Katherine's Blog 2.0

Useful sites for news from Iran:
Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Huffington Post
National Iranian-American Council

And for video:
CitizenTube
(Be aware that some of these videos show a great deal of graphic violence.)

The best foreign media coverage has been from the BBC. Still, most foreign journalists in Iran have been asked to leave and/or face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement. The above links depend largely on reports and video from citizens in Iran, either submitted by email or posted to sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. (Search for the IranElection tag on any of these sites.) Most of these reports are impossible to confirm.

Supposed links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were one of the main justifications for the Iraq War. Dick Cheney in particular continued to point to those links long after they had been debunked by both the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon.

That's bad enough. But now McClatchy is reporting that the search for proof of such links was one of the major motivations for the torture of "high value" detainees.

Let that sink in for a minute. Techniques used by Communist regimes to extract false confessions were deployed by American interrogators searching for evidence of a conspiracy that didn't actually exist. The Bush regime sacrificed the rule of law and 200 years of hard-earned American moral authority in order to achieve their own political goals.

(And incidentally, that last link is truly scary stuff. Katrina-level incompetence applied to interrogation policy.)

I just had a look at the latest equipment book-to-bill numbers, and they're pretty ugly. Both bookings and billings are below the levels reached in the depths of the dot-com meltdown, which was itself a historic downturn for the IC industry.

Worse, the ratio has not been above one since January 2007 (although it lingered in the upper 0.90s until May). The two years of the 2000-2002 downturn seemed like an eternity, and this one clearly isn't over yet.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that bookings seem to have stabilized, although at painfully low levels. I'm not going to call a bottom just yet, but I'm hearing hints of optimism rather than the unmitigated doom of a few months back.

The other good news is that the rise of consumer electronics in the last few years probably means a faster bounce off the bottom, at least for IC volume. It takes a lot less to get people to buy hundred-dollar gadgets than thousand-dollar computers. Of course the gadgets bring in less revenue, too.

I've had my differences with Robert Castellano in the past, but I think his view of the proposed 450-mm wafer transition is pretty accurate. The switch to 300-mm wafers was great for the chip companies, not so great for the equipment companies. So there are likely to be some tough negotiations about development funding and equipment purchase commitments before 450-mm equipment moves forward.

The bottom line, though, is that fighting with your customers is never a winning strategy. If big customers like Intel and Samsung are determined to build 450-mm fabs, the equipment companies who help them do it will be more successful than those who can't or won't.

Environmentalists often argue that investments in clean coal technology are just wasted money. It's a dirty fuel, it will always be a dirty fuel, and so the ultimate answer is to tax it into fiscal oblivion.

In a perfect world, I would agree with them.

But in this world, coal-generated electricity isn't going to go away. Coal is too plentiful and too cheap. Given a choice between turning the lights off and burning coal, countries will choose coal every time. Any workable energy or climate change policy is going to have to deal with the problem of coal.

Which is essentially the point Energy Secretary Chu made this week in comments supporting clean coal investments. Yet his other point was equally important: the problem of coal isn't going to be easy to fix. Clean coal is important, but it's not a strategy by itself.

There's something to be said for putting smart guys to work on energy policy.

Solyndra recently received DOE loan guarantees to support construction of a new manufacturing facility. Good for them. The guarantees illustrate the challenges as well as the benefits of government support, though: the law authorizing them was passed in 2005, applications were due by the end of 2006, yet Solyndra is the first company to actually receive a guarantee. Inclusion of funds in the recent economic stimulus package no doubt helped the process along.

Solyndra has an interesting technology, with CIGS solar material deposited on a cylindrical substrate. The idea is to keep the same cross-sectional area facing the sun at all times, without the complexity and cost of tilted mounts or tracking motors. It makes sense, but unfortunately they haven't shared much information about cost or performance. Third party sources tell me that their installation is as simple as claimed, but are more skeptical about how cost effective the panels are once installed.

I joined an Internet startup in 1998. Even then people were saying things like "biggest change since Gutenberg." The original Napster launched in 1999, and iTunes in 2001. I've been watching ad pages in industry print magazines shrink for most of that time. So count me among the flabbergasted that Traditional Publishing seems to be only just realizing that there might be a problem with their business model.

Really? You think?

Sheesh. What rock have they been hiding under for the last decade, anyway?

(Link by way of the Daily Dish.)

No, I haven't died or quit. I'm sorry about the lack of posts in recent months. I've been transitioning into different (and mostly bigger) projects for some new clients, and am still working out the necessary load balancing. I hope to be more conscientious going forward, and appreciate your patience.

A new study from MIT compares energy and resource consumption of various industries on a pound-for-pound basis. Yep, energy consumption per pound of output for manhole covers versus integrated circuits. Not surprisingly, integrated circuits consume a whole lot more energy. A more useful metric might be energy consumption per dollar value, or perhaps a ratio of value in to value out.

While it's tempting to dismiss the study as obviously ridiculous, energy consumption is an important issue for energy-generating technologies such as solar power. The more energy it takes to make a solar panel, the longer it takes for solar panels to start reducing net fossil fuel consumption: the panel has to recover its own energy cost first. Unless the solar industry generates more power than it consumes, it's hard for it to claim to be "green" or "sustainable."

Greentech Media recently updated their list of solar industry startups. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of them. At least 200 who are willing to tell the world about their plans, goodness knows how many more in stealth mode.

Most new businesses fail, so many of these won't live long enough to grow up. But without entrepreneurs willing to take the chance, the Intels and Apples and Googles of tomorrow would never see the light of day.