New York is still alive. Battered. Flooded. And danger still everywhere. I shot this from our front door:
This dangling, busted crane is up 90 stories and ready to drop. It’s atop a building full of apartments for billionaires. (That’s the sales pitch.) Who was rthe moron who forgot to tether the boom?
Everything is closed for the second day. Many of the subways are flooded. The subways carry something like 8 million people to and from work every day. That’s going to make getting back to normal a many week process.
So, the cloud is so wonderful? As a backup for your data? As a place to work?
It’s not. It sucks. To wit:
This web site is in the “cloud.” This morning, the site was down. I emailed tech support. Their response:
There are connectivity issues to the servers in the Savvis datacenter in Boston, MA. We have contacted the network engineers there, and they are working on resolving it. These connectivity issues are caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Savvis report that all their Boston datacenters are isolated. The datacenter itself is secure and operating on a backup power. The isolation is due to power loss at multiple network exchange points. Savvis technicians are working on restoring the connectivity through alternative routes. An estimated time of resolution is unknown at this time.
Imagine if your multi-million dollar customer proposal was due this morning. And it was stuck in the cloud because a bunch of incompetent Savvis (whoever they are) engineers hadn’t organized adequate backup power.
The “big” cloud is run by companies like Amazon and Google. Amazon has suffered multiple outages at its cloud. I bet Google has too.
So, Harry, what’s the warning? Simple, keep backups on your own PC or laptop. And never ever rely on the cloud.
So, Harry, why should I care? You should care because every major vendor is pushing the cloud like there was no tomorrow. Every corporation (including yours) is embracing Google Docs (in the cloud). Apple is “backing” up your stuff into the cloud. And most worrisome, Microsoft’s Office 2013 makes heavy use of the cloud to “sync” all your docs to your various devices. Good luck.
Just keep backups.
Speaking of backups, I was in Best Buy. They had this darling little USB one terabyte external drive for $99.99 made by Western Digital, a legitimate manufacturer. Buy a couple of these things. Back up to both of them. That way the cloud’s unreliability won’t bother you.
Microsoft is spending $1 billion to introduce its new stuff. That will include massive advertising, about 32 popup stores and demonstration kiosks in shopping malls.
In the last few days, I got my hands on Windows 8 and the Surface Tablet. Neither got my juices going sufficiently to buy one or the other, or both.
Apple’s iPad is a far more interesting product and, more importantly, sports hundreds of thousands of software applications from independent makers (including myself).
I haven’t seen Office 2013, but there is nothing in the reviews that suggest I should instantly replace the Office 2003 I’m using happily every day. Yes, Harry is using a ten-year old Microsoft product, which has a nice search engine — called Lookout — and a nice layout for weekly appointments, which Microsoft killed in later versions.
One tech reviewer actually suggested that someone ought to start a class action suit against Microsoft for all the time it’s wasted corporate America by changing its user interface with each edition of Office and forcing corporate America to relearn the way it’s worked.
John Grisham makes a reommendation.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Fifty Shades of Grey.” Why should he miss all the fun? Plus, it might loosen him up a bit.
For the full interview, click here.
Harry Newton who cautions; You should not underestimate the extent of the devastation in the Northeast. Around eight million are without power. Many of the main subway lines are flooded. Many large buildings are flooded. Many blocks around the crane, which is on 57th street, have been evacuated. It’s across the road from Carnegie Hall. I guess there won’t be any performances for a while. It’s awful.
Harry, as you know, cranes are my specialty. They don’t get “tethered” when high winds are expected, in fact it’s the opposite. They are left in free-swing mode so they can “weather-vane” (i.e. turn in-line with the wind)
In this case it appears to me that either that wasn’t done (highly unlikely) or the boom was left at too high an angle. If it was facing the wind when a big gust came, there wouldn’t be time for the whole crane to swing and the boom would (and did) go over backwards. Whatever happened, there will be one less operator with a licence this morning.
Recovery will be a cast iron bitch. There is no mobile crane in the US that can reach that high. They will be reduced to lowering the boom down with manual rigging methods or building another tower crane next to this one to dismantle it and continue construction. The latter gets my vote as they’re going to need another crane there anyway.
I say get him to read the constitution and bill of rights.
I heard that they thought it too risky to bring the crane down before the storm.
As for a suggested read for the president? He’s already read Alinkiski’s “Rules for Radicals”, How does one pull him back from the Abyss of that?
A better read for everyone would be “The Amateur”