Saturday, April 4, 2020

A Technology World Gone Wrong According to Jason Page



The world we live today with computer technology, mobile smart phones and smart watches has  given us a lot to take for granted. With exponential growth in resources we are finding that while we gain more available options to connect and network, the process of doing so becomes less efficient with an increasing hoarding of overhead and il-sufficent resource management systems that are duly the affect of both hardware and software design models. And with the mobile devices, we also become more reliant on the need to charge our phones more frequently with the demand of smaller and thinner phones, that lose me for practicality sake: why would I want a phone so thin that it be easy to drop. Sounds like a win win for planned obsolescence?!

I have been using computer systems since 1990 and saw the evolution of the proprietary and open source options with Microsoft eventually taking chariot of the storm in the market place dominance. What I saw at the very beginning was some very nicely thought-out system designs both hardware and software. IBM at the time of the Microsoft split took priority in efficient, dependable and reliable system designs. From Micro-channel BUS (Where Bus Speed matched Processor Speed) to OS/2 Warp's infrastructure, at the time and even with Gate's acknowledgement at Comdex '89 "We believe that OS/2 will be the platform of the 90s" there was sure to be gainful hope. And instead that gain came with returns in the expansion of the IT industry tasked with fixing problems with systems that Microsoft created and mirroring that same aspect with the self propelling health industry in America and most of the world: Give people a problem so they can be dependent on a market solution.


I remember running an OS/2 Kiosk system at my college for 7 years and that system was never shutdown or restarted in that 7 years. It's uptime of 7 years then would be unheard of today with our modern systems. Even with Linux distros I have found that in a matter of a week of uptime, at best I find myself having to hard boot the system as a faster alternative to closing all the applications and restarting due to the computer environment getting ultimately very sluggish.

OS/2 was designed to use pre-emptive multitasking as well as very good memory and resource management that is so much today lost in our peripheral to what problems ark us. Instead of solving the problem, we throw more resources at it. In the end we end up with systems that just fail. Having a fault tolerant fail safe system does becomes an impracticality today. Banks and call centers take longer to fulfill requests over the phone because their software interface has too much overhead in executing specific queries.

Some of this has to do with both hardware and software. We wouldn't want to send a person on a trip to Mars with using a coordination system run by Microsoft Windows Embedded. What mission critical systems use is called a Real Time Operating System. That is every task executed takes the same amount of time to load and execute no matter the changes in system environment.

There was one company that tried to bring real time operating systems to the public: BlackBerry. Sometime in early 2011 BlackBerry acquired QNX and used that and their engineers to develop first the PlayBook and then an upgrade path from the Java powered smartphone platform of yesteryears BBOS to BB10.

Because people were so bought on and dependent on the appearances brought by an already dominated duopoly, Android and iOS, the market potential for a new system, regardless of it's superior system design, was already a lost cause.

And when it comes to phone technology dependability, the idea that demand for phones need to be thinner and smaller miss out on the awareness the ability to maintain critical calls without convenience of a power outlet every day maybe equally if not more important.

I hope this blog article can help people understand where we have gone royally wrong in our demand for technology,

Sincerely
Jason Page

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