Category Archives: Energy

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

Do we know how to make software?

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Jeremiah asked and I did my best to answer without getting wrapped around the axle because he bragged to me about buying a big American car during the fuel price rise.

Here is my response:

Well, maybe you knew I couldn’t resist commenting on your automobile engine analogy. I’m still laughing from the time last year you told me ‘when gas prices went up, prices on Suburbans went way down, so I bought one to drive my five miles to work’. Clearly we still don’t see eye-to-eye on managing risk.

You say “the United States ruled the automotive industry; an industry we created from a machine we invented”. For brevity sake I’ll concede the industry was largely built by the US (not created) but I can’t let you assert that the machine was invented in the US. The engines of steam, electric, internal combustion, diesel; all were invented outside the US in the 1800s. I mean by comparison the US at that time was stuck in a rut over whether slavery was a viable engine to power its industrial production!

Yeah, ok, I know Ford gets lots of credit for ramping up his assembly line and blowing a whistle at his workers, but even that was an application of British automation developed and built 100 years earlier to support the quality and speed necessary for their military during the Napoleonic wars. Imagine watching a steam engine-driven system in 1808 that produced over 100 thousand blocks (pulleys) for the Navy. The Block Mills of Portsmouth proved that with an assembly line and machines just 10 men were made able to work as quickly as 100.

More to the point you say “The trend is that we (in the U.S.) invent something new, create an industry around it.” That seems to skip right past the fact that most industries in the US were started by European immigrants based on European ideas in place for many years before the US copied them. From Budweiser to Champagne, Cheddar Cheese to Chandeliers, what the US has really done well is bring down the price of goods and make them more accessible. In fact, that was an obsessive element to the Nixon administration that success would be determined entirely by the availability of goods. A steak on every table. And it’s true our shelves were stocked our pantries full while others in the world were still paying more for fewer goods, but somewhere in that heady explosion of prosperity out of the 1900s the US lost its sight of quality as a measure of success in “efficiency”.

You bought that Suburban, you said, because you perceived value, right? Did you feel like you were buying innovation? Quality? Maybe a trip to a car show to look at the latest models (all outside the US now) will change your perspective:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/automobiles/as-frankfurt-show-opens-industrys-balance-shifts.html

“If it seems as though German manufacturers are on the leading edge of new, gas-free urban transportation solutions, it is due in no small part to the European Union’s strict pollution controls. ‘Today, all the innovation in the auto industry is coming from the German manufacturers…A little from Japan. None from the U.S.’”

NONE from the US. Our amazing ideas of “efficiency” apparently were not so.

I mean a four-door all-wheel-drive station wagon made by Volvo is expected to be available next year that delivers better horsepower than a Ferrari 308 and a Camaro Z28, yet will also provide 100 mpg. That should have been an American made vehicle. No reason that it could not have been built and sold here. We have the weather, the open roads, the crap to haul around. Oh, no reason except people were for some reason still buying Suburbans. You know I could go on about this forever and someday I MAY convert you to a highly resilient low-risk source of energy for transportation, even if I have to do it on the mat…but I’ll try to get back to the point of your post.

I think your definition of software may be too narrow. You say “software must be built by highly skilled people, whose skills are not trained up quickly or easily.” But isn’t that the very opposite of what is causing so many problems in code? Code is being written by many more people less trained and using toolkits. It is based on a massive rise in the amount of shared/borrowed/stolen code available. I see this most in recent cases of malware mutations — so many more people developing (or at least modifying) more code more rapidly than ever. The mobile app stores are another example. Anyone with a cheap personal computer and a few online tutorials now is in place to build and release software to hundreds of millions of users. Compare that to the training, samples and platforms of twenty years ago. Software is just flying off the wires now and it’s going to get even faster as more remote areas are connected.

You say “those who profit by the billions from creating software, like Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe seem unable to ship multi-million line software projects on a deadline”. You’re looking at the wrong sources of innovation. That’s like criticizing the British Navy for deploying ships late (a critique as old as the British Navy — special note to the Falklands War deployment, which led to the development of ITIL). While the Navy isn’t going away and will continue to find ways to automate production, they are solving massively complex problems. The future of software build efficiency is less about the big guys just like ship building an ocean-going vessel for the masses is at a much smaller scale today. The lessons learned from the big expensive mistakes are applied faster, better and at smaller scales of automation.

So, I’d be one to argue yes, we know how not only to make software but hundreds of millions of people know how to save time by learning from the innovation of others — sharing knowledge and tools to reduce build times. I’d be happy to go more into the myths of commodity and innovation. I also would like to clarify trends and real numbers but I’ll leave those for another day (e.g. Today’s fastest growing telecom company? Skype is barely over 500 mil while India mobile is soon expected to have 1.2 billion subscribers). Alas, it’s time now to go make some more fuel for my engine.

Update: My comment has not yet been approved, so I’m glad I made a copy here just in case. I also have to point out there is some sweet irony; a post about efficiency and automation is taking a long time to approve a comment. Maybe it’s a manual process. :)

Energy, Security

Warning Labels for Coal Power Plants

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Illustration by Tom Toles.

Warning Labels for Coal

He forgot serious illness such as cancer, birth defects…

…huge rates of coal consumption were a factor behind an increase in cancer and birth defects as well as non-specific and chronic nervous, immune and respiratory illnesses.

Coal-fired power plants contribute three quarters of China’s total electricity needs, but also around 70 percent of energy sector air pollution.

The government has been studying how to reduce its toxic effects, but “clean coal” remains a misnomer, said the group’s China campaign manager, Yang Ailun.

“There are many coal power plants saying they are now ‘clean’ but there are a lot of misunderstandings — coal creates pollution and clean coal is impossible,” she said.

Studies of the effect of coal used in homes have a similar warning:

[Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley] said the results of the study do provide further evidence that coal causes significant health problems and should be replaced by other fuel sources. “Coal can’t be burned cleanly…it should be banned from all household use,” he told Reuters Health.

Energy, Poetry, Security

Cloud Security Different, Says Okta

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Okta has announced their series B financing today. It includes a recap of security in the cloud that reveals how they pitched it for money, and why it’s different:

The concepts of security, single sign on, user management and auditing are not new. They’ve existed since the first user logged into the first mainframe. Why is the problem different or the potential solutions better in the cloud?

  • There are more services and applications available to users within an enterprise than ever before.
  • The cost to build, deliver and sell the services is dramatically lower leading to more services available in the market. Literally, thousands of new SaaS start ups have spawned in the last 10 years.
  • Companies aren’t limited by their ability to build infrastructure to deploy and maintain as many applications as they want.
  • In addition to more services, there are more users. Each generation of technology, from mainframe to mini computers to client server to cloud has seen a 10X increase in the number of users. And each of these users is accessing the services in a variety of ways. Gone are the days of one desktop per employee. There are desktops, laptops, virtual desktops, tables and smart phones
  • Finally, companies need to support a mobile workforce. They can no longer rely on securing the physical network perimeter with a firewall and selectively permitting VPN access. They need to have the same kind of rich authentication, authorization, auditing and logging for all their critical services.

Call me anal, or haiku-obsessed, but it looks like that lists boils down into the following:

  • More services are available
  • It costs less to build services
  • Infrastructure costs are lower
  • There are more users
  • Users are mobile

Wait, let me try that again.

  • More services now
  • Can’t stop the mobile access
  • Deployed for less dough

Coming up with definitions and finding differences is fun. Who doesn’t love isomorphism? When is a muscle-car a muscle-car? I mean if a Toyota Camry races a Pontiac GTO and wins, do we still get to call the GTO a muscle-car or does the Camry get the title? More to the point, if we accept the Okta explanation, clouds do not seem far ahead of traditional IT departments. What really stops on-premise IT from providing more services at less cost to more users who are mobile?

But there’s more to a muscle-car than just measuring horsepower (the 268 horsepower Camry LE is still a second slower than a goat BTW. Efficiency is another story). Okta could have highlighted the new cloud use-cases and security issues from cloud behavior.

Many more roles/identities with far more relationships and yet less permanence are cloud specific. Tracking identities and meta-directory data when it’s not clear who exactly should be the one to track identities, now that’s a different problem than on premise where accounts are doled out more carefully by a clear authority.

They also could have highlighted the tall and wide shadows of data created and then “destroyed” when accounts and services are spun up and down on short cycles because “owners” come and go. You thought keeping track of hires and terminations was hard before, try managing it for systems you can’t see or touch and only get a utilization report from. That’s another difference, a sort of opaqueness to their hidden services with their secretive SRE (service reliability engineers), which all may be completely untrustworthy.

Maybe it’s all coming in their next installment and I’m just jumping the gun.

For now, congrats go to them for round B. Perhaps it’s best to end by saying they are in a great market space — cloud providers clearly need identity management solutions like a GTO needs seat belts, air bags and a catalytic converter to control behavior-induced risk.