Chad Dickerson links to Scott Rosenburg’s thoughts on some motherboard issues he was having:
Scott Rosenberg has a darkly entertaining�(though not to him)�post about his recent travails with a motherboard replacement:
“Thanks to the amazing support resources on the Net I eventually figured out that what I had to do was hold a paper clip to a pair of solder points on the motherboard in order to reset the CMOS. I am not kidding. It’s 2003 and we’re still poking paper clips into our computers to get them to work.”
Paper clips and solder points?� Are we talking Heathkits here?� These kinds of stories make me seriously doubt the future of autonomic computing, at least for technology�devices that aren’t sitting in a highly-regulated data center environment.
At first I was thinking of nodding my head and thinking “ouch” then I thought about this again knowing what I know about hardware and it’s like… DUH!
If you know anything of how electronics and computers are made at the circuit level most of the commodity stuff isn’t made to be durable or have layers of protection against physical elements like some military grade hardware. So well yeah, one thing will knock down the whole machine. Of course if we’re thinking autonomic computing there are 2 strategies:
- Make these small components really durable like living organisms so that one bad solder won’t take out the whole system. That will be the start to making the electronics more durable
- Admit that the electronics stuff would cost too much money and stop thinking in terms of one machine as being the whole organism and just stuff a bunch of PCs and view each of them as one cell (parallel computing anyone?).
So far survey says #2 is winning rather than #1. Anyone that builds #1 charges piles of money for it so enough of these components won’t hit enough of a mass market.
