A perfectly valid question almost no one is asking. This guy is.

Just to be clear: I’m not advocating that steriods be legalized. In fact, I think that’s probably a terrible idea.  I’m simply puzzled. The professional sports establishment is in the midst of a major witchhunt against alleged users of performance enhancing drugs. But no one–so far as I can tell– has articulated a coherent explanation for what should be banned and why.

“James,” one of the commenters on the “Free Fernando Vina” post brought up the issue of Lasik eye surgery. That’s a very good example.  It is perfectly legal for an athlete to undergo “performance enhancing” eye surgery, that moves him from, say, the 50th to the 95th percentile in sight. It is not legal for that same athlete to take “performance enhancing” hormones that move his testosterone from the 50th to the 95th percentile–even thought the additional advantage of the eye surgery may be greater than the additional advantage  conferred by the exogenous testosterone. Now, there may be a perfectly valid distinction between those two interventions. But what is it? Shouldn’t it be spelled out before we drum Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame?

It is nice to know I’m not the only one confused by the hypocrisy. In my opinion, all performance enhancers should be on the table when it comes to consenting adults. Sports or otherwise. Life might be shorter for some but it would probably be more interesting. Shouldn’t that be their choice as long as they are not hurting anyone else?

The war on drugs has changed the list of readily available substances and enhancements available. It has not done a damn thing to change humans basic desires to be something they are not, to rise higher than they otherwise could have and the propensity of a given subset of our species to flameout in spectacular blazes of glory. Our James Dean and Marilyn Monroe types will always be among us.

One of the hot new terms in information technology is cloud computing. According to some of the writers and pundits who cover developments in infotech, many IT departments could soon be replaced by cloud computing providers. That would be OK with me but I’m dubious as to how quickly the change could take place.

There are any number of factors that have to be taken into account. Any organization that is considering cloud computing models has to feel a sense of assurance that the scalability and speed come with stability and appropriate security. Most important, some companies, the ones with a culture of control, will never adopt cloud computing. At least, they will never adopt it unless they control the entire cloud.

Just as SaaS (sofware as a service) required ceding critical data control to a third party vendor, cloud computing requires giving up that central authority. The CEO cannot call his CIO in the middle of the night, rousting an IT staff whose jobs depend on fixing any problem (real or perceived) when the data is in someone else’s cloud. The leverage just isn’t the same when you are not the ONLY customer and the source of bread and butter for everyone in your IT chain of command.

If I am ever replaced by a cloud I look forward to the opportunity to take some much needed vacation time. Since I work for a conservative firm that values control more than it values scalability, I am watching the progress of this new idea with interest devoid of any alarm.

If you are the CIO of a modern, risk taking, early adopting kind of company then you might benefit from the scalability, improved deployment times and simpler management of systems offered by clouds. On the other hand, you could just migrate your existing infrastructure to VMWare and keep control. That’s what we’ve done.