Article: Drying of the West

Tucked away towards the back of the February issue of National Geographic is a fantastic article that highlights one of the main areas of concern for the 21st century – the availability of a reliable, clean supply of water.

Many places are experiencing droughts or long periods without rain, with the last few years being the driest ever. The article concentrates on western America – over the last 50 years the population has almost doubled, and this has been possible because there was enough water to meet their needs.

“What we have come to consider normal is profoundly wet… “

The trouble is that it has been revealed that the 2oth century was the wettest century for a millennium, and that as the world returns to its drier state and the rivers return to their normal levels they may not be able to support the number of people they do at the moment. This leads to water shortages for consumption and agriculture. Even if you can rely on more than one source of water, chances are they will all be affected in the same way. Reduced supply means that water prices will go way beyond what we are used to paying, and that’s before any costs involved in trying to improve the situation. It won’t be cheap – if it was, we’d be doing it already.

“Global warming will intensify the whole process…the dry regions will get drier and the wet regions will get wetter.”

The article does a good job of explaining how various States are discussing ways of dealing with the situation and how to share out the shortages so that there is the least immediate impact. There is the underlying prospect of the States becoming tougher with each other over time as the situation really starts to take hold. And these are just political battles in a stable modern country – it’s not too difficult to foresee disputes arising between countries as governments on different sides of a border try to safeguard supplies and protect / appease their populations.

Although not dealt with in the article, this ties in with one of the world’s other concerns for the next 50 years – reducing our reliance on oil as a fuel source. We are looking at growing crops to do this – what happens if the demand for water in urban areas means that there is less for irrigation? A global population increase already means that food prices are rising. Our approx 6 billion people today could reach over 9 billion by 2050. How will we balance our need for food with the need for fuel if there is less capacity overall?

It’s not a pretty picture, and it has already started.

• National Geographic: Drying of the West
• Wikipedia: World population

Thinking boxes

“ In 1999 the internet generated 2 exabytes (1.074 billion gigabytes) of information; by the end of 2007 it was handling 1 exabyte an hour.”

It’s not just the internet that faces this growth, the challenge of dealing with the demands of storing and serving the growing rate of information is being dealt with in different ways by different organisations. People are having to think big. A couple of articles highlight just how big…

The computer grid is the main way of dealing with this kind of problem – low cost machines clustered together to give the processing power and storage required. Cern (my first workplace, so holds a special pace in my heart) is building a grid of 100,000 CPUs to deal with the load and data generated by the Large Hadron Collider – up to 15 petabytes (15 million gigbytes) a year.

IBM is contemplating a slightly different approach. A distinctly different approach. It is taking the grid idea, removing a number of machines until there is one left:

“The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable “of hosting the entire internet as an application.”

One machine but over 67 million cores. I want one of those… but I don’t think I have the money for the electricity bill. Or the real estate. The article continues:

“[The] platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today…a more reliable computer – by more than two orders of magnitude – than commodity boxes which fail all the time. IBM has issued a novel approach to the utility computing, mega data center problem.”

To be honest, I’d never convince my wife anyway…

• Computer Weekly: Cern builds largest computer grid to study origins of the universe
• The Register: IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet
• Wikipedia: Large Hadron Collider

Microsoft goes for Yahoo!

It’s now a week since Microsoft announced its $45bn bid to buy Yahoo!. There has been a lot of good coverage, and the links below give a good insight into the deal. I can’t see it being turned down by the Yahoo! shareholders as the offer is way above the current share price. The authorities shouldn’t really question it.

The main point for me is whether it will make any real difference in the long run, or even the medium term. Even with a combined share of the search market, Microsoft and Yahoo! don’t come close to matching the dominance of Google (in 2007 MS + Yahoo! totalled just over 3bn searches to Google’s 5.6bn.) Add in the time it will take for the deal to actually go through and then the time for the integration of the two companies to start in any real way (not to mention different company cultures) and then any merging of search technologies. Even the back ends of the companies are different – Yahoo! is based on linux, whilst Microsoft use their own technologies. You’re looking at a couple of years, especially if MS tries to convert Yahoo! to using its technologies too, in the way it did with Hotmail. Then there are decisions about which web portals to keep and which to let wither and die.

All the while Google is innovating, improving its current offering so that it is even further ahead. Then it will be focusing on the future, especially the mobile phone arena – what with Android software for handsets and bidding for spectrum. Localised search, based on your current position, search results on your TV determined by your search history and viewing patterns and more. Then there are the corporate backroom deals with other companies with web presence to supply advertising, which is where the bigger money is.

This isn’t a game for a combined MS and Yahoo! to win. They’re going to be focusing on (soon outmoded?) PCs and maybe even trying to prove their search results are more relevant than Google’s. This is Google’s game to fumble and lose – they have won the public’s hearts and minds. Only a sea change in public opinion is likely to challenge Google’s position – but that is possible if Google is perceived as abusing their position of trust. They have to stick with doing no evil and being fair in their use of private information.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out… Microsoft has to make it work and I see it being a bumpy ride. Maybe the biggest barrier to success will be a lack of focus, knowing it wants to be successful but not really at what. “Everything” is too simple a response and certainly no answer.

• The Guardian: Microsoft launches $45bn bid for Yahoo
• The Guardian : Google cries foul over Microsoft’s Yahoo bid
• Google: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
• Search Engine Watch: Search Engine Market Share: comScore’s December Scorecard
• The Economist: Giants in combat

UPDATE: Yahoo rejects the Microsoft bid saying MS “massively undervalues” the company:

“The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share…It’s unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to pay such a premium, which would increase the value of its original cash and stock bid by more than $12 billion.”

Here we go…