Week 2 - reflective post

Hey, look, what is that shining in the distance? Ah, that is the reflection of my week 2 reflective blog post :-)
So, we talked about hardware and software, what we would do without them? We'd have to use type witters, copy and fax machines, calculate things manually using calculators, then all this mess with the papers, and none can figure out any more where all the papers from the last week went while I was on 2 day vacation...help!!!!
I think this sums it up. I am not sure that we could go back to paper age ever again. After evolving from stone, to iron, bronze and paper ages, finally we are reaching the peak in this digital age. The peak of civilization. Reminds me on the story from Matrix (the movie). But that's just the movie, here machines are not running the world, or are they? Well, kind of, we let them do things for us and we pretend that we are in control. So the machines work fairly well until they fail, and at that time our biggest weaknesses are exposed, WE ARE DEPENDENT ON THE MACHINES!!! Believe it or not, that is the harsh truth. What to do, in case the machine fails? Well, we can use another one which will take over when the first one fails and then another one just in case and then another one on a different location (after all there are such things earthquakes, floods and hurricanes). And just in case that the machine on another location fails, we should put a machine on a different continent or a two. So, what is the problem here? The problem is that our systems are becoming more and more complicated without any good reason (that is what keeps IT people employed BTW). The reason for this is that we want cheaper and cheaper computers and those cheap computers are not very reliable. So under illusion that we are getting the best deal, we create these incredibly complicated networks of computers all over the globe for the purpose of redundancy not realizing that the total cost of ownership is much more than what it would cost to buy couple of high-end computer that can run trouble free for years. Couple of high end computers can be maintained with less people, they take less space and power as well, but their initial cost is high which is the only thing what most of the people is looking at, the initial cost vs. total cost of ownership. I say, do the math!