Dana Blankenhorn

The Interface Game and the iPad 2

Some good comments to my last, flippant post deserve an in-depth response.

I write. I'm a writer. That's the kind of content I create. I've been a professional writer since 1970. My favorite interface is a typewriter. I have often been very disappointed by keyboards. I think they were better in the 1980s than they are now.

I consider writing to be at the heart of all creation, even movies. And the tools for writing I see on tablets sucks. I have no idea why this stuff seems to go backward more than it goes forward.

I had a therapist 10 years ago who was using a tablet, with a stylus, to take her notes. The keyboard folded behind the tablet. I liked that.

But enough about me. Let's talk about computers.

Creating a Future for MeeGo

The decision by Nokia to abandon MeeGo in favor of Windows seemed to shock the Linux Foundation.

Jim Zemlin handled out a brief statement calling the decision "disappointing," although the handwriting should have been on the wall for months. MeeGo got a "lukewarm" (read cold) reception this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona -- buggy, slow, disappointing. "It doesn’t look like Meego will be a serious competitor anytime soon," wrote Slashgear.

But there's been no blog post yet about it, at either Linux.Com or Linuxfoundation.org. This is an important story. This may be as disappointing to me as the brief statement. If the site wants to be corporate that's fine. If they want to grow the community we need a little more.

It might help, for instance, to point out where Meego can and should go from here:

Solar Miracles Happening Every Day

What critics of solar energy fail to realize is that its growth is being matched by technology that reduces its necessity.

A generation ago, when Steve Roberts launched his ride across America, even a “portable” PC like my Kaypro had to be plugged into the wall. Today you can get infinitely more computing power in an iPhone, and while thin film solar systems may offer just at trickle of charge, it can be enough.

All sorts of Moore's Law miracles are also accompanied by lower power requirements. Modern cellular systems ride on Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) that deliver more-and-more bandwidth with less-and-less power every year. In American cities we see this reflected best in WiFi, which is 10 times faster than it was a decade ago.

Solar Breathroughs Continuing

The difference between solar power and resource power isn't just  pollution, or current costs, or the color green.

It's about trends.

Resource energy is going to get more expensive, and bringing it up to the surface will continue to cost lives. Solar energy is going to get cheaper, as technology changes. Eventually the two lines cross. Just because they haven't crossed yet does that mean we stop pushing toward solar breakthroughs, or give all our subsidies to coal, or stop buying solar systems?

A quick look at the news shows enormous progress. And it's important to note that progress is happening across the board -- in gear being made today for shipment in the next year, in gear which may come out in 2012, and theoretically.

Breakthroughs are needed on efficiency, on cost, and on durability, as well as total capacity. New plants continue to come online. Current technology, based on the same construction techniques used to make silicon chips, has greater efficiency right now than thin films made of copper, indium, gallium selenide (CIGS), but CIGS efficiency is improving, and on a per-watt basis it should prove better than silicon soon.

This doesn't mean silicon is giving up. In fact, because it's a tested technology, silicon advances are coming onto the market faster than CIGS. Sharp has begun mass production of new cells with a back contact structure and improved alignment. It estimates production for next year alone at the equivalent of 200 megawatts.

Intevac, meanwhile, just bought Solar Implant Technologies with an eye toward bringing SIT's ion implant module to market in its LEAN SOLAR production system. Note that in both these cases we're looking at serious improvements to readily-manufactured systems and immediate production.

But don't just look at silicon and CIGS. Konarka produces a thin, flexible plastic with an efficiency rating of "only" 8.3%, but the flexibility and low cost of what it calls "power plastic" give it many market advantages.

Thin film polymers can become even more efficient. Iowa State researchers (above) think they can improve the efficiency of thin films by 20% with a very thin substrate that adds texture and can capture twice the light of flat cells. This is a manufacturing technique, which could make thin films as efficient as silicon or CIGS within a very short time.

Moore's Law of Renewable Energy

There is a lot of dispute among renewable energy advocates over whether Moore's Law applies to what they do, or will ever apply.

Strictly speaking it should not. Gordon Moore was a trained scientist, who worked as an engineer. His famous Electronics article spoke only about circuit density on a silicon substrate. Moore himself has repeatedly said his law can't go on forever.

But many other exponential improvements emerge naturally from Moore's Law, so many that I wrote a book about them called Moore's Lore. What we learned in making circuits smaller came to apply to other components.

• Moore's Law of Storage -- it's easy to see exponential improvements in magnetic storage. Desktops have hundreds of gigabytes of storage, some even terabytes, where my first hard drive 26 years ago had just 10 megabytes.
• Moore's Law of Optical Storage -- We've gone from CD to DVD to BluRay. Progress is slowed by a need for standards that doesn't exist in the magnetic world.
• Moore's Law of Optics -- Dense Wide Division Multiplexing (DWDM) means we can run multiple channels on a single optical fiber, exponentially increasing carrying capacity by simply identifying colors.
• Moore's Law of Radios -- A decade ago a 10 Mbps WiFi signal was considered great. Now laptops come with 100 Mbps standard. It's possible because of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), which Texas Instruments decided to focus on rather than microprocessors.

Then there are the other outgrowths of exponential abundance made possible by these other corallaries to Moore's Law.

Moore's Law of Knowledge is what you're soaking in. You have immediate access to exponentially more facts today than you did a decade ago. Or Moore's Law of Connection, which your teenager is probably enjoying right now on his or her iPhone.

To the popular mind, all these other changes are just as much Moore's Law as his original silicon conception. Moore's Law has become a shorthand for the computerized world all around us, and for our (correct) assumption that it's just going to get better and better, faster and faster.

So how does this apply to renewable energy?

A Hundred Million Miracles

I have switched full time to a new beat -- devices which harvest the energy all around us.

In terms of this technology transformation, we're about where PCs and the Internet were at time time in 1970. Back then, you'll remember, Intel was just starting work on what would become the 4004 chip and a researcher had just sent-and-received the first online message.

Skepticism abounded. Computers were seen as giant machines useful only in accounting and scientific applications. New "minicomputers" from companies like Digital Equipment Corp. were starting to drive prices down. But the main interfaces remained the punch card and the print out.

We're at the same stage today with energy technology. Skeptics abound. Working, cost-effective systems seem thin on the ground.

Windmills work, the technology is stable, but they cost big money to erect, they do require maintenance, and each new windmill increases our supply of wind energy by one unit. Geothermal units work best where a source of Earth heat is relatively too close to the surface (to minimize drilling and energy loss from lifting the hot water) but the underlying rock structure is stable. We have not yet learned how to tap volcanoes.

Where the Next Boom Will Start

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every economic recovery is different. What worked before may recover but it's never the same.

That said, note that every new boom starts slowly. Growth is never uniform, not between industries or within an economic cycle. Recovery will be slow. It will take years. But its pace will accelerate and at some point we'll forget again what hard times felt like. That's when we'll be ready for another bust.

Let me start by looking at previous booms I have lived through:

• The 1970s happened in the oil patch. I was in Houston then and it was a lot like Dubai has been the last few years. One bank put up what looked from the air like a huge green dollar sign. That's how things were. After the crash, which was hard, there was finally a recovery, but it was never the same as it had been.
• The 1980s happened on Wall Street. I was a business reporter then and I watched as supposedly brilliant people took apart companies, then put them back together to reveal value. Everything else went up in sympathy. After the crash the Wall Street game changed. You still read about the "heroes" of that era, like Carl Icahn, but it's not the same. Nor will it be.
• The 1990s  happened on the Internet. I was an Internet reporter. I started warning of the crash in 1997, but the boom happened despite me. The bust took down a ton of companies, and I was out of work completely for over two years. But it did come back. Amazon and eBay came back. Other sites came back. Google barely existed at that time. But, again, this decade, online, has been mainly about consolidation and steady change, not revolution.
• The 2000s were all about housing. Whether the boom was real or artificial, the product of lax regulation or an attempt to cover up for the Iraq War's costs, is irrelevant right now. We created enough Confederate Money to paper the world, backed by houses that were only worth a fraction of what we paid for them, and it will take years to unwind that. When housing does "come back" it won't be the same. It can't be. But, in time, it will come back.

Moore's Law Gets Another 10 Years

I wrote The Blankenhorn Effect, my book on Moore's Law, over five years ago.

Then, as now, people underestimated the impact of Moore's Law, and predicted it would soon meet its demise.

In conventional terms -- circuits per square inch of silicon -- it's possible that limit was reached in 2004. But parallel processing and low-power designs have kept the improvements coming, and exponential improvements have also come in other areas -- hard drives, fiber optics, radios -- just as the book predicted.

Now it looks like chips themselves have another 10 years of Moore's Law improvements in them, thanks in part to design changes which replace the silicon semiconductor with metal conductors, and an insulator, hafnium oxide, between the conducting lines.

This let Intel put down lines 45 nanometers apart, against the 65 nanometer distances in other chips.

Rice Science Thursday: Palem's Project

The news release says a joint venture between Rice University and Nanyang Technical University of Singapore will launch a joint venture in very low power embedded chips, under Rice's Krishna Palem (right).

In fact, we've got something much bigger, something which demonstrates just how powerful Rice is becoming.

Palem, who co-authored a report on probabilistic CMOS chips last year, which will be at the heart of the effort, is actually a very new recruit to Rice.

He had been, until this semester, at Georgia Tech, where he had founded its Center for Research on Embedded Systems and Technology.  He's now a joint fellow of both Rice and CalTech, where he is listed as a Most Distinguished Scholar.

 

What the Financial Press Never Gets

Everything at CNBC, and in the rest of the financial press, is focused on personalities and numbers.

Never operations.

Yet operations are the real key to business success or failure. Once your business is built, it's the day-to-day operation of the business which determines your success. Not your marketing. Not your financial wizardry. Not the personality of your CEO. Not the food at your press events. Not how sexy your people are.

Operations. Nothing else.

This is easy to see by the performance this decade of Hewlett-Packard and Dell.