Daily Technology News

Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC’s cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing.

A panel of experts, organized by the New England Clean Energy Council, earlier this week said that the utility storage field has enormous potential. But rapid deployment of storage devices is held back by concerns over technology risk and financial complexity.

Technology optimists say that wide-scale energy storage will change the face of the transmission grid and make wind and solar power more compelling economically.

In this scenario, utilities store electricity made from renewable sources or produced during off-peak times. Then, when demand for electricity peaks in the middle of the day, they could draw from the stored-up charge.

This “peak shaving” practice avoids the need to build new power plants to meet growing demand. Utilities could also idle dirty and expensive “peaking plants,” which are only turned on during times of high demand, such as very hot summer days when air conditioners max out the load.

But moving megawatts’ worth of electricity around the grid like files on a computer is more theory than practice these days.

“Buying power at night and then selling it during the day–something like that will happen maybe in 30 or 40 years when storage technologies are one-tenth the costs they are today,” said Ric Fulop, co-founder and vice president of business development at lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems.

But as utilities try out new technologies for different uses, Fulop and others predicted that storage will start to take hold in a variety of ways.

“I think we will see a lot of deployments in the next few years that will change how the grid works,” Fulop said. “Then we’ll see utilities jump on the bandwagon.”

Two markets for energy storage

A123 Systems, which makes batteries for plug-in hybrids and power tools among other devices, is actively pushing into utility storage with more than 100 people dedicated to the market, said Fulop.

It’s targeting what’s called grid stabilization, or grid support, where warehouse-size installations of lead-acid batteries are the incumbent technology. That alone is a multimillion dollar market and will pave the way for different grid storage applications, he said.

With grid stabilization, kilowatts’ or a couple of megawatts’ worth of electricity are pumped onto the grid for a short amount of time, from a few seconds to under an hour. It’s used to match grid demand and supply to make generators run more efficiently or to ensure a steady frequency.

Earlier this year, grid operators in Texas had to shut down power to its customers because the wind died down momentarily, effectively cutting off supply from its wind farms, noted Lawrence Gelbien, vice president of technology at utility NStar.

“If you could take the wind power, store it in batteries, and discharge when the wind starts again, then that’s a fine application of storage,” he said.

Gelbien said that storage units could be deployed in place of installing more “wires and poles” in a place that isn’t served with enough electricity to meet demand for only a few days of the year. Because storage devices are movable, they could be redeployed in other places after a few years as the need arises.

Grid support is relatively mature at about $2.4 billion and growing at 3.3 percent per year, said Lux Research President Matthew Nordan.

Batteries with different chemistries as well as ultra-capacitors, such as the ones being developed by secretive start-up EEStor, serve this end of energy storage, Nordan said.

Flywheels are also a viable alternative. Flywheel maker Beacon Power earlier this month said it expects to have a megawatt-size machine, able to store 15 minutes of power, on the grid by the end of this year.

Dizzying array of technologies

At the opposite extreme are companies pursuing the “bulk storage” market
where power is delivered for more than an hour.

This part of the market, where companies are developing a range of technologies, from so-called flow batteries to compressed air storage, represents the biggest business opportunity in grid storage.

The end game is to allow utilities to provide baseload power–meaning electricity during the middle of the day when demand is highest–with stored energy.

If only 10 percent of the installed wind power plants adopted large-scale energy storage, the market would hit $50 billion, according to Lux Research. That’s because electricity costs more for utilities to purchase and deliver during peak times.

But utilities are risk-averse, and power plants take 5 to 10 years to construct. As a result, Lux Research pegs the market at $600 million in 2012, growing at about 25 percent per year.

One company tackling bulk storage head-on is General Compression, which is developing a wind turbine with an integrated air compressor.

Air is compressed and pumped underground into geological features like depleted gas wells or limestone caverns. There are currently two compressed air energy storage (CAES) plants in operation with a few others in development. But some utilities are seriously considering CAES.

“There is an increasing gap between the growing demand for electricity and the availability of options,” said Julianne Zimmerman, chief marketing officer for General Compression. “With increasing shareholder resistance to new fossil fuel and nuclear plants, there’s a shrinking set of options.”

Different types of batteries are competing for bulk storage as well.

So-called flow batteries, where liquid chemicals move between huge storage tanks to deliver a charge, are also being tested on the grid.

Start-up Deeya Energy says it is developing a flow battery for grid backup power or to integrate wind and solar power that will be far cheaper than lead-acid, lithium-ion, or nickel-metal hydride batteries and cheaper than fuel cells. Its products will be able to delivery between 2 kilowatts and 2 megawatts of electricity for 2 hours or up to 24 hours, it says.

Another flow battery maker, VRB Power, is currently testing systems, including a 5-kilowatt, four-hour prototype in Florida.

Pumped hydro, where water is pumped up a mountain and released as needed in a hydro plant, is also used, but its use is limited by the number of available sites.

The latest generation of concentrating solar power plants are being developed with integrated storage, in the form of hot water or even molten salt to deliver electricity after the sun goes down.

Challenges

But for all the promise of making the grid operate more like a hybrid car, there are serious challenges, panelists said.

Many of these technologies don’t have a 15-year track record that utilities like to see, which makes them skeptical. Large-scale battery projects requires systems integration that involves batteries, electronics, software, and thermal management systems, said A123 Systems’ Fulop.

They are also very capital intensive. To get around that problem, Beacon Power doesn’t sell its flywheel. Instead, it bids on power generation contracts and sells the electricity to utilities.

Regulations for utilities are written around power generation units, but not energy storage, said Matt Lazarewicz, vice president and chief technology officer of Beacon Power.

“The market rules have to change to allow nongeneration assets to connect to the grid and get paid for it,” he said. “And to make the grid look more like a Prius, utilities need to change their mindset to make more efficient use of the generation system.”

Rising fossil fuel prices are an incentive to explore energy storage, as well as the rising costs of constructing new plants.

Ideally, a utility would be able to get money from a storage unit in multiple ways. One rural co-op installed a four-hour, 300-kilowatt storage system to offset peak electricity rates and to provide backup power to a nearby industrial company, said Matthew Johnson, director of business development at Gaia Power Technologies.

Utilities are showing interest in more options, but storage is still very much an emerging technology.

“There’s a lot of technology development and new work. But one of the reasons we don’t see more of it today is because the economics of this are actually quite complex,” said Bruce Phillips, director at Northbridge Group.

Yahoo is trying to show that it’s taking hold of its own destiny again.

Phase 1 was the ad deal, under which Yahoo expects more cash by showing Google’s more lucrative ads next to Yahoo search results. Phase 2 came Thursday with a Yahoo management makeover, supposedly under way for months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

But two big factors make it clear Chief Executive Jerry Yang and his allies have a long way to go before Yahoo achieves independence.

First on the agenda is the possibility of some partnership with another rival, Microsoft. Despite proclamations on two occasions that its interest in Yahoo was over, it appears Microsoft is still interested, and investors are agitating for a deal.

Second is the pressure by activist investor Carl Icahn, who disclosed Thursday he controls a 5 percent stake in the company. Icahn has proposed a dissident slate of directors and made clear his recommendations should they be elected Aug. 1: move Yang back to his chief Yahoo role and hire a new CEO, open the door to a Microsoft acquisition or partnership, and scrap an expensive severance plan that would kick in if somebody acquired Yahoo.

It looks like Yahoo is showing a bit more of its fighting spirit with the Google deal and reorganization. The moves are somewhat reactive, to be sure, but they also show the company trying to let someone inside the company determine its fate.

Fixes through a reorg?
The reorganization has the potential to clean up some of the company’s overlapping structure.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The reorganization creates some new groups reporting to President Sue Decker–notably a business and advertising group for the U.S. region under Hilary Schneider and a group for products such as Mail, Flickr, and My Yahoo under Ash Patel. Also new is the audience technology group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan, which reports to Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh.

Panchapakesan’s engineers at the audience technology group will work closely with their counterparts in Patel’s audience products group.

“Together we shape the product,” said Scott Dietzsen, the new leader of Yahoo Mail and Messaging. “We’re in different organizations, but we ultimately function like a single team. I’m so committed to tightly integrated product management and engineering. That’s how you do great work.”

It better be tight integration with high interdepartmental communication bandwidth, though. For Internet companies, technological constraints and possibilities are central to product management.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Monetization will be the responsibility of Schneider and her three regional peers, which raises another potential problem. We’ve heard of Yahoo tensions before between product groups and monetization groups, with Decker mediating the disputes, and the new Yahoo structures at least at first glance does nothing to change that.

“Monetization and product have always been at odds,” said one source familiar with Yahoo’s inner workings. “Product people by nature don’t like ads. Monetization people think Yahoo needs more of them.”

But there are a lot of new faces running the show, including in product management, where Patel largely replaces now-departed Jeff Weiner and Dietzen is taking over much of soon-to-be-departed Brad Garlinghouse’s job.

Some responsibilities at Yahoo still seem fuzzy. One is the Yahoo Open Strategy transformation–important work that could help Yahoo recover lost ground lost to rivals in the fast-changing vanguard of Internet businesses.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

On the flip side, Yahoo set up a specific group to try to get a handle on the important area of cloud computing, in which applications run on central servers. “We have bits and pieces everywhere. This brings it together into one organization,” said Balogh, who oversees the group.

Reclaiming the initiative?
Even if the management changes are effective and Yahoo brings its various strategies to fruition–and those are big ifs–there’s a problem: time.

The outside pressures on Yahoo, from Icahn and Microsoft, along with potential internal pressures from Yahoo’s own board, will come to a boil in the next month as the annual shareholder meeting draws closer.

A good quarter could give Yang and Decker more breathing room. It wouldn’t make Icahn go away, but it could make it harder for him to enlist support among other shareholders.

But even with a good quarter, Yahoo’s new structure won’t change the company overnight, and the Google ad deal won’t begin generating revenue for another three months or so even if Yahoo vaults cleanly over the antitrust hurdles.

So at least for now, Yang and Decker don’t get to keep the Yahoo reins to themselves.

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google’s manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Do you vet code for patent or copyright?

No. We have legal people on our lists. We have two main lists that track these things. Open-source licensing for incoming code and open-source releasing for outgoing code. Legal has a presence there. Patents are incredibly tricky.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

When you think big, comfortable sedans with cutting-edge tech, you look for a price range around $80,000 to $100,000 and think models such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7-series, and Lexus LS. But then here comes the 2008 Infiniti M45x with all the tech those other cars offer for a measly $60,000, fully loaded. This is the car for well-heeled value shoppers.

The M45x model is Infiniti’s top-of-the-line sedan, featuring the model’s largest motor along with all-wheel drive. This big sedan cruises easily and coddled us in its very comfortable front seats. Infiniti has been a real leader in cabin technology lately, and our M45x test car came with not only the optional Technology package, but also the Advanced Technology package. There are only a couple of places where we felt this car let us down, in its uninspiring automatic transmission and its mediocre fuel economy, which was expected given the size of the engine.

Read the review.

With gas over $4 per gallon, on average, across the country, there is now a carpet bagger economy on the Toyota Prius.

Many dealers will still sell a new one at MSRP, but you are likely to wait 10 to 12 weeks before seeing a car. Yes, if you act quickly you can buy a used Prius, but this is where the real price gouging occurs. Case in point, a basic 2007 Prius with no options and 29,000 miles will cost you around $27,000. If you bought a brand-new car identical to this in 2007, it would have cost around $24,000, and Kelly Blue Book, the authority on used car prices, says that this car is worth just under $23k today.

Obviously, there is a new supply-and-demand curve in the market. Nothing illegal mind you; this is capitalism at work, but it just doesn’t seem right. Gas may go up to $6 per gallon, or oil may go down to $80 per barrel; no one really knows, and there are bulls and bears forecasting both extremes. Since rationality has given way to speculation and panic, my advice to would-be Prius buyers is:

1. Do the math. A nicely equipped 2007 Honda Civic EX with equal mileage carries a suggested retail price of about $18,300. Assuming 30 miles per gallon for the Civic, and 45 miles per gallon for the Prius, it could take around 13 years to recoup the extra money for the Prius at $5 per gallon (assuming 12,000 miles per year of driving). Now I know that there are a lot of assumptions in this formula, but suffice it to say that when you do the math, the Civic seems like a better deal overall–not to mention that the EX has a Sunroof to boot.

2. Wait. Delaying a Prius purchase could have two benefits. First off, buyers get to see whether the price of gas goes up or down. If it does go down as some predict, the Prius premium is likely to disappear faster than a Lakers fan after the NBA finals. The other advantage to waiting is that the highbrow Prius will finally get some competition moving forward. Honda is rumored to have a 2009 hybrid Fit and brand-new five-passenger hybrid–with better gas mileage than today’s Prius–waiting in the wings. Rumor also has it that VW, Hyundai, Ford, and others aren’t far behind with high-mileage alternatives of their own. Finally, in 2009 or 2010 Toyota will introduce its own next-generation Prius that may offer plug-in capabilities and better gas mileage as well.

Supply and demand are constant market conditions, but shortages come and go. Is a used Prius really worth a $3,000 to $4,000 premium? The answer to this question can be summed in two sagacious words: caveat emptor!

Virgin Mobile USA is expected to announce a deal to acquire fellow mobile virtual operator Helio as early as this week, according to a story in The Financial Times.

The report cites sources close to the companies that say Virgin Mobile and Helio’s majority owner South Korean cell phone operator SK Telecom have agreed in principle to a deal. As part of this deal, Helio’s subscribers will become Virgin Mobile USA branded subscribers. And Virgin Mobile USA will give SK Telecom a 20 percent equity stake in the new combined company. SK Telecom is also expected to invest a nominal sum in Virgin Mobile USA, the article said.

While the combined MVNO will still be dwarfed by the four major wireless operators in the U.S., it will have a wider subscriber base that includes both pre-paid customers as well as highly valuable post paid customers. Since Virgin Mobile USA and Helio each buy wholesale capacity from Sprint Nextel to run their separate mobile services, a combined company could help them negotiate better rates with Sprint.

The companies have been rumored to be in merger talks since May. And last month, Virgin Mobile and Helio each confirmed they were in “strategic” discussions.

Earlier this week, Gizmodo reported that talks between Virgin Mobile USA and Helio’s parent company SK Telecom had stalled. And there were also rumors that Helio was starting to shut down its retail stores.

A spokeswoman for Virgin Mobile USA declined to comment on the Financial Times story. And a spokesman for Helio was not available for comment. The Financial Times reported that SK Telecom representatives in South Korea declined to comment on the merger speculation.

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google’s manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Do you vet code for patent or copyright?

No. We have legal people on our lists. We have two main lists that track these things. Open-source licensing for incoming code and open-source releasing for outgoing code. Legal has a presence there. Patents are incredibly tricky.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

This past weekend word leaked out that Mio Technology had a Knight Rider-themed GPS in the works, and now we can officially say that it’s real. Since we were bound by NDA (nondisclosure agreement) till now, we couldn’t really spill the full details when the news broke (please don’t get me started on this) on Friday afternoon, but the floodgates are open now.

The Knight Rider GPS will indeed feature the voice of William Daniels (aka KITT), and there will be a database of names so you can customize the device to have KITT personally greet and talk to you (provided that your name is included). As far as navigation features, the specs will be similar to the Mio Moov 310/300, minus the real-time traffic. The portable navigation system is expected to ship on August 8 for $269.

Mio actually stopped by our office with a prototype of the Knight Rider GPS and was brave enough to leave it with us for a couple of hours. The video to the right shows what ensued. For the record, this is quite possibly the most embarrassing video I have ever shot (also they didn’t have “Bonnie” in the name database, so we used “Katherine” for our lovely First Look shooter and editor. On another note, how do you not have Bonnie when one of the main characters of the Knight Rider TV show was named Bonnie? Sorry, I digress.), but we were just trying to capture the fun of the device. The voice of KITT and the flashing LEDs are certainly gimmicky, but it’s still a blast to use and hopefully, it’ll deliver on the performance front when we get a final unit in for a road test.

If it seems like many people you know would like to own a hybrid car, J.D. Powers and Associates has the data to back up your hunch.

The auto market research firm on Tuesday released results of a survey that found that there is very high interest in hybrid-electric vehicles–even after the substantial price premium is revealed.

The company performed surveys with consumers before and after telling them of average $5,000 difference of hybrids.

The study found that 72 percent of consumers are “definitely/probably” interested in having hybrid-electric technology for their next vehicle.

In 2005, 58 percent of consumers responded yes to that same question.

After the average price difference is revealed, 46 percent of consumers were still interested in the 2008 survey.

“High consumer interest in hybrid-electric powertrain technology may be reflective of not only rising gas prices but also a heightened effort among consumers to be more environmentally conscious,” said Mike Marshall, director of automotive emerging technologies at J.D. Powers and Associates, in a statement.

That research dovetails with what many people in the electric and plug-in hybrid car industry are betting on. Namely, the consumers are demanding a product that is not quite yet widespread.

The financial part of a decision to go hybrid is getting clearer as well. A financial analyst earlier this month presented an analysis that showed that purchasing a hybrid-electric car has a lower cost of ownership than a gas-only car when gasoline prices are over $3.18 a gallon.

Meanwhile, the J.D. Powers and Associates study found that consumers are not interested in buying so-called clean diesel vehicles.

The researchers conclude that people still have negative associations with diesel from older diesel technologies that have unpleasant exhaust.

The study also queried people on what sort of new technology features they are looking for.

If price were no object, it found that people want blind spot detection, backup assist, and navigation systems. After prices were revealed, consumers showed a 53 percent interest and wireless connectivity.

“Consumer interest is likely heightened by the fact that more states may prohibit the use of cell phones while driving. Wireless connectivity will potentially become a necessity rather than a luxury as time goes on,” Marshall said in a statement.

Co-founder shares surprises, letdowns, morsels from early Microsoft days

By Ina Fried
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 24, 2008 4:00 AM PST

TalkBack

E-mail

del.icio.us

Digg this

REDMOND, Wash.–If you ask Bill Gates what life will be like when he stops working full time at Microsoft, he’ll have to get back to you.

That’s because, a week away from the transition, he still hasn’t slowed down his pace. If anything, things have picked up as he tries to have one last meeting with all the leaders and projects that are important to him.

Gates, who dropped out of school more than 30 years ago to run Microsoft, steps down from full-time work on Friday. He’ll remain chairman and a part-time Microsoft employee.

Credit: Ina Fried

Bill Gates poses for a shot in his office,
which includes a three-monitor display set-up
as well as a Surface tabletop computer.

The Microsoft co-founder did take some time out of his schedule recently to sit down with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried and offer some reflections on the early days of the PC market as well as thoughts on where Microsoft is now and what technologies he will need in his new role, working full time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In the interview, Gates shared some little-known stories from the company’s early days, including the fact that Microsoft seriously entertained combining with Lotus, but talks ended when that company’s chief executive pulled out. Gates also noted that Microsoft was invited and then uninvited to the launch event for the first IBM PC.

“We’d been invited, and then they decided not to invite us,” Gates said. “Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people, yeah, we had this invitation that said, yeah, we’re going to go, there’s going to be a big deal. And then they decided, nah, we don’t want you to come to the thing. That was a little bit of a downer.”

industry response

Thanks for the memories

Technology insiders say their goodbyes as Gates steps down.

Q: As you’ve been thinking about the transition, what are the kinds of things that have been on your mind the most?

Gates: Well, for 33 years I’ve worked at Microsoft and come in every day, and thought about what are the new things we need to do, and what’s my personal role in that, a lot of e-mail, lot of meetings, lot of product reviews. So, in a sense it’s hard for me to project what it’s going to be like for me or Microsoft when I’m not here.

As long as I’m here, I’m still sending a lot of e-mail and in a lot of meetings, and so the real change in terms of people having an opportunity to step up and do things, to some degree it’s after July 1 when my involvement is only a very specific involvement on particular projects as opposed to the overall strategy thing.

Everybody likes to pick the current competitive battles that we’re in, and kind of think, OK, those are the big things. For me, I’d pick like tablet or interactive TV that are, according to me–but I’ve been over-optimistic before–on the verge of big, big impact. So, I’ve been sending a lot of mail to the tablet and interactive TV team, sort of sending the mail I would have sent three months from now, now, just giving them encouragement. Because, you know, all the big successes, whether it’s Office integration or Windows, it takes a long time for those things to get established.

We thought it would be a good idea for me to go to the Windows 7 group and go see the work, and I was thrilled. Steven Sinofsky took me around, showed me what they’re doing.

So, you’re going to product group by product group?

Gates: Well, in terms of big meetings, that’s pretty much done. Like the Windows group had a meeting, and the Surface group had a meeting, but this is more just sitting down with the top executives, so Stephen Elop, Craig Mundie, Kevin Turner.

The timing is actually pretty good. We just did our business reviews. We do the business planning, which is for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. So, we have the plans in place, and I sat through that last set of reviews, but it’s a perfect example of something that as just a board member working on projects I won’t sit in those business plan reviews in the future. I mean, Steve (Ballmer) may ask me to sit in on one that touches directly on something I’m doing, but the default is that I’m not there at all.

I hear search is one you’re still pretty enthused about.

Gates: Yeah, that doesn’t mean I’d necessarily go to their business plan review, but I’ve developed a relationship with them where brainstorming and thinking about what things we’d pick and how we do it.

You know, it’s another good example of something that breakthrough work is not–doesn’t happen in a day; it happens in many years. Now, many of those years fortunately are the years we’ve already put into it, but to really help that keep on track, and just to give them the positive feedback as they’re going through it, that group, that’s actually the only one that’s truly concrete at this point where literally we’ve scheduled out a bit this summer and even some into the fall when and how I’m going to look at various aspects of their work.

Can you think of a time when the company really sort of behind the scenes was coming from behind? I mean, we’ve all heard sort of the early days of developing the first version of DOS, but are there other times where it was kind of a mad scramble?

Gates: Well, we weren’t that well-known publicly until sometime in the 1980s, and one of my favorite articles was where they wrote that there were four software companies, and none of them was that much different than the others. But we knew at that time that the other three just weren’t long term, hiring the right people, thinking globally.

It was ourselves, Ashton Tate, WordPerfect, and, I guess, Lotus. There were many software companies that were bigger than us. VisiCorp was bigger than us at a point in time. MicroPro (publisher of WordStar) was bigger than us at a point in time. And then each of those three–WordPerfect, Lotus, and Ashton Tate–were bigger than us at a time.

But the way we were going about it and just thinking about software and how was the chip going to change and how did the pieces come together, and how did you do business in Europe and stuff, we were just different, we were just a long-term company.

So, it was funny to me that the article was written right as if somebody had really looked carefully, they would see that we were quite different than those others. And then it was only about four years later that there was a spoof article in InfoWorld where they said Microsoft announced today that Ashton Tate never existed, which is kind of an over-the-top thing. But that was a period where we came to the fore.

There’s a lot of interesting twists and turns. There was actually a point where we talked with Lotus about getting together with them, but it wasn’t a good cultural fit there. It was actually (Lotus CEO Jim) Manzi who–I mean, it wouldn’t necessarily have happened–but it was Manzi who ended the discussions.

There was one day that was rather funny. IBM didn’t invite us to the introduction of the PC. We’d been invited, and then they decided not to invite us. Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people, yeah, we had this invitation that said, yeah, we’re going to go, there’s going to be a big deal, and then they decided, nah, we don’t want you to come to the thing. That was a little bit of a downer. Now, who cares, but…

Looking back at those early days, if you could give that 21-year-old you just starting Microsoft some advice, what would you–is there something that you know now that you didn’t then that would have been useful?


Gates: Not really. I mean, you can say, hey, you’re going to be successful, so don’t work so hard or something like that, but then it might completely erase the whole thing. Or learn that you’re going to need a mix of skills, not just engineering skills. But at first the fact that we were just over-the-top engineering-centric wasn’t so stupid.

Today, as you get a large company, having a push that says, hey, we’ve got to stay somewhat engineering-centric, even as you have all these different skill sets, you know, I could have told myself that guys’ IQ, it’s not as fungible to learn other things. If they show IQ in domain A, you know, I always thought, well, then just use them in domain B.

And that worked a bit. You even see another company in the industry doing this bit where you’ll hire somebody who’s a good scientist, and you say they can be a programmer, and you only–you interview them on sort of their–the depth of knowledge about the field they’ve spent in, and assume they can come to the other field. Some of that is true. But when you go into, say, management-type things or dealing with people-type things, then the number of people whose IQ is fungible is surprisingly low.

I mean, that’s the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career is that you find people who are so good at one thing, and where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, very similar, and yet they’re very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other.

What do you think–if that same 21-year-old you could see where things have gotten, what do you think would be most surprising? Because it sounds like you had the ambition all along.

Gates: Well, yeah, we certainly said a computer on every desk and in every home. I had calculated out that we’d only need a thousand developers to write all the software that we were going to do all the horizontal software. So, definitely if you took me to this place, I’m sure as a 21-year-old, I’d say, what do all these people do, and how can you afford (all of this)–look at these offices, look at this wasted space. Shuttles? Come on! Somebody is paying for all these shrubberies and things? You guys are crazy. You have too many people, and just the cost structure would blow my mind, because I was thinking, OK, should we let people have two chairs in their office or just one chair, kind of thing.

I’d come into this office and meet myself and I’d say, well, are you still reading all the code? I mean, these guys could ship some really crummy code; I hope you’re still reading it. And I’d be like, are you kidding? It’s been a decade since I took anybody’s listing home and read it. It would be like, well, then how do you keep it good?

The thing that I would drool over is to walk over to Microsoft Research and see that here are people spending full time on vision, full time on speech, full time on machine learning, full time on software proof, where at early Microsoft we couldn’t give back to the intellectual base. We drew on the base that the universities and Xerox had done, and we used it in a fantastic way, as did Apple and the whole personal computer industry.

Now we are very significant. In fact, if you leave universities out of it, we are probably the most significant computer science research thing. I mean, we’re rated No. 1. We have the most papers.

So, I would be in awe of the hard things that this kind of scale and success lets you do, and I’d be really torn–geez, should I go over to that research group and just go help those guys, or should I learn that chairman’s office-type thing where you kind of have to give people positive feedback, negative feedback, balance that well, think about people. To have a time warp would feel like such a discontinuity, like, hey, if you haven’t seen code, you’re not me. So, it would be confusing.

Do you have a sense of what technologies are going to be important to you personally in your new role?

Gates: Well, immunology is very important, because that’s the science that teaches us how to make vaccines. Vaccines teach your immune system how to block the diseases. And so in the biggest foundation program, global health, the key miracles we’re looking for are vaccines, a vaccine for malaria, a vaccine for tuberculosis, a vaccine for AIDS, a vaccine for pneumonia, a vaccine for the various diarrheal diseases.

If you take something like education, the whole way that teachers improve and learn from each other, and what is an effective teacher and how do you encourage them to adopt best practices, that’s a very complex area that I want to learn a lot about. To some degree online video can come in and play a role there, particularly as you get up to college and community college.