Samsung Gasses Up

Samsung has invented a fuel cell for laptops which will keep them going continuously for a month. It runs on methanol (also called a direct methanol fuel cell, or DMFC), and produces up to 50 watts of power. Looks like the only drawback is that it's a little big, about the size of a pint milk carton.

Milking the Cow

A nice read from the Ubuntu founder on how Vista will try and confound Linux from gaining ground. Ultimately, I think Linux will win out, it's just a matter of the diehards dying hard so the new generation can take hold of the OS. This quotes sums up the article:

[Microsoft is] going to try to enforce their licenses much more aggressively in parts of the world where that pricing is an issue, where people do have until today continued to use pirated versions of Windows. Suddenly [they will] have to consider other options, and we do see that in emerging markets in particular, Linux is taking off because people want a stable platform that is cheaper. So in that sense, yes, Linux might well benefit from the release of Vista from a pricing and licensing control point of view.

Microsoft is milking the cow here, trying to squeeze out whatever juice is left in their OS business. They have come a long way from condoning, even supporting, piracy of their operating system to get market share, haven't they? Squirt, squirt.

Refurb Reverb

For the last ten years, I've always bought refurbished computers from Dell's outlet and never had a problem. Here's a great piece from the NYT on why refurb is making a debut. There are a few facts here I didn't know, like NEC makes a monitor with corn-based plastic, and New Hampshire and Minnesota have now restricted throwing monitors into the trash.

The Singularity is Near, But Scarcity is Closer

You have probably heard of Zeno, a fellow who is credited with identifing several mathemathical paradoxes, including the dichotomy paradox. This one states that is order to go from point A to point B you have to go through the middle, and since there's always a middle to go through you never get to point B.

I've been reading a bit of Ray Kurzweil and really enjoying his work. Ray is a very visionary guy and when reading his work I was wondering about the middle points we will need to go through. In this article, I pick out a few middle points that will take some doing to get over.

• Peak Copper - We are going to need a large amount of this metal to bridge the physical gaps in the network infrastructure so we can all talk to each other, and it looks like we won't have enough to outfit newly developing countries in the manner that developed ones did. That would be ok if they used something else (like wireless) but they aren't. Gold doesn't look so abundant either, another necessary component for a lot of communication gear.
• People are Dumb - By Ray's own definition, the human race is capped off at about 10 to the 26 power of calculations per second. Now if we are going to interface with all these machines that will be exponentially faster, we are going to be a real bottleneck, particularly since we will only have a very small fraction of that calcualting power targeted towards this topic. The rest will be blown on silly stuff like playing doom on the OLPC, watching NASCAR, and changing poopy diapers. I seriously wonder whether enough people care about promoting the capabilities of the human race to get there. And finally, the big one:
• Computing is About Power - Power, in the sense that we primarily use the power of computers to leverage our power over other human beings, and to get what we want on a personal level. We use them to send spam, target missiles, view the latest playboy centerfold. It's a control thing, a chimpanzee thing which has been with us forever. And I just don't see people embracing a machine that's 10,000 times smarter than themselves to do anything that will remotely affect their life without having the opportunity to subvert it whenever they want. We are a little too scarce on controlling our emotions for that one to happen.

Via Takes a Blow, the US Takes a Beating

Looks like Via's carbon free computing campaign took a shot recently when journalists pointed out that Via only offsets the power used by their CPUs, not the carbon actually used to manufacture the product. Yes, it's a bit disingenuous. However, the real losers seems to be the US journalists, who (according to the article) didn't even know what carbon free computing meant:

...the case is different in the US; a spokesman told me that during an American press conference the concern was over consumers thinking 'carbon free' means there is no carbon at all in the PC.

C'mon, everyone knows 'puters are made of a titanium carbonic alloy from the planet Hoth. My four year old said it best - whatever.

A Little Light Reading

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers Inc. [ASHRAE] has published a book on data center liquid cooling that could promote standardization of the technology. It is available here. With the tome covering such topics as 'Settleable Particulates' and 'Raised Floor with Perimeter Modular CRACs', you aren't going to take this one to the beach, but you could get your CIO to pay for it.

Lets (Get The) Feed Off Each Other

When you are in the blogging world, you read about 50 other blogs a day that are related to your topic to find the new stories. Heres one from ecoGeek where they review a human power generator. Looks like you can crank out (pun intended) about 300 watts, should be plenty to keep your laptop going, but probably not your dryer.

Popes Got It Down?

Like myself and others, The Pope has been wondering recently if technology is really worth all the hype. I quote from the man himself:

"Does a 'Saviour' still have any value and meaning for the men and women of the third millennium?" he asked in his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message to the faithful in St Peter's Square, broadcast live to millions in 40 countries.

"Is a 'Saviour' still needed by a humanity which has reached the moon and Mars and is prepared to conquer the universe; for a humanity which knows no limits in its pursuit of nature's secrets and which has succeeded even in deciphering the marvelous codes of the human genome?"

I wonder if hes is not answering his own question out loud here. Ray Kurzweil might be able to answer it for him. Of course, maybe Jesus was an alien so (ironically) technology is what got him here in the first place.

This Time With Feeling

Paul Strassmann is a fellow who has been critical of IT spending for some time now. His resume is about as impressive as they come; he has also authored many seminal works in the field, including the Squandered Computer, which I have reviewed before (The ROI Hath No Clothes.)

A good exercise for the start of the new year will be to calculate your Information Productivity Index, which measures exactly how much output you are getting out of your information processing dollars. Paul explains exactly how to do this in this Baseline 500 writeup. You will probably be surprised at how low your score is; in fact, half of all companies don't even get a positive score, implying their entire IT program is just a hobby. Where are you?

First Principles (Bob Black Attack)

It's high time we got to the root of this green computing problem, and I think I have figured out what it is. Me, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research think that it's work. They estimate that if everyone worked as long and hard as Americans do, the world is going to use 15-30 percent more energy than we are now by 2050.

It reminds me of the essay The Abolition of Work, written by Bob Black in 1985. It is a short, though strangely compelling piece about how we should all really do less. I have tongue only somewhat in cheek when I state that the most environmentally friendly thing any of us can do is go to sleep. The cat is our hero here - with most sleeping 13 to 14 hours a day, and almost never using computers (well, sometimes), they are about as green as you can get.

Something tells me that if everyone in the world works harder, that the 15 to 30 percent more energy we use won't make things 15 to 30 percent better. In fact, the solution is right under our noses - just sit on on your fanny and do nothing. It's easy, in fact you are probably doing it right now. So, turn off that computer and take a nap, write me and let me know how it goes.

Gaming the System

Recenly I've been thinking about the underlying rationale of using a computer to do anything. Frankly, it has dawned on me that perhaps the entire 'IT revolution' is a bit overrated; we are pouring billions, trillions of dollars into these things annually. Are we really getting that much out of it?. At first, I thought I was just reading too much Nick Carr, but now I've got a better idea; I think computing is about Power. And yes, that's a capital P, Power like Max Weber Power:

"By power is meant every opportunity/possibility existing within a social relationship, which permits one to carry out one's own will, even against resistance, and regardless of the basis on which this opportunity rests."

Basically, It's an "I'm going to tell you what to do" type of thing, this old, rather un-fun competitive chimp infrastructure full of winners and losers. I don't see anything wrong with that, but we should clarify that connecting to the Net, and the trillions we are spending to do so, is really about access to Power, the Power to control and profit off of other human beings. Opinions like this put projects such as OLPC and rural wifi in a different light - maybe we are just connecting more suckers to the Internet to take their money.

The irony of this is that I don't think the investment is worth the returns. In fact, I think it is a giant gambling game, where instead of hunting the Woolly Mammoth, we are now hunting virtual information to put food on the table. I'm the first to admit have a heap of personal examples where I tried to make a million off the net - online poker playing, domain name investing, surfing for money to name a few - Guess what, It didn't happen; my poker bot was just as good as people (or bots) I was playing against; I bought 200 domain names and sold one; the surfing thing took too much time, an I ended up making 30 cents an hour. Who is gaming who here, and are we going to keep turning earth into computers to keep this going? It can't last forever.

Mainlining

You might have heard about AMD's project to bring 50 percent of the world online by 2015. It's called 50x15, and it's a pretty grand initiative:

...today, less than 15 percent of the world's six billion people have access to the Internet and the economy it is helping to drive. This not only prevents people in high-growth and developing regions from realizing greater educational, social and business opportunities, it also limits the opportunities for their country's economic growth and participation in the global economy.

AMD's 50x15 initiative is a bold and far-reaching effort to develop new technology and solutions that will help enable affordable Internet access and computing capability for 50 percent of the world's population by the year 2015. With the global population estimated to reach 7.2 billion people in 2015, there is tremendous potential for 50x15 to bring billions of people into the digital age.

It's an interesting idea, and I can agree with the nub of the argument. I'm kinda wondering where this project ranks in terms of other global projects, like access to drinking water (about 1 in people people don't have) and elimination of diarrhea (responsible for 18 percent of all children's deaths). Can we really get 50 percent?

What the Other Guy is Doing

Let's see what's on the plate for this week:

• The financial services industry goes green.
• Toshiba launches green laptops in India.
• LG electronics creates a laptop that runs on natural gas.
• Sun continues their innovation initiative.
• Antec introduces green power supplies.

That Giant Crunching Noise

Vinnie is a guy I met on a comment section on a blog. Wow, could I have said that five years ago? But let's continue. Here's a nice one from his blog on how Utility IT is being squeezed to nothing. In Vin's definition, Utility IT is:

...any Infrastructure product introduced over 18 months ago, and any Software or Services offerings introduced over 3 years ago. Most vendor investments in these products should have been recouped.

This sounds good to me. Furthermore, what I dig about Vinnie analysis is that he has real numbers for specific vendors on what they need to do to get their house in order. Specifically:

So if you are Oracle, think about annual maintenance at single digit rates, not 22%. CIOs, from their own offshoring experiences, know what Oracle has saved from growing its staff by thousands of employees in low cost markets like India.

If you are SAP as you seek large mySAP upgrade fees, be prepared to price your core FI/CO, MM, SD functionality at $ 300 a production user. You recouped that investment a long time ago. If not, you are encouraging CIOs to look closer at BPO offerings which offer less maintenance/upgrades hassle and a lot lower TCO.

If you are EDS or Accenture, learn to make money at $ 75 an hour, not $ 200 as you try to sell "transformational" outsourcing.

If you are IBM and serious about On-Demand make it reflect Utility economics and service levels

If you are Sun, explain why you deserve a premium over Linux pricing

If you are Gartner, discount your research pricing on Utility spend by 75% and move to pay for results if you can help crunch the Utility spend.

Rock on. Let's put the T back in IT.

We Are The Battery

Pictured here is the pull string power generator for the OLPC. According to the article, pulling the string for one minute gives you an hour of light or 25 minutes of talk time on a cell phone. What a great idea, how about we Americans, as the largest people on the planet, use up our extra poundage into making energy. Let's see, one pound of fat is about 3500 calories; that's about 4 kilowatts. 300 million Americans, maybe 10 pounds overweight each, for a grand total of 12,000 Megawatts! Sounds like plenty.

In the Ghetto

Here's an interesting take on virtualization; it's the new ghetto in the data center, as more and more servers are crammed onto a single piece of hardware to cut costs. Robert Mitchell, the author, doesn't think it's such a great idea:

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Management, troubled by server utilitization rates in the range of 10%, was delighted to discover virtualization as a way to get more out of existing hardware. Some organizations have begun cost saving initiatives that require all new applications to reside in virtual machines unless a business case can be made to break policy. Unfortunately, the temptation for some overzealous bean counters is to put too many applications on each physical server.

Ok, there could be a tendency to load a virtual server up to the breaking point. But 10 percent? Come on, we are talking about massive waste here, the equivalent of driving a tank to the 7-11 to get a quart of milk. Typically, 40 percent is about the figure where the hardware people start getting queasy anyway; nevertheless, I challenge anyone to draw me a parallel where you buy a piece of equipment and baby it in this manner. Mitchell concludes that "Such determinations can't always be made purely on a technical basis.", but I have to disagree. You benchmark, weight the options, and allocate the timeslices to the applications. It's a numbers game, and the numbers can be way better than they are now.

The Wood Thing

If you are desparate for those green geeky gifts, try the twiggy thumb drive from Guido Oooms. Starting at 79 Euros, it's not the cheapest thing out there, but it's the thought that counts.

Two Sawbucks

That's the price of your new IT infrastructure, after Google announces that they will be hosting domains. Once again, Nick Carr has a great wrtite up on this:

In some ways, the traditional vendors seem to be going about their business in traditional ways, selling lots of gear and software licenses and maintenance contracts, pushing upgrades and service agreements - and making a pretty penny off all of it. And yet the entire enterprise seems increasingly unreal. Watching the IT business today feels kind of like watching one of those Roadrunner cartoons when Wile E. Coyote would race off a cliff and manage to tread air for a few long seconds, his legs moving in a blur, his mind not quite registering the fact that the ground had disappeared from beneath him.

Couldn't agree more, it's Old King Cole running around in his birthday suit. Except, it's like there is thousands of kings running around, IT folks who are keeping the smoke and mirrors going. What are they so afraid of? Let Google do the grunt work; you can reallocate your staff to the innovative fun stuff, like solar data centers.

The Power Octopus

You know when you have eight different things plugged into a single wall outlet? That's called an octopus. It seems like these days in IT everyone is pointing at their own energy octopus and wondering how to solve the problem. Treehugger has had it with screen savers and phantom power. Worldchanging is taking on servers, and Gomeler is concentrating on the boards themselves. Some even are concerned about our power usage and health. It's pretty clear that some folks are sick of talking about it, and are hungry for action.

Here's my advice; follow the old adage of reduce, reuse,recycle. With about 80 percent of the total energy used going into just making the computer, and most machines being capable of being used for six years, that will make quite a dent. For starters.

A No Brainer

President Bush is about to sign a bill into law to promote the use of energy efficient servers in the United States. The bill also provides for the EPA to have a good hard look at data centers and what can be done to cut their energy consumption.

The bill passed the house 417 to 4; the Senate voted unanimously. We are going to see at lot more this this, lawmakers doing what they do best - make laws. I think a round of applause is in order!

At the Bridge

Just letting you all know that I am in San Francisco until mid-week. Will resume regular posting after that!

Virutal Slaves in Virtual Worlds

Nick Carr has another insightful piece on the fact that Second Life avatars use as much power as the typical Brazilian. The analysis is fascinating:

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that's:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

There's something a little mysterious about these avatars, these virtual avatar/people. As I pointed out in Do My Bidding, we Americans already have about 100 energy slaves working for us already on a daily basis. I see avatars as just another appliance working for us, like a toaster or a refrigerator, giving us a bit of fun or maybe even making some money. But when it gets down to it, when energy is one dollar per kWh, are we going to keep or avatar or our refrigerator?

Mommy, Where's my God Box?

A God Box is a device that holds every bit of some particular media in one place. For example, if you wanted to create a God Box of all the music ever recorded, you would need space for about 46 million songs. The Library of Congress takes about 10 terabits, and the whole Internet is about 100 terabits.

Toshiba is bringing the God Box a little closer to reality, with their 100GB hard drive that is about the size of a battery. And, as a bonus, it's RoHS compliant too. Storage prices have been falling steadily for years, but this is going to push it to the next level. Oh, and let's not forget the 10 terabyte CD that was just invented.

It's hard to say what the effects of these God Boxes will have have on the younger generation, the Abundance generation, but I think it will be both very subtle and very deep. Imagine never deleting an email, saving all of your telephone calls, recording your entire life on video. Ultimately, having all the information you will ever need right at your fingertips all the time is probably the ultimate ecofriendly thing to do.

Strong Language, for a Zombie

That's funny, I thought that Greenpeace's report on electronic toxins blew away in the wind after being soundly refuted by Keith Ripley and RoughlyDrafted. But no, it's back and kicking, having been reported on recently by both zdnet and computerweekly. Here is some strong language:

"In sharp contrast, Apple is awarded the last position because the company has made absolutely no improvements to its policies or practices since the ranking was first released three months ago, although most of its competitors have improved environmental policies," said Kruszewska. "Despite being the world leader in innovation and design, Apple is losing the race by failing to keep up with the other companies."

Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics ranked the top 14 PC and laptop producers on their use of harmful chemicals and waste recycling. Not one PC manufacturer gained a green ranking, while Apple and HP products contained the highest levels of toxins, according to Greenpeace.

It's always surprising when a zombie talks, you always need to wonder what the reason for such an odd event is. Wouldn't have anything to do with getting kicked out of Macexpo, would it?

It may not be appropriate, but I'm going to use some strong language of my own. Right now. This is malarkey; there, I've said it. I'm not saying Apple is perfect, but Greenpeace is about as misguided on this one as they were when they drove the Rainbow Warrior into Tubbataha Reef.

The Last Refuge

Certainly this is a lot of Microsoft for one week but I couldn't resist, because my previous thoughts are vindicated! And who can resist that.

I've mentioned before that Windows may be very popular in America because it is an American product (see One Eye on the Flag) Now it seems that maybe the British should buy it too, if they want to keep their productivity up. That's the message Roger Whitehead came away with after attending the London launch of Microsoft Vista. I quote:

Samuel Johnson’s dictum—“patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”—came to mind while I sat through this bombardment of dodgy stats and implausible insinuations. I doubt that Gordon Frazer is a scoundrel, or any of his colleagues there that day, but I did think they were desperate.

Yeah, maybe waving the flag to sell software is a bit much. Unfortunately, it seems like this can backfire - couldn't one argue that your patriotic duty is to install the free, open source Linux? Why, that's exactly what other countries are doing.

The Color of OLPC

Seems like more than just Markus is interested as to what the purpose of the OLPC project is - now we have the Green Party blasting Microsoft for trying to put Windows on the OLPC. Why should the Green Party care?

I'm betting they care because they see the project as not just a technology project, but an appropriate technology project. I would have to agree, the OLPC project is not just about creating low cost laptops, but it is also trying to solve other problems as well such as access to technology, energy use, etc. In my book, that makes OLPC green.

But one can take a few different sides here. One might argue that the project is just a low cost hardware project, and it doesn't really matter what people do with the boxes after they are made. Certainly, with DOOM being ported almost immediately and the Nigerians about to run their scams on the thing, this might be the only practical view. So maybe the OLPC is a nice neutral color, maybe beige.

There's another possible color. Say some for-profit vendors get together with the manufacturers and distributors of the OLPC and start giving them incentives to install their proprietary software on them at the factory. It costs a little bit on money but they can just pass the cost on to the children getting the laptops. Now say the OLPC steering committee allows this. What color would that be? Well, it's right up there in the upper right hand corner.

Vistasaur

Could Vista be the last operating system ever produced for profit? Dean Takahashi thinks so. I particularly like the economic arguments for his case. For example, According to Dean, Microsoft put 10,000 people on this project for 5 years; at 200K per employee (probably a little high), that's a 10 billion dollar investment. Seems like a lot - heck, they probably could had gone into the fried chicken business and made more money. Imagine that, 10 billion on fried chicken!

To use my favorite analogy, at 20 watts per brain there's 40 megawatts of human brain power on this project. Seems like a lot of brain juice, especially when only 20 percent of companies surveyed think they move to Vista in the next 12 months. 10,000 of the best brains in the world working on this thing for 5 years? I have just one question, is it going to do my laundry? At least match my socks up, I hate doing that.

I think there's some other signs that the desktop is on shaky ground. Just look at that pretty picture I found on the left. Looks so green doesn't it? But Vista is a power hog (or is it?). If so, that's called greenwashing. Also, try searching for Vista in Google. Guess what comes up, the old Wintel partnership as the first link. And when you see same old, same old in the computing industry, you know that something is just not right. It's bad enough that Microsoft is trying to stuff Windows CE on the OLPC, must we also eat Vistasaur? It's a little stringy.

Firing on All Three Cylinders

Dell has come out with several new green desktops and servers. The Optiflex 740 and 320 are supposedly more energy efficient than most, though I can't find the documentation to support it. Here's their site, you give it a whirl.

Dell has also come out with a few server lines, the 1950 and 2950 lines, that have similiar claims. Clearly, the processor uses less energy, but the machine is also less functional. And it costs more.

C'mon, this is a three cylinder offering, as good or as bad as any other product. As that biting realm of sarcasm the Register has observed, "All of the hardware makers look to capitalize on rising energy costs by pitching themselves as environmentally sound sellers of plastic, metal and chemically-enhanced computing innards." How about putting Linux on it and extending the warranty to five years? Try harder Dell.

I'm as Free as a Beer Now

Chris Anderson has a nice piece here on the economies of abundance, which I think is quite important to what is currently happening in the IT sphere. It seems that everywhere you look in IT these days, things are essentially free. Bandwidth, that's essentially free. Hard drive space, almost free, along with computers, printers, outsourced software developers. It's an information factory that's being constructed.

The problem seems to be that none of this free stuff actually turns into cost savings; I recently experienced two events which just highlighted this point. The first was talking to a fellow who works for a very prominent university in the Boston area; he was installing a new email server for a few departments. The cost? 400 thousand dollars. My jaw hit the sidewalk.

The second was talking with some IT people from a Fortune 50 company who wanted to host a few hundred gigabytes of data for a project. The cost? One million dollars. This time my jaw hit China.

Economic tends to focus on the scarcity of resources, not on the abundance of them, and that's probably why when, say, the cost of hard drive space drops to nothing, the costs stay the same to use it. And I'm going to tell you what you already know, that most IT people are terrified of abundance. As Anderson points out, what a wrong way to go:

Abundance thinking--understanding the implications of "practically free"--is a core competence of our age. It brought us everything from the iPod ("what if storage were so cheap you could put your entire music collection in your pocket?") to Gmail ("why should you ever have to delete an email?"). Most truly disruptive technologies disrupt because they take a scarcity assumption and, thanks to some technology that generates abundances, simply turn it on its head. Just think VOIP (why should phone calls, which use hardly any bandwidth, cost anything?) or how anyone under 25 uses a digital camera (why settle for stills when you'd rather have the video?)

To be a successful green computer enthusiast you will need a set of strategies for implementing abundance into your organization. For starters, try to find examples of things that are free and how they get implemented. For example, why is water and bread free at restaurants, but beer and steaks are not? What should be free in IT?

Bit Shift

Matt Stansberry always does a great job covering the world of data centers. We already know that there's a crisis looming here, particularly with power. IBM is trying to get their hands around it with a whole raft of new services and products. The biggest issue? Metrics. How to measure what it takes to make an efficient data center.

What the Other Country is Doing

This is my third article in a series on what others are doing in green computing. This week we are concentrating on specific countries and their efforts.

In Mali, for example, SMS messaging is taking off because a lot of citizens work abroad and use cell phones to send money home. Canada is dumping 67,000 tonnes of eWaste per year, but is working towards upgrading the Basel Convention to help deal with the issue (along with 160 other countries). Bolivia, Jamaica and Kenya are rapidly implementing used cell phones (Plus Brazil! as well) and the French parliament is dumping Windows for Linux. They will save millions.

Worldwide, be prepared for part shortages as RoHS and WEEE come into force. WiFi is coming to Uganda, and an Oregonian firm now specializes in leaping into dumpsters to retrieve eWaste. Companies in the UK are embracing refurbished equipment; finally, Via is building eco friendly infocenters in the Solomon Islands.