Given recent media coverage, it’s easy to believe that P2P and streaming video traffic is a rising hurricane battering upon ISP levees, that ISPs are frantically sandbagging their systems against disaster, that throttling, bandwidth caps, and traffic management are urgent and absolute necessities to keep the storm surge at bay. But new research from Telegeography only confirms what we’ve been saying for some time: the Internet backbone isn’t drowning beneath any kind of exaflood. In fact, backbone capacity has grown faster than Internet traffic in the last year—for the second year in a row.

Check out the full article, it even has some shiny graphs. It also reminds me of XKCD the other day… header: “I get in trouble for showing up contented to protests,” and the stick figure’s holding signs: “Things are pretty OK!” and “Anyone for Scrabble later?”

Jeff uses the example, “Smart Order Routing” as an example of taking an event and routing the resulting market order match based on some simple rules.    Routing a order kicked off by a simple order match against a deep liquidity pool (or other market factor) does not define complex event processing nor detecting a complex event - the core idea behind CEP.   Order routing based on simple rules is BPM, plain and simple.

Let’s take another example, fraud.  In this example, there is some complex neural network monitoring for credit card fraud and a potential fraud is detected - this is CEP, detecting a complex event based on some sophisticated analytics.   

After a possible fraud has been detected, a process looks into a database and the routes the incident to someone in the company who is a (1) specialist in credit card fraud, (2) working at the same time of the discovered threat, and (3) immediately available to act on this type of task.   Routing the incident is not CEP, it is BPM.

Jeff makes the argument that it is OK to call an event-driven BPM task CEP because “it fits the EPTS definition” in the CEP glossary.   He also avoids the discussion of detection accuracy, and instead insists that latency is a ”very important” factor in a CEP application.

If you read the various post by vendors in the blog-o-sphere, it is obvious that they are continually defining CEP as BAM, BPM, BRE, BRMS, SOA and just about every other related processing activity that is complimentary to the event correlation and analysis required to detect an opportunity or threat to your business.

I’m not picking on Aleri.  TIBCO has been doing the same thing recently in their CEP blog, continually attempting to redefine CEP as BRMS.    Detecting business opportunities and threats with high confidence requires sophisticated analytics, and their tools have not yet evolved to “real CEP” capabilities.  Instead, vendors are attempting to redefine BPM, BRMS, BRE, and even SOA to some degree, as CEP. 

CEP is Not BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA.

He’s a bit indignant that so much energy goes to sporting events like the Olympics rather than more important news that isn’t getting reported around the world.

This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.

This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.

Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance

Reminds me of a feeling I had back in college as an undergrad student studying social sciences and humanities, about the way my friends who were physicists interacted with the world. They were so awed by the stars, Mars, astrophysics, and it seemed to me interesting but altogether unimportant. They argued they may find something outside our planet that could help solve Earth-bound problems like disease, or find the origins of earth and humanity — but really they were doing it because they loved it. One of my friends had a good argument, though — there are enough people right now that we can specialize in what we care about, and there will still be others covering other topics. He could be a physicist and look into the universe’s origin, while I studied social interaction and writing, and our other friends looked into solving cancer or eradicating invasive plants in the native wetlands. We have to specialize, and there are enough of us to do it too.

I think it’s the same way in journalism — whether it’s sports, celebrity journalism, or coverage of politics and war, there are a lot of opportunities right now for journalists. Of course the business model is changing, and some old-schoolers won’t know how to roll with that, but generations change slowly; we’re learning.

Also, the Olympics is seen as more than a sporting event, it’s also a symbol of world competition and cooperation too — a way for countries to come together and share entertainment globally. I think that’s worth covering.

In the second post, Robert Scoble says there are plenty of great journalists but the public doesn’t care. In some ways I have to agree with that, but I don’t think it’s negative, necessarily. I had a conversation with someone the other day about world news reportage. He says, “I was just reading this story, but what does it matter to me if there’s a flood in some city in another country I’ll never visit and some farmer lost his sheep?” World news is only important when it’s relevant, so it’s no wonder that many people don’t care — if they don’t know much about the area, and it doesn’t affect them, they have no incentive to give it full attention. You can call that apathy, but I think it’s an important selectivity skill that humans have. We have to choose what to give priority to, so if nothing stands out as being particularly important, we just ignore it or gloss over it. Human nature…

Also I think the common person today just gets desensitized and doesn’t know where to turn their energy, when surrounded by so many crises. Either you focus on one specialty and do your best to work toward one cause in your life — and maybe that’s just in the course of your daily work — or you become a complete Attention-Deficit-Disorder case and bounce from one problem to the next, without knowing how to solve anything. That just causes a sense of bewilderment, despair, and either that bogs you down or eventually you get desensitized.

There’s a commenter on Scoble’s blog, Spencer, who talks about this generation’s apathy. There are so many people who want to blame today’s generation or the young generation for this “apathy” that they sense. But I see it as a survival mechanism that arises from the way information flows these days. We’re surrounded by crises, everyone wants us to know about them — the water shortage, global warming, death in Iraq, the national deficit. Okay, crisis, I get it. But no one gives a real clear idea on what any individual is really supposed to do to solve the problem. You can’t get involved with one global cause, without ignoring all the others, and if you do get involved it’s likely to become your life’s purpose. Most people are concerned with other things — their families, their work, personal development, their homes and futures, and really that’s enough to take up all their time.

I’m always amazed when I read about the early unionists. Emma Goldman for example, the activist who pushed for the 8-hr workday, and campaigned for free love in the early 1900s when women were still wearing corsets, used to work 16 hour factory days as a seamstress, then lead meetings late into the night. Today we lead cushy lives comparatively–8 hour days, plus commute and lunch, family time, dinner time, gym maybe, sleep… but it still doesn’t seem like we ever have enough energy and time.

What Emma had that most people today don’t, is a community living in the same conditions as herself, with clear goals about what they were campaigning for, and a cause that affected their own daily lives. Today, unionism and local activism is in much shorter supply, in part due to the many people who work fairly comfy desk jobs, and the problem that everyone has his own specialization, works in a cubicle, does his or her own thing. The problems we’re facing today in terms of global warming, global water shortage, aren’t the same kinds of problems that activists have fought for in the past, and there’s no clear road map for how to solve them. Our leaders sure aren’t leading the way.

What we do have, at least, is the Olympics, which is an age old symbol of international cooperation, play and competition…so, uh, go sports! As for full disclosure, I don’t actually have a TV and haven’t watched the Olympics in many years, but I do try taking short showers–does that help?

“Actually, it is fair to say that some of CEP can be found in other disciplines. Event processing has been going on in one form or another, for the past 50 years. Simulation, Networking, Active DBs, Middleware.

{ …. }

CEP has only just begun. The foundations are unexplored. Its an open field of research issues.”

Actually, on slide 12 of this presentation from 2006 Processing Patterns for PredictiveBusiness, we show that the foundations for complex event processing have been in place for many years and in many disciplines such as multisensor data fusion, control theory, sensor management, planning, correlation, estimation, tracking, information fusion, data fusion, data mining and more.

One obvious problem (or at least obvious to many of us) with the current group think marketing CEP is that many have ignored the established foundations for event processing and complex event processing that have been mature for many decades. It is not very efficient (nor good for customers) to pick a phrase, or concept, like “CEP” and ignore the relevant mulitiple disciplines that have been used to solve complex classes of distributed event processing problems for decades.

Therefore, “CEP has only begun” is only true for those who have ‘drank the CEP koolaid” and do not understand (yet) that they are “reinventing the event processing wheel” and ignoring (by accident or purposely, I have no idea of the motives) the prior-art and/or selectively picking the prior art or research associated with their company, byline, favorite researcher, CEO, etc. This is a fundamental issue (and constraint) with CEP, in my opinion. Complex event processing does not stand alone as an art or a science, nor should it, nor should it be based on single dimensional, or small groups of single dimensional, technologies.

If you want to see many of the foundations of CEP, you don’t need to go much further than slide 12 of this  presentation from 2006, Processing Patterns for PredictiveBusiness.

Based on my observation, it reminds me of a small group of folks on a discovery mission where their ship lands on the shore of a distant land and they call this “new land” — “CEP” because they feel they have discovered a new land.  Nevermind the big cities that already exist or the many people already “in the fields” of their new land.  These ”CEP explorers” are seemingly in some kind of modern day epic struggle to define themselves as “discoverers” or “founders” and they are coming up with new names of the lakes, rivers, streams and mountains that defined the landscape long before their ship arrived.

Note: It is encouraging to see folks slowly “catching up”…. maybe in a few years we will move CEP beyond the “not invented here” mind share that we see today.

Also note that, recently we saw a flurry of posts where many people rightly stated that “CEP was overhyped” - but then in rebuttal the EPTS community leaders came back with “Is CEP a mere hype?” or “Is CEP a hype?”. spinning the discussion to an extreme position that is wildly different than “CEP is Overhyped”.   

Soldiers were deployed throughout Italy on Monday to embassies, subway and railway stations, as part of broader government measures to fight violent crime here for which illegal immigrants are broadly blamed.

[...]

The conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi won elections in April while promising to crack down on petty crime and illegal immigrants. The new patrols of soldiers, who are not empowered to make arrests, do not seem aimed only at illegal immigrants, though the patrols were deployed to centers where illegal immigrants are housed.

“Security is something concrete,” Mr. La Russa said on Monday. The troops, he said, will be a “deterrent to criminals.”

That reminds me of one of my favorite logical fallacies: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it." It does seem largely to be a demonstration of "doing something" by the Berlusconi government. The legitimate police, of course, think it's a terrible idea.

“You need to be specially trained to carry out some kinds of controls,” Nicola Tanzi, the secretary of a trade union that represents Italian police officers. “Soldiers just aren’t qualified.”

He also questioned whether the $93.6 million that will be spent for the extra deployment, called Operation Safe Streets, might not have been better used to increase the budgets for Italy’s police and military.

People ask why do you blog?  In the final analysis I blog because I like to. Every once in a while though you get a comment from a reader that reminds you why it is all worth while.  Here is one I received today from a person alleging to be a Julie Peterson:

Julie Peterson commented on Safe Access wins SC Magazine Award Reader Trust Award, again!:

Dressed in a tuxedo and chewing those rubber chicken breasts at the award ceremony is your idea of fun? Aren't you the same mentally retarded idiot who said in 2007 that you hated SC awards and that anyone can buy the SC awards with a sponsorship? Why do you think people give over $10k as sponsorship for the SC awards? Who is watching the awards except other vendors? By the way you suck big time with your rubbish blogs. Didn't networld magazine give you the boot within 3 months? Think before you write Mr. mental. Well done on winning, but please, dont give the impression that you cant buy an award from SC! And don't forget to eat your medication pills tonight, otherwise from your hair it is obvious you ran away from a mental hospital.

First of all Julie, let me thank you for your kind words! You made the statement and let me answer your questions for you.

1. Is dressing in a tuxedo and chewing rubber chicken breasts my idea of fun?  Actually, I do enjoy dressing up in a tuxedo once in a while.  The food at the awards ceremony was actually pretty good, if not diet friendly, as were the cocktails.  The entertainment at the awards show was pretty good as well. Catching up with friends you had not seen for a while and networking with industry peers was pretty worthwhile too.  Maybe your idea of a good time is putting on a bowling shirt and swilling a couple of beers and pretzels before going home and undressing into your dirty ripped underwear. Hey I say to each his own.

2. I am not the idiot who in 2007 said that I hated the SC awards and that anyone can buy the SC awards with a sponsorship.  I am the idiot who said that about the InfoSec Products Guide award by the folks at Silicon Valley Communications.  In contrast I have always said nice things about the SC awards. I actually have a lot of respect for them.  Also for the record, StillSecure has never been a sponsor of the SC Magazine awards. I have seen sponsors who did not win awards as well.  So looks like you got that one wrong Julie, but it happens.

3. ???Networld??? magazine didn???t give me the boot within 3 months.  They never had the chance, as I never wrote for ???networld, network world or any other magazine. Maybe you have me confused with Mike Rothman or Mitchell Ashley, who do and did write for Network World. But let me assure you that I do try and think before I write.

4. Regarding what medication pills I take and does my hair make it obvious I ran away from a mental hospital. I don???t take any medication, maybe I should.  Better living through chemistry you know ;-)  As to my hair, what can I say.  At this stage I am happy I have any hair at all.  My wife always says when I get my haircut it looks like a Buzz Lightyear style, but no one ever mentioned a mental hospital look to it.  In any event sorry it doesn???t appeal to you.

So who is this troll Julie Peterson?  Could it be Richard Stiennon in drag?  Maybe his wife striking out?  Maybe another one of my fans?  Who knows, but these sort of comments keep me juiced about blogging and remind me of how much fun I have doing it.  Thanks again Julie!

People ask why do you blog?  In the final analysis I blog because I like to. Every once in a while though you get a comment from a reader that reminds you why it is all worth while.  Here is one I received today from a person alleging to be a Julie Peterson:

Julie Peterson commented on Safe Access wins SC Magazine Award Reader Trust Award, again!:

Dressed in a tuxedo and chewing those rubber chicken breasts at the award ceremony is your idea of fun? Aren't you the same mentally retarded idiot who said in 2007 that you hated SC awards and that anyone can buy the SC awards with a sponsorship? Why do you think people give over $10k as sponsorship for the SC awards? Who is watching the awards except other vendors? By the way you suck big time with your rubbish blogs. Didn't networld magazine give you the boot within 3 months? Think before you write Mr. mental. Well done on winning, but please, dont give the impression that you cant buy an award from SC! And don't forget to eat your medication pills tonight, otherwise from your hair it is obvious you ran away from a mental hospital.

First of all Julie, let me thank you for your kind words! You made the statement and let me answer your questions for you.

1. Is dressing in a tuxedo and chewing rubber chicken breasts my idea of fun?  Actually, I do enjoy dressing up in a tuxedo once in a while.  The food at the awards ceremony was actually pretty good, if not diet friendly, as were the cocktails.  The entertainment at the awards show was pretty good as well. Catching up with friends you had not seen for a while and networking with industry peers was pretty worthwhile too.  Maybe your idea of a good time is putting on a bowling shirt and swilling a couple of beers and pretzels before going home and undressing into your dirty ripped underwear. Hey I say to each his own.

2. I am not the idiot who in 2007 said that I hated the SC awards and that anyone can buy the SC awards with a sponsorship.  I am the idiot who said that about the InfoSec Products Guide award by the folks at Silicon Valley Communications.  In contrast I have always said nice things about the SC awards. I actually have a lot of respect for them.  Also for the record, StillSecure has never been a sponsor of the SC Magazine awards. I have seen sponsors who did not win awards as well.  So looks like you got that one wrong Julie, but it happens.

3. “Networld” magazine didn’t give me the boot within 3 months.  They never had the chance, as I never wrote for “networld, network world or any other magazine. Maybe you have me confused with Mike Rothman or Mitchell Ashley, who do and did write for Network World. But let me assure you that I do try and think before I write.

4. Regarding what medication pills I take and does my hair make it obvious I ran away from a mental hospital. I don’t take any medication, maybe I should.  Better living through chemistry you know ;-)  As to my hair, what can I say.  At this stage I am happy I have any hair at all.  My wife always says when I get my haircut it looks like a Buzz Lightyear style, but no one ever mentioned a mental hospital look to it.  In any event sorry it doesn’t appeal to you.

So who is this troll Julie Peterson?  Could it be Richard Stiennon in drag?  Maybe his wife striking out?  Maybe another one of my fans?  Who knows, but these sort of comments keep me juiced about blogging and remind me of how much fun I have doing it.  Thanks again Julie!