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Reboot

July 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I was just looking at my new galaxy S3 phone and I saw an alert message in the notification bar. I naively assumed that it was a low power alert, but when I clicked on it, I saw this:

For optimal device performance, T-Mobile recommends that customers routinely restart their Android devices.

Included was a convenient link with more information and a suggestion that this is to be done on a weekly basis. If I was Apple and saw that; it would be all the advertising fodder I’d need against Android. Weekly restart? Really? I though this was 2012. I remember back in the early Windows NT days, a weekly restart was part of a standard sysadmin operating procedure. I guess Google is really following Microsoft’s path….Of course it could just be a T-Mobile “feature”.

How Complex Systems Fail

July 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A very good article. The author provides 18 points about complex systems and fault tolerance. He talks about complex systems in general, but it translates very well to IT systems. Particularly point #8 that “Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.” is very much true. I’ve engaged in this process more times then I care to remember and nearly every time it leads to fighting yesterday’s war. Complex systems also generate their own emergent properties that are hard if not impossible to see; which is a huge contributing factor to massive failures.

http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf