Today’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Letters to the Editor section contains this profound missive:
LOL!
Susan Pfund
Oakdale, Minn.
That whole letter clocks in below Twitter’s 140 character limit. Why pay $155 for an annual WSJ subscription when you can browse any random Twitter stream and get LOLs, with a few bonus OMGs thrown in, all for free?
I rooted for IBM to acquire Sun Microsystems, praying for a bright future for Java and MySQL. IBM understands open source software better than any major computer industry player. But the antitrust risk of the combined hardware business seems to have reared its ugly head. So the deal was off.
The Oracle transaction startled me. Yet this insightful analysis by InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister foretold Oracle’s move. Namasté, Mr. McAllister.
Knowing that college tuition and fees have grown faster than inflation for most of the past twenty years, I sometimes wonder how effectively the money is spent. A 2002 lawsuit alleged that Princeton University misspent part of the Robinson family’s $35 million (in 1961 dollars) gift, intended to train graduate students to serve in the federal government. The suit produced over 170,000 pages of documents and 120 days of depositions, including testimony from four Princeton presidents. A recent Wall Street Journal article quantifies callous waste:
Both sides said they settled in large part to avoid legal fees that already totaled roughly $40 million apiece…
Why didn’t either side recognize sooner that $80 million could have been better spent on education? Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman’s depiction of this episode as “a tragedy” hits the bullseye.
After adding political celebrities to the show, Web 2.0 hype scaled a new peak last week. Tim O’Reilly’s meme for “harnessing collective intelligence” and building systems “so that they get smarter the more people use them” seemed prescient when it arrived in 2004. But Web 2.0 became a “piece of jargon” which “nobody even knows what it means” according to web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, who grew bored of it two years ago. Now Web 2.0 has jumped the shark.
Listen to what environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore said at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit last week:
Web 2.0 has to have a purpose… to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our relationship to this planet and the imminent danger and opportunity that we face because of the radical transformation of the relationship between human beings and the Earth. We have everything we need to save it…
Let me translate: Web 2.0 is about saving the Earth. From ourselves. Endorsing Gore’s rhetoric, O’Reilly gushed, “Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming?” The divisive global warming political debate has no middle ground. By cranking the dial to the left and ripping off the knob, O’Reilly now adds partisan politics to the long list of things Web 2.0 stands for. When a buzzword stands for everything, it stands for nothing.
I write about technology, not partisan politics. O’Reilly is following a political path, which I respect, but I cannot endorse. Our blog’s former tag line, “Cognition, Coordination, and Cooperation in the Web 2.0 Era” is history, not just because the Web 2.0 meme has lost its mojo, but because politicizing Web technology is the wrong way to go.
As I’m a sucker for just about every consumer technology that comes down the pike, I had to try Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) in my new house when they first appeared on the consumer market in 1995. I quickly discovered that the expensive (about $25 in today’s money) bulbs were not very bright, so I installed them in relatively inaccessible places like the basement crawl space, hoping that the manufacturer’s claims of long life would come true. Alas, the bulbs died young. Not recognizing the environmental hazard, I tossed the dead bulbs in the trash and forgot about them.
Fast forward ten years: I found CFLs at Costco for less than $3 per bulb. The manufacturer, Feit Electric, specifically claimed 8 times the lifetime of a 60 watt incandescent lamp. Do the math: 8 x 1,000 hours = 8,000 hours (11+ months, operating continuously). So I bought a pack and paired some of them with double-life (2,000 hour) incandescent lamps. Guess which lamps failed first: incandescents or CFLs?
Yup, another disappointment for me, the Green wannabe. Was it an industry conspiracy or was I just unlucky? Now Consumer Reports shines light on this dark enigma in its May, 2008 issue. Since 8,000 hours is a long time, CR’s tests aren’t finished. Still several brands have passed the 7,600 hour mark. But Feit Electric ESL13T bulbs “failed between 3,300 and 3,900 hours.” I would have been happy if my Feit Electric bulbs (not the same model) had lasted even that long.
Moral of the story: if you want to buy a long-lasting CFL, brand and model matters. Before plunking down hard earned cash, read this Consumer Reports update to find a bulb that’s likely to be reliable. So now I’ve got a pack of dead CFLs, each containing 3 to 5 milligrams of mercury, making them toxic waste. Anybody want to take these bad boys off my hands? I can’t get rid of them!
Many bloggers, including respected author Nicholas Carr, recently applauded Amazon for offering a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for its S3 storage service in response to competition from Nirvanix. Though SLAs have long proved an effective technique for managing corporate information technology, in Web infrastructure the SLA is nothing more than a scam that only a used car salesman could love. (Thanks, Paul D. Cocker, for the lemon.)
See what the Amazon SLA offers:
we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails … this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Let’s calculate “99% uptime,” which is the same as 1% downtime. A month has 43,830 minutes, so your site will be down 1% of that time, 438 minutes, or over 14 minutes per day on average. Suppose just 14 minutes of downtime occurs during your daily peak period. How will that downtime impact your revenue? Will being able to “apply for a service credit of 25%” compensate you for lost income, troubleshooting time, and unhappy customers?
Now consider the worst case of having all 438 minutes of downtime occur in one big failure during, say, the peak selling hours of the day after Thanksgiving. Then what recourse do you have? The dirty little secret is that the SLA protects the infrastructure provider, not the customer.
Amazon’s 99.9% uptime commitment means average daily downtime of 1.4 minutes. To put this statistic in perspective, I hosted a website for family and friends at a data center that, according to my measurements, delivered slightly worse than 99.9% uptime over a 3 month period. The number of complaints I received and the time I spent dealing with downtime astounded me. Do you think the infrastructure provider graciously provided me the 100% refund to which I was entitled according to its generous SLA? Think again.
I would have been fired for delivering 3 months of 99.9% availability back in the 1980s when I managed a corporate data center.
Web SLAs today are no better than the “9/90 warranty” my father offered years ago on his used car lot. If you shopped carefully, you could buy an awesome car at my dad’s store, but the warranty was only good for the first 9 seconds or 90 feet, whichever came first.
If you’re like me, you strive for a low profile while traveling. You want to avoid the watchful eyes of every nosy Tom, Dick, and Harriet as you fly the Gulfstream to London to visit the tailor. Alas, there is precious little privacy left. Once your inquisitive comrades know the tail number of your personal aircraft, your life is an open book. They can track your jet’s every move on FlightAware. (Photo credit: albspotter.)
But money can still buy happiness. By filling out a simple form and paying a mere $720 annual fee to FlightAware, you can conceal your plane’s whereabouts from the prying eyes of the site’s users. How nice of FlightAware to provide this helpful service. They didn’t invent the hush money business model, but they’ve certainly done a great job translating it to Web 2.0.
I wonder how long it will take government to catch on to this. After all, you can look up on the local property tax site the value of my neighbor’s house and even the size of her swimming pool. The tax man could easily whip up a form that would shake me down for a pretty penny to remove data about my house from the tax site. Ain’t Web 2.0 grand?
I ran into Vinny the barber on Friday at Starbucks and sat down with him over a latte to ponder the state of the Net. He had stumbled upon the Twitter web site, and wondered what was happening. 
As he put it, “I thought connecting with others to make better social and political decisions using the wisdom of the crowds was such a good idea. Now we have behavior that seems to have no social purpose whatsoever, merely generating stupendous amounts of inane chatter about personal events no one cares about in the first place. What’s going on?”
Taking a long pull at my latte, I gave his question some thought, and came up with several possible explanations, none of which consoled him. First, it seemed to me that pushing social networking to its extremes is by no means unprecedented; small-town behavior, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, has been doing that for centuries. Nor did I feel that the fact that some site produces such trivia is an indication that social networking is doomed; on the continuum of group behavior there are always extremes, which tend to wash out over time.
These remarks did nothing for Vinny’s despair over the deterioration of social networking, so I tried again, recalling Michael H. Goldhaber’s article on The Attention Economy and the Net. Goldhaber argues that the product of the Net that carries value is not information (of which there is a glut) but attention, which can be viewed as existing in inverse proportion to the amount of information. But that was no help either, for I wondered how any of these non-stop personal situation reports like Enjoying the weekend with family… Just got a great $400 haircut could generate much attention for the typical twitterer.
I finally gave it my best shot, arguing that not all such services would be worthless. For instance, imagine a service that reports your child’s whereabouts at any time. In spite of the privacy concerns, as a parent who has lived through his child’s struggle for independence, I have been torn between the desire to let her make her own way and the need to protect her if necessary.
Vinny seemed mollified, if not encouraged, by these observations, but time will tell whether social networking will produce useful results or just chatter.
My barber was commenting the other day about the disappearance of Internet hackers. “Seems like there used to be a deadly new virus on the Net every other day”, he said as he clipped away. “They made the evening news, caused terrible disruption for a while, then faded, only to be replaced by other more malicious worms, trojans, and malware. But you don’t hear about them anymore; why not?” I pondered these remarks later as I did my online banking, checked auctions on eBay, and visited my seniors-only social networking site.
He’s right, but why? Is it because there is more pressing news to devote the airwaves to, like Anna Nicole Smith? No, I didn’t think so. Networks just not reporting it anymore? Maybe. Is security so much better that these exploits are defeated? Possibly, but as everyone knows, there’s a long way to go, and some very smart people out there are dedicated to mischief.
I think the openness of Web 2.0 will create new opportunities for hackers. Ajax, for example, offers many ways to get security wrong. It’s already clear that Web 2.0 provides a context for antisocial behavior, such as death threats and Google bombs. But the worst is yet to come.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, a front page piece tells amazing stories of Alaska Airlines pilots flying up north. In beat-up Boeing 737-200s affectionately called “mud hens,” they flew into the world’s toughest airports. What got my attention was this snippet:
Capt. Malcolm af Uhr, 45, co-piloted a flight headed for Juneau in a snow storm. He and his pilot aborted four attempts to land because they couldn’t see the runway at the critical moment. After refueling back in Sitka, 95 miles away, they returned to Juneau and tried to land five more times without success. As local fliers dozed or read the paper, a passenger from California stood and demanded, “What’s wrong with you people?” The plane finally landed on the 10th try.
I have to admire that kind of patience, persistence, and derring-do. Seldom have I experienced similar effort in the computer industry. Capt. af Uhr’s everyday heroism makes me feel jealous of his passion.
