Keith

Member since: Jul 20th, 2005

Keith's Latest Comments

Blog Activity

Blog	# of Comments
Engadget	1 Comment
Download Squad	8 Comments

Recent Comments:

Fierr adds a more helpful "server not found" page to Firefox (Download Squad)

Oct 12th 2010 4:17AM +1 for Resurrect Pages -- a much more useful variation on this theme.

First zero day exploit hits Firefox 3.6 (Download Squad)

Feb 22nd 2010 6:00PM There are concerns posted to the Secunia web site that this may be a hoax. It isn't clear that anybody has been able to reproduce it yet.

Washington state Rep. says no to data center, suggests Amazon S3 (Download Squad)

Jul 24th 2009 4:33PM Um....I'm very embarrassed to have to make a small correction to my disclaimer: Rep. Carlyle DOES represent my district. D'oh!

I swear I didn't know that when I wrote my (rather lengthy) reply, though. :-)

Washington state Rep. says no to data center, suggests Amazon S3 (Download Squad)

Jul 24th 2009 4:29PM Grant - thank you for this posting, if only because I hadn't heard about it, and I'm glad that I did. This is definitely something I will follow with interesting.

I agree with many of the commenters that you seem to be blowing this out of proportion. To answer your response to Rep. Carlyle, why change direction now, it's because the technology has quickly matured, that's why, far beyond where it has been the past few years. To continue headstrong on a project plan that is dated and potentially reflects expenses that can be reduced given new resources and capabilities is fiscally and technologically irresponsible.

Taking on a GRADUAL strategy of EXPANDING current infrastructure, then eventually moving older infrastructure, into the cloud makes perfect sense today -- for big Fortune 500 companies, and for smaller governments. I don't see anything in here that states Washington's desire to move everything, whole-hog, into a new data center or into someone's cloud. Doing it a little at a time is perfectly sensible, and the smart thing to do, perhaps with an end goal of dropping all existing and "outdated" systems in...oh, let's say five years. Your posting went a little too far and suggested the entire idea was ludicrous. I believe, from your comments, you now didn't mean to go quite so far in that direction.

I think Rep. Carlyle pinpointed the issue, which is that the plan was probably not fully thought out with this possibility in mind, and if it really is that old, this is probable true. I also think you may be misled into how government data centers work. The vast majority of IT roles in state government are subcontracted out to non-government workers. A relative of mine that works for the California government (when they are, in fact, working) stated about 90% of their IT is billed out, and at extremely profitable rates (partly because few companies want to take the risk of being paid in IOUs, but alas, I digress).

So does it really matter whether you're relying on non-government workers to manage physical hardware, vs. virtual hardware? I would say no. It is certainly POSSIBLE, perhaps even LIKELY, that adopting cloud computing resources for SOME aspects of the state government will save the state money and allow resources to be diverted to more important areas.

Lastly, I want to make one side note that nobody else seems to have explicitly mentioned. It would be foolish not to see this at least SOME political motivation behind this, as the three biggest commercial cloud vendors -- all of which were named here -- are either based in, or have a strong presence in, the state of Washington. Now, Amazon is far and away the market leader, so they should be mentioned in any discussion of cloud computing, and Google is a strong contender, so I'm not crying "foul" or anything here. But surely the fine Representative has also considered that some of the state's financial investment in these companies will find its way back to the state coffers in the form of taxes and jobs.

Disclaimer: I, myself, am a resident of the state of Washington, although my opinions are based more on my experience in the software industry (none of the companies listed) than personal impact. Rep. Carlyle does not represent my district.

Cheers.

Windows Live Local Virtual Earth (Download Squad)

Mar 1st 2006 5:19PM Let me see if I can understand this name, here.

It's local, but only if you live in Seattle or San Francisco. But it's the whole earth...if you consider one of those two cities to be your entire world. And it's live, even though the satellite images are a few years old. And it's Windows...but it's on the web.

I wonder what made Microsoft's marketing folks decide against OS-free Outdated Virtual Two Cities.

Petabyte disks coming in 5 years? (Engadget)

Feb 20th 2006 12:40PM Hey, guys, try to keep your measurements consistent.

If you're using 2^n notation, then 1 PB = 1024 TB (not 1.2 PB). If you're using marketing notation (1 KB = 1000 instead of 1024), then 1.2 PB = 1200 TB. Your formula is mixing apples and oranges.

skonofvulcan: after the Petabyte comes Exabyte, which a well-known tape backup company took for its name. And after that, there's Zettabyte (which Sun is using in the name of their new filesystem, albeit mispelled), and Yottabyte. Really. http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/units.htm#prefix

To tell you the truth, though, I suspect storage space will start to level off soon, in the Petabyte range. Considering that all of the known digital data in the universe right now is only a handful of Petabytes, I doubt we'll ever see ZB disks.

Then again, HD porn does take up a lot more space. :-P

New version of iTunes tells Apple your listening habits (Download Squad)

Jan 11th 2006 5:24PM Has anyone verified that simply turning off the Mini-Store stops sending them your listening information?

Folder Size solves a big Windows annoyance (Download Squad)

Aug 24th 2005 2:49AM Very handy, though it sorts the values alphabetically, rather than numerically, at least on my Win2K system. (Tried emailing the author, but the mail bounced.) I've been using Berger Laurent's Folder Size Shell Extension for many years (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_download.asp?fid=15304&fileidx=1) -- this is an excellent complement to that (will be even better if the sorting can be made to work -- hopefully it's not just me). Thanks!