ZDNet: Sun Eyes Supercomputing Glory

What's better than a computer that can do a petaflop? A computer that can do 2 petaflops.

Sun recently revealed its Constellation supercomputer, and the system will contain 3,456 ports on it's "Magnum" switch.

Sun's Magnum switch, based around the InfiniBand high-speed networking technology, is a honker. The largest InfiniBand switches on the market contain 288 ports, according to Bechtolsheim, and require leaf, or helper switches. (TACC's system will have two of the Sun switches.)

The density of ports, and the large number of them, creates a cascading effect in performance and pricing, he asserted. By deploying Magnum, which sports a "fat tree" style architecture where servers branch out from the trunk of switches, customers will need to install far fewer switches when building large computers, he said. Fewer networking boxes mean about one-sixth the number of cables.

"The cables cost more than the silicon" when it comes to the networking systems inside supercomputer clusters, he said.

And we've got quite a few odd stories dealing with networking today:

ComputerWorld: Shark Tank

Basically a tech-support horror stories blog, here's a few particular stories we think our readers might be interested in.

Soccer vs. The Internet
A barrage of traffic
Friday's Traffic Problems

ComputerWorld: IT ad favorites throughout the years

"80 Mbytes of storage for less than $12,000!" boasts one. In another, a woman in hot pants touts a modem that's, yes, "maybe even sexy." There's even a campy B movie celebrity hawking development software.

It was too much fun not to share. So after one of the best meetings ever, we bring you 10 of our favorite, most entertaining IT ads from four decades of Computerworld.

Worse Than Failure: Which Cable?

With miles of cables wired to thousands of jacks in a typical office building, an unlabeled block of cable is just as good as a dead one. Fortunately, the fine folks at Patrick McGoohan's office made sure to carefully label everything …

By Brian Boyko

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister. Gordon Brown, formerly the chancellor of the Exchequer, became prime minister when Tony Blair stepped down this Wednesday.

Tony Blair had been prime minister since May 1997. That's just slightly over ten years in office. The United Kingdom has had one head of government for the past 10 years. That's about par for political change.

Technological change, on the other hand…

1997 wasn't when the Internet first started getting adopted by the mainstream, but it was still early in the formative years of the "ubiquitous Internet." Back in 1997, most of us were still on dialup. The term "blog" hadn't been invented, online gaming consisted of dialing directly into your friend's modem to play some Doom, and the world had never heard of "kitty pidgin," "all your base," "Leeroy Jenkins," or "the Star Wars Kid." An ISDN line was considered "incredibly fast."

In 1997, for example, a time which predates the original Napster, the record companies were still going strong and the RIAA was not an infamous household name. Today, in Rolling Stone, an article published recently states outright that the major record labels are terminal cases, and that there's nothing at this point the record labels can do in order to recover - mostly because the record industry was unable to adapt to the changes of digital distribution.

There have been amazing changes in Internet and Network technology since Blair first took office from the day he left.

Netscape was separate from AOL until 1999, and AOL was separate from Time Warner until 2000 - an Internet service merged with one of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerates. In 2001, the European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses over the Internet. The U.S. Department of Commerce privatized DNS in 1998. A list of MI6 agents were released on a UK Web site in 1999.

The Y2K Problem. IPv6. SETI@Home and distributed/grid computing. Flash Mobs. Even The Guardian launched, in 2005, a "Blair Watch Project," asking citizen-journalists to follow Blair, blogging and capturing his every move in mobile phone cameras, coordinated through the Internet.

In 1997, according to Hobbes' Internet Timeline, there were 19.5 million hosts connected to the Internet. In July 2006, there were 439 million hosts. We have had revolution after revolution in the Internet sphere while politics remained more or less the same. Change in politics occurs slowly. Change in technology occurs quickly.

This is particularly important to realize that the elected officials, who change ever so rarely, are charged with regulating and stimulating the growth of this technology.

While some political candidates have turned to blogging and YouTube in recent elections, I'm not entirely sure that the candidates I've seen have really understood the technology in question. Often it seems that blogs are used for smear campaigns (when they can be incredibly easily fact-checked) or used for fundraising. Even in the rare times that they may be used to announce a policy platform or explain a candidate's opinions about a news event, they're often used for broadcasting a particular announcement, much like the "traditional" media, and it's not often used for communication - and this is something that affects almost all candidates of almost all democratic nations of almost all political party and affiliation.

Allowing people to vote on your campaign song through YouTube does not a participatory democracy make.

And while it is outside our realm of expertise to suggest any particular policy, and it is certainly beyond our license as a technical publication to favor any candidates, the resignation of Blair and the retrospective over the past ten years leads us to conclude this: The people elected to office today will be determining policy for technology that we have yet to dream about. Yet, the only thing most people - and most geeks - really know for sure about the political stances of the current candidates on developments in technology is that, for some reason, Democratic candidates tend to use Linux and FreeBSD for Web hosts, while Republicans tend to use Windows Server 2003. Why? Who knows? Who really cares?

At any rate one thing is clear: We have reached a tipping point where it seems that politics simply cannot keep pace with the change in technology. The only thing that can really be done is to guide the officials we elect, through gentle but firm public pressure, to make the right decisions for the people when these issues - unknown of today - show up in the policies of tomorrow.

Apple: Rate plans for iPhone

Apple has released the rate plans for iPhone - the plans start at $59.99 per month and include unlimited Email/Web data access. Existing AT&T customers can keep their current plans and add Web/Email to the iPhone for $20 more each month.

So, to recap:

iPhone: $499 or $599.
Monthly fees: $59.99-$99.99
Having a cellphone programmed to "wuv you.": Priceless.

NetworkWorld: Can cell phones be hacked? Security experts say yes, but it's not that easy.

One of the concerns about the iPhone is that its internet connectivity could make it as vulnerable to virii as any other (Macintosh based?) computer out there. If this seems unlikely to you - well, you're probably right.

Security experts from IBM, McAfee and Symantec all agree that cell phones of virtually any type can be broken into and maliciously controlled, though it takes a high degree of sophistication to do it.

"It's definitely possible but still something that is limited to a very sophisticated attacker," says Neel Mehta, team lead in the advanced research group at IBM's Internet Security Systems Division.

The concern was brought up by the Kuykendall family, who believes that people are spying on them through hacked cell phone cameras. Not that I doubt their story, but if you wanted to spy on someone, which is easier and less costly: developing a malicious application designed to infect the specific hardware of the specific phones that the target uses, or taking the time and money developing said program and just hiring a private eye?

PC Magazine's John Dvorak: Shut up about the iPhone already!

Sorry, John.

(Look for John Dvorak's next column, entitled: "That's okay, Brian, but don't let it happen again.")

You talk football and the conversation switches to the iPhone. You talk baseball and the conversation switches to the iPhone. TV, movies, stock market, community theater-it all switches to the iPhone. "Yes, what about them Raiders? Many players will buy the iPhone, I bet. Yes. I think so. They will. They will have to, I think."

I swear (though I have unsuccessfully tried taking pictures to prove it), when you look at these people closely, there is a spinning disk in each pupil that you can barely make out. It's like a spiral that turns and turns toward infinity. And, I can assure you, a hard slap won't help.

E-Week: Computer Failure Grounds United Flights

CHICAGO, June 20 (Reuters)-A two-hour computer outage affecting dispatch operations at United Airlines, a unit of UAL Corp., delayed nearly 270 domestic and international flights by the No. 2 U.S. carrier on Wednesday.

Twenty-four domestic flights were also canceled as a result of the systemwide failure, the airline said in a statement. United had not determined what caused the problem.

It's that last line that gets me - "United had not determined what caused the problem." To me, if your company is losing millions of dollars in revenue because of 270 delayed flights, it might be a good idea to determine the cause of the problem as quickly as possible.

Time: Cyber Attack Hits Pentagon

(WASHINGTON)-The Defense Department took as many as 1,500 computers off line because of a cyber attack, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Cyber attack? EVERYBODY PANIC!

Gates said the Pentagon sees hundreds of attacks a day, and this one had no adverse impact on department operations….

Hundreds of attacks every day? EVERYBODY PANIC!

During a press briefing Gates said: "We obviously have redundant systems in place. ... There will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences."

Personal inconveniences? EVERYBODY PANIC!

He said the Pentagon shut the computers down when a penetration of the system was detected, and the cause is still being investigated. When asked if his own e-mail account was affected, Gates said: "I don't do e-mail. I'm a very low-tech person."

Defense secretary of the U.S. secretly Amish? EVERYBODY PANIC!

By Brian Boyko

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of an academic paper not yet published, doing a comparative content analysis of the "Daily Show" and the network nightly news broadcasts. Not surprisingly, the "Daily Show" actually conveyed a similar amount of substantive material - that is, information without jokes - as the network news broadcasts.

But in that paper, written by Prof. Julia R. Fox, Glory Koloen, and Volkan Sahin at Indiana University-Bloomington, there was a passage that caught my attention.

"Although the two sources were found here to be equally substantive, are they equally informative? There is debate among scholars as to how well soft news shows, in which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is categorized by some (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006), can inform their viewers…. the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found younger viewers of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart answered more political questions correctly than respondents who did not watch that show ("Stewart's 'stoned slackers,'" 2004).

Experimental research may well substantiate this corelational survey data suggestion that viewers may actually process and remember substantive information presented on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart better than when it is presented on more serious sources of political information. When viewers see positive messages that are appetitively activated (in an approach mode towards the message) and tend to encode more information than when they are aversively activated while viewing a negative message (Fox, Park, & Lang, 2006; Lang, 2006a; Lang, 2006b; Lang, Sparks, Bradley, Lee, & Wang, 2004). Previous studies have found that political coverage is often negative… In contrast, although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart may also be negative in tone, the appetitive system is likely to be activated by the humor on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and by the audience's laughter, which may elicit emotional contagion (McDonald & Fredin, 2001).

Or, to sum up without the Ph.D. language: "Maybe the fact that Stewart is funny causes people to remember the important stuff more."

I too had read the "Stoned Slackers" article from CNN, and thought at the time that it was not particularly surprising that the Daily Show viewers were likely to know more about the election, thinking something along the lines that the Daily Show just attracted smart viewers - Stewart doesn't exactly do sophomoric humor on his show. But now I'm not so sure.

Certainly, the professors and teachers that I remember the most from are those teachers who used humor on a day to day basis to get their points across. Walter Lewin, professor of Physics at MIT embodies this idea - his class lectures have made it to YouTube, where he tells a student, quite matter of factly, that "So what I'm going to do now, Simon, I'm going to beat you with cat fur." Not that Prof. Lewin's classes are all laugh-riots, but I think the students paid attention and retained more of that information for that experiment than if he had just read from the text book.

Of course, especially in the technical fields, it's incredibly important to be able to learn new skills and tackle new problems. Today's darling language is tomorrow's obsolescence - COBOL comes to mind, although C++ programmers now find that they're migrating to AJAX and RUBY in order to produce the Web apps that are now in demand, rather than the console apps that were once king.

So why are technical demonstrations and technical skill-imparting meetings are often so painfully dull? If you want to impart information to be retained, it's usually best to add a bit of humor to the information. Even we've been doing this for a while at Network Performance Daily - making jokes in the Tuesday and Thursday link posts, adding humor where possible and appropriate. (Heck, I was even hired in part because I do have some professional comedy training.)

Certainly, many technical people aren't known for their comedy, and the only thing less funny than zero-humor content is humor content from people who aren't actually funny. But if someone in the IT department has this talent, it should be encouraged, not repressed due to a stifling corporate culture. Investors and clients will know you're serious from the job you do - and you can do a better job if you retain more relevant information.

By Brian Boyko

We've been covering the iPhone release and what it might mean for those in the IT department in a series of articles, including: "Why Apple's iPhone means more work for the IT department," and "I, Phone: could the Apple iPhone's broad consumer appeal present a formidable threat to enterprise networks?"

There was one aspect that we really did not consider, and that was from the international perspective. The iPhone really doesn't bring anything absolutely new or revolutionary to the table - it just seems new and revolutionary because consumer cellphone and mobile development in North America has lagged behind Europe and Asia. So, from a global perspective, as NPD reader David Deans pointed out, these problems aren't new. He posted at NPD and we engaged in an e-mail conversation which may be of some interest to our readers:

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Enterprise Apps, Safari, and Consumer Adoption: A discussion on the iPhone and how mobile computing will affect IT." »

Just a quick note: We talked previously about the improved TCP/IP stack in Windows Vista (here and here) but now Ann Bednarz at Network World has taken an in-depth look at what Vista's code changes mean for WAN optimization planning.

Between the updated TCP/IP stack, the new CIFS implementation, and built-in QoS enhancements, there's much to look forward to in Vista, but the main criticism addressed in the article is that the best benefits are only reserved for those who upgrade to Vista on the entire IT infrastructure - with a Vista client and a Longhorn-based server, and required upgraded hardware and may need recoded applications as well.

Additionally, Vista's improvements don't do much for Web-based applications and does not deal with data-reduction based compression - so Vista will not replace the need for a WAN Optimization appliance.

Some very interesting news coming out of Australia, the "America of the Southern Hemisphere," according to "America: The Book" from the Daily Show writers. (No, not the one in Europe. You're thinking of Austria.)

Sydney Morning Herald: Australia announces vast national broadband plan

First is the announcement that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has announced a $1.68 (US) billion plan to deliver broadband access to 99% of the Australian population by June 2009.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said wireless was the best option for rural Australia because it was impossible to install cables which would reach every farm and property across the country.

"It's been specially developed for rural and regional areas, where (with) fixed broadband you've got to actually run a fibre optic," she said….

But the opposition labour Party attacked the plan, saying it was too little, too late ahead of this year's election and provided country people with a second-rate service.

"The government proposes a two-tier system -- a good system for the cities, they say, and a second-rate system for rural and regional Australia," labour leader Kevin Rudd said.

To give you an idea of some of the difficulties of Australian broadband - Australia has roughly the land area of America but less than 1/10th the population. Also, Australia is an island, which means that any cable linking to the rest of the world will be massively expensive to install and maintain. Some of the difficulties of Australian Broadband are explained here:

Forums.Mactalk.com.au: The Reason Australia Lacks Unlimited Internet Plans (Caution: Strong language)

Pseudonoymous poster "Brains" gives a very detailed - and somewhat coarse - rundown of why Australia has always had problems with providing broadband internet access to customers - and unlike many people in the area, he doesn't lay the blame completely at the feet of Telstra. He doesn't refrain from using vulgar adjectives to make his point, either. If Crocodile Dundee went into network administration, he would be Brains.

Because of the sheer distances involved, it costs an arm, leg, six puppies and your first three children per kilometer to lay cable anywhere. God's Own Earth Mate might have almost the same amount of land-mass as the USA does, but our national population is on par with that of the state of Texas. … Extrapolate that, and that means (roughly) that every kilometer of copper or fibre laid down costs we Aussie customers twenty times as much.

"But I live in a city, they live in cities too!" Sure you do. Sure they do. But we city dwellers have always subsidised our rural cobbers with their telephone service…

The USA consumes something on the order of 30% of the world's internet traffic, and most of it stays within the US borders. We here chew a piddly 5% or so, which considering our [expletive deleted] internet is a pretty herculean effort ... but where does the bulk of our internet content come from? Ahh, the US and Europe, a land-mass with an even higher population density.

So that means international cables, and they make our costs of running copper from Ballarat to Bendigo look like pocket change you couldn't buy a bag of mixed lollies for.

"Brains" also talks about the rise of P2P bandwidth - fueled mostly because Australians resort to BitTorrent to get television episodes of favorite series that haven't yet aired domestically, but which have aired in Europe and America - predicting that this added demand from what Australians dub "Channel BT" will cause Australia to eventually go to a pay-as-you-go service.

The story of BT resulting in a large spike in Internet traffic over the past couple of years is an old and familiar story, but Peter Wells has examined this story from the Australian viewpoint here.

Speaking of which,

TorrentFreak: HTTP Traffic Overtakes P2P, Courtesy of YouTube

According to a study from Ellacoya networks, HTTP traffic, at 46% of all Internet traffic, has actually beaten, relatively, P2P traffic, at 37%. Just two years ago, 65% of all Internet data was P2P traffic. This doesn't mean that P2P services are slowing down - just that HTTP traffic has grown immensely. The most likely culprit being video hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpace, etc.

A breakdown of the HTTP traffic reveals that audio and video streaming represents 41% of the HTTP traffic, half of that is caused by YouTube. Text and images from web pages are still using a bit more bandwidth (46%), but this won't be for long…

… The total volume of bandwidth that people consume will probably continue to grow in the years to come. New streaming services, and Internet based TV project such as Joost will require massive amounts of bandwidth. Also, BitTorrent is still gaining popularity, earlier this week we reported that Mininova is still growing at a rapid pace, they served 1 billion downloads in less than 6 months.

Julie Bort interviewed George Kurian at Cisco in Network World, where they talk about WAN optimization.

The interview talks about how Cisco's optimization and acceleration products are distinguished from competitors' and (of course, considering that George Kurian works for Cisco) promoted as superior because of their transparent placement in the network. This means they can be shared among several servers and applications, as well as integrated with Cisco's existing products, and QoS and security policies do not have to be migrated or disrupted. One item only barely touched upon is the idea of using a single appliance in the branch office - the Integrated Service Router - to handle WAN optimization, security, and routing - and how having one appliance to handle all these tasks helps cut down on server room clutter and complexity.

To be sure, these appear to be advantages to Cisco's solution. But the dirty little secret is that all WAN optimization solutions on the market, including Cisco's, obscure end-to-end performance metrics. This is a major issue, of course, and makes the current state of choosing whether or not to deploy a WAN optimization solution a Monty Hall problem - do you opt to retain visibility into your network performance and the ability to solve problems faster, or you deploy a WAN optimization device and hope that whatever's behind curtain number two (the resulting performance gain) is better than what you've traded for?

Maintaining transparency of response time and latency metrics is critical in our view and any WAN optimization vendor that provides a solution to this problem will have a serious competitive advantage.

By Brian Boyko

In an early Network Performance Daily post, we spoke a bit about the impact that the Apple iPhone is likely to have on the company's IT department, and we thought that with some of the announcements of WWDC, it would be worth taking a look back and revisiting some of those ideas.

Back in January, we opined:

• People will use the iPhone at their jobs the way they use Blackberrys now.
• To the end-user, the iPhone is a personal cellphone, with no more need of IT scrutiny then their current phones. To the IT department, the iPhone is a mobile computer, increasing the complexity of the network and creating an additional demand of resources.
• The iPhone's rumored "phone over WiFi" capabilities means that even if you don't intend to roll out VoIP, you may still be dealing with converged traffic on your network.
• The iPhone's web browsing capability may draw additional bandwidth.
• The iPhone would be used as a gateway to SaaS software such as Google Docs and Salesforce.com.
• The iPhone is small enough to steal, requiring data to be secured.

Now that we know a little bit more about it, we can start to revise some of our predictions of how the IT department will have to deal with the new iPhone.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "I, Phone: Could the Apple iPhone's broad consumer appeal present a formidable threat to enterprise networks?" »

Wired: Mr. Wizard Gives a Last Interview

Wired Magazine has published the last known interview of Don Herbert, a.k.a. "Mr. Wizard," who unfortunately passed away Tuesday. Like many people - especially those of us who went into scientific and technical fields--who were fans of his show, I feel a profound sense of loss. We're a generation raised, and educated, to some extent, by television, and if Sesame Street taught us language and Mr. Rogers taught us civics, Mr. Wizard certainly gave many scientists and technologists their start in understanding this world.

WN: What advice would you give to the makers of science television programming?

Herbert: Science is about the real world around us and it's filled with fascinating wonders.

In the meantime, I found a YouTube clip, of an old NBC "Watch Mr. Wizard" dating from 1965 episode on YouTube, and a video interview from 2005 from the Archive of American Television.

ZDNET: Judge: TorrentSpy must turn over logs in RAM

The case so far: The MPAA sues Torrentspy to get access to server logs of people visiting the site. Torrentspy says that they don't have any logs. So far, so typical.

However, the judge in the case then orders Torrentspy to make a copy of the system RAM to capture that data.

The decision sets a precedent for the argument that information stored on RAM is subject to the rules of relevant [sic], Chooljian said. The decision pokes holes in the notion of privacy that many Web sites guarantee, and Web site operators will probably have to revise their privacy policies. TorrentSpy intends to appeal.

Of course, how are you going to write an image of RAM to the hard disk without using any RAM? If you do, you'll have to record that, and for that you'll need more RAM, and… oh no I've gone cross-eyed.

Kidding aside, there are, as mentioned above, serious implications for privacy policy holders if this case is taken as precedent, but it also presents a wrinkle into Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.