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Gone Forever

If you had files stored with Myspace.com, I hope you backed those babies up. Those files are now history as is the free storage service itself. This reminds me of the dangers of online storage, something I experienced first hand with HotMail, which didn't go out of business but blew away my files anyway! I was on the road and got a message saying I'd better get my files down below a certain amount or mail would be deleted. I tried and I tried, but you know what kept me over the HotMail limit? All that stinkin' spam. And did HotMail delete the spam? No, they blew away legitimate e-mail. Thanks guys.

NYSE Proves Software Imperfection

The New York Stock Exchange was down all morning last Friday, keeping all those overpaid CNBC reporters hopping. Turns out a software upgrade to the trading system wasn't fully stress tested and didn't work. Reporters and commentators kept asking, "How could this happen?"

Here is a primer for the uninitiated, and feel free to e-mail it to CNBC. The key issue is the nature of software itself. Today we can build networks with all kinds of redundant connections. If you have enough redundancy (and enough money) you can insure that only a catastrophe will bring down the network. Hardware, such as servers and mainframes, can also be built with lots and lots of redundancy. Servers, for instance, can fail, and the operations can be picked up without a hitch by a backup server.

Software is a whole different beast. There are various versions of applications running on various versions of back-end operating systems running on various hardware configurations. That is one level of complexity.

But the real issue is the sheer size of these applications. Many include millions of lines of code (multiply that by five for software written by Microsoft). Fixing or upgrading one chunk of code can wreak havoc on other chunks of code, which is what happened with the NYSE upgrade. Software development remains an imperfect art. I still can't envision the day when software will perform flawlessly 100 percent of the time.

Those that rely upon software must be mentally prepared for software failures. Electronic commerce makes a site's uptime and availability crucial. If your site doesn't respond quickly, you lose customers. If it goes down, you lose loads of money. Thousands of companies are trying to improve availability, caching, load balancing, content-delivery networks, storage-area networks, power supplies and clustering, and make OSes more reliable. But doing all that can't truly protect the system when the software fails to perform as designed.