Managing L'unix

February 6th, 2010

Trust but verify: evaluating the message, not the messenger

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: General

Tags: Imperative, Mainframes, Servers, Hardware, Paul Murphy

Sometime, I’m guessing in the last eighteen months or so, internet usage passed an important milestone. Nobody rang bells or blew trumpets when it happened, but somewhere during that period the value, volume, and diversity of news and analysis posted by interested amateurs increased to the point that it became practical to live by the ideal that one should always judge the message, never the messenger.

What brought this to my attention seemed innocent enough: I cited a report by somebody named Laura as as authoritative on opinion pieces written by WWF, Greenpeace employees, and other Malthusians being passed off as science by the UN’s IPCC - and then realized that not only do I know nothing about this person, but that the work speaks sufficiently for itself that there’s no reason to care.

A lot of people don’t think about stuff like this, but ever since Descartes published his Discourse on Method in 1637 formalizing work by Bacon, Galileo, and others on the scientific method and the rejection of authority as a source of knowledge, we’ve known how things should be done, but not had the means to do it outside the narrow bounds of whatever scholarship we may ourselves have been able to practice.

Now we have - and of course that’s the way it should always have been but knowing what to do and being able to do it have hitherto been different things. Now they’re not: a case of science fiction made real by the uncoordinated efforts of tens of thousands of people.

Unfortunately there’s a corollary: a moral imperative: because if we can, we must.

And, of course, like all good moral imperatives this one comes with a catch: because negative authority still discounts. The legal maxim “falsus in unum, falsus in omnia” says it all: if you catch your source in one lie, you’re entitled to assume anything else he says is a lie.

Mistakes and lies can be hard to tell apart, but inconsistency tells the story. Thus when a well known tech writer publishes something mildly critical of IBM’s mainframe business model and subsequently seems to become both obsessively anti-Sun and obsequiously pro-IBM, the inconsistency suggests a failure to recognize the moral imperative to stick to the right - admittedly a conclusion I jump to in part because of my own unhappy experience in getting over 2,700 pieces of personalized hate mail for debunking IBM’s mainframe Linux as over priced, over hyped, lunacy.

The bottom line, though, is that this change has happened: that internet access now means that message generally trumps messenger in both theory and practice - meaning, among other things, that anybody who still acts as if attacking the messenger’s credentials; trying, for example, to dismiss the content of the Wattsupwiththat climate site by claiming that Mr. Watts isn’t a scientist, is categorizing himself as intellectually weak, emotionally dishonest, and fundamentally out of touch with reality.

January 30th, 2010

ZFS/Flash and the climate debacle

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, General, Government, Oracle, Storage, Sun

Tags: Oracle Corp., Theory, Data, Kilometer, Paul Murphy

Here’s something I wrote back in 2005:

It should be possible, for example, to build or modify coal-based power plants to intentionally inject “tuned particulates” into the upper atmosphere, thereby reducing insolation and causing global cooling.

The downside, of course, would be that the effect would be uncontrollable at any but the most aggregate level -and that we couldn’t easily turn it off if we notice the other planets, a year or two later, starting to cool. In other words, there are obvious solutions, but grabbing one without understanding the problem might turn out to be even dumber than the anti-nuclear protests of the seventies that led to the carbon economy that’s supposedly the cause of global warming.

Fortunately, there is a far better technical solution on the horizon, one that’s unambiguously desirable but nicely illustrates how closely technology and politics are linked.

The earth has about 509,600,000 square kilometers of surface area, roughly 71% of it water. Extend our area of interest 3 KM down and 12 up, and we have about 7.644 billion cubic kilometers within which climate is of direct importance to us. Heat and material transfer functions for most of the materials found in that volume are well understood, thus there are no theoretical impediments to modeling the effect that an isolated increase or decrease in solar energy input to a cone cut across these cubes will have on the cubes themselves and thence on their neighbors.

There are a few practical impediments to extending that model to cover the globe, but the theory’s all there. What’s missing is the both the data and the computing capacity needed. Make those available, however, and it should be possible to fully predict the effect in San Francisco next year of man made cloud cover in Beijing this year.

Getting the data is a matter of being willing to spend the money -the lack of surface differentiation in much of the globe coupled with the availability of space-based sensors make that much less challenging or expensive than it might appear. The problem has been that the combination of processing power and storage needed has not been available at any price - but they soon will be. Both IBM’s grid on a chip and Sun’s SMP on a chip offer the potential to do this: both directly and in terms of the computation needed to enable data reduction to the point that the required storage becomes practical.

That threshold of feasibility probably won’t be crossed this year, but it almost certainly will happen within three or four years.

(Note: I was wrong at the time to trust the data enough to conclude that some warming was occurring, and also wrong about the size of the problem: recent research on energy transfer from solar wind suggests we need to go up another forty kilometers or so.)

At the time, however, my big concern in terms of actually doing this was that the technology needed to efficiently compress, store, and retrieve the data didn’t exist.

But did you catch some of the numbers the Oracle team was bruiting about last Wednesday? 60 Terabyte data warehouses? Single tables with three billion rows? sub-second performance on Oracle database machines with multi-terabyte tables?

The contextual bottom line here on what they were saying seems simple: between CMT computing, flash, and ZFS this job doesn’t seem out of reach on either practicality or cost grounds anymore.

So why do it? Well, there’s an obvious reason: the meltdown taking place in the global warming advocacy business as one alarmist after another proves to have been lying and cheating his way to personal fame and fortune tells us a lot about the people involved, but nothing at all about the reality or otherwise of the threats humanity faces from climate change.

Personally I’d bet an incoming Maunder minimum (mini-ice age) over another MWP (Medieval warming period) - but that’s a bet: not a certainty because the combination of theory and data needed to be sure simply doesn’t exist.

The best bet, of course, is that nothing significant is happening: that the next hundred years won’t be significantly hotter or colder than the last hundred; but, again, discrediting the people phonying up data - and if someone had told me even late last year that the IPCC would be caught selling WWF opinion pieces as refereed science I’d never have believed them - tells us they have no evidence for their warnings, but says nothing about whether those warnings, in either direction, are right or wrong.

What we need, obviously, is good data on which to build, and against which to test, the theories we need to develop before we can understand the problem and make informed predictions.

This project will spin out all the data we need while making it possible to do next hour, next day, next month weather predictions with no more theory than what’s already known about energy transfer and material reaction to it. And that, as MArtha would say, would be a very good thing - not to mention, of course, one fantastic opportunity for Oracle to do its stuff.

January 27th, 2010

Quietly rejoicing

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:17 pm

Categories: Apple, Sun

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., Intel X86, Sun Solaris, Processors, Operating Systems, Software, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Paul Murphy

2000 more engineers for Sun! Mostly on SPARC and Solaris - I don’t know how they’re going to make that java marriage work, but if I were on the Sun side in those discussions, I’d feel pretty secure right now.

Build to order manufacturing! Finally! (Guess Oracle has the guts - Sun’s people have pointed at HP’s SAPping for years as THE reason not to go this way.)

And the sleeper slipped into the pack? the application appliance desktop computer (aka Sun Ray) driven off the local cloud (i.e. 2 CMT machines.)

And, speaking of the insanely great: iPad’s A4 != x86 It’s a PA Semi designed PPC/SOC derivitive. Know why it doesn’t cost a thousand bucks and still works fast on low power? Did I mention.. A4 != x86 ?

Seriously, does IT news get better than this?

January 23rd, 2010

Nothing but olive twigs: a solid week of good news!

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Innovation, Sun Microsystems Inc., Leadership, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

For Sun employees - and customers: Sun is the brand, innovation is the product, Oracle is the company. Go Oracle!

And just so you know: the meaning of “innovation” varies over time - but right now the correct form is packaged applications on CMT/Solaris with some ROCK and flash on the side.

For Americans in general (and thus the civilized world) the reign of democrats in the House and Senate that started in 2006 and peaked with the Pelosi/Reid two trillion dollar debt extravaganza last fall fell off a cliff in Massachusetts. Go Scot!

Nine months to go - just about what it takes to gestate a recovery to sanity, economic growth, and real jobs for people who want them. Go tea partiers!

Meanwhile the IPCC confessed to spreading faked glacier data, climategate spread to NASA, another czar bit the dust, and even the Supreme Court of the United States overcame its four wise latinas long enough to uphold the constitution - meaning that political bloggers, among other internet information sources, can now legally be paid.
Go John (Roberts)!

From Apple: whether it’s an ipad, an inet, or an islate the bottom line isn’t in the device: it’s in the business backend support for publishing. To misquote someone whose teachings and beliefs have brought the editors of Time, NewsWeek, CNN, and rest of the liberal empire to its present unhappy state of barely put off bankruptcy, “Apple has seen the future, and it works.”

Go Steve!

January 16th, 2010

"Geeks rule!"? Yes - but what that means depends.

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Database Management, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux

Tags: Wintel, Card, MySQL, Microsoft Corp., UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Databases, Software, Enterprise Software

An odd experience this week: I wanted to get a bunch of people collecting roughly similar data (on donors) to produce samples for me that were both randomly selected and geospatially representative. Since that’s oxymoronic, what I actually asked them to do was to stratify by district and then select randomly within each stratum.

The striking thing about the exercise was that an easy majority have moved the database for this to MySQL on Linux with holdouts on Solaris (mostly also MySQL), HP-UX, and various Microsoft configurations - but the unexpected thing was that none of the Unix people had any difficulty either understanding it or doing it; while the Wintel people equally unanimously wanted meetings, paperwork, “a better understanding of the requirements”, and in something like three out of four cases additional monies from their bosses before they could see about getting it done.

I was contemplating the difference between the Wintel marketing image as the solution for do it yourselfers who want to avoid having to deal with systems managers and the reality of the inflexibility and burdens its protagonists impose on users when, just as I was explaining the joys of the formulation “I’m from Microsoft and I’m here to help”, some black ice shifted my focus to practicing breakfalls on the sidewalk.

So as I’m laying there wondering where the phone went, one of the PC people who’d come out behind me looked down all concerned like to ask “did you fall?” Well, I’m a Jeff Foxworthy fan, so I dug out somebody’s business card from a previous meeting and handed it to him.

I’ve no idea whose card it was or what he made of it - but the analogy between what really happens when businesses replace their Unix infrastructures with Microsoft people and that slickly invisible ice on the sidewalk? Yep: that I’ll buy into.

January 9th, 2010

A business problem

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:00 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General

Tags: Data Center, Customer, Data Centers, Internet, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Paul Murphy

I have a problem - not that one :). This one involves that rarity for me: self-doubt about a technical recommendation juggling system ownership issues versus out-sourcing and customer co-locates.

The whole thing started as a simple question about a hardware refresh for an application they’ve had running on a little AMD/Linux grid for about five years now. What the application does is take in client files measured in the hundreds of gigabytes (often terabytes) to produce a relatively small number of large images measuring in the four to eight gigabyte range.

Twenty years ago tapes came by truck, that became boxes of cassettes, then Fedex packs stuffed with optical platters and later DVDs, and now some customers want to do everything instantly over the internet.

Unfortunately the company is in Canada and network costs are well over American expectations: the total cost for the two 100Mbps ports they currently maintain on their local metropolitan area network runs to about $6,000 a month - and those ports are about 65% idle with average monthly volume running just below 6TB between them. Note too that actual performance on links crossing peering boundaries on this piece of backbone often drops by an order of magnitude, so customer delivery of a streamed, 2GB, image zip can take forty minutes to an hour.

I’ve suggested three scenarios to them:

• convert their software to cell, (specifically to Linux mini-supers made up from playstation boards), and license whole racks as appliances to their customers for operation by customers on customer premises.

• co-locate the grid with, and effectively outsource data center operations to, a high bandwidth data center operator in Omaha.
• do the traditional thing: upgrade the grid, upgrade to Gbit ethernet ports, and charge the customer who wants internet turn-around a bandwidth surcharge.

I like the first option best: go appliance computing!. Nothing wrong with this picture: it’s positive for the company and its customers - and the software, written in C and F77 for BSD4.3 on Vax but targeted to an Elxsi 6400 and since converted first to SunOS and then to SuSe/MP, is easy to port (but hard to optimize) for cell.

So what’s wrong with this? Well, it’s wholesale business change and even testing it properly requires putting other options on hold for at least six months, investing a bunch of expensive manpower, and risking the business relationship with a couple of important customers.

Option two, my second choice, is purely cost driven. Putting new machines into the Omaha center would cut processing time by an average of about four relative to the existing system, provide about eight times the burstable bandwidth for customers, and end up costing the company less than half what it pays out for data center operations now.

Equally importantly, the impact on customers is muted: internet customers don’t typically care where the service is, and courier customers mostly wouldn’t care because they tend to ship data from field offices, not head offices.

Unfortunately for my line of thinking here the business founder (and still majority owner) won’t consider this - and the idea of moving processing without moving the company and its people strikes me as a plan to end the business badly: with some customer’s confidential data falling into hands that aren’t supposed to get it.

Option three is popular with some of the key players, but is a bet on the future being the past - and how often has that happened in anything IT related?

To complicate matters, the company has one competitor offering much the same service for roughly the same money (not how they see it, of course :) ), everybody’s tight for cash, and volumes went through the floor last year when the boom died - so even casting internet transfers as an optional new, and premium, service has its risks.

What’s needed for this decision is a nice, clear, way to quantify the relative risks of each approach - and that’s where I’m stumped. I can argue a strong case for either the pro or con on each of these three options - but risk numbers I haven’t got; and risk numbers are what I need.

Ever see a cartoon in which the hero flies off a cliff or a building and floats serenely in the air before discovering the lack of support and plummeting down? That’s me on this issue: serenely confident in the opinion that business change is the way to go, but entirely without a leg to stand on. Duh, anybody got any ideas? Real data on leaks from out-sourced versus hugged systems that take system complexity and change into account? How about real data on changing the business model to keep up with IT changes? How about just real data on the speed and reliability of large file exchange across the internet?

January 2nd, 2010

Lessons from the last decade

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Defenestration, Enterprise Policy, General

Tags: Information Technology, Law, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

One of the more widely honored end of project traditions involves holding a lessons learned meeting and then burying results critical of the seniors who made the major mistakes driving the project to rack to ruin.

In that context what I’ve learnt over the last ten years comes down to two blindingly obvious -in retrospect- general laws of human behavior with broad applicability to both public policy and IT.

The easier of these to understand is something I’ve previously described as the real “Murphy’s law” and now formulate as:

The consequences of actions in the real world align with expectations to exactly the extent to which the beliefs underlying those expectations align with reality.

Thus both the normal formulation in technological or engineering contexts: viz, that anything which can go wrong will go wrong; and the social analog known as the law of unintended consequences (claiming that public policy and/or legislation usually has consequences opposite to those intended) are really just domain specific observations illustrating the working out of Murphy’s law.

To cite a simple public policy example - and I don’t have to cite IT examples, do I? - it’s obvious that newspaper recycling is a good idea. Right? Well, wrong, it turns out that this does far more harm than good - and in two ways:

• First, a ton of new newsprint in North American costs very roughly what a ton of recycled newsprint does, but the price of the new stuff contains about $200 in taxes paid, while the price for the recycled stuff contains about $200 in public subsidies for an actual difference in economic cost of about $400. Since that additional money relative to new production goes mostly for collections (fuel and labor intensive), de-inking (chemical and infrastructure intensive) and sludge disposal (about 30% by weight of the collected newspaper ends up as dense, low digestibility, and marginally toxic sludge that has to be disposed of) the net effect on both the economy and the environment is negative; and,

• not only does the reduction in pulp production mean more fires and thus fewer trees (illustrating yet again that the cutest victim of efforts to save the spotted owl has been the spotted owl), but the reduction in long fiber cellulose (paper can be recycled about six times before the cellulose fibers break down) in municipal trash significantly retards natural digestion processes in buried waste dumps - meaning that the half life of dump sites (the time needed for about half the material to become grossly indistinguishable from soil) gets extended from under 200 years to over 500 (for areas with 26″ or more in annual precipitation).

The harder one to understand involves something I think of as the law of temporal spreading - the reality that we don’t all operate in the same temporal zone in personal, political, or technological contexts.

At the IT level this shows up in many different ways - two of the most obvious being:

• the widespread force fitting of control ideas evolved in response to the explosion in data processing during the 1920s to the (largely unrelated) technologies evolving from the development of science based computing in the 1940s and 50s; and,

• the general pattern in technology adoption under which new ideas first get reviled and rejected before gradually becoming mainstream when copies made by the majority vendors get treated as exciting innovations - witness, for example, all the companies which declared the iPhone a joke, a mistake, a horror -and are now promoting their copies as somehow magically better, newer, and more innovative.

At the public policy level this shows up most clearly when you consider that large swathes of the world are dominated by 11th century societies cheerfully equipping their crusaders with AK47s, jet aircraft, and modern bio-labs.

It’s when you combine these two laws - meaning, of course, the predictions the two allow you make about the behavior of groups you have to deal with - that the real challenges for the next decade become clear because the job is to succeed despite both temporal spreading and the operation of Murphy’s law.

Consider, for example, the current crisis in air travel security - on the surface this is a situation in which a few nut cases successfully imposed new economic costs on airlines, airports, police, and about two million passengers a day at the world’s airports. Look more deeply, however, and blame ultimately adheres to the people who made this kind of thing inevitable by blindly and stupidly insisting on applying 18th century ideas about personal identity verification to 21st century problems - themselves compounded by mixing 11th century social and religious behaviors with 20th century technology.

So, bottom line, what’s the personal lesson learnt from the last decade? That I’ve only begun to understand this stuff, that both IT and social policy successes depend on testing every assumption against reality first, and that manipulating some self righteous idiot living in the 1920s DP world into doing something right, requires first understanding that the problem is the temporal and social boundary, not the person living inside it.

December 26th, 2009

Predictions for 2010

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Linux, Security, Sun

Tags: Google Inc., Idea, Economy, Wikipedia, Attack, Wiki, Online Communications, Paul Murphy

It’s unfortunate that the Saturday schedule puts this on the day after Christmas - because there’s not a lot of good news.

The Economy

First of all, everything we do in IT is conditioned by the economy, and the economy is going to get worse - and not just in the United States. It’s simply not possible to take the world’s most productive economy out of play and not create a vacuum that will suck down everyone else too.

(Yes, I know lots of people are saying that things are looking up, but it’s the same people who spent eight years yelling down the Bush economy - and you can jawbone a market up or down if you’re a big enough player, but the reality disconnect is obvious when you consider that the same guys who screamed about economic disaster while the economy grew from 2002 to 2008 and most Americans held jobs, are now blowing hard to puff economic growth when over 10% of Americans can’t find jobs, another 7% or so have given up looking, and more are being laid off every day.)

Bottom line: expect it to get worse; plan accordingly - and if the attack on America gets derailed before November? well, it’s a lot easier to adapt to good news than bad.

2010’s astonishing tech success

I’ve been saying for years that google is vulnerable to a kid with a better search idea - and while some think Bing’s been proving me wrong on that, the truth is that Bing isn’t really a better idea: it’s just the same idea minus the social agenda.

Wolfram Alpha, in contrast, is a better idea- one whose execution seems likely to benefit in a perverse way from the economic mess. What’s going on there is that alpha is on the long and slow climb to respectability characteristic of products that seemingly come out of nowhere to take the world by storm - but really spent years growing roots. That’s what Alpha’s been doing, and because their funding is pretty much assured they’re using the time the economic slowdown gives them to significantly improve their product.

By this time next year I’d expect a majority of readers to be familiar with at least the name and a few key ideas - and two or three years from now a majority among the web’s more educated users to be regularly using alpha to replace both search engines like google or bing and faux knowledge engines like wikipedia.

2010’s astonishing tech scandal

According to the theory of cognitive dissonance - simultaneously (and not coincidently) the most reviled behavioral theory there is and the only one that produces consistently correct behavioral predictions - most people will double down on stupid as long as there’s someone telling them they’re not alone in doing it - but once the dam starts to crumble, many of the early leakers will become proselytizing antagonists. That’s what’s happening now with respect to both google and wikipedia.

Both are under attack for information hiding and information distortion.

Last weekend, for example, the communist Chinese leadership in Copenhagen treated the American president with all the respect he deserves -and in that process grievously insulted both the Office and the American idea. Today (Dec 22nd), however, eight of the top ten google hits on “Obama snub Copenhagen Chinese Premier” either deny anything happened, attack those who reported what happened, or otherwise downplay the event. In contrast, four of the top five hits from the same search on bing quote eyewitness accounts in discussions of the event and its implications for Americans.

Similarly, this week’s big news from wikipedia celebrates a senior player getting caught censoring over 5,000 separate articles relating to climate science, climate politics, and the individuals involved - all apparently as part a strategy aimed at selling climate alarmism while destroying the careers and personal credibility of those who said that the data did not support the conclusions:

.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it - more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred - over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

I think it’s early days on this, but that we’ll see the abuse of google and wikipedia to hide some information completely while preferentially putting forward agenda driven publications as authoritative, will become a cause celebre - and the biggest tech scandal of 2010.

Sun will recover

But only if its new owners (presumably Oracle), replace; remotivate; or redirect most of Sun’s line management in marketing, emphasize SPARC/Solaris, go after the mid market; and put more much effort into selling the company’s technology advantages while de-emphasizing its ability to compete on price reselling nearly the same x86 junk everybody else does.

Security

If you liked Windows security, you’ll love what the bad guys can do with mobile phones - especially the next gen ME/Atom ones widely promised for RSN.

Android and iPhone, because ARM/PPC/Unix and not x86/Windows, will do better than the rest; but by year’s end the number of scare stories about stolen sync data and trusted connections going wrong will be serious enough for even the traditional media to notice.

New Hardware

Sun apparently has a rock box about ready for prime time as an Oracle applications server but nobody making decisions - and Apple, if it does finally release the iNet for use as a video equipped iPhone and personal interface between the net and an HD TV, could go a long way toward upsetting the cable company cart.

Beyond that, however, I think it’ll be slim pickings with thin clients picking up a bit, Linux sucking some market share out of continuing economic uncertainty, and IBM probably pushing back the switch to cell for another Power or hybrid generation.

Open source

Open source is already solidly main stream - 2010 will see that become more obvious to more people.

Programming languages

As I’ve said several times Sun’s Fortress language had great potential largely because its creators found effective ways to adapt ideas from APL and LISP to today’s hardware, but ate up much of that potential through excessive complication and too much ritual bowing toward Java and the whole re-usable object idea.

Google’s go programming language looks like more of the same - but has three significant advantages over Fortress: a simplified concurrency and threading model; a familiar look that’s likely to convince beginners and pundits that it’s not hard to learn; and a combined library and function structure that will eventually push those who really do learn to use it toward adopting the APL/LISP throw-away coding culture.

Between them these will, I think, make Go the breakthrough development environment for 2010.

Customer care on the web

There’s a fast growing epidemic of what I think of as screwuicitus (the more PC term -lovingly coined by a junior helping draft the 1946 Army DSM manual- is “Malignant narcissistic personality disorder”) affecting DP managed windows shops. This example, technically a hopeless hop, is a response from info@electionsalberta.ca to an email asking for information:

Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:58:48 -0700
Content-Language: en-US
Subject: Undeliverable: form query
X-Spam: [F=0.2000000000; CM=0.500; S=0.200(2009110601)]
X-MAIL-FROM: <>
X-SOURCE-IP: [(unknown)]
X-AnalysisOut: [v=1.0 c=1 a=FKqoTAkqqqzS8bulTHJWDA==:17 a=Tc8dGPhyAAAA:8 a]
X-AnalysisOut: [=bv6bFCNp7-9ugQYD-14A:9 a=Yo77siEqQ3jiC286QuutTcVvMSMA:4 a]
X-AnalysisOut: [=Jxe9xgG-pfsA:10 a=8OTclXnn6y8A:10 a=yxUQOyTO8zkA:10 a=g0r]
X-AnalysisOut: [9pcIiu8AA:10 a=xiFkkGY24DfCcbPf:21 a=eBedUNMayesKZ6iE:21 a]
X-AnalysisOut: [=PoYnnNtHiO6ZZESWjWEA:7 a=-3L5SdoPKKtaFP5cMSPt9crfO1wA:4 a]
X-AnalysisOut: [=aOlAIKAlFP8A:10 a=U8bkrWzPuQwA:10 a=6YMv5lkmwArEvWrA:21 a]
X-AnalysisOut: [=AkraVF67Akh1eLcT:21 a=jUplb4chcM6txb2-hOkA:9 a=XUuUfRPsYo]
X-AnalysisOut: [e1iY7s0TPQxojJTngA:4 a=sA-ssjpUAAAA:8 a=6m6jf_kxXhjD1BRq8m]
X-AnalysisOut: [QA:9 a=5c7CR3u8qAZW27wCBNoA:7 a=VHrYSyJ6auanJfjOsbsnUx-HGW]
X-AnalysisOut: [sA:4 a=TEQiFNGRbg4A:10 a=LK2cxUu1gWkA:10 a=61nhVlxHhMZrA5p]
X-AnalysisOut: [2:21 a=tA0rCwbRLPBPz3RV:21]

This will get worse - probably much worse, as organizations preferentially lay off the wrong people and thus end up giving their most deeply dug in DP people an increasing role in customer contact management.

And in general?

More of the same: more Linux uptake among those who see no alternative to x86 and find themselves marginalized in the on-going data processing takeover of wintel; consistent growth in the Mac world; increasing consumer resistance on paying for much more than they get on internet connectivity; and much more pundit nonsense about clouds, virtualization, Windows security, and souped up pagers and netbooks pretending to be iSomethings.

Bottom line for 2010? a holding pattern with not that much in the way of grounds for optimism before markets understand just how revolutionary the November elections in the United States are likely to be.

December 19th, 2009

The year that was

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Database Management, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Hardware, Linux, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Information Technology, Health Care, IBM Corp., American, Vertical Industries, Linux, Benefits, Healthcare, Strategy, Operating Systems

On the good news side - I’m going to live forever.

Makes me wonder how long it will be before access to porn becomes a health rights issue in elder care.

On the humor side: when I glanced sureptiously at my watch an hour into my son’s school Christmas concert, his grandmother scandalized the assembled grade two parents around us by “muttering” (loudly enough to be heard across the auditorium) “No, your watch hasn’t stopped.”

Ya, you’re right -I’m stalling; so on with what I don’t want to do: the review of last year’s predictions.

Personally I think the odds strongly favor a deep recession stretching at least into 2010, the collapse of international law as China, Iran, and Pakistan move into the vacuum left by the withdrawal of American power, a further economic shift away from the United States, and ultimately a bout of hyper-inflation on the Carter era model.

If so most of the technology companies will be fighting for survival with the “winners” being those who adapt best to the new international realities and the primary losers being American employees working for these companies and their major corporate customers.

Batting 1000, I’m sorry to say.

Dell could, I think, prove to be the walking dead man here: Apple should be fine if they don’t have a leadership change, HP and IBM are deeply embedded in government and largely supra-national in outlook, while Sun has exactly the low energy, high performance, portfolio people should be looking for - but may not be willing to make the marketing changes needed to sell them.

Still batting 1000.

Sun is an odd case: by any reasonable standard the company should be a big winner next year: in particular with respect to storage markets, web services markets, and HPC markets. In practice the company is often its own worst enemy: unable to cope with people manipulating its stock, unwilling to tell the mid market about its products, and collectively baffled by the tsunami of ignorance characteristic of the IT press writing for the Wintel industry.

On balance, therefore, I expect they’ll muddle along: appeasing Wall Street through periodic layoffs instead of doing a leveraged employee buyout; selling to big customers and those willing to jump high hurdles for technical gain instead of going after the mid market; and making a success of the forthcoming “Rock” release despite being unable to tell most of their market most of why the thing is exciting.

Oh boy, I think I got the company right; but totally missed the attack from inside that very nearly killed it. Not in my worst nightmares did I think they’d be forced to sit out a year while IBM made hay and Intel published lots of claims about catching up.

IBM is another company with enormous potential for change - but economic turmoil is, particularly for a true multi-national like IBM, a bit like headlights to a deer and I expect little change in the bitter infighting going on in that company.

Umm: the good thing about predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow is that it raises your percentage accuracy.

On the other hand it’s remotely possible that the incoming American administration does sensible things: repealing CAFE and SOX, explicitly and somehow believably repudiating their health care nationalization ambitions, and triggering an economic boom by investing heavily in nuclear energy and Gingrich’s “drill here, drill now” program.

If so we should see a rising tide raising all boats - with none of the big guys going under, significant new job opportunities opening for IT people everywhere, and the accelerated movement of manufacturing (and IT) jobs from Asia back to the United States.

Either way, however, senior IT management will be largely unaffected in terms of its ideas: some new acronyms will become popular as signposts to IT nirvana and some old ones will drop by the wayside, but the end of the year will see the same people doing the same things in the same ways as last year.

“Remotely” wasn’t remotely the right word - it really seems that given some set of choices, Mr. Obama and friends enthusiastically pick the one that does the most damage to American community contructs - meaning the economy, democracy, personal freedom, and the rule of law.

On that same basis Microsoft and Intel will get Windows 7 and “Nahelem” into the market: lots of people will sell them to each other, and they’ll be significantly better than what came before - but their only impact on IT cost and user productivity will come from the contribution they make to furthering Data Processing’s takeover of the Windows culture. As this moves further downscale it will push more and more IT “amateurs” to the sidelines - and further consolidate the 1970s glass room computing model for mid size and smaller companies.

A work in progress - and one that will continue next year.

That will, I expect, drive some business managers to embrace time sharing as a solution and some former Windows support people to Linux - in the former case because corporate data processing can’t control the time sharing account and in the latter because going Linux defends their x86 loyalties without invoking the horrors of MacOS X. That will be good news for people selling Linux netbooks (bigger iphones without phones) but have little longer term impact as these people either adapt to the demands posed by Wintel centralization or find other, probably non IT related, roles.

Another work in progress - and again something that will continue next year.

Another trend that will first continue and then collide with economic conditions involves the use of video on computers. Economic conditions mean that few companies will invest in the bandwidth infrastructure that got so badly over built a few years ago -and is now being stretched to its limits. As a result there will be a lot more complaints and frustration as people promised, and paying for, 10MBS and up get much less and ultimately respond by reducing demand for network downloadable (or viewable) video.

Yep, that’s happening, and getting worse. Oddly (for a cynic) I missed google’s strategic response: trying to get government to manage consumer bandwidth allocation to their benefit.

But it’s not all doom and gloom: one consequence of reduced funding for key military R&D will be a flood of new civilian applications as the people involved find other roles. I’d expect, for example, that the nano analyzers now nearing testing for use in civilian airports (spotting the particulates that embed in the skin and lungs of anyone near a chemical explosion such as a gun shot) will spawn a wide range of related devices for use in health care, environmental monitoring, school security, and fire protection. Similarly, advances in robotics, recognition, and communication should soon give us things ranging from a robot that sits out on your driveway and cleans off new snow as it falls, to locks that stop others but effectively disappear as impediments to your movements and the commercial viability of personal “on-star” services monitoring your health and safety.

Not soon, and probably not made in the United States.

Overall, I think, 2009 will prove a fine fullfillment of the fortune cookie curse: “may you live in interesting times” - because, no matter what, the times are going to be “interesting.”

I’d be a lot happier if I’d been a lot more wrong; but, bottom line, what can I say about 2009? It was the year technology took a breather: the tech leaders got stopped, the tech marketers struggled out catch up products, and the Obama/Pelosi assault on American values, American education, and American freedoms continued.

So maybe I was right the first time: juvenile humor really is about as good as it gets - so, what do you get when you a cross a vampire and a snowman? frostbite. And what do you get when you cross a palm with social coin? serious trans-national concern over the fate of an open source database, of course.

December 12th, 2009

An open letter to Larry Ellison

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Deploying Sun Rays, E-voting, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Hardware, Infrastructure, Productivity, Security, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Larry Ellison, E-voting, Government, Paul Murphy

Dear Mr. Ellison:

Re: Adding several hundred million a year to Sun’s bottom line - and helping save your country at the same time.

As you may be aware the recent special election for Congress in New York 23 was the first in that state to use its new electronic voting technology - and the results argue strongly for the use of a large rock crusher to dispose of that technology before it can do more harm.

One of the local newspapers, the Gouveneur Times, has a nice collection of charges and counter-charges, but the key takeaways are:

there is no way to know who actually won the election;

before the democrat won, he accused everyone else of cheating; after the conservative lost, he accused the democrats of cheating;

the audit and self correcting capabilities thought to exist in the voter eligibility processes, the vote collection processes, and the vote counting processes, all proved, in reality, to be either missing or inadequate in the face of mutual mistrust, human error, inadequate software, and real or imaginary malfeasance.

on review, the one thing that’s strikingly obvious about the failed processes the board of elections put in place and tried to execute on before, during, and after the election is that the compromises made to accommodate the limitations of the state selected e-voting technology within a framework of traditional expectation were both inevitable consequences of the technology and at the root of most of the problems.

NY 23 is just one district among 435, but every district (and every county and state) has the same problem: states rights to the contrary, PL 107-252 (the 2002 Help America Vote Act) is widely seen as mandating evoting; all the popular evoting technologies follow the same model in which mechanical voting machines are replaced by customized PCs running voting software - and most of the problems encountered in New York 23 follow directly from accommodations made to fit a voting management process around this model.

The voting management challenge (which is not co-temporaneous for all voters) breaks down logically into three major stages: before the vote, during the vote, and after the vote.

The big problems faced by those compiling a list of eligible voters before the vote are verification and completeness: balancing the risk of disenfranchising eligible voters against the risk of enfranchising ineligible voters. Although actual processes vary on almost a county by county basis across the United States, most rely first on voluntary voter registration - a process that worked well when the population was relatively homogeneous, but now generally under-represents the educated employed (because it’s voluntary) and over represents the uneducated, the unemployables, and the ineligible because these are professionally marshalled.

The people charged with collecting the vote must also verify eligibility immediately before issuing a ballot - and while that task is handled differently by those dealing with advance or absentee votes and those dealing with polling station votes, people in both groups face tremendous pressure to skew decisions on individual eligibility toward likely Democrat voters because of that party’s national policy of suing on all close losses - something that often bankrupts their electoral enemies and threatens every electoral official not obviously a democratic partisan with having their personal lives, and family finances, destroyed through the courts and the press.

One consequence of this is that, particularly in counties, districts, or states where Democrats generally lose by small margins on election night, election officials tend to resign after each election - and this, combined with the drive to minimize the expense of running an election, usually means that most of the people making the decisions have no experience, little training, no chance to rehearse, and no one better off than themselves to call for help when things go wrong.

The vote counting phase is where the press sees most of the problems but, in reality, the occasional stuck printer and the reality or otherwise of e-cheats built into the voting machines would matter little if only genuinely eligible voters voted exactly once and the audit process ensured that all votes could ultimately be counted correctly. It’s the weaknesses in the pre and post election processes, in other words, that put unusual stresses on the vote collection processes and thereby make it possible for people who find weaknesses in those processes to destroy the credibility of the entire effort.

Sun technology can help during all three phases - and virtually eliminate the problems affecting both vote collection and audit.

The basic components Sun would sell are:

1. all the software needed to make, present, count, and audit ballots - all as open source, and with a committment to its improvement through a Sun sponsored voting software foundation.

2. up to three pairs of servers per jurisdiction (typically county or state)
3. evoting terminals made by combining circuit boards and software from the 2FS Sun Ray with touch screens, a barcode reader, and a cartridge based roll printer - all in a single frame with no easily accessible components, keyboards, or ports.
4. integration, installation, support, and related software services including available, on call, expert testimony on the systems.

Each jurisdictional configuration would start with two systems, optionally locally redundant, in separate locations and primarily on different networks, managed by separate sysadmin teams of two with oversight by political appointees, each serving about half the Sun Ray based voting stations - with the databases on each set to replicate to the other in near real time with failover arrangements for each one to a third system run jointly by one sysadmin from each primary team.

State wide, and national, systems would be built up of these local systems.

In operation, voters would get a (self-authenticating) card with their names, addresses, and a 24 digit bar coded number on it identifying both the voter and the ballot questions the voter is considered eligible to respond to.

That card, when read on the terminal, would trigger the server to construct and display a ballot made up of the questions this voter is certified for and has not yet voted on.

As each question is answered, the system would record the vote, wait for write acknowledgment, mark the question as answered, and then wait for the next answer. On completion, card withdrawal, or a sufficient pause, the system would print a plain text summary on the paper roll, advance the roll, and write the same record to a database implemented using different technology on the shared (backup) server.

The benefits of this approach include:

• auditability and reliability: the Sun Ray software ensures that only authorized devices produce votes, that only the authorized application can write to the databases and paper rolls, and that the recorded data reflects the user’s actions.

  Limited failures - of terminals, servers, networks, or sysadmins - will have no significant effect on counts or processes. Each server can be independently audited before, during, and after the vote - and results between the system records have to agree absolutely.

  Having the paper and ribbon rolls in cartridges inside the terminal frame makes them difficult to tamper with (as well as unlikely to jam) and testifies to the integrity of the paper trail needed for final comfort on the auditability issue - while writing the summary records to a different database technology on the backup machine protects against surprise software issues and sabotage.

• voter education: the overall process allows local electoral boards to set up web based practice sites for partisans on both sides to familiarize their voters with the ballots - and to set up one or more terminals for public access as training and familiarization aids prior to, or even during, the election.
• voter flexibility: this process allows the electoral board to issue most token cards in advance and thus allow voters to vote at any polling place they happen to be near on election day - even if that is an American embassy or base in another country.

  Aside from the obvious advantages this offers in terms of managing advance and absentee voting, the critical point here is that the system silently eliminates one of the most traditional ways of electoral cheating: having people swear in at multiple polling stations - a fraud that depends on the electoral board’s expectation that the match between people showing up at polling stations and the subset of the list of eligible voters sent that polling station will not be perfect.

  More subtly, people with the right to vote in multiple jurisdictions can do so as long as each jurisdiction is using the Sun technology - and anyone who really wants to vote in multiple polling places can do so: but only once on each question.

• instant, accurate, counts: electoral boards can provide up to the second vote counts on each ballot question - broken down to any level that doesn’t violate voter privacy.

  More importantly, the token issuance and verification processes for advance, absentee, and polling place voting can accommodate differing degrees of certainty about each voter’s eligibility on each ballot question. In consequence results can be shown, at any time in the process, with or without votes cast by people whose eligibility is questioned by one side or the other.

  Notice, however, that this is a two edged sword with the rather nasty consequence that individual votes can be identified in this way. Significant legal controls exist to prevent this kind of information abuse now and will need to be reviewed as part of implementing this approach.

• low cost: total capital costs are comparable to, or only marginally less, than those for the traditional client-server approach - but things like simplified polling station management, easy on-line eligibility verification, and reduced training and turnover costs produce significant total process cost reductions for the customer.

One source of customer cost savings of importance to Sun derives from a fundamental difference between this approach and the traditional voting machine one: voting machines have to be stored between elections and, in effect, newly implemented every two years or so. The Sun solution, in contrast, is a specific application of a generalized system that can be used continuously - the voting stations, for example, are ideal kiosks for things like local license renewals and can, with minor (plug in/out) component change, be used in everything from schools to counter service at City Hall. Similarly the servers are general purpose - ideally equipped to handle public information services functions, but fully usable for almost any server function in the customer’s data centers.

It’s this system generality that drives Sun’s profit opportunity here: not the chance to earn a few million selling to electoral boards, but the chance to put people, software, and a high stakes demonstration system into roles where they earn customer commitment from the git go.

There is a natural confluence of interest in this: Sun has the technology and the country needs it - because the customer may be able to justify the purchase on process cost savings, but the country’s real bottom line on the Sun technology advantage here is elections that work - virtually eliminating audit, recount, and lawsuit costs while rebuilding credibility and public faith in the democratic process.