The Resilient Internet

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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The Internet is as we all know highly distributed, but it does have huge concentrations of power that are vulnerable.  For example, Hot Mail and Gmail servers are big 'sinks' of information and it is micro second to micro second important to us all.

The Saugeen Times and Kincardine Times are aware of the vulnerabilities to information flow and use multiple channels to send and receive news.

One of the channels, Hotmail, had an outage yesterday for a couple of hours so we had to use an alternate path, which was easy to do.  Some of our news was stuck on a server someplace.

It is much harder to make Internet server sites immune to trouble than it is mail boxes.   There is a certain entropy to life and especially to computers.  Order creeps to disorder.  What did work fails and we replace, patch and move forward.

Last night when many of our readers were asleep, we had a minor glitch on a server a thousand miles away that caused a short interruption in service.  An email via another route and a quick response and here we are up and running again with a $200 part replaced.

There are very few laws in nature.  Will the Sun rise tomorrow is not one of them.  Some time in the distant future it will not rise.   A law we can count on (so far) is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Anything that is not in perfect equilibrium (and what is?) will tend toward disorder.

The Internet is not in perfect order.  Many people worry about the dominance of Microsoft and Google for computers, search engines and technology.  They worry about Apple's inroads into the music business and Blackberry's hand held communication.  These are minor.  They are not disorders, they are orders and humans always want to order things and keep them ship-shape.

The Internet continues to grow at a fantastic rate.  PC world issued their report on Internet use yesterday November 28.

The Saugeen and Kincardine Times has reported that Microsoft's Windows Operating System had amounted to 93.4% of our readership over the millions of hits this year.  (see table below)

Windows	Apple	Linux	Other
93.4%	5.5%	0.4%	0.6%

PC World (the industry magazine and web site )reported the following yesterday:

 "Windows' overall market share of 92.64% for the week of Nov. 15-21 was slightly higher than the OS's October share of 92.52%"

What was surprising about the statistics was how fast System 7 use has grown. 

29/11/2009 03:57 PM

"Last Saturday and Sunday, Windows 7 powered an estimated 5% and 5.14% of all computers that were online those days, according to Internet metrics vendor Net Applications. The two-day average of 5.07% was higher than the 5% of the market that Net Applications said Apple's operating system averaged for the week of Nov. 15-21."

In any event it looks like the Saugeen Times and Kincardine Times statistics are a very, very good metric of what's going on as they are live and get updated every day.  We have a tremendous pool of information.  What's surprising is how closely we track versus the industry experts, who are monitoring far more than we are. 

Back to resilience ......

We interviewed a couple of our readers out west as we do from time to time to see what they are doing.

One family had just gotten a new computer after using an 8 year old laptop. It was a Model T.   They had no idea what they were missing. They are now right with it.  They have hooked their new machine to their new flat screen TV and are streaming down old movies to watch.

Another reader in Arizona who is a contributor to this column has built a neat new facility that will soon appear on the ST/KT web site.  He writes code and keeps on top of the industry all the time.   We spoke online using Skype so that we could see him and he us.  Midway through our conversation his new web cam failed, so he just switched to his laptop. The new web cam did not work on his older model MAC (entropy).   He made do and got to us in another way within 30 seconds by switching to his laptop.  The Internet is really resilient, but so is entropy!