Indoor Cloud. Courtesy ‘Where Cool Things Happen.’ com
Before We Called it “The Cloud” … We Still Had “Software as a Service.” We just didn’t know what Marketing wanted to call it.
Back in 1990 – ’91, before we called it “The Cloud,” before most of us used the Internet, when we were young and idealistic, I worked on three systems that offered what we would now call SaaS – Software as a Service.
Fukushima Explosion, Courtesy Forbes
A lot of people have been talking about a new dawn of nuclear power (Telegraph, article from 2013 here). “Fukushima,” they say, perversely, “proves nuclear is safe because only 3 reactors melted down.” They also say, “a culture of safety can make or break nuclear power.” (Japan Times, op-ed, here).
I think these people are not asking the right questions.
For example, the melt-rate of Antarctic ice has double since before 2010, that is since before Fukushima. Andrew Freedman on Mashable, here, and Phil Plait, on Slate, here wrote about a scientific study, accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which documents the increase in the rate at which Antarctic ice is melting. The study attributes this increased ice-melt-rate to rising ocean temperatures. The conventional wisdom is that “The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing ocean temperatures to rise.” But … what if this is only part of the problem?
What effect, if any, does the release of radiation from the Fukushima melt-down have on ocean temperature and therefore, the rate of melting ice?
Image of a limit courtesy One Sage Math Calculus Tutorial
While Amazon Redshift offers “fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service… for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1,000 per terabyte per year” (and I can do it for less – see below) there are limits to the cloud.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 26.29% from 12/21/12.
The S&P 500 is up 32.03%.
The Fossil Fuel Portfolio is up 18.52% from Dec. 21, 2012.
The Sustainable Energy Portfolio is up 211.6% from Dec. 21, 2012. Continue reading
How not to implement a cloud-based information service.
What’s the Cloud? The Internet is The Cloud. GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail are cloud based information services. More technically, these are referred to as Software as a Service, or SaaS. There are also Platform as a Service, PaaS, and Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS.
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. The results:
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. The Sustainable Energy portfolio is composed of Cree and Lighting Sciences in the LED space, GTAT, which at the time made solar ovens for cooking PV wafers, and today is diversifying, First Solar and Sunpower in the solar space, Vestas, a wind company, Solazyme a biofuel company and Next Era, a utility. The fossil fuel companies are the oil companies BP, Chevron Texaco, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil and RD Shell, the coal company Peabody Coal, and Haliburton and Transocean, companies in the offshore oil and oil and gas drilling service industries.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 23.01% from 12/21/12 to 2/21/14.Note that the Sustainable Energy portfolio does not include Solar City, SCTY, or Tesla Motors, TSLA. Solar City’s stock price is up 713.0%, from 10.73 on December 21, 2012 to 75.86 at the close of trading Feb. 21, 2014. Tesla is up 614.5% from 34 to 209.60.
Figure 1, above, shows the relative performance of my hypothetical investments in sustainable Energy and Fossil Fuels, since Dec. 21., 2012.
As described in the earlier posts in this series, in Dec., 2012, I read that MidAmerican Energy was buying large scale solar electric generating stations being built by First Solar and Sunpower, and being financed by GE. This got me thinking … Continue reading
Imagine an small to mid-sized enterprise which needs accounting, document management, e-mail, a central file repository, centralized printer management, and a central anti-virus console. These services can be put on discrete servers, along with, using Microsoft’s authentication model, a redundant pair of machines described as “Domain Controllers.” Add an “Intranet” and a central backup system and you’re looking at 10 servers, at a cost, as shown in Table 1, below, in the neighborhood of $54,000.
The advantage of discrete servers for discrete functions is that maintenance on one system does not effect any others. By wrapping the logical functions – accounting, e-mail, etc – into “virtual machines” we get the same advantages – maintenance and upgrades to one system do not effect other systems – while reducing the total number of physical machines.
This can be “Virtualized” onto two or three servers at a cost, as shown in Table 2, below, in the neighborhood of $26,000 to $36,000. These are summarized in table 0, below.
| Price Comparison | |
| Item | Ballpark |
| Physical | $54,000.00 |
| Virtual | $26,000.00 |
| V w Archive | $36,000.00 |
| Table 0 | |
This savings also scales. Larger enterprises, which require more servers, may realize a 10 to 1 server consolidation.
If a picture is worth a thousand words …
here are two thousand words on Sustainable Investing in 2013.
While the data may suggest that a “correction” may be in progress for the “Sustainable Energy” portfolio, and while the actions or inactions of various governments can dramatically effect performance of these portfolios, the Sustainable Energy Portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500, both of which outperformed the Fossil Fuel Portfolio.
As the professional say, “Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.”
On Dec. 21, 2011, reading that MidAmerican Energy was investing in utility scale solar energy generation, I looked at First Solar and Sunpower. Then I looked at six other companies in the sustainable energy world. I created a model portfolio. To make things interesting, I looked at eight companies in the fossil fuel industy and invested $16 Imaginary Million in these 16 companies, $1.0 Imaginary Million in each. As of the close of trading one year later, Friday, Dec. 20, 2013,
The data are summarized beginning in Table 1, below.
On April 8, 2014 Microsoft will end support for Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6, Office 2003, and MS Exchange Server 2003. If you still use XP, and according to Net Market Share, as of Dec. 22, 2013, 31% of people on the Internet still use Windows XP, then you should plan on migrating to Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux or the Mac before April 9, 2014. Or retiring.
As I see it, the main reason to upgrade is security. Another reason is performance. The bottom line is money.
Nelson Mandela
“I realized they could take everything away from me except my mind and my heart. Those things I would have to give them. And I decided not to give them away.” Nelson Mandela, to Bill Clinton.
“During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Nelson Mandela, on trial in 1964.
Pres. Carter
Pres G H W Bush
Pres. Clinton
Pres. G. W. Bush
Pres. Obama
“In real life we deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous.” – Nelson Mandela
