The Broken Window Industry and Its Ongoing Desires to Make Technology Less Dependable
Yesterday the subject of backups came up, as we are ardent and persistent when it comes to backing up stuff we'll publish and have published. The above site came up because of how it compares simple phones to "traditional" computers - not the erratic mess that gets updated over the network and is frail enough to unexpectedly break. It seems probable that my writing laptop will exceed 1,000 days of uptime and since it's a LAN-connected machine it is a lot less critical to update and reboot routinely. It's just always there, always working, since 2023. No reboots. I wake up, it's just there waiting; no messing about...
Reliable computing is becoming harder to find. Yesterday we wrote about AWS and Clownflare with slop and Rust, respectively, forcing them offline.
Society has a choice: reliability or experimentation. The latter is advertised as "cutting edge" or "novelty" or whatever. They say nothing about the risks. Hours ago I saw someone boasting about Rust-based coreutils, focusing on speed and nothing else. This collection of tools - developed using proprietary tools (Microsoft GitHub) with a licence that favours GAFAM - has bugs, missing functionality etc.
But hey, it's modern! It's new! So what if stuff breaks? Like Clownflare going offline for many hours.
GNU/Linux got stigmatised as a platform for "tinkerers", but in practice it has some of the most robust and reliable components. Some people want to change that by throwing experimental toys into it, then - in due course and of course prematurely - making them the default.
Originally the title of this article did not specify where the desire to make things worse comes from. It was more vague. An associate remarked: It should say *who* is working to make technology less dependable.
Pointing the finger at any one company is hard; it's more of a "mindset thing". Whatever is behind it can be attributed/assigned a lot of pain and resembles the "broken window" theory.
Let's get back to basics, a return to innocence or simplicity so to speak. █
The REAL "five-nines" of IT:Is it fast? Nein!
Is it reliable? Nein!
Is it secure? Nein!
Is it documented? Nein!
Is it maintainable? Nein!