The other day I was browsing around on a professional networking site and came across a post in one of the forums from a guy asking for help on solving a monitoring problem. The problem was that when the servers got under a heavy enough load they would become unresponsive to his monitoring systems and the page would light up like a Christmas tree. He was looking for suggestions to relax the monitoring thresholds so the alerts wouldn't bug him.
/o\
The problem is not that the monitoring system is doing its job. The problem is that the servers are under such high enough load that they can't respond to simple "Are you still alive?" queries from a monitoring system. The correct solution is to either add hardware to the cluster and distribute the load or find some way to refactor the code so that it's more efficient.
More alarming was the fact that a bunch of people weighed in before I got there with various suggestions on how to increase timeouts, drop SNMP monitoring, etc. In a week, none of them said, "Hey, maybe the server being in distress is like, bad."
In the tech world, we fall prey to tunnel vision a lot. We become willing to push an incorrect solution to a problem so far that we will layer bad idea after bad idea on to a system, which in turn just keeps bringing in more and more points of failure. Pretty soon, you end up with a shaky, complex Akira style thing that is impossible for anyone else to understand or modify that does nothing but create unnecessary work for you.
The more I look around at my colleagues and talk with them about the battles they're fighting daily, the more I start to wonder if anyone else understands why the bearded Unixy elders held elegance in such high regard.
Showing posts with label forest for the trees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forest for the trees. Show all posts
Monday, April 12, 2010
Sunday, August 30, 2009
ebook insanity
So, the other day I noticed that I hadn't read any fiction in quite a while. I'd fallen into a rut of tech manuals and online howtos as my only reading, and my prime source of entertainment coming from hulu/netflix or video games. I decided it was high time on catching up on some good sci-fi, and with the memory of recently lugging around boxes of novels after the move a few months fresh in my mind I decided to check out the ebook route (since O'Reilly's Safari has been absolutely kick ass for me).
I was shocked (shocked!) to find out that the publishers wanted about $20 for an ebook. That puts it on the same price level as a hardback book (which I rarely buy). Paperback novels are in the $10-12 range, and the mass paperbacks (what shows up in the airport or along that back wall at Barnes and Nobles) are about $7. That's assuming you buy the book new... which means the publisher gets a cut of that. If you buy it used from Half Price Books or from Amazon, the range is about $2-5, and the publisher makes zero dollars.
You would expect the ebook to appeal to the lowest common denominator... that the publishers would be using it as a way to snipe at those $2-5 transactions they aren't getting a cut of. But you'd be wrong. They seem to think that ebooks are competing with hardcovers. It's like they don't understand that people who already buy hardcovers do so because they like the big print, extra art, and the fact that you have a good, solid book in your hands, and that these people wouldn't be likely to purchase only the ebook, anyway.
If the story is the key piece of intellectual property that they're selling, I find it highly amusing that I can go download and watch The Hunt for Red October in 2 hours from Amazon for $6, but if I want the pdf version to spend a week reading that'll cost $18. And then the publishers have the nerve to bemoan the fact that no one reads anymore....
I was shocked (shocked!) to find out that the publishers wanted about $20 for an ebook. That puts it on the same price level as a hardback book (which I rarely buy). Paperback novels are in the $10-12 range, and the mass paperbacks (what shows up in the airport or along that back wall at Barnes and Nobles) are about $7. That's assuming you buy the book new... which means the publisher gets a cut of that. If you buy it used from Half Price Books or from Amazon, the range is about $2-5, and the publisher makes zero dollars.
You would expect the ebook to appeal to the lowest common denominator... that the publishers would be using it as a way to snipe at those $2-5 transactions they aren't getting a cut of. But you'd be wrong. They seem to think that ebooks are competing with hardcovers. It's like they don't understand that people who already buy hardcovers do so because they like the big print, extra art, and the fact that you have a good, solid book in your hands, and that these people wouldn't be likely to purchase only the ebook, anyway.
If the story is the key piece of intellectual property that they're selling, I find it highly amusing that I can go download and watch The Hunt for Red October in 2 hours from Amazon for $6, but if I want the pdf version to spend a week reading that'll cost $18. And then the publishers have the nerve to bemoan the fact that no one reads anymore....
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