That’s what greeted me this AM when I checked in on Twitter to see if I had any direct messages requiring responses. Apparently, someone has come up with a widget that will tell you how many of your followers are fake and folks who were using it were proudly posting the results. ”1% of my followers are fake.” ”4.7% of mine, I wonder who the .7 follower is…” You get the idea.
Just another poor signal to noise morning in the Twitterverse. I wonder why I bother. But then I am reminded of all of the useful leads I have collected in that forum of 140 character messages. For example, just yesterday…
A tweet came across from some guy at Sepaton that caught my eye, together with a link to an article in Computer Technology Review. (Caution to all: I followed this link and whether as a result of buggy code or deliberate malfeasance I ended up having to reboot my machine to clear out the problems it created for my browser. They may have resolved it, so I will try the link again now. Seems to work now, with just one pop up ad. So here’s the link.)
Anyway, what caught my eye was the author’s claim, first, that according to a survey of X people, 50% said that data growth rates this year were 25% higher than last year. The author went on to tell the story of how efficient database dedupe was going to solve the problem.
I felt sick to my stomach when I first read this, then got blisteringly mad when the bad code/pop up ads or whatever brought my system to its knees, requiring a reboot.
Please, please, all writers and editors, out of respect to your readers who are trying to kick their nicotine habits, here are some things not to say or do in your articles posted to blogs or on-line web portals.
- Don’t claim that you have any insights whatsoever regarding rates of data growth. NOBODY KNOWS HOW FAST THEIR DATA IS GROWING, THE ONLY KNOW HOW MUCH MORE STORAGE CAPACITY THEY ARE ADDING EVERY YEAR. That is not the same thing.
- Please refrain from citing survey data THAT DOESN’T REFERENCE THE SIZE OF THE SURVEY SAMPLE OR CHARACTERIZE THE RESPONDENTS BY JOB DESCRIPTION OR INDUSTRY SEGMENT OR POLITICAL PARTY OR SOMETHING. Without any point of reference, your data is bullshit.
- Please do not use the expression “unmanaged data growth” in the same paragraph as “de-duplication.” DEDUPLICATION DOES NOT ADDRESS THE PROBLEM OF DATA GROWTH, IT IS AT BEST A TEMPORARY OR TACTICAL FIX FOR CAPACITY DEMAND. That is not the same thing.
See, without Twitter, I might have missed this opportunity to rant. But wait, there’s more.
Another Tweet led me to this article/column/propaganda piece from EMC. I was pretty sure it was a misprint when I read it. CLOUD SHOULD BE DEFINED BY WHAT IT WILL BECOME, NOT WHAT IT IS TODAY.
WTF? I mean, “What the F..k?” I mean, “WHAT THE FUDGE?”
The author says cloud is in its infancy, so it shouldn’t be evaluated in terms of what it can deliver today. Just buy cloud services and watch them “grow up.” Really?
The Ford Model T was only available in Black, the writer observes, but today we can buy a custom designed car online. Clouds are like that.
Really?
The Model T actually delivered value from the get go: it transported folks from point a to point b and made up for its high cost, lack of speed, and poor carbon footprint by appealing to a particular kind of gal who wanted to pitch woo with a guy in a car.
Current clouds deliver no value (at least not reliably) that would compensate for their poor security, lousy SLAs, dodgy carbon offset story — and I am not aware of any women who will find you more attractive on date night because you outsource your IT to a cloud.
This is a silly if not downright idiotic defense of clouds. Which is why the author saw fit to share it on Twitter.
The author is one JP Morgenthal, who’s bio says he is a Principal Solutions Architect in the Cloud and Virtual Data Center Services Ranger group for EMC. ”He is one of the world’s foremost experts in IT strategy and cloud computing. He has over twenty-five years of expertise applying technology solutions to complex business problems.”
I don’t know the guy, but I bet he has a lot of phony followers.
If you don’t like this blog, please check back often to see what it will evolve into going forward. Verste.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Bravo. Very, very well said. Dedupe isn’t the answer to all the world’s problems as vendors would lead you to believe. Nor is cloud computing, SSDs drives, or “big data”. Just the industry super hyping a technology and idiot “experts” singing along the company pitch line..
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