The Digital Dispossessed

The Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives analogy by Marc Prensky is getting a bit of an airing at the moment. It ties in to the media scare stories about web 2.0 technologies altering how young adults brains might be wired up – I get an image of a cosmic determinist electrician using a crack team of programmers to long-windedly restructure human thought processes without recourse to the roll of synapse solder.

As a person that by fact of age would come under the umbrella of Digital Immigrant I am not convinced by the analogy, ok I haven't read the two part series in depth and I could easily fall in to the category of old nay-sayer and stick in the mud when in actuality I would like to have an open mind and take a positive view.Prensky. Part1 Part2

The things I don't particularly like about the analogy are that the term Digital Immigrant seems intentionally to carry a pejorative feel of having old-fashioned ways rather than that of an immigrant enriching a culture by bringing new ideas. This is probably more of an example of the clunky nature of this analogy and how it has been used in the media. The other thing I find wrong is that it ignores the idea that all we are talking about fundamentally is technology, and that as each generation ages then it is not unusual that a proportion of that population has difficulty adapting to and using newer technologies.

Prensky refers to an example of a Digital Immigrant having an odd or thick accent demonstrated by, for example, printing out emails. Nice to know the Digital Natives don't have much need for something with a history dating back to the 15^th Century, I'll be turning off those heavy power consuming servers that deal with the print queues, spooling, jobs and release stations next week! Ok the machines are virtualised and not so hungry and some departments still insist on receiving double spaced printed work, yet other organisations, the Open University and others prefer to handle electronically submitted work. But there are plenty of Digital Natives printing out websites, emails and PDF documents, what went wrong?

Also it is not always apparent when using new technologies that not all our information is there. A lot of people may not use the immediate and at hand research tools of the internet and search engines, but a lot of us do use them as a first line of investigation – yet it is still only one line of research. How much use is the internet for providing the meta-data that is presented with print media, the annotations scrawled in the margins (not only by the likes of Fermat or Joe Orton), physical feel, size, binding, and other elements that make up an object like a book, a journal, a newspaper or other types of printed documents? How sad would it be to lose those extra quantifiers of context. In some cases the physical object is the subject of study.  But I have heard of Digital Natives turning up at libraries only willing to read a document if it is in electronic format, if the document only exists in paper format the student will shrug and say they can't be bothered. In what other areas do we decide that resources are of no use if it presents a mild inconvenience to use them – after learning to drive I would still use the upstairs loo even if there isn't a well lit dual carriageway leading to it. If physical documents aren't used they may be disposed of, depriving potential researchers of resources even if they have been digitised in a high quality format (which is not always the case, grainy reproductions of images and badly scanned pages).

I know that the analogy is really about young students and new ways of thinking, but I don't think that the new ways of thinking belong exclusively to the young. My main grumble about the analogy is not Marc Prensky's use of it but the way it is used in the media. The media informs us that we are one or the other, it provides a nice dualist argument to be lined up for a five minute filler piece which helps to get the Daily Mail readers large intestine clear before the morning commute. A couple of talking heads are lined up with their diametrically opposed arguments and allowed to let rip until there is no more time available as we have to move on to the weather report. The disappointment heard in the voice of the interviewer on the occasions that the supposed adversaries agree with each other is a joy I mark with a gold avatar in my online calendar.

I am biased, I feel peeved because I'm no snake hipped teenager, my winning smile is now a lop-sided smirk and I have to work harder to keep from standing still, but I like technology and I love learning about the new ideas and opportunities it can reveal. But what happens is I turn in to a fundarantelist with a half-cocked, semi-baked argument and start wondering about the massive number of people out there that are the Digital Dispossessed.The ill educated, disabled, elderly and poor are the people that are likely to have had little or no contact with the new media and technologies. Whether they are on a council estate in this city, or in a low-tech nation washing gold from semiconductors with acid in the open air, they don't get much of a mention in this technology and education debate.

Here's Bob with the weather...

The Electronic Charleston – backup thoughts 1

The dance we do when we apply old ideas to new technology.

A current task is investigating new backup methods for our systems and data, looking at how we should approach maintaining backup for the purposes of recovery of data. Data may need to be recovered in the event of data loss due to disaster affecting machine rooms, individual machine disk failures or major failure of the SAN.

Some questions that have been tossed around are:

Why are we backing data up?

Are we doing it this way because we have always done it this way?

Now we have new technologies should we be doing it differently?

Are there other technologies we could be using?

Some background.

The first line of protection is the resilience of the systems themselves, all machines are running some form of raid, either raid 1, 5 or 6. This protects against disk loss, in the case of raid 5 a single disk loss can be survived, with raid 1 it may be a single disk or more that can be survived depending on the configuration and which disks in the raid set fail, with dual parity raid 6 two disks can be lost.

In the case of raid 1 and 5 the system is no longer resistant to failure once a disk has failed and the system will continue to be at heightened risk until the failed disk has been replaced and the data has been rebuilt on the replaced disk. This window of risk during disk failure and rebuilding is why many SAN systems use variants of raid 6, given the probability of a second disk failure during the risk period, the risk being increased the more disks there are in the raid array. Other components can fail, an array controller may decide to invert all the bits being written or add or subtract bits randomly or play tunes using the disk read/write heads, all of which may leave the data in an unusable state. These things may randomly bite us on the backside, the hope is that those problems are discovered quickly.

The second line of protection is mirroring data between sites, typically only available to data stored on the SAN. If one of the machine rooms gets vapourised by an alien death ray we can mount the mirrored data on spare or less used hardware at the second site, data is categorised with different priorities and the higher priority data will be higher on the list to be returned to service.

Tape backup is not a level of protection in the sense above but is a method for storing data from a reasonably recent time that may need to be recovered in the event of the first levels of protection failing, or in the event that data has been deleted for whatever reason and which is now needed. The current terminology for the reasonable amount of time since the last backup is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), or how much data loss can be tolerated. In practice with backup tape this is usually the previous nights backup, if the data is lost at any point up to the next backup being written we can roll back to data from last night from tape, so the RPO is 24 hours.

There is an assumption that the backup has been successful. Not just from the point of view of the backup completion notice announcing a success, but that the tape write head isn't misaligned and not writing bogus data, that the tape drive was operating correctly, the tape cassette is intact and the tape hasn't been chewed by tape weevils or been stretched or that the tension is correct, that the tape has historically been stored upright rather than side on, the fire safe has been kept at the correct temperature and humidity, and perhaps any number of other things that I am completely unaware of.

One option available that moves away from direct backup to tape, is to use the tape backup concept but using virtual tape and virtual tape drives configured on a disk array or Virtual Tape Library (VTL). There are benefits in that existing backup software can be used, but the idea is the one that gives me the Electronic Charleston heebie-jeebies, there are better ways of using backup to disk rather than using a hammer to drive home a screw. But VTL won't be ruled out and it will be looked at fairly, my opinions may not be valid not an unlikely occurrence.