Negative Approach

Wired is running a photo gallery related to the history of Bell Labs. If I had to pick one word to describe the photos, it would be depressing.

Besides the fact that Bell Labs was one of the greatest innovation companies of all time, I worked in two of the buildings that are part of the photo collection. My first "really real" job was at a Bell Labs start-up based on the Inferno programming language (which was based on Plan 9, a very early open-source OS) that Lucent attempted to commercialize.

I was based in the Murray Hill, N.J., building and used to see Dennis Ritchie in the elevator. We even got to bowl in the Unix lab. I then moved to the optical networking group down in Holmdel, N.J., before moving to California.

One of the pictures shows part of the Holmdel building, which was recently sold off to developers as part of the Lucent/Alcatel debacle. The building is historically significant not just because it was designed by Eero Saarinen but also because all kinds of technological breakthroughs occurred there. There is also a famous myth that a researcher at the Holmdel building got beat to the punch on his discovery and hurled himself off the 6th floor into the atrium.

Here are 10 Bell Labs innovations that changed the world.

1. Data networking
2. The transistor
3. Cellular telephone technology
4. Solar cells
5. Lasers
6. Digital transmission and switching
7. Communications satellites
8. Touch-tone telephones
9. Unix operating system and C language
10. Digital signal processors

Without Bell Labs, very few people who read this blog would have jobs today.

The immediacy of game content delivered via Web browser could be the thing that knocks game consoles out of the foothold they have established.

But it seems a bit naive to think that people will only play games one way. Video games are not much different than other software--developed, consumed and distributed in different manners.

A more-likely scenario than the death of the console is one in which the console can play games of all types, including those that are browser-based or require a download installation.

The digital distribution era as described by Mike Yuen, senior director of BREW Gaming for Qualcomm Internet Services, is one that requires the gaming industry to re-evaluate the way it distributes content:

At this year's Casual Connect Conference in Seattle, Alex St. John, CEO of WildTangent, predicted the death of console gaming by 2020. He surmised that as the industry shifts its focus from quality graphics to production value it will be less inclined to invest in the development of next-gen gaming consoles. When coupled with rapidly increasing digital content distribution through online and mobile devices, the decrease in console production will cut into the profits and demand for retail console and PC games. With the increased proliferation of affordable, immediate digital content, St. John predicted that the PC and browser will emerge as the dominate "console" within the gaming industry.

Of course, this assumes that consumers would be willing to have a less graphically intense experience and have the requisite bandwidth to make the game usable. While I don't see the bandwidth as an issue, and games such as World of Warcraft aren't hurting for high-quality graphics, it's hard to see a world where the consoles go away completely.

Looks like Google is starting to take Apps Premier a bit more seriously, providing users with SLA credits for the August outage and realizing that the guy who chose Google Apps has to report to someone else when things go haywire.

Not much more to comment on...I hope they make it work. I switched entirely to browser-based Gmail and I'm still liking it.

E-mail pasted below from the Google Apps team:

Given the production incidents that occurred in August, we'll be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so there's no action needed on your part.

We've also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that we're doing to make things better:

1. We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:

1. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.

2. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.

2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, we'll provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:

a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
c. actions taken to solve the problem;
d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
e. time line of the outage.

3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, we'll support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

From Cloudsourcing to Cloudstorming to Cloudburst (which can be both negative and positive) a new set of terminology has arrived. It was inevitable. Embrace the Cloud.

Over on Thinking Out Cloud, Geva Perry outlines some of the new Cloud Computing Terminology, which does start to sound a bit like Dr. Seuss after a while.

These new terms help to explain the various aspects of the Cloud and somewhere down the line it starts to show that the internet and SOA have come together. Nonetheless, make sure you hold your breath lest you drown in the metaphorical sky.

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

My post on using the Cloud for storage went live just minutes before my intrepid IT guy Kevin received this email from utility computing provider Flexiscale about the potential large-scale loss of data stored on their Cloud storage service.

The short version: human error in their backup process deleted one of the main storage volumes. Roughly 12 hours later users have read-only access to the storage platform but no read-write. And now, they have to rebuild, but don't have the space.

"After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it's integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it's size we didn't have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it."

Without disparaging Flexiscale, this is what I mean about the BigCos like IBM figuring these "enterprise-class" features out before enterprises move into Cloud consumption.

Full email pasted below:

The vast scale of services like Amazon S3 or Google Apps provide new ways to establish or augment backup and disaster recovery plans.

Realistically, many large corporations won't trust their data to Google or Amazon.com (and they probably shouldn't). However, they will trust IBM, AT&T, and other big companies, as they start to expand their offerings.

If you are using AT&T bandwidth, and you can tap into its data centers for data recovery, you've just solved a major problem in a theoretically secure manner.

Managed backup and data recovery services do exist today, but they tend to be very expensive "enterprise-class" or very mediocre consumer-oriented services. There should be a way for cloud infrastructure to become a real option for enterprises.

Here are a few of the issues that would need to be addressed:

• Automation: How does the data get from internal servers to the cloud, or how does it get from individual desktops?
• Security: What is the security model that can be applied and managed universally?
• Data integrity: How do I know that my data is actually my data if I am not in private space or virtual machines?
• Risk: What is the risk of losing my data without a defined service-level agreement?

The broad adoption of virtualization can be very beneficial but can also present some challenges, considering the lack of tools and options available. And considering that virtual machines are what most of today's clouds are built on, odds are that you will run into the very real challenge of how you even manage your virtual machines effectively.

According to the latest disaster recovery research report from Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), based on surveys of 1,000 IT managers in large organizations worldwide, 35 percent of an organization's virtual servers are not included in its disaster recovery plans.

Worse yet, not all virtual servers included in an organization's disaster recovery plan will be backed up. Only 37 percent of respondents to the survey said they back up more than 90 percent of their virtual systems.

One way this lack of attention to disaster recovery could be addressed would be direct connectivity from one cloud-computing provider to another, giving users the ability to replicate data. Alternatively, users could set up virtual-machine farms internally that push the data to the cloud as a backup.

It won't be long before we start seeing storage clouds popping up. My bet is on the big IT vendors to get there first.

The more research I do into online video games, the more I see that there are still very large opportunities available for those who know how to develop games and build community. When the market leader in a category has only 11.5 percent of the market that says that there is plenty of room for other challengers to take pieces of the pie.

The Hitwise data listed below for July shows an interesting split between aggregator sites like Pogo and Yahoo and specialized game sites like RuneScape and Webkinz showing that you can make money (or at least get eyeballs) via either method of gaming.

Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on U.S. market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

Better get a look at this awesome stop motion video of a bunch of Legos performing Whiplash, a Metallica classic, before Lars Ulrich sees it and sues everyone.

BTW--I heard the new Metallica song on the radio and it sounds like they just chopped up 4-5 old songs.

Via GeekStuff

If you're a Java developer and use Ant or Maven to build your software, there's news coming out this morning that should catch your attention. Sonatype, the company built around supporting Maven, is announcing its Nexus 1.0 release, a repository manager that allows developers and teams to quickly and easily manage internal and external repositories, including the Maven Central Repository.

Behind a build and release framework, managing big repositories of artifacts and tools adds a level of complexity to software development that can slow or kill a build. Great idea, having a big bucket of stuff to pull out code snippets and tools whenever you need, but not simple. Nexus 1.0 addresses this directly.

Jason van Zyl, creator of Maven, the popular Java development framework, has quietly founded an open-source company around the popular build framework. Maven has over 2 million downloads and the Maven Central Repository--home, incidentally, to more than 50,000 main artifacts and averaging 100 million hits a month--has made access to and integration of Maven crucial to Java developers worldwide.

Sonatype has done a couple press releases this summer about joining the Eclipse Foundation and releasing a plug-in that integrates the two. But otherwise they've remained quiet about their audacious goal. Maven plus Eclipse going after Visual Studio plus .Net. This is a serious and popular open-source alternative to Microsoft's development juggernaut.

This is an open-source company worth keeping an eye on.

BONUS: O'Reilly and Sonatype have published a much-needed reference book, "Maven: The Definitive Guide," covered by a Creative Commons license and replete with examples. It's free online in html or PDF or can you can order it through O'Reilly.

Disclosure: My company shares investors with Sonatype.

Cloud computing means different things to different people. In this guest post, Tom Mornini, CTO, of Engine Yard looks at the differences amongst the applications that get lumped together as one amorphous cloudy mass.

Navigating the cloud
Guest post by Tom Mornini, CTO, Engine Yard

The term cloud computing is now in common use. So common in fact, that it clearly encompasses many incompatible ideas. Let's consider the differences among Amazon's AWS, Google's AppEngine, and Apple's MobileMe.

AWS provides "raw" compute resources via EC2 and higher level services such as S3, SQS, and SimpleDB. You configure the raw compute resources as you see fit, using the OS of your choice and write applications in any language using any framework. Those applications may or may not rely upon additional AWS services such as S3, SQS, and SimpleDB. Deployment is entirely up to you.

AppEngine, on the other hand, is far more opinionated. Just as Ford once sold cars of any color, so long as they were black, AppEngine allows you to write programs any way you want, so long as it's their Framwork, Python, and BigTable. While Google has already suggested that it would support other languages in the future, it seems clear that Google doesn't intend to offer as many "colors" as AWS does.

This is not to suggest that AWS is "better" than AppEngine or MobileMe, merely different. As Engine Yard is 100 percent committed to Ruby and Rails, we're big believers in the Rails creator's triple philosophies of: "Convention over Configuration," "Flexibility is Overrated," and "Constraints are Liberating." It certainly does mean that AppEngine is dead to Engine Yard, since we simply cannot make use of it using the technologies we prefer.

Apple's MobileMe marketing also makes reference to the concept of cloud computing, but takes it in an entirely different direction than Amazon and Google. It doesn't offer any software development or deployment at all.

From my perspective, EC2 is a hardware as a service (HaaS) offering while the rest of AWS is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering. AppEngine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that also provides deployment as a service (DaaS). MobileMe is a software as a service (SaaS).

If cloud computing encompasses all of these items, it seems to me that we've developed a new name for something we're all quite familiar with: the Internet! Consider this: When, exactly did subscription Web sites become known as SaaS? I suspect that this term is rooted in enterprise marketing. After all, nobody would ever pay that much to use a Web site!

Programs running on computers have been providing flexible and valuable services to the cloud for quite some time now. Since the beginning most end users have been unable to conceptualize how it works. Sun deserves credit here: "The network is the computer" was really ahead of its time.

So, perhaps cloud computing represents a new abstraction layer entirely. This time around even the developers don't understand how their applications work. Of course, many might suggest that this has always been the case!

As applications grow more complex and become interconnected, simply managing applications becomes a highly complex task. Particularly so as consumers of these applications demand local application response times and 100 percent uptime. These consumers don't care and don't want to know about peak loads, hardware failures, etc. The providers of these applications are increasingly finding little benefit in managing the infrastructure themselves.

For the cloud to reach its full potential, I strongly suspect that new application development technologies will be required. With dynamic hardware availability, applications must be dynamic. Security, resiliency, and scalability must be inviolate. Most importantly, all of these ideals, currently recognized and strived for by developers, must be inexpensive to achieve and built into the very fabric of these technologies.

It's imperative that these technologies provide enough abstraction to allow an application to run not just on a single cloud, but be run and managed across the one true cloud: The Internet itself.

Tom Mornini, CTO
Engine Yard.