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Why Your IT Spending Is About To Hit the Wall
CowboyRobot writes "For decades, rapid increases in storage, processor speed, and bandwidth have kept up with the enormous increases in computer usage. That could change however, as consumption finally outpaces the supply of these resources. It is instructive to review the 19th-century Economics theory known as Jevons Paradox. Common sense suggests that as efficiencies rise in the use of a resource, the consumption goes down. Jevons Paradox posits that efficiencies actually drive up usage, and we're already seeing examples of this: our computers are faster than ever and we have more bandwidth than ever, yet our machines are often slow and have trouble connecting. The more we have, the even more we use."
Despite technological advancements, it takes forever for Slashdot to load on my phone.
Life in Orange County
From my own observations, there are two schools of thought.
Seems the former spend their time fixing things and the later spend time bitching about "damn kids" and their lawns.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
There was a time when my 486/25 with the 120 megabyte hard drive and the 14.4 modem was "all you'll ever need". That didn't last long . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
As we in the military, research university, and government spheres move to IPv6 and Internet So Fast It Makes Your Ears Bleed (tm), have you ever considered that perhaps it might be slow for you but not for us?
I mean 1000 Gbps is considered normal here, and some of us are running on faster connections, using less energy total to do the same thing.
We rarely print things anymore, and just because you have slower access to resources, you have to realize it could be because, in the war between Urban America and the rest of the country, Urban America with its more efficient energy usage and lower distances traveled - basically won the war.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My work Pc is slow and has trouble connecting because of the n layers of Corp security whatnot. My home Pc is reasonably fast and always connects quickly.
IT is a lot more than just CPU and the amount of little switches on a die. Yes, those get better and continue to do so, but there are a lot of bottlenecks that are not going away anytime soon. Until these are dealt with, things will stay almost the same in the IT world.
Couple examples:
1: Wireless bandwidth fees. This has gotten worse as time progresses. Two years ago, my T-Mobile CLIQ had unlimited tethering. Now, if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
2: Regular bandwidth. A year ago, bandwidth might be throttled on P2P downloads. Now it is metered as well on most ISPs.
3: Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarentee. Individuals usually don't have the cash for the drive, so have to deal with hard disks which usually have a year warranty, and there is no consumer level software to handle backups, where it knows where a specific revision of a file is on what volume, be it a primary volume, or a copy saved in a safe deposit box somewhere. The enterprise has NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and other items. So, there is a major issue with making sure data is saved safely for anyone who can't afford to stick an EMC VNX array in their garage.
In the past, tape drives were not just affordable by consumers, and kept up with hard disks, but usually had some decent software that could help find media in case of a disaster. These days, there are not any good consumer level backup utilities, especially ones that can restore bare-metal.
4: Encryption. As grows storage grows the need to protect the data from everything from tapes falling off the pickup truck to hard disk drives getting yanked out of arrays.
Just raw CPU power may help things, but that is more incremental than anything else. Right now, IT is more affected by the BYOD trend than it would be by any CPU revolution. What would stir the pot would be bandwidth increases that don't have corresponding fee hikes. Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.
This is similar in nature to the Laffer curve. It depends where exactly on the curve you are, and we have no real idea (in either case).
Debunking the Jevons Paradox:
The theory behind it is sound: Lower the cost of anything and people will use more of it, including the cost of running energy consuming equipment. But as with many economic ideas that are sound theory (like the idea that you can raise government revenues by cutting tax rates), the trick is in knowing how far to take them in reality. (Cutting tax rates from 100% to 50% would certainly raise revenues. Cutting them from 50% to 0% would just as surely lower them.)
3: Backups.
I have a Time Capsule and use Backblaze. I'm set in that department (I'd like to think).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
1. Computer hardware is not a finite resource like coal is or any other natural resource. Prices go up; somebody build a plant to make more. Econ 101.
2. This assumes that computer hardware will be used the same way as it has been in the past. We are already seeing major changes. Less individual storage and more online storage; different devices that are less hardware intensive and computing is being used differently - less desktop and more handheld and all the differences down the chain from that.
3. No mention of significant technology changes. Who's to say will still be using the current architectures or even silicon tech in the future. This assumes the same old same old for the future.
Don't we hear this same story every so often? Before it was trace width or storage density or whatever. Perhaps some day we'll run out of tricks to making better cheaper hardware but there seems to be a long way to go yet. I mean, we don't even have tenth generation AI hologrammatic computers with IQs of 6,000 yet!
I remember my Apple II with 110, 300, and 1200 baud serial. The 1200 baud would not work on the 110/300 baud modems of the day. But I figured out how to get the serial port working at 440 baud by crossing some flags for 110 with some flags for 1200 in the serial port device register. Amazingly, that actually worked on a 300 baud modem calling another setup done exactly the same way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
will rise a lot when they have to move to local servers and companies to avoid the intrusion on their private data mandated by US government
I'm not even sure where to start other than to say--technology is only ever adopted broadly if it is cost-effective to do so. The printing press wasn't successful because of some incontrovertible march of progress--it was successful because it was cheaper to make books that way than by having monks transcribe them by hand. Yes, that caused more people to read which drove up the demand for books. And I'm sure some jackass back then wrote an article saying that demand for books was accelerating at a rate that we weren't going to be able to afford enough printing presses anymore.
Is that we allow bloat to continue. We should be *demanding* efficiency in code.
There is really no excuse for the sorry state of affairs we are in. My Atari ST from a good 20 years ago boots and runs faster than a current PC, and does just as much.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not good! I've got to throw it out and spend thousands on the most expensive one that I can find so I can use Microsoft Office and play Solitaire!
That's pretty basic economics and even physics stuff.
The more of a resource there is, the more it will be used.
The more of some form of a resource or energy or a product there is and the lower the barriers of using it are, the more of it will be used, always driving the usage up and as a result using 100% of it.
Usage increases until 100% of a resource is used up. Is that really such a new idea?
In economics of-course it's tied to a cost of using something - the less pricey something is the more it will be used. You can look at it from every perspective, from free money by the fed, welfare, EI, SS, Medicare or food-stamps to other concepts like youtube accounts. Nearly everybody has got one, the only thing that limits usage there is laziness.
I could summarise it this way: usage expands to occupy all of the available resources and the limits around usage are set by the price (or other type of expenditure, like energy expenditure) of using them.
You can't handle the truth.
There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.
There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.
One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.
Better known as 318230.
In our company, IT spending is actually dropping, even as we expand. The cost of used hardware is insanely low because of all of the individuals and companies who still feel the need to buy "new" equipment so rapidly. We have no problems running Pentium 4's and Windows XP throughout our business, and wil do so for the foreseeable future.. We've moved our email/backup/web hosting services out to providers, and all of that is sill insanely cheap. Tech has actually exceeded our needs, so our IT spending has dropped significantly. Keep buying new machines every few years, people! We're loving buying your completely functional equipment at yard sale prices!
I don't respond to AC's.
When you lash together the disparate clouds of application, compute, and storage facilities from the various vendors in that space, and truly begin to tie them together as distributed applications, an amazing thing happens.
The work load distributes. The storage requirements distribute. The compute requirements distribute.
And the more distributed they become, the closer we approach a true peer-to-peer architecture.
Now take it one step further, with each person having their own "data server" nodes in their home or leased from such cloud providers. Your device is no longer used for storage, but just presentation. It caches the data from your server(s), but it doesn't need to keep the data unless you expect to use it again in the near future. Your whole SSD/HDD system in the device becomes a cache, similar to the Andrew File System, but using different communications technologies including torrents that map into a virtual file space, and private downloads directly from your data servers for content that you own personally.
Suddenly you realize the problem is not that we need infinite capacity, but that we need to break the mindset that industries like banks "own" the data. They don't. It's OUR data, and it should be on OUR servers, with them needing OUR permission to access or modify it.
Problem solved.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If I gather what this article is speculating on, it's a phenomena similar to peak-oil.
Peak-oil doesn't necessarily mean that you run-out of oil, it just means that the marginal cost of producing more oil reaches a point which causes the rate of oil production to decrease. In the backdrop of increasing demand, and limited supply this implies a sharp downturn in availability of oil at historical prices.
If applied to computing, it would imply a limit to computing resources. I don't think we are there (although computing takes lots of electrical power and there seems to be enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity for the moment), but we may be at a point where demand increases beyond the rate at which technology can keep it on its historical increasing MIP/$ trend. If this MIP/$ trend flattens out, it may be difficult to find funding for new technological advances and fundamentally change the market for computing.
I'm not even sure where to start other than to say--technology is only ever adopted broadly if it is cost-effective to do so. The printing press wasn't successful because of some incontrovertible march of progress--it was successful because it was cheaper to make books that way than by having monks transcribe them by hand. Yes, that caused more people to read which drove up the demand for books. And I'm sure some jackass back then wrote an article saying that demand for books was accelerating at a rate that we weren't going to be able to afford enough printing presses anymore.
Don't forget the laments for the unemployed monks.
And the cries for the government to save them! Oh, wait, there weren't many irresponsible, can't-take-care-of-themselves PUSSIES back then DEMANDING someone saving their lame asses as a "right".
Tomorrows /. article will probably be titled "Forget wasting money on IT, jump into the cloud-wagon". Guys... come on... make up your mind.
4. The opinion piece also assumes that consumption will continue it's trend. Looking at the consumption of desktops, we see that eventually growth of consumption flattens out and even starts to decline and net consumption is even starting to decline in the PC industry.
It isn't so much that users are expecting more from the apps, but that application vendors bloat their software as time goes on so that newer versions really only run on newer and faster hardware. I won't point fingers too much - there are many offenders here.
And on top of that, the industry is using more Java which is as slow as snot. The attitude seems to be that if it runs slow, then throw some more iron at it.
I remember my first Linux box - i486 at about 90MHz. Those were the days..
I read the headline for this story and laughed - it doesn't matter how much faster my computers or networks get - Our IT department just installs more and more virus scanners, software maintenance tools, firewalls, monitoring tools ,etc.... Each computer I get has more CPU cores and memory and faster graphics and they are able to do less and less and take longer and longer to boot. I figure before too long I'll have to go back to my old TI-30 calculator and some engineering graph paper and I'll be equal in efficiency to my computer once I factor in all the time I spend waiting for it to get around to sparing .5% of the 12 CPU cores to run the actual software I need to use....
We used to say Andy [Grove] giveth but Bill [Gates] taketh away.
These days though it's more the result of hard drive capacity growing faster than CPU power.
Which is good for me professionally because I like to work on algorithms for web scale data handling.
Urban farming is enjoying a renaissance.
Good luck getting zoning boards in all cities to agree to allow urban farming. Some cities have even been waging war on vegetable gardens.
It's all FUD. There is no reason to believe any limit is being approached. If we need more network capacity, it will be built.
2: Regular bandwidth.
I [...] use Backblaze
How should one avoid exceeding an ISP's monthly transfer quota while making regular use of online backup?
I worked in assembler in my day. Where a skill was a skill. Now it's all objects and bullshit.
I got a great idea why not rewrite slashdot in FLASH !!!
p>
Personally I think it is high time we use an old solution to fix a new problem...bring back the WPA. a lot of our bandwidth problems would disappear if we had nationwide FTTH or at least fiber to the neighborhood. It seems like a great way to put all those sitting at home on unemployment to work and you build it right and just as many bridges built by the WPA in rural areas still work fine so too could a well built fiber network last us for ages.
I think there is plenty of old-school WPA-type work that those people could be doing. lt won't happen because it means "Big Government" giving opportunity to poor people, and that is somehow un-American.
... we should all buy SUVs to reduce gas usage and drive down price.
Makes perfect sense.
Oh yeah, I remember that guy! He talked to the King about it, and the King said "ok, well, to cope with that we'll introduce copyright. That way, anyone who can't get the books they want becomes a criminal, and no books for crims. Problem solved!"
What a bastard that guy was! But a couple of years later he tried to sell the King a Microsoft solution, and he ended up on the wheel. Served him right, I say.
The security holes in XP start to really worry me. You can put an uptodate Linux on an old box and be quite safe.
I picked up an older Dell Xeon box from eBay about a year ago. As time goes on, I have upgraded with more memory, faster CPU (with quad-core chips), larger hard drive, 64-bit OS. But it is still insanely fast for what I am doing with it.
Certainly the business and scientific servers will need to be faster and have more storage, as will the home gaming and video editing PCs, but I predict even the corporate desktop PCs will as well as YouTube eclipses PowerPoint and PC displays play catch-up to the iPad 3 retina display.
That's because it's not just me trying to use my machine any more. Now it's me, some guy in Shanghai trying to log my keystrokes, the software I installed to keep him out, plus all the various companies who paid my hardware vendor to put pointless "dashboards" on my machine.
You sir, are probably running a bogged windows with Areo interface or ubuntu with unity for that matter... :)
I stick to my own kernel, kde and my quad core 8gb really feels like quad core 8gb
>>> if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
You must have a darn fast connection to get 500 GB per month. Or you could buy the Sprint(?) plan that costs ~$90 and gives unlimited cellular data.
P2P is metered on your ISP? Wow. Verizon DSL has not done that to me.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Six year old laptop. Decent enough, all software updated but it started to crawl. I noted AVG sucking CPU resources so went with another AV package. Still the one real symptom was really slow web and email performance.
Firefox updated, Thunderbird updated, still the same.
I had occasion to snap my hard drive into a machine of the same make/model and all of a sudden everything worked. The key differences between the two machines were different wireless network adapter, different amounts of RAM and the one I snapped into had a DVD burner and mine is only CD.
So it had to be the WiFI NIC. The machine I snapped into had an Intel 2915, mine was an Intel 2200. I ordered the 2915, snapped it in and all is well!
I'm a C++ developer. I see Javascript as a poorly designed language and it only made sense once I realized it was originally meant as an easy to implement scripting engine.
Now I'm developing a website and want to offer a version in the app store for iPhone and Android.
One code base for many devices is obviously the way to go and that means javascript. By the time I'm releasing most phones will be powerful enough. those that aren't will have more reasons than just my app to upgrade.
It's a waste but from my new perspective it's easy to see why it works this way.
Boyle's Law of computing:
1. Data expands to fill available storage space, plus 10 percent.
2. Processing requirements increase to utilize available cpu cycles, plus 10 percent.
3. Network utilization increases to fill available bandwidth, plus 10 percent.
These are immutable... :-)
Does not matter. Because once it hits the VoIP with PoE for their phones it will be knocked down to 100Mb/s anyway.
gig-switch ---- VoIP-phone-with-PoE --- computer
Means that the computer is only going to get 100Mb/s.
You want to run 2x as many lines as you need to so some people can get gig to the desktop? As long as someone above you is willing to sign off on the expenses and maintenance contracts.
And I'll still be spec'ing 100Mb/s switches with PoE for the phones.
Accountants feel a resource is being utilized efficiency at very high average rates of capacity utilization. Engineers look at the resource's operational efficiency not financial efficiency which is FAR FAR lower than maximum utilization. Unless you're running a z/OS mainframe, utilization above 80% is counterproductive, operationally. Some systems operate best at 50% of maximum capacity. But try telling that to your financial officer.
Stop watching the news media reporting on crime 3 states away and realize that urban violence and murder rates are at historic lows in the cities of America.
Please accept my sincere my thanks for your service to our country that has protected us from imaginary foreign threats while we're still stuck dealing with domestic threats that refuse to accept losing a civil war. I am envious of your bandwidth.
Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarantee.
Who modded this moron up? Obviously, he's never had to buy LTO-5 tape drives in bulk. I don't mean a few boxes totally 25 tapes, but hundreds and THOUSANDS of cartridges. LTO-5 isn't cheap. The enterprises may be upgrading their tape drives, but the cartridges that are often bought are LTO-4 because they are so much cheaper. Plus they can still be used in the LTO-4 drives, for which putting an LTO-5 media in an LTO-4 is a waste of $$.
This is why backup to disk is moving in. Media is expensive and restore times are slow. However, backing up to tape is actually quite fast. Still requires a pretty fast source and server to saturate an LTO-5 drive with compression.
Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.
Hello. FC over WAN is called FCIP. It's already here and used as an ISL (inter switch link) rather than a host to array (or array to array) method. Yes I know that EMC has 1GbE blades for their arrays which do replicate SCSI over IP, but that's a proprietary solution and doesn't scale. How do all the arrays move data from site A to site B? They plug into a switch via FC and then the switch encapsulates the FC packets in IP packets. Then it's up to good old TCPIP to get you to your destination.
FCIP isn't exactly cheap, but the alternative, FC over DWDM is quite a bit more expensive. Go price out your next Cisco 15454 and get back to us.
Now try to play MP4 video. Or any first-person shooter with an MP5. Can your Amiga do that?
My Atari ST from a good 20 years ago boots and runs faster than a current PC, and does just as much.
Can it display text in Farsi, Chinese, Hindi, and Vietnamese all in the same document, without embedding image files? Can it show true-color graphics with multiple composited semitransparent layers and drop shadows and shizz, as a lot of web pages use now that IE 6 is negligible?
Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.
As for the latter, we have a long way to go before the wireless last mile is good enough to stream even SDTV 24/7. How long have the satellite and cellular companies been stuck in the neighborhood of 5 GB per month?
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Oh, wait, there weren't many irresponsible, can't-take-care-of-themselves PUSSIES back then DEMANDING someone saving their lame asses as a "right".
King Ludd would like a word with you...
Or just use colored optics and a passive mux.
Unless you're going hundreds of miles (at which point FC has probably broken anyway due to latency expectations) you don't need active DWDM kit, passive muxes are a much better solution, and far cheaper.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Good thing quantum computing will be here sooner than expected.
FCIP, iSCSI they all HATE latency in sync mode and async gets scary quick. CDWM is dirt cheap read under 1k even with the cisco badge on it and good kit for under a few hundred. No power no OS just optics not much to go wrong if you don't hit it with something and break it.
No sir I dont like it.
Hardware had pretty much caught up with need for nearly everybody. The low-end boxes were doing find with current software, and the developers weren't being stupid or evil.
Well, that couldn't last. We now take a 100x performance hit for Python, Javascript, and similar languages. (generally the ones that fail to catch type errors until actually operating on your precious data)
This is so wrong. Developers have the luxury of nice hardware. Their employer provides it, or they are a well-paid nerd buying it for home. This turns formerly-good hardware into crap hardware, forcing upgrades. As hardware standards rise, the developers keep getting the very best and we stay in an arms race to buy hardware we can tolerate.
This is an ugly expense. Developers are essentially forcing the less-fortunate and more-frugal to regularly buy expensive equipment to replace stuff that hasn't even broken. This is totally unethical.
2 mb/s download 640k upload doesn't cut it for designing games. If we had 1 GB/S up 100m/s up, we could have P2P games where you have up to 100,000 players in the same zone playing something like quake. Imagine a Fighter game like Tekken with 1,000,000 fighters in the same zone. The limitations no longer become technical, but how many people desire to play the game. You could even make games like military reinactments with everyone playing a role of a soldier.
God spoke to me
the more you have, the more you spend
Hi,
Warning in advance - this is long. This to thwart the attention deficit crowd *grin*
"The more we have, the even more we use".
I've worked with computers in one way or another since 1982. I've been a programmer, a computer technician (bench and field), a network technician (back then, being a technician wasn't a bad thing. Now days, EVERYONE is an "engineer"), a network engineer, service manager, VP of Technical Services, and even owned my own business doing all of the latter, for small/medium businesses. One thing that I've noticed over the years is that, while the quoted statement is true, in a business environment it appears that the uses to which a company's computing resources are put are increasingly non-work related.
I blame multi-tasking, and unfettered Internet access, and here's why:
Back in the "Dark Ages" of business computing with PC's, there was little to no multi-tasking on end-user PC's [1]. Computers ran MS-DOS, and people such as myself set up menus for the users which ran when the computer booted. Want to edit a document? Pick the word processor on the menu, and go. When you were done, exit back to the menu, and select the next task.
People that used multiple applications learned to organize their use of them to minimize the amount of time spent switching between applications.
There was next to no access to games for the average computer user on their computers (sure, there were always some that were computer literate who could exit the menu and install and use whatever they wanted, but those people were few and far between), and, no Internet access (and, in fact, the Internet, as commonly understood today, didn't exist at all). From a business perspective, the computers were tools, used for business purposes, and they really did help efficiency.
Fast forward to today: Multi-tasking graphical interfaces have made it easy to have multiple applications running. Ubiquitous, always on Web access allows people to access their personal email accounts, Facebook, YouTube, Internet games, etc., creating an ever-increasing demand on corporate computing and networking resources, with increasingly less return on the expenditures to upgrade them from a business perspective.
One example: We have a sales office in Manhattan which until recently "only" had a T1 line. Given the fact that the permanent full-time staff at the location was less than five people (most of the sales staff work remotely from their homes), it was more than adequate for corporate email, telephony (Our entire corporate phone system is VOIP), and work-related Web access.
Two years ago, we started to get complaints from the people in that office: Poor voice quality on phone calls, dropped calls, slow email access, slow access to file servers, etc. The sales people were screaming: "I get faster Internet access at home! I can get to my email faster at home! Why can't we just switch to Roadrunner/FiOS/?!?" and other such comments.
So, we started monitoring and analyzing the bandwidth use.
Invariably, when the calls and email messages complaining about voice quality, etc., came in? 80% or more of the bandwidth utilization was non-work related.
So, we gathered up the logs, charts, etc., and passed them along to the powers that be, with our recommendations, first of which was to encourage the users in that office to use the company's resources for company-related activities before spending money on more bandwidth.[2]
On a semi-related note: This, of course, is one reason why everyone hates MIS/IT: From their perspective, we're interfering with their use of "their" computers, when the truth is that we have to cost-justify all requests for increased bandwidth (and everything else) with hard numbers.
Another example: We have an office in Upstate NY, which is primarily dedicated to software engineering/development staff and our technical assistance center (TAC). Again, this is about two years ago now. The office was experiencing the sa
I don't understand that.
How can doubling the number of connections and ports in use "cover the extra price"?
It does not matter about "the price difference" unless you're spec'ing one brand but actually buying a different (less expensive) brand. In which case you might want to watch out for anyone reporting you for an ethics violation.
I agree, and here's an anecdote for what it's worth. One PC was working perfectly for all work related tasks - and then the user started mucking about on Facebook and the web browser brought the system to a crawl. That was a while back but still it's insane to hit hardware limits and get to 100% CPU for a few seconds just to put a single page of text and a few pictures on a screen. Even if it's got a good reason to take a while at least give the user something to look at in the meantime.
Libertarians have been making the same point about energy-efficiency. As houses, cars become more energy/fuel efficient, people use more A/C, leave on more lights, and use more gas. It's crazy to think it's different with computers, especially since everything has been going digital for decades.
The up side is that when real scarcity (not artificial scarcity), consumption and the market adjusts on its own until innovation solves the problem.
The more we have, the even more we use.
There is no fucking way that is a sentence. Why are English-speaking editors so hard to find?
This happens with air conditioning efficiency increases. When people get a more efficient air conditioner or do some other efficiency upgrade (tinted windows, radient barrier...) they still run the system as hard as they did prior, they just enjoy a lower summer temperature in the house.
Assume your users will stream 4x1080p 3d @ 60fps for the rest of their lives,
Assume your users will be able to access any of this data at any time
Assume your users will expect all their data to be auto-meta tagged with full geoip data
moox. for a new generation.
The processing and storage requirements for a system are inversely proportional to the mean value of the information managed by the system.
Def 1. Mean value of information - the total sum of the value of the information, divided by the number of users of the system.
For example, a popular social networking site may require 10's of thousands of CPU cores and petabytes of data storage. Whereas the same number of bank accounts are handled on the low 100's of mainframes with 100's of terabytes of storage.
Another example, really, really important information is generally small. The design and maintenance is managed by a professional staff which carefully manages changes, copies, and access to that information. You can fill up petabytes of storage with click histories and other (largely) useless data, which is then duplicated into reporting databases, copied to data warehouses, copied to BI data marts, and then versioned (should anyone ever want to know who clicked on the "Contact Us" link back in 2007).
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
I always suspect I'd be learning something new whenever I visit /.
Thank you for proving it
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I have walked into 4 companies in the past 10 years. 1 Company decided to upgrade a lot of thier antiquated servers with 3 year old refurbished models.and invest in inexpensive but robust hardware. They did it right.
The other 3 companies had IT managers or whatever they were called run on obsolete crap(mostly the fault of the company) and the scary thing is they never did IOS upgrades on either thier hardware and software and they wonder why the network is slow, Servers reboot for no reason and users complain of slow performance on the network.
No documnetation
passwords all the same for every device and in some cases default passwords never changed.
If the IT admin got hit by a bus they would be in a world of hurt.
In a lot of small to medium companies IT is treated like fast food when something breaks and causes the network admin to work 24 hours straight to get something critical (IT ALWAYS IS) up and running.
I think there are some network admins who value themselves as indespensible and play the Mighty Mouse syndrom to justify thier exsistence.
They lie to thier managers and unfortunately some managers accept thier lies for fear the network admin will walk out and take all of his band aid knowledge out the door.
The summary gives a general statement. The article focuses on a niche area -- computing in the finance industry. It is fully possibly that within that realm the statements in the summary are accurate. The same statements might not hold in the consumer or scientific realms.
Easily fixed with some load balancing, as are most things in life.
captcha: solved;
...however, has always been gasoline. The evidence shows that legislating higher gas mileage for cars has *increased* gasoline usage. The law of unintended consequences at its finest.
I'm not sure if anyone else has taken note of this, but this paradox has been seriously re-visited concerning modern technology in the fairly recent past, near the beginning of the rise of computers in the 20th century.
When sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, microwave ovens, frozen meals, etc. became popular and readily available in the 1950s, the overwhelming assumption was that homemaking women would suddenly find themselves bored, and with nothing to do. The assumption was that the great efficiency with which housekeeping tasks could now be done would mean that the women would do what they always did in 1/2 the time, then spend the rest of the time without anything to do. What actually happened, however, was exactly the opposite.
Suddenly, the level of housekeeping that was expected went way up! The homemakers didn't do their normal duties and then stop; they made the homes more spotless and perfect than had ever been practical before, thanks to these wonderful new technologies. Now, instead of being bored, homemakers were running themselves ragged (partly at the behest of others and the new culture of perfection).
This is exactly what's been happening to everyone over the past 20 years or so, thanks to computing. It makes us work harder and faster, and runs us ragged. Likewise, increased efficiency means increased demand (since my work will undoubtedly require support from some other person, business, or industry--such as webhosting or tech support), so for every person/business/industry that does more, somebody else also has to do more. It's not just our computer hardware that's about to hit a wall; the stamina of human beings is already nearly there. (Parts of Asia have had some major problems with this in the last 20 years, what with kids going bald from stress, workers committing suicide because they can't meet demand, etc.) I strongly suspect that this increased pace of life is also a major contributor to the increasing pandemic of mental health disease (more research required to verify).
While this technological "wall" is certainly something to take notice of, it's really just a "second fiddle" to how we, as biological creatures of limited capacity, will soon find ourselves saying (at the behest of our minds and bodies), "enough!" Personally, I look forward to that particular outbreak of common sense. While I love computers and the marvels they make possible, I absolutely hate how we've allowed our technology to rule us, instead of the other way around.
In terms of the internet pipes, I think people will innovate as resources (bandwidth) tightens. The internet is how we do business, and at some point people might get fed up with telcos and just start building their own local networks and caching the content like the BBS's of old. Mesh networks or public wifi with content hosted on a cluster of servers in someone's apartment, or long distance wifi, or microwave, I don't know.
Personally, I think those sorts of things would be a HUGE boon to telcos: Allow neighborhoods, towns, or even cities to own their own networks and host content, allowing citizens/local government to alter their systems as necessary to accommodate traffic. Heck, it could be a draw for some cities that they a great network.
I'll try a non-car analogy: It's like the federal vs state government. Right now we have what is effectively a dictatorship run by 3 big fat greasy bastards. It's too much for them to actually handle, but they like the income. Make it more like the U.S. government (just stick with me) and have a "federal" i.e. national set of carriers (or even federally owned/mandated) like the utility companies, and then have a state and local level for the infrastructure as well, perhaps. It could be more flexible, perhaps, and expand/contract as necessary.
There may be a crunch, but the inefficiencies in the system are rampant because we've been long on providing "resources" to the beast without overseeing a good system manage those resources. The internet will go on a diet, get leaner and meaner and more efficient, and it will be better than ever.
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We've seen this story before. Vint Cerf predicted the Internet would crash about 10 years ago. Sky was falling, we're running out of ip addresses... and so on. Well here we are 10 years later and still going strong with probably a few powers of 10 more devices on the net and counting.
Fact is, we're probably still at the beginning. Most centers are running a bunch of machines that are for the most part 99% idle. They also have roughly no more than 50% of their possible storage filled. Yet with cutting edge technology, that will change. Data mining. From conferences I've been at lately they are spending more than ever. A lot on security. Things that require a token, like a badge will come into play in a big way the next 10 years. We'll probably also lose a lot of data as passwords are lost. Either unintentionally or dude leaves for a better job.
From reading this discussion, I'm guessing you are insulting someone without checking recent prices.
My work gets LTO-5 tapes for $40 a pop, $50 per tape if we use WORM media. Yes, we can get LTO-4 tapes cheaper, but we rather get twice the capacity -- fewer tapes to take care of.
Tape drives? $1500 gets me a LTO-4 drive, $1900 gets me a LTO-5 drive, both external SAS. I can also pay $2500 and get a LTO-5 drive that plugs into a Thunderbolt port. Expensive, yes, but there is no better way to store items long term.
The GP had a point which seems to be missing. The warranty on tapes is lifetime. The enterprise drives in a high end SAN? Five years. Consumer level stuff? One year.
Hard disks are not intended for archival storage. Instead, they are intended to be part of a RAID array. When older ones fail, newer ones are put in to rebuild the array.
Yes, the big boys use hard disks for archiving, but the magic is in the EMC VNX's controller firmware, and using redundancy on redundancy. The drives are in various RAID configurations and are replicated over the WAN. However, it assumes that both ends of the replication setup will always remain operational. One malicious act, and both lose their data permanently.
Backup to disk sounds great... until one realizes it just takes someone logging on with full admin authority on the SAN who can purge the whole thing with just a few commands. Tape,OTOH, will require physical possession of the tapes, and even then, it either requires a sledgehammer, or enough time for the tape silo to shove every single piece of media in, erase it, then move it to a shelf for the next piece. Even then, if a place uses offsite storage, an intruder will be out of look if they are looking to cover their tracks.
Until there is an offline disk cartridge solution (lots have been made by Dell, Iomega, and iMation, none have persisted past a few years) that is adept at moving hard disks offsite, with hard disks that have an archival-grade warranty, tape still has a place in the enterprise. Even with replication over the WAN on the SANs.
Bitter? Twisted? Me? Get off my lawn.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Europe is full of small, cheap, fuel efficient cars. Your problem is that there was a size and power war on American roads. While I would feel perfectly safe driving a Fiat 500 Twinair or its equivalent around most of Europe, I would be terrified driving it in the US. By the time European designs make it to the USA, they seem to be carrying around a third of a tonne of additional padding and reinforcement to protect against rednecks in light trucks or middle class mothers talking on the phone in their main battle tanks. It will take a long, long time for the USA light vehicle fleet to get down to sensible sizes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You have some interesting theories as to why your bandwidth and loading times suck. Notice that blinking light on your modem that never stops? Use Wireshark and look at all of the stuff that your computer is doing without your knowledge or consent.
CONTROL! That is what you gave away when you chose Windows, Apple, or all of the myriad of consumer gadgets that you bought over the years. You did not choose to allow SMB, DCOM, PnP, or all the protocols that make computers talk to each other. You also did not choose the viruses that attack your computer that were made possible by these "Services".
You probably did choose to ignore those updates and sign up for Facebook. People are so predicable and easy to manipulate - it's just too easy. Now your computer is jamming out a crapload of SMTP traffic encouraging all of your friends and relatives to buy Viagra online, while you are considering a "Faster" Internet connection and a new computer.
Then again, if you are reading this on /. you are more likely to be using Linux, monitoring your processes and ports, not installing rootkits from rogue repositories and none of this actually applies to you. But you do know the other 99% that is responsible for this mess. Something must be done!
Send copies of this post to all of your contacts! Oh, and tell them to forward it to EVERYONE they know - or the soul of their beloved cat will spend an eternity in cat hell (also known as dog heaven).
All the demoscene programmers are about to be rich.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Do we really need 3D graphical desktops with moving wallpaper? Do we really need page-turning animations? Turn off all of the pretty crap in your system, and it works faster. (Plus I endorse the numerous others pointing out the drag of multiple layers of security.)
The more shelving you have, the more you use...