PG apologizes for his lack of online activity yesterday.
Casa PG suffered from an internet outage connected with an “upgrade” in internet service.
Suffice to say, PG spent a lot of frustrated time attempting to fix the outage until finally succumbing to the need to call tech support, which was no help. Evidently, PG may not be the only customer with problems because a physical tech support person can’t arrive at Casa PG until tomorrow morning.
Cellular internet access via PG’s phone requires a great deal more patience than PG is able to muster under the circumstances.
So, PG is writing this post from a small café where he and Mrs. PG frequently lunch. The café is a lovely place with good food and friendly staff. It also offers free internet access.
Since Mrs. PG uses a notebook computer for her writing and PG spends his working days at a maxed-out desktop hardwired into his home network and only uses a notebook computer when the PG’s take a trip, PG uses hand-me-down portable computers from Mrs. PG.
One of the consequences of PG’s intermittent use of his laptop is that, when he starts it up, lots of software updates require attention before he can use it. Many, many updates plus an adequate restaurant wireless connection means PG spends a lot of time waiting for things to happen and restarting the computer before he can do anything useful with his laptop.
Being without fast home internet service has made PG realize that, for him, in 2021, a computer without internet access is pretty much useless.
You have my sympathies.
I once did an analysis of what keeping our computer infrastructure alive for us heavy users can cost us in time: https://rationaldelight.com/wp/2015/10/the-hidden-personal-cost-of-your-computer-ecosystem/
There’s a reason enterprise computing is buying into cloud computing.
We’re headed back to the future.
Just because the cloud’s updating activities are behind the scenes doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and they get to choose which ones they find cost-effective, not their users. Good luck finding support for any of the more obscure components of their offerings after a few years (and getting your invested data back in a no-longer-supported format when you try to rescue it). Primary tools may keep transitioning/upgrading for cloud use, but specialist ones… not so much.
A few decades in this industry does at least convey a cynical perspective, alas.
Oh, I know that.
In fact, Microsoft’s strongest selling point (and the reason they won tbe JEDI contract) is the private clouds they build and manage on site for big companies. They’re the only big player doing desktop, LAN, and Cloud, with single contracts and unified management. Ray Ozzie gave them in AZURE a gift that keeps on giving.
The back to the future bit is about the eternal struggle between endusers and IT departments, centralized vs distributed. For a while there end users had it their way (we did, way back, on the day job–we went literally overnight from the biggest user of Cray cycles on site to zero via our own local Workstation cluster. And we demonstrated a 10x productivity boost. We were not well loved at central IT.)
The pendulum is swinging back, not to the mainframe era but to a more rational balance; the right tool for the job in the right place.
There’s at least one more swing left before the next revolution renders it all moot. 🙂
Plus ça change, etc…