November 21st, 2009

Educating IT decision makers

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Productivity, Strategy

Tags: Education, Risk, Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

One of the more difficult questions behind some of the discussion here over the last week or so involves the extent to which we should try to educate our users so they can make informed choices.

The most basic problem, of course, is that it’s easy to support education in the abstract and extremely difficult, particularly when you’re involved with real world decision making, to separate education from advocacy.

I’ve got an unusually nasty version of that problem with a project I’m working on because I’m on both sides of the fence: user and techi. As a user I’m quite sure I know better than anyone else what needs to be done, and as a techi I’m quite sure I know better than anyone else how to get it done - the problem being, of course, that’s there’s no actual evidence to support either belief.

In this particular case, and I suspect often enough in other contexts, what’s going on is that I’ve spent a lot more time on this then they have, and as I help them catch up, both their views and mine are going to get modified. We are, in other words, most likely to educate each other about the specifics of the one and only right way of doing this - i.e. the one that evolves for us over time.

However, if I peer deeply enough into my navel, I think I can clearly group the issues or things about which there’s consensual uncertainty into three categories - and maybe learn something from doing that:

1. there are clear issues of fact on which I’m convinced my conclusions are largely unassailable.

   For example, I expect to use open source software, on Unix, for this - and maintain that for the particular class of application we need, Domino is the only proprietary option that makes the slightest sense, but that would be too expensive. (In fact, it would cost about $250K more upfront than using an open source mix, but in the long run the most likely IT related risk to be realized by this organization is that they hire an idiot to run the system - and using Domino could reduce both the risk of that happening and the rate of IT collapse if it does.)

   On these kinds of issues, therefore, I see no distinction between preaching the obvious to my user colleagues and educating them.

2. there are conclusions I’m equally sure about, but can see counter-arguments on - most are cases where cash costs are knowable, but the costs of what happens if some risk is realized, are not.

   For example, I’m convinced that the risks of using cloud anything vastly exceed the cost of owning and operating almost everything (except the net) ourselves. At the same time, however, bandwidth costs (especially in Canada where they’re more than three times comparable U.S. numbers) make a powerful argument for using other people’s bandwidth, and thus other people’s servers. Notice, however, this this isn’t as simple as it seems: a good compromise may be to do everything in house, but rent space on servers maintained by the three network carriers as store and forward points for bandwidth intensive material like videos.

   On these kinds of issues, therefore, I try to very carefully separate advocacy from education - explaining costs and risks in as nearly objective terms as possible, while stressing that decisions made to minimize risk (as opposed to decisions made to reduce immediate dollar costs) are almost always highly subjective. Thus showing them what the cost choices are is mostly education, but valuing risks avoided is mostly advocacy.

3. there are conclusions that reflect little more than bias and familiarity - but that familiarity is a ticket to both risk and cost reduction.

   I’m comfortable, for example, with limesurvey and think it can do a particular part of the job very well. Is it really the only choice? No, but it’s the only choice I’m immediately comfortable with and therefore the one I’d like to educate my users to choose - except, of course, that’s it’s pure advocacy for me to do so.

So where can we sensibly draw the line between advocacy and education? Logically it’s education if it helps them make their own choices, and advocacy otherwise - but, in practice education is often so slanted as to be indistinguishable from advocacy (even by those involved) unless you already know enough about the subject not to need to education. As a result my bottom line is a cop out: the idea that just making sure that both you and your users are aware of the issue and the impact it has on your working relationship is half the battle - while the other half is both so situation specific and touchy-feebly in nature that it’s like walking through a minefield: every step an adventure, and your first mistake also your last.

November 14th, 2009

An interesting exchange on politics and IT

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, Productivity, Security, Sun

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

Here’s a comment on last Saturday’s blog by “dedmonst”:

OT: squaring your political & technology views…

Paul,

slightly OT, but something that’s been bothering me…

Please pull me up if I’m being presumptive here, cos I confess to only dipping in to your blogs and comments occasionally, but I had you down as a republican - which I would have assumed (yes I know ass-u-me) put you in the bracket of beleiving that “the market will find a way” - i.e. let the market operate freely and the best operating mechanisms etc etc. will float to the top.

However when you talk technology you are constantly telling us “the market has got it dead wrong”. Your so called “data processing” folks, MS windows, what you call “ghosted virtualization” make up a vast and ever growing part of the market…

So how do you square these views? Or what assumption about you do I have wrong?

I wrote a quick response, ran an errand, and came back to replace the first response with this one:

This circle not square - (earlier response deleted - this is v.002)

The essential difference between people on the left versus the right of the political spectrum is that leftists want to tell others what to do and rightists don’t. Thus Pelosi’s health bill has jail sentences for those who don’t buy into her health insurance ideas while Palin thinks you should make your own decisions.

Put this in the IT context and what you have is a bunch of people on one side in IT who think they should tell the business what to do, and others, like me, who think the business users should make their own IT decisions.

Thus they demand central processing with central control, I argue for central processing on cost, security and reliability grounds with decentralized control for business productivity reasons. They want to tell users what to do and how to do it, I want them to figure out what they need to do and then do it.

But how can I see “the market” as wrong given the DP/Wintel majority in place and still defend people’s right to choose? Easy, I see most people as misled, by themselves and others, on most IT issues. DP had a fifty year headstart, the advantage of a position in finance, and the benefit of the high school nerd vs party people differentiation that keeps senior people from questioning them - and, most of all, ensures that few ever figure out that data processing and computing are different things.

So I tell people to smarten up - saying that the people who comprise the market can and should correct their mistakes. That’s a right wing perspective and approach. Most DP/Wintel people, in contrast, say its settled science and the user should shut up and pay - that’s a classic left wing position.

So, bottom line, no conflict.. :)

I thought this exchange worth repetition here because it strikes at the heart of a conflict most IT managers feel nearly every day: we’re paid to provide services to users but they generally appreciate neither the service nor our skills, most don’t understand what we do, many make demands that seem unreasonable, and a few demonstrate increasing irresponsibility with every action - so why not tell ourselves we know more about how tech should be used than they do and use our organizational leverage to insulate ourselves from them?

My answer is that the only really effective way to address this conflict is to remove it - and that you do that organizationally by either making IT the business or by turning IT people into business people: giving them the power to affect IT change but posting them in user groups and making them report to user management.

This is ultimately why I like Sun and Sun Rays - not because I love the company or the technology, but because this combination enables me to have a very small operations group responsible only for keeping the lights on, the machines running, and the IT bills paid while my sysadmins work in user areas to make that central system do whatever their local users want. You need the right people in the trenches, you need to empower your sysadmins far beyond what seems responsible in other organizational forms, and you need a very light but steady hand at the helm - but the end result is that your people cross train themselves, you get very close to 100% reliability on systems that change in some detail virtually every day, help desk and related PC costs disappear, and the productivity killing user/IT differentiation characteristic of most large organizations just quietly fades away to leave your IT people with better jobs and the business with an electronic nervous system that works.

November 7th, 2009

The real pros and cons of server virtualization

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Data-processing, Server, VMware Inc., Server Virtualization, IBM Corp., VM, System Utilization, Virtualization, Hardware, Paul Murphy

First, lets be clear: this comment is about server virtualization through ghosting - the business of using one OS to run one or more ghost OSes in lieu of applications each of which in turn is able to run one or more applications - it’s not about desktops, not about N1 type technologies, and not about containerization.

The pre-eminent examples of ghosting OSes are IBM’s zVM - an OS that originated in the late 1960s as one answer to the memory management and application isolation problems confronting the industry at the time- and VMware’s more recent rendition of the same ideas for x86.

Back then, IBM was caught between rocks and hard places: lots of people (including IBM’s own research leaders) were developing system resident interactive OSes aimed at using the computer largely as a central information switch, but its commercial customer base absolutely refused to countenance any advance on the batch tabulation and reporting model around which its management ideas had evolved in the 1920s and 30s.

Thus when the Multics design effort started at MIT in 1959/60, most of IBM’s people didn’t even know there were two sides to the argument but the research people lined up with science based computing while those who made the money for IBM almost unanimously choose the data processing side - and ten years later, after MIT’s people had first won their design battles and then lost the war (by letting data processing get control of the Multics development effort), IBM’s own fence sitting solution: VM, ended up roundly hated by nearly everyone.

Nearly everyone, that is, except people limited to IBM 360 class hardware who had no other means of achieving any kind of interactive use (this was before MTS and a dozen later solutions) - and they, essentially over the objections of IBM’s own management, made VM the success it still is.

All of which brings us to the 90s when available x86 hardware mostly wouldn’t run NT 3.51 and Microsoft’s emergency iVMS port, aka 4.0, contained a misconstrued uaf derivative known as registry that effectively limited it to loading one application at a time - thus forcing buyers to choose between a lot of downtime or rackmounts of dedicated little boxes.

The rackmounts won - at least for a few years; but then data processing got took control of the wintel world and VM, in the VMware incarnation of its ideas, soon became the preferred tool for reducing the rackmount count in the name of their professional holy grail: higher system utilization.

Unfortunately there are two big problems with this:

1. first, NT 4’s limitations went away with NT 4 - addressing them today with VMs achieves a level of absurdity no audience would accept in musical comedy -it’s right up there with using a licensed terminal emulation on a licensed PC to access a licensed server running a licensed PC emulation; and,

2. it is very nearly a universal truth that every gain data processing makes in improving system utilization produces a larger loss in IT productivity for the business paying them to do it.

The reductio ad absurdum example of the latter is Linux running under VM on a zSeries machine: data processing can get very close to 100% system utilization with this approach, but the cost per unit of application work done will be on the order of twenty times what it would be running the same application directly on Lintel; and every variable in the user value equation: from response time to the freedom to innovate, gains a negative exponent.

You can see the latter consequence in virtually every result on benchmarks featuring some kind of interaction processing. For example, the Sun/Oracle people behind their recent recent foray into TPC/C, both demonstrated their own utter incompetence as IT professionals by achieving less than 50% CPU utilization and the user value of this “failure” by turning in response times averaging roughly one seventeenth of IBM’s:

The counter argument I usually hear about all this is that virtual system images are more easily managed than real ones - and this is both perfectly true and utterly specious.

It’s perfectly true that VM style virtualization lets you bundle an application with everything it needs to run except hardware, and then move that bundle between machines at the click of an icon; but the simple fact that this applies just as well to Solaris containers as it does to VM ghosts shows that this is an argument for encapsulation and application isolation, not for ghosting.

Worse, the argument is completely specious because it bases its value claims on two demonstrably false beliefs: first that the only alternative is the traditional isolated machine structure, and second that virtualization lets the business achieve more for less. Both are utter nonsense: Unix process management has worked better than VM since the 1970s, and because virtualization adds both overheads and licensing it always costs more to do less than modern alternatives like containerization or simply letting the Unix process management technology do its job.

Again the quintessential example of this is from the heart of the data processing profession: when you take a $20 million dollar zSeries installation and achieve a 60 way split to produce 100% system utilization from 60 logical machines running applications or ghosts, what the business gets out of it is roughly equivalent to what it would get from four Lintel racks costing a cumulative $500,000.

A more down home illustration is provided by VMware itself - their competitive value calculator computes a cost advantage for their products over those from others on the basis of their belief that their VMs impose less overhead and allow you to get closer to 100% hardware utilization. Thus if you enter values saying you’ve got 200 applications running on NAS connected quad core servers, want to manage virtually, and have average infrastructure costs, they produce a table with this data:

All of which should raise a couple of questions in your mind:

1. first, if the consensus that ghosting doesn’t have significant overhead is right, where is VMware getting the third of the box it claims you can recover by getting its ghosting software instead of Microsoft’s?

2. and, second, wouldn’t the money VMware wants you to spend on ghosting ($241K in this example) be better spent on hiring people who can move these applications to free environments like Linux or OpenSolaris?

So what’s the bottom line? Simple: the real ghost in ghosting is that of 1920s data processing - and the right way to see this particular con job for the professional cost sink it is, is to focus on costs to the business, not ideological comfort in IT.

March 23rd, 2009

Today's Cloud: garbage; Tomorrow's? insanely great

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Database Management, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, Productivity

Tags: Agent, Data, Real Estate, Business Operations, Paul Murphy

The near term truth about cloud computing is that it’s only useful for enterprise applications if you’re a user manager who wants to get around the obstacles in IT - that’s what supported time sharing in the seventies and could make it a short term success again today.

Look beyond that, however, and the risks are simply too high for this ever to become a viable form of enterprise computing service. Google, a company with lots of resources and some pretty smart people, can neither keep gmail running consistently nor protect users from information abuse - and they’re not even handicapped by any commitment to Microsoft’s software.

Basically, my bottom line on cloud risk is that I’ll put serious user data on the cloud right about the same day someone proves Dante’s hell a physical reality, shows that it’s frozen over, and proves that it’s run entirely by squads of flying pigs.

On the other hand existing attempts at building a cloud do have two interesting uses:

1. as a transit and filtering service for high volume data subject to resource intensive, but non lossy, initial processing. You might, for example, load a 10GB seismic log via a connection in Siberia, process it in the cloud, and download the 1GB filtered result with very little lag in Calgary; and,
2. as an open source development and testing platform - providing quick access to wide variety of hardware and OS/combinations to project contributors around the world.

Beyond that, however, I think the standard cloud vision as some kind of universal computing resource is just eye candy for dilletantes - but that doesn’t mean we won’t see the evolution of a very different kind of cloud.

That one’s in sight and coming fast - although, admittedly, today’s google search stacks up to it just about the way Sony’s 1979 walkman relates to today’s ipod nano.

This is an eight minute video demo of something coming down the pike. The demo uses traditional input/output devices (real and virtual screens and keyboards), to communicate with the user and is, of course, canned in the sense that you can’t actually get all the data they’re showing in appropriate formats or at the rates they show.

But you should eventually be able to - and by then communication with that device should be based on something that looks a lot more like telepathy: at the very least, doing away with overt vocalization, keyboards, and screens.

When those devices become available, users will have the same problem the people making this demo did: where’s the data coming from and who controls it?

This problem comes in two forms:

1. on the survivability side, if you’ve ever tried to take away your teenage daughter’s cell phone you’ll be familiar with the kind of panic a device failure would cause among the information addicted. And that makes centralized storage an absolute requirement - meaning that you can use either the Sun Ray distributed server model or that model plus local storage, but you can’t get away with just local storage.
2. on the data source side the problems are sourcing, formatting and access: you’d pick up some data from local learning (for example, the name for your neighbor’s new puppy), and some from traditional sources: google, twitter, linkedIn, and so on; but even if you had sources for everything, how do you format and access it?

The answer to both parts will, I think, have to be delivered via a cloud of data jobbers: people who provide personalized data support by running automated agents handling multi-point lookup, retrieval, evaluation, and reformatting for each of their customers.

Thus I might sign up for Gold Support with Bre-X data mining - meaning that my link would connect exclusively to Bre-X, automated agents at Bre-x would both collect and manage my data, and Bre-X partners in other jurisdictions would seamlessly take over agent services when I travel. As a result I could be completely senile and still pass a math exam in Moscow, cheerfully hand over my iLink to the nice policeman in Beijing, get a replacement at the airport in Seoul, and still expect to know what the customs agent charges when I land near Brussels.

Oddly we have a cloud like that now: it’s called the telephone system - and really the bottom line on long term cloud computing is that data jobbing is the cloud opportunity - and it’s their opportunity to miss.

March 16th, 2009

Wood, Arrows, and motivation

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Implementations, Media bias/incompetence, Productivity, What users care about, Wintel vs Lintel

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., Stagnation, Motivation, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

A comment by frequent contributor Roger Ramjet from last week:

Free Databases

There are many free databases to choose from: Firebird, Ingres, Postgres, and MySQL to name (most of) them. Most of the “best” developers and the largest community are behind Postgres. MySQL came out of nowhere - and it seems destined to return there, after the can-do founders left the horribly middle-managed Sun Microsystems. You would think that this situation would expose what Murph has said for years about Sun mid-management - but Sun doesn’t seem to learn from its (or anyone else’s) mistakes.

It’s really too bad that the state of FOSS databases is so fragmented. It’s just like the bad old days of forked UNIX, where you needed to not just pick an OS - but to pick a “winner”. The resulting infighting kept UNIX from ever reaching its potential (I blame the Sun bigots …).

Caught me in a more than usually argumentative mood:

Ah Ha! a topic for next week

I think putting all the wood behind one arrow makes strategic sense for a company, but not for a community.

So now you’ve inspired me to argue (next week some time?) that fragmentation is actually good for innovation - and if you’d like to argue the contrary.. my blog is your blog etc etc. ?

There are two main claims here: that users need to pick winners, and that market consolidation is a good thing.

On the global economic level the history on this is that governments have never successfully picked or created economic winners - and that monopoly control leads to travesties like Canadian Medicare under which those who can afford it pay our exorbitant taxes - and then go to the U.S. when they need actual medical help.

In the IT context we have the classic exemplum horribilis of market consolidation: the Microsoft desktop - a product featuring lots of paid media (and uninformed enthusiast) support praising its power and innovation but an actual history of predatory practices, almost total stagnation, ever increasing costs, poor scaling, and low reliability.

And on the Unix side we have the opposite: Solaris setting new records for both scalability and reliability while adapting the “out of the box” Unix ideas from Plan9; the BSDs driving single box OS research; Linux making enormous strides in commercial x86; and Apple’s market leading desktop technologies.

Value perceptions about this vary, of course, with your point of view: if you’re an IBM or Microsoft shareholder, predatory pricing looks like a good thing - but if you’re being asked to pay IBM $23,000 for an activation code on a CPU core you’ve already paid them $11,500 for, the fact that you can get a faster system from Sun for less makes that kind of thing rather less attractive.

What’s going on is simple: Unix diversity and change demonstrates that competition drives product improvement while Wintel stagnation drives home the point by demonstrating the opposite - and if you don’t think SunOS improved HP-UX you didn’t use Domain/OS; if you disagree that Linux replicates a lot of stuff from System VR3, you’ve been drinking the groklaw Koolaid too long; and if you’d like to argue for Wintel innovation I’d suggest you compare all the wonderful things you can do on tomorrow’s i7 combo to what Mac users could do in the mid to late nineties without invoking things (like most of the internet and lots of software) that didn’t exist then and got started on Unix.

The bottom line on competition is just dead simple: when everybody tries to beat everybody else, the survivors and new entrants get better - and that has an important corollary: in a diverse, competitive market buyers can expect that the next generation will be an improvement on the current one.

Once you assume that anything you buy now will be improved on tomorrow, it’s obvious that picking winners is silly: what you need to pick is something that works now, has acceptable costs, and doesn’t impose significant downstream barriers to change.

Pick a “winner” -like Microsoft- and you need to ask yourself what they won: because the answer is your money and your freedom to adopt alternative technologies. Pick, instead, a competitive market product - something built to open standards - and your future cost of change becomes negligible as a determinant for present decisions.

When that happens you can make today’s decision on cost and suitability to purpose in the full knowledge that when something better, cheaper, or otherwise generally more wonderful, comes along, you’ll be able to use it.

Focus does, of course, make perfect sense for vendors: when Sun put all of its wood behind the SPARC arrow, Sun prospered; and, conversely, HP’s current confusion about whether they want to be IBM, Dell, or NCR is contributing to their decline as focused elements from what’s left of Compaq eat them out from inside. Basically corporate focus sharpens corporate competitiveness - and while competition can be painful for individuals, it’s good for both the companies and their customers.

Stagnation - isn’t. Thus it makes no sense for the Unix customer community to want homogeneity because that’s the route to stagnation - to the Windows and mainframe worlds where there are no serious competitive checks on the seller’s power and a touch of some other company’s lipstick on the product front passes for fundamental change.

And that, fundamentally, is what’s wrong about Roger’s position: he claims that the Unix wars kept Unix from obtaining a market monopoly or near monopoly like Windows - and my response is to thank God it did because otherwise we’d all still be using Xenix.

Think of it this way: whenever government or other predators pick and enforce winners, stagnation sets in and product values trend down - but whenever open competition encourages diversity and change, product value averages trend up.

March 9th, 2009

RDBMS license costs and Open Source

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Sun

Tags: Processor, Oracle Corp., Open Source, Sun Microsystems Inc., Hardware, Pricing Strategy, RDBMS, IBM Corp., Pricing, Sales Strategy

A comment by frequent contributor JesperFrimann last week caused me to take a closer look at licensing practices among major commercial database vendors other than Microsoft.

All three of the big guys (Oracle, IBM, and Sybase) follow the same basic sales model:

1. publish nominal list pricing only;
2. obfuscate package names, functionality, discounts, and prerequisites to the point that no customer can reasonably understand what’s where;
3. frown severely on anyone who even thinks about publishing pricing, performance, and/or functional information; and,
4. give the sales crew lots of leeway in dealing with customers who pass credit check.

Thus Oracle, for example, publishes its commercial price list and from that you can discover that licensing for Oracle’s Enterprise Edition Plus Business Intelligence Suite lists at $295,000 per processor - but if you want to know what’s in it or what it really costs, you’ll be doing some serious reading, and lots of guessing, before eventually sitting down with a sales guy.

I don’t mention that particular package here to pick on Oracle but to illustrate the impact licensing has on hardware choices:

1. first, the ratio of hardware to software pricing used to make some rough sense: when a processor cost half a million bucks, paying $100K for a license for the software on it didn’t seem unreasonable - but now paying $300K for a Sybase license to run on a $22K T2 seems absurd.
2. and, second, if you really had to pay $295,000 per core for an Oracle BI license, you’d feel a lot of pressure to run it on the fastest single processor box you could find - even if that machine wasn’t remotely competitive on its own.

Put these two things together and paying $260K for a pretty basic p570 running $600K in Oracle licensing on two cores doesn’t seem so absurd - and is nearly half a million cheaper than looking for the same delivered performance on a four license AMD machine.

On the other hand this kind of license pricing is about to hit two rocks: one a new processor from Sun, and the other Open Source.

Sun’s Rock processors will come with LDOM and hardware scout technology that should make a license purchased for operation on a single processor more productive than multiple licenses purchased for Power6 or Niagara gear - and that’s going to leave these RDBMS companies facing a lot of pressure from customers and hardware partners alike: all trying to leverage more realistic pricing on their gear by threatening migrations to Rock.

Once customers start to think in terms of possible change, however, change to open source may seem much less emotionally charged than hardware change - because people identify with their hardware suppliers but, except for wintel bigots, typically much less so with software suppliers.

In other words, most people who start by considering the cost of saving half a million bucks on licensing by switching from IBM to Sun on hardware, will soon jump to considering keeping their IBM stuff but saving all of the licensing cost by switching to open source - and most will find that sticking with IBM while abandoning DB2 for MySQL feels much more comfortable than switching to Sun hardware.

Equally importantly, the entry barriers to change are lower too. If you’re facing a $338K charge to put Sybase ASE on a T5120 and some consultant or blogger tells you that MySQl (or PostGresSQL) can do the job just about as well for free, your cost of finding out whether that’s true or not is largely going to consist of some staff time because all the tools you need for the experiment are free - and once the test system demonstrates feasibility you’re going to understand that the real bottom line here is simply that spending that $338K on staffing and support is a lot better than spending it on licensing.

February 21st, 2009

Death and hope of resurrection among newspapers and magazines

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Deploying Sun Rays, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Infrastructure, Media bias/incompetence, Productivity

Tags: Revenue, Newspaper, Web, Advertisement, Journalism, Web Site, Papers, Paul Murphy

As regular readers know I’ve been exploring the use of Drupal for a large website. Overall I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it’s the right tool for what we want to do - largely because what’s there works and the open source nature of the thing means that what isn’t there should be relatively easy to add.

I say “should be relatively easy to add” because of course I don’t know what isn’t there - and therefore don’t know how hard it will be to add whatever it is that’s needed to deal with whatever requirements it eventually turns out I’ve missed.

One of the things I’ve been doing to address this business of not knowing what I don’t know has been to review lots of other people’s websites looking for applicable functionality - and in that process I’ve “discovered” something very intriguing about the way traditional newspapers and magazines “do web.”

The print media are in big trouble - and to show you how serious this is, let me quote from when No News Is Bad News, a James Warren pleading for The Atlantic:

Newspapers have been and remain by far the largest source of news coverage and analysis in any city or town. Without the local paper, the TV and radio stations would be in difficult shape, despite the good work they often do. The most popular websites: Yahoo, the Drudge Report, MSNBC.com, CNN.com, the Huffington Post, you name it, also rely heavily on the work of newspapers, more often than not appropriating and linking to their stories without providing a penny in payment. …

The cooption of that Post story serves as a clear reminder of the extent to which newspapers serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets. The Chicago Tribune has, or at least had, many more reporters and editors than all the TV stations and radio stations in town combined. Far more than CNN or Fox or CBS or ABC News. Traditionally, it brought in $100 million to $200 million more in revenue annually than all Chicago’s radio stations put together. But now a stunning decline in advertising revenue has broken the traditional business model for all papers. (There were weeks in the early part of 2008 when the Tribune began to fall behind conservative weekly revenue projections by more than $1 million. And in seemingly no time, its editorial department has gone from 650 employees to about 470.)

Classified ads, once the mainstay of newspaper advertising, are scarce - headed to Craigslist.com and other websites, where you can place your ad for free or for pennies. Other key advertising categories, notably auto and real estate, have also plummeted. Meanwhile, the price of newsprint is skyrocketing, despite declining demand.

Adding to what is essentially an advertising-driven calamity is the reality that though the U.S. population has more than doubled in the past 60 years, absolute newspaper circulation this year will be lower than in 1946. A younger generation wants its information online, and newspapers and magazines have obliged by, after first being too slow to embrace the Internet, giving their content away online for free. Content for which, I might add, they charge their traditional subscribers hefty sums in print. But even as other sites profit by aggregating and linking to their content, most newspaper websites themselves are austere, dull, and technologically backward, relying for revenue on the evaporating supply of low-cost help-wanted, real estate, and auto classifieds.

Newspaper penetration -the number of households looking at a paper - now amounts to less than 18 percent of the population, compared with 33 percent back in 1946. In its home market, The New York Times has a dismal 7 percent penetration. The New York Times Company, which, like the rest of the industry, used to reap tremendous profits, is one of the many publicly traded newspaper companies that have lost well over half their market value in the past two years. Just this past year, shareholders of publicly traded newspaper companies have lost 83 percent of their investments, according to Alan Mutter, an astute industry analyst, blogger and former newspaper city editor. Papers are throwing out employees almost weekly, cutting national and foreign bureaus if they have them, and slicing the actual size of the product, since newsprint is a huge cost. In some cases, entire newspapers are shutting down. Hearst Corporation is the latest to serve as executioner, announcing the likely demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer can’t be found.

…

Meanwhile, websites are not obligated to spend money on newsprint, printing plants, or union drivers to drop their product at readers’ doorsteps. Yet they benefit from linking to all that work they’ve not done or paid a nickel for. And they supplement this borrowed reporting with user-generated content and material produced by freelancers who are paid a pittance or nothing at all. They’ve also opted for chat rooms and ongoing dialogues among their adherents, a laudable, democratic impulse, but one that often devolves into an unedited legitimization of stupidity and bigotry.

…

Why should we care?

This matters because of the unique role journalism plays in a democracy. So much public information and official government knowledge depends on a private business model that is now failing. Journalism acknowledges and illuminates complexity, and at the same time prioritizes, helping us to evaluate the relative significance of developments playing out all around us. A very shrewd journalist-entrepreneur I know, Steve Brill, asks that one just imagine walking into a library and seeing the pages of all the books scattered on the floors and stairwells. To be sure, editors are human and subjectivity plays a role, but a newspaper places those pages, and thus the news, in some sensible order.

And, importantly, there’s a sense of social mission. Good journalism keeps public and private officials honest and helps citizens make thoughtful decisions. It does this by systematically gathering, processing, and checking relevant information, and by doing it with a spirit of independence. It’s how two previously unknown Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, put together the Watergate puzzle that forced the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. And as they pursued their investigation, they, like all good reporters, followed certain commonly accepted ethical norms: You don’t take money from the people you’re covering. You don’t bow to special interests or to the economic interests of your employer. You confirm and reconfirm the accuracy of assertions and supposed facts and quotes. As an old saying used to go at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now-defunct training ground for decades of reporters, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

The ironies here abound: and neither least because I’m proving one of his points by not paying anyone for this extract, nor most because a one to ten scale ranking for the major media players on how fanatically they avoided checking things out to protect and promote Obama during the last election, correlates almost perfectly with their percentage revenue losses this year relative to 2006/7.

Bias, self-pleading, and anti-customer blindness aside, Warren’s main argument here seems to be that the loss of readership to “pirate” news sites like the Drudge Report, combined with the loss of traditionally reliable classified advertising revenues to sites like craigslist, has reduced the revenues available to protect democracy through good journalism - and I couldn’t agree more despite thinking his definition of good journalism as anything attacking Republican and/or core American values a big part of the problem.

I also agree with something he slipped in between whine courses - here it is again:

A younger generation wants its information online, and newspapers and magazines have obliged by, after first being too slow to embrace the Internet, giving their content away online for free.

What he’s saying is that the traditional media not only haven’t adapted to the web, but that what they have tried to do with has been wrong - and, again, I think he’s right despite this being only a secondary symptom of a wider problem (the first being that major media’s obsessive campaigning for Obama angered about two thirds of the customer base -remember that the total votes counted for Obama didn’t quite make it one third the number of eligible voters).

Contrary to his beliefs, however, players like craigslist and kijiji didn’t win the personal ad business by being cheaper; they won by being better - photos, fast access, and full text search are worth far more to both buyers and sellers than the few minutes and/or dollars they save by avoiding the traditional print process.

So what’s going on? As it turns out there’s a mindset issue at work here: major media management staff seem deeply conflicted between two sets of beliefs:

1. the cynical belief that advertising earns their salaries and editorial content is what attracts the reader to the ads; and,
2. the idealistic belief that the ads pay for editorial content as a public service.

Put these together with pressure to establish a web presence and what you get is a generic decision to leave the print ads off the web presence and then seek to sell additional ads to pay for that web presence.

Or, in my particular case, it suggested a downstream requirement to reproduce printed pages, including ads, without giving up access speed, searchability, and the ease of access that goes with web style hyperlinks.

As it turns out Drupal will do that trivially in either high end or low end ways. In the low end way you simply format your docs as PDFs and start-up the user’s acrobat reader as a new page - backing its search and related functions against your server files. That’s in-scope for reader7 and later, but has the downside of depending on the customer’s willingness to launch a 70MB application just to read a few pages of text - and that’s not really a winner if the customer is using a low end netbook or a slow connection.

The high end way to do this is to take the postscript file magazine and newspaper editors send their ($60 million and up “lot top”!) printers, direct to the web. If your customer happens to be on a fast link and a Mac (or a 1985 Sun NeWS terminal) that’s fairly easy and astonishingly effective - it gives you everything you need from guaranteed fidelity to easy searching and hyperlink navigation, at little more than the cost of creating, maintaining, and using a filter.

Unfortunately Wintel customers don’t have PostScript compatible display technologies so this approach won’t generally work to reach a majority of customers -a reality that can be seen either as requiring a two tier approach or as creating an opportunity for bigger media players to work with telcos on putting NeWS type terminals in customer homes.

The latter approach sounds ridiculous: surely the cost of replacing a physical newspaper with a very thin, 23″ x 21″ LCD screen flat on the customer’s kitchen table is out of reach? But it’s not: in the kind of numbers that the most self destructive of the big players would command, delivered costs running under the magical dollar a day would be fairly easy to achieve and provide better service to the customer at lower total (subscriber plus advertiser) cost than paper - oh, and generic internet access too, of course.

January 24th, 2009

From Windows to Unix: a mental journey

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Defenestration, Linux, Productivity, Strategy, Sun, Wintel vs Lintel

Tags: Data-processing, Microsoft Windows, Troubles, zOS, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

Last week reader leigh@ wrote:

OK I get the picture but…

When will, or how will we get an article that helps us unfortunates who were trained on M$ across the line with Linux?

The second comment that cited the article as pro M$ made me laugh, and the response to that is typical and I didn’t read any more of the inevitable OS flame wars. Could we have a clear concise article on what they should have done in the transition from NT4 to Linux or even better…the same article covering how to transition from what they have now to Linux.

We use Fedora 9 in a VM at work, on a M$2008 server. I’d like to go away from M$ servers, retain .net stuff and move a lot of stuff to php. Troubles is the ratio of info about ‘How OS xyz is better’n OS $’ to ‘How to architect a change to OS xyz and why’ is about a hundred to one. I know mono may help me but I am having trouble finding time and information because juvenile jingoistic OS pundits write reams of crap. Help I’m drowning in FUD, and some of it is open source…

I will be revising my Unix Guide to Defenestration before serializing it here later this year - and that book, originally written in 1999/2000, is dedicated to meeting his needs.

Notice that I’m not concerned, and I assume Leigh isn’t either, with the specifics of individual conversion processes - i.e. the question isn’t “how do you convert from .net to mono?” but “how do you convert from a Wintel orientation to a Unix one?”

The single most important pre-condition for success in doing this is to be very clear that Unix is not Windows, not zOS, and not VM - and that what you know about managing these other architectures has co-evolved with those architectures and therefore may, but more likely will not, apply in the Unix world.

Some skills and ideas are transferable, but many of the management and technology assumptions, particularly those people are surest of (and are therefore least likely to think about) are likely to prove wrong in subtle and devastating ways.

Two very basic differences, for example, tend to so utterly confound data processing (and now Wintel) people that they never learn to use Unix properly:

1. With Windows (and zOS) you care mostly about applications, with Unix you care mostly about users.

   This has many consequences; for example, the natural thing to do with Windows (and any other data processing architecture) is to put your people as close to the gear, as you can - where with Unix you do the opposite: spreading your people throughout the organization by putting them as close as possible to users.

2. With Windows (and zOS) the IT job is mostly about managing the IT resource: infrastructure, people, and applications - but with Unix, the IT job is mostly about serving users.

Both of these are consequences of differences in costs, risks, and performance. With zOS adding another job can upset a delicate balance between limited time and expensive resources; in Windows adding an application for a few users can have unexpected consequences across the entire infrastructure, and, of course, in both cases performance and flexibility are limited while change costs are high.

In contrast, the risk of adding a new application in the ideal Unix environment - big, central, processors with smart displays - is trivial; and the cost of doing things like creating a container for users who want “the database” as it was last February 19th at 10:00AM please, is, like its performance impact, essentially zero.

From a grunt’s perspective the key operational difference is that, with with Windows you spend most of your time keeping things working -but, with Unix you set systems up to work and trust that they do, thus freeing yourself to spend most of your time, not in futzing with the system, but as the human facilitator in the system’s interface to users.

As a manager the big difference between Unix and traditional data processing gets expressed most clearly in the default response to user originated change requests. With zOS (and now Wintel) the risks, and costs, of change are so high that the right answer is almost always “no” - and shunting persistent requesters into the budget process is an appropriate learned reflex because it works to provide both budget growth and time.

In contrast, Unix costs and risks are so low that the right answer is almost always to simply say “yes” and move directly to the how and when.

This difference has a major organizational consequence with respect to role separation. When Finance spun out data processing in the 1920s, role separation naturally came along - and is still embedded in the CoBIT/ISACA data center operational standard. Unix, however, came from the science side and has no evolutionary history to justify any of this - meaning that the right thing to do is to wear a suit and a bland look in meetings with your auditors, but actually cross train everyone to do just about everything while leaving within team assignments for team members to sort out among themselves.

In practice, of course, you see rigid role separation applied to Unix, but this is almost always the result of organizational evolution and the decision making roles played by people whose assumptions reflect Finance, audit, or data processing backgrounds. In general what happens in those cases is that Unix gets used as a cheaper something else - and that can work, but doesn’t take advantage of the technology’s real strengths.

Most IT executives find it extraordinarily difficult to accept that you get the best results with Unix by cross training your people, freeing them to make their own operational decisions, and centralizing processing while distributing real functional control to people working one on one with users; but this is the only known route to making corporate IT what it should be: a cheap, fast, and trusted “nervous system” for the business.

As I say in defen, the difference is that between management and leadership. With management you organize to get a known job done in repeatable, controllable, ways -and that’s the right way to address something like printing customer lading reports for a railway in the 1920s: you train people to operate each machine, put someone in charge of each line, yell “go” at the right moment, and then wander around ensuring that each batch gets handled “by the book” by exactly (and only) the right people at each stage from keypunch to print distribution.

With IT, however, the job changes daily and you need leadership: the process of focusing more brains on goals; not management: the process of organizing hands to execute well understood processes. Thus the very basis of applying data processing methods, whether with zOS or Windows, is antithetical to the IT job - and therefore to Unix as a tool for doing the IT job. Basically, most corporate data processing is organized and equipped to pound square pegs into round holes - and thus the amazing thing about them isn’t that they constrain organizational change while costing too far too much and doing far too little, it’s that they work at all.

December 20th, 2008

Postdictions for 2008

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Sun, Vistabulations

Tags: Wintel, Information Technology, Microsoft Corp., Dollar Devaluation, Linux, E-voting, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Government

On December 31st of 2007 I said that:

1. The IT word for 2008 will, I think, be either “continuation” or “consolidation” as existing trends become more obvious to more people and little new enters the market.

2. SCO .. will continue to dominate direction setting in the Linux community - and until or unless IBM gets its collective head straight on the issue and cleans house, the polarization this case has led to will continue to undermine Linux legitimacy.
3. the number one Linux influencer for the year may turn out [to be a battle for control of the OLPC desktop as Microsoft tries to kill its Gelernter derived "Lifestreams" interface model"]
4. Sun will get “Victoria Falls” out on schedule and is somewhat more likely than not to get its “Rock” chip sets out by late summer, early fall because I think the changes now expected to delay “Rock” until early to mid 2009 are ultimately more tied to commercial/strategic considerations than technical ones.
5. Microsoft’s inability to transcend simple minded x86 programming will continue to drive wintel back to the gigahertz race while delaying the move to PPC - with HP taking a bigger hit from dollar devaluation than Dell and the acceleration of existing trends to an iPhone/Sun Ray style of computing becoming more and more obvious as Microsoft’s inertia grinds down its wintel partners.
6. Microsoft’s organizational limitations will mean that we’ll probably see lots of press hype about advanced Intel products like a 32 core wafer running on micro-watts, but no significant products.
7. Key management trends from last year will continue - although I think we’re starting to see some push-back against the absurdities of PC/mainframe style virtualization and no-one will figure out what SOA means in 2008 either. What will happen is that the emphasis on “security” will get worse as more auditors train up on 1920s data processing control models and company legal departments get heavily into the act.
8. The outsourcing reversals and repatriations going on now will, I think, continue; largely because they’re driven from oil related dollar devaluation. As a result I expect to see a minor gold rush in IT hiring -and that spells good news for American IT workers as increasing numbers of legal visa holders choose to go home and more and more illegals either get deported or take pre-emptive flight.
9. France, because of its commitment to nuclear power and political response to the riots two years ago, may become the hot spot for IT investment in the EU.
10. what’s going to happen with respect to time sharing and social networks won’t be anything new - existing trends will merely continue to strengthen the former while weakening the latter, at least until (or while) current structures get replaced.
11. it’s an election year in the United States and you’d think that would lead to some focus on E-voting - but it won’t, at least this year. What’s going on is that existing e-voting technologies are absurdly vulnerable and everybody knows it, but the democrats prosecute nearly all election related lawsuits in the United States and they liked the results last time, so nothing’s changed since - and nothing will unless the Republicans win big in November.

So in the finest tradition of objective reviews I barely thought better of using “Benedictions” in today’s title - but then, well; here’s my take on each - and your invitation to argue.

1. “continuation” or “consolidation”

   Yep.

2. SCO .. will continue to dominate direction setting in the Linux

   No sign of IBM getting its act together - the Novel thing is an utter absurdity that may kill off SCO while leaving all claims against IBM intact for the next actor. I don’t think a worse outcome for Linux is possible.

3. the number one Linux influencer for the year may turn out [to be a battle for control of the OLPC desktop as Microsoft tries to kill its Gelernter derived "Lifestreams" interface model"]

   It’s not clear who pulled what strings or how much it cost - but Microsoft won, and OLPC’s interface is functionally dead.

4. Sun will get “Victoria Falls” out on schedule and is somewhat more likely than not to get its “Rock” chip sets out by late summer, early fall

   The 5240 owns its markets, but notice the hedge on “Rock”? The Nots held their position.

5. Microsoft’s inability to transcend simple minded x86 programming will continue to drive wintel back to the gigahertz race while delaying the move to PPC

   The reality is more confused than that: Intel focused existing product advancement on gigahertz and its marketing on pre-selling its me-too follow-ons to AMD - while Microsoft continued to demonstrate its determined inability to “think PPC” via the 6 core 3.2Ghz Xenon in the X360.

   Oddly enough, Microsoft adopted Intel’s marketing strategy in the fall: selling Vista by hyping its promises for Windows 7.

6. with HP taking a bigger hit from dollar devaluation than Dell

   Yep - but Dell took a bigger hit from its own managerial ossification.

7. the acceleration of existing trends to an iPhone/Sun Ray style of computing becoming more and more obvious as Microsoft’s inertia grinds down its wintel partners.

   Yep.

8. Microsoft’s organizational limitations will mean that we’ll probably see lots of press hype about advanced Intel products like a 32 core wafer running on micro-watts, but no significant products

   Yep.

9. Key management trends from last year will continue - although I think we’re starting to see some push-back against the absurdities of PC/mainframe style virtualization and no-one will figure out what SOA means in 2008 either. What will happen is that the emphasis on “security” will get worse as more auditors train up on 1920s data processing control models and company legal departments get heavily into the act.

   Yep.

10. The outsourcing reversals and repatriations going on now will, I think, continue; largely because they’re driven from oil related dollar devaluation. As a result I expect to see a minor gold rush in IT hiring -and that spells good news for American IT workers as increasing numbers of legal visa holders choose to go home and more and more illegals either get deported or take pre-emptive flight.

    This was turning out spot on, until about July/August when governments in China and the mid east realized that their candidate could actually win this time and the dominoes started to fall on Wall Street.

11. France, because of its commitment to nuclear power and political response to the riots two years ago, may become the hot spot for IT investment in the EU.

    Yep.

12. what’s going to happen with respect to time sharing and social networks won’t be anything new

    I think this one was wrong - because one side effect of the current depression is that the absence of an actual business basis for many of the bigger ponzis is now becoming important.

13. it’s an election year in the United States and you’d think that would lead to some focus on E-voting - but it won’t, at least this year. What’s going on is that existing e-voting technologies are absurdly vulnerable and everybody knows it, but the Democrats prosecute nearly all election related lawsuits in the United States and they liked the results last time, so nothing’s changed since - and nothing will unless the Republicans win big in November.

    Yep - For example, the obvious contradiction between the near average total vote counts and long voting lineups following a huge advance vote in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and the DC area has yet to trigger anything remotely resembling official interest.

So, overall? I’d say pretty good - but I’m uncomfortably reminded of those back page, small print, announcements you see in newspapers under titles like “Officers cleared in shooting” whose English translation is “the police, having investigated the police, declare the police to have acted heroically.”?

So over to you…

November 15th, 2008

Storage Analytics meets Tufte

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Productivity, Storage, Sun

Tags: Storage, Data Centers, Hardware, Data Management, Paul Murphy, Network, Analytics, DTrace

Sun’s new line of storage appliances supports NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI network connections to anything from two to forty-six terabytes of ZFS stored data per box.

In the short term what’s important about the hardware is its low cost and compatibility with established network connected storage practices.

In the long term, however, what I think will prove most important about the package is the storage analytics capability - with the links between its integrated iSCSI capability and the CMT/SMP line’s integrated network cryptology support coming in a close second.

If you haven’t already looked at the storage analytics software that ships with the new gear, now is the time to do so. It’s a whole new world - something that gives sysadmins the ability to both monitor and act in real time on the basis of both instantaneous and long term data.

The place to start your researches is key developer Brian Cantril’s weblog - he has a discussion with lots of embedded references on how they got started, what they tried to do, and the circumstances in which they did it.

Two samples:

In October 2005, longtime partner-in-crime Mike Shapiro and I were taking stock. Along with Adam Leventhal, we had just finished DTrace — and Mike had finished up another substantial body of work in FMA — and we were beginning to wonder about what was next. As we looked at Solaris 10, we saw an incredible building block — the best, we felt, ever made, with revolutionary technologies like ZFS, DTrace, FMA, SMF and so on. But we also saw something lacking: despite being a great foundation, the truth was that the technology wasn’t being used in many essential tasks in information infrastructure, from routing packets to storing blocks to making files available over the network. This last one especially grated: despite having invented network attached storage with NFS in 1983, and despite having the necessary components to efficiently serve files built into the system, and despite having exciting hardware like Thumper and despite having absolutely killer technologies like ZFS and DTrace, Sun had no share — none — of the NAS market.

…

I believe that the result — which you can sample in this screenshot – does more than simply strike the balance: we have come up with ways to visualize and interact with data that actually function as a force multiplier for the underlying instrumentation technology. So not only does analytics bring the power of DTrace to a much broader spectrum of technologists, it also — thanks to the wonders of the visual cortex — has much greater utility than just DTrace alone. (Or, as one hardened veteran of command line interfaces put it to me, “this is the one GUI that I actually want to use!”)

The key document to review is the storage Analytics presentation he makes available in that discussion - and note also his link to a VMware instance you can download to actually try the package, complete with a 16 disk virtual storage implementation.

What I find most compelling about all this, however, is a combination of two different, but closely related, things:

• the combination of control and analysis built into this package is, at least to my knowledge, both unique in the industry and the first real time command and control package I’ve seen that meets the information presentation criteria taught by Edward Tufte.

• there doesn’t seem to be anything about this package that limits its applicability to storage management.

Thus what’s compelling about the software is first that it is a real tool - something you can lay your hands on and work with right now- implementing what have previously been mere talking points in presentations about how to combine information and action; and, secondly that it’s easy to see the potential for applying the same software, and thus the same ideas, to much more complete systems - to, for example, an entire project blackbox data center.

And that, I think, is the real bottom line: not just storage rethought in low cost hardware, but new, powerful, and widely applicable, systems management tools for us.