O'Reilly News & Commentary

Happening Today - Nuclear Energy: Future Directions - Join us at 10am PT / 1pm ET

By O'Reilly Media
October 15, 2009

Today's free, live webcast is a discussion on the current state and potential future of nuclear energy with Per F. Peterson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Attendance is limited for today's event, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts: Tokyo Cabinet in One Hour MurderBoarding: It's not about the ideas you keep, but the ones you kill Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

From Pond Scum to Powerhouse: Algae Biofuels Day in the Sun

By Kurt Cagle
September 24, 2009

The use of algae as biofuel has also become one of the hottest areas of development in an increasingly aggressive alternative energy sector. Large, traditional oil companies are increasingly creating joint ventures with bio-savvy startups, while others, seeking an opportunity in pond scum, are going it alone.

Energy Revolution is Equal Parts ET and IT

By Sarah Sorensen
September 16, 2009

I had the privilege of hearing Thomas Friedman talk about his latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded and how accelerated globalization is presenting us all with new challenges and opportunities that need to be met head on if we want to sustain our planet and way of life. Challenges and opportunities that will not only take innovations in energy technology, but also information and communications technology.

O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series - New Series Kicks Off with Dr. Saul Griffith on Energy Literacy

By O'Reilly Media
August 20, 2009

The O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series will feature scientists, technologists, and other thought leaders seeking to inform and engage O'Reilly's audience to help solve the most pressing issues of the day, including energy, climate, the environment, and globalization. "With this series, we hope to encourage people to consider these issues and motivate them to be part of the solution," said Tim O'Reilly. Kicking off the series is Energy Literacy, presented by Dr. Saul Griffith, on Wednesday, August 26 at 10am PT. Attendance is limited, so register now! Upcoming Global Issues Webcasts: Nuclear Energy: Future Directions, Presented by Dr. Per F. Peterson, UC Berekely Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

XBRL: the Solution for Carbon Credit and Smart Grid Accounting

By Kurt Cagle
February 26, 2009

During the State of the Union speech, President Obama made formal an assumption that had been emerging since his candidacy - his support for a carbon market as a vehicle for capping carbon emissions:

Google's PowerMeter. It's Cool, but don't Bogart My Meter Data

By Jim Stogdill
February 17, 2009

Google, love what you are doing with Smart Meter energy consumption visualization, but don't Bogart my meter data!

Email letter from 2019

By Kurt Cagle
January 21, 2009

I miss a few things - we don't get oranges this far North as often as we used to, and coffee and cocoa have become considerably more dear. Shipping has gone way up on them and because a lot of the cacoa growing areas were overfarmed in the last decades, but overall I'm not hauling around an extra fifty kilos of fat due to lack of exercise and processed fast food - can't argue the beneft of that.

Printing Solar Panels

By Kurt Cagle
January 15, 2009

Solar power represents in many ways the purest form of energy available to our energy hungry culture. The sun's energy is endlessly renewable (well, for at least the next three billion years or so, at which point, we'll likely have too much of it), produces no greenhouse gases, and is available nearly anywhere.

Pedal Powered Petaflops

By Kurt Cagle
January 15, 2009

Chances are that when you think about supercomputing, you think about big machines (or lots of machines) all running full bore while performing complex calculations to determine weather patterns or wind-tunnel simulations. Secondarily is the assumption about power - you need lots of it, as well as ways of cooling those systems down (which requires even more power).

Analysis 2009: Energy Sector Faces Volatile Year

By Kurt Cagle
January 8, 2009

Here in Victoria, my corner gas station has a liter of regular unleaded gas for CAN$0.80, about US$3.00 a gallon. Six months ago, a similar liter cost nearly $1.50, more than $6 a gallon when factoring in the dramatic...

Food, Technology, and Energy

By chromatic
January 6, 2009

What are the true costs of getting fresh strawberries in Oregon in January? I don't know. Can we find out?

The Energy Secret

By Julian Darley
December 2, 2008

Do we really understand the deepest causes of the economic crisis? If not, then we run the risk that our remedies will not produce sustainable results.

DIY Appliances on the Web?

By Jim Stogdill
November 19, 2008

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors...

Is Telework the Face of the Agile Workforce?

By Kurt Cagle
August 3, 2008

The idea that twenty-somethings have to commute an hour plus each way to an office and work eight hours a day in a cubicle seems absurd to them. As they become the work force, expect the days of the cubicle to become numbered.

Audio: Luiz Barroso on Energy Proportional Computing

By Timothy M. O'Brien
July 1, 2008

Luiz Barroso talks about the concept of Energy Proportional computing and how he thinks DRAM and disk manufacturers could do a better job creating devices consume energy in proportion to the computing to perform. Barroso and Holzle analyzed 5000 servers at Google over six months and found the average CPU utilization was between 15-45% - the region in which a computer operates the least efficiently. At issue is the fact that most manufacturers maximize efficiency to SPECpower which assumes that the computer is running at 100% utilization.

Building the Green Data Center

By James Turner
June 20, 2008

Bill Coleman, founder and CEO of the Cassatt Corporation, and one of the founders of BEA, has made it his mission to make data centers more energy-efficient. We caught up with him right before the O'Reilly Velocity conference where he is scheduled to speak to get some pointers on making data centers planet-friendly.

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