wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

The problem with image backup services like iCloud

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At NetApp in 2008 while we were struggling to define feature set of ONTAP 8, a product manager asked me if it was okay to ship backup in 8.0 and restore in 8.1. He quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work…

Unfortunately Apple has made a similar mistake with iCloud.

The problem with iCloud is that it is an image backup service. An image backup copies every disk block and restores every disk block. An alternative to an image backup is a file backup that restores every file. An image backup has the nice property that it is faster to restore than a file backup. The problem with an image backup is that it is a an all or nothing restore. If a part of the image has a corrupt file, then the backup is useless.

For example, if you have a firmware image in the iCloud backup that’s corrupt, then restoring the backup from iCloud restores the phone into a corrupted state.

And that is a problem. Turns out if you have let’s say 5 years of photos in those backups, there is no way to restore the pictures because the image contains the corrupt firmware.

This isn’t impossible to fix. Many backup apps that do image backup are also able to do file restores. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t offer that service.

Fortunately third party restore apps do!

The real lesson is that if you are using an iPhone, please use a service like dropbox or google drive or one drive. In this manner if the backup is corrupt you don’t lose your data or spend money on someone tool.

 

Because some 1’s are 0’s and some 0’s are 1’s

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When I was an aspiring software engineer at my first job at SGI in 1996, I asked my friend and mentor why a specific kernel debugger wasn’t working.

He gave me an answer, but even then my unwillingness to be satisfied with a curt answer was – well – annoying. He looked at me as I tried to get a more interesting answer than just – well the configuration didn’t work and realized that he needed to get on with his life than answer one more annoying question from this freshly minted new grad.

His response to my: well okay but really what was going what was the fundamental issue?

His answer was legendary:

Because some of the 1’s that should have been 1’s were 0’s and some of the 0’s that should have been 0’s were 1’s

I love the answer. It was a brush off, but at the same time was deeply insightful. At the end of the day the reason software doesn’t work can be reduced to a string of 1’s and 0’s that aren’t correct.

And many years later my son repeated this to me when I asked his mom why the database wasn’t working:

Apparently some sayings endure.

Why we can’t have nice things

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KMM8q

 

This really captures how different disciplines see each other!

The way to really read this:

  1. Look across the discipline you belong to
  2. Look diagonally across to see how each discipline sees itself
  3. Look vertically down to see how we wall see sysadmins.

 

It wasn’t me, it was my neighbor

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Keith Adams of Facebook pointed me to this paper:

Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them:
An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors

The fun part is that we have a new and exciting way to induce memory corruption. Reading memory.

The interesting part is the proposal of a probabilistic algorithm to address the issue.

This continues my enduring belief that reliance on reliable hardware to make software work is increasingly a fools errand. As we patch more and more of the cracks, eventually we will have to stare at the chasms and rethink software design.

In the meantime, the next time I get a memory corruption I am pointing my boss to this paper.

 

Looking back on “Here Comes Another Bubble”

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In 2007 the Richter Scales captured the zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley bubble atmosphere with this hysterical video:

The irony about this song was that the 2007 bubble was killed by Lehman’s. A lesson in mass hysteria.

And as I was re-watching it last night I wondered – so what happened with those scrolling startups? And was Peter Thiel right or wrong?

bubble-3

When it comes to Facebook, he was probably right. In fact, the valuation of Facebook is staggering and an amazing achievement for the folks at that company!

That got me wondering about the rest of the companies … The hype around MySpace wasn’t probably justified:

myspace

And then if you look at the scrolling startups, I tried to circle the ones I knew were still in business. Admittedly I didn’t look through every single one — there are a lot but was struck by how few of them are around:

bubble-2 bubble

Starting a company is hard. Creating investor value is hard.

And sometimes it’s worth remembering that for ever Facebook there is a scrolling morass of companies that go nowhere.

And like the song says, those folks are probably back at work looking to start another new thing…

 

 

And as if on cue – Sony employees unhappy

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A few weeks ago I asked – what exactly happens when your employer treats your personal data as unimportant?

Why you get sued.

I am delighted.

Only when the cost of mishandling private data is high will the average business actually try and secure our private data.

Regulation or Encryption for Big Data

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A few weeks ago I called for a Hippocratic Oath for data scientists.

Now the New York Times is calling for regulation.

We can fight regulation all we want and we will.

But…

Customers will fight us. And they will fight us by moving to vendors that offer privacy and encryption. Where data is wholly owned by the customer.

And the customer will win. Because if we don’t act like their data is a sacred trust they will learn to distrust anything that they cannot control.

And they will control it through encryption.

And then we will have the medical industry where breakthroughs are there if only we could look at data …

What’s your employer’s security policy for your ID?

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After reading about the attack on Sony Entertainment, I am thinking that instead of worrying about hackers stealing from your bank we should be worried about hackers stealing from major corporations.

And that isn’t really surprising.

If identity is the seed of theft, then as banks and retailers get marginally better the soft squishy underbelly of HR departments becomes an inviting and easier target.

To date, a company cares about their business secrets being stolen, followed by their customer data being stolen and ending somewhere below not-at-all their employee’s private data being stolen. Employees don’t quit their job if their employer loses their data… At least not yet.

Identities are simply too valuable an asset for the bad guys to not want to steal, and unlike retailers where you can choose to not give them something that’s worth stealing your employer must have everything…

Me-thinks there is an opportunity for an innovation where companies can use tokens from some really secure system instead of the real raw data that they are just simply incapable of securing.

This Sony attack isn’t the end it’s the beginning.

 

Hardware not Software is Eating the World: Refinements…

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After I wrote my comments about hardware, a bunch of my software friends reacted …

And it got me thinking. My argument is a little bit more subtle than I thought.

Without a shadow of a doubt – A (capital A – no typo) disruptive product is the combination of software and hardware. That almost seams silly to have to write … After all is hardware with no software anything but inert rare earths?

Let me add some refinement.

1. I was really talking about as an innovator where do you go looking to go create the next disruptive product

My point was not that software is irrelevant, my point was that disruptive products emerge where new hardware is not where old hardware was. And that the new hardware creates new kinds of software systems that are very different than the old ones, and the combination of the new hardware and the new software is what displaces old software.

If you are looking to CREATE new disruptive technologies, the most important thing to be looking at is hardware not software. The hardware will create the opportunity to create new products that may have been previously imagined but impractical to build or sell.

2. It’s about utilization

When I say utilization I mean how much of the true capabilities of the hardware are being wasted versus being fully utilized. For example, the smart phone in 2007 was underutilized compared to it’s true potential leaving 100’s of billions of dollars of unrealized value in innovation.

Innovation really happens when the existing software systems are unable to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities creating an opening for a new software system to leverage the hardware differently. Typically what happens is that the old software made certain assumptions about the hardware that changed and a different software system making different assumptions is able to create new experiences that are profoundly different than the old ones.

What has happened, typically, is that the hardware vendors ability to create new hardware has exceeded the pace of innovation in software of the incumbent players creating an opening for new vendors.

3. Physics begets hardware begets software that is not math.

A lot of the new hardware that we are seeing come into existence is the result of new deeper understandings of the materials we are using.  Ultimately that science into materials is what is creating the opportunity for disruption. Hardware is the – in this vast oversimplified narrative of the world – first order derivative not software.

And yes I know some believe math begets physics, but I also know that software is not math.

In short

Clearly any novel and new disruptive product is a combination of hardware and software … My personal bias’ when looking FOR disruptive products is that they must be hiding in places where new hardware is being underutilized and the product must have software that is making trade-offs that are inherently incorrect for the old hardware. And if the new product succeeds it will do what seems impossible – kill old software.

Because hardware comes first, software later in this tale – and that the triumph of the new system is to kill the old software then my original point of view remains – new hardware is the place to go looking for when you want to create disruptions and therefore hardware not software is eating the world because it is allowing the world to be radically changed.

And I know Mr. Andreesen meant something else.

 

 

 

Towards a new application stack

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I stumbled upon this post about the bitcoin application stack.

And what got me intrigued was that the stack described is very similar to the way network database works.

A world where the database is not owned by anyone creates applications that must co-ordinate using open distributed protocols where bad-actors are expected. In the network world these kinds of protocols take years to evolve and develop and that constrains the speed with which new services can be deployed …

What could be very interesting is if the bitcoin transaction technology can be evolved to be consumed by non-experts in cryptography to be able to share and store data and the applications that are built on top of that technology don’t require up-front protocol collaboration …

I worry that I am in fuzzy brave new world thinking here… Maybe the speculation is too great. There is something here, though. Something meaningful.

It is encouraging that people are thinking about this.