What Happened? They're Tearing Down Our Youth! Cell Phones! Video Games! Computers & the Internet!

What happened to our youth?  I took a good, hard look at Google Maps to see.

It's not just Richardson Square that's gone...

Of all the malls we went to, Richardson Sqaure was the most convenient,
   (especially for simple after-school pleasures)
Valley View was second in convenience, and pretty nice,
Of course, the Galleria... nuff said...
but I always liked Prestonwood best.

Now it's a Wal-Mart.  A set of strip malls.  And, if you'll believe it, an airport.  I feel pretty sure that wasn't there, before.

I also looked on maps over by Big Spring Elementary - did you know there's a lake just the other side of the "nature trail," now?  I guess it's been there for years, but it's got piers, and everything.  Boats 'n stuff.  And that big field across the street from the school is mostly a swamp, it looks like.  I used to play with friends, there, during recess.  We'd play "G-Force."  Yeah, the old "Americanized" version of the anime "Gatchaman."

Richardson Junior High is still there, but it's got a new name now.  At least it's still a school.  A Math and Science Magnet school, but that's ok.  I wonder what they use the old band hall for, now?  The days of Mr Costellano directing band are long gone, I guess.

It's weird to look back on all these places, even just with Google Maps & with street view.  Places where Home used to be, and is no longer.  Places that were so important to our lives that even decades later, fill our memories more than most of what's happened since.

It's not so much that I'm brought to wonder what happened to our youth, as: What happened to make such important places less valuable than a parking lot?  Is it online shopping?  Cell phones?  What was it?

Most of us didn't have computers in our homes.  When I graduated in '89, there was just the one set of computer labs in the school.  There were the TI based MS-Dos machines, and the IBMs.  I learned some Basic and Turbo Pascal on the non-IBMs.  I didn't even really consider that I'd get my first computer shortly before graduation (a 80286 briefcase portable with monochrome EGA graphics, 512k ram, 1.2m 5 1/4 floppy, & a 30 mg hd).  I never, ever considered that computers would be such a huge part of everyone's lives only a decade later, let alone how much they've taken over our lives today.

There are times when I wish we could just go back to those days.  Days before email.  Before Facebook.  Before cell phones were disposable, let alone common.  Before we had to be connected, every single second of the day.  Sometimes I consider leaving my phone at home when I drive to the store, just so I can disconnect for a few minutes... but then I bring it along, anyway.  The days when phones were attached to our homes by wires are gone; the days when getting in the car meant nobody could reach us are gone.  "Call us when you get there," is gone, replaced by status updates and tracking software.

Is it possible, do you know?  If it's possible to disconnect, and live life actively, instead of under the direction of all of our wonderful, powerful, all-consuming technology?  Are things really better?  Or, are we simply distracted from reality by our new toys?  I really would like to know if it's possible to get out there, and live without being in constant, total contact, or if it could only mean coming in last for the rest of our lives.  After all... there are new sets of kids out there, today, growing up with their sets of favorite places... but more and more, their favorite places are on the couch in front of the X-Box and Playstation, instead of at the mall or riding bikes with their friends.

I guess in part, I just miss what we got to have when we were young.  And I wish that the youth of today could experience that for themselves, too.  I guess when they grow up, they'll be nostalgic about playing online games with friends who they only ever knew as voices in their headset, and shopping online at Amazon.

The Internet's Cloud of... What?!

Gone are the days when a business could pack all of it's computing needs into one room.  Or even one building.  Today, the big boys have turned to farming as an answer:  Data Farming.  This basically entails buying up some farmland in an area with cheap electricity, getting some great tax breaks from the local small community, and putting in one or more large warehouse-type buildings packed with computer servers connected to the internet.

In one sense, this is the cloud - warehouses full of servers.

In another sense, this is the cloud: great billowing clouds of deisel smoke that go up whenever the warehouse decides to run on their own generators, instead of the power supply they bargained for so eagerly.  Once in a while, there's good reason for the data farm to switch over to generator power; the local substation will be undergoing maintenance, for example.  The rest of the time, for some unknown reason, the data farm will simply decide to run on it's own power, instead of locally supplied power.

Microsoft is one of the biggest troublemakers, when it comes to using deisel power instead of local power.  In Washington state, a small farming community thought they'd hit the jackpot when Microsoft decided to put in a huge data farm.  Overall, they did come out ahead.  Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't the best friend to the area - instead, Microsoft is one of the areas biggest bullies.

 

When they decided to move into the neighborhood with their "cloud" factory, they made deals for cheap electricity from the local provider.  Part of this deal is to make a serious estimate on how many kilowatt hours the server farm will need.  This way, the electric company is able to reserve that much power across the year for Microsoft's use, when otherwise that power might be sold to the overall power grid.  Microsoft has, at times, run their own deisel generators excessively, sending clouds of smoke over the nearby elementary school, even though the local power grid was fully capable of serving their needs.  Near the end of the year, Microsoft was going to have to pay a very large fine for not using power that was reserved for their use.  What does MS do?  They threatened to run large, electric heaters full-out during the last few weeks of the period, in order to waste electricity and bring their usage up to near the estimated levels.  Having shoved with their strong arm, the electric company fell, and reduced the fine. 

There are many other data centers around the nation that also rely on deisel backup generators.  Yahoo, practically right next door to the Microsoft facility.  Facebook and many others, as well.  These data centers typically run at 100%, 24 hours a day, no matter what the demand actually is.  The New York Times found that these data centers can waste 90% or more of the power the pull off the grid.

It's been said that if manufacturing plants were as wasteful as these server farms, they'd be out of business right away.  So... how are these data centers managing to remain so profitable, under their clouds of deisel exhaust, with such massive waste of resources?

Profits are that good?

So... is it a cloud of data, cloud of smoke, or cloud of money?  One thing is for sure:  there's a big cloud of wasted energy.


For more info, check out The New York Times' articles on the Cloud.

Netflix Moving to Dump Snail Mail Customers

From what I've seen so far, Netflix is attempting to nudge - perhaps more like ram! - it's customers away from physical DVDs and BluRays, and more toward streaming video content. It's true that Netflix carries a number of movie titles, "on demand," but it seems that the movie selection is much more limited than what you can get on DVD; also that they don't seem to get very good streaming rights to the movies, leaving a limited window in which people have to find, queue, and watch the movie.

The customers are putting up a fit, as they learn of the changes. People like getting that Netflix envelope in the mail. They like being able to add a movie to their DVD queue quickly and easily - but Netflix is deliberately making it harder to do. They like to watch their movies on their TVs - but Netflix is limited to computers, some handheld platforms, and some gaming platforms, seriously limiting many people's ability to watch a movie with the entire family.

"But wait, there's more!"

Here in the United States, we have a pretty decent broadband internet network. It's not anywhere as speedy as, say, South Korea's, but it does us okay. The question we have to ask, is, can our (somewhat) creaky broadband network handle the kind of high-bandwidth usage that Netflix is encouraging? In this writer's opinion, just watching a TV show on Hulu is sometimes difficult enough, and that's not trying to watch at Blu-Ray Hi-Def settings, either! It seems doubtful that, if we replaced every single DVD customer with a high-speed internet customer, anyone would be able to watch much at all!

This writer lives alone, so doesn't mind watching movies on his computer, or android device, most of the time. But if I get a date for a "movie night," I'll definitely want to pop in a DVD and watch it on the TV, to share the experience.