Filed under “why we need the paradigm of Rhythmeering” and “hardware is software crystallized” …
Con Ed said some components of the system are examined about every six weeks, but steam mains underground are generally not inspected because doing so often requires digging up the street.That is something that should change immediately, Agrawal said. Robotic probes can detect corrosion or damage to steam pipes from within, without having to dig them up, he said.
“They have to start looking at the entire system,” he said. “Imagine something like this exploding under Grand Central? Or under Broadway?”
N.Y. blast raises questions about aging infrastructure - CNN.com
Today we have many pressing infrastructure needs some of which have really high stakes:
If we look at today’s global environment we see a relatively high performance system driven by real-time global markets and rapid technological progress. Its performance explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, it is also moderately unstable. In our drive towards higher levels of performance we pursued a path of rampant global interconnectivity that has quickly outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).
The long-term solution is to build more stability into the system. The best approach I can think of is a highly interconnected but fundamentally decentralized system (most of the benefits of interconnectivity but with lots of local control). Unfortunately, we are far from realizing that goal, since our current view of the world is based on old models.
Big Bangs
The new paradigm which Rhythmeering represents isn’t anchored in the notion of fixed assets but rather recognizes that
Infrastructures are dynamic. There are flows of information, power, and substances constantly coursing through them.
Cascading System Failure
and expands the notion of the network as computer, to realize that the meshverse is the computer which is in essence software.
“I think it’s time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we’re going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren’t sustainable,” Worrall said. … At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said. In Sun’s vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers. … The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall. With Sun itself a purveyor of server hardware, a widespread move to services-based computing by users at large would mean a radical change for Sun’s business model. Its customer base will shift to being service providers, who need to maintain large datacenters. With this paradigm, Sun’s server sales volumes potentially could increase, even if the customer list itself shrinks. As Sun moves to a services paradigm, the company will need to focus on an ecosystem to accommodate this, because it is not the same as having a traditional ISV strategy
Sun anticipates move to software services
(the entire podcast)
Rhythmeering supports this kind of ecosystem.
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