Software

What a Difference a Day Makes

There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in the film to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed for time travel. Yet as we in 2008 look at $130-per-barrel oil, there are those who argue that our energy independence can be found, just like Doc Brown's, in trash. What if they are correct?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about SwiftFuel, a non-petroleum gasoline substitute made from biomass and proposed as an alternative to aviation gasoline. Every column generates mail not just from skeptics, but also from enthusiasts and true believers. Among this latter group is the father-son team of Eric and Andrew Day from western Massachusetts pushing their particular version of trash-to-power, which they call the Day Cycle, after themselves. I think their ideas have merit and ought to, at the very least, provoke a lot of good thinking from this audience.

But before we get to the Day Cycle, let's consider the role in our culture of what I'm choosing to call "miracle cures." Based on the medical analogy of wonder drugs that cure easily what was previously incurable, I think this concept can be applied broadly to most areas of scientific inquiry. A miracle cure comes along, appears generally to do what is claimed -- problem solved, right?

Not usually.

It's rare that any bad news is simple and without nuance. Longtime readers will recall that I've been working for six years now trying to end Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which claimed our son Chase back in 2002. People contact me all the time with reports of a "cure" for SIDS, but I know that SIDS isn't just one condition but several lumped together under the name "SIDS." I believe most alternative energy technologies ought to be approached similarly. The Day Cycle, while having some merit, won't put Saudi Arabia out of the oil business or even put the United States directly into a state of energy self-sufficiency. The Day Cycle is just one part of a comprehensive rework of the ways we make and use energy that can have the eventual effect of making us in large part energy self-sufficient. It's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

The challenge of the Day Cycle is profound: to solve at once the problems of how to power our society and what to do with all of our garbage, all without making the world worse for the effort, which is to say without increasing the problems of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

I don't want to have a global warming debate here. For the purposes of the Day Cycle, it simply doesn't matter. If what the Days propose will get rid of our garbage, create usable fuel and power, and, by the way, doesn't cause any net increase of greenhouse gas emissions, that's good, right? Even those who don't believe in global warming (and I hear from them all) probably aren't specifically IN FAVOR of greenhouse gas emissions -- gas for the sake of gas. They just don't believe in global warming. That argument is not what we are about here.

What we ARE about here are the 251 million tons of municipal waste that we as Americans created in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 5.1 billion barrels of oil we imported that same year, according to the Department of Energy.

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Dividing 251 million tons of municipal trash by 365 days by 100 tons per furnace says we'll need 7,000 such furnaces to burn all of America's trash. That doesn't really sound like a lot of furnaces to me, when you consider that's about how many landfills we have today and about how many municipal trash incinerators we used to have. Moving to this method of waste disposal and energy generation is a no-brainer... if it works.

There's that big "if" -- if it works. I fear the plasma furnaces will get clogged, but if they don't then the result is pretty darned amazing. Here is what the Days propose to do with that plasma furnace and the chemical plant they'll build around it. The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

The potential impact of all these products is significant, though not in themselves enough to eliminate the need for energy imports. I have real doubts about hydrogen-powered transportation and tend to believe that the best use for that hydrogen is simply for generating electricity at the sewage treatment plant which is, by the very nature of sewage, close to the population, and can be pumped into the electricity grid.

Multiply all these numbers by 251 million tons of solid waste and convert them, where possible, into equivalent barrels of oil and it comes down to about 2.6 billion barrels per year if all waste treatment facilities were so converted. That's half of our current oil import volume -- enough to substantially destabilize the international oil market if that's the goal.

Will this work? I don't know. But making energy from what we'd normally just transport and bury makes sense to me.

MeMobile, You Kaput

As widely predicted, Steve Jobs this week introduced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference the iPhone 3G that was first reported in this column late last year. The $199 price was a welcome surprise but shouldn't have been given Apple's confident predictions that it would sell 10 million iPhones by the end of the year. That's four million more by Christmas in up to 70 countries, so the numbers make sense. Apple, which holds its sales estimates pretty close to the vest, had to do something like this in order to remain the darling of Wall Street. But you know what was the REAL big news in Jobs' keynote? Not his apparent poor health, which I have to admit concerns plenty of people, and for good reason. No, the big news was MobileMe, Apple's Microsoft Killer.

Huh?

Watch the recorded video of the speech (it is among this week's links) at around 1:10 when Phil Schiller takes the stage. He demonstrates a lot of stuff, mainly push e-mail and calendaring, but also a suite of web applications for remotely accessing user data and metadata held in MobileMe, the successor to Apple's .Mac service. He doesn't show a word processor, doesn't show a database or a spreadsheet, and doesn't show a presentation program. In short, he doesn't show the guts of any networked office-type application. He shows applications that are actually far more sophisticated than any of those.

Given the code Apple already has for its iWork applications, how much more effort would it take to webify those apps, too? Not much, I'd say. A year from now I guarantee you that MobileMe will offer a complete suite of web-based Office applications.

Now let's get back to that Microsoft-killing part. Microsoft's success is based on two products and only two products -- Windows and Office. Microsoft is obsessed with the idea that Google will undermine one or both of those monopolies through Google Apps. This is all Steve Ballmer thinks about and is what made him so eager to spend $40+ billion for Yahoo. But what if the real threat isn't Google at all, but Apple?

In every business there is some version of the 80-20 rule that says 80 percent of the business comes from 20 percent of the customers. Smart businesses do whatever they can to play to that powerful 20 percent. If you are a new CEO who needs to turn around a business 10 minutes after walking through the door, there are two things you can do: 1) cut costs, and 2) focus on your top 20 percent customers. That's it -- you are now a turnaround expert and I grant you an honorary MBA.

There's another kind of company, however, that applies the 80-20 rule in a different manner and Apple is one of those companies. They aim everything they do at that top 20 percent and ignore the rest. Sometimes you hit a home run and get 75 percent market share, like Apple did with the iPod and iTunes, but I can guarantee you the business plan was aimed at taking 20 percent, tops, and making a good living with that.

There are other companies that take a similar market approach to Apple, but few of them are in the computer business. BMW and Porsche are good examples.

What if Porsche were in the software business. What sort of word processor would Porsche build in 2008? It would be distributed, network-based, have central file storage and an elegant user interface. That's the key to what Steve Jobs does all day: he sits around and asks questions like, "If Porsche made a media player, what would it be like?" That's it -- you are now qualified to replace Steve Jobs at Apple on days when he's away making trouble for Disney.

There are two delightful aspects of applying the 80-20 rule in this manner. For one, the 20 percent market -- if that's all that you are aiming for -- tends not to be price-sensitive. That market is willing to pay something for elegance or convenience, but better still for elegance AND convenience. That's how Apple could charge $99 per year for .Mac and for the successor to .Mac, MobileMe. There is at least $60 in profit for Apple hiding inside that $99 price.

The second delightful aspect of Apple's application of the 80-20 rule is that Microsoft can't do the same thing. Microsoft can't compete. Bill Gates made the decision decades ago to go for market share -- for the 80 percent part of the 80-20 rule or -- better still -- for all 100 percent. And it looked for a while like he might get his way, until Apple was reborn.

If Microsoft gets only 20 percent of any market it enters, they consider that effort a failure and it would be, because Microsoft's business is scaled and its cost structure is optimized for really, really big numbers of mindless and fairly undemanding customers, most of whom wouldn't pay $99 per year.

That takes care of Microsoft, but here's the real beauty of this Apple strategy: it takes care of Google, too.

Though Google has a very different approach than Microsoft does to almost every product and market segment, in this one aspect they are identical. Google, too, aims for maximal market share, which means they can't expect customers to pay and their cost structure has to be maintained such that they make a profit without being paid.

Which leaves a lucrative niche all to Apple.

Now let's jump back to the automobile analogy and look at Porsche, which is presently buying Volkswagen. This is probably a stupid move on Porsche's part, but makes the point that smaller, highly profitable companies can develop the kind of financial power needed to take over vastly larger, if more poorly run kinda-sorta competitors like Volkswagen.

Nearly everyone who tries it is going to LOVE MobileMe, which Apple -- calling it "Microsoft Exchange for the rest of us" -- will madly market to small and medium-sized businesses, of which there are six million in the U.S. alone. Those outfits will buy iPhones, MobileMe accounts, and eventually Macs and MacBooks for their workers. IPhone enterprise customers will do the same. Organizations that find Google Apps too hard to use (have you actually tried to build a wiki using Google Sites? I have and it is HARD - far worse than using JotSpot, from which Sites supposedly evolved) or aren't big enough for Exchange will buy MobileMe instead and never look back.

And that's just in the U.S. What about those other 69 countries that will have iPhone service by the end of the year and the 62 that will allow Apple's App Store?

This will become a juggernaut driven not by the iPhone, not by the Mac, not by Apple's media distribution business, but equally by ALL THREE businesses.

There are ways it could be made even better. For example, the smartest thing Apple could do with its cash hoard right now would probably be to buy SalesForce.com and fold that into MobileMe, instantly taking the high ground among the road warrior set.

Steve Jobs is brilliant and patient. He has a plan and is executing on it to perfection. Bill Gates couldn't pick a better time to retire and let someone else take the fall.

New Phone

My wife is getting frustrated with her Windows Mobile base Palm 700w, so we were thinking about getting her one of the new 3G iPhones when they come out.  Since she would be need to switch to AT&T, I would switch at the same time. 

Though, I do like the iPhone, I don't think that it would work for me.  There are still several features that I would still to have:

• Qwerty keyboard (hard buttons)
• Ability to tether to a computer to allow the computer to use that network connection
• MMS support.

I am thinking that I would go with the AT&T Tilt, Blackberry Curve 8310 or potentially an unlocked phone that I would get somewhere else.

This Google Andriod video has me interested in this as an option, even though there isn't a query keyboard.

GreenDimes

About a year ago, I saw this post the mentioned GreenDimes.  GreenDimes is a services that stops junk mail. We donated the $15 (which is supposed to plant 15 trees), and then filled out the postcards that were in the packet they sent.  Then when ever we received a catalog, I would enter that information on the GreenDimes web site.

Within a few months, we have seen a significant reduction in the junk mail and catalogs that we receive.  I would recommend GreenDimes, as it has been working for us.

Photos with Windows Home Server

I have pretty much transitioned everything from our old NAS and Mac mini to our HP MediaSmart home server.  Copying the content to the server was very easy.  All of this content is easily accessible on all of our computers and can be played/viewed on our Xbox.

Windows Home server also has the ability to host "public" web gallerys. The intention is that you can select some photos to share with family members.  Theoretically, I could use Windows Home Server, and get rid of my gallery2 installation.

I made the assumption that once I copied all of our photos into the "Photos" directory, that these photos would automatically be available to be added to these Web Share galleries.  I found out that things don't work exactly this way.  It looks like, even if you have all of your photos in the "Photos" directory on the server, you still have to upload the photos through the web interface.  I wouldn't think that it would be hard to present an html representation of the photos in that share, to allow one of those photos to be selected