The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

• A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
  .
• A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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• New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
• The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

• Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
• The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
• Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

What makes Sonicwall an enigma is their choice of Dell as acquisition suitor. (Dell is acquiring Sonicwall.) There are so many mismatches I don’t even know where to start.  While they both fit the economy pricing model, that’s about the only similarity. For starters, Dell has tried and failed on many occasions in the networking space, and persists by rebranding the Netgear form factor in switches and managed switches–which very few people buy because of their poor dependability. Sonicwall, on the other hand, dominates the low-end firewall market.

This would seem to do nothing for Dell’s two weakest product areas: enterprise networking and the high-end firewall.  Still, this seeming round-hole-square-peg situation gives us a clue as to what Dell is doing: adding revenue $200 million/year at a time.   (Dell’s revenue is somewhat higher that that…)

The other big mismatch is in support.  Dell’s foreign-based call-in engineering support is, most would agree, awful, slow, and tedious.  Requisitions for replacement parts are delivered by unreliable third parties, and this frustrating protocol for on-site service is the teeth behind Dell’s famous three-year manufacturer warranty on PCs.  Sonicwall’s support on the other hand, is reputable, quick, and stateside. So for us Americans, we see the writing on the wall. If you’re an end-user, you might not care, but as a systems engineer who has to deal with the stuff every week, sitting on hold with Pakistan gets tiresome in a hurry. Maybe Dell will learn from Sonicwall instead of forcing them to confirm with Dell’s charming, linguistically-difficult support program.

Perhaps the most difficult integration concern with this acquisition is the two companies’ attitudes towards the reseller channel. Namely, Sonicwall loves the channel and Dell just gives it lip service.  Sonicwall uses real distributors, while Dell insists on inconsistently pricing every single deal through at least three different business units who are all vying for the reseller business: PartnerDirect (horrible name, their discounts are the same as the public Dell.com store); Medium/Large business (better discounts, slow quote turnaround), and the nefariously-named, oft-referenced but mysteriously incognito “Dell Reseller Division”, whose state of existence seems to reverse from one quarter to the next.

Dell could learn a thing or two from Sonicwall by standardizing system configurations and offering them into wholesale at a price that actually compels resellers to go out and sell Dell instead of HP, whose competing products are more expensive and less serviceable, but whose products also earn more for the reseller channel.

My company is partners with all three companies I mentioned, and while dealing withDell is a huge pain, the serviceability of their equipment is unmatched by anybody on the market today. Let’s hope that they can take the positives from Sonicwall–good support, a real reseller channel, and a quality value-oriented product–and integrate them into their daily business.

But I am thankful that it’s done, that the release party has come and gone, and that I can refocus my energies on things that I’ve needed to work on more: my I.T. consulting company, my teenagers, and my messy house.  It is very easy to underestimate the time and commitment necessary for an artist to record, produce, promote, and perform an album.  Every minute spent tweaking a vocal track or tuning a session instrument is a minute spent not doing something else, after all.

Those interested in the recording can check it out at http://www.poutband.com.

Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:

- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply.  According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.

- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage.  Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.

- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed.  The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement.  I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth.  These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.

2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on.  Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers.  More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily.  They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital.  Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now.  I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

Best Technology, my general I.T. consulting firm, now has six employees, and has grown like a weed since late 2008.  In fact, I’m heading down to Miami tomorrow to consider a new business opportunity that represents a strategic significance to Best Technology–virtualization infrastructure and private cloud computing.

I look forward to giving you another update soon, and miss everybody in the blogosphere with whom I’ve lost touch over the last 18 months.

This passing really has me thinking about life and its pursuits, and the varying degrees to which we pursue meaning in life. What is our life’s purpose?  And how do we achieve it, personally, professionally, and spiritually? How do we define purpose, and how can we work humbly and thankfully like my associate?

Before I wrote my books and began working as a technology consultant for small businesses, I went through a very difficult period of unemployment and financial insecurity.  It was during this time that I realized that I must rely upon myself–not my family, or my friends, or the government–for success.  To me, part of success in life is independence from the graces of other people, or the ability to avoid subjugation.  To some degree, I have achieved this.

The other thing I figured out is that you’ve got to have fun.  You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, whether it’s work, play, or chores.  And if you don’t automatically enjoy these things, you’ve got to have a good attitude–to try to get something out of them even if they’re mundane or difficult tasks.  Maybe that’s why I joined a dance band.  Do I like dance music?  No.  Do I like dancing?  No.   But I love when people dance ot the music I play.  See how that interplay works?

Finally, I decided to stop separating my spiritual life from my social life.  If the people in the church have a problem because I drink beer when I play in my (gasp) secular dance band, then they can be consoled by my non-church friends who think Christians are a-holes (many are, sadly).  In good company (me), both groups can get along, and maybe even understand each other.

I’m thankful for this learning experience.  I’m thankful that I’ve taken some lumps when it comes to being humbled. The biggest single thing I’ve learned is that I’m not happy in my work unless I’m helping other people succeed. .. and it was a failure to others succeed that got me unemployed in the first place.

Not surprising. Here are the facts.

On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”.  Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress.  They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments.  From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset.   One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.

Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset.   Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur.  They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.

So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.

After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points.  For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).

Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities.  To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging.  We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.

Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion.  Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board.  We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team?  Hardly.  Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.

My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.

But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience.  And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.

The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.

Ie, would programmers be less likely to write highly productive code if less productive, less sophisticated code would yield the same result, given the availability of tons of hardware? And what would this mean in terms of energy conservation, and more importantly, the advancement of human thought?

Put another way, there are many ways to perform a certain computational algorithm, all yielding an accurate result, but all requiring various levels of computational intensity.  I’ll give an example.  First, the bubble sort.  This is a very simple, iterative method of sorting data into ordered lists–a method taught in basic computer programming classes. I first learned the bubble sort while taking Pascal at Cass Tech high school in Detroit.  I thought the bubble sort was awesome, although I later learned that there were other sorting schemes that were far faster and less computationally intense, ie. more economical.

So the hypothesis is this: innovation in more effective programming is lessened by the availability of horsepower.

Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat.  Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure.  With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order.  Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based.  Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.

That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping.  If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.

1 – The ratings for terrestrial FM radio still dwarf that of satellite stations, when you look at the local cumes, so while a Sat channel may have 650k listeners at a time, they may only have 15k in a particular local market.  Good for national advertisers; bad for community ones.  For this singular reason, FM isn’t going anywhere.

2 – It’s free to the listener, can be accomplished anonymously, and requires no subscription or membership.

3 – The digital terrestrial stream (ie. HD radio) is of excellent fidelity and provides a transport for digital (and even interactive) programming beyond what FM broadcasters are currently using, so there’s headroom below terrestrial’s technology ceiling.

4  – Terrestrial radio is more or less weatherproof. Sat radio isn’t.

Now, as to whether or not it should be mandatory–well that just sounds like a war between the recording lobby and the cell phone carriers.  I’m of the opinion that the FM broadcasters are generally in favor of it but hamstrung by the recording industry.

 ”…with the iPhone I now have Yahoo video to anyone running Windows XP versions or later of Yahoo Messenger (sorry, no Mac version yet) as Yahoo is taking advantage of the phone number…”

The nugget is in the parentheses.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the feature never translates to OS X because Yahoo has never really cared much about feature parity in Messenger on OS X. My guess is that they just view the market as being too small, too much of a subset of user requirements, that it isn’t worth their development dollars.  But the mobile device market–especially iOS–is  a whole different story. Lots more potential customers there.