Chaos Program

So there’s a story going around that Time Warner Roadrunner is proposing instituting tiered service in Rochester, NY. The levels would start at $29.95/month for up to 5 GB of data transfer and go up to $54.90/month for 40GB of data. There would also be fees for going over your monthly allotment. More details here and here.

This would directly affect me, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer. But in an unbiased way, my first thought on seeing this structure was, “Between YouTube, Facebook and online Mah Jong or what have you, who on Earth actually uses a lousy 5 gig?” It may sound like a lot to people who don’t know any better but take it from an old – professional – Computer geek. That one is a red herring. They don’t even mean it seriously.  Ignore it (except possibly to be offended by the mendacity of a company that pretends to be offering a low price option that, in effect, no one can use).

My second thought was that there is no need for tiered service. The infrastructure is there, in place. When a particular user downloads some huge file, there is no one in a control center yelling, “Scotty! We need more power! Hurry or she’s gonna blow!” There is no danger that the pipes are going to burst because there are too many electrons going through them. The system works just as well at a user’s first gigabyte downloaded as their hundredth. Tiered usage is a bookkeeping device, completely unrelated to the stresses and strains on the system.

As I said, this will directly affect me and I’m not happy about it. I work from home more often than not. And I take online classes. I can use a half gig (500 mb, 0.5 gb) in a day without even trying. I can do that without downloading any Linux ISOs or software, or using Internet phone (skype – I’ve thought about it but haven’t tried it yet) or viewing YouTube videos or other streaming media, believe it or not. I know this because I have a bandwidth meter installed on my main computer. I’m just that kind of guy. People who use streaming media are likely to use much more.  And pay more. This is starting to sound like a bad thing, especially in a recession.

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The stream of bad news for newspapers has been almost constant for months. Yesterday, we heard that the New York Times would be cutting pay across the board (New York Times set to impose 5% pay cut on all staff). Last week, Gannett announced 1 week of paid furloughs (2 for higher paid employees) in Q2 of 2009 (Gannett calls for second-quarter furloughs). This is in addition to a week of furloughs imposed on employees in Q1 (where old newspapers go to die). This is exactly the same as a pay cut except with the added bonus of giving people extra free time to stew about it. Who says big companies don’t care about morale?

But wait! There’s hope! US Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) (Cardin’s official website) has introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would allow newspapers to operate as non-profits – That is, as organizations exempt from taxes on their profits because of a stated dedication to a purpose approved by the government as being beneficial to the greater good, as opposed to their common current status as “failing to make a buck in spite of trying REAL HARD.” Apparently the theory is that letting them keep all of the money they make will help them stay healthy (Don’t ask why that doesn’t apply to the rest of us. I don’t know). In order to justify the non-profit designation, papers would no longer be allowed to endorse political candidates (apparently the Senator thinks we don’t know who the papers favor otherwise).
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I usually stay away from the popular news of the day but this one was so funny I had to say something about it: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft (Note: This link keeps coming up with an excerpt and a “subscribe” link, but when I opened it from Google search results it gave me the whole article. Interesting, huh?). The short version of this is that the two companies are in talks and there’s a possible price tag of $6.5 billion.  As of this writing, no actual deal has been announced. They’re just talking. Interestingly, according to the WSJ article, Sun has been looking for a buyer for some months. This makes sense to me since I’ve considered Sun to be doomed for several years.

I’ve worked with Sun’s Solaris operating system quite a bit. I like it. It’s terrifically stable. In fact, the times when it seemed to fail there was always an underlying hardware problem. Sun hardware is pretty good, too. Some of their Sparc stations run practically forever. That said, I don’t see Solaris to be all that much better than Linux and it costs MUCH more (On any hardware. Linux has been ported to everything except my mailbox but it’s not much of a mailbox). The extra cost for Sun just isn’t worth it.

When I worked at the newspaper the editorial software we put in during my first year ran on Solaris 8 on a pair of V880s the size of one of those mini office refrigerators. At the time, that editorial system depended on Oracle for the db and was not available on Linux. It was a powerful, very stable and fabulously expensive system. That editorial software is now available on Linux. It’s still fabulously expensive but the cost of the hardware and the operating system are a fraction of what they used to be.
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Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?

I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.

The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.
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The subject of my last post, the serious problems faced by news media today, hasn’t gone away. If anything, maybe I was early commenting on it. The news came out today that my old employer, Gannett corp, is furloughing workers for one week without pay. See D&C employees to take one week unpaid leave. Once again I find that my decision to leave was the right one – but I’m still worried and unhappy for the good people I left behind. They work hard and try to put out the best product they can. They deserve better.

One of those good people posted an interesting link to a blog post entitled When newspapers are gone, what will you miss? It’s an interesting post. Here’s the money quote: “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.” read more »