(no subject)

[randomness]

People who think of technology as a panacea tend to be confused and irritated by expenses for training and maintenance.

Technology does not replace training or maintenance. Higher technology requires better trained staff to operate it and more expense for its maintenance. This will continue to be true until we reach the "say a magic word and it happens" level of technology. (Although, even then, training will still have to include teaching people which magic words to say, and when.)

Comments

[marginaleye.livejournal.com]

This will continue to be true until we reach the "say a magic word and it happens" level of technology.

... he gasps out the statement that he vast machine was designed to materialize any thought that the Krell desired to manifest. He then adds "But the Krell forgot one thing! Monsters, John! Monsters from the id!"

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Bruce Sterling wrote a story once in which raw intelligence could basically be wired into buildings like cable. It was nearly incomprehensible.

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

Doesn't being able to say the magic word mean that you're paying someone to be better trained and maintained than you are?

Or maybe there are fairies. I want fairies.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

It has already been shown that a Macintosh based computer network requires considerably less bodies to keep it running than a Windows one (similar level of skills, just different ones). This is reputed to be one reason IT bodies prefer Windows – it employs more people.

[evilmagnus]

Yes, but a truly useful computer network requires some form of non-Apple *nix, which requires even more skilled wizards to run it. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Exactly. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Windows is just lousy design. In any case, you're comparing Apples to oranges. (Couldn't resist.)

For a slightly better comparison, I would contend that a lot more work goes into maintaining a Macintosh-based computer network of 2009 than it did in 1984, partly because AppleTalk couldn't do very much. (Way, way back in the day, it was one of the things I administered.)

But that's part of the point: greater capability generally requires greater complexity, and greater complexity gives more chances and more ways for things to go wrong.

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I agree. Better tech can be designed to be maintainable, and as such can be cheaper to maintain. I know a guy who works in a cube in Norwood, from which he maintains over 2000 computers located all over the earth. (by comparison, the usual standard is about 3 admins per 100 workstations.) This is possible because he carefully chose the technology and set up the environment with maintainability in mind. Yes, he's an expensive guy to employ, but he's a lot cheaper than the small army of inexpensive guys that would be required if the company had just bought systems with off the shelf software and hired cheap junior admins.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

...training will still have to include teaching people which magic words to say, and when

... and what to do when it all goes wrong.

I mean, come on. Stuff goes wrong. Isn't that one of the fundamental laws of the universe?

[sea-bound.livejournal.com]

Hence the intense frustration felt by people who *do* understand the need for training and maintenance. Jordan will become the 3rd largest USAID recipient, behind Afghanistan and Iraq, at 600 million USD per year. This is for a country with a population of 6 million people. The money gets poured into water infrastructure--hardware--that no one is trained how to use or maintain, so it literally sits here and rusts. My friends who are engineers constantly rant about the waste (and rightly so--god forbid that money ever comes with conditions, such as the restructuring of a corrupt government system. Must be nice to be strategically important).

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

This is, alas, all too typical. Incentives matter. In this and in many other cases, there's a lot more incentive to pay for shiny hardware than on boring training and maintenance.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Though when technologies get to their mature stage, user training and technology maintenance start going down because that's what becomes the competitive differentiator. (Witness the old saw that Rolls Royce once decided to not go into mass manufacturing because there could never be enough chauffer-mechanics to drive a large population of automobiles.)

Computer-literate people have highly complex mental models of how computers and operating systems do what they do, and geekly conversation is made up mostly of an exchange and comparison of these models.

Users do not want a complex mental model of their dishwasher and fiercely resent attempts to instill one. It makes them feel put-down for not having one and yet, at the same time, they know they neither want nor need one. All they want to know is what to set the knob to. They are appliance users and they want the computer to act like an appliance. [...]

As Tim Hunkin points out in his TV series, "The Secret Life of Machines," an appliance interface is the most difficult and sophisticated interface that can be constructed. To allow people accomplish a complex task without possessing a mental model of the process is extremely difficult.

-- "Ask Mr. Protocol" by Michael O'Brien