I really try to be the calm rational one when it comes to accusations of massive surveillance and people saying that the government can “hear, see and read everything,” but this seemingly casual remark seems to be the last in a string of information that points directly to the US government trying, and succeeding in many cases, to record all communication so that they can go back to it later if they so choose.

As the article points out there have been congressmen, NSA employyes and private company (AT&T) employees all trying to blow this whistle. The article doesn’t even mention the massive NSA data center being built in Utah.

I guess it’s time to adjust pur expectations even as we try our best to push for transparency, regulations and change.

My official day job is as a computer systems researcher at IBM Research, but I really like to build things and, when possible, push them into the real world. I’ve had the incredible good luck to land in a spot where I’m able to do just that. Last year, I helped ship IBM’s first in-house OpenFlow controller. This year, I’m hoping to do quite a bit more than that. Yesterday was the public launch of OpenDaylight and now I can talk about a bunch of the things I’ve been working on in one way or another since December.

There’s been lots of coverage all over the web about OpenDaylight’s launch today, but I’ll just give the link to the Wall Street Journal’s coverage because I think it describes the details and context better than a lot of the other coverage.

OpenDaylight is really exciting. It is a Software-Defined Network (SDN) controller backed by real promises—both money and people—from pretty much every big name in the networking industry. At the same time it’s a project being run by the Linux Foundation and managed by people who have real reputations for doing open source well and for keeping projects truly open. With OpenDaylight, even individual contributors are encouraged participate and contribute freely.

If things go the way I hope they will, OpenDaylight will provide a common platform for companies to build solutions, researchers to implement new ideas and for people to learn and teach about SDN and networking in general. It really has the potential to be the Linux of networking in a way that I don’t think anyone thought was possible six months ago.

Lest the people who know me think that I’ve been somehow brainwashed, there are obviously still challenges and rough edges in the project. Just to name a few: There’s no magic bullet for interoperability; right now the controller relies solely on OpenFlow 1.0 to control the network. The code is pretty “enterprisey” using OSGi bundles and and some pretty heavyweight design patterns. The process of getting the code down and loaded into Eclipse is more complex than I’d like. Despite that, if we as an Industry and community can actually use this as a focal point, we can fix these issues in short order.

Really, my hope is that those of you who are interested take this post as a call to action. If you’re a networking researcher and looking for a platform to build an SDN application, consider using OpenDaylight. If you’re interested in what this whole SDN thing is, consider playing around with OpenDaylight. If you’re thinking about trying to actually build an SDN application, definitely try working with OpenDaylight first.

If all of that doesn’t convince you, then here’s a promotional video that contains unicorns, rainbows, bacon and penguins:

If you want to get started, go here an sign up for an OpenDaylight account here: https://identity.opendaylight.org/carbon/user-registration/user-registration.jsp
The account should work to grant access to all of the various systems including git repositories and the wiki.

Then follow the wiki instructions here: https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/OpenDaylight_Controller:Eclipse_CLI_Setup

A while ago I wrote that I thought Apple’s major failing is not realizing that we’re heading for a post-device world where the devices we use in the future will become a lot like the apps we use today. That is, with a few exceptions, more or less impulse buys rather than painstakingly selected profitable objects.

It seems as though some of this new world is happening faster than I would have thought. In a recent article at VentureBeat, a financial analyst who’s spent a bunch of time in China over the last 10+ years describes his shock at finding fully-capable 7″ Android tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich for sale for $45. They’re apparently called A-Pads.

The truth is that if your company sells hardware today, your business model is essentially over. No one can make money selling hardware when faced with the cold hard truth of a $45 computer that is already shipping in volume.

My contacts in the supply chain tell me they expect these devices to ship 20 million to 40 million units this year. Most of these designs are powered by a processor from a company that is not known outside China — All Winner. As a result, we have heard the tablets referred to as “A-Pads.”

When I show this tablet to people in the industry, they have universally shared my shock. And then they always ask “Who made it?.” My stock answer is “Who cares?” But the truth of it is that I do not know. There was no brand on the box or on the device. I have combed some of the internal documentation and cannot find an answer. This is how far the Shenzhen electronics complex has evolved. The hardware maker literally does not matter. Contract manufacturers can download a reference design from the chip maker and build to suit customer orders.

He goes on to draw the scary, but straightforward conclusion that:

No one can make money selling hardware anymore. The only way to make money with hardware is to sell something else and get consumers to pay for the whole device and experience.

So, companies like Apple can stay around if they can add enough extra things to demand a higher price for their hardware. Apple in particular has an advantage because they have enough money that they actually fund the creation of new fabs in exchange for getting the best hardware before everyone else, but it seems that will likely fade some too. He mentions that product cycles are getting shorter and so competitive advantages like Apple funding fabs are likely to last shorter and shorter times.

As product cycles tighten (and we had quotes for 40-day turnaround times), the supplier with the right technology, available right now will benefit.

It seems to me like the right option is to admit that your hardware business is likely to be undercut in most areas and to instead focus on software and integration and move up the stack to where there’s still real value. That being said, this is exactly the kind of thing that the Innovator’s Dilemma says is nearly impossible for companies to do.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/

This whole recent article on “The Cheapest Generation” does a lot of talking about how young people’s buying habits have been changing. Specifically, they’re buying fewer cars and houses and even when they buy them, they’re going with smaller and cheaper ones. Some of that can be chalked up to the recent economic collapse, but the article argues that even the collapse doesn’t quite explain it all.

In any event, the article has one line which explains so much of the current generation in a single, short sentence that it’s stuck with me ever since I read it.

Young people prize “access over ownership,” said Sheryl Connelly, head of global consumer trends at Ford.

It explains the transition from car ownership to Zipcar. It explains the shift from buying music to subscription services like Pandora and Spotify. It also explains why people are mostly happy to jump to the cloud—where they don’t own their data, but do have access to it. It even explains a bunch of the mentality of Facebook—focusing on providing the cleanest simplest way to give people access to their lives even as they give up control of things.

Apparently, Ford employs some smart people.

I’m sure a bunch of you remember the story a while back about how the app store is more of a casino than an actual business model. Now the recent acquisition of the sparrow mail app by Google has people talking again about how the app store works again.

It’s not good.

On the one hand people are feeling betrayed because after they shelled out money for the app, the developers are walking out on the project because of the acquisition. At least one person is correctly pointing out that the real reason people are reacting so strongly is that it violated one of their assumptions about how apps work. They thought that by paying for they app they were somehow more in control over what they were getting.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, other people noted that even though Sparrow has angered their users, they were also likely not making enough money to support their development efforts.

From our experience, a $2.99 app in the App Store needs to hover around #250 in the top paid list to sustain two people working full-time on the app.

This doesn’t work. You need to be able to have more than ~500 developers full time making apps. A lot more.

The worst part of all of this isn’t actually the fact that the app store is unsustainable—that’s fine, the app store can fail or people can raise prices. The real problem is that in the process of failing, the app store is redefining what people think software is worth. If we’ve permanently changed people’s valuation from software down from $30–50 to $1–5 that’s going to really hurt software development for some time to come.

For the last while I’ve had this unsettling feeling that while there are a lot of startups going around, most of them aren’t really innovating that much. Most notably, I’m tired of the idea that innovation can come from companies busy basically just trying to make apps that serve the smallest little quirk of what we want rings hollow to me.

If your core innovation is just an iPhone app, then it’s not clear that you’ve really had the impact you wanted to have. There are obvious exceptions like VizWiz which a friend of mine (now a professor at the University of Rochester) wrote that allows blind people to take a picture, speak a question about the the picture and get a response back within seconds allowing the vision impaired to “see” via a proxy. But, in general, your new startup about hyper-local, crowdsourced, social, location-based iPhone app is probably not going to change the world.

The always great Planet Money Podcast reminded me of this with their recent episode The Cool Kids Don’t Want To Go Public. They explored the fact that a lot of the new companies that people are starting aren’t really sustained business models but rather a elaborate courtesan dance to seduce the princely giants of the tech world.

As Bill DeRouchey (@billder) put it:

Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

The Planet Money Podcast also makes the more nuanced point that there are people who choose not to take their companies public because they don’t need the extra money to grow and they don’t want the extra oversight that’s required. Still, it seems like we could use more people trying to build companies than can last decades rather than companies looking for the early out.

I am by no means a prolific photographer, but I do own an halfway decent entry-level SLR—an Olympus e-520 for those who care. This has resulted in my having about 100 GB of photos that I need to somehow keep stored in an accessible and reliable way. More worryingly, about 45–50 GB of the photos are from last year.

So, in reality, storing that amount of data is trivial. A 3 TB hard drive can be had for $150 on Amazon right now and it would easily store all of photos for the foreseeable future. However, the SSD I have in my MacBook Air is only a 256 GB drive and between music, the videos I want to watch over the next bit, virtual machines and general stuff I don’t have 100 GB free for all of my photos.

the easy (almost-)solution

Fine, so I need to get something to store my photos on that isn’t my laptop. The easiest thing to do is to get a big external hard drive and store all the photos there. I could even get two and you can store a second copy. At least in theory.

In practice, there are at least 2 problems. First, when I put all my photos on an external hard drive, they’re suddenly inaccessible to me except when I’m at home with them plugged into my laptop.

Second, I need some way to make sure the data is replicated on both drives. I can’t simply set them up in a RAID since then anything you accidentally deleted will be deleted on both drives. Since the drives themselves are dumb, they can’t run a chron job to back themselves up either. Meaning that I have to manually make sure they’re both in sync.

This is actually more or less what I do right now, but it sucks. In actuality, one of the two hard drives sits in a Windows box that sits under my TV, so I can kind of get at my photos by remote desktoping back into it, but it’s not what anyone would call elegant.

working out a real solution

Fine, both the previous problems seem to have a common problem which is that you can’t have just dumb drives. You need to have some intelligence associated with you date both to give you access to it even though it’s not all stored locally on your computer and to maintain replicas for you.

Ideally, it should also meet the following 3 goals:

1. Keep older version of files and folders so that accidental deletions don’t actually destroy any data.
2. Be easily accessible over the network—fast while you’re on the same LAN and at least functional over the Internet.
3. Allow for some data to be stored off-site either on a remote machine or in the cloud somewhere.

With goal 3 above, you might be thinking that a cloud solution might solve all of your problems. Just store it all in DropBox, SkyDrive or Google Drive and be done with it.

While this seems like a great solution at first, it doesn’t actually work out so well in practice. The problem isn’t actually the cost so much, in fact, SkyDrive will sell you 100 GB for $50/year which is more than reasonable.

The biggest problem is that you basically have to be willing to store all or nothing of the collection on any given computer. In other words, I can’t easily access my photos from my laptop where I don’t have enough space to store a complete copy. The web interfaces which might save you aren’t really quite good enough to actually use to get at your files except in a pinch.

This does kind of point out what I think the real solution is though. A virtual folder—or file system, however you want to look at it—that gives you the logical view that it contains all the 100s of gigabytes of your files, but in practice only stores a small cache of ones you’ve recently used. Then, if you try to load a file that isn’t cached it goes out and finds a copy to fetch for you whether it’s from your home PC or the cloud.

In theory, this shouldn’t be too hard to implement using a FUSE filesystem—though that rules out Windows for now—where when the user accesses a cached file it works just the same as opening any other file and when they access an uncached file, it blocks until the file can be retrieved. This could even be made better for photos in particular since OSes now store metadata like thumbnails along with photos and you could conceivably cache all of that allowing for easy browsing.

Any file dropped into the virtual folder could be sent to any number of replicas in the cloud or elsewhere and any changes to a file could be made to a new version while the old version was carefully squirreled away.

Basically, I get a magic folder on my laptop which takes up only a small fraction of the space of all my photos—My bet is that 10–15 GB would be more than enough. But, the magic folder does exactly what I want. When I put stuff in it, it backs it up for me. When I look at it I see all of my files—albeit maybe a bit slower than if it was actually local.

I’m honestly a little surprised that DropBox hasn’t already done this.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/google-coordinate/

On Thursday, Google uncloaked a new service dubbed Google Maps Coordinate that lets businesses track the activities of remote workers — such as traveling sales staff and field technicians — by tapping into GPS devices on their cell phones. For instance, says Google, a cable TV company could follow the progress of their field techs as they move from home to home repairing cable connections.

Really? Is this the space that Google needs to be innovating in most? Also how does this fit into their “don’t be evil” mantra?

These people interviewed Allwyn Sequeira, CTO and vice president of cloud, networking and security for VMware about OpenFlow. Honestly, the technical content is pretty weak, but my favorite part is all the snark.

If you have 200 Stanford Ph.D.s and you own your own fiber and can build your own boxes in your backyard and you own your own traffic and have proprietary applications, then [Openflow] is for you [now].

Ouch!

Then, when asked if he thought of Nicira and Big Switch as possible competitors, he had this to say:

The real question is: Are Nicira and Big Switch a feature in VMware?

Beautiful. This guy is great.