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The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing
icke writes "A quick overview of where the Economist thinks we are with the The Next Big Thing, also known as Stuff that doesn't work yet. Quoting: 'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of "adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes". IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls "on-demand computing". Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
If you can't explain what you do in a way a 10 year old can understand, your business will probably fail.
damn if the lights would just stop flickering
If they can't describe it in real world, understandable terms, it's either pseudo-marketing babble or some ethereal, vapor-concept whom the perveyors of can't quite wrap their minds around themselves. In either case, they need to put up or shut up. I'm grow weary of it.
Computers will be everywhere and the will all talk to each other all of the time. That is all they are talking about, however what makes them nervous is whoever makes this work seemlessly first will be a huge winner.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Sounds like the standard round of buzzword bingo.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
She has enough money in her coffers (thanks to over 6000 layoffs translating to a $150M bonus last year) to give everyone she's ever met the finger, buy an island somewhere near the equator, and sip margaritas all day every day until she dies a miserable and lonely death.
She knows nothing about technology, and rather little about business. She only knows how to drain money. Don't expect to see HP change the face of computing with her in the captain's chair.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
All that they're flogging is this: lots of intercommunicating little computers in everything. We're already about halfway there -- between the XBox, Tivo, and KISS Technology's (GPL-violating) DVD player, *normal* people are more likely than ever to have a computer connected to their television without even knowing it.
An appropriate term is:
Bullshit Computing
or maybe PADOS "Pump And Dump Our Stock" Computing
The instructor couldn't explain it, so she brought in a marketing exec, who could only define it in terms of itself. "E-business on demand is about computing, on demand, for e-business." Sprinkle in a healthy dose of meaningless adjectives, and you get the picture.
I'll tell you, it's pervasive. Since then, I've not found one person who can give a cohesive definition at this company. And yet, it's supposed to be my driving force and ultimate goal.
yay.
I was at Thinking Machines (the company that invented massively parallel computing) a decade ago, and back then Danny Hillis talked frequently about "utility computing" -- the idea that your computations would know how to flow back to wherever it needed to be done. So you'd work on a desktop computer and the user interactive bits would run locally, harder parts would flow back to a big CPU in the basement, and the really hard parts could flow back to a city supercomputer, in a CPU equivalent of the power grid.
...
At a high level, it's a pretty simple idea, and very powerful.
At the detailed level, there are some amazingly hard problems to solve. Like, for example, how does software get split into parts that can be separated with minimal communications overhead, or how do you decide when a task would run more efficiently spread across a bunch of CPU's, or how do you keep running smoothly when a network outage causes 10% of your CPU's to drop off of the grid.
I suspect that the reason that all of the big companies are pitching this is that:
1) CPU's and operating systems have been commoditized by Intel/AMD/etc. and Linux, and they want to have a reason for you to buy bigger/better/more expensive systems.
2) Once one of them announced it, they all have to have a "response".
That being said, I think that what they're doing is going to be of real value to high-end customers. If you're running a farm of 5,000 servers, you really need the software to be self-healing, etc.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
/* fucking bug I can't find! */"
Absolutely. It's called saturation and we're closing in on it. So the marketing drones are in red alert to find something different to sell before the old business runs out.
Note the keyword "different". Also note that to marketing it means something entirely... uh, different, then to you and me.
It's a bit like C++ and C - there is a new paradigm, a new approach, and some real technical differences. A lot of books get written, some people become famous, some rich, a few both. In the end, though, 90% of what you're actually writing doesn't change. It's still "i++;" and "exit 1
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Look at it this way... if we cant work out what a "Darwinian reference architecture" is, the indians must be totally fucking baffled!
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
But if you have no idea what it is how can you claim it to be profound? Remember the Segway?
Perhaps the simpler explaination is that they are making lame-brained babble about how there are lots of computers now, there are going to be even more and they need to be easier to use? They then pick some high falutin sounding words that kind of describe some aspect of that as they see it.
Just maybe?!
Really, anything short on details and full of buzzwords probably isn't a big deal - or anything at all. Yes, there are current trends in the way computers are used that is changing. There usually are. There IS a push that people want SERVICES, not computers. They want INFORMATION, not machines. People don't want to worry about running servers and infrastuctures and they also don't want to have to deal with a lot of computery stuff to do things in their daily life like listen to music, communicate, etc.
Nothing new here.
CEOs like Carly do nothing to improve the current sad status of fiscal responsibility in corporate America. Man or woman, anyone who is willing to fuck thousands upon thousands of working Americans out of their jobs in order to dump their salaries into a neat little bonus* is Part Of The Problem.
As an AC below me suggested, it is precisely this behavior which might see her head roll from a guillotine someday.
* oh, did I say "little"? I meant $150,000,000, or about $25,000 for every employee she put out of a job in order for HP to "remain competitive" (her words, not mine).
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.
There's nothing monumental that's really floated to the surface yet. I work in grid computing, which itself is an amazing buzzword that everyone wants to say and no one understands (hell, I am not really sure what the purpose of what I do is).
Everyone's grasping for straws right now, b/c when some research project actually does become useful, they want to be in front of the wave so they can ride it all the way. This is everyone throwing out made up words in the hopes that people will like some (or at least one) of them. Around here, our made up phrase that I love is that we are being called "the cornerstone of cyberinfrastructure." It's even been used so much that they've shortened cyberinfrastructure to "CI" in big rambling memos about our future and direction. It's sort of depressing, though, when you realize that none of this actually means anything yet. Maybe it will one day, but that's not quite here yet.
"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
:)
Yup. It's called "Bandwagon."
Carly Fiorina spews out a bunch of meaningless bafflegab and everyone just nods their head. Once again we see that nobody learned anything from the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.
>the current sad status of gender equality in corporate America
Obviouslly, you believe the lies spread by political hacks that get paid by perpetuating the myth that a bias agains women still exists in corporate America.
1. Harassment laws and corporat policies favor women over men
2. Diveristy training always includes training on how we should all be sensitive to women but never ever has any training on how everyone should be sensitive to men.
Gee she's done alot for working women, layed them off by the thousands at HP and Compaq, not mention the thousands of contractors that took it up the hiney in houston (at least 30% of whom were working women). On top of that all she has to show for it is a muddled and confusing product line, and she's running long standing customers off in droves (like the co. I work for) and not adding any new ones. At this rate she'll singlehandedly drive HP/CQ into the ground, quite an accomplishment for the little lady.
I think giving women an equal chance is great, but if they are going to do all the same bone headed, greedy crap that men do why bother?
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
It's so hard to name because these companies all lack the synergistic, results-driven leverage that will incentivize their paradigm shift.
I'm fairly certain that used to be the case when *everybody* was running mainframe environments (not that lots of folks still aren't), but the key to the new version of this is that it'll be done over the network.
Look at it from IBM's perspective. You can have 8 extra processors on-site for each client for those few times when they need the extra CPU, or you can have massive datacenters all over the world with a pool of extra CPU's to draw from. The latter will lead to unprecedented economies of scale as you can reassign computrons dynamically between clients to whomever needs them most, while still maintaining a comfortable cushion. Those economies of scale likely mean both lower prices for the customers as well as increased profit for IBM, because it drastically increases the efficiency of their services.
I would be surprised if IBM was *not* working on a way to make applications portable across architectures also, and the push towards Linux on everything would seem to support this endeavour, irrespective of all the other reasons.
Imagine buying systems capabilities instead of machines. Let's say you need gobs of CPU but not so much I/O bandwidth. Your jobs are allocated to a Power-based compute node. Let's say you need gobs of I/O bandwidth but not so much CPU. Your jobs are allocated to a zSeries machine. Now things get *really* interesting when your job first needs lots of I/O, then lots of CPU, then settles down for a bit. Your job could get reallocated across the grid based on its needs at any given moment.
The technical end of making transfers of processes and datasets seamless is where the difficulty lays, and all of the 800lb gorillas are chomping at the bit to get it working first. The first one to do it right stands to make a fortune.
Dan
I think that a lot of people are missing that there are two concepts here. The first is grid computing, which is as far as I understand being able to offload processing to multiple computers. The second is ubiquitous computing, which is being able to use computers anywhere you want and access data anywhere you want in a natural fashion such that you're not even thinking about the fact that you're using a computer. See this google-cached page for an example. The two may be used together but are not dependent on each other.
To think that women would (or should) do a better job than men is quite sexist. The point of gender equality is providing an equal opportunity for men and women to prove themselves. It has always been a problem that women in men's fields face a higher barrier for others to take them seriously; thinking that one shouldn't hire a women if they are not going to be any better than a man just makes this worse.
In 1994 I got a temp job (temp in the sense that they weren't hiring on less than the PhD level to avoid paying benefits, but permanent full-time in every other respect) at HP-Vancouver Washington.
My job was to disassemble brand-new packaged printers for rebuilding as prototypes for new models and loading the base unit CPU boards with Unix code for their prototype firmware.
I worked in a locked warehouse room with an outdoor loading ramp and about a million dollars worth of packaged printers stacked to the ceiling.
(They'd given me a marijuana unine test so they knew that they could trust me, but of course, no benefits not even morning coffee). My boss and my self were the only people who had keys to this locked storage workroom.
I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC desktop as wallpaper to keep from going insane in this sealed environment.
After about three weeks, I was fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' for this picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown.
I can't recommend anyone seriously considering working at Hewlett-Packard. Sooner or later their bizarre culture is going to wipe you out regardless of how well you work or try to avoid their weird company politics.
I'm sure that Carly's only made a bad situation worse.
Thank you,
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers-not just the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.
This "guru"'s story is so unrealistic that it's downright dishonest. First, how is the patient identified among the millions of medical records in this miraculous database? The patient must be carrying some kind of identity card, so why not embed his/her medical records in the card instead of putting them online where they are exposed to hackers? (Of course it's still possible for someone to steal a smartcard, but at least it requires a separate attack on each patient rather than a single attack on the entire database.)
Second, how do the doctors authenticate themselves, or is everyone allowed to browse and update the medical records? These are doctors at a "random hospital", so in order to help this patient they must have access to the medical records of everyone in the country. Every doctor has access to every patient's records - great, what happens when one doctor's smartcard goes missing? The entire database is compromised. Again, the only sensible option is to keep each patient's data on a separate smartcard (with an offline backup in case the card is lost). The 'grid' is not the solution here.
Finally, we have the touching story of The Little Computer That Could - the hospital's computer is too slow to crunch the data on its own so it makes use of idle cycles donated by other computers. This completely misses the point of utility computing, which is to make it possible to buy and sell computing resources. If grid computing ever becomes widespread, all those idle CPU cycles will become a commodity and you will have to pay for them. Perhaps some philanthropic souls will donate cycles to the hospital for free, but they're just as likely to donate a real computer - the idea that the 'grid' solves the problem of equipment shortages is absurd.
The Next Big Thing will not come from large innitiatives at HP, Microsoft, IBM, or any big business. If the history of computers teaches us anything, it's that great innovations arise from small groups or unexpected places, with people trying to solve real world problems, not just trying to find anything new to sell someone. See UNIX, WWW, desktop computers, just to start. Also, very few people, especially the big execs, will see it coming.
Watching Slashdot readers spew on topics they know nothing about.
Newsflash #1: Carly doesn't actually RUN anything. She's the CEO of a 150,000 person company. Asking her to explain in detail any computing architecture is like asking Arnold Schwarzenegger to explain California's budget. Yeah, it's painful. She's also not the person to look to for a good explination.
Newsflash #2: You won't *really* get it until it happens. Do you remember the first time you heard about the web? I was a VAX/VMS programmer in college in 1992 when my brother calls me up and says "Have you heard about this Mosaic program they cooked up?" He tried his best to explain it to me. I didn't get it.
Newsflash #3: To those of you ranting on about Carly: I'm sorry you got fired/laid off from HP or Compaq and you're still bitter. But if you were so damn bright you should have seen the writing on the wall and gotten out on your own schedule. And since you left all divisions are profitable, growing, and the stock is up 25% in the past year. Not exactly the definition of a dying company. Get over it.
If you pay attention to her speeches... Yeah, I know, even the tape recorder falls asleep. But if it was possible, the problem is that her ideas aren't too complicated, it's that they're too simple to be sold.
We automate stuff.
Well, yes, that's what all I.T. departments do. HP doesn't even do it particularly well. That's why they need to say that they enable adaptive cross-platform solutions for process-centric business aplications. I used to facilitate reliable time-sensitive information distribution services because it wasn't that impressive to just have a paper route.
The ______ Agenda
If PCs continue to live in a world of their own among consumer products, utility computing will become 'the answer' to its own problems.
I mean, today, I buy any other piece of consumer electronics, I plug it in, and I use it. It breaks, I throw it out.
With a PC, I have this thing that needs to be maintained, occasionally turned on and off, needs to be asked permission to be turned off, becomes useless when its OS gets EOL'd, has software from dozens of companies on it, and still has stone-age level means of really assessing/changing how it's configured. It's a big load on a consumer's patience and requires much more skill to really safely wield than all but a few geeks possess. (asside: I think this is one reason MS will be surprised at how fast Linux catches on, because the extra ease of use of MS is eclipsed by the 'you can fix anything, there are no dead ends' attribute of Linux) Plus, more and more our PCs hold valuable content (your baby photos, your music library).
So...eventually if someone instead offers a cheap, indestructable maintenance-free terminal and left the ugly issues of data storage, backup, application upgrades, virus definitions, and more to be handled for you remotely somewhere, and if it was done cleanly over a super fast connection, I think this idea will take off because consumers will value convenience over the flexibility and pain of essentially being a 1-man IT department for your own house.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?