The Rockethouse

The case against net neutrality

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:32:03 -0400

I’m not sure net neutrality is a good thing. Here’s why:

Networks have to throttle traffic when there is congestion
If networks can’t selectively prioritize traffic during congestion, they must resort to random dropping of packets
Throttling randomly leads to unfair application quality of experience impacts
We want convergence of our phone, our mobile, our tv, our computer, etc… And carriers want to give it us (and they will give it to us).
If networks aren’t able to deliver these applications (tv, phone, mobile, etc…) with expected quality of experience on a shared IP network, they will deliver them on multiple, un-shared, networks. Re-birth of the walled garden. Content locked in protected, private networks and inaccessible except from certain devices.
If networks CAN selectively prioritize traffic during contestion, then converged applications CAN be delivered with high quality of experience, even during periods of conestion. Convergence will happen at the IP layer. Content and data is available to all applications and devices on any IP network.

I will expand on each of these points in subsequent posts, but that’s the gist of it.

The reason software is so bad is that it's so easy to make

Wed, 07 May 2008 22:16:00 -0400

New Relic announced that it raised some money today. It looks like a pretty cool product. Assuming it works as advertised, you drop their plugin into your rails app, then visit their web app to browse and analyze its performance.

Isn’t this a problem that every programmer in every language runs into? Tools like gprof and DTrace perform similar functions, but in a MUCH more general set of applications.

Despite not really being “new technology”, New Relic stands apart in that it seems to generate useful data without requiring the developer to really know what they should be looking for (e.g. you don’t have to tell it what you want monitored, it just figures that out for you). Makes you wonder whether you can ever expect an application to scale when it’s built by someone that doesn’t know how it will scale.

A friend of mine always used to say “The reason software is so bad is that it’s so easy to make!” And over time it seems that software really does only get easier to make. But this doesn’t tell the whole picture.

This whole “software gets easier to make” progression relies upon a small cadre of software engineers who actually make software easier to make. While you have the mass of programmers growing and applying decreasing levels of sophistication to their application authoring techniques (e.g. assembly language -> C -> J2EE -> Ruby on Rails), you have the small cadre of architects applying increasing levels of knowledge about what has worked at what hasn’t (e.g. procedures -> libraries -> classes -> patterns -> frameworks — or some such progression WLOG).

So I can accept the “dumbing down” of software, because it is directly enabled by the “smartening up” of the underlying technologies on top of which most software is built.

That being said… Hey DTrace team. You can’t just be sitting on your haunches? Where’s your DTrace web service that let’s you “one-click” monitor any application?

Fail! makes bid to acquire Fail!

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:51:09 -0400

Blockbuster made a bid to acquire Circuit City today. I can’t really imagine this being successful. Here’s my reasoning in sexy bullet list format:

Seems like old-school business model (brick and mortar movie rental) trying to bail itself out by combining with another old-school business (brick and mortar electronics).
If blockbuster is really going to introduce a box in the home that streams movies right to your TV, they’re going to experience some channel conflict with their suppliers acquired through circuit city.
One of Blockbuster’s biggest problems is that they have long leases on a ton of real estate which they can’t get out of. This is much of their $2B in debt. This deal will leave them with MORE real estate they can’t get out of.
Blockbuster has a market cap of $617M this morning (down 12% as I’m writing this) and yet they are offering up to $1.8B. This would be financed through issuance of additional stock. Now THERE’s some dilution.

My take: Blockbuster knows they can’t beat Netflix. Rather than try to compete, they are trying to hop into an adjacent market. BBI CEO Jim Keyes was formerly CEO of 7-11. Head down to your local 7-11 to preview BBI’s future.

The distributed computing myth

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:33:00 -0400

GigaOm posted this article about Google’s App Engine and I couldn’t help but comment. Much of what Mr. McConnell has to say is right on. Yes, we want utility like computing that can scale up and down as needed. Yes, we want to be able to use our development language or platform of choice. Yes we want it to be standards based.

But where I take issue is with the notion that cloud computing should look like a single linux CPU. Or that it should provide what looks like a single MySQL database.

This will not scale. If you want scalable computing architecture, you need to look beyond the CPU. If you build your application assuming that all CPU’s have access to a single global memory, you will build your software in a way that is inconsistent with running on a distributed system.

For example, don’t assume that every CPU has access to all session state. As you scale up to hundreds or thousands or millions of CPU’s, you’re going to spend all of your time making sure that your CPU’s have the same and consistent version of memory. Computation will grind to a halt as your virtual servers continuously update everybody else. You’re preserving an abstraction that does not efficiently scale with growth of infrastructure.

Same goes for the database. If you assume that everything sits in a single database image, you enable and in fact encourage the programmer to make bad decisions.

The key to achieving scale is to set up your programmers with an environment in which they can’t make bad decisions (or rather, make it such that the easiest decision for them to make is inherently scalable).

BigTable is a perfect example. Google realized that it just isn’t feasible to build a single database cluster that contains the entire web. So they sacrificed some of the features of SQL that limit it to a single database instance in favor of a subset (GQL) that can be supported across a massively distributed set of servers. Engineers design their tables using BigTable and they query it using the tools Google has provided. As long as they do that, they can scale their database from kilobytes to petabytes without sacrificing performance.

Virtualization is not about “making the Internet look like a single linux CPU”. It’s about changing the programming environment in ways that prevent bad decisions and encourage good ones.

The classic problem with distributed systems has been trying to hide the fact that you’re running on a distributed system. It’s better to embrace this fact and build our tools in a way that supports the right abstraction.

I DO NOT want a single linux CPU or a single MySQL database. I want a set of API’s that ensures that whatever code I write will scale from one CPU to 1,000,000 CPU’s without modification. BigTable’s a giant leap in this direction. Distributed Hash Tables are another. We need more technologies like these to make this happen.

Is new media really going to be better than old media?

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:37:00 -0400

Lots of buzz about SellaBand raising $5M today. It’s a really interesting model. They have 18 groups that have been funded to the $50,000 level. That’s $900,000 raised $10 at a time from people over the web. Pretty impressive!

But have you read through the terms and conditions?

My favorite part:

“5.5 All rights in the titles on the CD, including intellectual and commercial property rights as well as master and copying rights and comparable rights are SellaBand’s rights exclusively.”

The band gets $50,000 to record an album (do they get what’s left over after recording expenses?) and gives away 5000 CD’s to do it. Then they get 60% of the net profit (after deducting expenses charged by sellaband) of sales after that.

Is this really that much better than the old media gig?

Babelgum unveils first fund project

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:53:39 -0400

Babelgum unveils first fund project:

I can’t say that I understand the strategy here. Babelgum has been investing in technology to deliver content for several years now. Why would they try to cross over into the studio business?

Do their skills in building P2P software translate into “picking ponies” in the media business?

They must believe that the only thing that’s going to bring users to their platform is a unique set of content that is available only from them. But because they have no audience, they are actually hurting the chances for the films they fund to ever succeed.

Unless they are willing to allow their content to be released on other platforms. But then why have a distribution network at all? Technology’s an awfully expensive and complicated thing to invest in if you don’t plan on using it…

Maybe they should open a vineyard too. I hear that’s a sure path to financial success.

Peer to Peer Throttling Continues, But the Real Threat Lies Unmentioned

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:59:00 -0400

Bell Canada has been caught throttling peer-to-peer traffic. The reality is that this stuff has been deployed in most networks around the world in either test or production capacity. The debate is all about throttling which may miss the point. Throttling is a necessary component of a working network. Your PC throttles its bandwidth usage by virtue of using TCP. The routers and switches along the network, when they have more packets than they can process, drop packets all the time. It’s not physically possible to build a network that doesn’t throttle traffic in some way unless you can control all of the endpoints and control the rate at which they send data. Throttling is just a necessary and fundamental part of the network and it always has been.

What’s more scary is the inspection piece. What’s so scary about throttling peer-to-peer traffic is that the networks _know_ that it’s peer-to-peer traffic. Most p2p protocols masquerade as other protocols by using ports commonly used by other applications (HTTP or SMTP). In order to recognize p2p traffic, the network actually needs to look past the IP header into the body of the packet. This allows the network to distinguish between web browser traffic and p2p traffic, both using port 80.

Today they’re just using this inspection technology to determine which protocol you’re using. But it’s not a huge leap to extract specific and meaningful data out of those packets. Companies like adzilla and NebuAd are already using the same technology to deliver targeted advertising to users. It won’t be long before the ISP’s can remember all of the websites you visit, all of the posts to your blog, all of the songs you’ve downloaded. And what’s really scary is that there aren’t really many ways you can get around it.

ISP’s can learn this information merely because you connect to the inetnet through them. Encrypted traffic is obviously out of bounds, but today it is impracticle to encrypt every single packet from every single application you use. The opportunities for abuse are far spread…

Web-Video Ad-Price Survey, Take Three : Case Studies : Web Video Report

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:20:04 -0400

Web-Video Ad-Price Survey, Take Three : Case Studies : Web Video Report:

Interesting report. Numbers seem high tho.

How Not to Get Rich Quick: Create a Web Series « NewTeeVee

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:04:44 -0400

How Not to Get Rich Quick: Create a Web Series « NewTeeVee:

Interesting story. I wonder how much YouTube, Blip.tv and MetaCafe made off all those views?

Is a la Carte Cable a Sucker’s Bet? « NewTeeVee

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:56:51 -0400

Is a la Carte Cable a Sucker’s Bet? « NewTeeVee:

Another “sky is falling” prediction. This time from Yankee group indicating that a la carte pricing would reduce overall cable viewership, drive up pricing on surviving channels and overall wreck havok on the industry.

The thing is, networks are already paid based on their viewership (as reported by our friends at Nielsen). The biggest thing they’re going to uncover is that Nielsen has been all wrong. Or perhaps it’s just going to prove that people are willing to produce content even in the absense of an (intelligent) audience.

Interesting that they didn’t mention switched digital in their analysis…

Stats Junkies Get Another Fix: Woopra

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:56:12 -0400

Stats Junkies Get Another Fix: Woopra:

Cool stuff. Look at who’s on your site in real time.

BitTorrent and Comcast have a deal, but is P2P really safe? » VentureBeat

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:19:57 -0400

BitTorrent and Comcast have a deal, but is P2P really safe? » VentureBeat:

So we’re all pretty alarmed by net neutrality issues. And recent issues at comcast surely have many raising their arms in the air praising Comcast for their recent moves. But what gives? Instead of blocking traffic by the corporation that sent it, now they’re blocking traffic by the USER. The guns have been turned away from corporate america and towards you and I. Beware!

Online Video: Joost hires chief software architect, cans three marketers

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:02:59 -0400

Online Video: Joost hires chief software architect, cans three marketers:

What’s going on at Joost? They have had nothing but employee shakeups for what seems like forever. Does anybody even use the service?

Turner Picks Rentrak for VOD Metrics

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:42:57 -0400

Turner Picks Rentrak for VOD Metrics:

It baffles me that there isn’t more of this going on (e.g. monitoring what the set top boxes are doing). Why aren’t the MSO’s capturing census level data across all of their set top boxes for both broadcast and on-demand? And why haven’t they been doing this for years?

Is Nielsen’s panel really so good and so cheap that nobody’s needed anything better until now?

The Pogues: Tonight @ Orpheum

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:14:19 -0400

The Pogues: Tonight @ Orpheum :

Yay

Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality Shouldn't Extend to Illegal Acts, Says FCC Comissioner

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:38:28 -0400

Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality Shouldn't Extend to Illegal Acts, Says FCC Comissioner:

Okay, so let’s dig into this for a second… First of all, in order to prevent illegal acts, you need to snoop ALL traffic going through the network. I can see why people don’t like this. But also keep in mind that the techniques used by the telco’s to filter traffic aren’t able to snoop into encrypted streams.

So the people who are doing _really_ illegal stuff are going to get past no problem. And the rest who are either a) innocent or b) too stupid to use encryption, are the ones that get snooped.

Why don’t they just block all encrypted traffic?

Songkick Launches “Alexa For Bands”

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:05:41 -0400

Songkick Launches “Alexa For Bands”:

Does anybody ever question the data underlying these services? Compete sniffs data out of ISPs. Alexa installs software on a panel. But Songkick? They crawl the web. Well sorry, the crawl myspace and amazon. It would be interesting to see some statisticians chime in on the validity of such limited panels. Are friends on Myspace really indicitive of usage patterns? Songkick captures such static data. Your myspace friends rarely shrink… This gives us an approximate comfort of stability as our fans rush out from under us to find new ground.

The Ad IS the content

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:25:57 -0400

The Ad IS the content:

It strikes me that the techniques used to by a website to measure its audience (think web analytics ala Omniture, Google Analytics) are one and the same that a marketer would use to track a campaign. Why don’t adds embed the same level of analytics as a website? Why can’t I put analytics tags into my widgets or videos? Interesting article suggesting that my ads should be nothing less than unique content anyway…

Combined TV / Internet Ratings

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:19:17 -0400

Combined TV / Internet Ratings :

It would be interesting to see how many people were double counted in these combined ratings. Can you really just add up online and offline audience? How many offline users also watched online?