iPad

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 03:13:03PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On Apr 11, 2010, at 2:39 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
> > 
> > This means that (if Apples succeeds) my hard-won expertise and long
> > training will soon be useless, and I'll have to learn how to sell
> > insurance or trade stocks or go back to the plumbing trade, or something
> > else I'm entirely unprepared for. I'm scared.
> 
> I'm not.  There will always be a need for skilled sysadmins.  That will never change.  What will change is what skills a "skilled" sysadmin needs.  Twenty years ago that was SMTP, DNS, and the like.  Ten years ago it was web servers and services.  Today it's elastic clouds and high-performance clusters.  I can't predict what it will be ten years from now but there will be something for me to do.


Rich is entirely correct. (Although the sysadmins from the future will
likely still be running DNS servers.)

Somewhere upstream in this thread, somebody said that Apple is an
experience company. That's right. The experience that Apple is moving
towards is Disneyland. (I owe somebody else royalties on that thought,
it's perfect.)

Disneyland is fun. Kids grok it. There's something fun for everyone. You
don't need any special skills to do anything, really. There's not much
in the way of creation -- the value is in consuming, not producing. Lots
of people like to visit.

No sane adult wants to live there, however. You can't get anything
interesting done at Disneyland -- you can't contribute.  You can't change
anything, except to go to a different ride if you get bored with the
one you're on. There are a lot of rides.

Behind the scenes, there's a whole army of developers, sysadmins,
network engineers (mechanical engineers, electrical engineers), people
who never interact with customers. That's what customer support is for.
That army of people doing work -- they aren't doing it in a Disneyland
metaphor. They aren't working on iPads. QA goes out and rides on all
the iPads to make sure they work as designed, but the machines that they
do the rest of their work on have keyboards and high-resolution screens
and lots more I/O than an iPad.

Now that I've thoroughly commingled my metaphors, let me leave you with
a parting thought: the number of people who actually want to live in
Disneyland, once they've thought it through, is actually quite low. But
lots of people like to visit.


-dsr- (doesn't like Disney or iPads, but understands why other
       people do)

-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.
You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.