My Virtual Display
 Random thoughts and notes to self

A question from LinkedIn:

How do you view the relationship between Technological Innovation and Job Creation?  A net positive, a net negative, net neutral?

The relationship between technological innovation and job creation is threefold:

1. Technological innovation creates (relatively few) high-paying jobs for people who develop, deploy, and maintain the new technology (including not only engineers, but salesmen and marketers as well),
2. Technological innovation makes certain types of jobs obsolete, but
3. The well-paid engineers, salesmen and marketers have a demand for everything a well-paid person tends to buy, from houses and cars to designer coffees and sushi restaurants to modern health care. Hence, the relevant industries experience job growth. Note that this job growth can occur in both unskilled (retail salespeople) and highly skilled (doctors and nurses) occupations…

As to whether it is a “net positive” or “net negative” process, the answer is, IN TERMS OF WHAT? The sheer number of jobs has steadily increased, as technological progress tends to lead to workforce shifting out of more productive (meaning, highly automated) industries into less productive (meaning, hard to automate) ones.

The effect on wages, meanwhile, has been diverging. Workers who operate expensive machinery (say, locomotive operators) and workers who require extensive training (as in, for example, registered nurses) see their wages increase over time; those who don’t, face wage stagnation in nominal terns and thus its slow deterioration in real terms…

Windows has a command-line utility called xcopy, which it inherited from the good old DOS.   This utility is very useful when you need to copy a large number of files, especially if they are organized into an elaborate directory tree.  Out of the box, you can make xcopy copy only files that already exist in the destination location (just use the /U option); strangely, there is no obvious way to do the opposite — to only copy files that do not exist in the destination location.  DOStips.com to the rescue:

for /f %%a in ('xcopy "%source%" "%destination%" /L /Y') do (
  if not exist "%destination%.\%%~nxa" xcopy "%%a" "%destination%" /Y
)

Neat…

From Institutional Investor:

Inside the Machine: A Journey into the World of High-Frequency Trading

10 Jun 2010
Michael Peltz

An editor’s journey into the world of high-speed trading and proprietary algorithms that make or break markets.

At 2:45p.m. on Thursday, May 6, George (Gus) Sauter received a frantic call from one of his traders to get in front of a Bloomberg terminal. The Dow Jones industrial average, already down 3.9 percent that day on fears about Greece, was in free fall. In just five minutes the index plunged 573 points. Less than two minutes later, the Dow had rocketed back up 543 points, going on to finish the day down 3.2 percent.

“It was just crazy,” Sauter, chief investment officer of mutual fund giant Vanguard Group, told me a few days later. “I had to go to our fixed-income building, about a five-minute walk from my office. By the time I got there, the market had rallied.”

Crazy, indeed. The aptly named “flash crash” temporarily wiped out more than a half trillion dollars in equity value, shaking what little faith nervous investors had in U.S. markets. Shares of Dow component Procter & Gamble Co., the ultimate defensive blue-chip stock, dropped more than one third in a matter of minutes before recovering almost as quickly, all for no apparent reason. A few other large U.S. companies, including accounting firm Accenture, saw their stocks trade as low as a penny a share, only to close not far from where they had begun the day (nearly $42 a share in the case of Accenture) — again, on no news. By the time the dust settled, a whopping 19.3 billion shares had changed hands, more than twice the average daily U.S. equity market volume this year and the second-biggest trading day ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Institutional Investor:

Investors Want to Plug Into China’s Smart-Grid Market

01 Apr 2010
Xiang Ji

Beijing’s massive conversion to a smart power grid could just one-up the rest of the world. Savvy entrepreneurs and investors are looking to get a piece of the green action.

When Beijing announced a $585 billion stimulus package in November 2008, Jeffrey Kang spotted an opportunity. The package’s vast investment mandates included one aimed at upgrading the country’s electricity distribution system to a smart grid that would use high-tech meters to precisely match supply with demand in households and offices. The energy savings would be an obvious boon for the planet — but savvy entrepreneurs and investors like Kang also wanted a piece of the green action.

China Electricity Council, a national power industry association, estimates that total spending on the smart grid will hit $40 billion by 2011, although the entire project likely won’t be completed until 2020. An estimated 300 million old electricity meters are to be replaced by smart meters that encourage lower energy use by displaying usage prominently. The meters can also track household energy patterns and adjust distribution accordingly.

The whole smart-grid system — comprising ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, sensors and smart meters, all connected through computer networks — enhances energy efficiency not only by matching supply and demand, but also by more efficiently managing intermittent renewable energy sources.

Entrepreneurs and investors see great prospects in the conversion to a smart grid. Kang, who is CEO of Nasdaq-listed, Shenzhen-based module supplier Cogo Group, signed a deal in April 2009 to acquire China’s Mega Smart Group, a supplier of parts for smart-meter makers. Kang estimates the deal will generate $20 million in sales in the first year, or about 7 percent of Cogo’s total revenue. And that’s only the start. “Smart meters will be a key driver in our growth going forward,” says Kang. Just last month Yale University said it had invested in Redwood City, California’s Silver Spring Networks, a smart-meter manufacturer planning an IPO in 2010.

SBI Energy, a Rockville, Maryland–based market research firm, forecasts that the smart-grid market will grow from $90 billion in 2009 to $171 billion in 2014. SBI says government and corporate mandates to convert to climate-friendly energy systems will drive the boom.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a Menlo Park, California–based venture capital firm, predicts that the world’s electricity grid will eventually be set up “so that smart transformers are feeding information to smart way stations and talking to smart meters.” VC firms’ interest in smart grids emerged only recently, with investments as of last year totaling $414 million. By contrast, solar power has attracted $1.2 billion of VC funds, according to consulting firm Cleantech Group.

London-based VC firm WHEB Ventures not long ago made a capital injection of an undisclosed sum in PassivSystems, a Berkshire, U.K., company that makes energy management systems that fit into smart grids. “Though it’s still in early stages, smart grid represents a potentially vast global market,” says Megan Bingham-Walker, an associate at WHEB Ventures, which manages £114 million ($170.2 million). President Barack Obama last October granted $3.4 billion in stimulus money to develop smart-grid technology and install upgraded meters in the U.S.; utilities are to match these funds. Europe, meanwhile, has mandated that 20 percent of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020.

Still, investors looking to plug directly into the smart-grid market may find it difficult to do so. For instance, Robert Metcalfe, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, a $3 billion, Waltham, Massachusetts–based private equity firm, has been screening energy-management software developers but has yet to write a check. “One of the challenges is that there is no standard to root for, making it hard to recognize the winner,” he laments.

Just a note to self: to make a scheduled Windows XP task run invisibly, schedule it to run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:

In some instances, it is desirable to disable generation of RSS feeds by WordPress.  Akuna Matata presents a simple solution to this problem.  Just add the following to your theme’s functions.php:

/**
 * Disable Our Feed Urls
 */
function disable_our_feeds() {
	wp_die( __('<strong>Error:</strong>' .
		'No RSS Feed Available, ' .
		'Please visit our <a href="'.
		get_bloginfo('url') .
		'">homepage</a>.'));
}

add_action('do_feed', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);

Equipment: a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437 laptop (AMD Turion 64 X2, 2,048 MB DDR2 SDRAM, 200 GB HDD, DVD SuperMulti optical drive, 802.11b/g wireless network card) running Vista Home Premium.

Problem: an atypical Black Screen of Death.  In most cases, the Black Screen of Death appears at boot; often, the mouse cursor is visible and draggable.  In this case, however, the Black Screen of Death would appear randomly during the computer’s operation, causing the computer to freeze, power button being the only way to regain control.  This would happen about once a day.  Typically, Vista would reboot in normal mode without a problem, but every once in a while it would have to go through a lengthy restore process before booting up (I think the behavior at reboot depended on whether the computer was doing anything sensitive when it froze).

Possible solutions that didn’t work: (1) disabling event logging; (2) setting processor minimum to 100%.

Solution that worked: upgrading BIOS software to the latest version available from Toshiba Support.  So far, over a week without a single black-screen incident.

Just a note to self…  To install fonts (in this example, the Arial family) on a Fedora system:

1. Log in as root
2. Change to the font storage directory:
   cd /usr/share/fonts
3. Create a subdirectory to hold the Arial family of fonts:
   mkdir arial
4. Copy the Arial fonts into that directory.
5. Make the font files accessible systemwide:
   chmod 0775 -R arial
6. Run fc-cache on the new directory to cache the new fonts:
   fc-cache arial

That should be it…

…seems to have been completed without a hitch. A separate source of happiness is that none of the plugins were broken in transition.

From Business Week:

Solar Panels Get Cheaper

With Congress considering both a cap on carbon dioxide emissions and renewable energy requirements for power companies, utilities are trying to figure out how they’ll produce clean energy. One increasingly viable option: solar panels. Solar is still several times more expensive than wind or natural gas and many times pricier than coal, says John Rowe, CEO of Chicago-based utility giant Exelon (EXC). “But solar is where costs are improving the fastest.” One reason: Supplies of crystalline silicon, the base material used in most panels, are plentiful, thanks to climbing production capacity. On June 8, analysts at Barclays Capital (BCS) said they expect output in 2010 to top 138,500 metric tons, 13% more than originally predicted. At the same time, solar panel factories are now more cost efficient. In a recent issue of Science, the president of panel maker SunPower (SPWRA), Richard Swanson, says it will be possible to make crystalline solar panels for $1 per watt in five years, down from about $1.90 today. Competing thin-film (non-crystalline) panel makers say their somewhat less efficient product will get down to 70 cents per watt.

Either way, the solar power industry is closing in on the long-sought goal of “grid parity”—making electricity for a price that’s competitive, at least in high-priced U.S. markets such as California, where energy is typically produced with natural gas at about 12 cents per kilowatt hour. Clean technology research firm Clean Edge predicts partial parity by 2015.

“We think this opens up a huge market,” says Christopher O’Brien, head of market development at Oerlikon Solar, a Swiss maker of equipment to produce thin-film panels. A short-term problem for the recession-battered solar industry: Many deals are on hold as customers wait to see if they can get stimulus money.