Ephemeral clouds

I’ve talked about cloud computing a number of times in these  pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of [X]aaS acronyms, the aaS part meaning as a service: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on.

I use email in the cloud. I keep my blog in the cloud. I post photos in the cloud. I have my own hosted domain, and I could have my email there, my blog, there, my photos there... but who would maintain the software? I could pay my hosting service extra for that, perhaps, but, well, the cloud works for me.

It works for many small to medium businesses, as well. Companies pay for cloud-based services, and, in return, the services promise things. There are service-level agreements, just as we’ve always had, and companies that use cloud-based services get reliability and availability guarantees, security guarantees, redundancy, backups in the cloud, and so on. Their data is out there, and their data is protected.

But what happens when they want to move? Suppose there’s a better deal from another cloud service. Suppose I, as a user, want to move my photos from Flickr to Picasa, or from one of those to a new service. Suppose a company has 2.5 terabytes of stuff out there, in a complex file-system-like hierarchy, all backed up and encrypted and safe and secure... and they want to move it to another provider.

In the worst case, suppose they have to, because their current service provider is going out of business.

Recently, Google Video announced that they would take their content down, after having shut the uploads down (in favour of YouTube) some time ago. This week, Friendster announced that they would revamp their service, removing most of their data in the process.

Of course, you understand that when I say their data, here, I really mean your data, yes? Because those Google Video things were uploaded by their users, and the Friendster stuff is... well, here’s what they say:

An e-mail sent Tuesday to registered users told them to expect a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks. It also warned them that their existing account profile, photos, messages, blog posts and more will be deleted on May 31. A basic profile and friends list will be preserved for each user.

Now, that sort of thing can happen: when you rely on a company for services, the company might, at some point, go away, terminate the service, or whatnot. But what’s the backup plan? Where’s the migration path? In short...

...how do you save your data?

Friendster has, it seems, provided a exporter app that will let people grab their stuff before it goes away. Google Video did no such thing, and there’s a crowd-sourced effort to save the content. But in the general case, this is an issue: if your provider goes away — or becomes abusive or hostile — how easy will it be for you to get hold of what you have stored there, and to move it somewhere else?

Be sure you consider that when you make your plans.

[Just for completeness: I have copies on my own local disks of everything I’ve put online... including archives of the content of these pages. If things should go away, it might be a nuisance, but I’ll have no data loss.]

Separation of church and Texas?

In a wonderful display of why we need to get religious nuttiness away from the halls of gummint, Governor of Rick Perry of Texas ranted thus yesterday in an executive proclamation that’s just in time for Earth Day:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

Texas has as a state ... been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer?

Indeed.

This proclamation seems as clear a violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment as I’ve seen in a while.

One might say that it does no harm. One might say that he makes it clear that it’s not just Rick Perry’s prayer, not just Christian prayer... that Governor Perry explicitly calls on all faiths and traditions.

The problem is that he still shoves some sort of faith in prayer into the faces of many, many people who consider prayer to be so much bullshit. This is totally inappropriate — just as inappropriate as if he’d said we should pray to Jesus, we should beseech Allah, or we should ask for the intercession of the spirit of Elvis.

It’s fine if Mr Perry thinks putting his hands together and muttering will do some good in relieving the drought. It’s fine if he wants to get his friends to join him in it. It’s even fine if he says so on statewide television when some talk-show host interviews him.

It’s not fine when it becomes an official proclamation. That’s crossing a line.

But here: I intend to draw an outline of Texas in the dirt in my garden today, and bury a ceremonial dried bluebonnet blossom in the approximate position of Austin therein. I will say Light-beam feelie! three times while holding my hand over the buried bluebonnet, and I am certain that within the month, it will have worked its magic and Texas will have had much-needed rain.

I know this to be the true answer, and far more effective than that prayer stuff. See if it isn’t!

Exercise while you work

I just got something new: a laptop desk that attaches to a treadmill. I tried it out yesterday, and it works great. It’s a little hard to type while I’m using it, but it works OK if I slow the treadmill down a bit. When I’m just reading, I can push it up to quite a brisk walking pace.

I gave it a go for an hour yesterday morning, and another hour yesterday afternoon, and I like it a lot. It’s a great way to avoid sitting in one place all day while I work. I may try some speech-recognition software as an alternative to typing, which, if it works well, might let me spend more time on it.

The treadmill might be a little noisy to use during conference calls, but those seem ideal times to get an extended period of walking in. I’ll have to try it, and see how that goes.

So far, with limited use, I can say that I really recommend it for anyone who works from home and sits at a desk all day!

Why is this night different?

Last night began the Jewish festival of Passover, one of several Jewish holidays (as was the recent Purim) whose stories can be summed up somewhat as, Someone tried to kill the Jews. The Jews survived. It’s time to eat. In this case, the someone involved the ancient Egyptians, or at least their Pharaoh and his advisors. Legend has it that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, Moses led a revolt, with God’s assistance it succeeded, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, and wound up in Canaan. Somewhere along the way were a burning bush, plagues on the Egyptians, parting of the Red Sea, a pillar of fire, manna from heaven, and the handing down of the ten commandments. The story is told in the biblical book Exodus, in a 1956 movie with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, and every year at two seders — ceremonial dinners on the first and second evenings of Passover.

Tonight, for the second seder, I’ll be joining Murray Spiegel for a very different seder, indeed. That Times article is from 2002, but Murray’s been doing this for years, and continues to. Last year’s theme was the musical Oliver, with bits of the story set to tunes from the musical, clips of The Four Questions spoken in various languages, including Na’vi (from the movie Avatar), and a bizarre puzzle to solve to find the afikomen, the hidden piece of matzah that’s part of the ritual.

We don’t know what the theme will be — we never do, until we arrive — but we know there’ll be about 30 people there, and we’re told to expect a late night.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

On all other nights we eat either leavened bread or matzah; on this night, only matzah.

On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs; on this night, only bitter herbs.

On all other night, we do not dip even once; on this night, we dip twice.

On all other nights, we eat either sitting up or reclining; on this night, we recline.

מה נשתנה הלילה הזה מכל הלילות
?

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין חמץ ומצה; הלילה הזה, כלו מצה

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין שאר ירקות; הלילה הזה, מרור

שבכל הלילות אין אנו מטבילין אפילו פעם אחת; הלילה הזה, שתי פעמים

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין בין יושבין ובין מסבין; הלילה הזה, כלנו מסבין

Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

Is it art?

The item to the right (click it to enlarge) is on display at the Czech National Gallery at Veletržní Palác. As you can see, it comprises two white-painted wooden chairs that are tied together with rope.

There’s lots of other stuff at the (very extensive and interesting) gallery for which I don’t have to ask this question, but for this piece, here it is: Is it art?

What do you think?

We decline!

I’m back from Prague, and recovering from the trip. I talked about the Czech language after my 2007 visit, and mentioned the case endings. This trip’s given me something else to say about that.

After the IETF meeting, during the vacation part of my stay, I moved to a hotel called The Golden Tree. In Czech, golden tree is zlatý strom, and there were a few things around that said that. But that’s the nominative case. Hotel names are frequently (usually, it seems) rendered as U [something], where the word u is like the french chez, meaning at the place of. That throws it into the genitive case, so the proper name of the hotel is U Zlatého Stromu.

Czech has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental), so the combinations of endings as nouns are declined and adjectives are changed to match can be dizzying.

Unlike German (but like other Slavic languages, such as Russian), Czech declines proper nouns, including people’s names. And they decline everyone’s names, not just Czech ones, or ones that look like they might be Czech.

This trip included a visit to the Czech Museum of Music, which had an exhibit called Beatlemánie, about the Beatles. I had to see that, of course.

It was amusing to see the names declined. The most interesting was Sir Paul’s. He was Paul McCartney when it was nominative, of course. But when a display talks about The Solo Career of Paul McCartney, it becomes Sólová dráha Paula McCarneyho.

Paula McCartneyho ?

Oy!