Storagezilla

Key breaks.

Q: As computers grow faster, doesn't cryptography grow weaker?

A: In general, the opposite is true. The time to perform cryptographic operations grows slowly in proportion to the length of a key, while the time to break a key grows rapidly. For example, performing RSA operations with a 1024-bit key requires about eight times as much computing power as with a 512-bit key. A 1024-bit key, however, is about one million times harder to break than a 512-bit key. As computers grow faster, their agility in performing cryptographic operations with larger keys outpaces their ability to break keys.

-Dr. Ari Jules

I didn't know that. I was in the camp of faster processors, therefore faster number crunching, therefore faster key breaks etc, etc, etc. It just goes to prove that spending my time looking out the window during Maths classes paid off. Why should I have bothered paying attention to that crap when my employer would pay a fortune to rent Ari's brain to do that sort of thinking for me.

Remember kids, no matter what your condescending Maths teacher tells you in school it'll all work out.

Invista 2.what?

"What's one of the most significant differences between version 1.0 and version 2.0? The version number - 2.0," D'Errico said.

With wit like that you'd think he'd start blogging..

The China Syndrome

Storagesoup asked so I'll answer.

Remember in the 80's when the Japanese bought up large tracts of US real estate & industry? There was a jingoistic backlash, talk of the need for protectionism (A negative charge usually leveled at old socialist Europe), and an overall anti-Japanese sentiment. People were convinced Japan's unstoppable economy was going to own the world and run US business into the ground.

It didn't happen.

What with lead paint and China's vaults stuffed with US Treasury Bonds (When G.W.B. looks for more money for Iraq they don't just order another print run of greenbacks and hand them over) we're seeing a re-run of that 80's movie again.

Why shouldn't China buy a drive manufacturer? Drives are components manufactured in bulk volumes, they may as well be capacitors or resistors and we're all for a free economy right? There are other vendors to source drives from and were I to throw my shoe into a crowd of people in the valley I'd probably hit someone working for a stealth startup which has a "disruptive" storage media technology nearly ready to go "..if only someone had a couple of $M spare to get them across the finish line."

Of course with the startups the issue is manufacturing scale, but then all of those needs can be made in Taiwan.

A new cloud, a new job, and a new blog

It's all go with Webby people today.

First off former EMCer (I used to drop by his cube and move his books around when he wasn't looking) and now full time Pixenate developer Walter Higgins has been working on Utility Photo Editing using Amazon's EC2. The jury is in and Walter thinks the technology is dynamite.

Meanwhile, Jeremiah Owyang has decided to get himself a real job, he's now a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research.

Now normally in our industry where EMC is J.R. Ewing (One of my childhood heroes), this would involve me blanking him but since he's going to be covering Web Strategy it's all good.

Someone else in Webbyland is EMC's Director of eBusiness Strategy & Operations Len Devanna, he's now blogging. He also fancies himself as a bit of a comedian, I'm not sure I like that as there's only room for one of us and I'm it. If he makes too much with the funny I may have to do to him what J.R. used to do to Cliff Barnes.. ;)

Sharpen your ice skates Barnes it's going to be a cold day in hell!

No money, no sense.

Idiot gets caught doing 172mph on a rural road in a Porche 911 Turbo. Not only will he now spend some time in the pokey but he's joined the ranks of the unemployed as well as he "borrowed" the car from work.

You'd like to think that the people who can afford to buy such things have more sense, you'd be wrong when you see them whizzing around the Nuburing but at least they're not doing it on some back road somewhere.

I can't even begin to imagine the stopping distance at 172mph. You hit anything and everything disintegrates.

Tales from the Claus

Just when you thought he'd given up his gig playing the Crypt Keeper on Tales from the Crypt, Claus Mikkelsen is back!

Okay, okay, that was a cheap shot and I'm kidding Claus. Though tell us, is it true you guys ate Dave Merrill to appese some weird Lovecraftian Eldar god?

And if that wasn't a vicious rumor before I'm starting it now.

Sun Microsystems goes nuts.

Sun Microsystems are changing their stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA. I'm not kidding. It's 1997 all over again.

One wonders why they don't change their ticker to BEAS (BEA Systems) or ORCL (Oracle) instead since both of those companies have made a hell of a lot more money from the ubiquity of Java than Sun has.

How did Jon S put it? McNealy drank wine from a box while he drank wine from a bottle.

Perhaps they now need someone who drinks from a glass as we've approched the point where they're drinking wine from a toilet.

Years ago when I was flying Solaris boxes for a living Sun ruled the Enterprise UNIX market, even with their crappily slow UltraSPARC II processors. They were the dot in .com. I have no idea who they're supposed to be any more and this tells me that they don't either.

Second Life. Not like your first, but with flying.

I logged into Second Life at stupid-o-clock tonight for the first time. Now usually I wouldn't have gone near the place, not enough Alliance to bring the pain to or rooms to loot, but tonight was the EMC Second Life Jobs Fair.

It got busy. Having zero idea of how to operate my avatar correctly I decided to get out of the way so I teleported out and went for a look around the other islands. After wandering around for a bit I flew in the window of a building which when fully rendered turned out to be a sex shop. I had to explain to a Dominatrix avatar that I'd taken a wrong turn and no I wasn't looking to acquire any of the particular items or services she was selling for a digital representation which was about as smooth as Barbie's ex-boyfriend Ken when it dropped trouser.

She took it surprisingly well for someone in that line of work.

I was very impressed with the EMC setup. Where I had expected the typical EMC ultra-conservatism [A typical box like building] what they had designed was an ostentatious & comfortingly arrogant venue for the event. A glass geodesic sphere. FMV running on screens attached to the central column, high def freestanding poster images which when clicked on downloaded different materials from emc.com, and the EMC primary colour scheme all over the furnishings. One part Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies, another part Fortress of Solitude from Superman.

The moment I saw it I wanted someone to agree to build it for real whenever EMC gets around to building it's mega-campus. I don't care how impractical it is, it's bloody brilliant.

The event was crowded and appeared to go well. The BBC showed up to see what was going on and the Second Life news guys were in for a looksy earlier.

Interesting event and a job well done. Glad I attended.

The spirit of the century

Backup Wizard is back, and in his first post it's clearly a case of blue states lose when he finds himself in SF surrounded by Linux bods & socialist plotters at Linux World.

Now, the 100 year archive is an idea I just don't get. I know the century is the grand vision but is it too grand? Shouldn't we be taking this stuff from decade to decade or format to format instead? I've been through the whole photo archive thing myself and I too have found myself going back to paper. Having photo books printed (Expensive) or putting photos into albums. (Not so much but expensive enough) It's only the good stuff which makes it into print, the throw away or just dumb photos live and die digitally.

Paper is the long term storage medium for what I'd like to show people later on down the road. The digital copy is just a copy.

With retail content, music/movies/what have you, the vendors will happily sell them again to you in any new formats which emerge. It was the 25th anniversary of the first commercial CD production run last week, and while I'm sure the bulk of CDs pressed back then succumbed to bit rot long ago I can probably find most if not all of the tracks available on day one up on iTunes or at my local music outlet 25 years later.

I suppose the difference is in the perceived value of the content you're managing for the long haul. If like the film industry your back catalog is your living then it's your job to ensure it goes from the movie print, to VHS, to LaserDisc, to DVD, to HD and various digital formats as smoothly as possible. I think the issue we face in this industry is that archive data is considered to be dead data and that's directly proportional to how much money we're willing to spend on maintaining it and transitioning it from format to format.

Where technology politics meet technology profits

There was a  big to do a while back when the FSF's legal council Eben Moglen went at it with Tim O'Reilly on stage at an O'Reilly event.

Having now looked at the footage (Thanks Walter) I don't see it as being all that severe. People have disagreements. Moglen obviously felt that O'Reilly ran out on them to chase the money too early and used the platform O'Reilly provided him with to air that and other grievances. O'Reilly could have handled the situation better but you can tell he felt somewhat ambushed, the fact he didn't lose his cool stands to him.

I do have a question as to what statement O'Reilly is making with the ratty looking sneakers? Were he Howard Hughes and he was buying the same cheap suit and the same pair of tennis shoes at Penneys I could live with it but looking at them on him in comparison to the rest of his outfit it comes across as being a bit too contrived. Too much "I'm one of you guys", when the cold reality is that he's a multi-millionaire book publisher and everyone else in the room is not.