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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Things i Hate (Or: Rants by an Old Man) Post 303030278 by bakunin on Thursday 7th of February 2019 01:23:12 PM
Old 02-07-2019
Things i Hate (Or: Rants by an Old Man)

I am an old man and i find modern times not so much confusing but outright - to use the correct word - "smart". Frankly, many things looked better back then - but especially the future. So today, instead of taking my medication, i will take a more "wholesome" approach and vent off some steam by sharing with you the things that i hate:

Intelligent Search Engines
Back in the good old days we had the mother of all search engines - Altavista. Altavista had a simple interface:

- you typed "foo" and searched for web sites containing "foo";
- you typed "foo AND bar" and searched for websites containing both "foo" and "bar"
- you typed "foo AND NOT bar" and searched for websites containing "foo" but not "bar"

and so on. Very complicated, no? Today, everything is much better: today i use the successor of IXQUICK, Startpage. When i enter "foo bar" there i used to get websites that contained "foo" as well as "bar" but some time ago they made the "experience" (as using something is called nowadays) even better. Now i get all websites containing either "foo" OR "bar" PLUS all websites containing neither but something startpage thinks is related to either "foo" or "bar".

Chances are that if i enter "bugs fooware" i am not interested in the bugs of fooware but rather in advice whom to call for fighting bugs (i.e. the website "GetRidOfAntsInYourHome.com") and places where to buy fooware at the lowest possible price. Many thanks for doing that, only now my life is complete. I might have gotten zero hits if i used unwisely selected keywords in the past, now i get some millions of hits i can't use at all. Isn't that phantastic?

It gets even more phantastic because the search itself is now "smart": i search for "A" and, by the seat of its pants, the search engine concludes that in fact i might be interested in "B". So i get listed all the results for "B", because "B" is somehow related (in the opinion of the search engine) to "A". And not only that, i get these mixed with the results that indeed contain "A" so i may myself enjoy sifting through all those "hits" only to find out that the first 20 hits do not contain my search string at all.

You might think that Startpage is just a bad search engine and i should use Google, yes? Well, the difference to Google is - apart from the fact that they claim they do not log my searches - that with Startpage i can at least go to "advanced" settings and with a finite effort make my search as dumb ("unsmart"?) as it previously was. Google works the same as Startpage but without me being able to configure it unless i create an account there and "log in". Huh?? Why should i "log in" to a web indexer??

Smart Phones
Nowadays "smart" is creeping up everywhere: yesterday i had a phone. I could use it to make or receive phone calls (for the younger: that is like Twitter, but without needing to type and not limited to 140 characters). Now i am told i need a "smart phone" which can do everything my laptop can do, but on a screen as small as a stamp (for the younger: ah, why bother....) and a locked root account which i am forbidden to unlock by law. What?? It even gets smarter because i cannot install the OS i want on this micro-laptop. On the other hand the "smart" phone can buy things without my consent, send my data to who knows, tell the NSA what the KGB wants to know about me and since it is built by Huawei i am being spied upon by the Chinese - says the US.

Smart Homes
Back in the days, i lived in something i called "home". But that was pretty dumb. Nowadays i am told to live in a "smart home", but alas, my "smart phone" got infected with something (i have no idea what, because i'd need root access to find out) and now the door won't open for me. I asked the person i see enter and leave my smart home on a daily basis but he claims he has no idea what i am talking about.

Smart Assists
Speaking about home: all this housing and searching and using phones is so awfully complicated for old people like me because we have no idea about technics.

But then "smart" hit pretty close to home where i thought i had some knowledge - systems administration - when IBM launched the new version of their high-availability software (i still call it HACMP, but its name has changed from that to SystemMirror to Spectre Something to PowerHA to ... well, whatever). The versions before a system administrator designed a HA-cluster for SAP that way: a ressource group for the DB, a ressource group for the application, one service IP for each of these ressource groups - done. You need to write a start script and a stop script for each of these ressource groups and that was that. But of course, system administrators being the persons they are they cannot be trusted with writing a simple shell script, let alone four!

IBM told us it is now considered "bad practice" to write start-/stop-scripts or design a cluster. Instead we have to use "smart assists": programs that figure out themselves what is best for your cluster. OK, so somebody from IBM came and told us lowlifes how to set up a cluster the modern way. At first it didn't work but he got a few not-yet-released patched from some lab and then it did work but not reliably but after some weeks of waiting and patching and "ohh"-ing and "ahh, damn"-ing he was finally able to automatically configure the test cluster: 47 resource groups, 20 configured IP addresses, close to 100 dependencies between the different configuration items and start-/stop-scripts that were close to 60k in size each. A switchover of the application took 25 minutes instead of 1-2. I think about the smart assists that their last syllable were an overstatement.

Can somebody tell me how i make all these smart things get dumb again?

bakunin
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