Slim Odds For The Jobless

Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade. Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college. Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty. In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock. Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years. Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage. Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing. Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.” Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat Filed under: OffBeat     

Yahoo's board of directors has approved a $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, it was reported earlier today. The initial reactions from many Tumblr users have ranged from skepticism to outright anger, as many fear the acquisition will change the culture of the platform What do you think the future holds for a Tumblr owned and operated by Yahoo? Let us know by answering the poll below. If there's another question you'd like to ask, you can add it to our poll Yahoo Acquires Tumblr Stay tuned for more updates from Mashable as this story unfolds. Photo via iStockphoto, kycstudio Read moreMore about Yahoo, Tumblr, and Social Media

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The paradigm hasn’t changed since the advent of software: Applications run, and platforms are what they run on. But the underlying principles of application design and deployment do change every now and then – sometimes drastically, thanks to quantum-leap developments in infrastructure. For instance, application design principles changed dramatically when the PC, x86 architecture, and client/server paradigm were born in the ’80s. And  it happened again with the advent of the web and open-source technology in the mid ’90s. Whenever such abrupt changes arise, application developers are forced to rethink how they build and deploy their software. Today, we’re seeing a huge leap in infrastructure capability, this time pioneered by Amazon Web Services. It’s clear that to take full advantage of the new cloud infrastructure, applications that run successfully on AWS must be inherently different than applications that were built to run successfully on a corporate server – even a virtualized one. But there are a number of other particular ways in which today’s (and tomorrow’s) cloud applications will need to be designed differently than in the past. Here are the most crucial ones, and how the ways of the old world have been changed in the new one : Scaling  In the old world, scaling was accomplished by scaling up – to accommodate more users or data, you simply bought a bigger server. In the new world, scaling is typically done by scaling out. You don’t add a bigger machine, you add multiple machines of the same sort. In the cloud world, those machines are virtual machines, and their instantiations in the cloud are instances. Resilience  Before, software was seen as unreliable, and resilience was built into the hardware layer. Today, the underlying infrastructure – the hardware – is seen as the weak link, and it is up to applications to accommodate for this. There is no guarantee that a virtual machine instance will always function. It can disappear at any moment and the application must be prepared for this. By way of example, Netflix, arguably the most advanced user of the cloud today, has gone the farthest in adopting this new paradigm. They have a process called ChaosMonkey that randomly kills virtual machine instances from underneath the application workloads. Why on earth do they do this on purpose? Because they are ensuring uptime and resilience: By exposing their applications to random loss of instances, they force application developers to build more resilient apps. Brilliant. Bursting In the old world – think accounting and payroll applications – the application workload was reasonably stable and predictable. It was known how many users a system had, and how many records they were likely to process at any given moment. In the new world, we see variable and unpredictable workloads. Today’s software systems have to reach farther out in the world, to consumers and devices that demand services at unpredictable moments and unpredictable loads. To accommodate such unforeseen fluctuations in individual application workloads required a new software architecture. We now have it in the cloud, but clearly it is still in its infancy. Software variety In the past we didn’t have much software variety. Each application was written in one language and used one database. Companies standardized on a single, or at least very few operating systems. The software stack was boringly simple and uniform (at least now in retrospect). In the new world of cloud, the opposite is happening. Within a single application, many different languages can be used, many different libraries and toolkits can be employed, and many different database products can be used. And because in a cloud you can create and spin up you own image, tailored to your and your application’s specific needs, applications within one company must be able to operate under a spectrum of configurations. From VM to cloud  Even between the relatively new technology of hypervisors and the modern cloud thinking, there are differences. VMware, the pioneer and leader in virtualization, built its hypervisors to essentially behave the way physical machines did before. But in the cloud world, the virtual machine is not a representation of a physical server; it’s a representation of units of compute. (Steve Bradshaw wrote about this topic in depth.) User patience In the old world, users were taught to be patient. The system may have needed a long time to respond to simple retrieval or update requests, and new features were added slowly to the application (if at all). In the new cloud world, users have no patience. They hardly tolerate latency or wait times, and they look for improvements in the service every week, if not every day. Evidence of this can be found in self-service IT. Rather than file a ticket with IT and wait for a response several days later, users of IT can self-provision the resources they need. Do these observations rhyme with what you are experiencing and taking action on in your organization? I look forward to comments and debate on this topic. Marten Mickos is the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. He previously served as CEO of MySQL AB, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He is a member of the board of directors of Nokia. Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info. Photo courtesy of Mike Flippo/Shutterstock.com. 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