Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.
so true.
I keep thinking about the disturbing pace at which technology is “evolving” and growing. Out servers at work are now being purchased with the idea in mind that they will be obsolete and “useless” within 3 years. This is absurd! You don’t buy a car thinking it’s only going to last 3 years! Why would we spend almost (or more) money on something that work’s just fine, knowing that we will dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into replacements for this equipment in 3 years.
I has become ridiculous but status-quo with large IT.
The hardware probably last another 3 or 4 years *after* the support contract is up, but parts may be hard to find. Total waste of money! And every vendor either hardware or software has us completely sold on this idea. It was called planned obsolescence when it was first noticed with car designs in the 40’s and 50’s. Now it’s called “life-cycle.” Since when did somethings life-cycle mean you already are planning it’s death before you get it in the door?
I keep thinking I’m going to write something insightful about technology, but technology is outpacing my thoughts so fast, I am getting nauseous from vertigo my head is spinning so fast. Exchange 2007 just came out 2 years ago and isn’t implemented in most places yet. However… everyone in “the biz” as my boss says is already talking about the next version of Exchange. What happened? When did it become OK for technology to NOT stagnate? Having something functional and well-running doesn’t mean you have to buy or do everything the vendor tells you to. And if it voids the “support” contract… guess what? You have systems administrators and engineers on payroll to fix problems like this. What the heck do I get paid for? To call a vendor and ask for support. That’s why I am offended by “the monkey pushes the button” mentality of large IT. It has been too long since I have been required to fix something *without* the “phone and friend” option. I remember the good old days where top-tier services would go down for days. ISPs would be down for hours, sure they would apologize for the inconvenience, but no one really expected anything different or miraculous. It was accepted that these systems fluctuate.
Now there is clustering and network load-balancing, and all sorts of redundancies built-in to mitigate resource contention. What a mouthful! It really means we have become so dependent on these systems that we built, that we are claiming a collapse of life as we know it if they were to go out. A system loss is rated in man-hours lost, and that directly translates into money lost while employees sit idle, because no one fills out form by hand anymore. And that money lost while they were idle coincidentally is the same figure as the salary the head-administrator is making…
Having a backup-strategy for your mission critical date used to me you were on top of it. You have a backup strategy. Solid as a rock you say. Nowadays the backup strategy would take you hours to even come close to being back online. What good is that? Backups to tape are now being replaced with “virtual tape libraries.” A VLT is a really expensive piece of hardware that really is keeping a live copy of your data, in case BOTH nodes of your cluster fail, you can bring back online your HOTSPARE server, and bring back your databases. That’s a lot of hardware just sitting idle, costing you money, the same hardware that may not ever get used in a production circumstance, and you have to pay for the replacement of that hardware within the next 3 years, or risk going out of support.
Oh how far we have come. I picked up a “Computer Basics” book printed in 1985 (revised 1986) that someone left on the table at work as a joke. It was incredible! The trip back in time when things were still esoteric, and it seemed that the guys in the white lab coats were doing something incredibly special. Magical. They were getting the machines to do things. Machines that lasted for years. Hardware.. big iron. Not commodity junk. Just the amount of money being poured into equipment is justification to not upgrade your software. At what point does an application become the ultimate example of what that type of application should do? Exchange 2007 is an incredible leap in technology. Along with it’s sister software SharePoint (MOSS version) and the overlooked step-child Office Communications Server, a business can survive, thrive, collaborate, and network amongst themselves for years to come. But… it will be out of support soon. It doesn’t matter so much that the software is fulfilling everything software of that type should fulfill. Those three products represent an incredibly huge investment. Several hundred thousand dollars in license fees, and it will be “outdated” and out of primary support within half a decade.
At what point is this technology “lifecycle” going to stop being driven by the greedy? Is Linux and open-source in general the most efficient way of improving technology for everyone’s benefit? From what little I know Linux isn’t getting changed so much every new release that it’s completely worthless years from now. You can get support for your particular flavor, and a particular version will be out of support someday, but in essence it is still the same as it was 10 or 15 years ago. You can probably still run software on it that was written 20 years earlier. “VI” did you really mentin VI? I haven’t heard of VI for years… and Pine! Who would have thought that they would recreate Pine to be the open-source “Alpine!” Wow… some things never change, but there may be a good reason for that.
When a tool is created it is usually to solve a particular function. The screwdriver was invented immediately after someone realized they invented the screw. The spear was invented to kill things. Software was originally created to solve problems. What good is software or tools for that matter, if they create more problems than they solve? It does no one any favors to have a hammer that is ineffective at driving nails.
I have finally purchased my all-in-one miracle device. It comes with wifi, camera, phone, GPS, calendar, email, address book, live weather reporting, web browsing, music, videos, audio recording, speech recognition, bluetooth, really cool “air mouse” capability, tethering for a modem, business card scanner, and it can print too! It doens’t make coffee but I can’t say that about my computer either. Although many coffee makers have computers, that is different. What is really frustrating is realizing that while I bought my device for function, hundreds of phones are being shipped overseas to pollute other countries. Unless they make it to our landfills first and pollute ours. What are we doing to the planet with our over-abundance of resuable and “disposable” lifecycle of technology.
I think you can run Linux on a 286.