Service Provider Journal

Silicon Valley needs to rescue house.gov

house.gov remains inaccessible to millions tonight as they try to figure out what their government is doing on the worst day in Wall Street history.

I think it's the patriotic duty of Silicon Valley, including Google, hosting providers such as Rackspace, and ISPs, to get house.gov back on its feet by tomorrow morning. What could be more important than letting the American people know what their government is doing on this day of days?

Beyond the woes of house.gov, I'm disappointed that news accounts of the defeat of HR 3997, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, don't even refer to the bill by name or number, instead simply calling it the "bailout bill." (And that's a bit of a misnomer itself.) The roll call of who voted yea or nay is here, but in this day of information at your fingertips, it should be a Google Maps mashup, showing the yeas and nays by Congressional district, readily viewable the same way the result of a presidential election is available.

ISP usage caps: Let the market decide

I haven't strayed so far from my ISPCON days that I could sign on to petitions calling for a ban on Internet usage caps. ISPs have to make a buck. But to urge ISPs to forego caps and rely instead on spending their way out of the problem seems to me ignorant of how much benefit technology can deliver in this case. I'm not convinced it's all that much. Let the ISP usage caps flourish, and if competitors can find a way to sell bandwidth cheaper, the market can sort it all out.

Amazon S3 now has an SLA

Jeffrey McManus reports that Amazon S3 now provides a service-level agreement (SLA) -- with caveats. Still, let's hope it's the start of a greater emphasis on SLAs as generalized grid computing services continue to deploy.

Fighting server sprawl

Virtualization brings benefits in terms of utilization and power consumption, but it also brings "server sprawl" -- an ever-proliferating number of virtual servers to be managed across your data center.  GroundWork is expanding a community of open-source-based management tools to do something about server sprawl. Listen to a conversation I recorded July 31 with Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork, describing this expanding open-source community and GroundWork's investments in it.

Pendulum swinging back toward the mainframe

That's right, the mainframe never died, and "green" computing is why. I used to chuckle when I heard IT managers worrying about all the spare CPU cycles running on all those PCs. No one's laughing anymore. Listen to a conversation I had yesterday with David Gelardi, vice president of deep computing at IBM.

I want on-demand phone call recording

This could be the killer app for Skype and VoIP: On-demand phone call recording. It's too difficult to record traditional land-line or mobile phone calls. I suspect it's trivial with many VoIP services. I'm looking into recording calls using SkypeOut combined with PowerGramo. These recordings aren't for podcasting, just for research purposes, so I'm not interested in a service that turns them into podcasts.

Google Autolink

This seems like a reasonable request: Allow any Web site publisher to disable Google's auto-link feature on their own Web sites. Why are there only 446 signatures so far?

Bloggercon and WiCon: Parallel universes

Parallel universes, three days and 20 miles apart, in the midst of Silicon Valley.

In the Bloggercon universe, the Apple iPod is a pervasive new content delivery platform.

In the WiCon universe, all devices are converging into the mobile phone. But what about the iPod and its ilk?

So I asked someone at WiCon -- specifically, Paul Marino, vice president and general manager of Philips Semiconductors. Dismissively, Marino deemed the iPod "a fashion statement."

I rebutted, before a passive audience of 150 Silicon Valley engineers, mobile phone operators and marketers, that the iPod represents a new content delivery platform, not a fashion statement.

I couldn't make heads or tails of Marino's response, but this is clearly a market serving a customer base salivating over the thought of collecting a nickel every time mobile phone customers request an instant video replay while watching the NBA live on their phone.

It's disheartening to see a company that manufactures silicon in such quantities not recognizing the most important shift in media in our lifetime. Watching broadcast TV on your mobile phone ain't it.

Google under more DMCA pressure to remove links

I'm listening to the EFF's Wendy Seltzer at ISPCON this morning. Google is now receiving 10 to 15 "takedown" requests per week related to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Google doesn't host much content, though; these "takedown" requests are to remove indexing links to supposedly copyrighted content. It's an interesting measure of the amount of intrusion the DMCA has had on search engines.

ISPCON: Giving away cars again

Well, I'd argue you can survive as an ISP without a car (but then I would). It's still good to learn that ISPCON, the show I used to program sessions for, is once again giving away a car this Friday (must be present to win). It's been a couple of years since that was true. (I learned this from an email blast from ISPCON...you won't find it on the Web anywhere.)