The end of rebooting
Rebooting has become routine for many computer users. ...In this world of autonomous interacting machines, ...With so many elements talking to each other?and no central server to control them?it will be hopeless to find which is the malfunctioning one when a major failure breaks out.
Rudolph is leading a team of researchers to create such failure-detecting systems and test them in a pervasive computing environment. The work is part of project Oxygen
Before the Internet, people built systems that were very well engineered?the telephone network, for example. AT&T understood its behavior?and owned the whole system. Then things like the Internet came around. Now no one owns the whole thing?it?s too big, it?s too distributed. We are no longer able to engineer the whole world. ...Very soon, though, we?re not going to have wires anymore. The communication will all be wireless?802.11, Bluetooth, whatever. ...We can?t rebuild the Internet. What?s great about the Oxygen experience is that we?re building new systems, so we can try to do something right from the start without the pressure on having to follow release dates. Universities have time to do something right.
What a fine idea. No more 3 hour wait to have some bored tech rep say, "...uh, reboot it."
For the record.. Great Blog. Thanks for putting up with our rants.
Posted by on 07/16/03 at 10:14 AMI don’t think this argument is very accurate. Rebooting is usually driven by internal issues on your PC, not by anything having to do with the Internet. The root cause may be similar to that he advances, though, in that the typical PC contains lots of software that was designed by independent sources. A good operating system should be able to protect itself (and you!) from such things.
“No central server” is misleading as a cause of problems, also. The telephone network doesn’t have anything resembling a central server; neither (fortunately) does the air traffic control system.
Posted by David Foster on 07/21/03 at 11:09 AM
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