Calculating Compact Fluorescent Bulb Energy Savings

Ever wonder how much a CFL bulb will save you but didn't have a calculator handy?  Well here's a simple and easy to remember rough calculation.  For every 1 incandescent watt, at an average of 4 hours per day, it's about 1 cent per month savings.  So replacing 100 watt bulb you use 4 hours per day saves $1.00 per month.  8 hours is $2.00 per month.  24 hours is $6.00 per month. 

The only variable assumption here is 11 cents per kilowatt hour, so it's only an approximation, but still handy considering the ease at which you can apply it.

The math:

365 days / 12 months * 4 hours * 11 cents per kilowatt hour / 1000 watts * .75 = 1.00375 cents

Where .75 is the average CFL to Incandescent efficiency ratio (100 watt to 25 watts, 60 watts to 15 watts)

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

It's not very obvious from the live site, but Live Writer beta has been upgraded to 2.0.  The writer zone blog is more specific and lists out many of the new features.

All well and good, but for me the first and most important feature?  Category support for Blogger!

I just wish they would add image support.  I'm not sure if they can because that might be an intentional limitation of the Blogger API, but I sure wish either they or Google, whichever is at fault would fix that one.

WinFS becomes SharePoint?

WinFS officially died a little under a year ago. As a project this is definitely true, but Microsoft stated they hadn't given up on the vision. In the past year there hasn't been much information on how this vision is being pursued. My guess is no one wants to be associated with the bad publicity that followed the WinFS project's end. Thus, if you want to understand how the vision is moving forward you'll have to look at results rather than press releases.

SQL Server was an obvious benefactor of the technology aspects, but has little to nothing to do with the user side unless we're expecting user's to learn SQL. For that side I think the lurking replacement is SharePoint. SharePoint stores documents in a database, automatically indexes them, attaches user and application customizable properties through lists and IFilters, and supports various mechanisms for change notifications. There's a lot more to SharePoint than just the document capabilities, but in that area the main thing missing from the WinFS vision is that SharePoint is a server.

There are some major technological differences, mostly for the better. One is that where WinFS relied upon GUID's for all items, SharePoint relies upon the URL. This makes SharePoint fit in with the rest of the global URL based landscape than WinFS ever would have. It also makes those descriptors much more human oriented. URL's can be hard to remember too, but there is a much better chance of remembering enough for a search to figure out your intent.

For a business user the server aspect isn't a big difference. The "My Site" feature, combined with offline capability tools (Outlook, Drafts, etc.), makes it more attractive to abandon My Documents in favor of My Site. You're IT staff will love you for it too because now it's easy to backup and manage those files. Sharing becomes a breeze, and if you ever want to access a file remotely it should at least be possible (though you may still have VPN issues hurdles, depending on how liberal you IT department is).

For the home user, or micro business users who won't have even a single server the server aspect is a big difference. I'm not sure how the vision plans to address this, but I can see four possibilities. All are wrought with some difficulties, so it's hard to say which is more likely. One possibility is an extension of the "Live" concept, to provide those micro users with a hosted solution. Google has made a great deal of progress in convincing users to give them all their data, but it's unlikely the marketplace will easily accept having Microsoft host their personal files. Micro business users might trade physical control for the efficiency possibilities, but home users won't. But then, maybe home users don't need the WinFS vision? Can't please everyone, right?

Microsoft could also try a third party variation of the "Live" concept. In a sense this makes sense since you get past the generally prevalent mistrust of Microsoft, but provide the same capabilities. The problem is, who is the third party? Despite the institutionalized fear of Microsoft and big corporations in general, consumers consistently place more trust in the known than the unknown. All the well known companies that enjoy greater trust have their own plans and are extremely unlikely to be found selling SharePoint services.

The third possibility is best described by Home Server. So far SharePoint like capabilities aren't built in, but maybe they should be? It's likely to enjoy more emotional trust than hosted services, certainly privacy, but it adds an IT management aspect. Microsoft is clearly trying to minimize the IT management aspects of Home Server, but they can't control power outages, DSL problems, or the cat chewing up the wires. Most users are desperately trying to minimize those concerns so I'm not sure this is the solution for everyone.

The fourth possibility is to put the capability back on the desktop machines like WinFS originally intended. To do this you must however sacrifice quite a bit of what's unique about the SharePoint way of managing files, such as reliability. Of all the possibilities, this seems the least likely to see soon. One reason is that it's technically the most distant from the capabilities already available. Another is there isn't the same kind of demand. It doesn't fit the vision of corporate IT departments, or most smaller business users. The other users care less about the whole concept. Most will be satisfied with Vista's indexing capabilities. Some might enable previous versions, but most won't unless it's done for them (Which maybe it should be).

Fear the Blog

Mike Gupta at Collaboration Loop explains what causes corporations to fear blogs, why parts of that fear are irrational, and what can be done to get past that state of affairs.

To start, there are three categories of no's:

• Risk-related: "We're afraid of what people will say."
  
• Productivity-related: "We don't want people wasting their time."
  
• Performance-related: "We don't see the business value."
  

Mike mentions a big raft of uses to address the performance related category, some of which are good. They're not all gems. For example, I was confused by the competitive intelligence idea, seems to me there'd be a better structure for this. Better than email though.

The performance fear is the second most irrational fear. There are so many uses that it does give weight to the productivity fear. People need a balance between action, communication, collaboration and synthesis to be productive in organizations. The fear is all those potential uses will encourage that balance to slip farther into a communication time investment for the creators, or synthesis for the lurkers.

Sure it's possible but a more effective communication medium reduces the time spent on less effective mediums. The synthesis side is trickier because there definitely are people who will become addicted to content. I think this is less likely when you talk about business content, even if they are in a more engaging medium and form.

The most irrational fear is however, risk related fears. It's not that there is no chance of someone saying the wrong thing; it's that it's irrational to think they'd do it in a blog. I'm sure the fear comes from observance of Internet blogs, and their comparison to traditional news sites, press releases and even print media.

But that is an irrational comparison because in the realm of the Internet the blog is more personal than the comparisons. That's not true for internal blogs. If an employee is comfortable posting something to an internal blog you can be pretty sure it's been said a dozen times in a closed office, at the water cooler, etc. Even email is more likely.

Putting something in writing and then posting it in a publicly accessible and reviewable place is sure be more self moderated than dozens of other internal communication mediums. Outside of the formal document a blog is near the top of the least personal internal communication mediums.

To drive this point home further, consider news groups and forums and their comparisons to blog. Or consider the difference between blog authors and commenters. Sure, authors are radical in comparison to the traditional new site, but comments can be downright nasty, and forums are where the flame war originated. The closer to anonymous a piece of content is, the less visibility has, the more self moderation will be applied.

Need more RAMDACs

Ever since the GeForce 4 was released in April 2002 it has been a standard feature for non-integrated GPU's to have dual integrated RAMDAC's.  This simple feature insured that a great deal of cheap dual monitor capable video cards became available.  Only the most miserly of manufactures would omit the extra physical connector required.  So it became quite easy to find video cards with dual VGA outputs.

As the DVI transition began, many or most manufacturers chose to place one VGA and one DVI connector on cards, but they retained they ability to operate independently.  So you were able to hook up one VGA and one DVI monitor, or with the right adapters two of either. 

Many, maybe 30%, of LCD monitors had both DVI and VGA inputs as well.  I managed to take advantage of these two features myself for several years by having two computers with DVI/VGA outputs and two monitors with DVI/VGA inputs.  With this setup I was able to at a touch of a button switch either monitor to either computer.  I could have one monitor each, or two for either.  The OS would continue to see both monitors, regardless of which input was switched on, so it worked smoothly and was ultra convenient.  I should also thank Dell for not only putting both inputs on, but making the switch a single button, something that my current monitors don't do nearly as easy (though now I have three).

So.. this was all well and good, but as I said, now I have three monitors, plus a LCD rear projection HDTV hooked up via component output.  As you can imagine two RAMDACs is no longer good enough.  I've gotten by because my motherboard had onboard video and this nifty SurroundView feature that let me use a expansion card and the onboard video.  But it's not a well know feature, and not well beloved by the ATI support team, so in Vista it's not working perfectly.

The obvious solution is to replace my motherboard with one with dual PCI express and get two real graphics cards, but that's not why I'm writing this.

What I'm wondering is, why are there only two RAMDAC's still, 5 years later?  Everything else has doubled, tripled, quadrupled or more, so why not the RAMDAC's?  It's quite common to find a video card with DVI/VGA/S-Video connector's, like the one I have, but the unfortunate truth is you can only use 2 of the 3 at once.  The laptop I recently purchased has all three plus the built in LCD, so you have to choose which 2 of the 4 possibilities you'll use.  I don't know a ton about component prices but my guess is that if RAMDAC's were cheap enough in 2002 to put two of them into the GPU by now they should be cheap enough that four would be economical.

With this we wouldn't have to choose which outputs.  This isn't even mentioning that I think Dual Link DVI ports use up both RAMDAC's to drive really huge monitors (not sure about this though).

So how bout it ATI (AMD)? (or NVidia?)  If there are three outputs, how about they all work at the same time?