Slashdot Mirror
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?
very disappointed that the word "synergy" did not appear in either linked article or the summary.
Beware of the Leopard.
It has vaporware all over it.
We need to bring about a paradigm shift, to think outside the box, and produce a clear synergy between cloud computing and virtualization.
Apparently it cures everything but RSI.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I still remember a visit from a PC sales rep that was hired straight off the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleading squad. OMG I bet she could sell computers.
Artificial intelligence is trying to make computers do things that are currently very hard for a computer to do, but very easy for a human to do. Once there are ubiquitous algorithms / hardware to do something as fast as a human can, we remove it from the category of "things computers will never be able to do as well as people."
"Let's just say the technology is not quite there yet"
aka
"Pertaining to the acceptability, us, speaking of the mechanical acumen almost has arrived, still"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
You repeat yourself, Mr. eldavojohn.
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
Umm, welcome to reality.
When it's all said and done, that's a good day.
Sweet informative mod.
That went over real well once they saw user visits drop by almost half...
Perhaps your visitors were able to accomplish twice as much in each visit :)
Since when are PHP programmers human ?
<matrix-parody> .NET
I'd like to share a revelation I've had with you, it came to me when I tried to classify your programmers. Every programmer on this planet forms a natural equilibrium with the software project, but you PHP programmers do not. You multiply and multiply script snippets until every semblance of readability and logic is removed. And then you simply spread to another project. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is, Morpheus ?
</matrix-parody>
I'm still getting therapy.
We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in.
Then they filled in garbage, so we enforced numerals only. The users entered "1111111" everywhere.
Then we enforced standard number formats based on a Country selector, with correct International Dialling Codes and pattern / format matching. The users entered "0044 (1)1111111" everywhere.
Finally we checked that the numbers didn't look like "0044 (1)1111111" i.e. too many repeated characters, after extensive testing to avoid false-positives. The users now enter "0044 (1)2121212" everywhere.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place.
But what if they say "Yes!"
Table-ized A.I.
"In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations."
"If I had your form to fill in, I'd either abandon it or put in your main switchboard, or a phone sex number."
lol
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.
Well, we tried ringing them...