Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
(Ok, so it was 2004, but it was the first thing that popped into my head reading the header)
Heres the slash coverage
liqbase
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.
My assumption was that "the cloud" was sort of in reference to the diagrams in Comer's book on TCP/IP. The sections of the internet (and of networks in general) that weren't really of interest for the sake of the discussion at hand were often represented with clouds which the lines went into and came out of.
For example, discussing how something got from a desktop to a computer (at a really really high level) might be depicted as:
Desktop -> Cloud (labeled as "internet") -> Server
Given that the professor I had for internetworking and operating systems was a student of Comer's, I got to know the material and conventions used in the book pretty well.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
See, that's why you DOWNLOAD the pr0n. Don't just leave it on the web site.
what?
A Human Right