Microsoft's Azure cloud service suffering major outage

"Microsoft's cloudy platform, Windows Azure, is experiencing a major outage: at the time of writing, its service management system had been down for about seven hours worldwide. A customer described the problem to The Register as an 'admin nightmare' and said they couldn't understand how such an important system could go down. 'This should never happen,' said our source. 'The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.'"

The Azure service dashboard has regular updates on the situation. According to their update feed the situation should have been resolved a few hours ago but has instead gotten worse: "We continue to work through the issues that are blocking the restoration of service management for some customers in North Central US, South Central US and North Europe sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers." To be fair, other cloud providers have had similar issues before.

I honestly am not picking on Microsoft for this. You could just as easily strike Microsoft's Azure from the subject and it would still stand. If you put all of your data in a cloud, you run a high risk of that data being unavailable at some point or another, and invariably it will be just when you need it. You also run a risk of a cloud provider going away and you losing everything. And if you think you can provide redundancy by pushing data to two different cloud providers at the same time, forget it. They use different API's and interfaces, it's extremely difficult.

http://slashdot.org/story/12/02/29/153226/microsofts-azure-cloud-suffers-major-downtime


Yesterday, Harris Corp. announced that it was exiting the Cloud business. Two years ago they built a $200m data center in Virginia to provide cloud hosting for the Feds, 'It's becoming clear that customers, both government and commercial, currently have a preference for on-premise versus off-premise solutions,' said Harris' CEO."

http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/1559255/harris-exits-cloud-hosting-citing-fed-server-hugging

An ignorant people are a happy (and easily controlled) people

"Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image."
— Rick Santorum on President Obama

Thanks, but I think I'll continue suggesting that attending college is probably a good idea. I guess he doesn't bother with pesky things like numerous studies linking higher lifetime earning with college education. Can't have them uppity have-nots becoming haves!

FBI turns off 3,000 GPS tracking devices

"The Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a 'sea change' inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann. Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called 'Big Brother in the 21st Century' on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use. These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them."

Just a bit of a logistics problem.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/147226/after-us-v-jones-fbi-turns-off-3000-gps-tracking-devices

Movies & Books, January & February 2012

I decided to start keeping track of what I'm watching in theaters and reading, and this is my list for the first two months:

Books 2012:
2/28: White Knight, Dresden #9
2/25: Proven Guilty, Dresden #8
2/21: Dead Beat, Dresden #7
2/18: Blood Rites, Dresden #6
2:13: Death Masks, Dresden #5
2/8: Summer Knight, Dresden #4
2/4: Grave Peril, Dresden #3

1/29: Mary Gentle, Grunts
1/19: Fool Moon, Dresden #2
1/16: Storm Front, Dresden #1
1/7 Graham Chapman: A Liar's Autobiography, Volume VI
1/5 Charles Stross: The Fuller Memorandum

Movies 2012
1/31 Red Tails
1/26 Haywire
1/12 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
1/6 Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
1/1 Blackthorn/Butch Cassidy

I'm frankly amazed that I haven't seen any movies in February, I think part of it is the lousy selection that our local theater brings in. I'm hoping to see The Artist when I'm in Las Cruces Friday night, we'll see how crowded it is.

I started reading the first Dresden book a while back and for whatever reason set it down and didn't pick it up again. I then played the RPG and started reading the game material and picked it up again and I'm pretty much hooked. It's interesting seeing the character(s) grow and change, I don't often notice that in a book.