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earthgecko

Listed below are comments made by earthgecko between Monday, 7th September 2009 and Friday, 9th October 2009.

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Inspiration wanted: help us name the series #bbcnamestorm 3:33pm on 09 Oct 2009 #revolution
Let's experiment 3:32pm on 09 Oct 2009 Another hashtag experiment for you this one is a bit time limited:

#yourvote4nobel #Tim_Berners_Lee

After all there must be better than Obama.....
Inspiration wanted: help us name the series #bbcnamestorm 12:41pm on 06 Oct 2009 1. Digitalisation - Our new colonies
2. Netamorphisis
revolution round-up: week nine 12:40pm on 17 Sep 2009 @TaiwanChallenges ... you assume too much, from too little ;)

In the global village connected by accessible flights to anywhere, the blurring of nationalities and increased migration of people. Could it not be possible that I was solely influenced by it all.

I am a citizen of Earth.

Full stop.
revolution round-up: week nine 11:08am on 17 Sep 2009 Why does the form not save my formatting? Two spaces between periods...

This is a test. Two spaces entered after the period.

This is a test. One space entered after the period.

This is a test. Three spaces entered after a period.

All looks fine in the Preview, in fact it seems to automatically convert all the spaces 1, 2 and 3 to just 2 spaces after the period. Hence I shall have to post to discover if that changes. It will it always does and my punctuation and writing style looks flawed....

Please feel free to delete this post, it is an experiment. Or let me know where I am going wrong :)
revolution round-up: week nine 11:02am on 17 Sep 2009 As always, one's post would not be complete if it did not include a reference @A_PERSON_NOT_A_BOT. She is definitely ahead in the "if there was an award for participation category" :)

I do not know where she finds the time :)

"The impetus towards Cloud Computing by the likes of Google, IBM, HP, Apple etc. is also grounded in a desire to decrease energy consumption in running data servers in which the same customer's information is duplicated many times over...."

Well I think that the cloud computing movement is more of a systematic change that has developed independently of business plans. Virtualised infrastructure was not driven by some altruristic business plan, it was driven solely be a need to increase efficiency of existing infrastructure and use "more" of it's capacity. It has really taken off becuase of massive increase in the about of information we need process and store and our need to scale rapidly in today's world in all sectors, business, science, government, etc.

Virtualisation has been around for a while and clouds may seem like the silver bullet to the current TCO (total cost of ownership) within the current economic climate. However, them "seeming" to be more green and the flavour of the month is not looking at the whole picture.

The cloud providers have hit the "prefect" business model because they are so sticky. VCs are seeing this and seeing a lovely "charge for everything you do every hour" model re-emerging in the clouds. Customers are charged per GB to store our ever increasing data, per byte to access it and per CPU hour to analyse and work with it.

Not too mention the fact that currently there is no agnostic cloud, each is proprietary in it's own way, i.e = more stickiness. Although there are already in-roads into agnostic service layers between the customers and the clouds, RedHat's recent http://www.deltacould.org being an example.

When there are clouds there is often thunder and lightining as well and they sometimes create great storms. Clouds will see bigger failures, that have more impact. That silver lining will grey and darken, it is only a matter of time until we start seeing the true cost of cloud computing in the mainstream.

That is not to say they are not going to happen, just there is a lot of BS in the current marketing hype. There are a lot of complexities in cloud infrastructure that the marketing does not address.

Their main drive is scale, speed of upgrade and deployment. Everything has a cost, there is no "free".

Now that is covered off :)

My main point I wished to raise. It may not be clear as we have not seen any of the footage yet, but it does seem that the following seem to be core to this project:

1) It is all positive and rosy, depicting how much good the Internet does for people.
2) Unless it is focused at the "me" or "us" and physcological adverse affects the Web has on us.

I realise that this format is not going to change, but perhaps there should be some thought into where it is all going.

I love the Internet, I fell in love with it's ecology when I started working with it in 1996 and since then I cannot count the amount of hours that this love affair has lasted. It has changed my life profoundly. However, I definitely see it as one of the greatest threats to our civilisation today. Not because it is going to rewire us badly, but because it can fail and no one seems to be comtemplating this.

What if it all came crashing down tomorrow? How would we survive? Forget about your social networking and think about the provision of day to day social services and infrastructure.

There are a number of severe impacts this technological experiment could have on us in the future and they could a have a lot more impact than climate change and in a much shorter time frame.

I think that this series is lacking in this arena. However perhaps this is a topic for a different platform. I only hope that people start thinking about the very negative impacts that the Web (Internet) could have on our societies as a whole in the future, instead of us always being in the moment and trying to figure out the now.

Not that I am a doom-mongerer and this is not a black swan. It is only a black swan if we ignore these possibilities. Therefore it is a black swan.

I am sure I have said all this before :)
Recycling clicks to benefit humanity 7:09pm on 12 Sep 2009 @GaryGSCC it is true that usefulness tends to stick around and slowly rise up. So if you miss it and it is truly useful changes are if you need something similar you may encounter it later.

A while ago I said that Google should use reCaptcha as kudos were kudos is due. Actually everyone should use reCaptcha, however that would mean perhaps slightly less innovation would occur in spam prevention. Competition is good as it drives innovation. However, reCaptcha is a great project and tool, possibly one of the best captcha services around today.

The point here is that usefulness tends to float up :)
revolution round-up: week eight - team one flies out (Video) 09:51am on 12 Sep 2009 Regretably, I have been too busy lately to participate, however it is good to see that the experiment continues.

This a quick one (I will try).

Many people have been making suggestions of what the Team cover and who they should perhaps interview and most of those are interesting and relevant relating to the core theme. However, I would just like to point out that this is under an "open source" banner and therefore open to contributions, by definitive. Now we have all been contributing, but a few things I have seen lead me to think that perhaps we could be contributing more and differently. @TaiwanChallenges and @SheffTim you both seemed to feel that there was a somewhat top down approach and maybe not everthing was clear. @A_PERSON_NOT_A_BOT you mention Mark's mother and being able to get in touch and I mentioned Ian Pearson.

Then perhaps we should try and contribute some things from these people, in an open source and collabrative manner. The team is limited to what they can do, cover and by airtime. However, if there is to be an online archive of this "open source" production, then perhaps it would be good to create this additional content for the project.

@BBCDigRev, sorry guys but you did came up with this idea :) And yes it is seems to be covering some things that do not have rules yet. Well done. Just having to question what the rules relating to credits are and finding out... "well we are not sure...", is revolutionary in itself. It is novel and your goal has been achieved. However, as with all open source projects, they thrive on contributors contributing because they feel they need to.

Now I am going to leave the net and help my friend hire peddle boats on the beach. It was a bit slow for him yesterday... so I thought of marketing the idea of seeing the wonderful jellyfish of the Mediteranean. Now making a very old school cardboard sign, "ver las medusas hermosas del Mediterráneo" and walking up and down the beach for the morning ;) Well see how effective advertising is :)
Aleks Krotoski on the web rewiring us, our relationships, and our addictions (Video) 10:23am on 10 Sep 2009 A suggestion for an interesting interviewee:

Marissa Mayer
Vice President, Search Products & User Experience - Google

One of the original 20 Google employees, an MSc from Sanford in which she specialized in artificial intelligence.

Forbes magazine lists her as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world (the 50th), and the youngest woman ever to make the list.

When you see Google, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and iGoogle, you are pretty much seeing her work.

She is the frontend of Google. Yesterday they released a change on their search page, a larger search box. You could be forgiven for not noticing. Perhaps this is a good example of a woman's touch. We hardly notice changes and upgrades to Google's UIs. Where as in some many other areas upgrades can be painful and disruptive. Perhaps a woman's touch helps that to be a smoother process.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/now-s-u-p-e-r-sized.html

Just a mashup up of a few ideas. One Google's upgrade and two Ian Pearson's grumble about upgrades. http://www.futurizon.net/2009/09/why-future-will-never-be-perfect-thanks.html

Perhaps Ian Pearson would be an interesting person to speak to as well, one of the pioneers in professional futurology.
revolution round-up: week eight - team one flies out (Video) 8:03pm on 07 Sep 2009 @A_PERSON_NOT_A_BOT

For you return. I just could not help myself.

"Otherwise, if we keep using old tools and economic frameworks which haven't kept apace with technological advances we shouldn't be surprised if in 10 years time there's another recession and risk of stockmarket collapse and values eradication."

I was involved in a very small part of the development of an Environmental Education cirriculum for the schools system in South Africa in the early and mid 90's, from an informal and outdoor educational environment point of view. What stuck me then as an achilles heel to education, was the length of time it took to get any cirriculum through review and approval stages. At that time it was about four years and I left ecology and environmental education and ecology in 2000, but I would imagine not that much has changed. Although theories develop and propagate faster, it take them a longer time to make it into the systems. Currently our stupendous rate of development and innovation, is far outpacing our system. If we are honest about it, we no longer control our truly global systems (if we ever did). However in the not too distant past the evolution of all human systems (barring conflict and disruption) was in the most part, slow that that which we experience today. Our rapid advancement although has great benefits comes at a price too. As soon as we think up a valid theory the much more interconnectted systems will evolve and as you pointed out, make all theory incomplete, in the sense that it does not incorporate all the variables. We could nitpick and say that this has always been true, however today, as with everything else, the changes are orders of magnitude greater and more complex.

Ironically, us making the systems so complex has in essence also led us to lose grasp and control on the systems. They are evolving faster than we can evaluate. I would challenge any group of people in the world to be able to model our social systems today. And even if they did, they would be wrong in a few months. This is indeed something new in our social experience and yet we do not seem to have excepted this fairly inevitable fact. Not that we should stop trying to understand it, heavens no. We must indeed try and understand it, however with no controls on innovation and development, we are inevitably on this path of chaos (simply becuase we do not understand it), because we will not and can not hinder innovation and progress. I do not say that there is an answer to this, just that it is. The blind leading the blind, into the dark or light, we have not quite figured which one yet, however to the blind it may be irrelevant, but one would have to think that sometimes blind people can tell the difference, just by the "feel".

I must say, I feel like we are heading into the dark, in the light we may be now. And that worries me, this is why I think. I unfortunately seem to have the EIA (Environment Impact Assessment) process in my blood which makes me question everything. Interesting that, we were at almost the last straw, when we developed an Environmental Impact Assessment process to try to manage the impacts of our Industrial and Commercial Ages, at the advent of the Technological Age. Yet we have failed to apply that wisdom to the Technological Age... maybe the saying is right, we never learn from history. However, just like our theories, I think that the EIA process would not be up to the task of current technological and scientific developments, it is all fair too rapid. That is probably why it never made the step.

I often smile and think of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" and I am glad I do.

Here is a thought. Sysadmins should not delete logs as they are the history of the Internet and will one day be wanted to map the history of the Internet as completely as possible....

Back to auto DB failover....

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