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IT Snake Oil — Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan surveys six 'transformational' tech-panacea sales pitches that have left egg on at least some IT department faces. Billed with legendary promises, each of the six technologies — five old, one new — has earned the dubious distinction of being the hype king of its respective era, falling far short of legendary promises. Consultant greed, analyst oversight, dirty vendor tricks — 'the one thing you can count on in the land of IT is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.' Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown." What other horrible hype stories do some of our seasoned vets have?
The bad news is that artificial intelligence has yet to fully deliver on its promises.
Only idiots, marketers, businessmen and outsiders ever thought we would be completely replaced by artificially intelligent machines. The people actually putting artificial intelligence into practice knew that AI, like so many other things, would benefit us in small steps. So many forms of automation are technically basic artificial intelligence, it's just very simple artificial intelligence. While you might want to argue that the things we benefit from are heuristics, statistics and messes of if/then decision trees, successful AI is nothing more than that. Everyone reading this enjoys benefits of AI but you probably don't know it. For instance, your hand written mail is most likely read by a machine that uses optical character recognition to decide where it goes with a pretty good success rate and confidence factor to fail over to humans. Recommendation systems are often based on AI algorithms. I mean, the article even says this:
The ability of your bank's financial software to detect potentially fraudulent activity on your accounts or alter your credit score when you miss a mortgage payment are just two of many common examples of AI at work, says Mow. Speech and handwriting recognition, business process management, data mining, and medical diagnostics -- they all owe a debt to AI.
Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet -- or even remotely comparable to the human mind. I don't ever recall reading anything other than fiction claiming that humans would soon be replaced completely by thinking machines.
In short, I don't think it's fair to put it in this list as it has had success. It's easy to dismiss AI if the only person you hear talking about it is the cult-like Ray Kurzweil but I assure you the field is a valid one (unlike CASE or ERP). In short, AI will never die because the list of applications -- though small -- slowly but surely grows. It has not gone 'bunk' (whatever the hell that means). You can say expert systems have failed to keep their promises but not AI on the whole. The only thing that's left a sour taste in your mouth is salesmen and businessmen promising you something they simply cannot deliver on. And that's nothing new nor anything specific to AI.
My work here is dung.
Microslop Craporation.
Not sure why virtualization made it into the potential snake-oil of the future. It's demonstrating real benefits today...practically all of the companies I deal with have virtualized big chunks of their infrastructure.
I'd vote for cloud computing, previously known as utility computing. It's a lot more work than expected to offload processing outside your organization.
very disappointed that the word "synergy" did not appear in either linked article or the summary.
Beware of the Leopard.
IT snake oil: Six tech cure-alls that went bunk
By Dan Tynan
Created 2009-11-02 03:00AM
Today, cloud computing [4], virtualization [5], and tablet PCs [6] are vying for the hype crown. At this point it's impossible to tell which claims will bear fruit, and which will fall to the earth and rot.
[...]
1. Artificial intelligence
2. Computer-aided software engineering (CASE)
3. Thin clients
4. ERP systems
5. B-to-b marketplaces
6. Enterprise social media
1. AI: Has to have existed before it can be "bunk"
2. CASE: Regarding Wikipedia, it seems to be alive and kicking.
3. Thin Clients: Tell that to the guys over at TiVo that thin-client set-top-boxes are bunk.
4. ERP Systems: For low complexity companies, I don't see why ERP software isn't possible.
5. Web B2B: He is right about this one.
6. Social media: Big companies like IBM have been doing "social media" within their organization for quite some time.It's just a new name for an old practice
And as far as his first comment,
"Today, cloud computing [4], virtualization [5], and tablet PCs [6] are vying for the hype crown. At this point it's impossible to tell which claims will bear fruit, and which will fall to the earth and rot."
[4] Google.
[5] Data Servers.
[6] eBooks and medical applications.
OOP was hyped as a cure-all, but only turned out to help out in a few portions of apps, and trigger a philosophical holy-war between set fans (relational) and graph fans (oop). As a new tool to add to the tool box, fine. As a cure-all, NOT.
It has vaporware all over it.
Bonus points if the salesman admits that he doesn't need to know your problems before selling it to you.
Let's just say the technology is not quite there yet.
I was surprised to find ERP on this list. Sure, it's a huge effort and always oversold, but there's hardly a large manufacturing company out there that could survive without some sort of basic ERP implementation.
That went over real well once they saw user visits drop by almost half...
Listening to the Willy Lomans of the world is no substitute for insight and understanding. As Plato might have put it, either the managers had better understand technology or the techies get to manage.
We need to bring about a paradigm shift, to think outside the box, and produce a clear synergy between cloud computing and virtualization.
Within limits, expert systems seem to work reasonably well. Properly-trained software that examines x-ray images has been reported to have better accuracy than humans at diagnosing specific problems. The literature seems to suggest that expert systems for medical case diagnosis is more accurate than doctors and nurses, especially tired doctors and nurses. OTOH, patients have an intense dislike of such systems, particularly the diagnosis software, since it can seem like an arbitrary game of "20 Questions". Of course, these are tools that help the experts do their job better, not replacements for the expert people themselves.
Worse, users resented giving up control over their machines, adds Mike Slavin, partner and managing director responsible for leading TPI's Innovation Center. "The technology underestimated the value users place upon having their own 'personal' computer, rather than a device analogous -- stretching to make a point here -- to the days of dumb terminals," he says.
So why does it look good now? Oh right different people heard the setup and a new generation gets suckered on it.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
This is a bit OT but I wanted to say that snydeq deserves a cookie for linking to the print version. I can only imagine that the regular version is at least seven pages. I hope slashdot finds a way to reward considerate contributors such as him or her for making things easy for the rest of us.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I don't know of a single IT department that hasn't been helped by virtualization of servers. It makes more efficient use of purchased hardware, keeps businesses from some of the manipulations to which their hardware and OS vendors can subject them, and is (in the long term) cheaper to operate than a traditional datacenter. IT departments have wondered for a long time: "if I have all this processing power, memory, and storage, why can't I use all of it?" Virtualization answers that question, and does it in an elegant way, so I don't consider it snake oil.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
The quote "Some day we will build a thinking machine..." which TFA attributes to Thinking Machines corp is bogus, I think. Google turns up only a handful of hits, and the happy times I had with C*/PRISM on a CM-5 left me with the distinct impression that the people at Thinking Machines definitely had their heads screwed on and switched on.
Did TFA just make this quote up?
I kind of miss the crazy hotties that used to pervade the network sales arena. I won't even name the worst offenders, although the worst started with the word cable. They would go to job fairs and hire the hottest birds, put them in the shortest shirts and low cut blouses, usually white with black push-up bras - and send them in to sell you switches.
It was like watching the cast of a porn film come visit. Complete with the sleazebag regional manager, some of them even had gold chains on. Pimps up, big daddy!
They would laugh at whatever the customer said wildly, even if it wasn't really funny. The girls would bat their eyelashes and drop pencils. It was so ridiculous it was funny, it was like a real life comedy show skit.
I wonder how much skimming went on in those days. Bogus purchase orders, fake invoices. Slap and tickle. The WORST was if your company had no money to afford any of the infratsructure and the networking company would get their "capital finance" team involved. Some really seedy slimy stuff went down in the dot-com boom. And not just down pantlegs, either.
Most of the technologies in the article were overhyped but almost all have had real value in the marketplace.
For example, AI works and is a very strong technology, but only the SF authors and idiots expect their computer to have a conversation with them. Expert systems (a better name) or technologies that are part of them are in place in thousands of back-office systems.
But, if you're looking for HAL, you have another 2001 years to wait. Nobody seriously is working toward that, except as a dream goal. Everybody wants a better prediction model for the stock market first.
I got interested in AI in the early 90's and even then the statements made in the article were considered outrageous by people who actually knew what was going on. I use AI on a daily basis, from OCR to speech and gesture recognition. Even my washing machine claims to use it. Not quite thinking for us and taking over the world, but give it some time :).
Same with thin clients. Just today I put together a proposal for three 100 seat thin client (Sunray) labs. VDI allows us to use Solaris, multiple Linux flavors, Minix, Windows, pretty much any OS we wish at the click of a mouse. The biggest problem is guessing what is going to happen now that Oracle is taking over, not the technology/architecture. Yes, Windows (CE) "thin clients" suck and are not very thin, but real think clients are quite handy.
A lot of these technologies were/are hopelessly over-hyped, but that is not a fault with the technology, but a problem with the idiots doing the hyping.
If nothing else, thanks for linking to the print version of the article...
It just when some aspect of symbolic computing is successful, its not really considered AI anymore and the goal changes. Or it was any computing technology to emerge from an AI laboratory was considered AI'ish.
Some researchers divided this into "soft" and "hard" AI. The later would be someone conversational humna-like mentality. The former is any software technology along the way.
Artificial intelligence at its worst.
Apparently it cures everything but RSI.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
We used to play buzzword bingo when vendors would come in for a show. Some of my personal favorites:
IT Best Practices - Has anyone seen my big book of best practices? I seem to have misplaced it. But that never stopped vendors from pretending there was an IT bible out there that spelled out the procedures for running an IT shop. And always it was their product at the core of IT best practices.
Agile Computing - I never did figure that one out. This is your PC, this is your PC in spin class.
Lean IT - Cut half your staff and spend 3x what you were paying them to pay us for doing the exact same thing only with worse service.
Web 2.0 - Javascript by any other name is still var rose.
SOA - What a gold mine that one was. Calling it "web services" didn't command a very high premium. But tack on a great acronym like SOA and you can charge lots more!
All those are just ways for vendors and contractors to make management feel stupid and out of touch. Many management teams don't need any help in that arena, most of them are already out of touch before the vendor walks in. Exactly why they're not running back to their internal IT people to inquire why installing Siebel is a really BAD idea. You can't fix bad business practices with technology. Fix your business practices first, then find the solution that best fits what you're already doing.
And whoever has my IT Best Practices book, please bring it back. Thanks.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And all that brouhaha surrounding it? We were supposed to sit back and have all that junk crammed down our throats, but we'd want it all, because the database would have our marketing preferences.
What about Linux? (On the desktop) (Sorry, I couldn't resist!)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Incredible labor saving devices of the future! Vacuum Cleaner salesmen would always say they were labor saving devices. They are actually _more_ work than sweeping with a broom, but the end result is cleaner (brooms just move dust around). Of course, telling a PHB that the virtual environment will cost more in hardware and manpower but will be 3x as good doesn't win points. PHB only wants reduction in cost.
Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?
"The idea of CASE was to produce better code faster by having a computer do it," says McLean. "Just feed your specifications into the front end, and it'll spit out flawless code. The vendors counted on customers who did not realize that the biggest problem in these projects is bad specifications, and they found a lot of those customers. So, people fed bad specs in one end and got bad code out of the other."
So, they never asked a single professional programmer? XD Seriously, has ANYONE EVER gotten a spec that wasn't ridiculously underspecified, internally contradictory, and containing numerous very very bad ideas? Anyone who's done any professional coding knows that the best way to make a product that probably does not look good and certainly does not do anything useful and does not even work right for the things it does do, is to give the customer exactly what they asked for. Although I've used that as a tactic before as a starting point. First, implement exactly what they asked for, then rather than trying to explain to them why that won't work, show them. But I use that as a last resort...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
"Artificial intelligence" - what's keeping the spam out of YOUR inbox? How does Netflix decide what to recommend to you? Ever gotten directions from Google Maps?
"Computer-aided software engineering" - tools like valgrind, findbugs, fuzzing tools for finding security problems.
"Thin clients" - ever heard of a "Web Browser"?
"Enterprise social media" - That really describes most of the Internet
As soon as I saw an opionion from "Ron Enderle" I knew this story would be BS.
In the early 90s (pre-web), I worked on two of the technologies mentioned in the article. First, thin clients. I worked on a system where we had a thin user interface layer (two versions: Windows and OS/2 Presentation Manager) talking to a powerful server backend that was doing database lookups and heavy number crunching. It worked well, but this type of architecture morphed into web applications in the mid-90s, and people stopped talking about "thin clients". However, a browser talking to an e-commerce backend or pretty much any other type of web app is precisely that: a thin client. The article is quite foolish to say that thin clients are "making a bit of a comeback". In fact, they have quietly taken over.
Secondly, AI. I worked on an expert system in the late 80s and early 90s that worked very well (and had modest commercial success). To this day, there are plenty of rule-based systems and neural networks in use in real-world situations such as decision support. But the term "artificial intelligence" made non-technical people overestimate what was possible at the time. Looking back, it was a term that encouraged people to overestimate what was possible. However, the set of technologies that were commonly referred to as AI have not generally failed -- only the term itself, "artifical intelligence", has fallen out of favour.
That's only hype if you don't understand why you'd use it.
You're building a website for example; you think it *might* become highly popular & high bandwidth. Normally you'd have two options; 1, invest in a tonne of infrastructure just in case and risk hugely over investing in nothing; 2, don't bother and risk collapsing under strain of hugely underestimating traffic demands.
Well, cloud computing takes that worry off your shoulders. If your app needs more "cloud"; you can give it extra juice in minutes without any interruption to service. In azure anyway it's just an XML file change - "instance count" to add/remove more/less VMs to your collection. Insane amounts of processing horsepower if you want; nay if you have the cash to match it you can have thousands of servers at your command without even restarting the app. That's value, and it doesn't even take much to "cloudify" an app either.
Yes it costs more to feed it more processing, but you know you only pay for what you need at any time.
So no; cloud computing isn't perfect or for everyone; but it certainly has its' place.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Funny the bit about ERP software. Essentially they say that ERP is not as good as people expected, but once you apply some Business Intelligence solutions you'll be sorted.
I don't think author has a clue. The secrets which could be accidentally spilled are not worth keeping. If it so short it bound to be trivial, really essential results are megabytes and megabytes of data or code or know-how. Treat your researcher as prisoners, get prison science in return.
What about speech-recognition software? In the mid 90s Microsoft and IBM thought it was going to be huge, but it remains limited to niche markets.
It was not too long ago that Java was going to:
Give us applets to do what Browsers can never do: Bring animated and reactive interfaces to the web browsing experience!
Take over the desktop. Write once, run anywhere and render the dominance of Intel/MS moot by creating a neutral development platform!
Yes, perhaps its found a niche somewhere. But its fair to say it fell short of the hype.
There is kind of a paradox about things like CASE, sometimes the better they work the MORE progamers you need because people always want MORE and now producing the final prodect is easier, so you get more for your money.
So consider what computers did for us in 1980 vs. what they do today. Improvements in programing have made is possible and cost effective to do what we do now. So CASE may have been a total sucess, from the point of view of someone in the 80's, but the net result is increased demand, not reduced.
House Rule for AI Medical Expert Systems:
Patients lie.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The most obvious counterexample to the "AI" nonsense is to consider that, back around 1800 or any time earlier, it was obvious to anyone that the ability to count and do arithmetic was a sign of intelligence. Not even smart animals like dogs or monkeys could add or subtract; only we smart humans could do that. Then those engineer types invented the adding machine. Were people amazed by the advent of intelligent machines? No; they simply reclassified adding and subtracting as "mechanical" actions that required no intelligence at all.
Fast forward to the computer age, and you see the same process over and over. As soon as something becomes routinely doable by a computer, it is no longer considered a sign of intelligence; it's a mere mechanical activity. Back in the 1960s, when the widely-used programming languages were Fortran and Cobol, the AI researchers were developing languages like LISP that could actually process free-form, variable-length lists. This promised to be the start of truly intelligent computers. By the early 1970s, however, list processing was taught in low-level programming courses and had become a routine part of the software developers toolkits. So it was just a "software engineering" tool, a mechanical activity that didn't require any machine intelligence.
Meanwhile, the AI researchers were developing more sophisticated "intelligent" data structures, such as tables that could associate arbitrary strings with each other. Did these lead to development of intelligent software? Well, now some of our common programming languages (perl, prolog, etc.) include such tables as basic data types, and the programmers use them routinely. But nobody considers the resulting software "intelligent"; it's merely more complex computer software, but basically still just as mechanical and unintelligent as the first adding machines.
So my prediction is that we'll never have Artificial Intelligence. Every new advance in that direction will always be reclassified from "intelligent" to "merely mechanical". When we have computer software composing best-selling music and writing best-selling novels or creating entire computer-generated movies from scratch, it will be obvious that such things are merely mechanical activities, requiring no actual intelligence.
Whether there will still be things that humans are intelligent enough to do, I can't predict.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
umm... worse list ever...
and anyone remember all the shit java was gonna solve for us? i'm still waiting for the OS to not matter. Computers got faster and java go slower. Worse POS ever.
AI already has successes. But, as an AI researcher friend of mine points out, once they succeed it's no longer 'AI'. Things like packet routing, used to be AI. Path-finding, as in games, or route-finding, as with GPS: solved. So yes, AI will never arrive, because AI is always 'other than the AI we already have.'
A.
I went through the list and this Computer Aided Software Engineering appears to be a huge success to me.
Look at the good IDEs and high level languages such as Java and PHP.
I want to make a web program that sends me emails based on some form data using PHP. I don't need to know how TCP works, I don't need to understand how OS manages files, or how email works, or how data streams are used, or how memory is managed... I just mark certain fields to mean certain parameters and use a function to send the email with the parameters I wanted in the order I want them and I get the end result I want to.
Yeah, optimized, large programs do need significant amounts of coding. But compare coding a large program with assembly and a notepad to coding that with Java and a good IDE and then tell me that Computer Aided Software Engineering has failed.
-
The software begins with contracts and actor/object/location definitions; connects all this to the script; semi-automatizes the previsualization process; links into all aspects of camera work, lighting, equipment rental and purchasing; defines and limits purchases for the art department and costuming; brings the design teams in direct, continuous, and streamlined communication with the director and department heads, via hand held computers; links into all aspects of post production; cuts the checks.
Far from being a failure, the software boasts a 5:1 ratio of footage-shot:footage-exhibited, compared to the average of 40:1.
This software has been used on major features like No Country For Old Men.
The financial benefits of the software-led creative process is impacting the traditional centers of film production.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7979381.stm
By my reckoning,
AI,
Thin clients (now known as using the cloud or SAAS (Gmail etc) or other webapps on a laptop),
CASE (What do you think Eclipse with GIT or Subversion is?),
and ERP are all going strong.
I think that A. the hype is not usually generated by the majority of people working in the field,
and B. how strong the hype is is kind of random compared to the progress that's actually going
on. Perception != Reality.
Best to investigate deeper in each case, rather than believing either the hype or
the anti-hype.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Thin clients for Windows Machines don't make much sense in many environments. Thin clients for Macs do. There is one Mac terminal server (http://www.aquaconnect.net) which allows thin clients or Windows machines to run on a Mac server.
The reason this makes sense is the price of a Mac as compared with a thin client or PC.
Thin clients (even for Windows) make sense in secure environments and environments that have great turnover (ie. A computer lab, internet caffe). A secure environment is obvious, the data is on the server and does not leave. In a high turnover environment makes administration easier, where you can wipe and restore the environment, though there are some other tools to do that, just not as convenient.
Why is AI always referred to as an attempt to create HAL? AI won't succeed until HAL kills the crew and begs for its life. *That* is the end goal for AI, as the general public sees it?
I would argue that AI is anything where a machine makes a decision without requiring permission. This includes automatic transmissions, autopilot (something they had back in the 30s!), and air conditioning; a device reacted to inputs by itself and made a decision to something without asking. I'd think the reason why AI is impossible is that, if you apply AI concepts as lay-people think of it,you'd see that there is no way to build a system that could account for all the possibilities, while also accounting for the reactions of the people a decision would affect.
How would an AI conditioner handle an Aunt Tillie (who loves it ice cold at all times), and Uncle John (who can't have it hot enough) in the same room at the same time? People are looking to AI to somehow please both Tillie and John simultaneously, which simply can't be done, and thus somehow this is "AI"'s fault.
Meanwhile, as it's been pointed out many many times, a lot of modern airplanes simply couldn't fly without computers performing thousands of little adjustments here-and-there to keep the ungainly thing flying straight. Likewise, haven't computers in cars improved car reliability by also being able to make a million tiny changes to things like fuel mixture, braking, airbags, etc.?
I remember a CASE tool called The Last One that was briefly hyped as making programming obsolete.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"self-healing" software designed to repair its OS and/or other SW. turns out it takes more man-hours to maintain/administrate/repair it.
I definitely agree with a lot of the items on that list. This time around, however, thin clients are definitely in the running because of all the amazing VDI, virtual app stuff and fast cheap networks. However, anyone who tells you that you can replace every single PC or laptop in your company needs to calm down a little. Same goes for the people who explain thin clients in a way that makes it sound like client problems go away magically. They don't - you just roll them all up into the data center, where you had better have a crack operations staff who can keep everything going. Why? Because if the network fails, your users have a useless paperweighr on their desk until you fix it.
I'm definitely surprised to not see cloud computing on that list. This is another rehashed technology, this time with the fast cheap network connectivity thrown in. The design principles are great -- build your app so it's abstracted from physical hardware, etc. but I've seen way too many cloud vendors downplay the whole data ownership and vendor lock-in problems. In my opinion, this makes sense for people's Facebook photos, not a company's annual budget numbers.
How about a less beefy one but a production, specced machine?
Artificial Intelligence is a body of research that has constantly spun off specific solutions for the past 40 or 50 years: 1) Object orient design/programming was originated in LISP programming decades ago and was used in the development of the original GUI interface APIs and is now taken for granted. 2) Robotic arm kinematics programming was spun off from AI research and is now used to build industrial robots, surgical robots, walking bugs, robot dogs, and is now taken for granted 3) Optical Character Recognition was originally AI research and is now commercialized and taken for granted 4) Speech recognition was originally AI research and is now commercialized and an IT industry of it own 5) Machine vision was originally AI research and has been spun off into its own body of knowledge 6) The blackboard architectural design pattern was originally called "production systems" in AI research and is now considered a standard solution tool 7) Bayesian spam filtering is based on Bayesian clustering, a basis of many AI systems like machine vision. It too is now taken for granted in IT. Artificial Intelligence gets a bad rap because every one of its successes has spawned another software industry. All hail artificial intelligence!
more than two machines wouldn't be needed if they hadn't bought Microsoft "Solutions".
Virtualisation there merely changed the hardware problem. The licensing problem was made worse. Much worse.
Unless you moved to OSS. But if you did that, you wouldn't need virtualisation...
When it's all said and done, that's a good day.
Sweet informative mod.
Well, in CASE you should still have given the requirements to a computer. Tell it what you want done but not need to mind the details as much. It is pretty much what abstractions and APIs are all about.
In addition, there are many CASEs where it is really hard to tell the difference. Net beans, for example, lets you build a GUI with WYSIWYG drag & drop editor. And write simple programs (calculators, etc. should be very easy) pretty much with right clicking a button, going to it's action and writing "Label13 = field4 * field3;". Sure, it gets more difficult as the program gets more complex... But being able to create GUI pretty much by defining what you want it to look like seems like a clear CASE to my definition.
EMC, IBM, HDS and HP I'm looking at you.
You've been pushing this Storage Virtualization on us storage admins for years now, and it's more trouble than it's worth. What is it? It's putting some sort of appliance (or in HDS's view a new disk array) in front of all of my other disk arrays, trying to commoditize my back end disk arrays, so that I can have capacity provided by any vendor I choose. You make claims like,
1. "You'll never have vendor lock-in with Storage virtualization!" However, now that I'm using your appliance to provide the intelligence (snapshots, sync/async replication, migration etc) I'm now locked into your solution.
2. "This will be easy to manage." How many of these fucking appliances do I need for my new 100TB disk array? When I've got over 300 storage ports on my various arrays, and my appliance has 4 (IBM SVC I'm looking at you), how many nodes do I need? I'm now spending as much time trying to scale up your appliance solution that for every large array I deploy, I need 4 racks worth of appliances.
3. "This will be homogeneous!" Bull fucking shit. You claimed that this stuff will work with any vendor's disk arrays so that I can purchase the cheapest $/GB arrays out there. No more DMX, just clariion, no more DS8000 now fastT. What a load. You only support other vendor's disk arrays during the initial migration and then I'm pretty much stuck with your arrays until the end of time. So much for your utopian view of any vendor. So now that I've got to standardize on your back end disk arrays, it's not like you're saving me the trouble of only having one loadbalancing software solutions (DMP, Powerpath, HDLM, SDD etc..). If I have DMX on the backend, I'm using Powerpath whether I like it or not. This would have been nice if I was willing to have four different vendor's selling me backend capacity, but since I don't want to deal with service contracts from four different vendors, that idea is a goner.
Besides, when I go to your large conferences down in Tampa, FL; even your own IT doesn't use it. Why? Because all you did is add another layer of complexity (troubleshooting, firmware updates, configuration) between my servers and their storage.
You can take this appliance (or switch based in EMC's case) based storage virtualization and Shove It!
btw: There's a reason why we connect mainframe channels directly to the control units. (OpenSystems translation: Connecting hba ports to storage array ports.) Answer: Cable doesn't need upgrading, doesn't need maintenance contracts and is 100% passive.
I find it hilarious that Rob Enderle is quoted in the article (which automatically means it is valueless) talking about how somethings were over-hyped but he is the guy who is always willing to provide a quote about how the next big fad will have a market value of a bazillion dollars in 2 years. That is why I don't subscribe to magazines who use him as an authority. I would love to see someone go back and get all of his predictions and find what percentage were even close.
All of these technologies, with the possible exception of AI, basically worked, and did what they were supposed to do. The catch was they didn't do it well enough, they were too expensive (financially or otherwise) to deploy, or the problem they solved wasn't worth solving.
I still remember seeing the mind-boggling array of supposedly-necessary CASE tools that people used on their VAXen when I worked at DEC. I could never figure out how people could actually afford to use them, nor did I ever find any applications people had actually created with them.
The problem "solved" by thin clients was better solved in other ways. I remember telling potential customers how cool it was to boot an obsolete PC off a floppy then run diskless over the network, when the real answer was to junk the PC and buy a new one.
AI is another matter entirely. We have expert systems and other goodies, but fully-blown AI just never happened. Will it ever happen? Probably. When? Your guess is as good as mine. It certainly hasn't happened yet.
...laura
Please add OOAD, UML and Agile into the pile.
While all of these approaches worked somehow none of them has delivered a panacea methodology for programming
I don't understand how technologies that are still being developed can be considered having "gone bunk." AI? Cloud computing? Virtualization? Come on, is this a joke? (Granted I think [and hope!] cloud computing is going to eventually fall flat on its miserable face.)
for one, this is not news. And not in terms of "we already knew this", in terms of this is clearly this misguided opinion of an individual and doesn't provide any new factual information
I'm tired of reading articles about something dumb somebody wrote in a tech magazine, and everyone here going nerdrage on it
Wow, this is even worse in the field of Educaiton where IT snake oil salesmen, use their skills to sell talks on new technologies that will revolutionize education as we know it. They get paid to give these lectures to captive Administrative/Instructional audiences under the auspice of staff development. Since many of these IT snake oil salesmen understand the audience so well - they know it is an easy sell because most attendees do not have a technology background.
It helps if the technologies have already been hyped by the media for other purposes. The latest push is for Web 2.0 technologies, which means just about anything. Right now in our area it is for Social Networking, BLOGs and Wiki to engage the students in the 21st century classroom. Previously, it was one to one computer instruction which was meant to be one device per students. Although that movement has yet to end and still seems to have some life in it. Started as desktops, then laptops and now is migrating to any form of electronic instruction device.
You'll never guess who would love to see one? You guessed it the device manufacturers. It's great for their bottom line but may not be the most efficient use of resources.
The worst part for those in IT is that being education there is no shortage of hardcore zealots for any particular cause and if you dare to point out any flaws or even just concerns with the latest cause dujour, you are a complete Neanderthal who is holding them back from complete educational excellence. The truly sad thing for our students is that it is not just with IT technology that this cause dujour phenomenon occurs in education, even well test teaching methodologies are constantly under attack for the latest and greatest new methods. Again with little or no regard to actual results.
There is little likelihood to see a change to this trend as long as the justifications for so many public school Administrative positions lie on their being able to "innovate" in order to improve the instructional paradigm. About the only way to derail the roller coaster would be for parents to stand up and demand a return to core competencies and proven methodologies. To become more vocal about their children's education than the zealots currently controlling the "agenda of the buzz."
In honor of Arthur C. Clarke's famous words, I have a button which almost got me fired at work. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
I remember reading about CASE tools in my first CS class. The idea was that software would be generated automatically, diminishing the need for programmers. From minute one this made no sense to me. Sure, there's off-the-shelf software, but for anything else, you still need to tell the computer in some way what/where the input is, what to do with it, how it affects other processes, how to return the data, etc. In short, you just push off programming at one level to programming at a different level. It's a false savings. People really seemed to believe that software would start writing itself, though.
In the company I used to work for, .misc in an internal newsgroup hierarchy was the best social networking tool in the company, bar none. Many a time I got help on problems and was able to help others in return. It's also interesting that the news server was run as an unofficial operation throughout and was several times threatened with closure by PHBs. Luckily it survived by judicious policy revision and support from a few clueful senior managers.
For some reason everyone seems to forget about Intel's campaign in the mid-90's that you would never have to upgrade your computer again. Simply plug a new processor into your existing mobo. Of course the Pentium OverDrive chip was majorly delayed, way more expensive than indicated, had compatibility issues, and underperformed. And then Intel moved on to the Slot-1 processors anyhow.
Huh? In the ear, "thousands of "hair cells" are set in motion, and convert that motion to electrical signals that are communicated via neurotransmitters to many thousands of nerve cells" . Wouldn't you say the joint work of "thousands of nerve cells" is exactly what "brute force" is about?
The reason why artificial intelligence still seems so distant is because no artificial computer has the brute force of the human brain. The average brain has tens of billions of neurons, each of which can process thousands of inputs a few hundreds times per second.
Although computers have been able to simulate smaller assemblages of neurons very precisely, simulating the full scope of a human brain is still off reach, even for Google.
But let's start with "Spam as a technical problem is solved by SPF", one of the most spectacularly blatant bits of hype ever published. The idiot responsible for this had, and has, no anti-spam credentials -- yet he managed to convince a large number of very stupid people that he had The Answer. Never mind that many people with superior credentials and superior minds said it wouldn't work: it was the panacea!
Of course, spammers were the earliest and most prolific adopters of SPF, which has since -- finally -- been recognized as pure snake oil with no value whatsoever.
Then we could turn our attention to Bayesian filtering, another technology hyped as The Answer. Never mind that it was obvious on inspection that spammers could defeat it at will -- and that they have, for years. There are STILL people out burning CPU cycles at ever-increasing rates, in a self-defeating exercise in futility, because they haven't realized yet that spammers can run the same algorithms against the same rulesets and pre-vet their spam. And many do.
And then there's sender address verification (SAV), used only by selfish jerks who think it's okay to use others' resources and -- worse -- who think it's just fine to do their part to help spammers conduct DoS attacks. This method has of course been completely discredited for years, but the cargo cult out there will still cluelessly claim that it's a good idea.
And then there are the vendors, selling hastily-thrown-together crap that puts perfectly good open source software on lousy hardware and pastes a web interface over it for the inferior people who can't use a command line, and therefore have absolutely no business attempting system administration. Is there any wonder that these systems are incredibly expensive, wildly inaccurate, poorly maintained, and quite often SOURCES of spam?
Our problems are bad enough, thanks to spammers. But the people responsible for these have made them worse, and in the case of the vendors, they've done it for profit. I'm sure they'll try to cash in on the next problem too, even if they have to help make it worse.
Book publishers just love such fads. If not for fads, people just buy 5-year-old used books from Amazon and no new books are printed. I'm planning on soon releasing my book, "Enterprise Web 2.0 Agile Security with XML and Java.NET in Seven Days Super-Bible Unleashed for Complete Head-First Idiots & Dummies" .
I don't know what's gonna be in it yet, but I know it will sell.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm still waiting to see this in action. I know it's fairly easy to synch passwords between systems and even provide some parts of SSO, but I'm still waiting on the application that lets me long into Windows in the morning and never be presented with another login box for the rest of the day. I don't expect it to ever happen.
My bosses are absolutely convinced that thin client technology instead of laptops will cut down on connection costs.
Their 'reasoning' is too bizarre to get around so all I can do is document that adding more connections 'probably' will not cut down on the company's connection costs.
By all measures, open source has not met anything CLOSE to what the hype had us believing. There does not exist a single open source tool or product that owns majority market share against its closed source competitors. We are CONSTANTLY told that open source is a "better way" to produce software, but what evidence exists to back this claim? Linux sucks. The GIMP sucks. Firefox pales in comparison to Opera or even Safari.
The parent poster asserted that OS virtualization made apps portable. This is false.
It may be true that OS virtualization does not itself make apps portable. However, the parent (VoidEngineer) does not assert what you suggest he does. Here's what he said:
Virtualization is indispensable for QA testing. Being able to run a virtual network on a personal PC lets me design, debug, and do proof-of-concepts without requiring the investment in actual equipment. Virtualization isn't just about hardware consolidation: it's also about application portability. Small companies have just as much need for QA testing
He is using virtualization to simulate platforms on which the software he is developing runs. By doing this, he makes the application portable by ensuring that it works on all platforms. His point is that virtualization makes un-necessary all the costly hardware that traditionally was required to perform platform-portability testing. For a small operation, virtualization in this regard is clearly an enabler of portability.
Your app should work on all supported operating systems regardless of the underlying hardware anyway.
The point is to make operating systems supported in the first place. That's what virtualization is helping the developer to ensure.
I'd put cloud computing as today's king of overhype. "We're going to save a ton of money by moving the processing power from here... to there!" I get that it's "supposed" to be more efficient. But you still have to pay for the all the processing power you get, and whatever slight discount you might get from buying in bulk is probably going to be offset by the fact that you have to spend MORE on getting a completely separate input/output device capable of connecting to the cloud in the first place.
"But, they'll be managed by professional I.T. guys instead of idiot end users!" Yeah, because giant server farms are never attacked, or compromised. Not to mention the fact that you now have to pay for the server guys managing it. Then comes the bandwidth costs. Just imagine how much bandwidth running simple OS procedures off the cloud would cost. That you'd have to have connections with incredibly low latency is already going to put the costs at astronomical and yet their are people really expecting they can run gaming of all things off the cloud. Assuming all the technical hurdles just disappeared you're really talking about running a constant, super low latency video stream at at least 30fps with an entirely separate input stream for hours on end. You're talking about running expensive, game worthy hardware (because one of the "highlights" of running off the cloud is everyone can have all the games with super fancy graphics), trying to get game developers and publishers to agree to an entirely new pricing structure (and yet somehow claiming that games will be cheaper for consumers, because price equilibrium doesn't exist!) and to top it all off people won't even get to own the games they buy!
Thin clients have to be the best thing I've encountered in IT. I'm the infrastructure Manager for a small health care company that runs about 1200 employees with 3 help desk employees, 4 systems employees and a handful of developers. After going from Desktops at a yearly budget of about 5 million down to 1.5 after terminals
Lets break this down a little bit, we have three failures according to the article; server I/O, bandwidth, and users giving up control. As one disclaimer I don't believe thin client tech would have worked until 2006/2007, things weren't their just yet.
Server I/O
We run almost nothing outside of VM. My real servers include 4 Cisco VOIP servers and 3 infrastructure server that support things like the ESX VM farm. Everything thing else is a VM. Everything from the SQL boxes, exchange, some linux boxes and all of the Citrix servers. Yes that's right, Citrix works GREAT in a VM. If you have the proper gear it works great. Costs are high but nothing compared to standard servers and full desktops. The gear this runs on is really cool. Giant EMC SANS, 8 way servers with 64GB of RAM. It's a fun environment for an IT type.
Bandwidth
It's not a problem today. I run 14 offices over MPLS 1.5MBPS T1s which range in size from 10 staff to 70. The only thing that runs of the WAN is Citrix and VOIP, everything else is restricted. Even in the largest offices with 70 employees we barley see usage of 40% on the T1s at peak times.
Users giving up control.
This actually sucks, but we were allowed to hide under HIPPA and health care staff will put-up with a lot of BS in the name of HIPPA.
That's about all I have to say on that.
A colleague and I were talking about this the other day. Both he and I are of the opinion that SAP does nowhere near what it should. This was supposed to replace HR departments, accounting departments, internal databases etc etc.
Instead it seems to attract contractors/support staff, more than any other product I have ever seen, while not really making anything simpler.
Regarding CASE, there were/are a lot of tools mis-labeled as CASE tools.
In order for a CASE tool to deliver, there has to be a sound method behind it. You can tell a poor excuse for one because the marketing hype uses the term "methodology" instead of "method".
The number of people who truly understand software development methods, their history and their benefits and limitations is probably in the hundreds, worldwide. (Hint - they do not include Rumbaugh, Jacobsen and Booch.)
The goal of real CASE and the methods behind it, was to develop zero defect software. This was equivalent to attaining the highest level of SEI CMM, as imperfect as that 'standard' is/was.
What 'killed' CASE use is the money behind UML and Rational and... the tonnes of money to be made from consulting on defective software products. And... a lot of people, who had no idea what methods are, ran around messing up projects left and right saying they were using CASE and 'methodologies'.
Call it the perfect automobile syndrome - the product rarely breaks down and seldom needs replacement. What manufacturer would dare to produce a product that would not require replacement or parts?
So, during the 'CASE' golden era there were a lot of ignorant people touting 'CASE' and now there are some people writing articles about 'CASE'.
Neither type has a clue.
Boy, was that a dog.
I think some of Moravec's charts seem a bit off. The last I heard, the brain was estimated to do 10^16th calculations per second, in parallel. And as brain scanning technology gets more refined, people are finding more and more subtle layers of calculation. (From varying analog to even possible quantum effects).
Is there a super computer that can do 10^16 in parallel? Last I looked, weren't most of them just cresting a petaflop at 10^15? It will probably be another decade or two before brain level computing power is commonplace and in the hands of most AI researchers.
And in addition, in order to simulate a brain, a lot of people think you might need to deal with things on an analog level, or at least vary the strength of neurons firing. So in addition to the total firings occuring at once, you'd need additional calculations to determine what strength each one should fire at, etc.. Probably orders of magnitude beyond 10^16th.
But that is just if you wanted to completely simulate a brain from models. It might be more efficient to work on learning algorithms and just keep it digital and let something 'grow up' inside the computer without attempting to model biology.
CASE was all about "Model Driven Development", and I'd say the "Scaffolding" provided by modern Application Toolkits (both web and desktop) is just that.
I write down a schema and BANG, I have all the code to maintain, modify, manipulate, and persist (through a database) that model. I can change the schema and BANG, the code gets regenerated. Some modern toolkits (e.g. Doctrine) even support writing migration classes to ease schema changes.
Many web application toolkits (e.g. Symfony) even auto-generate form classes, filter classes, a REST api, as well as basic templates to show, edit, create, and delete these models - making prototyping AND RAD super fast and easy.
If my interpretation of CASE is correct, it is very much a success today.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
I've been running it on my Linux desktop for years... with first, a Windows 98SE guest in Win4Lin, now WinXP and Win7 guests in Sun Virtualbox. The only reason why I don't have an OSX guest is that Apple won't sell one to me that'll run without hacking. This tech works exactly as advertised for me. I can run Linux and Windows apps against my datapool easily without having to keep two or more machines running to do this.
YMMV, especially if you're using something other than Virtualbox.
Tech Public Policy stuff
From wikipedia: "In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's statement."
A brute-force search is a serial process that tries a set of things one-by-one. Your brain generally processes information in a massively parallel manner, and makes decisions without trying every possibility. (For example, you don't hear a sound and then compare it to every other sound you've ever heard.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Virtualization has been highly useful ever since IBM first shipped it on the System/360.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Tablet PCs are so last year. I assume you mean "netbooks." Duh.
I'm not sure that our habit of redefining intelligence (computationally) is an argument that we will never surpass human ability (computationally).
In the unknown future, when the sum total of human faculties are expressed as algorithms, and there is no residual uniquely human talent, and we are surpassed in every mental endeavour by better hardware and software, your argument will simply illustrate that we were never 'intelligent' in the first place.
You don't find any pause in the fact that 'auto'-motive power was comprehensively dismissed as infeasible in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, or that space flight was an impossibility until it happened?
-- Joe Fazzari (Anonymous Coward without a slashdot account)
discuss.
Some technological wonder working in a way the observer doesn't understand may be perceived as 'magic'.
I think the same holds true for AI.
For problem fields seeming easy for humans, but hard for machines, the solution must be AI.
If a solution is found, the solution suddenly consists of procedures, if's, else's, and that dispells the magic.
So, in a way, AI may never exist.
XML. Need I say more?
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
I can see the potential in cloud computing, although it isn't as huge as some would have us believe, and virtualisation is very useful technology for many purposes - I can see that going a long way, though it has many limitations too. But the tablet PC? I honestly can't see what I would use one for; it seems to combine the worst features of a notebook PC - general clunkiness, short battery life, easily breakable - with the disadvantages of pen and paper. Both are very valuable technologies on their own, but combining them is a bit like combining a pneumatic hammer with a nose-hair trimmer. It's not going to give you the best of both worlds, I suspect.
Rabbit advances closer to the turtle but he is still not at the same position. Then he advances smaller bit, but he is still not there.
And this is why AI may never exist... oh really?
Of course there will be strong AI and there will be people refusing to acknowledge they lost top position in evolution of intelligence. When machines start treating us like we treat less intelligent animals, I'm sure some people will loudly complain.
As soon as something becomes routinely doable by a computer, it is no longer considered a sign of intelligence; it's a mere mechanical activity.
Correct. I have observed this thought in myself. I also wondered whether I deceive myself. But this is something else than AI: AI aspires to create "intelligent" machines, which can:
learn, understand, and reason.
Without having been programmed specifically. To follow a certain programmed algorithm, which is simply processed and executed, doesn't count as AI for me. That is then indeed purely mechanical. Input -> specific, given process -> Output.
What we see is that we can program ever more jobs as such a mechanical algorithm, through advances in hardware and software as you describe. Our toolbox increases, gets more powerful, therefore we can build more powerful, more useful machines. We can take a data source like the ID3 tags of songs played in Amarok, and compare that with those from other users, and find matches and differences, and based on that make proposals. 20 years ago, we'd have said that needs a true music lover or an inspired music shop owner, but now we can program it with our bigger toolbox. We can even generalize it to arbitrary data sources (RDF, OWL). Nevertheless, it's still a mechanical process that a human has analyzed, abstracted, broken down, and expressed as mechanical steps using the toolbox. It's the human who thought it out, and the computer just follows a given work pattern.
This is very useful and on a very high level, but it's per se not KI for me, because the computer has neither learned nor understood nor reasoned. Throw corn in from the top, run through mill, get flour out at the bottom. "Routinely" and "mechanical" are the key words in your comment. Sorting letters into a file folder cabinet is a routine that requires no intelligence, even if a human executes it. Inventing sorting was intelligent. But it only needs to be done once. That's what computers are good for, IMHO: Routine. We are striving to let them do ever more, higher-level routine jobs.
It's typical mismatch between the promises and the expectations...
Vendor: This computer will reduce your workload by half.
Customer: Great! I'll take two!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well, why would any company go for automated computing wheeling and dealing for the best price? If you do that where are the kickbacks, special trips and perks from the vendors? Everyone talks about wanting to cut out that sort of thing, but it never gets around to being fixed...