Facts about the earth as they relate to the Internet…

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.

Earth’s Circumference at the Equator is 24,901.55 miles

So, that means you can communicate between the other side of the world (there and back) in 0.133 of a second… or there and back 7 complete times with room for one more trip back (7.5 times around the globe in one second).

Wow. That’s why call centers and outsourcing IT jobs to India make sense if the fiber is in place to allow these “speed of light” transmissions to occur.

There are some devices that handle the bits along the way and slow down the light but I can ping Australia and see the echo return in 0.2 seconds so the slow down is slight. You could do this too… in fact you do when you hit a site in the au domain.

Human Population of the Earth: 6,610,000,000 (6.61 billion) as of Aug. 2007

Internet addresses allow for 2 to the 32th power unique possibilities:  4.2 billion internet addresses. So, One Laptop Per Child will potentially prevent 1 iPhone Per Child from coming to fruition… the good news is that IP addresses are upgrading to Ip version 6 with enough addresses for everyone to get a million personal addresses… we’ll just need to update the OLPC devices and iPhones and every device in between. It’s good to sell internet devices. The market effect is in full force.

World Population Growth: 1.14% – 2006 estimate (this means at the current rate of growth, the earth’s population will double in 61.4 years) That’s 6 more bits needed in the big IP addressing scheme. It has room.

Countries of the World: 194… we typically lable countries with 2 letter domains. That creates 26 * 26 combinations many of which are just plain odd: xx, pu, et, al.

Earth’s Circumference at the Equator: 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 km)

Highest Elevation on Earth – Mt. Everest, Asia: 29,035 feet (8850 m) Take extra batteries. There’s no power there and the wifi is spotty at best.

Lowest Elevation on Land – Dead Sea: 1369 feet below sea level (417.27 m) It’s OK. It’s dry.

Deepest Point in the Ocean – Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench, Western Pacific Ocean: 35,840 feet (10924 m). No ISP’s service this region. No humans can survive. Send robots.

Highest Temperature Recorded: 135.8°F – Al Aziziyah, Libya, September 13, 1922 (57.7°C) Ouch. Bad for laptops with hot chips.

Lowest Temperature Recorded: -128.5°F – Vostok, Antarctica, July 21, 1983 (-89.2°C) Good for laptops. Bad for people.

Water vs. Land: 70.8% Water, 29.2% Land – Satellite Internet is a great advantage over wired or even wifi systems.

Age of the Earth: 4.5 to 4.6 billion year. Age of the internet: 20+ years.

Rotation on Axis: 23 hours and 56 minutes and 04.09053 seconds. But, it takes an additional four minutes for the earth to revolve to the same position as the day before relative to the sun (i.e. 24 hours). Too slow to change any bits in flight.

Revolution around Sun: 365.2425 days

Chemical Composition of the Earth: 34.6% Iron, 29.5% Oxygen, 15.2% Silicon, 12.7% Magnesium, 2.4% Nickel, 1.9% Sulfur, and 0.05% Titanium… oh, oh. only 12% silicon and Titanium laptops will be highly prized when every child has their plastic clamshell.

This blog was brought to you by a database needing to be expanded. It should have taken 30 minutes and it took 2 hours. So… I went and figured.

Physics and media: they go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Addicting.

Joyent, ZFS and the All Disk DR Plan

I love Joyent: they are the most open hosting company I have found. I also have a fascination for a company that uses Solaris, ZFS, OpenSolaris, Rails, F5 and DTrace.

Following Joyent’s products, technologies and even employee activities is a great way to see how to scale complex services using bleeding edge approaches. They have a podcast and talk about their practices, discoveries and product opinions.

Joyent had a cleverly crafted storage service using a Sun X4500 “Thumper” system running OpenSolaris. A Thumper can provide 24 Terabytes of storage and ZFS has some great ideas for reducing the complexity of Storage Management… For months the service was rock solid. But on Jan 12 they were hit by what their CEO termed a “perfect wave”… an event I would call a “Black Swan”. An unplanned event that was totally unexpected.

When trying to move a ZFS pool of storage using the command “zpool import” the sys admin staff experienced a system panic…. the ZFS software halted to avoid data corruption.

They investigated the OpenSolaris forum and discovered that the panic matched a big that was fixed. Great, there’s a fix. But to implement the “patch” they needed to reinstall OpenSolaris with a newer version. Oh, oh. They have Terabytes of customer data and they need to re-build the whole system (OS, ZFS, etc) to fix the bug.

The secret of system availability if to always have at least two of any critical component: in this case they needed a second Thumper… They have one so they needed to:

1. Copy the files from production Thumper to back-up Thumper. Several terbytes of data to be transferred across the ethernet. 15 hours per terabyte. Tic-tick-tick.
2. Then re-build Thumper #1.
3. Copy the files back to the patchd Thumper 5 hours, yada, yada.
4. Then patch the backup Thumper? Probably.

Anyway. I see many commercial accounts being sold and buying into a totally disk-based architecture. Typically, using new software or systems that implement a “Virtual Tape Library”. All the data ends up on disks and doesn’t get sent off-site. The benefits are reduced costs and improved data transfers between devices. You just need to be sure you have a lot of disks to prevent any loss of data and you need to be sure the software involved is rock solid.

I predict the hot new phrase for the year just may end up being:

Black Swan: a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.

No one can afford to plan for the unexpected. It’s always a statistical effort to move towards a perfect plan. And the Black Swan is that which you cannot foresee. That which you think you’ve already accounted for: like the one person that has the skills to fix the problem and didn’t document anything and gets hit by the bus just before the system did something it never did before.

For Joyent that person is probably Ben Rockwood.

Ben announces today that he has joined the OpenSolaris Governing Board. Hopefully, he’ll help OpenSolaris improve, scale and become more widely adopted. It would certainly make my life easier. Learning new systems is harder as you get past a certain age: not that I don’t try to learn it’s just that I seem to have storage bugs. Go figure.

I Twit away the hours…

Twitter: A wise person said “Take any Unix command line tool and re-design it as a web service and you’ve got a Web 2.0 business plan.” wall?

How long would I have to Google to find the wise person’s name?

60 seconds: Russell Beattie (in his own words).

Remember the senator talking about the “internets” as a series of “tubes”? Too bad didn’t say “pipes”. More connecting options with pipes. Yahoo said “Pipes”.

More Comment Work…

I get passionate about the issues surrounding Bubblegate. I saw the SF Weekly Column and had to comment:

For more legal analysis of Bubblegate see:

http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2007/12/20/here-comes-another-takedown.html

“Is the momentary use of Hartwell’s photo an unfair substitute for something she should have had the right to license, or a fair use the law should license irrespective of the copyright holder’s wishes? I’d be inclined to find the use fair, as transformative commentary, but I couldn’t guarantee that a court would agree with me.”

http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/ip_rights_and_wrongs/index.html

“the Video is probably fair and not illegal.”

And some poliicy advice from the EFF re: Video and Fair Use:

http://www.eff.org/issues/ip-and-free-speech/fair-use-principles-usergen

I respect Lane’s right to protect her commercial interests but in this case there is a strong argument for “Fair Use” as a protection. Issuing a DMCA harms the audience since the work of an artist of often controlled and censored without legal protections.

There are two artists in conflict in this case. A general discussion of IP protections should also include some discussion of the rights for re-use of IP content in derivative works… especially non-commercial video’s that comment on our culture using cultural artifacts like Lane’s happy smiling Web 2.0 “gossip journalist”. If you can’t see the satire in the work then you’re missing the intent of the art it represents. It can’t be claimed as any strong commercial attempt to cash in on Lane’s IP. Th re-edited video without her image is 99.9% the same work.

I’m glad you’re hosting a serious discussion of the conflict and I hope everyone is moved a bit towards demanding that free speech be protected against over reaching claims of IP infringement because the real villans in that regard are the huge media conglomerates that won’t even pay the creative talent for a cut of the digital download action… without a major battle.

Embedding a published image in a freely distributed video doesn’t meet my definition of “theft”. I hope the EFF representative makes that argument, gently, put persuasively.

Freedom of speech and protecting the right of re-use for derivative art is important. Most popular culture is a re-mix or derivative application of prior art. If culture is owned the artist is prevented from creating work that comments on culture.

I hope the EFF spokesperson at the public forum is good at explaining the “chilling effect” of Lane’s DMCA action without maing it sound like she needs to loose control of all her images. That’s just not true. She simply needs to have a better sense of when her rights are really violated illegally for a profit motive and not for a derivative work of art that doesn’t impact her commercially.

Frustrating issues but worht discussing… especially now that the whole culture is converting to digital artifacts that can be distributed, re-mixed and re-used any anyone with a home computer. Art and culture are even enabled by simple “toys” like the OLPC XO-1. The world of digital ownership needs new guidelines for empowering expression.

EFF on Fair Use

Read this too:

http://www.eff.org/issues/ip-and-free-speech/fair-use-principles-usergen

“Content owners should, as a general matter, avoid issuing DMCA or other informal takedown notices for uses of their content that constitute fair uses or that are noncommercial, creative, and transformative in nature.”

This is a principle of free speech in a free society. It’s NOT theft… it’s art, culture and the functioning of an open society.

Lane should be ashamed of taking down valid art for misguided commercial bias.

scripting…

A Comment Re: Scoble Being Erased

Scoble got “erased” by FaceBook. I commented on his blog:

Some people think I’m an asshat for blogging anonymously… but I think too many invest far too much and risk too much on-line.

I know you’ve made a business out of your work on-line and that’s OK but for many the risks exceed the reward.

Text can make as many “enemies” as it can “friends”… and neither of those roles actually map to a real world relationship. It’s all virtual and we’re all in a walled garden w.r.t. on-line words.

Real people don’t obsess like a few of us do with these issues.

You were not erased. You were “managed”. You signed up to be managed. IMHO.

I wanted an XO for Xmas…

Everyone that put down money was getting their One Laptop Per Child XO devices.

I wanted one but couldn’t justify the Holiday money spent on an adult toy.  Especially since college tuition  fees, room and board and other expenses are exceeding our income.  It;s been a negative economy here for 4 years.

But, still I wanted to play.

And I did!

I downloaded the XO-1 LiveCD and booted it into a VMware session on my laptop. I got to play and  can say that the virtual experience is worth testing for any serious geek.  The only thing more fun would be a classroom full of them with kids discovering everything the XO can interact with… the web, other XO’s, RSS and several media and computer tools made with kids in mind and NOT people trained by years of PC use and expectations. A programmable, extendable, networked, media playing toy.

Someday, I’ll get the real deal but until then I’m a virtual XO kid.

Getting Into Twitter…

Can’t get out.

Ownership in the Digital Age

Digital products are always approximations of reality. They get as close enough to reality to be acceptable for the user.

The “photographs” that are being “stolen” are not really photographs at all. They are digital approximations (so many bits wide by so many bits tall with so many bits used to pick a color).

And even worse they use more approximation techniques to reduce the overall size of the file.

We’re not passing around exact copies of someone’s art. We’re passing around digital estimations of that art.

Lane Hartwell still has the original photo she took of Owen Thomas. What we can easily copy and pass about is the “jpeg” file that

Wired magazine is offering for use with our browsers.

Most of the music we are listening to is a quality reduced file approximating the original sound recording. The approximation is suitable for most of our uses to avoid dragging around good sound reproduction systems.

Life is increasingly full of such compromises as art, media, news and even social interaction shift to a digital interface.

The most profound aspect of the digital revolution is the freeing of the artist to create and share work without any of the usual gatekeepers that we’re required to distribute their work before.

This freedom of creation allowed the Richter Scales to make a CD and make a music video from one of the songs and reach an audience of millions without any complex business or financial transactions.

But they learned that there are years of “copyright” laws designed to protect anyone from duplicating art. And their work was removed from distribution and they re-mixed it without out those infringing bits.

But the fact exists that we all make copies of those very same bits every time we visit:

http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/geeks_and_suits.html

Lane still has the original “raw” image and we can see (and save by the way) the digital approximation of her cameras output.

http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/11/owen_thomas_2.jpg

Music, art, photography, film are all easy to create digitally. And easy to modify. Some think this creates the culture of the amateur.

If an amateur is someone that creates work out of love of the act and shares the results: then I hope they are right.

We should all do something for the love of it and share it with the world.

And a small, very talented or lucky, portion of us will be lucky enough to get paid for that work.

I’d be very happy if they could do that without using lawyers to attack or censure amateurs.