I've never been a first adopter of technology advances; there's a reason for the terms "bleeding edge" and "vaporware."
Thus, a minor schadenfreude overcame my soul this morning as the RIM/Blackberry story hit. The whole system went down for 24 or 72 hours (depending on where you live), and it will take until Saturday night for the logjam of twatter/flitter/emails to clear out.
Seems that "fail-safe" ain't.
And there's no reason to believe that "fail-safe" for other large systems is actually "fail-safe," either.
Just sayin'.
Dad29,
ReplyDeleteI often come to your site and enjoy it. Your posts are often well reasoned - not always but often. I must take exception, though, to this one about the troubles being experienced by RIM, makers of the Blackberry devices.
In your post you claim schadenfreude over their troubles because you didn't go through them as a non-early adopter. I hate to tell you this, but if you think that Blackberry is on the "bleeding edge" you are much farther behind the technology curve then you think. The underlying technology that RIM uses is more that 20 years old. Even the current version in the coupling of cell phone and email is more than 10 years old. How, in that, do you see some sort of "bleeding edge"?
Frankly, the trouble that RIM and its users have been having is because they were not sufficiently close to the technology curve. RIM transfers all email through a single site in Canada. When that one critical choke point breaks down the whole system breaks down. That is what recently happened and it is a testament to the lack of redundancy built into RIM's network. Just a bit more tech would have taken care of that. Worse, it's happened to RIM before some years ago. That was several years ago. They should have learned from their lesson by now.
As someone who gets paid fairly well to keep his company informed of new technology and has been doing it for some time, I don't expect everyone to jump on the bandwagon of the most current technology. Some people enjoy it, others do not. Some simply want to do their work efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. But don't think that, by avoiding RIM you are even anywhere close to the technology curve. You are closer to a Luddite than you know.
Good remarks! I heard that the backup for that server also did not work....
ReplyDeleteLuddite is good. Using stamps is good. Pen/paper---all good.
Nothing wrong with stamps and paper in the right circumstances. These days - mainly for summons and subpoenas but be it as it may.
ReplyDelete