What I have at this stage is a premise and an outline set of requirements. The premise is simple, go fully digital, but retain analogue controls. The outline components are as follows:

• A powerful PC/MAC + Essential Apps such as Ableton Live
• A High Quality Multi-channel sound card
• A midi trigger device
• A Good quality Mixer
• A Sampler/Effects Unit

Now, its actually possible to have all of the above in a single box, and in fact, many solutions exist for sub £250, but to be honest, its just not going to give me the flexibility and expandability that I desire. What I want is complete fluidity in the solution so that I can expand upon for many years, giving me not only multi-channel mixing, but the real-time remix capability that I desire

So where next?

Well, I already have a decent mixer (DJM600), a powerful PC (Multi-Xeon Monster) and Ableton, so the most important piece and crux of the system is what I need to acquire first. This would be the multi-channel sound card! I have had a look around and found many options, but this one seems to be the best by a mile:

Motu Ultralite MK3

This unit has all the features I could need, from 192Khz sample rates, through to 6 channels of input and 10 channels of output to give me as many feeds as I could possibly deal with! The spec list goes on forever on this thing, which is why it can command a £500+ price tag. But if I am going to invest, this is the way forward.

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Consider these examples:

1. From an effort perspective, the effort required to secure a system is significantly less than that required to exploit it.
2. From a cost perspective, it is less expensive to prevent a serious data breach than it is to clean up and recover from one.

Point 1 above was illustrated very clearly to me on the IISP’s TopGun event I attended recently, and is a scenario that you have to step back from to fully appreciate. Eg. If you have a smallish network, with most modern services such as web, email, mobile, databases, websites etc, then the effort to secure that is quite mammoth. You have to consider the perimeter, the information, how its stored and used, what services are on offer and the impacts etc. Then you have to consider every conceivable vulnerability, patching strategies and stay on top and at least up to speed with the curve of change. All of these efforts equate to a team of people, but all it takes to break in, is 1 person with a brain, motive, and a few freely available tools.

Point 2 of course, was illustrated very well by a study by the Pnemon Instutue LLC in conjunction with PGP and Vontu (Symantec), this study evaluated the true cost of a breach of data security and considered factors such as direct and indirect costs, and has trended the data over the last few years with enlightening results.

Despite both of these points clearly illustrating that the best way to tackle the security conundrum is head on and proactively, those of us in the industry will all surely testify that getting the right backing, funding, and often, even the right audience with the business, is still a hard task. From my perspective, I will keep on trying, and keep on flying the flag in the hope that one day reality sets in and my job / life gets easier!

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So what I hear you cry!

Well think of this, Cloud computing is here to stay and can yield some massive processing potential, but its still quite young and clouds tend to be privately owned and sold to the highest bidder. But what if we could all club together and build a cloud so big, so powerful it blew the Crays and IBMs of this world out of the water?

Again, I hear the crys of yeah right!

Well, ask yourself this, do I own a PS3? if the answer is yes, welcome to the “PSCloud”

The concept is simple, in a PS3 there is an IBM Cell Processor with 8 CPU cores, a very powerful CPU indeed! and guess what, IBM’s Roadrunner uses them too, yes, the Roadrunner has just short of 13,000 Cell Processors in it, of course it has quite a few AMD’s as well (6.4K), but the cells are the bulk of it.

So lets look at the facts, the same basic architecture used for the supercomputer market is in our homes, and cloud computing is here to stay, well I’m no rocket scientist but I reckon if we put these two concepts together, Roadrunner and Jaguar have a problem on their hands.

As of November 2008, over 16 million PS3’s have been sold around the world, of which we can assume by the design and nature of the unit, that nearly all of them are connected to the internet, so if we were able to join them into a single cloud, what sort of processing power could we achieve?

I ask you this….. If 13,000 Cells and 6K AMD’s get you 1.6 Petaflops, what would 16million Cells get you?

All we need to make this happen is a software/firmware update to turn the PS3 into a cloud member and a peer based command and control mechanism, any programmers out there?

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Its a simple mantra, but one that has served me well in security.

Think of of this way, it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, someone, somewhere is more intelligent! When it comes to security this is never more true. As we all know, security is asymmetric, in so much that the effort required to secure something is significantly more than that required to break into it. Given this point, it makes the mantra even more relevant! If security was symetrical, you would have a 1:1 effort relationship, however, as its not, (we will for the purposes of this article assume its 2:1, i.e. double the effort required to secure), it would theoretically take less brain power than it took to create the control to break it.

Obviously I accept that this is a very simplistic representation of the point, but one I think is valid.

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