Futurists, especially those who claim to have a methodology beyond psychic prediction, tend to rely primarily on Moore's Law for figuring out what technology will be like 5, 10, or 20 years from now. But Moore's Law, which predicts that computing power will drop in cost by 50 percent every 18 months, isn't some absolute speed limit and some measures of technical achievement are actually moving faster than Moore's Law predicts. It's not that they violate the law (if it even IS a law) but that they take advantage of loopholes like the one where Moore's Law can sometimes be applied TO ITSELF, leading to even faster change. That's what's about to happen to television and why your new digital television probably won't matter much as a technical standard after 2015.

In order to understand this better let's first look at the broadband Internet market. I'm an American employed as a cranky technologist by an American television network, so this is pretty U.S.-centric, but there are lessons here for many countries.

Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and most expensive. Fortunately, this is likely to change as U.S. broadband Internet services become decidedly more competitive, both in terms of cost and available bandwidth. Unfortunately, U.S. broadband adoption rates are slowing at a rate that suggests ultimate market penetration under 90 percent.

Japan went from being among the most expensive countries for residential Internet bandwidth a decade ago to absolutely the cheapest today. While some of this change can be attributed to technology improvements, most of the change can be attributed to competition, specifically the entry of Softbank BB into the Japanese broadband market. Softbank BB entered the Japanese market early this decade with loss-leader pricing that forced all the incumbent broadband suppliers to respond in kind, leading to a dramatic expansion of the Japanese broadband market where today residential 100-megabit-per-second service costs less than $20 per month.

This Japanese model does not apply well to the U.S., where there is no broadband provider willing to take the bet-the-farm approach of Softbank BB. The U.S. market also has no true national broadband ISPs that operate on a scale comparable to those in Japan. And the topology of the U.S. Internet is such that the high-bandwidth technologies applied in Japan would not work as well here simply because of a larger rural customer base.

Korea, as it is often wont to do, followed Japan in terms of bandwidth pricing. More importantly the government of Korea made it a national priority to build out the residential Internet infrastructure at government expense. This was, ironically, in part inspired by the U.S. National Information Infrastructure plan, which was intended to accomplish the same end but failed miserably. Though they took full advantage of $150 billion in tax credits, the U.S. telcos simply did not build the network they had agreed to build, yet their model inspired more successful efforts in Korea, Singapore and other Asian markets.

Of the 30+ nations that can be judged to have residential Internet service superior to the U.S., in case after case that superiority can be attributed to government funding of infrastructure, to largely urban (short-distance) topologies, or to aggressive competition.

In the United States, unlike most of the rest of the world, broadband Internet service has been dominated by cable television companies offering cable modem service on their hybrid fiber-coax systems, with telco xDSL service a less popular broadband alternative until very recently. Cable Internet service was originally coordinated on a national basis through Excite@Home, but with the failure and liquidation of that company in 2001 most cable systems were left to fend for themselves as ISPs, with varying levels of success. Since few cable TV systems have competition and regulation has tended to concentrate on television -- not data -- service, changes in price and available bandwidth have been generally dictated by whatever competitive broadband offering came from the local telephone company.

It is important to realize that bandwidth has not been lacking for U.S. cable ISPs, which typically devote to Internet service the bandwidth of one analog channel (usually Channel 80) on their systems. By adding a second data channel or (more often) segmenting their network into subnets, cable ISPs have plenty of aggregate bandwidth at their disposal but have simply not been challenged to provide it given that competitive telco products have been, until recently, limited to 1.5-megabit-per-second downloads.

Technology improvements and business model changes among broadband ISPs appear to be finally leading to significant changes in the U.S. residential broadband market. Technology is always advancing, of course, and the technologies coming into play are DOCSIS 3.0 on the cable Internet side and various forms of Fiber to the Home and Fiber to the Curb among the telcos. The business model changes involve so-called "triple play" services where ISPs hope to make money from providing not just Internet service, but also telephone and television. The cable TV companies want to steal from the telcos basic phone service while the telcos want to steal television service from the cable companies. Since either possibility requires advanced data services and more bandwidth, users benefit.

DOCSIS 3.0 services will begin appearing shortly, offering up to 150 megabits per second, though it is doubtful that many cable ISPs will jump straight to that level given the emerging xDSL telco limitation of 24-26 megabits per second.

The telcos, notably AT&T and Verizon, are aggressively building out their fiber plants. Verizon is taking fiber directly into the home, but AT&T is taking its fiber only as far as the curb . This ostensibly limits AT&T to xDSL speed limits, though the company can use channel bonding (more than one pair of copper wires per service) to increase speeds if forced to do so by competition. Verizon is rolling out residential fiber service from 30-50 megabits per second but its equipment can jump to 100 megabits per second if needed without requiring another truck roll.

An important secondary motivation for this fiber rollout is that telcos are not required to share such facilities with competitors as they have been required to share copper infrastructure under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So while there may be competition in the neighborhood from cable modems, once the fiber is in and the copper is out the telcos need never again fear competition from Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs).

Over time there will be other types of broadband ISPs that may provide competition and thereby spur service improvements. One possibility is WiMax, but WiMax is NOT a service that can compete for true high-bandwidth (above 10 megabit-per-second) service on an economical basis. The same applies for so-called 3G and emerging 4G wireless data services from cellular phone companies, which are also limited in total aggregate bandwidth.

While the number of U.S. residential broadband users is continuing to increase, the rate of that increase is slowing according to several surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Extrapolating these numbers suggests that ultimate broadband penetration will be comparable to cable TV, or around 85 percent. This slowing of growth may be inspiration for the growing telco vs. cable battle over triple play digital services, with the idea that some telephone users (where market penetration is already 97+ percent) will be induced to buy broadband service to lower their telephone costs.

There is a base cost of around $20 per month for providing broadband Internet service irrespective of the allocated bandwidth based on published cost assumptions of international ISPs. This $20 is essentially the ISP overhead and is unlikely to decrease significantly no matter how inexpensive bandwidth, itself, becomes. So while there has been some moderation in broadband subscription rates in recent years, it has been minimal, with ISPs generally using introductory specials, rather than permanently lower rates, to attract customers. Broadband customer churn is minimal, probably due to local monopolies and not wanting to give up ISP-branded e-mail addresses, so there is not significant price pressure. Rather, there is pressure to provide greater bandwidth at the same price. Nearly any U.S. residential pricing model, then, will have a base subscription cost of around $30-40 per month but with the ISP allocating increasing amounts of bandwidth for that unchanging payment. In this instance the ISP is generally hoping to make much of its profit on value-added services like Voice-over-IP phone service or movie downloads. After staying for years at an average 1.5-megabit-per-second download speeds, broadband ISPs are moving to an average of 6 megabits per second in 2007-2008, 24 megabits per second in 2010-2012, and 100 megabits per second in 2014-2016.

Okay, so that's the bandwidth picture, but what will we do with it? Here's where Moore's Law reenters the picture. As processors get more and more powerful they will migrate into many consumer electronic devices, especially televisions. It's not that televisions will become computers but that televisions will become more and more computerized. This leads to a very interesting effect. As we've seen above, Internet bandwidth growth is already defying Moore's Law, growing at 100 percent per year with roughly flat prices. Add to this increased processing power in televisions and we'll get decreasing bandwidth requirements as televisions will be able to run more powerful codecs. Where many PCs today can't do real-time 1080p video decoding in software, simply throwing in another generation or two of Moore's Law will eliminate that problem completely.

So bandwidth will get cheaper and cheaper while our entertainment devices will be doing more and more with available bandwidth. Add to this the slow evolution of video standards and we'll have cheap bandwidth and even cheaper processing power colliding with the wall that is the 1080p HDTV standard, leading to ultra-low per-stream costs for entertainment providers.

To explain this another way, traditionally industry would react to such cheap bandwidth by jumping us all to 2K or 4K displays or maybe 3D, and that might well happen eventually. But until then we've decided as a technical culture that 1080p -- so-called Full HD -- is as good as it gets. Jumping beyond 1080p will require years of haggling and during that time 1080p will become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to do, leading to that inflection point alluded to in this week's column headline.

Around 2015 is the time when the cost of sending a separate 1080p video signal to every Internet-connected viewer -- or POTENTIAL VIEWER -- will be the same as using a broadcast model and sending that signal through the air. After 2015 there will be no scaling limits, no processing limits, no decoding limits. And since individual video streams mean individual commercials with a requisite CPM (cost per thousand) bump of up to 10X, commercial television as we know it will die, replaced by consumers choosing from a menu or recommendation engine what they want to see when they want to see it.

Just follow the money.

Commercial stations will repurpose their bandwidth for alternate wireless services, eventually shutting down their digital transmitters completely. And PBS, which can't create a marketplace all by itself, will follow.

My young and lovely wife, showing what might be overoptimism or maybe artful timing given the economy but more likely just general disappointment with me, has decided to embark on a career in real estate sales. She has taken classes and passed tests, joined one of the very best local firms, and hurled herself into the business of selling historic Charleston homes while they still have some value and the termites haven't finished their work. And along the way, while mastering the Multiple Listing Service, she learned an important fact that was news to us both: people no longer find houses for sale by looking in the local newspaper. They use the Internet, instead.

The irony here is that -- at least in these parts -- the local paper seems chock-full of real estate ads. But according to her teachers down at the MLS university, those listings are simply vestigial, like little toes we all have but probably don't need for balance or, indeed, for anything at all. Real estate brokers put ads in local newspapers because their customers expect them to do so, not because they actually help sell houses.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but if 80 percent of all houses for sale in the U.S. are eventually sold NOT because of any newspaper listing, tradition or professional pride aside, at some point we can expect real estate newspaper advertising to eventually disappear. Chock up more bad karma for the newspaper industry, where this fact has to have been long known, and which is apparently in even worse trouble than we thought.

But this column isn't about the newspaper industry or even about the real estate industry. It is about the lack of friction in our commercial lives brought about by the Internet and an emerging thought in my mind that maybe it is time we as a people took action to change some things.

Let me explain.

It's not that newspaper ads work so poorly for selling real estate, it's that Internet advertising works so well. You can put more words on a web ad than you could ever put in the newspaper for the same money. You can put more and bigger pictures, virtual tours, Google maps. You can put Zillow virtual appraisals and links to lenders, home inspectors, and the local Chamber of Commerce. Internet house listings can be searched in a zillion ways that newspaper listings cannot. In the time it takes to find a house -- any house, maybe even the wrong house -- in the newspaper and then go see it, well in that amount of time using the Internet you can find the house, order an inspection, get a loan, and make an offer on the darned thing. It's like crossing house-hunting with air hockey.

But is it all good?

Don't tell George W. Bush, but we are in a recession, which is making me look more critically at the Internet as a marketplace. There's a lot of good about the Internet market, of course. Auction sites like eBay help us get rid of our junk and then help us replace it with new junk. The web has made comparison-shopping for houses and cars and disposable diapers almost a contact sport. And we're sure as heck better equipped than we were before to claim all that money that's been waiting for us with some bank manager in Nigeria.

Just as an aside, I know a guy from Japan who actually went to Nigeria once to pick up some of that unclaimed money. It didn't exist and he felt lucky to get home at all.

The theme of disintermediation -- of eliminating middlemen -- has been a driving force in the Internet for as long as commerce has been allowed on the web. But what happens when the middleman you just eliminated had as one of his or her jobs the task of keeping us from being ripped off?

Tasks that are harder to accomplish are also less likely to be foolishly accomplished, which is why so few of us make trips to Nigeria.

That's not the way we are supposed to view things, of course. Ideally the Internet as a research tool is supposed to give us all the information we need in order to resist any allure the Internet has as a tool of fraud or misadventure. But this attitude ignores many of the fundamental forces at work in most sales situations where the simple fact is that we want to buy, the seller wants to sell, and so any countervailing forces are purely voluntary, which is to say often nonexistent.

Take our current national economic mess, the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis. I like to think that I'm not a subprime kind of guy, but pretending to work as I do (my kids think I TYPE for a living) the world may not always see me the way I would like to be seen. So last year, in what we didn't know were the waning and idyllic pre-subprime days, I tried to get a new mortgage. Of course I used the Internet to get the loan because, as we all know, when banks compete I win. And within a few days, without having to actually meet with or even speak to another human, I found myself offered a $336,000 mortgage.

It was SO easy. Fill out a few online forms, make some choices, and there I was, about to close that loan. But then I did an odd thing. I carefully read the papers I was about to sign (I'm one of THOSE people). And in that residential loan application, right on line something or other, was a number that didn't make any sense to me at all. It was labeled "total household income" and was almost twice the pitiful amount I actually earn.

From where did that number come? It certainly never came from me. Since my signature would be at the bottom of this application I wanted to make sure everything was correct, so I called the mortgage broker. For the first time we spoke. She was a very nice lady, too, and explained that number was the variable required for all the ratios to be correct so I could qualify for the loan.

"But it isn't true," I said.

"Do you want the loan or not?" she asked.

Not.

I wasn't so principled as cowardly, but maybe that doesn't matter: I did what I knew was the right thing for me, which was to walk away from the loan. But evidently a lot of other people took the other course and today are having trouble paying for their houses, which is a big part of the reason why we are in this current economic mess.

This little drama of mine explains the credit crunch better than Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke ever would. Securitization of mortgages works just fine unless the mortgages are based on lies. Lenders turned a blind eye to bad loans and bad loan candidates because another company assumed the risk by bundling these loans and reselling them on a global market.

What has caused the credit problems to extend beyond subprime borrowers to just about everyone is the simple fact that lenders can't act so sloppily now, but having turned that blind eye for so many years they have no idea who is telling the truth anymore. So they don't trust anyone.

And that brings me back to transparency and disintermediation and why the heck the Internet, which was very involved in enabling a lot of this bad behavior, didn't do even the smallest thing to help save us from ourselves?

I suppose it was because there is no money in virtue, no easily measurable value in NOT having those banks compete so I could win only to eventually lose.

Do these loan referral outfits like LendingTree and LowerMyBills and the many, many others EVER say, "Wait a minute, pardner, there's no way you can qualify for any loan, much less that no-doc super-jumbo you have your eye on?"

No.

In their defense, these companies are never actually faced with that question, which is ultimately asked not of them but of their customers, the lenders, and we know how much self-restraint those people have: almost none.

Here's why I bring this up. It is clear to me that government (ANY government, not just the U.S. federal government) and Wall Street have no idea whatsoever how to handle the current crisis. They are just trying to look busy while protecting their own interests and allowing those affected to muddle our way through this mess to some kind of solution. It's not that they don't want to be helpful (if the cost of being helpful is low enough) but that they simply don't know HOW to be helpful. They can't be educated and they can't be changed. Certainly they wouldn't consider any course that would curtail government authority or commercial opportunity.

So I figure we're on our own. And if we are really, truly on our own, we shouldn't pretend that we're not, that some agency that doesn't know its IP address from a hole in the ground will take care of us and make this all better. If we're on our own we should solve our own problems using the tools at our disposal. Which brings me back to the Internet, where it ought to be possible for a change to use all that transparency and economic friction reduction to actually do something FOR us, rather than something TO us.

So where is the next wave of financial start-ups that view ME, not Citibank, as the customer?

Another favorite word from the 1990s was "disruptive." Your start-up needed a disruptive technology or a disruptive business model -- anything to throw the market on its ear and allow your start-up to accumulate market share before the incumbents figured out how to compete. But nearly all such disruption, at least the disruption that survived the Internet meltdown of 2001 and therefore was based on real -- rather than voodoo - economics, was on the sell side. It was companies finding new ways to take our money.

There are few really disruptive technologies or business models on the buy side, but one that stands out is Craigslist, which is close to unique in its efficacy, impact, and the fear it has put into an entire industry (newspapers, bringing us full-circle, see?).

I'm not asking for a revolution, just 2-3 more Craigslist-type successes that actually put consumers first and don't just say they do while selling our identities out the back door to some marketing mafiosi.

Where the Super Bowl-advertising dot-coms of the 1990s didn't know and didn't care where their profits were coming from, the dot-coms of today are obsessed with profitability and the easiest way to make a profit is from saps like me. I'd like that to change, please.

But not all news in this area is bad. Sometimes unscrupulous behavior gets what it deserves. In Australia, for example, eBay just tried to make PayPal not just its preferred payment system for auctions, but the ONLY payment system eBay Australia would accept. That's seeing eBay customers not as customers but as sheep to be sheared. Fortunately the results of this bullying were disastrous for eBay Australia, which is swooning as customers bail for other auction sites that are less greedy or maybe just see themselves as less powerful. It's a powerful lesson for eBay that may cost them Australia and hopefully will teach them a lesson about REAL customer service.

It's a sign of the times, or maybe I just hope it will become one.

There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in the film to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed for time travel. Yet as we in 2008 look at $130-per-barrel oil, there are those who argue that our energy independence can be found, just like Doc Brown's, in trash. What if they are correct?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about SwiftFuel, a non-petroleum gasoline substitute made from biomass and proposed as an alternative to aviation gasoline. Every column generates mail not just from skeptics, but also from enthusiasts and true believers. Among this latter group is the father-son team of Eric and Andrew Day from western Massachusetts pushing their particular version of trash-to-power, which they call the Day Cycle, after themselves. I think their ideas have merit and ought to, at the very least, provoke a lot of good thinking from this audience.

But before we get to the Day Cycle, let's consider the role in our culture of what I'm choosing to call "miracle cures." Based on the medical analogy of wonder drugs that cure easily what was previously incurable, I think this concept can be applied broadly to most areas of scientific inquiry. A miracle cure comes along, appears generally to do what is claimed -- problem solved, right?

Not usually.

It's rare that any bad news is simple and without nuance. Longtime readers will recall that I've been working for six years now trying to end Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which claimed our son Chase back in 2002. People contact me all the time with reports of a "cure" for SIDS, but I know that SIDS isn't just one condition but several lumped together under the name "SIDS." I believe most alternative energy technologies ought to be approached similarly. The Day Cycle, while having some merit, won't put Saudi Arabia out of the oil business or even put the United States directly into a state of energy self-sufficiency. The Day Cycle is just one part of a comprehensive rework of the ways we make and use energy that can have the eventual effect of making us in large part energy self-sufficient. It's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

The challenge of the Day Cycle is profound: to solve at once the problems of how to power our society and what to do with all of our garbage, all without making the world worse for the effort, which is to say without increasing the problems of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

I don't want to have a global warming debate here. For the purposes of the Day Cycle, it simply doesn't matter. If what the Days propose will get rid of our garbage, create usable fuel and power, and, by the way, doesn't cause any net increase of greenhouse gas emissions, that's good, right? Even those who don't believe in global warming (and I hear from them all) probably aren't specifically IN FAVOR of greenhouse gas emissions -- gas for the sake of gas. They just don't believe in global warming. That argument is not what we are about here.

What we ARE about here are the 251 million tons of municipal waste that we as Americans created in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 5.1 billion barrels of oil we imported that same year, according to the Department of Energy.

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Dividing 251 million tons of municipal trash by 365 days by 100 tons per furnace says we'll need 7,000 such furnaces to burn all of America's trash. That doesn't really sound like a lot of furnaces to me, when you consider that's about how many landfills we have today and about how many municipal trash incinerators we used to have. Moving to this method of waste disposal and energy generation is a no-brainer... if it works.

There's that big "if" -- if it works. I fear the plasma furnaces will get clogged, but if they don't then the result is pretty darned amazing. Here is what the Days propose to do with that plasma furnace and the chemical plant they'll build around it. The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

The potential impact of all these products is significant, though not in themselves enough to eliminate the need for energy imports. I have real doubts about hydrogen-powered transportation and tend to believe that the best use for that hydrogen is simply for generating electricity at the sewage treatment plant which is, by the very nature of sewage, close to the population, and can be pumped into the electricity grid.

Multiply all these numbers by 251 million tons of solid waste and convert them, where possible, into equivalent barrels of oil and it comes down to about 2.6 billion barrels per year if all waste treatment facilities were so converted. That's half of our current oil import volume -- enough to substantially destabilize the international oil market if that's the goal.

When this column first appeared in 1997, the price of oil in 2007 dollars was about $20 per barrel. This week it is $122 per barrel -- more than six times as high. Many things besides the price of oil have changed in those 11 years. Thanks to Moore's Law a new PC today is typically 25-30 times as powerful as the machines we had in 1997 yet costs less than half as many dollars to buy. Consider inflation and the cost of computing is even lower. Our new PCs are substantially more energy-efficient on a per-MIPS basis, too. Though the bigger shift of attitude might simply be that now we care about how much power our computer is using versus simply not noticing a decade ago. Back then data center power consumption was inconsequential compared to the cost of Internet bandwidth. Today Google builds its data centers where the power is, not where the fiber or even the users are. Power is everything in modern computing and is becoming ever more important to our lives in general. The high cost of energy is starting to cause real pain in our society and real pain is, unfortunately, about the only incentive strong enough to make us change our ways.

I know a little bit about the oil business, which is at the root of our energy crisis today. At one point my job was to write about the international oil industry. I worked off and on in the Middle East back then and attended OPEC meetings in Vienna and Geneva during an earlier oil crisis when prices went for a moment to $43 per barrel and we all held our breath then, too. I was sitting in the lobby of OPEC headquarters in Vienna that day when Carlos "The Jackal" came in the door, told the sleepy off-duty Vienna cop providing security that he was from "the Palestinian delegation" and walked right into the big meeting, taking the oil ministers hostage.

Given that I know a little bit about the energy business, then, and I still have friends in it, here is what's going to happen over the next 2-3 years. The price of oil is going to come down substantially, but probably never to pre-9/11 price points. At least half of the current price for crude oil is driven by speculation and market manipulation as it was during the original oil crisis of 1973 (I have an interesting story about that in this week's links). But unlike '73, today our flexibility is less and our excess capacity is less, too. High prices will cut demand, spur exploration, and force governments to open new areas for exploration, but it is doubtful that we will EVER see oil prices under $60 per barrel again.

This is not all bad. Just as high oil prices spur exploration they also encourage conservation. With $2.50-$3 gas with us probably forever, we're finally starting to learn to do things somewhat differently, though it isn't at all clear to me whether these lessons will stay learned after prices subside somewhat.

Which brings me to the moral of this story -- the importance of platforms and standards, and when and how to abandon or change them. This applies to ANY capital-intensive technology, whether it is computing or energy or transportation.

The life expectancy of a car in the U.S. is about 10 years, during which it will pass through an average of three owners. I use cars as an example because they are an intrinsic part of any American energy crisis and we generally all own one. This automobile life expectancy means that any technology improvement has to trickle into the market because only about 10 percent of the total fleet is replaced each year with new cars -- the only cars that are likely to have the latest technology. So if some car company comes up with a way to get 100 miles per gallon, it is likely that no more than 10 percent of us will be getting mileage like that a year from now. The rest of us are stuck with old technology until we can afford to change: we're on the old platform.

Platform, in this automotive example, means some significantly different technology that offers real advantages though usually at a cost. Hybrids, diesels, electric cars, fuel cells, hydrogen, and ethanol cars are all examples of platforms.

If we want revolutionary change -- change where nearly everyone moves to the new platform in short order -- that is usually going to require heroic action on the part of government or the occasional mad scientist. If the mad scientist were able to offer a car that got 100 miles per gallon, was safer than the current standard, yet cost substantially LESS to buy, then maybe more of us would transition more than the traditional 10 percent replacement model suggests. Governments, on the other hand, could simply outlaw the old cars and force us to upgrade, though it still might not happen if we couldn't afford the new cars.

What's key here is the push and pull of platform change. We see this all the time in computing where somebody comes up with a clever new idea but for that idea to succeed we all have to get new computers. How likely is that? Well it depends on how great the improvement being offered. With computers I can tell you that the improvement has to be pretty darned substantial to inspire us all to jump. That's because Moore's Law is going to give us a 100 percent improvement anyway on our next PC without having to throw away any software or peripherals. So inspiring a revolution in computing generally requires a performance improvement of 10X or more.

There is a similar effect to be seen in the adoption of new energy technologies. That list of platforms I rattled off a few paragraphs back offer advantages but not without cost. Hybrids and diesels are the easiest to accept, but both are a bit more expensive. Electric, fuel cells, hydrogen, and ethanol are more expensive, too, but they also require infrastructure changes like finding new ways to manufacture, transport, store, and sell fuel. You won't go on a long road trip in your electric car until there are reliable places to plug in and recharge, for example.

This is our dilemma: we want to make radical energy improvements but these typically require expensive platform changes and platform changes can take a decade or more to happen.

A better solution would be to leave the platform alone and find a single variable that could be changed for everyone practically overnight.

Cars are the key to U.S. energy consumption. The dominant automotive platform here, whether you drive a truck, a car, or a motorcycle, relies on gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines. That's the platform we are unlikely to change quickly. So how do we leave that platform intact and unchanged, ask nobody to significantly sacrifice, yet still achieve the noble (and Nobel) goals of lower fuel consumption, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower pollution levels, dramatically lower oil consumption, lower cost, and lower geopolitical vulnerability for our country? There's only one way I know to accomplish this: change the fuel.

This happened to a certain extent in Brazil during the '70s and '80s by embracing ethanol. But ethanol has less energy per gallon so fuel consumption goes up and mileage goes down. Ethanol can't be shipped in pipelines also used for oil. Cars have to be modified to run on it and even then there are issues about internal corrosion. Ethanol is far from perfect. What's needed is a replacement for gasoline that looks and feels and tastes just like gas to your car but isn't made from oil. Then the platform could remain completely unchanged yet my 1966 Thunderbird (and the world) could benefit starting with the very next tankful.

There is such a fuel, developed by a husband and wife team of scientists working in Indiana in cooperation with Purdue University. This new fuel, called SwiftFuel, is right now intended for airplanes, not cars, but the lessons are the same.

Piston-powered airplanes have a unique fuel problem. Their high-compression air-cooled engines require higher-octane fuel to avoid destructive engine knock. This higher octane is achieved through the use of tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive. Remember lead was outlawed from car gas in the U.S. more than 30 years ago to good effect: we all have significantly less of the toxic metal in our bodies than we used to. But lead is still used in aviation fuel, which accounts for an infinitesimal portion of total U.S. gasoline consumption. Lead is on its way out for aircraft use, too, with international treaties scheduling its demise in 2010.

If we aren't going to retire all the little airplanes in America -- force a total platform change -- we'll have to come up with a replacement for tetraethyl lead. The additive used most for this is ethanol added to gasoline to bump up the octane number. But ethanol does a number on seals and hoses typically used in aircraft to an extent that it is specifically prohibited by the Federal Aviation Administration from being used in certified aircraft. At the same time, U.S. energy policy is moving toward the mandated use of ethanol in ALL motor fuel, meaning there may be nothing available two years from now to fuel your Piper Cub.

Enter SwiftFuel, the Splenda of motor fuels because it is made from ethanol yet contains no ethanol. SwiftFuel is the invention of John and Mary Rusek from Swift Enterprises in Indiana. To your airplane SwiftFuel looks and tastes just like gasoline. It has an octane rating of 104 (higher than the 100 octane fuel it replaces) yet contains no lead or ethanol. SwiftFuel mixes with gasoline, can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and be shipped in the same pipelines as gasoline. It is made entirely from biomass, which means it has a net zero carbon footprint and does nothing to increase global warming. Its emission of other polluting byproducts of burning gasoline are significantly lower, too. SwiftFuel has more energy per gallon than gasoline so your airplane (or your car) will go 15-20 percent further on each gallon.

Oh, and based on an average $1.42 per gallon wholesale cost for the ethanol used as its feedstock, SwiftFuel costs $1.80 per gallon to produce, meaning that it ought to be able to sell for $3 per gallon or less no matter what happens in the Middle East.

Heck of a deal.

The ethanol used to make SwiftFuel can be any type, according to Mary Rusek, president of Swift Enterprises. The pilot plant they are building in Indiana will, interestingly, make ethanol from sorghum, not corn. The Ruseks claim that sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production.

The FAA is already testing SwiftFuel with the goal of approving it for use without modification in all aircraft, leaving the platform unchanged while improving its impact on almost any scale. Hopefully by the 2010 cutoff for tetraethyl lead SwiftFuel will replace the 1.8 million gallons of 100LL aviation fuel used every day.

"But what about cars?" I asked Mary Rusek. "We don't say much about that," she replied. "The aviation fuel market is tiny and has a real need we can fulfill so everyone wants us to succeed. Cars are different and we don't want to make any enemies."

Last week's column on Gartner Inc. and the thin underbelly of IT was a hit, it seems, with very few readers rising to the defense of Gartner or the IT power structure in general. To be fair I probably should have said that Gartner isn't totally worthless, but I think their specialists should be more specialized and they shouldn't promote technologies or products without being darned familiar with them -- a lot more familiar than they seem to be at present. But the bigger question is why IT even has to work this way at all?

I don't think it has to.

Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job?

The answer is almost always "no." By "almost always" I mean 97-99 percent of the time.

It's a question I have been asking for 15 years and the answer hasn't changed in that time. It would appear bosses aren't becoming more accomplished, at least not yet.

The implications of this answer are profound. It either means that IT managers aren't being promoted from within or, if they are being promoted from the ranks, they lose their technical skills almost immediately.

If we drill down a bit further some real truths start to emerge. Whether IT managers are promoted from within or brought from outside it is clear that they usually aren't hired for their technical prowess, but rather for their ability to get along with THEIR bosses, who are almost inevitably not technical. For every John Reed, who rose from IT to run CitiCorp (and ultimately failed), there are a thousand CEOs who want nothing to do with computers.

It might be easy to say that IT, as a staff -- rather than a line -- job simply isn't seen as critical to the success of the organization, but that's crazy. IT touches every employee and customer every day. Most of what's accomplished in business these days is ordered, fulfilled, paid for, and analyzed through the use of IT. We can't eliminate it because now government expects -- even demands -- that it be there. If something is so important, then, why do the big bosses understand it so little?

For the most part they are kept in the dark.

Since the early mainframe days there has been a priesthood of sorts in corporate computing -- a level of executives who felt that their power would be enhanced by keeping technology mysterious. "It's much too hard for you to understand, Mr. CEO, even if you started out long ago as an electrical engineer. Electrons are different now you know."

"It's complex and mysterious, this IT stuff, and dependent on people who don't think like you or I do," the CEO is told and he/she believes it because the alternative is laboriously becoming an expert in an area they don't like or thought that they had outgrown. This leaves IT in a bit of a vacuum but it is a vacuum with some power. And in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process.

The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture. It's the AV kids from school versus the "normal" kids. IT organizations often disrespect users and users often disrespect IT. This is not good for either group.

One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s.

In time this will end through the expedient of a generational change. Old IT and old users will go away to be replaced by new IT and new users, each coming from a new place. This is the same challenging effect I wrote about a few weeks ago for education. A generational change will completely alter our cultural approach to information technology. And it can't happen soon enough for me.

An analogy we used to make years ago was comparing the PC industry to the early U.S. auto industry. There were hundreds of companies in both businesses at one time (in the 1920s for cars and the 1980s for computers), but each eventually consolidated into a dozen or so major brands and a few hot rods. Our problem using the auto analogy today is that we haven't let it evolve. Where IT may have once been like the 1920s auto industry, now it is becoming more like that same industry in the 1980s.

This transition goes far beyond simple brand consolidation. When was the last time you worked on your own car? You could change your oil, probably, but you don't, right? And you haven't done so since the late 1970s or early 1980s. Same for IT today, where the do-it-yourself attitude of the 1970s has given way to a do-it-for-me attitude. I'm not saying this is bad. Indeed, I think it was inevitable as the market broadened from just PC enthusiasts until it today encompasses everyone.

Al Mandel, who helped market the original LaserWriter at Apple and later had several high-level positions at AOL, used to say that the step after ubiquity was invisibility, and that's where we are headed today with IT, which has become so pervasive that everyone uses it to the point where NOT using it is no longer even an option. The problem is our management of IT hasn't evolved as quickly as our assimilation of it. We'll probably still be fighting over who owns IT long after the IT resources, themselves, become effectively no longer ownable, except in our corporate minds.

I'm writing this column on an iPhone, for example. It isn't the easiest or best writing environment but, as Adam Osborne used to say, it is good enough. It offers the input, output, networking, and storage I need and almost nothing I don't need. I'm not saying the iPhone or smartphones like it are the absolute future of personal computing, but I AM saying the desktop PC is its absolute past.