oil age is completely misunderstood by far too many people. Unfortunately that seems to include Greg Burch You don't have to eliminate all use of oil to end the oil age. In fact, oil usage will continue to happen long after the end of the age of oil much as whale oil continued to be used long after the current oil age (petroleum version) started.
Let's say that average petroleum based motor has a lifetime of 20 years (some more, some less). Let's further stipulate that we count an engine that uses twice as much petroleum twice as much as a smaller motor. Taking this weighted measure means that every year, we're replacing 5% of our oil demand (these are not real numbers). When the age of oil ends, most motors won't be replaced any faster than normal. They'll just run out their lives and be replaced by the new technology, let's say electric motors using hydrogen fuel cells for power with an ultimate source of orbital solar power.
The oil wells will still be pumping for motor two decades after the end of the oil age. They'll still be pumping after that because oil will be needed for lubrication, for plastic production, and for non-fuel uses. Since the Middle East is the world's low cost producer, they'll be the last producers forced to cap their wells because of lack of profits. Making the arabs choke on their oil won't be accomplished by ending the oil age.
But ending the oil age is necessary to win the GWOT in a way that is completely different than what Greg Burch talks about on his blog. We need to end the oil age so that we vastly increase our available energy stream to bring the world into the Functioning Core and out of the Non-Integrating Gap. As states enter the Core, they cease to be terrorist producers and start to be terrorist fighters. We can only win when the terrorists no longer have safe haven states which are pretty much to be found in the Gap and not the Core. The demand for additional energy to fulfill this project far exceeds what we can deliver using current methods even if we go all out and remove most political restraints on energy production. We just don't have enough oil, uranium, natural gas, or coal to manage the huge new demands on energy.
This sad fact is a major reason why we need to shift over to a hydrogen economy, not because it's cleaner (though it tends to be), but because it is multi-fuel friendly. In fact, being multi-fuel friendly is largely what makes hydrogen cleaner. It smoothes out renewable, bursty electrical sources into hydrogen producers that can release hydrogen out when it's needed, not when the sun's out or the wind's blowing and it's a lot better than the current battery alternatives.
Any bright new idea for energy has a much lower barrier of entry in a hydrogen economy. So if you have turkey guts, you convert them to hydrogen and plug your (smallish) contribution into a common energy backplane. No more need to tune cars for different fuels. Everything is convertible into hydrogen and everything can run on hydrogen. No more retooling infrastructure to accommodate advances in energy production.
Poor SDB. Apparently every time the USS Clueless enters the wild and wooly waters of alternative energy, he gets inundated with ideas that simply won't scale and won't work. For the most part, he's holding up admirably well but I have my usual nits to pick.
One of the biggest is that just because there are people who provide ideas that simply do not fly, it does not follow that there aren't serious, reasonable methods of going forward with a solution. Mea culpa, I googled up a link that solved the problem of high efficiency electricity to microwave conversion and missed that this particular approach was unlikely to scale (at least according to Steven Den Beste's dismissal). Upon further research, the papers at JUSPS provides several papers examining the specific problem of space to earth power transmission and seems to be an awful lot more optimistic even though they're also realistic enough to know that this is not going to happen tomorrow.
One paper I found particularly interesting was this one from the University of Michigan (PDF) which contrasted the vacuum tube approach that SDB characterized this way:
This is one of the few remaining applications where semiconductors have not yet displaced vacuum tubes. In a modern TV transmitter rated for 500 KW or 1 MW, everything is transistorized right up to the very last amplification stage, which uses vacuum tubes the size of garbage cans.The satellite downlink will have to generate and transmit as much RF as a thousand such TV stations. Doing that is difficult. Doing that with 90% efficiency is "nontrivial".
Whether the original link that provides a 90% solution can be combined with the decentralized, distributed approach currently rated at 60% is not something that I'm really qualified to judge. I do suspect that the answer to such challenges is much more likely to be in the engineering realm of "tough and challenging" rather than "nontrivial". With cheap enough lift costs 60% efficiency might be feasible today. We don't have enough numbers in our debate to be sure yet where the tipover points are.
I've gotten burned myself on things I thought would "never" happen, or not in my lifetime. In 1978, environmental airheads were touting synfuels as a panacea and I, in my youth, sneered at the idea that I'd ever see anything practical come out of such pie in the sky research. They were extracting tar sand oil for about $40/barrel in 1979. In today's money (2003) that's somewhat north of $101 a barrel. The current extraction cost is $12 a barrel which puts Canada's Albertan oil sands right around Russia's Siberian extraction costs.
The skeptics were right that it was far too little and too late to fix an oil shock that died away in the next few years but the optimists were right to pursue the technology. A few hundred thousand barrels out of Canada (limited only by water availability), and who knows how many other hundreds of thousands of barrels available in nontraditional oil areas (Brazil for example) and you have a significant addition to world supply that isn't going to run out anytime soon.
So one problem is not one of technological difficulty but of time. I think that it will take decades, not centuries to solve the problems because serious scientists are putting out papers showing progress that's going along at a fair clip and they seem to have at least conceptually solved an awful lot of the problems already.
Another time component is that we're talking about a crisis that isn't going to go away after a few years like the 1979 oil shock did. We're talking about a multi-decade effort that is going to roll up the Gap and pull the third world into intimate contact with the first, creating a place where everybody has a stake in the system and there is no place where you can go off and plot for many years to create WMD in some sort of safe haven where the locals are with you.
So if you combine the shortening of time from thousands of years to tens of years on the solution side and the lengthening of the crisis time from the few years that some people (not necessarily SDB) think that this GWOT is going to last to the decades I believe will be the minimum time it's going to take to really solve the problem and you have an inescapable conclusion. Hunting after new energy sources including unconventional sources is an important component to winning the war.
Reading Strategy Page's latest (again, no permalink) on the battlefield net, one thought kept cropping up in my mind. Does the thing have an accessible API and what are the 3rd party application opportunities for it?
A battlefield PDA in this generation handed out to squad leaders and sergeants will be a really cheap piece of occupation tech four generations down the road handed out to native families because it's the cheapest way to provide connectivity and plug them into the Core. The satellite phone may morph into something cheaper or we may get really cheap satellites in the meantime, who knows? In any case, we're not likely to see the original manufacturers make the transition without third party software. One route might be military intelligence wanting to take a few of these and give it to their higher quality assets among the natives. Then, as software comes on line for intelligence work, some people figure out that it's cheap enough to hand out to all intelligence assets. The PR/education corps will see enough of these among the natives to start giving lessons in freedom via FAQ and cheap web apps on a variety of subjects and somebody is just going to open up the whole net to the general public in a country in forcible transition courtesy USAF.
This is something similar to what happened to the Internet and what will happen with Internet 2. Technology is rolled out to a select few and people who used to qualify or almost qualify for access agitate for their inclusion on the list and, with pull, they get it. This just extends the number of people who almost qualify and the process starts happening again.
Imagine a war zone. You can't really send reporters in to a lot of it because they'll just get themselves killed. But what if you had the reportorial equivalent of disposable cameras and could widely disseminate them on both sides of the lines? If you could figure out a secure method of anonymous payment, you could count on a huge increase in the number of reports coming out of the area by participants in the conflict and locals who want to make a quick buck and are in the danger zone anyway.
We're a good 10-20 years out from a world where the technology to do this is affordable, but there are no conceptual barriers for the engineers to conquer. Given an infinite amount of money, you could do it today.
Go Moore's Law!
The reported battlefield would not only change the nature of war reporting but would also change the ability of soldiers to get away with war crimes. With so many potential reporters everywhere, the chance of getting away with it falls to near zero.
A very nice BBC article on a group that plans to put the tooth implant boys out of business by 2009 using stem cells to grow new teeth. Only one thing wrong with the whole article, it makes no differentiation between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. After a few seconds of digging at the company website it becomes clear that these are adult cells that avoid all the nasty moral problems that embryonic stem cells raise. You can get these stem cells with just a bit of liposuction from your own body.
There's nothing morally objectionable about that but I bet you that 9/10ths of the readership won't make the differentiation because they aren't told in the article. They'll likely, and wrongly, associate embryonic stem cells with the advance and view it as just one more bit of evidence that the moralist types are holding back progress. In fact, adult stem cells seem to be much more promising for actual therapies, rather than grant applications for theoretical treatments that all too often seem to go wrong.
Material science is making its usual unheralded contribution to health and safety. In this case, it's liquid armor. It's a liquid filling to put inside armor or even normal clothing items like boots that remains light and flexible in normal use but stiffens immediately to rigidity under sudden stress. After the stress goes away, it softens right up again. Not only is liquid armor useful in areas like limbs than kevlar with rigid plates it also has potential civilian uses like a steel toed boot replacement.
It also has the advantage of being better against stab wounds than regular body armor, a must for law enforcement/penal operations.
HT: defensetech
The Airforce is creating software to allow UAVs to conduct automated airborne refueling. This will help in providing persistence on the battlefield and is important for many reasons. One of these is that it would allow UAVs to serve as airborne wireless network access points. Motorala has a wireless system that has a range measured in miles not feet. Combine that with a flying wireless routing station and you can provide a persistent, inexpensive, generally inaccessible by insurgents, airborne network infrastructure.
Thanks to the Peeve Farm for linking to my previous Apple gushing but Brian Tiemann doesn't quite get it right when he says "[t]hat's the enterprise market pretty well covered, if you ask me—Apple seems to be going after the big-iron crowd with a vengeance".
First of all, the 'big-iron' crowd turns its nose up at 20 year old Unix implementations as still being a bit green. Things like CICS, VMS, IMS and the rest of the mainframe alphabet soup that handles a remarkable part of the world of corporate IT is not going to be swapping over to Objective-C and the drinking the rest of the Apple koolaid anytime soon.
But there's lots of room for Apple to come up with new solutions for the enterprise. Here's a few things they're missing (and this is by no means an exhaustive list):
Blade Servers (for when 1U is not dense enough)
4 way + Servers (more power)
Security Appliances (attention to detail is key here)
Large Scale Remote Access Servers (sure Apple has dial-in via Airport but try supporting 500 road warriors that way)
Vertical Application Servers (Apple's only begun to plumb this one)
VoIP applications
In other words, Apple's still in humble phase, and rightfully so. It's got a long way to go before its business strategy fully unfolds. It's just that with the release of Apple's SAN solution, Xsan, negative minded Apple watchers can no longer even pretend that they're just trying to pick off limited vertical markets like video or genetics companies. There's a lot of growth potential left for new hardware and software solutions before Apple's enterprise market strategy has reached the mature phase of limited growth.
Apple's recent product entries have pretty much let the cat out of the bag for even the most unobservant that Apple does, in fact, have a business strategy. It's one that they've been executing quite well for some time now. They're trying to get into the server room and the network infrastructure business. Why else would they revise their WiFi base station so you can legally put it in the space above a drop ceiling while not having to plug it into a wall socket for power? They're also releasing software and hardware that undercuts traditional application price points by huge margins in certain vertical markets. Avid is losing huge amounts of business to Final Cut Pro for example.
And now Apple's server hardware line, already impressive with its 1U rackmounted Xserve and Xraid disk array solutions are complemented by the new Xsan Storage Area Network software that Apple just announced.
It looks like the Safari experience was not a fluke. Safari, Apple's browser, uses KHTML, a well respected HTML rendering library published by the KDE group intended as part of their Konqueror browser. The various available browser engines were tested and KHTML came out as best.
Xsan is 100% compatible with (and probably borrows the guts from) ADIC's StorNext File System. This means that anybody who is comfortable with the ADIC solution has to seriously consider Apple's hardware. Because Apple's RAID solution is much cheaper than its competitors, it's reasonable that its going to start cranking out a good deal of demonstration units to test Xsan this winter and start making serious sales come 2005. There are no additional licensing costs beyond the $999 software cost per controller server. And the price savings are sufficiently eye opening that nobody can afford to ignore this entry into the field. Apple's total solutions cost for a SAN is around $30k while similar capacity and performance systems run $150k-$200k. That's aggressive pricing by anybody's standards.
The US, via DARPA is moving towards cognitive radios. These are software defined radios that are loaded with local rules and search for open chunks of spectrum to use for their transmissions. This permits a much higher use of spectrum without providing interference. DARPA has decided to release the specifications of these radios as an open standard, hoping civilian equipment manufacturers will widely adopt the technology and make military interference in local RF networks a thing of the past as both military and civilian equipment adjusts to stay out of each other's way.
This also has implications on bandwidth licensing. The current FCC structure, for instance, assumes dumb end devices that require rigid spectrum allocation according to very old formulas. With cognitive radios and like minded equipment like cell phones and TVs, such rigid rules can be relaxed in future (if we can get the bureaucracy to loosen its death grip on power).
StrategyPage, invaluable as usual (despite no permalinks), points out the availability ofcomputerized translation for the armed forces. As Moore's law works its magic, in the next decade we should be seeing the availability of cheap enough solutions so a future occupation could distribute information appliances widely to occupied populations to both enhance security and accelerate the process of convincing people to act for themselves and to form (or re-form) civil society.
This is all first generation stuff so anybody without a sense of tech history will find the scenario I'm laying out a bit far-fetched. But the pieces necessary for including the occupied civilian population in an occupation 'net are rapidly falling into place.
I've written previously on this subject and talked up the simputer. Well, now it seems to be available, and not just in India. This is not precisely the configuration I would recommend for an occupation network but it's pretty close, closer than I've seen anywhere else, and the price ($240) is not bad for the number of units you're going to have to distribute. The CDMA/modem circuitry is going to have to get replaced with something that can work with airborne wireless access points but it should be a wash in terms of manufacturing cost and you're going to have to get some sort of distributed power recharger to go along with it.
We're still a long ways away from getting this up and running in an occupation/peacekeeping situation but we're getting much closer than we were even a year ago.
HT: Slashdot
A CEO is going to meet with a long-time corporate rival. Within hours, the rumors are flying that there are secret negotiations but secrecy was absolute. How did reporters find out so quickly? It turns out that a reporter bribed somebody at major cell carriers to track the cell phones of industry CEOs and using a bit of GPS magic discovered that the two CEO's cell phones were within 10 feet of each other and they were in a conference room in a hotel without any industry events going on.
This is the kind of location detection conundrum and opportunity that is starting to appear with new gadgets. If you can talk to it, and it's smart enough, any bit of electronics can tell you where it is. And if you don't know that's part of the feature list, you can be broadcasting your location even though you don't want to.
Now often being able to broadcast your location is important but the key is having such broadcasts being under control. I don't particularly see any interoperability standards that will allow individuals to control all the technology that might snitch on them. There's a crying need for such a thing.
One of the things that would be quite useful for me is to have the ability to set up automatic pulls of data that can be subsequently imported into a database for further manipulation. I know that there are commercial products that can do this. There are also freeware libraries that do the heart of the job. What I don't see is something that will take non-standard HTML and pull out the data with a nice GUI interface that I can use and script well.
Anybody out there have any experience in this sort of thing?
Imagine a map on a computer screen. Click on a border and a box comes up explaining how that border was set, when was it established, what treaties led up to it and the conflicts that preceded the current border's establishment. All that information is available today in encyclopedias, history books, and other weighty tomes. But what you don't get is some sort of easy connection between an everyday act (like looking at a map) and all that deep knowledge that you could plunge into if you were just the least bit curious.
I had a colleague who was absolutely gaga over Edward Tufte and especially his book Visual Explanations. At first I didn't quite get what the fuss was all about but eventually he got it through to me that without access to information in an understandable way, information is virtually worthless. And you can have information right in front of you without ever really understanding what you're seeing. The classic example of that is the Challenger tragedy where the managers simply didn't understand that a powerpoint chart they were looking at wasn't just dots and lines and failure rate percentages but a death sentence for the astronauts if they persisted in launching.
But back to maps, they are a highly useful graphical presentation of the world around us. In fact, an entire field has grown up around the use of layered smart maps called GIS (Geographic Information Systems). But these maps are mostly used as specialty tools for planning where to put the sewers and other very practical but highly specialized tasks. What's missing is a GIS system that you can go to when current events bring up places that you've never heard of with histories that you never even imagined and have all the details in all its glorious layers laid out in front of you quickly and comprehensibly in a compact, comprehensible manner.
If we could develop a system like that, the light fluff and commentary driven focus of nightly news broadcasts would be much less pernicious. It wouldn't matter so much that the anchorman doesn't give all the basic facts before launching into speculation and interpretation. If you know them already, well and good. If you don't, you have a freely available tool that the news organization is tying into their report that lets you dig into the background sufficient that you no longer need to be brought up to speed in the actual body of the report.
TalkLeft's got a story on police falsifying crime reports either by downgrading them or not reporting them at all. If true, it's a horrible example of a failure in information systems, one that could be easily remedied by simply providing a feedback loop for the crime victim to know and understand what is going on with his case. Simply by creating an extranet that contains the public record portion of all open crimes you have most of the problem solved. You hand the crime victim (or closest appropriate family member or guardian) a serial number and give them an access password so they can keep those who should be informed, informed. So if you file a complaint for rape and see it's filed under misdemeanor assault, you can raise a stink immediately. And that's really the point because once police know that they're going to get monitored, their incentive to make the numbers look good disappears because falsifying a report will look much worse than any possible gain from fudging the numbers.
The dumb ones might still try it but they're likely to get fired, and that's a good thing. The data entry overhead for such a system means it probably won't work for very small towns that aren't computerized but that's likely not where the problem is. The big issue is likely to crop up in cities that are already computerized.
What makes this solution even better is that you could probably organize the victims groups, the civil libertarians, and the police watchdog groups to create a generic program that can be customized, release it as open source, and give it as a gift to the police forces of America. And Mr. Police Chief, Mr. Mayor, why is it that you don't want to accept a free system whose only effect is to give crime victims easy access to information they have a right to anyway? The politics of it make a continued coverup very difficult to maintain.
Furthermore, since the code is open source, the police may have their own ideas about usefulness and add features that actually improve policing by making it easier to enter the data they already have to input. In the end, I suspect that police will find such a system as useful in their job as police car cameras are for the honest cop.
Phillips has a new take on RFID and wants to put RFID readers in mobile phones so you can comparison shop. This, along with a bar code reader, would take away a lot of the normal retail strategies that stores use to enhance profits via sales. People go into stores just to get what's on sale but what the retail outlet wants them to do is to buy enough other items so that they increase gross sales and profitability at the same time. Being able to consult a database wirelessly and know that the item you're looking at (or a comparable one) is available for less a block away will drastically change shopping patterns, especially for multiple stores in a category that are close to each other.
If it were little trouble, I would simply submit my shopping list to the database and take the road instructions to minimize my overall cost. Simply enter in your fuel economy (if traveling by car) and how much you value your time and you can cherry pick among two or three stores and know, before leaving, who has what for less. Any impulse shopping would bring out the RFID/bar code reader and you'd see if the next store had that new gizmo or treat for less.
Of course stores would hate this and would not cooperate in creating the necessary database. But they can't hide the receipt and they are unlikely to ban cell phones so the data is going to get entered. There will be attempts to poison or game the database with quick lasting sales or simply putting employees up to entering in false data. It's a war that they are unlikely to win and this will end up changing both day-to-day pricing strategy and store site location as it becomes a more significant competitive danger to locate a store next to your competitor.
Brian Crozier over at Transport Blog muses about train stopping ability a subject that I didn't know much about but this referenced article makes all clear (it pays to read comments). One improvement that presents itself immediately to me is to combine the current air pressure brake signalling system with some sort of electronic communication. Currently, it can take many precious seconds for the back car on a freight train to get the signal to start applying its brakes. The article supplies an example figure of 16 seconds. If there were a parallel electronic system that could achieve sub-second response times, stopping distances would be improved, though how often that would make a difference and would the expense be worth the savings is beyond me. No doubt a trial lawyer will be making that argument at some future date in some tragic case.
Another issue is that brakes are monolithically set so that they do not skid, whether under load or empty. Adding intelligence to the braking system in the form of a type of rail car ABS system would also increase stopping power. The cost of such systems versus the improved braking performance would have to be weighed as well as what happens when you have a bunch of old and new cars mixed together. Anyway, it's an interesting intellectual exercise. Unfortunately, such innovations are unlikely in the US as the dead hand of government regulation has been killing off railroad innovation for over a century.
This should kick up the problem of automation eliminating jobs a notch. A UCLA researcher is getting the bugs out of an automated house building robot that is, essentially a 3d printer working on a building scale and in concrete.
The US, with it's residential preference for wood frame housing is not likely to use it much for standard homebuilding but it should prove popular in Europe as well as commercial construction in the US.
HT: Rex 2.0
I regularly read the City Comforts Blog because I think that we can do better in how we construct our physical space. The author of City Comforts and I have an on again, off again email correspondance going between us. Surprisingly, he was somewhat on my side in my paen to sprawl as a solution to agricultural overproduction.
It seems his major objection to sprawl is that the commercial strip malls are not very walkable and are simply built in a manner that makes them very unfriendly to pedestrians. As somebody who has actually walked these things, I think this is not, at heart, an unreasonable criticism. The problem is how to find a solution that is practical.
Essentially, most of these commercial zones are mostly reached via passenger car and this is unlikely to change anytime soon barring a knockoff of the Segway that undercuts its price by a large amount. So what's being asked for is a reconfiguration of what is so far a very viable commercial public space model to accommodate what is a very small minority of potential users, pedestrians.
The only way that I can see this going forward is to create either a new mode of transport, either Segway or something very much like it, or creating a very low cost way to create and maintain pedestrian walkways, something like the moving walkways in the Isaac Asimov book Caves of Steel but built for all weather outdoors use with low maintenance. The distances are large, usage is low, so costs explode to maintain conventional pedestrian transportation. I think the moving sidewalk is a lot further off into the future. Getting a cheap Segway might not be so far off though.
In consumer electronics and other established economic sectors, certain price points are well understood. You introduce something above that price point and only a few people will buy it. They're generally called early adopters and have the combination of loving new things for their own sake and plenty of disposable income. But if you get enough early adopters, you can scale up production and lower prices. Once you hit the magic price point, everybody wants one.
But what is that magic price point for a pedestrian like transporter that will make pedestrian style sidewalks economical in sparse suburban commercial construction? And when will Segway style vehicles hit that price point? Once you have the answers to those questions, you've generally solved the problem of architects making pedestrian unfriendly commercial malls in suburban sprawl developments.
Architects, once they know that a new mode of transportation is either here or predictably coming within the lifetime of their development, will accommodate it without much debate. Let's say the magically patent unencumbered $599 Segwee is projected to be three years out. Why would anybody design a shopping mall in 2004 that's designed to last 20 years in its current configuration without taking into account a major new shopping reality that's going to be around for 17 of them?
Thus the problem of unwalkability has a simple technological solution and those who care about such things deeply should, by all means create studies to find the price point and assemble prizes for the first person to create a Segway like device that hits that price point.
The battlefield Internet is moving forward and it looks like it will progress along the same style 'S' curve as the Internet itself into a full fledged occupation net that covers all aspects of an occupation. The new innovation is multilingual chat and this makes possible simplified cross-linguistic communication even when people aren't speaking the same language.
This development can take the grand strategy of Thomas Barnett and rewrite it small in the day to day activities of future US military interventions. With a solar rechargeable simputer like device deployed across the population, information connectivity is pretty quickly achieved because simputers are designed so that you don't need previous computer experience or even literacy. With these two innovations combined, you get near instant connectivity. At first, you just hand them out and announce that security notices, where to get food, and where to get jobs and money will be sent through these systems. You maintain a parallel classic announcement system for notices that can get people killed but quickly move over money, job, and resource announcements through the electronic systems.
Once they are in use for such basic things, you've got a communications pipeline into every home in the occupied zone. Tell the truth faster, more complete, than your opponents propaganda can circulate and you win the propaganda war. Provide the information tools to promote the formation of burkean 'little platoons' and you give a leg up to civil society formation. Create reporting modules so that people can inform the military about rebel movements and hideouts without leaving their homes and rebels can no longer intimidate locals into silence.
Monitor the packets that travel across the network and you'll catch rebels trying to piggyback on your system (with airborne wireless access points, they'll never be able to take over all of it). Create economics modules for trading, education modules for learning the habits of freedom, history modules to learn their own history without the cult of personality the previous dictator is likely to have created during the previous regime.
It's an information matrix that is not very useful for the creation of an empire but will provide a very effective information substrate if what you're after is planting a liberty tree.
Update: Ooops I ommitted the link to the story that made me write this article in the first place. It's corrected above and also the link in this update.
Strategypage (still no permalinks, darn it) has a story on bunker busters and the difficulty that the offense is currently having against the defense. I recall that the oil and gas folks have been experimenting with laser powered oil drilling rigs. A little googling shows that they've gotten very close to deployment with civilian systems based on Reagan era SDI patents coming into operation by 2007.
I don't think it takes much of a genius to see the full circle potential. Take an airborne laser, combine it with orbital beamed power, and you just have to maintain air superiority for the length of time it takes to drill down, using a system that "can slice through rock like a hot knife through butter." There isn't a country in the world that can challenge us in the air and this is likely to continue for some time. With such a system, we wouldn't need nuclear bunker busters.
Beamed power is currently a NASA priority and due to deploy a decade or two down the road. Putting a military application on it would certainly enhance funding and speed up deployment.
It seems that sonoluminescence might end up being a real source of energy. Sonoluminescence is the long-known phenomenon that sound waves in liquids can cause random light flashes in air bubbles. The effect was