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Mistrust of Today's Technology
narramissic writes to tell us that Sean McGrath has an interesting look at a general mistrust of today's technology and draws a comparison to the proofreading of photocopies. From the article: "The constant availability of web services out there in the cloud is one such idea. Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."
Considering how many useful services in "the cloud" currently bear "beta" tags, I think it's a pretty easy to argument to make that reliability will improve. Google's own search engine was "beta" the first time I used it 7-8 years ago.
Of course, by the time Gmail is out of beta we'll all be salivating over ZMvnxjowi (pronounced "Leonard") mail, and the cycle will begin anew.
For more information, click here.
Why aren't some of these internet companies regulated/audited/etc like the Utilities (phone, power, water etc..). I would expect atleast root DNS server owners and the major ISPs to fall under the same umbrella as a SBC/ATT.
This is why if SBC has a major phone service outage, the Feds can levy heavy fines... but if Google goes out... they lose some face and ad revenue but are not responsible to the gov't.
Sure we mistrust the internet. Why wouldn't we? Most of us have had broadband providers with poor service, or just good old fashioned blips in our ability to connect. It is hard enough as is to get what we need done on the local services we run on our computers today... running them from the internet when there are so many potential problems is sure to be a bit scary.
I know that in many ways it is the future to move applications to the net. One that I respect a ton is salesforce.com, thats an amazing product.
But still, I think that most people are skeptical, like myself, about the viability of it currently.
Some things we do on our computers are extremely important... and the thought of adding in another variable can be disturbing. It will be interesting to see how these things are deployed and how succesful they are in the near future.
Hrmmm, even my blog has crashed on me a time or two.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system.
Net services are more stable than electricity where I am at the moment. Storms have a habit of knocking out the power for short periods of time - generally 2-20 minutes. (not counting the 5 days that the power was out after an ice storm a couple of years ago).
The power supply when I was living in town was so much more reliable.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
when Slashdot got /. it made me want to run to the basement
(Ok, so it was 2004, but it was the first thing that popped into my head reading the header)
Heres the slash coverage
liqbase
Always have a backup. It's not about mistrust, it's about being prepared for when the brown stuff really hits the fan.
But my printer is out of paper.
Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available.
Whenever I setup a new workstation or do 'maintenence' on the network, I always go view and ping google.com and cnn.com to verify connectivity. This is cause I trust they will always be there.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system.
No no no no no no. It's not about them losing electricity. You're right! That doesn't happen much.
To my mind, it's the same as what happened to S&Ls. People felt their money was safe there until the scandles broke and a bunch of people lost their money. Trust went away! The similarity here is that a tech company makes a big break on the scene, they chug along promising "forever" services, they experience problems, then they change their business model or shut down leaving users that depended on their services in a lurch. I'm not scared of power outages! I'm scared of companies simply changing their minds.
So, go ahead and use an online backup service, but I'll never believe that they'll be around "forever."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
This is a new one to me. I don't think anyone would think too much of it if Amazon went down. There's plenty of alternatives, including brick and mortar, for most of what Amazon is used for.
The technology I see people not trusting are the ones we cannot control. Voting machines? With the punch card style we can still see where our vote goes. Most kiosk type services have withstood time (ATMs, for example), but people are still afraid of airplanes on a purely mechanical level. And when even pacemakers get recalled, can we ever really become complacent with technology?
I'd be worried about relying on anything mechanical to stay alive; it's just a lack of control. Who am I relying on for repairs, the medical field or the engineering department?
I would have seen this article earlier, but our corporate internet just came back up after being down all day. Thank god that's a thing of the past.
I don't buy the power-is-gone analogy, because while a power out is really bad, how do you explain your customers you can't do business because you preferred to store your valuable emails/docs/spreadsheets/data at the last über-hyped dot com beta and it's down on maintenance?
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
In recent years, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN have had widespread outages. Have no fear, people will not stop screwing things up any time soon.
...as power out at the datacenter. The whole reason that businesses park their e-commerce platforms (and web services, and increasingly their accounting platforms and messaging systems) out at a for-real datacenter is so that when their local office utilities puke, their customers can still "see" them online, send them an e-mail without it getting spooled up or bounced, etc.
In the sense that a good datacenter's got local power generation covered, the failure of the larger cloud is the bigger risk. I know, not for all business profiles (like call centers, etc). But I'd say that the "we don't care if our cubicles are in the dark, as long as our web site is up" description probably fits 80% of my clients. Just sayin'.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
``Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud''
Not for long, I think. Service providers already provide fault tolerance in the form of multiple data centers with redundant power and network connectivity. With the Net getting increasingly important to users, it's only a matter of time before backup power and Internet access become commonplace.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
People mistrust photocopies because they didn't understand the technology. Now we just make sure there's toner.
People mistrust new technology because they do understand them (to a degree), and all the moving parts, and what can break. Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
The only truth to this is that knowing how to survive in the future without google may be as pointless as knowing how to survive during a power failure today. Actually, there's still a good reason to be able to survive on your own.
It isn't that I don't necessarily trust a service like Google to be up and running as much as I distrust my ISP having an 'issue' (quite freqent for some providers), infighting between top tier internet providers (happened not even 6 months ago), someone with a backhoe cliping some line they're not supposed to (happens all the time here in FL), the spread of unsecured boxes providing bigger and bigger DDoS botnets (happening quite often to varying degrees of success).
For the same reasons I don't hand my car keys to a coworker each day I come in I don't give control of my access to important business files/data to someone else. I need it when *I* need it and would rather not be dependant on a bunch of 'someone elses' (ISP, their provider(s), Joe Bob the backhoe operator, malicious script kiddy+, coworker with my car keys, etc) to be around to figure out a problem preventing me from doing what I need.
I'm surprised that they seem to sprinkle this term "the cloud" around with such childlike glee, and I don't really know precisely what it is. Either that means I'm not in the target audience, who are probably conversant with this term, or that the author has a buzzword fetish. And "mistrust"? I actually had to look at one up to make sure it wasn't, like, place trust in something unworthy thereof, rather than a synonym for everyday, "distrust."
Weirdo writers.
Anyway, on a more salient note, I really don't like how Google's stolen the term "Beta." When you talk to a lot of people out there in "the cloud," or whatever the hell, they think "Beta" means that it's up 98-99% of the time, like GMail, and aren't really aware of the fact that beta software contains bugs, or that there is some inherent risk in using it.
Google will always be there.
Doesn't mean I will always be able to get to it.
That's what we don't trust.
google.com or amazon.com or live.com
What the hell are you talking about?
Google.com is reliable, but I've certainly seen outages within the last few months. Luckily, I am usually redirected to a new server on the first or second reload. But still, this is an outage-- maybe you can't call it a blackout, but perhaps the term "Brownout" is more appropropriate. "beta" services are even less reliable, which is probably why Gmail is still in "Beta" after a year.
Do you even use Amazon? It throws errors a little too frequently for my taste-- maybe 5% of the time? The problem with Amazon is that if I reload the page, sometimes I'll loose the contents in my shopping cart, or loose my search parameters. Want to see some of these errors? Search for rare products from Amazon's third party vendors. You'll find dozens of items that don't exist, you'll get stack traces, etc.
I don't even think I heard of live.com until you mentioned it. Is this service even comparable to Google or Amazon?
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... but more along the lines that I mistrust the software driving the said technology.
A tool is just a tool until there's human intervention involved.
8==8 Bones 8==8
...is not the possibility of Google being down. The problem is John Q. Homeowner's ISP being down, a router at work being down, etc.
Who hasn't had degradation of service to the internet? Or can't remember google being down in 2004? Amazon's shopping cart problems...
Internet services are less reliable than power and POTs lines. Getting there though.
WoW this is actually a pretty good post
GI
When the power goes out, most businesses are crippled and it doesn't have anything to do with the web being unavailable when the power is out. But when the power is working fine and there is a phone system or network outage, that is almost as crippling for many service oriented businesses, but you have a contract, so these utilities can't simply bail on you. If your business relies on having access to free web services (i.e. ones where you don't have any recourse if they fail or otherwise stop to deliver the service), you must be fucking nuts or have contingency plans for every outage (in which case you don't really depend on the services, so you lied).
How many sites have we slashdotted today?
There hasn't been a significant regional power outage here since the Northeast Blackout of 1965. There hasn't been a significant regional POTS failure here since the Northeast Hurricane of 1938.
When power does fail the generators kick in. We remain a going concern even when a backhoe cuts a cable. But what happens when The Big One flattens Mountain View and we lose our connection to Google?
In theory the Internet routes around disaster. In practice there can be many points of failure.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has definitely not been maintained in the computer era.
Electric power system reliability in the United States is down, mostly as a result of deregulation. Rate-of-return regulation tended to encourage utilities to overbuild their systems, which was good for reliability. When there's a free market in electric power, no one bears responsibility for downtime.
I don't expect things to get better. Not after Cleveland had a five-day outage and nobody went to jail.
"Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline"
High-profile stuff goes down all the time. Often I can't ping google for a bit, and GMail has been unavilable multiple times in the last month. Slashdot occaisonally is out for a few secs here and there (often in wee hours at night).
None of this stuff is bulletproof, and even if it were, the network from them to me is not as reliable as POTS or the water company.
coding is life
The average person's experience of computing is that it's a crap-shoot. You back-up like crazy, because you never know when you might get a blue-screen-of-death. You walk into a coffee shop, and pray your computer will connect. You accidentally open the wrong attachment, or click on the wrong button on a web site, and you've got new spy-ware or worse. Most people need a geek friend to come over just to tell them if they have a problem (and they usually do). How are average people suppose to know if there a bot recording their credit card numbers and sending them to Russian hackers? Can they trust their computers with financial information? Can they trust a computer with an active wireless connection?
Web sites record our visits. They leave cookies on our machines, and our computer records web-page visits in it's cache. They execute javascript and java applets, and show us tits when we wanted bits. We try and censor our children's access, and worry about pedophiles on myspace.com.
I think trust isn't a word most people would use in the same context as anything related to a computer. Let's face it... we've kinda got these things working, but just barely.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
"There is presumably an ugly little fact that ruins this beautiful theory. So it goes."
How about... We already have and widely use private/public key encryption? What is the author getting at here?
If a chair is thrown in a forest, and there are no witnesses, did Ballmer still do it?
See, that's why you DOWNLOAD the pr0n. Don't just leave it on the web site.
what?
A Human Right
From dictionary.com:
mistrust - lack of confidence, distrust.
Why might we distrust our technology? Perhaps because in the media all we hear is of the lack of confidence in technology. The RIAA's smear campaign on people is doing nothing but building resentment towards corporations and their concepts and implementations of technology.
Corporate vision in general needs to start showing high moral standards. As it is, technology itself is amoral. It is the use of the technology that makes it moral or immoral. This is what sets Google apart from everyone else, their vision high moral standard.
With our technological progress increasing, we need a media that can relate technological innovation and progress in a balanced yet engaging method. We need to trust that our technology will be used in a responsible manner.
No, not entirely on topic, but it does raise some concerns.
Neutiquam erro
This already happens all the time, no guarantee that anything you find on the web will be there tomorrow, whether it's free information or paid.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
For a long time I have seen the push to try to get applications off the PC (ironically, after pushing them all out there from the mainframe days). All the usual cost benefits are cited: ease of maintenance, upgrading, compatibility, etc.
/on/my/computer/. I do not trust my email sitting on a server somewhere, for privacy and accessibility reasons. So to this extent, the article is right - I do worry about accessibility, probably irrationally in this day and age.
/claim/ to be secure. But every week it seems there is a news story about someone else who has let slip with their customer's data. Maybe files on Service Provider X's computer system are in reality more secure than the files on my PC, but at least if they are compromised from my own computer it's my own damn fault. Anyway I feel like my files are more private stored on my machine generated on apps on my machine instead of on someone else's machine across the interent.
/need/ my applications to be remotely served to me. The two biggest applications I use are word processing and email. I'm still running Office 2000 for these applications, and they work just fine.
I have been hesitant to adopt. For example, I still insist on a local email client that stores all of my email
But in the last year it seems that the real money push on the 'Net has been in not just PROVIDING content, but rather CONTROLLING content.
So while in the past remote applications were pushed as a means to providing a better service to the customer, nowadays they seem to be pushed, unspokenly, as a means to provide better service to the PROVIDER.
If you can lock someone into your DRM vehicle, you can make the customer dependant on you. If they stop paying for your service, oh, so sorry, you can't access any of your application data anymore. Or you can't share your application data with anyone who isn't running our application. Basically the service provider can use DRM to control what you can do with your data.
My other concern with a remote application is privacy. Sure they
So my biggest source of distrust these days for a remote application is not the AVAILABILITY of the service, but rather:
* Being at the mercy of the service provider in terms of DRM.
* Privacy.
And finally, I just don't
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I'm left wondering with the taste in my mouth of someone spewing smoke to sell me something.
The connection between proofing photocopies (which just don't work that way -- you can get a smudge, but you CANNOT get the wrong character) and mistrusting Internet reliability (which CAN go down and DOES go down, albeit rarely) is specious. One is not understanding, and the other is understanding and knowing damn well that there are vulnerabilities.
This is puffery.
Are these 'clouds' connected together with 'tubes' somehow?
I don't care why you're posting AC
There's a fundamental difference in the basis of trust/distrust. We trust the power grid because the power company's a financially-stable entity that's not going to close it's doors tomorrow, and because we have a contractual relationship with them (that bill we pay every month). They're going to suffer financial and legal consequences if they just stop providing power for any length of time. And even at that, those of us who depend on having power don't put all our trust in the power company. Three words: uninterruptible power supply.
We distrust network services (Google, Amazon, etc.) because most of them aren't financially very stable (How many Web companies have never turned a profit?) and because we typically don't have a contractual relationship with them to provide their services to us (When was the last time you paid your Google bill?). The companies behind these services don't make much money from actually providing the service, they get their income (if any) from selling ads and such. This means it might well suddenly become more profitable for them to stop providing that service and do something else with their infrastructure. Or they may simply exhaust the supply of cash in the bank and not be able to get any more. And if this happens, we don't have any recourse. The service won't suffer any legal penalty for just shutting down. Worse, we can lose the service even if they don't have a problem. There's a plethora of entities between my computer and the service, starting with my ISP and working through all the backbone and transit providers until we hit the service's data center. There's a lot more places network services can fail, and again we don't have a contractual relationship with any of the entities involved and can't put any hurt on them if connectivity goes away.
I'm 54 and I'm not old enough to remember photcopiers being new, but you know, they still screw up! I've had originals shredded by a photocopier, haven't you ever? I've had them copy half a page, etc. If I copy a stack of paper, I make sure I have all the pages, because I've been burned by NOT checking.
The fact is, no technology, old or new, is perfect. I'm sure there were a few people who thought the machine "retyped it" like a secretary, but they were used to secretaries! It's like today with computers, some people, even some who should know better, think computers do or will someday think.
Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available.
But they DO go offline - every time our own internet connection is down for whatever reason.
your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes.
So... TFAuthor doesn't trust electricity! And you know, he's right not to. My power went out a couple of days ago, along with 2500 other people when a squirrel committed suicide.
It came back on; the twirley bulbs (CF) lit up and the cieling fan came on. I went to start the PC back up and the lights came on then out. I thought a surge had killed my power supply, until I went in the bathreoom where the incandescant round bulbs were dim.
I back up my data and check my oil and look to make sure I have all the phoocopied pages. My computer itself isn't trustworthy. Neither is the power supply, my car, or a photocopier. The more stuff in the middle the more likely something will break. as Scotty said in Search for Spock, "the more complicated the pluming, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
Where I work they used to keep applications on the server. They finally smartened up; with apps on the server, when the server goes down everybody twiddles thumbs instead of working.
Google Spreadsheet is for when the local spreadsheet goes titsup.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Outages are not the main reason to distrust web service providers.
Privacy is.
And that is the reason I don't use them as much as possible.
When you expect people to trust the unseen middleware which runs a frighteningly high percentage of their lives (both at home and work), you have to remember most of them have no idea how it works and have enough experience with today's crappy OS of choice that they don't see computers as reliable. In 20 or 30 years, some of us will wonder how on earth our kids trust a computer with a Microsoft core to drive their cars for them while they watch movies over their wireless broadband dashboard videoscreens. They will trust it because they are used to computers that are reliable. Remember, we are only in the first 20-30 years of computer technology that is available for average people to directly interact with on a daily basis. How reliable was an electrical home appliance 100 years ago or a mass produced car 75 years ago? Think of how long it took us to fully trust these technologies (jokes about the quality of current American autos aside) and realize how early we are in the personal computer age (which is again the only way that most people experience "computer technology").
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Yeah, like the fact that you're trapped in an elevator and the VOIP phones suddenly, mysteriously, stopped working at the same time as the power went out.
I mistrust something even more basic: Grocery stores. If gas prices get too high, then food is going to cost more. People on low income will have trouble buying food, or getting gas to work for their money. An all out fall out of society can occur if inflation starts to barrel out of control. Now there is not a whole lot of worry now, but with the national debt rising, its something that can happen in the next 30 years. Google, I can live without, but food I need.
God spoke to me.
I remember times when Amazon.com and Google.com were not fully available. And I certainly remember times when they weren't fully available *to me*, like last night when my terrible ISP had problems. Access to these services is not reliable.
...and God created whiskey to keep the Irish from comquering the world
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I had to laugh when I read the phrase "as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system."
I admit the phone system per se is pretty decent, only for POTS calls. DSL is not reliable.
And, here in Calif, ever since Steve Peace (R) and Gray Davis (D) we have been paying upwards of 25cents for a nickel's worth of electricity, and they FUBAR the grid at least every 6 months with a power outage or "rolling blackout."
If only my power company was as reliable as my web site...
This sounds like an urban legend, if not outright made up.
I am old enough to remember the introduction of the Xerox 914, and while it was revolutionary, the only things revolutionary about it were the speed, the copy quality, the copy durability, etc. I never ever ever heard of anyone suggesting that the copies needed to be proofread.
Similar processes had been available literally for centuries. There was nothing new about the idea of an exact image copy. The "Shovel Museum" at Stonehill College in Easton, MA has bound volumes containing hundreds of copies of letters sent to the Ames Shovel Company, which were copied by a "letter press," a device which squeezed the handwritten letter against a piece of moist paper, transferring enough ink to make a copy. These copies were perfectly legible, even though more than a century old.
Before the Xerox machine there was the 3M Thermofax, which made instantaneous dry copies. They were expensive, and the coated paper was nasty, curly stuff, and being heat-sensitive the copies were not exactly archival, and the "exposure" tended to be hard to adjust and uneven across the page. And since the image was produced by heat absorption, in effect it was an image made by far-infrared light, and idiosyncratic: some inks wouldn't copy well. Heck, a Thermofax copy needed to be proofread--but I never heard of anyone doing it.
Before the Thermofax there were photostats, a fast but not instantaneous wet chemical process that made negative images on paper. And of course architects used blueprints and Azos and so forth...
So, Xerox copies were not unprecedented. They were just an amazingly fast, cheap, high-quality way of doing what Thermofaxes and photostats and azos and blueprints and letter presses had done before.
The idea of unsophisticated office personnel gawking at the miraculous Xerox machine and thinking they needed to proofread the copies sounds to me like an anecdote made up to prove a point.
(Or... someone might have been confusing photocopying with OCR. I remember representatives of an OCR company trying to sell OCR equipment to the editorial services department of the company I worked for, circa the late 1970s. A substantial part of their job involved having typists rekey manuscripts which scientists had typed on their own typewriters, prior to word processing.
The OCR people told the chief editor would save incredible amounts of time by avoiding the need for rekeying. "How accurate it is?" she asked. "99.5% accurate," they claimed. She said, "Unless you can guarantee 100% accuracy, your machines are practically valueless to us... because in the reentry process, 20% of the time is spent keying and 80% is spend proofreading, and unless you are 100% accurate we are still going to need to proofread the results.")
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Otherwise I would never have guessed!
1) Do no evil.
2) Everything is beta.
Seriously, my electricity and DSL have been out more in the last 3 years than all the big web sites combined, including MySpace.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
My mistrust of 'the cloud' is justified. There have been many useful pages on obscure topics (like some old synthesizer's undocuments SysEx commands, or the tape encoding method of my old Coco) that just went when the website owner either forgot to pay their Geocities bill, or just let the page rot until it was removed by their provider. I hope that one day this won't be an issue -- the Wayback machine has helped me resurrect a few pages that Google brought up in search terms, but didn't even have cached anymore.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
Actually I can remember when amazon was last offline - at least their login system - about a month ago. I'd setup an amazon wishlist for family to know what I wanted for my birthday however my dad was having trouble getting to amazon, he was unable to login. When I tried (different machine, different isp etc) I was able to connect to amazon.co.uk I was unable to login either and the same problem occured on amazon.com, amazon.fr and amazon.de.
In addition for people to have mistrust the service they want doesn't have to be down, it just needs to be unreachable. As such services are used by more and more people who have less and less technical knowledge the end user doesn't care if the reason they can't reach amazon is their ISP having dns problems, amazon being unavailable or their pet rabbit has chewed through their modem cable - all that matters is they can't reach it with the new-fangled interweb thingy so they'll go to the local store instead.
Kithran
Now you know wy some of us have some solar power and some generators. Electricity 100% of the time is a good thing, quite useful. It tends to go out with grid supplied when you really want it and need it, such as storms, etc, let alone during any potential future "terrorist" attack.
I do copy content to my locally available storage. Not because I fear that some provider suddenly and magically happens to vanish, or that he is suffering a power outage. My fear is that the content that I want to access suddenly vanishes and ceases to exist. Mainly because someone powerful decided that it's not "appropriate" for me to view it.
So it's not the internet I mistrust. It's those who wield powers that I have no faith in. I trust computers more than people. They don't decide whether information is to be made available. Computers store and distribute it. People destroy and withhold it. So tell me, which should I mistrust?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Enron caused a ton of "reliable" utlity power to be unavailable or "dirty" off and on and it went on for months and not a single governmental regulator found out about it while it was happening. It was done on purpose to shaft people out of more money by creating an artificial scarcity. I also think it goes on all the time in the oil industry,m but I can't prove it. And this latest fast price drop at the gas pump right before the election..uh, huh, another "coincidence". I know gasoline/diesel isn't a public monopoly/utility, but it might as well be, it's just as important as electricity to most everyone,(even to people who don't drive themselves) and I bet if you took a poll most folks would think there's pricing shenanigans (in other words mistrust) going on there all the time.
"Whenever I setup a new workstation or do 'maintenence' on the network, I always go view and ping google.com and cnn.com to verify connectivity. This is cause I trust they will always be there."
Using slashdot.org would have been better. We're always here.
Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwhile, given the rapid rise and fall of services, do you really trust a given service to be there tomorrow? Google's not going anywhere, but is UberWebSpreadsheet3000 going to be there tomorrow? Anyone who thinks major service providers don't have outages should check Netcraft's coverage. If MySpace and Wikipedia, can be taken out by a power outage, so can lots of mid-size providers. If for-pay companies like Final Fantasy XI's game servers, online payment site StormPay, or domain registrar Joker's DNS servers can be taken down by DDOS, so can lots of other online businesses for which people pay for reliable access.
A bit of mistrust in online services, especially if you rely on that service, seems like the prudent thing to do.
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At my previous employment, the ISP and internal IT folks were two separate and distinct groups. I worked in the ISP group. At one point in time, management dictated that *all* internal documentation was to be stored on an internal web repository run by IT. After the second time the IT folks accidentally erased all of our documentation, we ISP folk rebelled and built our own internal web documentation repository.
We humans tend to trust things that we own and control ourselves, and be skittish around things that are owned and controlled by others. I don't expect to see that aspect of our nature changing any time soon.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If the author can't be bothered to spell check his article why does he think we should bother to read it?
I cant access my Gmail account right now!
This is scary !
From the article:
Apparently photocopier machines were greeted with suspicion ... How can you know that the machine has made a perfect copy of your vital
document.
I still check photocopies of multiple page documents, if it is important. It is not the first time that a page was omitted. Also, small printed parts or graphics is not always copied correctly.When dealing with technology, I always try to have a backup plan. Take two laptops for an important presentation. Have a second computer in sync with the main production computer, have two printers available, a backup plan if a slide presentation would not work due to a broken projector bulb etc.
exactly - who cares how often google or 'insert your service here' is down, when the local internet companies can't keep their service reliable for longer than a week at a time.
Gekido's Lair
My concern isn't for reliability so much as longevity. I want something that is going to stick around. After college graduation, then a ISP buyout less than two years later, and having to notify everyone I knew each time about a change in email address, I bough my own domain and setup my own mail server on my linux box at home. Reliability may be a tad bit lower than my ISP (probably not from what I hear) and probably is lower than the majors such as google, hotmail, yahoo, etc. But, unless I really screw up, I'll never have to notify people about another email address change again, even when changing physical addresses.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
...it's with privacy. I don't trust the web services to not use my information for their own nefarious purposes. They all expect to analyse my dataflow for marketing purposes, and I've no doubts that most of them will sell out specific information in a heartbeat.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
and Google is part of the Internet, right?
It's out there in one of those tube thingys
D
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system.
And as deregulation becomes more prevalent, that is becoming a more common occurence.
"How about you couldn't get at your patient's records because you hadn't paid your proprietary software vendor's outrageous (just increased manyfold) maintenance fee?"
Of course you're going for the implication that the software in question lacked the ability to save in a non-proprietary format, even if the customer wanted such a thing.
Much like when slashdot goes on it's regular run on MS and proprietary formats. Forgetting that it's software can save in non-proprietary formats. You just have to make a conscious decision to do so.
> This is why if SBC has a major phone service outage, the Feds can levy heavy fines... but if Google goes out... they lose some face and ad revenue but are not responsible to the gov't. Well, not all of the root DNS servers are in the U.S. of A., therefore not under U.S. jurisdiction. But should those services become "guaranteed-always-up" utilities, maybe we'll see some international legislation concerning these, or maybe laws for Internet as a place.
> Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline
Care to add yahoo.com to that list? Oh, wait...
A year ago, I would have thought it a safe bet that Yahoo would not have availability problems. Now I am tempted to post big signs next to all the internet workstations announcing "Yahoo is down, sorry for the inconvenience". True, Yahoo isn't actually down most of the time, but their domains fail to resolve with sufficient frequency that I am *constantly* bombarded with questions about it, and it has become my #1 support issue, _even though_ none of our services rely on it in any way -- to us, it's just a website, albeit one that is apparently used by roughly seven out of every five users.
If we had actually implemented infrastructure that relied on Yahoo's availability, we'd be in real trouble.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
and they don't care. The phone company is the same way.
Ever since deregulation they've hired people that could
care less about doing their job well. The attitude comes
from the top down. Your comments seem accurate enough
but for me they don't address the root cause.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Google knows the only thing they have to sell me is good service - everything they offer is available somewhere else, and I can change away from them at a moment's notice (mod moving any data they may be holding for me). Every second they're off line, they're losing revenue - they'll work hard to be as reliably available as possible.
Comcast knows they have me over a barrel - in my neighborhood, they're really the only choice for broadband, and they behave like a minimally regulated monopoly where reliability is concerned (as I type this, I'm waiting for a call to go home and let in a technician to get me back on line). Comcast would love for me to dump my land line and get a VOIP phone through them. I might consider it when they come within an order of magnitude of the reliability of my land line.
I trust the parts of the cloud where competition keeps things honest.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I was trying to get through to the article but my internet connection went down.
:-)
Something about how we can blindly trust the websites to be up? Well...maybe when my connection is back up I'll go read about how I'll always be able to access them. For right now, I can't access them.
Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com
Two peanuts crossed the street. One was assaulted.
There are known knowns-- those things we know that we know, and there are known unknowns-- those things that we know that we do not know. But there are also unknown knowns-- those things that we don't know that we know, and unknown unknowns-- those things we don't know that we don't know.
>In what format? If it's stored as a big blob of binary garbage, you're just as much
>held to ransom as if it were on a remote server. You still can't get at your data
>except by going through the 'official channel', in this case running that particular
>mail program and hoping it doesn't crash or corrupt its data store.
I use Outlook for my email client. Thunderbird, when I tried it, imported all of my email just fine.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Apples and oranges? No, more like chain saws and paring knives, with the car being the chain saw. Danger vs danger; 400,000 vs 3,000. I'm not the least bit afraid or terrorists, I'm far more likely to slip and fall down in the bathroom and break my neck than to die by terrorist attack. Hell, I'm even more likely to be murdered by somebody in a bar.
Your risk of terror attack is greatly overstated, and they overstate it with good reason - to further their own power. I'm talking of both the corporate owned government and the corporate owned media.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest