Ken Novak's Weblog

Seeking a Car That Gets 100 Miles a Gallon: "The same group that awarded $10 million to a team that built the first private spacecraft to leave the earths atmosphere is expected to announce today the rules for its automotive competition. The group, the X Prize Foundation, says that the automotive contest, expected to carry a prize of more than $10 million .. the organizers want to ensure that vehicles entered in the contest, which will compete in races in 2009 to determine the winner, are commercially viable. Entries must be production-ready, unlike many of the fantastical concept cars that are presented at auto shows. Each team must prepare a business plan for building at least 10,000 of the vehicles at a cost comparable to that of cars available now. ..This is not a question of curing cancer, Mr. Goodstein said. The technologies to build superefficient vehicles exist. Its just a matter of convincing manufacturers to build them."Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-04-09 03:35:18

America's Broken-Down Army: Time magazine: "A decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, Murtha is experiencing a sense of déjà vu. "The readiness of the Army's ground forces is as bad as it was right after Vietnam," Murtha tells TIME. Even Colin Powell.. acknowledges .. the service whose uniform he wore for 35 years is on the ropes. "The active Army," Powell said in December, "is about broken." ..The soldiers' change of heart is reflected in a poll by the independent Army Times. In December, for the first time, more troops surveyed disapproved of the President's handling of the war (42%) than approved of it (35%). Over the past two years, the number of troops surveyed who think victory is likely has fallen from 83% to 50%. ..McCaffrey, the retired general, says the Joint Chiefs are responsible for the state of today's Army. They rubber-stamped Rumsfeld's plan to build a smaller, more agile force while fighting two wars. McCaffrey, a Vietnam veteran, recalls the scolding lesson of Dereliction of Duty. That 1997 book explained how the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs' timidity in challenging Defense Secretary Robert McNamara allowed the U.S. to slide into that war. Written by H.R. McMaster, an Army colonel now in Iraq, the book has been required reading for many military officers. "Should there be a Dereliction of Duty II?" McCaffrey wonders aloud. "The answer is, Yes, of course.""Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-04-09 03:35:18

Bruce Sterling update: Now calling his concept "cybergreens": "They're all about creating irresistible consumer demand for cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade. It's the Net vs. the 20th-century fossil order in a fight that the cybergreens are winning. Why? Because they're not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It's not even science fiction -- it's a cybergreen manifesto.In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green."Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-04-02 03:33:07

TechComparison - Linux Virtualization Wiki: Interesting comparison chart of virtualization technologies. Also: a story of a satisfied Xen user.Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

Clone your Active Directory in 12 minutes using VMWare: Short instructions.Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

Start-Up Fervor Shifts to Energy in Silicon Valley: Yet more coverage of the boomlet that started in 2001. "Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars. It is no secret that venture capitalists have begun pouring billions into energy-related start-ups with names like SunPower, Nanosolar and Lilliputian Systems. But that interest is now spilling over to many others in Silicon Valley  lawyers, accountants, recruiters and publicists, all developing energy-oriented practices to cater to the cause. ..the Valley has always run in cycles. It is a kind of renewable gold rush, a wealth- and technology-creating principle that is always looking for something around which to organize."Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

General Motors battery development: Details with simple slides about GM's PHEV battery efforts.Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

The Globus Consortium Journal: Overview of Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing workshop. "Among the highlights was an interesting paper from Intel dissecting the performance of Xen networking. A wonderful adoption scenario was represented in the work from the University of Marburg where suspend/resume properties of VMs are being used to improve backfill strategies in the local scheduler - computations running in VMs are simply suspended when a large parallel job is scheduled to run and resumed afterwards. The remarkable part of this work was that it was very much requirement-driven and has been voted into production by users. Another interesting talk came from the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) described their experiences using virtual machines in production Grids for a couple of years now."Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

About Parabolic Trough Solar: Solid review of the field, from Sept 2005. Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20

SolarMission Solar Tower Video: "SolarMission Technologies and its Australian subsidiary, EnviroMission Limited produced this 5 minute video about its early pilot plant in Spain. It is an older video (2000) but gives a basic understanding of the solar tower concept." Very effective story.Ken Novak's Weblog, 2007-03-26 03:34:20