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Re: [LUG] Routing around damage

 

On 23 March 2014 13:51, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm all for user friendliness/freedom/etc and look forward to a time
> when I am no longer required with my decades of hard won hard core IT
> skills.

I have a feeling I'm about to hear a "but"...

> But

Mm-hmm.

> that is never going to happen Phil - you might as well be
> arguing for users to wire their own houses, perform their own medical
> procedures or write their own astrophysics papers.

Nope. All three are inapplicable comparisons.

>
> COMPUTERS ARE INCREDIBLY COMPLEX.

Sysadmins manage computers. Programmers manage complexity. That is
more or less the whole of their job. They don't pretend complexity
doesn't exist; they make, find, share and accrete ways to manage it.
The key technique is abstraction. Recursively applied (as with a
network protocol stack, for example) it hides (but does not ignore or
deny) complexity. With that comes ever-increasing power and simplicity
for both the technical and the non-technical end-user.

I am always on the look-out for someone to give me new insights and
greater depth of knowledge about complexity and computing. What you
have written above does not qualify.

None of what you are saying contradicts my thesis. On the contrary, if
you truly believed and understood your own words, you would not be
arguing as you do.

>
> They will ALWAYS require seriously skilled professionals to marshal them
> in their hordes in the datacentres,

I've seen the ops game change in my lifetime; more and more
automation-and-abstraction means both that individual sysadmins shine
with ever-increasing productivity *and* that non-tech individuals and
workgroups can do things in the office or home that previously
required a team of sysadmins and a data center. I perceive that trend
as currently accelerating faster than any improvements in programming.
It's getting easier to get it right first time for big rollouts and to
keep getting it right reliably and to recover from disaster and...
it's all getting easier, faster, cheaper. When you started, could you
have imagined confidently and competently managing as many hosts as
you do today? Would you have damned for a fool anyone who tried?

> write complex routing algorithms for
> them to talk to each other

One of the few real-world problem domains with realistic prospects of
AI working and working well. Very bad example!

> and evolve the latest incredible OS advances.

Which is a defence of the don't-fix-DNS cause... how? Strictly
irrelevant, unless I'm missing something.

> This isn't protectionism on our part: you might as well be accusing
> neurosurgeons of being anti-egalitarian for clinging on to their
> precious skills and not "opening them up to users".

I'm not able to comment on what surgeons do or don't do by way of
sectional interest and barriers to entry, but the analogy between
surgery and computing as disciplines is very poor. Surgeons have
strict and demanding peer-reviewed and peer-enforced professional
standards, accreditation and regulations. We, er, don't. The hardware
on which surgeons work, human bodies, does not change over time
measured in human lifespans; the hardware on which we work is
obsolescent in spans of two to five years and unworkable in twenty.
The tools and techniques of surgery have been documented, taught,
researched and developed for millennia. Computing is not even a
century old; there are people alive who began their working lives
before Turing wrote his first papers, never mind before the first
computer was switched on.

> You're also ignoring
> the painfully obvious fact that the vast majority of IT users quite
> frankly couldn't give a crap about any aspect of their under the hood
> operations and that goes double for incomprehensible IT gobbledy-gook
> about crap like DNS, proxies and firewalls.

I think the simplest way to deal with this is just to say: no, I'm
not, and there is nothing in what I have said to support you saying
so.

> They'd look upon your
> earnest and well-meaning but completely unrealistic to liberate them
> from the clutches of us evil IT professionals with disbelief.

Perhaps, but so what?

> We're just
> IT guys you know, not a cast of priest-kings gleefully withholding the
> forbidden knowledge...

The fact that the denial is necessary or can even be made is evidence
of its own falsity.

> Stop being silly Phil.

Stop being vexatious, bad. See what I did there? Name-calling. Ad
hominem. Silly you.

I'm content to let history be my judge. Time will tell whether DNS and
its attendant votaries go the way of the dodo or not, and whether the
world is better off as a result, and whether those who tried to stand
in the way were kindly paternalists seeking to protect their (!)
flocks from irreducible and unavoidable complexity, or whether they
were obscurantist sociopaths.

-- 
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63

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