Dengl 45 Shelves, Clouds and Caves

Shelves, Caves and Clouda

Something Erica Wagner (their book critic) wrote in Saturday's Times Review stuck in my mind as an important, even a potential milestone observation.
She was lamenting the smothering of "the book" inundated by the tsunami of tsweet (my word, I think – not hers).

A penny dropped in my mind prompted also by my experience of two different systems of handling my email. I had a system called Eudora - which is now somehow disabled on my computer - though it may conceivably be
reinstalled and I very much hope it will. Currently I mostly used gmail.
(Since then I have also used iMail – which resolves several of the difficulties described below).

Old E-mails as Book Ingredients
Amongst the advantages (though some claim other disadvantages) of Eudora is that it allowed one to slide a message from its own window, to the desktop. From here, it could be transferred to folders for storage. It seems (through its absence, and what Wagner said) that those messages were not like the modern (dispensable) tweet, but like documents which ultimately could be compiled into articles or books. It was good for one's own storage and control. One readily had a plan to organise and benefit from what went where. (Eudora's statistic facility tells me that before this year with my wind-down, I handled some 5,500 messages last year; most, it seemed to me, were satisfactorily dumped or stored where they 'belonged').
iMail now lets me slide into a folder - though imposing awkward demands and byways of its own – it conserves the “shelf” in digitaland; good.

New E-mails as Dross
I have not found a way of simply moving a gmail message from its arrival window (like a platform in a railway station) into an appropriate folder. The only plan I have (had, then) is/was to copy the text within a gmail, and paste it into a word or other document one sets up, to act as the folder once did, within the Eudora regime. The advantage of the Eudora-sourced folder was that it was like the shelf in the library - one could open the folder and see an array of messages - each with its title - to facilitate choice and study). The disadvantage with the word document store of gmails is that not only does it need time to set it up by copying and pasting, but having done that, the new document is not like a shelf but like a volume - it is less easy to scan within itself.
It does seem that google mail is not constructed to serve its users as Eudora did, to help one compile (quasi) books.
Instead, googlemail is constructed to leave one with a morass of messages whose labels within the inbox or the outbox ("sent mail") make it harder to discern sense and plan within what seems a cacophony of chattering birds. The temptation is, then, to disregard the pile-up and maybe, from time to time, to sweep away the contents into some 'bin' - maybe as the council rubbish-people may have swept the floor of Trafalgar Sq of pigeon droppings in the pre-Livingstonian era.

I recently visited the "sent mail" (= "bin") location in my gmail. I found 800 messages piled up - waiting for ... what?
I have been through them from top down and bottom up and discarded around 600, leaving the rest requiring further sorting into meaningful (for me) locations. These 200 will take more work to "shelve" than it took to dump the 600.
(Gmail had introduced – it took me a while to discover it – a list of ‘mini-bins’ where one can put material into sub-categories for easier retrieval).
Incidentally, Google offer some distinction between the instruction in one place to "delete" and elsewhere to "discard". I have no idea what they are getting at. My inbox has around 80 messages - which I try to keep down to far less than this number, 50 ideally, so I can actually see in one window what has been going on.
Amongst all the discourses in which I indulge it has been helpful in previous years to set up folders (and further folders within each) to store and take stock of correspondence. This seems to have been made harder or more time-consuming to do, with Mr Brin's system.
A few more notes on Google:
I have a massive list of “contacts” – over 700 – and believe I could effectively trim this down to half. I looked everywhere for a tab or pointer as to how to delete. It turns out that one summons up the ‘dead or departed’ name and presses a tab called “MORE” (when what I really seek is LESS) and find a place where I can then delete. The effect of this is to pile up more names – and this is not for MY convenience but for someone else’s ….that is Google’s. They want to advertise a ‘client list’ of so many billions - but an amount of this is spurious or double counting. One eventually gets on top of it.
This whole phenomenon is misleadingly called a CLOUD (not cuckoo-land) giving the impression that the data are stored in a satellite or perhaps in the upper atmosphere rotating the earth. Enquiry suggests this is not so. The data are in hard “servers” with massive capacity. We are assured that there is considerable duplication and back up and that no mishap could punch effective holes in the system. Is this perhaps an impression put about by the security services to allay doubt or suspicion among users/clients? Maybe it is really true. It does seem that bombing a large ‘server warehouse/cave” has either not occurred to the miscreants in our society, or they have not managed to “take out” a CAVE; yet.
There have been ‘outages’ due to power cuts said to have isolated some of the smaller servers.
A different kind of ‘outage’ or outrage? Has been suffered by several people I know. Their account is “hacked” by a miscreant; the innocent person has to send out scores or hundreds of messages of apology to contacts – and suspends their password (or whole account membership). If this is done in not the right way (with the victim under some time pressure and anxiety) their whole “store” of messages, some considered personally very valuable – is lost. It is of no reassurance to be told that the data are “somewhere there in the cloud” or amongst cave-bound servers, as there is no visible way of getting at one’s erstwhile intellectual “property”.


Eudora and Gmail - a couple of conparisons
It may not be a coincidence that Eudora is/was developed and offered by a University (of Illinois) - hitherto the domain of the book, while gmail descends via internet from big daddy arpanet, a military operation. I understand that all of gmail's clients' (it tells me I am using 238 MB out of "my" 7426 MB - what made it "MY" 7426MB? - what is the total MB capacity across all Google Clients? - and how many are we happy band?) messages are stored, physically, in something called a server (am I right?). This server array either actually or metaphorically is in a Cave in Colorado where the machines can be kept cool (or, they are looking to move to Alaska for cheaper storage). I also am given to believe that all my (and everyone else's messages including those which I appear to have deleted or discarded) are stored there.
Clearly, the Colorado Cave is not like or in any sense equivalent to a Library (of Congress), or analogous publicly accessible source. Google is good at making searches and no doubt can and does search within its Colorado Cave. It does this, to help us clients when we search for knowledge - and to serve us with what it seems to believe are relevant advertisements (alongside what I write, now, are nurseryman ads (baby? anyone?) offering me apple trees to buy); thus we individual clients are served to advertisers. It is, largely, a mutually beneficial deal.
The Colorado Cave is a resource that is potentially (or routinely?) very valuable to our security/intelligence organisations. Somebody will be wanting to defend these servers from any potential physical attack. That somebody is the military. We may not easily see what is likely to be in place, but how can it be other than that special defence systems are indeed organised around the Caves (yahoo and maybe some other outfits also have their own caves). Organisations striving to destabilise our society will have it in mind to try to damage or even destroy these over-centralised resources.
Movie plot, anyone?

quote from a recent newsletter:
SERVERS SEEKING COOLER CLIMES
Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with over one million servers. Microsoft is adding up to 20,000 servers a month. As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature than is used for computing. Electricity consumption at the largest data centres rivals the needs of an aluminium smelter. Microsoft's new $500m facility near Chicago will need three electrical substations all to itself to keep it running. Finding a site for a large data centre is now more about securing a cheap and reliable source of power than anything else. It's the reason that so many in America are close to the Columbia River, where there is plenty of water for cooling, and massive dams produce cheap hydroelectricity. Such sites are in short supply in the US, however, and the boom in data centre construction is spreading to some unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location, firstly for its cool climate, but also because of abundant geothermal energy.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=a7a

(most of the above was written in Feb 2010 – but it has been updated now, Feb 2012; the essential categories explored remain, I think, intact)