Monday, May 30, 2011

Reflection: Will managed hosting providers run out of capacity?

Today I came across a post which made me reflect for a moment: Will managed hosting providers run out of capacity by 2012?

My "extended" reflection:

My first reaction was "interesting question". I saw it can be looked from various angles.  Will they "run out of capacity"? Capacity of what or for what?
  • Network capacity? Traffic demand has been growing exponentially. I believe that eventually we may reach a point were we will not be able to build infrastructure (i.e. fiber) as fast as it is needed. When everything start migrating to "the cloud" and hyper connectivity become a wide social demand, that will be the moment. What will happen when this hyper connectivity status spread out to the "major cities"? What if that request happen in relative short time frame? Imagine if that in 10yrs from now the world get out of the recession to a hyper connected world wide boom era?
  • Storage capacity? We are already generating huge amount of data per minute. Can you think how much will it be in the next decade? 
    • Last year (Aug 2010) Eric Schmidt said that every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. How much we will be generating in 5 years? We will have enough primary materials to build the storage or space to put it?
  • Capacity to find adequate human resources? With the new generations more interested in games than understanding technology or even studying I think we can run out of human resources during the next decade unless governments take action. (or probably we will have nations that will become the source of outsourced services) 
  • Power capacity? We already have problems supplying our current demands. What about in 10 years? 

So, going back to the original question "for 2012"? I don't think so.  But we need major shift in current hardware and communication infrastructure to be able to handle it.


Friday, April 22, 2011

Code Syntax Highlighting for Blogger: SyntaxHighlighter

I've been trying to move back to Blogger but I was still waiting for it to support some kind of code syntax highlighting in order to properly present source codes or CLI outputs.


After waiting, waiting, waiting and waiting, I've decided to move forward and transition back to Blogger. Searching for available options I found SynaxHighlithter. This is a very versatile Javascript and it is easy to integrate to Blogspot's templates. So, it is definitely the code syntax highlighting I'll be using: SyntaxHighlighter.


If you are interested, the step to integrate it to blogger are detailed at MLA Wire blog: http://mlawire.blogspot.com/2009/07/blogger-syntax-highlighting.html

If you are looking for this functionality, I can tell you, it just works.