Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather.
Gates and a dozen other scientists have raised eyebrows by submitting patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures.
It's a noble idea, given the horrible memories from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast four years ago this week.
The storm, which rated a frightening Category 3 when it made landfall in Louisiana, was blamed for $81 billion in damaged and destroyed property and the deaths of more than 1,800 men, women and children.
Skeptics applaud the motive of the concept but question its feasibility.
"The enormity of it, in order to do something effective, we'd have to do something at a scale that humans have never really done before," said Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
How exactly would this hurricane-zapping technology work?
Hurricanes are fueled by warm water, and cooling the waters surrounding a storm would slow a storm's momentum.
According to the patents, many tub-like barges would be placed directly in the path of an oncoming storm. Each barge would have two conduits, each 500 feet long.
One conduit would push the warm water from the ocean's surface down. The other would bring up cold water where it lies deep undersea.
World reknowned hurricane expert William Gray, who's been studying and predicting the storms for a half-century, also doubts whether the proposal would work.
"The problem is the storms come up so rapidly," said Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. "You only get two to three days warning. It's very difficult to bring up enough cold water in two to three days to have much effect."
The idea itself isn't groundbreaking, according to Gray, who said it could only be feasible if the barges were put into place at the beginning of hurricane season with the idea that storms will come.
"But you might do all that, and perhaps no storms would come. That's an economic problem," Gray said.
Even if the technology does work, Gray said it won't completely halt a hurricane.
"There is no way to stop it. The storm might weaken in the center, but the outer areas wouldn't be affected much."
And flooding and storm surges are determined by these outer winds, Gray said.
When word of Gates' five patent applications first made headlines in July, alarmed bloggers lit up the Internet, expressing fears that playing with ocean temperatures could lead to catastrophe, possibly forcing a storm in a different direction.
That's not likely, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor in atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"You're doing something to the ocean that the hurricane would have done anyway," Emanuel said.
Cold water that churns up during a storm slows down a hurricane naturally. But the coldest water is usually at the rear of the storm, so sometimes it's too late to weaken [the storm], Emanuel said.
"The key is doing it a little sooner than the storm itself does it and make [the hurricane] weaker than it would have been," he said. "There are enough experiments to find out whether hurricanes' natural cooling could steer the storm in a different location, and the answer is no, or it's a very small chance."
While Emanuel believes the physics are conceivable, he says the cost of implementing the system shouldn't outweigh the benefit.
"This would only be practical if the amount [of money] you spend doing this would be less than the damage caused by the hurricane," Emanuel said.
Gates and scientist Ken Caldeira, both listed as inventors on the patents, did not respond to CNN's requests to comment about their venture.
The patents, which were only made public last month by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, were filed in January by Searete LLC. The company is a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm run by Microsoft's former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.
A spokeswoman for Intellectual Ventures, which holds about 27,000 technology patents, didn't elaborate on the cost associated with the patent.
"At this point, there are no plans for deployment, so there is no talk of funding," she said, adding that it could take up to 18 months for the patent application to be approved.
Regardless, inventors say that this technology is not something they'll be rushing to use anytime soon.
"This type of technology is not something humankind would use as a 'Plan A' or 'Plan B,'" Paul "Pablos" Holman, an inventor in the Intellectual Ventures laboratory, wrote on the company blog.
"These inventions are a 'Plan C,' where humans decide that we've exhausted all our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies. If our planet is in this severe situation, then our belief is that we should not be starting from scratch at investigating mitigation options."
Hurricane expert Gray agrees.
"I don't think this is anything that's going to be done in the next few decades in a practical sense, but maybe further down the line," Gray said. "I would love to see Bill Gates, with all his money, use some of it to experiment."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates.gray/index.html
Monday, August 31, 2009
Can Bill Gates stop hurricanes? Scientists doubt it
Friday, August 28, 2009
Dell Beats Forecasts, Then Surges
For years, Dell feasted on a banquet of corporate technology spending, as large companies spent millions of dollars every three years or so to update their fleets of personal computers. However, ever since the recession began more than a year ago, the computer maker has had to fight for every morsel as companies hoarded their technology dollars.
Now, Dell’s involuntary diet looks as if it might be coming to an end.
On Thursday, after Dell reported unexpectedly strong second-quarter earnings, executives said that its commercial business should pick up again in 2010, starting in the United States.
The advent of new technologies from Intel and Microsoft, including October’s release of the Windows 7 operating system, and the cost of maintaining older machines will spur companies to replace their aging PC fleets, said Brian T. Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer. “We’ve seen the whole entire installed base is basically 12 to 15 months older than it usually is,” he said.
A new refresh cycle could prove vital for the recovery efforts at Dell, which despite its recent struggles remains a top contender in the market for commercial desktop and notebook sales. The company, based in Round Rock, Tex., generates more than 80 percent of its revenue from commercial customers, and it continues to lean heavily on sales of PCs even as it expands its higher-end products and services.
On a conference call with investors to discuss the quarterly financial results, Michael S. Dell, the chief executive, said the company already had won bids to upgrade several large computer fleets. While many deployments have been delayed because of tight budgets, he said, “we’re convinced they’ll occur.”
Dell reported net income of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, for the quarter ended July 31. That was a 23 percent decline from the $616 million in net income, or 31 cents a share, reported in the period last year. Excluding costs associated with its continuing revamping, the company reported earnings of 28 cents a share, substantially exceeding the forecast of 23 cents a share from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Dell’s revenue declined 22 percent, to $12.8 billion, from $16.4 billion a year ago. Analysts had expected revenue of $12.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
Looking ahead, Mr. Dell said he expected revenue in the second half of the fiscal year to be stronger than in the first half.
The better-than-expected performance caused Dell’s stock price to surge nearly 7 percent, to $15.65, in the final minutes of trading Thursday. The shares had been roughly flat, but about 15 minutes before the 4 p.m. market close, they started rising sharply on heavy volume. About three minutes before the market closed, the company put out its full earnings news release, which had been scheduled to come out after the close of trading.
Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman, said the company accidentally posted some material from its quarterly financial presentation too early. “It was an inadvertent error on our part,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Consistent with full disclosure, we immediately posted our news release as soon as we recognized what had happened.”
The brightest spot for the quarter came from Dell’s public group, which includes government, school and health care customers. Buoyed in part by customers’ use of federal stimulus funds and strong sales to educational institutions, revenue for that group rose to $3.8 billion, a 20 percent increase over the previous quarter.
David Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said he was pleased to see that Dell’s gross profit margin actually rose slightly in the quarter. He said that the company appeared to be selling a more profitable mix of products. “That puts them in a better position in the near term,” he said.
Dell’s efforts to improve its cost base should also put it in a good position to defend and perhaps expand its commercial market share, he said. The company has spent the last two years revamping its operations to gain a better competitive footing.
Its ability to recapture or expand its share of large PC contracts will be a critical test of its reorganization efforts.
Meanwhile, rivals have upped the ante. In particular, Hewlett-Packard has gained significant momentum in the last two years. The company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., now ships more PCs worldwide than any other computer maker. It accounted for 19.8 percent of worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter, according to IDC, a research firm. Dell, once the market leader, was a distant second with 13.7 percent.
Throughout 2008, Dell retained its lead in market share for shipments to commercial customers, according to IDC. But during the second quarter, H.P. passed Dell in that segment, too, IDC said.
“H.P. has a much higher proportion of its business in the consumer market, so it gets a proportionally better lift when consumers are buying and corporations aren’t,” said Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. “If corporations are buying, Dell gets a bigger swing than H.P.”
A positive swing from corporate technology spending cannot come soon enough for Dell. Its commercial businesses showed some early signs of recovery in the company’s most recent quarter, but revenue and profit fell far short of last year.
H.P.’s momentum could help sway a handful of corporate technology buyers, said Matthew Eastwood, vice president of enterprise platform research at IDC, but large companies do not change PC vendors on a whim. Companies typically want to maintain some consistency with vendors and supplies, he said, and being clued in on a computer maker’s road map for future products helps technology managers plan for what’s next.
“Up until now, a lot of the end users and actual customers have been very quiet, sitting back and more or less trying to manage their infrastructure by looking in the rearview mirror,” Mr. Eastwood said. “Now they’re starting to shift and focus toward the future again: ‘What kind of investments am I going to make in I.T. to fuel my next business cycle?’ ”
Computer makers need to have an answer for that question now, or they risk the loss of new hardware sales and sales of the more profitable services and products that go along with the computer. Sales of technology-management services like online monitoring of PC fleets have become increasingly important for computer makers as profit margins on hardware narrow.
Dell has pushed hard into these services through acquisitions, partnerships and internal development work, but its list of services still lags the size and scope of H.P., especially after H.P.’s acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last year.
“If you’ve got better services than your competitor, then you can drag your hardware in on the one-stop shopping idea,” Mr. Kay said. “H.P. is better positioned with its services and software acquisitions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/technology/companies/28dell.html?_r=1&ref=technology
Now, Dell’s involuntary diet looks as if it might be coming to an end.
On Thursday, after Dell reported unexpectedly strong second-quarter earnings, executives said that its commercial business should pick up again in 2010, starting in the United States.
The advent of new technologies from Intel and Microsoft, including October’s release of the Windows 7 operating system, and the cost of maintaining older machines will spur companies to replace their aging PC fleets, said Brian T. Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer. “We’ve seen the whole entire installed base is basically 12 to 15 months older than it usually is,” he said.
A new refresh cycle could prove vital for the recovery efforts at Dell, which despite its recent struggles remains a top contender in the market for commercial desktop and notebook sales. The company, based in Round Rock, Tex., generates more than 80 percent of its revenue from commercial customers, and it continues to lean heavily on sales of PCs even as it expands its higher-end products and services.
On a conference call with investors to discuss the quarterly financial results, Michael S. Dell, the chief executive, said the company already had won bids to upgrade several large computer fleets. While many deployments have been delayed because of tight budgets, he said, “we’re convinced they’ll occur.”
Dell reported net income of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, for the quarter ended July 31. That was a 23 percent decline from the $616 million in net income, or 31 cents a share, reported in the period last year. Excluding costs associated with its continuing revamping, the company reported earnings of 28 cents a share, substantially exceeding the forecast of 23 cents a share from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Dell’s revenue declined 22 percent, to $12.8 billion, from $16.4 billion a year ago. Analysts had expected revenue of $12.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
Looking ahead, Mr. Dell said he expected revenue in the second half of the fiscal year to be stronger than in the first half.
The better-than-expected performance caused Dell’s stock price to surge nearly 7 percent, to $15.65, in the final minutes of trading Thursday. The shares had been roughly flat, but about 15 minutes before the 4 p.m. market close, they started rising sharply on heavy volume. About three minutes before the market closed, the company put out its full earnings news release, which had been scheduled to come out after the close of trading.
Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman, said the company accidentally posted some material from its quarterly financial presentation too early. “It was an inadvertent error on our part,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Consistent with full disclosure, we immediately posted our news release as soon as we recognized what had happened.”
The brightest spot for the quarter came from Dell’s public group, which includes government, school and health care customers. Buoyed in part by customers’ use of federal stimulus funds and strong sales to educational institutions, revenue for that group rose to $3.8 billion, a 20 percent increase over the previous quarter.
David Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said he was pleased to see that Dell’s gross profit margin actually rose slightly in the quarter. He said that the company appeared to be selling a more profitable mix of products. “That puts them in a better position in the near term,” he said.
Dell’s efforts to improve its cost base should also put it in a good position to defend and perhaps expand its commercial market share, he said. The company has spent the last two years revamping its operations to gain a better competitive footing.
Its ability to recapture or expand its share of large PC contracts will be a critical test of its reorganization efforts.
Meanwhile, rivals have upped the ante. In particular, Hewlett-Packard has gained significant momentum in the last two years. The company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., now ships more PCs worldwide than any other computer maker. It accounted for 19.8 percent of worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter, according to IDC, a research firm. Dell, once the market leader, was a distant second with 13.7 percent.
Throughout 2008, Dell retained its lead in market share for shipments to commercial customers, according to IDC. But during the second quarter, H.P. passed Dell in that segment, too, IDC said.
“H.P. has a much higher proportion of its business in the consumer market, so it gets a proportionally better lift when consumers are buying and corporations aren’t,” said Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. “If corporations are buying, Dell gets a bigger swing than H.P.”
A positive swing from corporate technology spending cannot come soon enough for Dell. Its commercial businesses showed some early signs of recovery in the company’s most recent quarter, but revenue and profit fell far short of last year.
H.P.’s momentum could help sway a handful of corporate technology buyers, said Matthew Eastwood, vice president of enterprise platform research at IDC, but large companies do not change PC vendors on a whim. Companies typically want to maintain some consistency with vendors and supplies, he said, and being clued in on a computer maker’s road map for future products helps technology managers plan for what’s next.
“Up until now, a lot of the end users and actual customers have been very quiet, sitting back and more or less trying to manage their infrastructure by looking in the rearview mirror,” Mr. Eastwood said. “Now they’re starting to shift and focus toward the future again: ‘What kind of investments am I going to make in I.T. to fuel my next business cycle?’ ”
Computer makers need to have an answer for that question now, or they risk the loss of new hardware sales and sales of the more profitable services and products that go along with the computer. Sales of technology-management services like online monitoring of PC fleets have become increasingly important for computer makers as profit margins on hardware narrow.
Dell has pushed hard into these services through acquisitions, partnerships and internal development work, but its list of services still lags the size and scope of H.P., especially after H.P.’s acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last year.
“If you’ve got better services than your competitor, then you can drag your hardware in on the one-stop shopping idea,” Mr. Kay said. “H.P. is better positioned with its services and software acquisitions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/technology/companies/28dell.html?_r=1&ref=technology
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