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Helping Computers Help Themselves
Jim Posner writes "The IT world's heavy hitters--IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and HP--want computers to solve their own problems.....If you're being chased by a big snarling dog, you don't have to worry about adjusting your heart rate or releasing a precise amount of adrenaline. Your body automatically does it all, thanks to the autonomic nervous system, the master-control for involuntary functions from breathing and blood flow to salivation and digestion." I'd just be happy with a few intelligent daemons to watch my back, like when a program runs amuck and fills up the process list.
Because it means they want to make us obsolete to increase the margins of rich idiots. And it won't save that much money, in the long run, from well run companies.
When I first came to this company, we had something like 20 IT employees. Through "attrition" (read: fire X, Y quits) we're down to 4. Every time somebody left, the remaining folks would write a script to automate what the other guy spent most of the day doing...watching servers for spikes and resetting them, etc.
Did it save us from hiring new people? Our HR department will tell you it did, but it's untrue. The fact is the turnaround time for IT requests has become abyssmal. Adding new segments to our network takes much much longer -- to the point that a new code base for email took 2 people six months to analyze deployment options and deploy, and only took me three weeks to write.
Customers are leaving, siting huge turn arounds for new features and fixes, and we're blaming it on our support dept. Support is fine -- they get requests to us fast. Deployment...well, it could take weeks even to get cosmetic changes through.
Can you imagine the additional testing you'd have to perform before changing a truly autonomous server? And how can you be sure that the self healing server is really healthy, or just not noticing the problem?
Das no like-y. Bad medicine.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Huh!
Guess it's about time I upgraded, then...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This made me look fore more info on this guy (Robert Morris), here is an interview. He seems like a good guy in good position.
Not likely, at least not any time soon. This article is not really describing a new phenomenon. The basic trend is all computing is to start with something that does a simple task, but is terribly difficult to install and run, and slowly make it easier. You remove the points where the end-user has to interact with the system if those interactions could have been easily figured out by the computer. This kind of optimization has been going on since computers were born, but despite all the progress, the tech industry has done nothing but grow.
So Sun and IBM are turning their attention to some particular area that needs more optimizations... this just means that in ten years, there is going to be a higher level of abstraction with the same problems to solve. I'll have to figure out how to my new McDonalds chain can just plug some new computers into a wall and have their order menus popup instantly... great for productivity, great progress, but it hardly cuts into the demand for technically skilled people.
Of course, intuitively there must be some point where the optimizations made start cutting into jobs. My feeling though is that we are still working on some of the most basic problems of computing, and it will be quite a long time before we reach the peak of this curve. I mean, a big focus of the article is how to most efficiently get data out of databases! We all take for granted that this is (currently) a very tricky issue. Imagine looking back in twenty years though... it's easy to imagine that we'll laugh at having to think about such basic issues at all. "Configuring a network? Gimme a break, piece of cake! Connect some wires and you're done!" we'll say. And yet it's easy to imagine that despite having solved all of these problems, we will still be faced with a set of complicated issues of the day to solve to utilize these features. We're still working out how to move information around efficiently. And this is just a discussion about how to move information around efficiently. We're not even getting into applications and what to do with that information once you have it.
Then someone will write an article about how IBM is focusing on the problems of that day, and is going to make it easy to handle *that* level of abstraction. We'll read that configuring interactions between networks to transparently and securely utilize excess CPU in your neighborhood, or your city, is going to be a breeeze, and we'll have this discussion all over again...
All the negative reactions here come from IT workers, who want their job places secured. But you see, as one previous reply pointed out, it's just replacing the monkeys. Imagine you current job. How much of it could be automised? Maybe not in the current configuration, but what if we had more standards (like XML, like standard hardware, ...).
This is going to happen, so the best thing to do is to climb up the ladder, and try to be ahead of it. It may be a lot of work in the beginning, but it could reduce work (and costs) in the end. This is similar to HP + (Compaq + Digital) who are reducing their server line from three types to one. It will cut in our flesh now, but it will allow us to grow as a whole.
It's life, my friends, don't think you're immune for it.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
How about a word processor that will automatically correct me when I type "the" instead of "the"? I mean THE. THE THE THE. T-E-H, there. Oh wait, they already have that, and it's the most annoying feature ever. When you get computer that think they know what's best for you, bad things are going to happen. Even with something as simple as TEH. Imagine if it was advanced things like too many processes, think how much of an obscure problem it would be for a novice user to track down when they really do want too many processes? Anyway, I think it's a bad idea.
Although it's ostensibly about "self healing", it seems the largest portion of the page was about databases that self-optimize their queries. They make a big deal about Microsoft having stuff like that out, and that IBM has some big thing coming soon (LEO).
AFAIK, the free and open-source PostgreSQL also has similar technology built in.
*YAWN*
Come back when there's something to read, eh?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Your body automatically does it all
If our bodies worked the way we wanted, things would be very different. First, you'd get a huge boost of adrenaline so you could outrun the dog. Also, although your heart would speed up, you'd have no risk of a heart attack or other complications from overexerting yourself. You wouldn't get tired. And you'd be equipped with built in weapons for annihilating hostile canines.
You'd also never have to worry about getting nervous trying to talk to that new cutie at work, acne wouldn't exist, and we all be our ideal weight.
Our bodies, at best, make fair attempts at adjusting to situations, but they blow it as often as they get it right. Frankly, if our computers become as reliable as our bodies, I'm going to invest in pencils.