My experience of management in the workplace is that it is something you need when workers are unable to organise themselves to work towards some goal that requires multiple skills.
Is computer management like that?
Software , in particular , has many components that need to work together harmoniously.
but
is a failure always
a fault in a software component, or
a failure to coordinate
For example… daemons ( things like cupsd) sometimes stop running . So instead of fixing cupsd, they brought in service supervision … which automatically restarts a daemon if it stops. … That is the computer managing itself!
Before that, a human would have to restart failed services.
Another example, distro makers try to get all app versions to work with each other and with the kernel. That is management. It seems to be needed. Real human intervention.
Will we ever get to the point wher AI could takeover management … ie build distros or supervise running?
I think yes. AI has all the signs of being able to do these routine tasks.
What do others think?
But, if that happened would the user learn about errors and how to resolve issues.
For a period in the 90s ? Ms office had clippy a pop up helped who would appear and say did you know you could press B for bold (example) annoyed the life out of most users and it went away. Imagine that today with AI … No thanks. When I go to a site and the AI helped appears covers half the screen saying how can I help you today. I would love just write ******* away
My favourite Clippy pop up was “don’t run with scissors”… that’s the only one I remember… Probably an unintended easter egg that management didn’t know about…
I was waiting for someone to ask. … It would be like Android … looks after itself, but it is impossible to learn anything about it.
You are confusing chat with AI. AI can be silent and do things directly … I dont like things going on behind my back in the computer, but AI can be a silent helper, just like supervisor daemons are silent helpers. I dont like them either.
AI could manage a distro. Would you use such a distro?
Yeah, I cant program on a tablet… but for someone who only ever wants email and browsing, it is enough. Wordprocessing might need a PC… but that is a small audience. Most people never need to write anything.
I now recommend tablets for simple users if they only want mail or internet. If they have a computer then i convert them to mint as that interface is so easy, but I take away the command line option not needed for 99% of users.
The apple system is great but expensive. If they have money the apple tablet to go with their apple watch, apple phone, apple fridge, apple car … apple boat … But they pay the price, ok virus free almost and updates that work. But 5 years down the line its buy a new box or go linux on apple hardware.
Oi! You forget that Mac is UNIX under the hood! It’s really the only survivor of the UNIX wars…
I still reckon that Apple make a better tablet O/S than Google…
Managing computers started getting automated - because shitty isolated teams would decide they needed a bunch of Linux computers to achieve “x” and did their own thing… and never talked to the other team in the same company with another business solution for a different problem or market segment..
So along comes puppet and ansible… and chef…
I still reckon we should have way LESS computers - but really POWERFUL ones… and vast legions of sysadmins to keep them well oiled and greased, and the boilers stoked…
For >replace the cuss word for reproduction<-'s sake - a “server” can do a gazillion things… Why for >cuss-word< do you need THIRTEEN HUNDRED of the f–kers???
IBM’s Watson (they named a supercomputer after him) famously quipped that the world will only ever need 5 computers…
Ironic? I suggest less computers - but I have like 5 computers running some UNIX like operating system in my house, that run 24 x 7… and you can add another 3 computers on top of that (desktop Linux and MacOS)…
Then on top of that : my Android Phone, my two iPads, my wife’s iPhone, both my daughters’ iPhones, and their Macs and their Xboxs and PlayStations and Nintendos!
But at least I don’t have any Microsludge (except maybe my daughter’s Xbox?)..
There used to be an access problem when it was like that with mainframes.
I dont want to lose easy access … that comes with distributed computing.
In a big server situation, I think you either have your inhouse experts, or you contract it all out like the IBM model. Mixing inhouse with contractors seems to generate the sort of clashes you refer to.
When faced with fixing a apple tablet its usually very simple user error, updating or loading an apple store app what i always forget as dont use them often enough is task switching and which direction to swip as its opposite my android habits and i forget.
We don’t have many physical servers. Hundreds of VMs though. Hundreds more containers. Less blast radius when there is an issue with one VM or container than if many applications are on one physical server. Patching is easier too. VMs and containers can be automatically moved to another host. Nothing you don’t already know.
