Recycling

Most of us have old computers or electronic devices in our basements. Among my “collection” was a huge CRT computer display. Not a flat panel — a huge old-fashioned monitor. My back hurt for days from lifting it. Not only did it weigh 100 pounds or so but it cost a small fortune in electricity and has a very ugly carbon footprint. I had not used the CRT display for years but one day I decided it was time for it to stop taking up space in the basement. How to get rid of it?

Too big to put in the trash and dangerous in the event the CRT got broken and gasses escaped. A quick search on the web revealed that BestBuy was the closest recycling program to where I live. I loaded up the truck and visited their store on a Sunday afternoon. They charged $10 but gave me a gift card for the same amount.  The young macho man who assisted me grabbed the monster display from the back of the truck and nearly dropped it. I hope his back feels better than mine, but one thing for sure is that the environment is better off by taking this monster out of circulation.

Whatever you believe about the effect of green house gasses, there is a compelling financial reason to be aggressive in reducing your footprint. Another dinosaur in my basement was an old PC server with a half-terabye of RAID storage in it. I used the "redundant array of inexpensive disks" as a backup server — music, photos, and data files of all kinds. (see various stories here in the blog about backup). It had served me well but then one day I learned about the Kill-A-Watt Meter. After plugging the server into the meter and later checking the reading I found that the server was using $50 per month of electricity. I then bought an Iomega StorCenter terabyte external hard drive which I placed on top of the now powered down rack in the basement. It is a tiny fraction of the size and uses a tiny fraction of the electricity. The setup was trivial.

I was proud of the savings but then I learned about iDrive.com. The online backup storage service costs $4.95 per month — for 150 gigabytes; free for 2 gigabytes) and brought my in-house electrical bill for backup to zero. The "backup in the clouds" solution has been totally reliable and automatically keeps all of my files backed up. Cloud computing is compelling but moving your servers and storage to the clouds does not eliminate the issue of greenhouse gasses — it just moves it to the cloud provider. How big is their footprint? I don’t know the answer but I am confident that with thousands of servers (not just one in the basement) that they are highly motivated to be energy efficient. Helping data centers become more efficient (and green) has become a really big business for IBM and others, and as footprint consciousness increases companies will ask their providers not only about their security and scalability but also about their policies and practices for handling their equipment recycling and their data center electrical usage.

Speaking of Cloud Computing, there is an interesting new post at Irving’s blog about "The Big Shift: from Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning

Comcasted – 2

There have been a number of stories here about service problems with Comcast. The company unfortunately gets a lot of criticism and I must say it is mostly well deserved. The latest concern is that Comcast is getting very aggressive with email marketing campaigns — most recently an invitation to participate in their sweepstakes.

It used to be that everything from Comcast was paper. Now it is paper plus a barrage of emails. Notices of my monthly statement and anything related to cable service is fine but I don’t want "Channel 1 On Demand: July highlights". Hopefully, spam filters will be able to tell the difference. At the bottom of the sweepstakes e-mail was "THIS E-MAIL IS AN ADVERTISEMENT". Really? Not only is your inbox spammed but your intelligence is questioned.

To add insult to injury the sweepstakes e-mail said "To exclude yourself from receiving future mailings regarding sweepstakes, please send a written request to “Thank You Times 3 Sweepstakes” C/O Comcast Cable Communications Management, LLC, Attention: Lifecycle Marketing, 1 Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd., Philadelphia, PA 19103-2838." The e-mail went out in a blast but a request to respect your privacy requires a written letter. Then they sum it up with "Comcast respects your privacy"! I took a look at their privacy policy and not surprisingly the 5,645 word document was written by lawyers to be read by lawyers. I could rant on, as many people and journalists do, but I’ll stop for now. Comcasted.

Adirondacks

The total Trike ride was just short of 500 miles. The first day got us to Cassville (near Utica) where my brother lives. Utica is situated in the Mohawk Valley and is the seat of Oneida County. Like many industrial towns and cities in the northeastern Rust Belt, Utica has seen continuous reduction in manufacturing activity during the past several decades. It is sad to see a beautiful area with open space and clean air be suffering economically.

The next morning the four us headed for the Adirondack Mountains with our first stop at Caroga Lake. There are extensive park systems throughout the state of New York, but Adirondack Park, with six million acres (half of which is private), is the largest by far. In fact it is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined. The park is dotted with lakes, rivers, streams and mountain peaks, forty-six of which are more than 4,000 feet high.

The next stop was Saratoga Springs. It was a perfect summer day to walk the streets and stroll through the park. The spring has a couple of fountains and the water has a heavy iron taste but the Irish Nachos at Gaffney’s were superb. There are many things to do in Saratoga Springs but we had more than a hundred miles ahead of us as we rode south and then west back to Cassville.

Riding back home to Lake Wallenpaupack the next day through rural New York and Pennsylvania was a treat. There had been a lot of wind and a minor sprinkle the prior day but the ride back was blue sky and warm. The scenery included a lot of great views, mountains, hills, rivers, streams, and farms. When it comes to road signs in this part of the world, there are all the normal ones for curves or hills but also some signs you don’t see in Manhattan — tractor crossing, horse and buggy, and cows. There are also signs that property owners display — "Guns", "Taxidermist", "Elk Meat". Most of the small towns in central New York state have American Flags on every other utility pole. Central New York is a very nice part of the world.

Other patrickWeb travel related stories

IBM Happenings: June 2009

The month of June was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a “smarter planet” is is Cloud Computing. IBM introduced the industry’s first set of commercial cloud services
and integrated products for the enterprise. This is an important and strategic move for the company. It reminds me of some disruptive times during my IBM career (hard to believe it began 42 years ago).

Disruption is usually associated with a technological shift but I have observed that the disruption is preceded by and accompanied by a “dissatisfier”. We have seen this movie three times.

In the 1980′s the dissatisfier was departments in enterprises that were dissatisfied with how long it took for the IT department to introduce new applications that addressed departmental needs. Departments started using spreadsheets on PC’s, sometimes acquired by finding a way to bypass IT department approval. Then companies like Novell offered “server” PC’s that allowed the spreadsheets to be centralized and shared by all the PC’s. Departments sometimes did their own network wiring to install “local area networks“. The IT department lost control. IBM was not the director of this movie and concentrated on defending the mainframe turf instead of embracing the disruption. The company was in the audience.

The second movie was in the mid 1990′s. It was called the the World Wide Web — a breakthrough application of the Internet. The dissatisfier was that there were many thousands of physicists in the world who wanted to gain access to a huge amount of data being created from particle physics experiments at CERN in Switzerland. The data was created in many different formats and the people wanting to use the data had many different kinds of computers. Enter Tim Berners-Lee with a new document format called HTML and an Internet protocol called HTTP. The result was any computer with a “browser” that could read HTML could get the data they wanted including multi-media. It was a major disruptive change to how all things IT worked. IBM did not sit in the audience for this movie. While Microsoft and Netscape (illegally driven out of business by Microsoft) were fighting over who had the best browser, IBM was making major investments behind the scenes to insure that all of it’s hardware and software supported the Internet. In 1996 Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, introduced the term “e-Business“. The company developed a layer of middleware called Webshphere that allowed enterprises to link all their applications to the web. This movie made $billions. There is much more to the story than summarized in this short paragraph. Take a look at Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by Lou Gerstner and Net Attitude by yours truly (now available to read free on the web).

The current movie is about Cloud Computing. IBM is planning for a repeat of the success it had with e-business. This time the dissatisfier is that IT applications have become too too costly and too difficult to use. A good example is Microsoft Office. I call it the “global IT tax”. GE decided to confront this by going to cloud computing with Zoho.com. While Google, Zoho, Microsoft, Amazon and countless others are waging “cloud wars” over the consumer, IBM is behind the scenes again this time building a range of cloud offerings for the enterprise — cloud tools for developers, public clouds to enable more efficient offerings for all of the enterprise’s constituencies, private clouds to replace intranets, and research clouds for academia. The offerings announced in June are the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for much more from IBM in the clouds.

Much as client-server computing and the Internet transformed how people interact with other people and with data, cloud computing will transform these things yet again. With every computer in the world connected to every other computer through various clouds the potential to deliver data and collaborate around it will dwarf today’s capabilities and at a lower unit cost. The data.gov project that Vivek Kundra talked about at the Wired Conference may be a model followed by enterprises. The idea is that when something happens — a transaction, a widget gets ordered or shipped or had a service issue or a patient sees a doctor or has a procedure, the data will be in the cloud for others (who are authorized) to see it on a real-time basis. This is going to be an exciting movie and we will all be able to watch it in the clouds. (See other stories on cloud computing here at patrickWeb).

Epilogue: IBM has received considerable recognition for leadership with the World Community Grid. The grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project. If you want to donate your surplus computer time to some of the great causes IBM is working on, take a look at worldcommunitygrid.org. Also, see IBM Happenings for May for more on the influenza project.

Other IBM Happenings for the month

Special Libraries Day

The flight down to Dulles on the Socata TBM 700 was smooth as glass and surprisingly quiet for such a fast airplane. A short shuttle ride got us to
The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center an enormous facility which provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest aviation collection in the world and accommodate more than one million visitors per year. The Center was made possible by a $65 million gift in October 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution by Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, an immigrant from Hungary and co-founder of the International Lease Finance Corporation.

You have to see it to believe it. The Boeing Aviation Hangar is 103 feet high, 986 feet long and 248 feet wide which makes it about ten stories high and the length of three football fields. The nearly 300,000 square feet of space is filled with airplanes — more than 160 — including a Boeing 707, a B29, a Lockheed SR-71, all manner of fighter jets, a 1903 Wright Flyer and everything in between. Adjoining the Aircraft Hangar is a Space Hangar — a mere 80 feet high, 262 feet long and 180 feet wide. The 50,000+ square feet includes more than 150 space artifacts, with the space shuttle Enterprise as the centerpiece.

We got to downtown D.C. in time to walk around the National Mall after checking into the hotel and then had a nice dinner at Olive’s. The next morning we headed over to the Convention Center for The SLA 2009 Annual Conference. I expected attendance would be down due to budget cuts and travel freezes but it was actually up from the prior year — nearly 6,000 people attended. It proves that even though you can find almost anything on the Internet there is still an important role for conferences where people can network in the halls and during breaks and meals.

The attendees were Information Professionals from 75 countries. The roles played by the library and information science experts have changed but are no less vital to libraries, information centers and corporate information and knowledge resource departments than before. Libraries are in fact very special places. A couple of weeks ago we took our granddaughter to visit the Yale Library. It was a busy place with a lot of computers but also a priceless collection of materials and most importantly a cadre of people who know how to help people find things. .

I only had time to visit one of the 400 exhibitors at the conference — Knovel Corporation, where I have been a director and investor for almost seven years. It has been exciting to see the company grow by serving a large number of corporate librarians and engineering executives.

The closing conference panel was moderated by TV newscaster Judy Woodruff. The panelists were Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robyn Meredith, and yours truly. I learned a lot from my fellow panelists. Judy did a terrific job of brining out important points about the future of information technology. A lot of it was focused on healthcare. I spoke about how important it is to move to an electronic model — how it can improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs.

Audience questions were provocative. One gentleman asked whether the Internet is making it possible for a very large company or a few companies to dominate the control of information. He was obviously referring to Google. I said no and reminded the audience how the press said in the 1970′s that IBM was going to take over the world. Then in the 1980′s it was Microsoft that would dominate. Now some believe Google will dominate. I have no fears about this. The barrier to entry for a new company is close to zero thanks to cloud computing. Google Docs is nice but check out Zoho.com. The race has only just begun. The bigger fear is monopolization by telecommunications and cable companies that has been made possible by intense lobbying of the FCC. I am cautiously optimistic that the new chairman will keep things “open” so that innovation and competition can thrive.