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Five Nines on the Net is a Pipe Dream
The New York Times today finally got around to noticing that when web sites go down, people are increasingly likely to get mad and generally react the way I might if I drove to my favorite bar and found it closed for a private party. I might be miffed and share a few choice words with members of my party before deciding on a new locale. However, when we write blogs or tweets (if Twitter is up), the inconvenience and our subsequent vitriol is archived forever and transmitted around the world rather than just to our friends. And because millions of other people want to go to that same bar, the chorus of curses grows quickly.
We’ve written about how hard it is to create a 99.999 percent up time championed by the telecommunications industry, but suffice to say there are a ton of moving parts involved in keeping a site visible to the end users; the list begins with the network architecture and ends with the internet connection of a consumer in Austin. Along the way there are software upgrades, server shortages, DNS issues, cut cables, corporate firewalls, carriers throttling traffic and infected machines.
The Times notes that downtime is more than just inconvenient: As more data is stored online and cloud computing becomes more prevalent for businesses, it’s less like a bar closing for a night than a bank closing for a day. But it will never be possible to keep all sites across the entire web up 99.999 percent of the time. Knowing that, architecting for failure, and more services such as downforeveryoneorjustme.com (I would really love a more memorable name for this site) and helpful 404 pages would be appreciated.
Dog Tracking GPS System!
Although the dog tracking GPS system from Garmin looks to be unnecessary for tracking dogs, (maybe its main purpose is for hunting dogs) I can recall countless times when I lost my dog in my neighborhood, only to find him 20 minutes, happy after his little lone-trip.
Now, this dog tracking system can be great if you tend to lose your dog a lot.
The Astro GPS Dog Tracking System requires very little configuration straight out of the box, and is extremely simple to use. Once the transmitter and receiver acquire a GPS signal, the receiver automatically lets users know the location of their dog. Unlike old radio telemetry collars, the Astro features a dog page that shows the precise direction and distance to a dog – even indicating if it is running, on point, or treeing quarry – and does it all without the annoyance of beeper collars. Unlike cellular tracking systems, there are no subscriptions or setup fees required to use the device.
We Heart Data Center Engineers
For those of you underappreciated server jockeys keeping data center costs down and utilization up using duct tape and homemade software, the New York Times salutes you. Actually it recognizes how important people like you are, especially now that demand for compute power and energy efficiency is soaring. Most of the article highlights the need for data centers to go green, which as we’ve pointed out, is neither easy nor cheap — just yesterday a startup building a “green” data center said construction would cost $100 million.
But the need to save energy is only a symptom of the rising demand for hardware and compute power — power that needs to be managed by someone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the demand for computer and network administrators will grow by 48.5 percent from 2006 to 2016. The demand for designers of such networks and folks to maintain web sites will grow by 82.3 percent, making them two of the fastest-growing jobs in the computer systems design category. According to other data from the agency, the pay isn’t bad, either.
Until software and hardware mature to the point of automating routine tasks around energy efficiency, virtualization and management, more servers mean more people. Which means that instead of social networking, the next generation of startups will need to figure out hardware-oriented tasks. Entrepreneurs focused on how to manage heterogeneous virtualized environments, compliance and security in virtualized servers, or on better ways to bring storage into the data center as Ethernet replaces Fibre Channel for storage area networks, will find funding. These days, we’re moving from programming to pipes.
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Woman Troubles in Technology
The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections.
I actually think the “macho culture” inherent to these fields has less to do with the lack of women sticking around than the persistent assumption that’s behind the NYTimes confining the article to the Style pages. The assumption is that work-life balance is a female issue. Aside from tales of overt sexual harassment, the main trends that emerge in the report are that women need to “act like a man” to succeed (code for working a lot and not talking about family), and that the hours are not conducive for working mothers.
Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.
These women aren’t dumb, but their employers might be. The Silicon Valley startup culture demands a person give 110 percent and can be gruelingly inflexible. Academia and research labs are similar. But after a child –or maybe a heart attack — people tend to look at the rigged game and decline to play. So either the culture in technology will be forced to change, or it will continue to feed on canon fodder in the form of youth and single men. Regardless, it’s not just a female problem.
Personal: Goodbye Gopal Raju
Not many of you know Gopal Raju, a man who has played a big role in my journalist life. He passed away this week and his passing brought back some bittersweet memories.
I can still remember the first time I met Gopal Raju. Joe Aranha, a NY-based freelance photographer introduced us. I was terrified to meet the man who had started and built India Abroad, one of the largest Indian American weekly newspapers. He did nothing to put me at ease but he gave an opportunity to write for his paper where I met some people who became lifelong friends. He sent me on assignments that made me appreciate the virtue of traditional, pound the pavement reporting, that has stuck with me.
There were many times when we didn’t see eye-to-eye, but that didn’t diminish my respect for the man and his ability to put out a fine paper. As they say, we are all a sum of many parts. Mr. Raju (as I used to call him) played a big part in my life. Good bye … front page will be ready Sunday at 6 pm!
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Sunday Update from Mega Book Marketing University
Mark Victor Hansen (co-creator, Chicken Soup for the Soul) hosted his MEGA Book Marketing University in Los Angeles on Feb 29 through Mar 2 2008. Make Anything Work was on hand to help new authors develop a strategic book marketing plan for their new book-based business.
Read the entire story here:
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Nonsensical NY Times Story on MSFT/YHOO Integration
To hear the New York Times' John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you'd think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.
The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And Microsoft's 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).
So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?
Well, of course they have. The one guy with direct knowledge that Markoff and Richtel interviewed (who now works for O'Reilly and should really know better) was probably migrating from Solaris to some version of Windows NT. One could imagine that LAMP as we know it today was not in the picture. And there are a broad spectrum of software engineering best practices that were not in place back then which go unmentioned in the article.
So ultimately, the piece leaves out several key facts that almost completely scuttle their thesis:
- Microsoft has worked with Zend to make PHP run well on Windows Server. In my February 1 post on the merger, I theorized that Microsoft did the Zend deal specifically to make it easier for them to digest companies (like Yahoo!) that extensively utilize PHP. The Markoff/Richtel piece does not mention the Microsoft/Zend deal at all. It does mention that PHP's inventor works for Yahoo, but it's a fact that Zend contributes far more to the language today and this has been the case for many years. At any rate, a reader of the Markoff piece could come away with the impression that PHP doesn't run on windows at all, which is totally bogus.
- The hellacious Unix-to-Windows migrations of the late 1990s often hinged on the ability to get Oracle running on Windows, which was a big challenge then and remains a challenge today. But Yahoo uses very little Oracle in its customer-facing properties; the big database in use there is MySQL, which runs quite well on Windows today. I wouldn't guess that Microsoft would migrate MySQL-on-FreeBSD to MySQL-on-Windows, but they could do it as an intermediate step if they wanted to get a merged Yahoo! running on Windows. But there is no mention of databases at all in the Markoff piece.
- FreeBSD, while prevalent at Yahoo!, is not actually the operating system that most companies in Silicon Valley (or anywhere) use. I've heard more than one Yahoo! engineer state that the company's choice of that operating system is a hindrance for a number of reasons. Migrating to Anything But FreeBSD (whether it's Linux, Windows Server, or Solaris) will have several key benefits -- not the least of which being the fact that very few recent college grads are learning FreeBSD today. Another implication for this is that when Yahoo! acquires a company, they acquire that company's operating system choice as well (all the company's recent acquisitions, including Flickr, run on Linux, not FreeBSD).
- Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have made extensive investments in XML web services, both inside and outside the firewall, which should ease technical integration somewhat. You may recall that XML web services were considered cutting-edge and exotic in 1999. There is no mention of web services in the Markoff piece.
- The Windows Server that Microsoft sells today is not the piece o' crap that Windows NT circa 1999 was. Period. The fact that Microsoft's server technologies no longer suck is key, but it's not mentioned in the Markoff piece.
- Probably the most ill-informed assertion is that Yahoo! is totally open source or that Microsoft is totally proprietary -- or that either of these things would matter on a technical integration level even if they were completely true. But let's imagine for a moment that someone needed to hack at the kernel of Windows Server to perform some Yahoo!/Microsoft integration task (which seems far-fetched, but let's just imagine). Are we really to think that getting access to that code would be a deal-killing problem?
How to configure XMLTV | MythTV | Users
While You Are Reading About The Steroids Report, Here Are Some Related Products You Might Enjoy
The problem with automated advertising on news sites has always been the placing of inappropriate ads next to serious news issues. Take today’s report on steroid use in baseball. For at least a brief period, the story on CNN.com was matched with these “Ads by Google” shown at right trying to sell you the very steroids that the baseball commission is so upset about
What’s next? Ads for plutonium next to stories about nuclear proliferation?
I don’t see the steroid ads popping up anymore on that CNN page, so maybe someone at CNN (or Google) got wise to the inappropriate mismatch. (Although, if you were in the market for steroids, you would probably be reading such stories). But the same types of ads come up when you do a search for “steroids” on CNN.com:
This is not limited to CNN. Here are sponsored results for a similar search on the LATimes.com, which also shows Google ads:
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Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox?
Link: Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox?
"...the Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog. Siobhan O'Mahony, an assistant professor at the School of Management of the University of California, Davis, calls Mozilla 'the first corporate open-source project.'
The foundation has used a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, to collect tens of millions of dollars in royalties from search engine companies that want prominent placement on the browser. And by collecting that money as a war chest to compete against giants like Microsoft and Apple, the foundation has, at least temporarily, moved away from the typical activities of a nonprofit organization. 'The Mozilla community has been a bit hybrid in terms of integrating public and private investment all along -- its history is fairly unique in this respect,' Professor O'Mahony said."
Unique maybe in the sense that it's achieved so much success, but it's nonsense that the notion of a public-private partnership to create open source products is "unique" or that Firefox was first. If the writer had gone further afield than UC Davis, that worldwide center of excellence in open source, he might have been able to get quotes to that effect. But I suspect what really happened here is that the reporter started with a thesis he invented while sitting with his feet up on a desk in the newsroom ("hey! Firefox makes money somehow!") and then sought out quotes trying to validate the overall amazingness of his thesis. This is a story that's been around for years and the writer didn't add much to it here.
For my money, MySQL AB is a much more interesting story of a for-profit company using open source, particularly since they've done such a terrific job disrupting the database market (and, unlike Mozilla, could go public soon). Alfresco is also particularly interesting in the sense that it's comprised of a bunch of pioneers in the content management field who are using an open-source content management product to disrupt their former closed-source companies.