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Why Your IT Spending Is About To Hit the Wall
CowboyRobot writes "For decades, rapid increases in storage, processor speed, and bandwidth have kept up with the enormous increases in computer usage. That could change however, as consumption finally outpaces the supply of these resources. It is instructive to review the 19th-century Economics theory known as Jevons Paradox. Common sense suggests that as efficiencies rise in the use of a resource, the consumption goes down. Jevons Paradox posits that efficiencies actually drive up usage, and we're already seeing examples of this: our computers are faster than ever and we have more bandwidth than ever, yet our machines are often slow and have trouble connecting. The more we have, the even more we use."
Despite technological advancements, it takes forever for Slashdot to load on my phone.
Life in Orange County
From my own observations, there are two schools of thought.
Seems the former spend their time fixing things and the later spend time bitching about "damn kids" and their lawns.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
As we in the military, research university, and government spheres move to IPv6 and Internet So Fast It Makes Your Ears Bleed (tm), have you ever considered that perhaps it might be slow for you but not for us?
I mean 1000 Gbps is considered normal here, and some of us are running on faster connections, using less energy total to do the same thing.
We rarely print things anymore, and just because you have slower access to resources, you have to realize it could be because, in the war between Urban America and the rest of the country, Urban America with its more efficient energy usage and lower distances traveled - basically won the war.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My work Pc is slow and has trouble connecting because of the n layers of Corp security whatnot. My home Pc is reasonably fast and always connects quickly.
IT is a lot more than just CPU and the amount of little switches on a die. Yes, those get better and continue to do so, but there are a lot of bottlenecks that are not going away anytime soon. Until these are dealt with, things will stay almost the same in the IT world.
Couple examples:
1: Wireless bandwidth fees. This has gotten worse as time progresses. Two years ago, my T-Mobile CLIQ had unlimited tethering. Now, if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
2: Regular bandwidth. A year ago, bandwidth might be throttled on P2P downloads. Now it is metered as well on most ISPs.
3: Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarentee. Individuals usually don't have the cash for the drive, so have to deal with hard disks which usually have a year warranty, and there is no consumer level software to handle backups, where it knows where a specific revision of a file is on what volume, be it a primary volume, or a copy saved in a safe deposit box somewhere. The enterprise has NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and other items. So, there is a major issue with making sure data is saved safely for anyone who can't afford to stick an EMC VNX array in their garage.
In the past, tape drives were not just affordable by consumers, and kept up with hard disks, but usually had some decent software that could help find media in case of a disaster. These days, there are not any good consumer level backup utilities, especially ones that can restore bare-metal.
4: Encryption. As grows storage grows the need to protect the data from everything from tapes falling off the pickup truck to hard disk drives getting yanked out of arrays.
Just raw CPU power may help things, but that is more incremental than anything else. Right now, IT is more affected by the BYOD trend than it would be by any CPU revolution. What would stir the pot would be bandwidth increases that don't have corresponding fee hikes. Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.
Its still all you ever needed its just not all you'd ever want.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
1. Computer hardware is not a finite resource like coal is or any other natural resource. Prices go up; somebody build a plant to make more. Econ 101.
2. This assumes that computer hardware will be used the same way as it has been in the past. We are already seeing major changes. Less individual storage and more online storage; different devices that are less hardware intensive and computing is being used differently - less desktop and more handheld and all the differences down the chain from that.
3. No mention of significant technology changes. Who's to say will still be using the current architectures or even silicon tech in the future. This assumes the same old same old for the future.
I'm not even sure where to start other than to say--technology is only ever adopted broadly if it is cost-effective to do so. The printing press wasn't successful because of some incontrovertible march of progress--it was successful because it was cheaper to make books that way than by having monks transcribe them by hand. Yes, that caused more people to read which drove up the demand for books. And I'm sure some jackass back then wrote an article saying that demand for books was accelerating at a rate that we weren't going to be able to afford enough printing presses anymore.
There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.
There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.
One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.
Better known as 318230.
In our company, IT spending is actually dropping, even as we expand. The cost of used hardware is insanely low because of all of the individuals and companies who still feel the need to buy "new" equipment so rapidly. We have no problems running Pentium 4's and Windows XP throughout our business, and wil do so for the foreseeable future.. We've moved our email/backup/web hosting services out to providers, and all of that is sill insanely cheap. Tech has actually exceeded our needs, so our IT spending has dropped significantly. Keep buying new machines every few years, people! We're loving buying your completely functional equipment at yard sale prices!
I don't respond to AC's.
If I gather what this article is speculating on, it's a phenomena similar to peak-oil.
Peak-oil doesn't necessarily mean that you run-out of oil, it just means that the marginal cost of producing more oil reaches a point which causes the rate of oil production to decrease. In the backdrop of increasing demand, and limited supply this implies a sharp downturn in availability of oil at historical prices.
If applied to computing, it would imply a limit to computing resources. I don't think we are there (although computing takes lots of electrical power and there seems to be enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity for the moment), but we may be at a point where demand increases beyond the rate at which technology can keep it on its historical increasing MIP/$ trend. If this MIP/$ trend flattens out, it may be difficult to find funding for new technological advances and fundamentally change the market for computing.
It isn't so much that users are expecting more from the apps, but that application vendors bloat their software as time goes on so that newer versions really only run on newer and faster hardware. I won't point fingers too much - there are many offenders here.
And on top of that, the industry is using more Java which is as slow as snot. The attitude seems to be that if it runs slow, then throw some more iron at it.
I remember my first Linux box - i486 at about 90MHz. Those were the days..
I read the headline for this story and laughed - it doesn't matter how much faster my computers or networks get - Our IT department just installs more and more virus scanners, software maintenance tools, firewalls, monitoring tools ,etc.... Each computer I get has more CPU cores and memory and faster graphics and they are able to do less and less and take longer and longer to boot. I figure before too long I'll have to go back to my old TI-30 calculator and some engineering graph paper and I'll be equal in efficiency to my computer once I factor in all the time I spend waiting for it to get around to sparing .5% of the 12 CPU cores to run the actual software I need to use....
Urban farming is enjoying a renaissance.
Good luck getting zoning boards in all cities to agree to allow urban farming. Some cities have even been waging war on vegetable gardens.
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
I always suspect I'd be learning something new whenever I visit /.
Thank you for proving it
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Europe is full of small, cheap, fuel efficient cars. Your problem is that there was a size and power war on American roads. While I would feel perfectly safe driving a Fiat 500 Twinair or its equivalent around most of Europe, I would be terrified driving it in the US. By the time European designs make it to the USA, they seem to be carrying around a third of a tonne of additional padding and reinforcement to protect against rednecks in light trucks or middle class mothers talking on the phone in their main battle tanks. It will take a long, long time for the USA light vehicle fleet to get down to sensible sizes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."