Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Power Sources, The Future of Tanning, Amazing Mazes

Aluminum smelters and data centers. Are alike in needed abundant and reliable electrical power. So the Columbia River valley is growing a crop of server farms. The Economist article notes that virtualization technology can be applied to migrate processing to where the juice is cheaper, as well as optimize the number of servers powered up to handle the given workload. Indeed, virtualization management startups are being reflagged as 'green' as fast as the PPT decks and web sites can be rewritten. Remapping the network connections, storage and other resources used by virtualized processes could sink any savings into a sea of management overhead if not optimized as well.

RIP, Robert Asprin. John Scalzi reports the passing of the well-known fantasy author. His Thieves' World was one of the more enjoyable multi-author sword and sorcery creations. Some few us also remember him as "Yang the Nauseating" in days gone by. I can think of far worse ways to go than on a couch, reading an SF novel.

All that time video-gaming was not wasted. At least if you want to join the Army or Marines and use the real thing. Designers of weapons and other interactive systems can now take facility with game controllers, computers, and networks for granted. We've come a long ways from the days when we tracked down (still abundant) naive users to try out our latest designs.

Hope for the pasty white? Perhaps for future generations: While I was paying attention to other things, the genetics behind human skin pigmentation were figured out. Seems that crosses between the melanin endowed and those less so 'average down', towards the paleface end. Not to fear, given the worldwide genome pool, a few more generations of 747s, migration and out-marriage, and everyone will come with a decent base tan pre-installed. It will be a more boring but perhaps more peaceful world, and fewer engineers will have to brave carcinoma to lose their hacker's pallor.

Speaking of microloans for mobiles. Here's a report by Kevin Kelly on a talk by Iqbal Quadir, founder of the original loans for village and family mobile phones program in Bangladesh.

Concrete Spaghetti. You think the MacArthur Maze is a mess? Check out these feats of civil engineering in Japan.

The Roving Eye: Energy, Blackmail and Memorial Day

Freeman Dyson gives a take on global warming and energy policy, in the form of a book review of William Nordhaus' "A Question of Balance". Written in Dyson's usual clear and concise style, it spells out conclusions for the layman and policy maker. Being an old modeling wonk, I'd like to know more about Nordhaus' DICE simulation that underlies the comparisons, but the lessons are pretty clear: The only clear policy winner out there, other than getting lucky with technology fixes for cheap energy, is a carbon tax. Direct government regulation is an economic catastrophe, and the more arbitrary and heavy-handed the worse. Al Gore's prescription comes out as a tens of trillions disaster, no surprise from someone who doesn't seem to have grip on either economics or engineering. If we're to get lucky with technology fixes, the best way to improve our chances is a carbon tax that creates a reliable incentive for inventors and investors. The current ethanol subsidy/tariff fiasco stands as an example of the outcome when winners are picked by political fiat.

Meanwhile, what's happening with the price we currently paying for energy? We're handing a cool trillion dollars a year to OPEC, according to an article by Bob Zubrin, whose work I've reviewed here. Not only is that crippling to our economy, but a good fraction of the money goes to prop up regimes pursuing policies inimical to our welfare, such as promoting socialism and Islamism. So while we're talking about a carbon tax, we should be discussing an additional levy on imported petroleum and gas. Meanwhile, go full bore after tar sands, oil shale, and - yes - drill offshore and in ANWR. If the right can get around the need for carbon taxes, it's time for the left to quit whinging about doing what we need to survive a transitional period. Reduce impact, but drill and dig. Those who oppose are effectively voting for more tombstones in our military cemeteries. There's only so long that the citizenry are going to put up with blackmail by those who happen to live on top a pool of oil, but add little value and often seek our harm, a fact likely obscured by the political battles of the moment. We can fix the problem by sweat and innovation, starting now, or by force later.

As we start the summer holiday season, and remember those who sacrificed for our freedom, it's also good to recall how good Americans have it. We live in a style beyond the dreams of our ancestors, and are not - yet - in a mortal struggle for survival. We're in a season when politicians of every stripe are incented to convince us we have bad problems that only they can solve. That's a siren song well worth ignoring. When political interests give us an ethanol fiasco, or prove unable to face simple actuarial realities, it's fair to ask what confidence we should have that government can fix the energy (or any other) mess with regulation and prescription. The best Memorial Day gift the government and politicians could give the American people is to get out of the way.

An OLPC Autopsy

I haven't written about the One Laptop Per Child project before, since I've picked it as a failure in the making from the get-go. Now that it's wandering around gut shot and waiting to fall down, it may be worth some examination in quest of lessons learned. Unfortunately, many of those lessons are old ones, but some reinforcement at others' expense never hurts.

The project has its own five point mission statement. I'd take that statement, blend with actual behavior, and distill out three de facto design points:

1. Provide networkable computing hardware at a rock bottom price, such that developing countries and their citizens can afford it.
2. Create a visual user interface and storage metaphor that is an alternative to the consensus files & apps form handed down from PARC and the Mac. As a matter of cost reduction and principle, build this entirely on open source.
3. Support a particular type of constructivist learning for children using the machines.

And, by the way, accomplish this with an organization of academics who had never shipped a product, nor tackled any project at scale. Not that I'd have funded a squad of successful Dell and Apple veterans to try it in their place. The problem is reality gaps and internal contradictions in the design statement itself. Those are the entrails worth examining, and I'll do it in more or less the same order as the design points.

The Roving Eye: The Disaggregation Generation, A Merger Of Inconvenience, Too Much Greenery?

Second Order Effects. Growing up in a low-friction economy, taking networked media for granted, may have profound effects on society and its organization, observes Michael Malonein a great WSJ piece. I've often found it ironic that electronic media, conceived in part with the idea of 'augmenting' large hierarchical organizations, have at times had the effect of pouring acid on them instead. Another effect has been to shift attention to areas where friction still binds, such as the need to free healthcare risk pooling from ties to specific companies, without turning it into a government bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the regulatory and compliance burden on even small enterprises continues to grow, not shrink. At some point these two trends are going to impact head-on.

Now there's an investing theory. Let's have all the annoying companies buy each other. Comcast acquires Plaxo.

Why I'll be backing McCain. It's certainly not because he's my favorite politician. For one, he takes a too casual - if not arrogant - attitude towards the First Amendment. Nonetheless, he will have my vote and support. This guy says why.

Has Green hype gone over the top? Well, yes.

The Roving Eye: Someone Poke Fake Steve, Spybots Invade England!, Genetic Nannyism

Reality sets in at Facebook: Low entry barrier, low CPM. Even Fake Steve has noticed that most Facebook apps are fluff. More pointedly, developers are seeing very low effective CPM rates. CPM being a rather obsolete concept, I'd prefer to see data presented in revenue-per-user terms, as here. But it's clear that the open, easy, widely adopted Facebook is struggling to monetize, while the smaller, focused, and closed LinkedIn is claiming much higher effective rates (see interesting discussion here.) I'm still picking Facebook to be the Pointcast story of this decade.

Winning the War with Rhino Snot. Letting the troops (as versus the Pentagon) name your products can have interesting results. This company looks like it's self-supporting, but it would be fun to see its CEO try to get through a VC pitch without cracking a grin. It would definitely earn a place on the 'best name' honor roll.

Better see what's hiding in the closet. Following the precedent of DARPA's robotic Grand Challenge, Great Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD) is mounting its own competition for automatons, with a twist. This time the robots are for surveillance purposes, meant to spy out snipers, IEDs and armed vehicles and soldiers in a village sized trial area. The task specific element of the challenge ups the ante from DARPA's trials, which were mostly about success in navigation. The MoD's competition also allows cooperating teams of bots, which could be of different types. One team anticipates coordinating a team of flying and earthborne bots. The MoD trial will take place in August.

The best things IBM ever made... were those clicky, battleship-weight PC keyboards. Dan's Data sings the praises of the 'buckling spring' design. (Via Derek Miller). Having spent many hours banging on an awesome converted Selectric used as the console on a IBM 1800 way back when, the PC keyboard was a welcome relief from the mushy action of the VT series and other 'glass TTYs' of the time. Almost worth having to put up with segment registers. The economics of the PC industry and weight requirements for portability put these things into the museum, but I still miss 'em.

What happened to 'Know Thyself'? Our self-appointed guardians in New York and California are on watch, making sure you can't get your genome analyzed at your own expense. Because it raises big concerns: 'What will patients do with this information? " Gee, would you suppose that might be their own business? if you wanted to freeze private investment into this area, you couldn't have picked a better way than this kind of statist fear-mongering. And maybe that's the point.

What Google Should Buy -plus!- Fun With R

The Experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a survey experiment that I was attempting using a new Google Docs interface, and promised a report on the experience. Here it is, along with some thoughts on implications for Google.

The Docs spreadsheet itself is pretty easy to figure out. (I did not read the documentation - an experienced user shouldn't need it for an entry level program). It takes a bit to get used to the somewhat modal interface required when using a browser to substitute for 'normal' menus in Excel or the like. However, it's fairly easy to find the common operations by just knocking around a bit. It would be nice to have a quick 'what do you want to do' internal search options - without dancing paper clips. I give the initial experience an A-.