All posts by Paul Raven

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Black Cloud Computing: botnets dwarf legitimate cloud processing providers

Via SlashDot, another reminder of the sheer scale and clout of botnets, all just sitting out there waiting to be rented, no questions asked:

… the biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google, based on Joffe’s information, made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps.

[…]

… their capacity pales to that of the biggest cloud on the planet, the network of computers controlled by the Conficker computer worm. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally, more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth…

Who says cloud computing will never scale, eh? Added bonus: some forms of hacking may be illegal, but that won’t necessarily stop the US Secret Service from payrolling you to the tune of $75k a year for your work. Guess I should have spent more time programming my Vic20 than reading novels…

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Blue genes: poetry encoded in DNA

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Via Lauren Beukes comes the news that Canadian poet Christian Bök has thought of a way to transcend Keats’ epitaph of being “one whose name was writ on water”; he seeks a poetic immortality that could outlive the human species itself, by the expedient of encoding some of his work into the DNA of a hardy strain of bacteria.

… it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.

You can’t fault the guy’s ambition. Who knows – his work might be rediscovered in some nigh-unimaginable future where interest in poetry hasn’t withered away to nearly nothing.

Then again, maybe it’ll stage a comeback – Damien Walter argues that the social media era is ideally suited to poetry’s narrative and expressive concision. I’d very much like to see it happen… but I’ll not hold my breath just yet.

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Momentary lapse of output

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Seems half of the posts I make here lately are apologies of one sort or another, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. Life has delivered me one of those major personal crises, and there’s a whole lot of metaphorical broken glass for me to sweep up; as such, things may be a little quiet here over the next few days.

Please rest assured that Futurismic is not under threat, however; we have new stories in inventory, and I’ll be posting as regularly as I can manage. I just need to deal with some meatspace stuff right now, and I hope you’ll bear with me in the interim.

Thanks for your patience. – PGR

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Remembering Mac Tonnies

Almost exactly five months ago, I had to pass on the news that writer, UFOlogist and former Futurismic columnist Mac Tonnies had been found dead in his apartment of natural causes. While we weren’t astonishingly close, I always enjoyed Mac’s outlook on the universe he found himself inhabiting, and I miss our communications, brief as they often were. [image borrowed from UFOMystic]

For such a reclusive and quiet-seeming guy, Mac had a lot of friends on the internet – y’know, real friends, the type that really care about you beyond your next blog post – and I’m pleased to see that some of them are running a tribute site for material relating to Mac and his work, and archiving and collecting his internet outpourings.

Regardless of what you may think of his theories (and believe me, I thought some of them were nothing short of bat-shit weird), Mac Tonnies was one of the good guys, and the world is a poorer place without him.

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Quicklinkage: writers on writing, Godin on slush

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Some quick links collected in a spare segment of a manic Monday, in lieu of our usual fare (i.e. me waffling on about stuff): here are some science fiction writers going all meta on our arses and writing about writing:

And to close up with a topic for discussion, here’s Seth Godin’s take on the oft-reported death of the slush pile:

If you have something good, really good, what’s it doing in the slush pile?

Bring it to the world directly, make your own video, write your own ebook, post your own blog, record your own music.

Or find an agent, a great agent, a selective agent, one that’s almost impossible to get through to, one that commands respect and acts as a filter because after all, that’s what you’re seeking, a filtered, amplified way to spread your idea.

But slush?

Good riddance.

What do you think: is this a case of Godin just not understanding the way fiction publishing works, and hence applying an inappropriate business model to it? Or is he prophesying the unavoidable future of fiction publishing? Your thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.