Dana Blankenhorn

Last Roadblock to A New World is Removed

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In writing about Ipv6 Day, which was Wednesday, reporters struggled to offer a sense of what it means.

We're about to run out of Internet addresses, they said. (Well, there's a workaround, but...) Remaining Ipv4 addresses are rising in price, and we're going to run out of new ones in 2014. (True, but...) Ipv6 is better – more efficient, more secure, inevitable. (As to the last, well, sorta...)

The fact, we've been kicking the can on this for a decade. Ipv6 was actually proposed in 1996, the idea being to expand the address space from four sets of three hexadecimal numbers each – xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx – to eight sets of four – xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx. Instead of having 32 bits – 4.3 billion addresses – you have 128 bits – 3.4 x 10 to the 38^th power addresses. You convert from one to the other by putting zeroes in front of the Ipv4 number.

Solar Has Its MITS Moment

The MITS Altair looks like a box with switches, but in 1975 it was the coolest thing evah and remains an important historical milestone.

That's because it was the first actual computer you, an individual, could buy and actually do calculations with.

It's true in retrospect that MITS didn't understand the vocabulary of personal computing, that we needed a familiar input (a keyboard), and a familiar output (a TV) to make this more than an engineering toy. But still...there's a reason Bill Gates visited founder Ed Roberts on his deathbed. 

Well, solar power is now having its MITS moment, and the Ed Roberts of our time may turn out to be Arthur Chew.

Chew runs a little outfit called Spinray Energy, in North Scituate, a town in western Rhode Island midway between Providence and the Connecticut border. And his MITS Altair, called the PowerDeck, is an $1,100 do-it-yourself solar system, which you can just plug into your house. No contract, no engineer, no nothing, just 200 watts of pure solar power. UL-listed. 

Chew is modest about what he's done, noting that it's not a replacement for rooftop solar arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars, more of a “stepping stone” for those who want to “experiment” with the idea.

All Chew has done is create a kit around simple panels and microinverters, then put it on Amazon.com. Amazon, in turn, is now offering the kit for 10% off, $999 if you act now. They're saying shipments take one to three weeks.

I'm being careful when I call this a MITS system. I don't want you to think that all the problems of DIY solar are solved. But the way is now clear to build on this and actually create the solar equivalent of the Apple II, years ahead of schedule.

It's an important moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publishers Screw Google News, and Google News Screws You

Over the last few years I have come to rely on Google News. It provides the most links to every news story, and scanning the main page gives me a one-minute view of the headlines, not just globally but in my areas of interest.

But lately publishers have been screwing Google News with new policies, and Google News has in turn been screwing its readers.

The reason: paywalls. Publishers think you should pay for reading their stuff. Fine, I won't read my stuff.

But Google doesn't want to piss them off, and still links to it. Worse, it now links without identifying the paywall. This is sometimes because it has made deals with publishers for “publicity” purposes, giving those who link to stories through Google News some access to the actual stuff. (Although if you try to leave that particular page you quickly find you're out of luck.)

It's for this reason that I avoid The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I can find out what's going on without them, thank you very much. They are not as essential as they think. And if we're forced to pay separately for each newspaper we look at online, how many papers are we going to look at? Exactly.

The purpose of these paywalls isn't so much to make money as to eliminate competition. Make a successful paywall a requirement for competing and there will be a whole lot less competition. 

Worse is what Google is allowing The Financial Times to do. They offer a story on Google News, but if you click on it you don't go to the story. Instead you go to the paper's main page. This is a strategy right out of Murdoch, circa 1998, and it's stupid. I have sometimes found Google adding a preliminary page to this hosing, saying that you're going to some long URL (which savvy readers can identify as the home page, although it includes all sorts of cookie data in it) and you should click here to give permission for the move.

Not good enough.

The old policy made sense. Identify when there's a paywall, or a forced subscription wall. Let me make the choice whether to click or not.

Better yet. Don't offer a link to something you're not letting people link to. (Or charge for the link as you would for an ad, and identify it as such.)

Europe's FDR Moment

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Something about this latest market move south troubles me.

It may have to do with the politics of the players. I've been writing at Seeking Alpha for almost a year now, and if there is one thing I've learned it's that most of the voluble small investors I see there are Republicans. Usually conservative ones.

Which means they buy the whole malarkey of the right. That the only way out of deficit is to throw grandma from the train. You can't raise taxes on the “wealth producers,” because they'll either quit or move. We can't cut the military budget, neither. Nope, it's break the promises of two generations, Medicare and Social Security. Otherwise you're not serious.

Something else I've observed about these folks. Pessimism doesn't quite cut it. Cynicism doesn't quite cut it. Armageddon-ism sounds closest. They assume the worst in people, they see unmitigated disaster at every turn, yet they seem to assume someone other than themselves will suffer when that happens.

The Lessons of Europe

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As this is written a second European panic is taking place, one you can put alongside the one from last year. (Picture from TotallyMoney.)

But even while the markets are roiled, policymakers are learning some serious lessons:

1. Countries aren't people. There is no austerity fairy.

2. Traders like action. Action is all they create.

The Education Revolution

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Turns out it takes two things to spur a tech revolution.

One is capability. The other is cost.

Health care resisted automation for decades after the PC. It only began succumbing (and it's a continuing struggle) after costs got so out-of-control that care became unaffordable for increasing parts of the middle class.

It didn't matter to doctors that PCs and networks could distribute data faster than their secretaries. Automation threatened their control of the customer. Not just the retention of the account, but the choices they made on treatment, their autonomy. Their power.

Some types of technology were acceptable. Systems that made it easier to get paid, new machines, these were readily accepted. But collecting and moving patient records didn't really start until the 2009 stimulus provided the money and set a firm deadline for the industry – about 2 ½ years from now. And even now progress is agonizingly slow, with doctors, clinics and hospitals making, not tech choices, but business choices. The winners in the Electronic Health Record market turn out to be the insurers and hospital networks, who are enhancing their own control over both patients and physicians.

Education has been much the same. Even after the Internet, and wi-fi, broke the cost barrier for networked education, principals and administrators have resisted technology fiercely, for the same reason doctors did.

It's about control. If kids have network access, they can learn things that aren't in the textbook. They may even learn that teachers are engaging, not in education, but in political indoctrination, enforced from on high. The smart ones might resist and get away.

The same is true, doubly true, in higher education. Even though networks make it possible for anyone to learn anything at any time, credentialism has locked kids into rote classrooms taught by unsympathetic drones at ridiculous prices.

Teacher-controlled education is as unsustainable as doctor-controlled health care.

The War Against Oil is Being Won

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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With natural gas prices having tanked, and the President being given stick on the campaign trail over high gas prices and failed subsidies at Solyndra and elsewhere, it may be hard to see that the War Against Oil is being won.

But it is.

The War Against Oil is a long-term project, begun some years ago, meant to wean the market from its dependence on fossil fuels and create a new era of sustainable abundance. It is at the heart of today's politics, oil interests having taken command of our politics 12 years ago and retaining an absolute stranglehold on the Republican Party. But this is, in the end, an economic struggle, and what ultimately matters is cost.

Solyndra, and the other loan guarantee recipients who have struggled, are in fact symbols of this war being won. They failed because their low-cost technologies could not compete in the marketplace, against lower-cost technologies. Because of the pressure created by companies like Solyndra, solar panel production costs are now below $1/watt, and they continue to decline.

The ultimate goal is a cost of roughly 50 cents/watt, which would make solar energy the cheap energy for much of the electric grid. It's already the obvious choice where the grid doesn't exist (which is most of the world), and it can be delivered where it is produced, a huge cost advantage.

Right now the market is dominated by a single technology, polysilicon, and by a single country, China. But the opportunity is so huge that American innovators, working with organic compounds, mirrors, and rare earths, are poised to blow through the current cost floor over the next four years and achieve real grid parity. And it's that point that is key here, because once you're competing effectively on price with fossil fuels, all you need do is scale profitable production to knock those fuels out of the market.

The current reduction in subsidies, in Germany, England, and elsewhere, sounds like a defeat but is in fact a victory. Because these subsidies were always based on cost, and as costs for solar fall it's natural that subsidies will fall with them. Remember, the goal isn't subsidized power, but lower-cost power, without use of fossil fuels.

Wind is problematic. Over the long run, I don't think it competes with solar, because its costs fall only arithmetically, not geometrically as tech costs do. But wind is highly reliable. What's most important about it is that it has gotten buy-in from utility companies who have found markets for the resulting power, with “green credits” that draw companies like Google, Kohl's and Starbucks into paying subsidies so government doesn't have to, and which gives them an appetite for green power.

All of which brings us to cars.

Why Gas Prices Are Rising

It's not what you think. Drilling has nothing to do with it. Oil prices have little to do with it.

This is a story of conservation and content. The story is in the refineries.

The gas you use in winter is different from what you use in summer. It's different depending on where you live.

Gas used in the winter contains a lot of butane. Butane is cheap, but it turns to gas at about the melting point of water. That's why your gas cap has a “vapor lock” – it's trying to trap the gases in the gas in the tank, so they can be used, rather than blow away and be wasted.

What replaces butane in summer gas? Mainly ethanol. Alcohol. It can be made in the refining process, or it can be made in other ways. Ethanol costs more than butane. Some people pay as much as $250/gallon for it – if it's properly aged in the right barrels. But even the cheapest ethanol has a price higher than that of butane.

What Warren Buffett Doesn't Know

Warren Buffett won himself some headlines today with another call for newspapers to charge people for content. 

Newspapers grabbed this one eagerly but there's something neither they nor Buffett know.

They already do charge. All of them.

They charge you in time. The time it takes you to read anything is a real cost, to you. I can very much understand why you would resent anyone talking about charging you money for something you're already paying for, with your time, attention, and (assuming you believe what you read) credibility. I resent it, too.

Especially since, in the old print model, content was always free to begin with. The cost of the paper was never more than the cost of getting it from the printer to you. The cover price was split between the newscarrier (or newstand) and the truck that dropped piles of paper on the street (or driveway).

How were writers paid 20 years ago? Advertising. The ads that surrounded the content paid for the writers, the editors, the salesmen, the typesetting, and the printing. Not to mention the executives at the top of the tower and the profits that went to shareholders.

Bitzio Bids For App Store Bit-ness

Not every interesting idea I see at Seeking Alpha (where I'm now the #1 writer on technology) is from the Fortunate 500, although that's what gets the clicks.

Some are in the "pink sheets," the penny stock listings where much is dross, but some nuggets can turn into gold.

Companies like Bitzio Inc., whose symbol is BTZO.

According to Bill Schonbrun, head guy (OK, CEO) , Apple doesn't really want to run an app store. That is, they don't want to be in the business of approving – or disapproving – every program that runs on its iPhones and iPads.

They just want their cut of anything that's sold.

To Schonbrun, this spells opportunity. Bitzio has created a system that lets anyone create a Web app, that runs in an as Javascript and HTML5, which Bitzio will then distribute and monetize through ads.