09.18.09
Posted in Semantics, Uncategorized, rant at 8:43 am by Nate Smith
There are a lot of terms that leave people scratching their heads but ‘cloud computing’ is one of the worst in a while. Everyone you talk to in and out of I.T. is thinking something different when the term comes up. The term ‘cloud computing’ is nebulous. (That is a good pun and I am not ashamed of it)
So let’s rectify this a bit. When we think of things like Google docs, Google mail and salesforce.com, we should call this the web application cloud. There are some one-trick poinies like Carbonite that work in the cloud too and may or may not use the web as their transport. These could be called Cloud products.
Then there are services we should think of as cloud computing services. Services like Amazon.com’s S3 storage are not a complete a product in themselves but are building blocks. These services are cloud computing services or web cloud computing services if they have only a web API (application programming interface).
Now it gets a bit tricky with vendors like VMware talking about building your own cloud. You can use products like VMware and others and build an on-premise cloud. This is multiple VMware servers or the Vsphere product letting you move inbstances of servers between physical machines. You might even be able to move them over a WAN or VPN to a remote hosting site or anyther company location. This might be the on-off-premise cloud.
It is possible to outsurce all your computers to someone else and run everything in their cloud of physical or virtual machines. This might be called outsourced infrastructure cloud or oursourced virtual infrastructure cloud.
Some people seem to imply that moving their operations or computer room contents to another company’s datacenter constitutes cloud computing. So let’s be inclusive and call this co-hosted cloud computing. When you do this it is usually done to get away from the issues of building and maintaining a computer room with special fire, cooling, and electrical services.
I’m not a big fan of many of the cloud computing types above. Even if you master the subleties of the financial arrangement, have goot toos to migrate and extract data, and even if you have a great exit strategy, the speed of light and fiber-seeking backhoes are still some of your worst enemies. When you boil it down, nearly any form of cloud computing is really outsourcing and the key is having a contract or agreement that is air-tight, and has rewards and penalties.
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07.16.09
Posted in Geek Culture, Google, rant at 9:35 am by Nate Smith
Remember the early days of Google? The Google page itself was plain and white execpt for the search form and the primary colors of the Google logo in the midde of the page? Remember when searching Google brought back results instead of advertisements? All the results were truly results, there was not a thinly veiled listing of commercialized results at the top?
Google once had a motto, “Don’t be evil”. Do you think a motto like that would loose its emphasis once the happy times are over and they discover they need to make some money to support all the amazing projects, long term initiatives, and employee benefits. How long can it be before they replace product quality with marketing as other large companies have done?
Has it already happened?
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04.28.09
Posted in rant at 1:53 pm by Nate Smith
Those of us that remember the old days in the 1990’s when Microsoft could do no wrong (much like the Google of 2006) remember the days of easy licensing and the brilliant aura each new product had as it was introduced. Microsoft was on fire and each new announcement meant the end of some drudgery or a more expediant way from point A to point B. Windows 95 was hot and each version of Office got easier to use because the esoteric features in the prior version no longer crashed.
You wanted to upgrade, upgrade was good. Upgrade was better. Upgrade = carrot.
Sometime in the early 2000’s (or was it the late 90’s?) when market saturation was beginning to set in and Novell and Borland were both put in their place, Microsoft realized they could not keep the market growing and the revenue climbing forever. They needed to attack their customers and their own products in order to continue selling. Things started changing and have been more burdensome ever since.
CALs or Client Access Licenses were required to access NT servers, software assurance hit and upgrade pricing disapeared. It became necessary to pay for support on some products. Then all these old products that shone like beacons as they were introduced were cut off from support. If you want support, you need to be on a recent version. Then things like Office were well established and probably all but the most esoteric 10% of features worked as they should and things didn’t crash nearly as much as they used to. That was good.
But the upgrades became more incremental and stopped being the dramatic improvements they once were. This is probably momentum coupled with mass. The upgrade track Microsoft would have us on now would probably do great things for the their t bottom line if we all complied.
Upgrades cost money for not much improvement. Upgrade= stick.
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02.10.09
Posted in rant at 10:16 pm by Nate Smith
Dear Seagate, Hitachi, and Western Digital,
I would pay more for a highly reliable hard drive. I realize it would cut into your revenue stream to make a hard drive that would last more than about three years, but I would pay for that benefit.
Yours Truly,
-Nate
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11.13.08
Posted in Geek Culture, rant at 11:17 pm by Nate Smith
We need a new unit of measurement to roughly estimate quantities of data, The HDEQ or Hard Drive Equivalent. For now, I think it should be the equivalent of a 1TB hard drive (let’s not split hairs over whose version of a Terrabyte).
Why do we need this?
You may have noticed a lot of people adding things like “please consider the environment before printing this” to the bottom of their email.
With the HDEQ we would have an offhand way of asking “I wonder how many HDEQs are filled up with this message?” and we would have a pretty good idea of what we meant.
It would come in handy in other places where we need to estimate how much storage will be needed or is in use or where we need to discuss the economics of storage. In a few years when 10 TB disks are commonplace, that will become the new HDEQ.
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09.30.08
Posted in rant at 4:22 pm by Nate Smith
The memory industry and the music industry are ganging up on consumers with a potential new music format called Slotmusic. We don’t need another format. We need the $7.00 CD we were promised 20 years ago when DVDs were introduced. And if Blu-ray is the movie format of the future how about some hi-def audio on Blu-ray?
I hope slotmusic goes the way of the mini-cd and 8 track tapes. Music industry, if you really want to push a new format make sure it has higher resolution than an MP3 or a CD.
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07.16.08
Posted in rant at 2:49 pm by Nate Smith
Somebody is messing with our buzzwords. That’s right; there is a shift from calling web 2.0 the “semantic web” to calling it the “social web”. I think O’Reilly may be pushing the change.
Web 2.0 is like art, you will know it when you see it.
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06.26.08
Posted in rant at 10:50 am by Nate Smith
Upgrade is the name for trading a set of problems you are familiar with or have already mostly solved or come to terms with (the devil you know), with a new set of unfamiliar problems and enhancements.
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05.14.08
Posted in Geek Culture, rant at 1:04 pm by Nate Smith
The “Berryheads” are those people (cause we would never do this) who are trying to walk while typing on their blackberrys. They run into people, walls, and get off on the wrong floor on the elevator. They make OGBs (Original Gansta Berry-users) shake their heads in disgust.
Watch out berryheads, you put yourself and others at risk until you realize whatever you have to say really isn’t that important. Or you never figure it out and go down as proof that natural selection is at work all around us.
UPDATES
7/29/2008 Chicago Tribune - text walker trouble
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04.27.08
Posted in rant at 7:49 pm by Nate Smith
I realize the media gets a lot of things out of context, but whoa! This was a quote from Steve Balmer on CNN. “Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.”
He’s right, we are having trouble justifying upgrades to an obese operating system that does not really have any justifiable ROI.
Steve must be living on the moon. He should go visit some people in the trenches really doing IT and living with a budget.
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