O'Reilly Community

As more and more of our activities are translated to the digitial world, we need to ask the question "Is the sustainable network unsustainable?" How do you balance 3+% of the world's emissions coming from a single industry with the potential to lessen environmental impacts of virtually every other industry?

We all know the network is everywhere. It's pervasiveness is what makes it the most endearing platform we have to address many of the issues we face today. Thanks to the convergence of increasingly affordable, powerful and mobile devices, access to the network has spread out and infiltrated parts of the globe that have typically remained impervious to previous technology advancements. There are some interesting numbers that I've heard recently that I wanted to highlight to articulate the scale and scope of today's network. Let's start with the fact there are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world representing almost one quarter of the world's population. Who are they and what are they doing?

I attended the Women's Conference 2009 today in Long Beach and listened in admiration to the many tales of triumph and hope that I heard throughout the day. One panel with Madeleine Albright, Amy Holmes, Valarie Jarrett and Claire Shipman discussed "How a Women's Nation Changes Everything." The world is certainly changing. And as women evolve their role, the network will continue to play its supporting part to help them find balance, take control and follow their dreams.

We are currently in a pivotal point in our world's history - the choices we make today will impact future generations. We need to change our consumptive habits, adjust our resource dependencies and create more sustainable social, economic and political models. I often get asked, "What can I, as an individual, do right now to better leverage the network and be more sustainable?" I have these 10 suggestions.

I would like to take a moment to recognize this year's Nobel Prize winners in physics and highlight the role they played in advancing the sustainable network. The inventions of Americans Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were instrumental in fueling the growth and utility of the network, which in turn fuels it's relevancy and spurs ongoing innovation...

The network offers us a sustainable platform for change, but to use it to its full advantage we must understand it; we must understand how it works, how it's integral to our daily lives and how its potential can be tapped more effectively to tackle our toughest environmental, social, economic and political problems.

You moved into the cloud to save some money. Now it's the first of the month and you're looking at your latest cloud provider bill. It's not at all what you planned. How can than be? You probably did a solid ROI analysis and it clearly indicated that a cloud infrastructure was going to save you money. Welcome to the dark side of cloud computing--the world of VM sprawl. Newcomers to the cloud generally find it very easy to start up servers but very hard to shut them down. The result is a cloud infrastructure with an unfortunate number of pointless servers.

The mobile network has created unprecedented opportunity for the world. It truly is pervasive - spanning out across geographies and socio-economic boundaries to enable sustainable participation, growth and potential prosperity on a previously unimaginable scale.

Yesterday, the FCC proposed rules that would create more government control over the Internet and force Internet providers (including wireless) to treat all Web traffic equally. There could be unintended consequences.

I had the privilege of hearing Thomas Friedman talk about his latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded and how accelerated globalization is presenting us all with new challenges and opportunities that need to be met head on if we want to sustain our planet and way of life. Challenges and opportunities that will not only take innovations in energy technology, but also information and communications technology.

The innovation enabled by the services and connections made possible by the network, is potentially our single, greatest hope for a progressive future. We can plod along making incremental progress, but we need innovation, that pure 'aha' kind of innovation that turns routines on their heads and changes everything.

In this Digital Information Age, that way is constantly evolving, growing in scope, both in terms of possibilities and challenges. An education represents one of the foundational steps on that path, and as such it arguably plays the single largest role in preparing our children to participate in the global economy.

O'Reilly's first book on virtualization uses our popular Cookbook format to give you ideas about administrative tasks you might not have thought you could do, or could be doing more efficiently. In preparation for the main annual VMware conference, VMworld (August 31--September 3 in San Francisco), we've put a couple recipes online: Ethernet Traffic Shaping and Monitoring CPU Usage.

Attempts to control access and content on the Internet is not unique to any one government or country. There is the risk that if we don't take action, censorship will chill and even stymy the open, free exchange of information that represents the transformative force of the network.