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1. Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind
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2. Riverwired.com: MyGallons Lets You Lock in Gas Price
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3. CRAB HOUSE: Modern Take on the American Beach Cabin
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4. GT Solar Shares Get Battered After Nasdaq Debut
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5. Riverwired.com: Songwriters Commune With Nature, Produce Excellent Tracks
Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind
Stacey Higginbotham - Energy
Hopper’s vision combines cloud computing and renewable energy: He wants to take electrical transmissions costs out of the equation by placing a data center directly at the site of a renewable energy source and use fiber optic cable to link it to the entity that uses it. Hopper is also the co-founder of Level 5 Networks, which was bought by 10 Gigabit chip maker SolarFlare.
Virtualization and fast Ethernet, which enable services such as Amazon’s EC2, will make Hopper’s idea feasible. The ability to separate the hardware from software through virtualization is what enables computing clouds to exist. Those clouds allow companies, developers or anyone with the ability to tap into that resource, to ship its computing jobs over to Amazon’s servers, no matter where they are located in the world.
The challenge is figuring out how to build software that can monitor electrical generation, prioritize compute jobs and then figure out when and where to send those jobs based on whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Hopper believes it would make sense to attach data centers, possibly in a container (as shown in the image), directly to a renewable energy source. The source could be located in the middle of a desert, on a platform attached to an ocean wind turbine, or anywhere else where power could be easily generated.
One of the issues with renewable sources of energy, is that the places where it’s most abundant, such as winds blowing across the ocean or solar power in the desert, are inaccessible and thus, expensive to attach to the electrical grid. An example is Texas’ $4.9 billion plan to bring wind energy generated in the barren, western part of the state to the more populous center. Bringing the data center to the power solves that problem as long as the area can be reached via a cheaper fiber optic cable. There are still issues of servicing such remote data centers, but the plan to have multiple ones around the world offers redundancy.
But there are still computing tasks that need to be worked out if this vision is to materialize in the next decade or so. “If it turns out you’re chasing the energy and copying a lot of data, then that’s less attractive,” says Hopper. “But with good caching, and if you’re only moving the data once or twice it, might work. You could design software similar to old-fashioned job scheduling on a mainframe. Back then the scarcity was the computing and today it’s energy.”
As data centers take up more and more energy, Hopper’s ideas may help the computing industry solve one of its fastest-growing problems.
image of a theoretical modular data center installation courtesy of Sun Microsystems
Riverwired.com: MyGallons Lets You Lock in Gas Price
khallgeisler - Bikes & Cars
MyGallons.com promises that users can buy gas at today’s price and fill up in the future. Once the service is completely up and running (right now, you can reserve an account but not yet use it), users create an account, receive a MyGallons card, and check the web site for the current price of gas. You’ll be able to click a button to prepay for as many gallons of gas as you like.
The prices quoted on MyGallons are all regular unleaded. If you fill up with premium or diesel, the company will adjust your balance to account for that. If you’re out of town and the price of a gallon of gas is significantly lower — or higher — than your hometown price, MyGallons will adjust for that, too.
A program like MyGallons is designed to hopefully save you money — not gas. Having a prepaid fuel-only card will not improve your fuel economy. You may in fact get worse mileage out of your car if you drive like you know you paid less for that tank of gas.
Something to keep in mind: Tara Baukus Mello, lead analyst for the NADA Guides, told me in an interview that they don’t expect gas prices to rise any more this year, and they may even drop a little. Not a lot, but a little. With the price of gas in such flux, I’d check my crystal ball twice before prepaying for gas.
CRAB HOUSE: Modern Take on the American Beach Cabin
Bridgette Steffen - Architecture
Cabins are meant as relaxing getaways in inspiring location, like the mountains, woods, or the shore. Andrea Salvini, revisits the American cabin, with this updated version of the beach house meant for Fire Island, NY. Of her trilogy of projects on Fire Island, the most interesting is her Crab House, an "anthropomorphic" house inspired by a crab. The stilts raise the vertical cabin off the ground, in order to preserve land as much as possible. The front of the house, which faces the ocean, is almost completely glass with a large open air solarium on the top floor.
GT Solar Shares Get Battered After Nasdaq Debut
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
Man, silicon solar gear maker GT Solar has been having a rough couple of days. Shares of the company, which priced at $16.50 for their stock market debut yesterday, closed down almost 12 percent. But the stock lost even more ground today, slumping as much as 36 percent to change hands for $9.30 after it was revealed that one of its customers had signed a deal with a competitor.
Chinese solar wafer maker LDK Solar said it inked an agreement to buy equipment from GT Solar competitor JYT Corp., also of China. It’s a big deal because as Reuters notes, LDK represented 62 percent of GT Solar’s revenue in fiscal year 2008.
In an effort to deflect investor concern, GT Solar issued a statement , with CFO Bob Woodbury saying:
“This announcement by LDK does not in any way impact GT Solar’s backlog, nor do we believe it will have any effect on our internal targets or projections. In fact, LDK Solar’s total orders represent less than 20 percent of our current backlog. Moreover, LDK’s furnace orders represent less than eight percent of our current backlog…Additionally, GT Solar has and will continue to diversify its customer base. LDK Solar remains an important customer, and we continue to negotiate with them for future equipment needs related to multicrystalline furnaces and silicon reactors.”
Perhaps the quick PR response did a small bit of damage control. GT Solar’s shares rebounded somewhat from their intraday low to end the session at $12.59.
Riverwired.com: Songwriters Commune With Nature, Produce Excellent...
Marcus - ben gibbard
You may have heard about Jack Johnson's commendable effort to record his entire latest release on solar power earlier this year, or perhaps about how Linkin Park or Radiohead have incorporated green initiatives into their band business models. In addition to these progressive rockstars, though, another green trend is emerging in a handful of this year's releases: the retreat to the natural world as a source for songwriting inspiration.
Throughout 2008, there has been a small, but significant, contingent of songwriters who have spent time alone in various isolated parts of the country, apparently utilizing the serenity that comes from a solitary commune with nature, in order to write material for their latest works. And the results are impressively good. Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie went to Big Sur, California, while writing songs for his band's new album, Narrow Stairs, and stayed in the same cabin where Jack Kerouac composed some of his most memorable prose. Justin Vernon, the force behind the critically-acclaimed Bon Iver, retreated to a cabin in Northwest Wisconsin to record his excellent debut, the beautiful, haunting For Emma, Forever Ago. Finally, Minnesota native and spiritual songsmith Mason Jennings headed to a cabin of his very own in a secluded corner of his home state to record an entire album, In the Ever, completely by himself and entirely on Garageband.
Listening to these three albums as a meditative, contemplative suite is indeed an eye-opening experience. Each work is incredibly personal and vulnerable, often painfully so, and the albums have an uncanny ability to meaningfully connect with the listener. Gibbard's sweeping tenor is markedly resonant on the album's opener, "Bixby Canyon Bridge," in which he ponders his ongoing lack of fulfillment despite the successes he's found. On For Emma, the longing and isolation in Justin Vernon's voice is palpable, as if you can hear how removed from the world he is as he sings song after heartbreaking song about a relationship that went tragically awry. Finally, Mason Jennings offers what could be considered his most personal release to date, a thought-provoking examination of love, spirituality and mortality that is at turns as fragile and delicate as it is vivacious and fun.
All three works speak to the importance of personal reflection in quality songwriting, and are particularly intriguing in that these songwriters are able to achieve such profound results by temporarily leaving their urban environments and attempting to reach a part of themselves more accessible when immersed in the natural world. If this trend continues to gain popularity, we can perhaps look forward to more exceptional music in the months ahead. It seems, if you want to write a poignant ditty, all you have to do is pack up your guitar and head for the wilderness.
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