There are 2 million miles of paved roads in the United States. Each of those miles has to be resurfaced periodically and the material generally used to pave roads is asphalt which is a petroleum product. So not only do you need to put gas in your family car, but the road you drive on also contributes to this country’s thirst for fossil fuels. But, what if that same road could instead be part of the production of green energy using solar panels. That wonderfully crazy idea is the brainchild of Scott Brusaw who is the CEO of Solar Roadways.

link: Solar Roads: The New Energy/Transport Convergence Device? | GeekBeat.TV

If they can solve the friction coefficient in differing conditions (ice on glass sounds really bad) then this may be a really good idea (something like this would actually be a decent idea for stimulus - as opposed to getting monkey's high).

If you haven't kept up with the advances in robotics, this video shows just how far it has come. Keep in mind, these robots are flying autonomously (no pilot, no remote control).

I cut my teeth as a Java programmer from the earliest days of Java (pre 1.0). So, I followed Sun quite closely through the years. As I watched the Google I/O keynotes, I was struck by how much Vic Gundotra sounded like a cross between John Gage and Scott McNealy.

Sun, used to make a habit out of cracking one liners about Microsoft. Google has done the same with Apple.

“Sun Is Not Proprietary, Just As IBM Is Not Bankrupt”

Replace IBM with Apple and Sun with Google…sound familiar?

As a I think about it, the comparison does not stop there. Sun stumbled into a fantastic market that was out of it’s core competency. They decided to use their cash cow, hardware, to fund this new business. Google has entered into the phone business. There is money to be made their, but the development and support efforts are largely funded by search revenue. Sound similar?

If you look back in history, Sun released and managed Java as free software (yes it was not open til later). For years, they funded that effort with their hardware business. Eventually, they were…

Anyone know?

There is nothing revolutionary here. Chrome is clearly faster on my macbook pro (i7, ssd hd). The only area where Safari 5 outperformed was in DOM manipulation…which is interesting. This should make it handle some in-application processing faster. Unfortunately, it may not be noticeable because Chrome will do the initial layout and the data processing much faster.

Greenpeace also links Apple’s decision to locate a huge cloud data center in North Carolina to that state’s cheap electricity supplies, which come mainly from coal-fired plants. Other companies, including Google, also run big data center operations in the Carolinas.

link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Greenpeace raids the cloud

This is another example of media games (or misstatements). While it is true that these facilities are in NC and it is true that most of NC’s power comes from coal, it is not true that these particular facilities are powered by coal. In fact, the specific facilities that he is referring to were intentionally located near Nuclear power plants. This is the CLEANEST and cheapest energy available.

Propagating that falsehood is another example of the modern media’s tendency to avoid fact checking or exaggerate in order to make a point. The bad thing is that the thousands of people that read that report or his blog that do not live in NC will never know that the…

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

link: Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam

Looks like QT is trying to answer the uncertainty that JavaFX has created for Swing programmers. Specifically, JavaFX is out there and has been named the air apparent to swing. However, JavaFX does not have a full component suite yet (table…cmon guys). So, with people knowing they will need to switch, but having some uncertainty about that switch, folks are a little lost. QT, looks like they are trying to position themselves as a good traditional gui toolkit that can be a refuge for swing programmers that don’t want to move to JavaFX.

Fun and Games

On closer inspection, our measurements told us that pages were primarily slow because of network and render time. Our generation time definitely had (and still has) significant room to improve but it wouldn’t provide the same bang for the buck. So we devoted most of our engineering effort towards two goals: drastically cutting down the bytes of cookies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript required by a Facebook page while also developing new frameworks and methodologies that would allow the browser to show content to the user as quickly as possible.

link: Facebook | Making Facebook 2x Faster

Some quick, back of napkin calculations suggest that they have reduced their overall bandwidth used for page transfer by 37%. If this is the case, using their published 200 million logins per day and 60 million status updates, they have reduced their bandwidth cost by over a half a million dollars. In other words, they actually get a return on that investment in year 1. Easy to justify that project. It makes you wonder why they waited so long.

Here are my back of napkin calcs:

I have been a believer to a certain degree. Though I was never certain enough to back efforts that would have significant impacts on the global economy. Last year, some material, from Lord Monckton, made me start questioning whether the political influence on the debate had tilted it from real science to political posturing. Today, more evidence was released of the latter. Granted, the source of the article may be considered biased. However, the report that it quotes is from the Chief Meteorologist at the Weather Channel. Frankly, there are only a few guys with better credentials.

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as it was originally presented. This is on…