I love the history of technology. My favorite place in Silicon Valley is the Computer History Museum. It’s a living timeline of computing technology, where each of us can find the point when we first joined the party. It’s great to learn about technology pioneers – the geek elite. Years ago I took a course on computer operating systems. We were studying the evolution of UNIX, and we’d gotten to Lions’ Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, circa 1977. (As an aside, the entire UNIX operating system at that time was less than 10,000 lines of code. By 2011 the Linux kernel alone required 15 million lines and 37,000 files.) As we studied the process scheduler section, we came to one of the great “nerdifacts” of computer programming, line 2238, a comment which reads:
* You are not expected to understand this.
That one line perfectly expresses my joys and frustrations with computing. The joy comes from the confirmation that computers can do amazingly clever things. The frustration is from the dismissive way I’m reminded of my inferiority. And I think that sums up how most people feel about technology. (more…)
If you’re an IT administrator, there are good and bad ways to offer cloud services to your end users. Get it right and your customers purr contentedly. Get it wrong and you get a claw to the face. Here’s what to watch for.
1. Taking Too Long
(“Where the @%#$’s my server?”)
