I don't know. My customers expect 24/7 reliability. They expect to be
able to access their info anywhere in the world over a variety of
different devices. I can remember times when people would just go home
because computer networks were down. I haven't seen that happen in a
long time.
Maybe that's just my experience with my customers. I have seen signs of
dysfunctional computer systems lately. I was in a fast food restaurant
in San Francisco a few months back and they were manually taking
orders. I think the only reason they stayed open was because the owner
was there. Last summer a McDonald's in Paris next to the hotel my
family was staying at shut down because their computer system was down.
It ticked me off because we ended up eating at some pricey cafe next
door. I guess I'm a typical dumb American, traveling all the way to
Paris to eat at McDonald's.
Richard Troy wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Mark Walker wrote:
LOL, I remember those days. "Uh, can you hold on? My computer just
went down." or "you need to fill out form 1203-B, send us $25 and we'll
get you the information you need in six weeks." Just kidding, but
certainly reliability standards and information demands are much higher
these days, aren't they?
"Reliability standards ... higher these days?"
-har-har-har!- That's a good one!
Sure, in terms of bits moved/processed between hardware failures, things
have much improved, but I can't help but think if what a joke it is that
favored operating systems think it's OK to run out of memory for their own
activity and randomly kill processes so they don't hang! HAH! Some
Reilability. And people think this is a Good Thing (tm) because 1% of
overhead was saved!
<rant>
Sure wish the Open Source OS people would get a clue; paying a percent or
so for reliability pays for itself thousands of times over and most
people, if knowledgeable, would choose to spend the overhead to have a
system that really is reliable.
</rant>
Richard
