Category: Technology

What do you do if your cloud-based mission critical application is down for an indefinite time? Illustration from a reader for RSS feeds.

(Cross-post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)

Update: The Old Reader back up at end of work day Thursday – that makes 1 1/2 days of the weekend and 4 workdays it was down.

Update 2: Shortly after coming back up, Old Reader went down again. After coming back up, they announced the move to a ‘private model’, meaning anyone who signed up after the Google announcement would get dropped.  I understand – this has been a hobby for them and free to users.  Then they said ‘never mind’, everyone could stay. They have been down a few times since then while migrating to new hardware.  Um, that sort of proves the point of this post.

Your tech provider may go off-line for an indefinite time.  Another reason not to let your technology hold you captive.

The Old Reader went down around lunchtime on Saturday, 7-20, and isn’t back up just before lunch on Wednesday, 7-24. That’s four days – most of the weekend and one-half of a work-week. No public estimate when it will return.

Don’t be held captive by your technology.

Continue reading “What do you do if your cloud-based mission critical application is down for an indefinite time? Illustration from a reader for RSS feeds.”

More good stuff on surveillance – 7-23-13

There are a lot of articles discussing the surveillance world we now live in. I would like to comment on many of them in a full post. Alas, time does not permit.

I will start putting up a list of good stuff that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a quick comment. Hopefully this will be a frequent list of links.

Here’s my first list:

Foreign Policy – The CIA’s New Black Bag Is Digital – When the NSA can’t break into your computer, these guys break into your house – Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 7-23-13”

New tech is changing undersea drilling too – peak oil #27

Amazing technology developments are making drilling in the ocean easier, reducing cost, and revealing the locations of hard-to-find oil.

Six Tech Advancements Changing the Fossil Fuels Game at Rigzone outlines the changes.

I like this sentence that points out what everyone knows (specifically that a particular well or field only so much oil and will eventually run dry) with what the peak oilers refuse to believe (that there is another field to drill which is now reachable with new technology):

Rig advancements are coming online in tandem with the significantly increased momentum to drill in deeper waters as shallower reserves run out. 

Oh, and advancement in technology is just one of several fatal flaws to the “peak oil” foolishness.

Here’s some of the new tech. One of the 6 applies to drilling on land – at least I think it doesn’t apply to deep-sea drilling.

Continue reading “New tech is changing undersea drilling too – peak oil #27”

The reach of federal data gathering is beyond imagination (most people call that spying)

Barry Ritholtz summarizes the currently known scope of information being gathered by the U.S. government in his post, How Much Is the US Government Spying on Americans.

There is an extensive list of the ways and means of data gathering in the long article. There are multiple dozens of links to other articles if you want more background on any specific point he makes.

Here’s a good summary: Continue reading “The reach of federal data gathering is beyond imagination (most people call that spying)”

Autonomous drone lands itself on aircraft carrier

Update – Third attempt on 7-15-13 unsuccessful. Frequent failures are the price of innovation. Two successful landings is very cool. 

Here’s an amazing first:  a self-flying drone, the X-47B, took off from land at Patuxent NAS, flew to the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush and landed itself. It was then launched off the catapult and landed again.

Check out the video in the WSJ article: Navy Drone Successfully Lands on Aircraft Carrier.

There wasn’t an operator on the ground controlling the drone – it flew itself. Very cool.

Continue reading “Autonomous drone lands itself on aircraft carrier”

Survey of shale oil; also the Peak Oil Myth – #26

Matt Ridley provides an overview of the flood of fracked shale oil in his post, The dash for shale oil will shake the world.

He points to The Shale Oil Boom: a US Phenomenon, a newly released report from Leonardo Maugeri.

I’ve mentioned this in the past, but look again at the explosion of estimated recoverable oil in Bakken: Continue reading “Survey of shale oil; also the Peak Oil Myth – #26”

Be careful when predicting who will win the tech battles – search engine illustration

Don’t be too confident when you guess who will win the battles for market share and who is destined to disappear. Remember when Yahoo was the dominant search engine provider?

When that upstart outfit, Google, appeared on the scene in 1998 who would have predicted it to be the dominant search engine in 2013, a mere 15 years later?

My friend John Bredehoft creates a forecast from 1998 using information available at the time in his post, In which I apply the wisdom of 1998 to an old Salon article.

If he was blogging at the time, he guesses he would have not given Google much of a chance to succeed against Excite, Lycos, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. He would have guessed the new Disney search engine would fare better than Google and several others.

His hypothetical comment about Google: Continue reading “Be careful when predicting who will win the tech battles – search engine illustration”

Video of micro drone that flies like bird

Two profs at the University of Maryland, my alma mater, developed a remotely controlled ‘bird’ that can fly. The wings operate independently which provides lots of maneuverability.

This is cool, just by itself.

The next step is to add a small camera and small transmitter. Then you have a usable surveillance system

You can view the video in this article:  Newly developed micro robot bird able to perform reconnaissance, surveillance.

You will need to watch a 15 second commercial before the news report starts.

Surveillance society – A very bad week for privacy.

Joke of the week – if my computer or website crashes, can I get a backup copy from NSA?

Lots of publicity this week on extensive federal monitoring of citizens and non citizens. No time to write a full post, so just a quick note to put some dots on the page. Hopefully will have time to connect them later

Four massive stories this week:

Continue reading “Surveillance society – A very bad week for privacy.”

How do you securely leak information in a surveillance society?

How do you talk to a reporter with minimum risk of being found out? What does the answer to that question tell the rest of us who don’t have really juicy stuff to spill to a national reporter?

You leave digital crumbs every time you use the internet or your computer or any device that accesses the ‘net. How then to securely leak info to the media?

Continue reading “How do you securely leak information in a surveillance society?”

With cell phone cameras everywhere, here is one proposal for how to balance freedom to record and the right to privacy

John Bredehoft ponders Striking the balance between freedom and privacy, and the other Empoprise rule

With almost everyone having a cell phone that can record video and audio, we need to work through the issue of balancing privacy right to *not* be recorded and the freedom to record things of interest.

As a society, we haven’t come to terms with that issue.

John has a suggestion: Continue reading “With cell phone cameras everywhere, here is one proposal for how to balance freedom to record and the right to privacy”

Plummeting price of memory

Check out this superb graph from Wired Magazine reposted by Carpe Diem – Chart of the day: The falling price of memory.

Fantastic illustration of how drastically storage prices have dropped in last 20 years.

Let’s look at the technology I’ve used to pass info back and forth to clients while at their office.

Continue reading “Plummeting price of memory”

Rough picture of how far the tech revolution has to go

John Bredehoft expanded my discussion on the tech revolution just getting started.

In his post, Why are some revolutions imperceptible?, he describes the revolution in his industry from getting powerful PCs. The impact on the economy was tiny, if even measurable, because the entire industry was small in relation to the overall US economy.

To point out how small the publishing and music industries are, he looked at the Fortune 500 list of largest companies in terms of sales. He points out that the largest identifiable media companies are News Corp at 91 and Time Warner at 103.

Since I’m an accountant and like to quantify things, his post gave me an interesting idea. I went to the list and did a quick analysis to compare the size of a few industries.

Continue reading “Rough picture of how far the tech revolution has to go”