Club Troppo

It is very common in IT to see “Service Level Agreements” specifying a certain amount of uptime. This is usually considered in “nines”: when someone talks about five nines, they’re referring to 99.999% uptime.

Very few services actually attain it, or even come close. All it takes is one bad day and the “downtime budget” for the next century is cooked.

But what’s the real problem? Is it the mean time between failures? Or the total amount time offline? Or is it how long business is disrupted for? I believe the latter.

So here’s my thought bubble: SLAs could be specified as Maximum Expected Downtime. We could even do it with nines, if we liked, with some help from the actuaries. “30 seconds, five nines” would mean that in 99.999% of downtime events, the system is available again in less than 30 seconds.

For those who are worried about interruptions to service and who want to keep the old measure: does it really work for you? And how seriously do you need that old-style uptime SLA? If you really mean it, consider buying a NonStop or z-Series.

Christopher Joye rang me recently and asked if I’d sign a statement supporting a comprehensive financial system inquiry. I agreed for reasons that are explained in the statement.  So did Joshua Gans, Stephen King, John Quiggin and Sam Wylie.

In short, as people with a bit of nous including those in government know, it’s scary how much dumb luck was involved in our not gettting as badly bruised by the financial crisis as some other countries.  Since the crisis struck, the Government has done most of the big things right. It’s stabilised the financial system with guarantees.  There were some hiccups as one would expect given the speed with which policy had to be made and the magnitude of the issues. And it’s been very vigorous in keeping the economy going with fiscal policy all against easy attack lines from the Opposition. (I’m fairly bipartisan about Oppositions by the way – any old scare campaign will do whether they believe it or not. The ALP didn’t believe the scare campaign it ran on the GST and the current Opposition, I like to think, doesn’t believe it’s own scare campaign on debt.)

In any event, I support the statement and think that we shouldn’t let our own luck condemn us to complacency.  There’s plenty of things that need attending to, and plenty of ways that we can get much better value out of our financial system.  The statement is over the fold. (Continued)

Hi all,

Apologies for not having posted here for a while. I’ve been flat out, but already have some posts I want to write – now to get the time . . .

Meanwhile I would greatly welcome Troppodillian’s views on which design(s) are best for the Government 2.0 taskforce – both in votes on the site and in comments either on the Gov2 website or below.

A cat named Hartigan has apparently put himself amongst the blogging pigeons. A generous amount of fur and feathers has flown as a result.

For example, Hartigan has defended traditional media reporting and newsroom methods; bloggers say that News Ltd don’t “get it”, or are already giving in, or their content sucks, or some combination of these.

As I pointed out about a month ago, what the content-producers for News Ltd and bloggers do is a total sideshow. This purely tribal confrontation between hacks, flacks and new jacks is just that: tribal. The internet is strangling News Ltd’s money supply, which is what counts.

It’s a mistake so common that even wise economists are missing the money.
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Frank Devine passed away on Friday morning. He enriched the lives of many people, whether or not they agreed with his views on politics, religion or anything else.

An early tribute can be found in The Australian, from Bernard Lane . The Weekend Australian tomorrow will carry stories from Peter Coleman and others.

Condolences to Jacqui, Miranda, Rosalind, Alexandra and others who are close to him.

About 10 days ago all State and Territory Attorneys-General agreed to enact uniform anti-bikie gang laws. The new uniform national regime will be modelled on the Victorian regime which is broader than three very similar laws recently enacted in South Australia and New South Wales and a yet-to-be-enacted bill in the Northern Territory.  The Age reports that ‘attorneys baulked at adopting South Australian laws aimed specifically at bikie gangs and went instead for a broader approach’.

Although the Victorian regime represents a significant extension of existing police powers in numerous ways, it is less extreme in terms of erosion o basic civil liberties than the SA, NSW and NT regimes, which are the main subject of this post.  However, South Australia and New South Wales seem determined to maintain their recently enacted laws, and the NT equally has given no indication that it will do anything other than push ahead with enacting its own version of the SA law.  It appears that the only reason other Attorneys-General opted for the Victorian model is that Victoria itself refused to sign up to the more draconian SA/NSW/NT model.

Strangely, the SA, NSW and NT anti-bikie laws have generated almost no debate in either the blogosphere or mainstream media.  I say strangely because NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery QC recently described them in the following terms:

“very troubling legislation” that could lead to a police state and represent “another giant leap backwards for human rights and the separation of powers – in short, the rule of law”.

Presumably the reason for the lack of public debate about these laws is that there is understandably little or no community sympathy for bikie gangs and their members. Most would no doubt agree with the Phantom of comic book fame that rough justice for roughnecks is the appropriate response for both legislators and police. However, maybe if people understood that these laws can potentially target any group (not just bikie gangs) and its members who police suspect of ‘organised crime’ involvement, they might begin to share Nicholas Cowdery’s view that the laws are dangerously threatening to the rule of law and that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

If they also learned the extent to which these laws allow police to prohibit suspect groups and impose drastic restrictions on the freedom of their members without those people having any real opportunity to defend themselves or even know what is alleged against them, at least some would certainly be alarmed, although no doubt most will still complacently think  “it could never happen to me” and dismiss articles like this one as just the rantings of a bleeding heart ratbag.

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