UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [483]
Every time hardware performance increases, software drags it back down, usually by getting bigger and more complex. For example, Windows 95 and 98 survived with 32MB of memory; Windows 2000 is rumored to run poorly unless you have more than 128MB. Yikes, talk about bloat. Old hardware slows down if new software is installed, sometimes to the point of becoming unusable.
Because users and management are often reluctant to scrap obsolete equipment, you will sometimes have to take the initiative. Financial information is the most persuasive evidence. If you can demonstrate on paper that the cost of maintaining old equipment exceeds the cost of replacement, you will remove many of the intellectual objections to upgrading.
You can ease the transition between systems by keeping both systems on-line. Leave the old system powered on, but step down the level of support that your administrative group provides. You can also discontinue hardware maintenance on the old machine, allowing it to limp along until it dies of its own accord. You can dangle various incentives in front of users to lure them onto the new system: better performance, next-generation software, better support, larger user community, etc.
Even a very old machine can find use as a print server or guest machine. If your organization is run for profit, it may be advantageous to donate older equipment to a university or school (“Hello? How would you like to have 2,000 nine-track tapes, with racks to put them in?”). Barring that, you may have to think of creative disposal methods. A Pyramid P90X that we had decommissioned found itself the primary piece of debris attached to our head sysadmin’s car when he got married. Quite effective. Another use of old hardware we have seen was during the CU’s annual Engineering egg drop contest, in which a raw egg is packaged so as not to break when dropped from an eighth-story window.
Smaller surplus computer gear is auctioned off to students by our local chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, the computer science professional society. Students are not allowed to bid money; they bid points instead, with one point being worth two hours of their labor. They must donate the labor to the labs or to freshman classes in their area of study. Our CS faculty are used to this now, but faculty in other areas are often surprised to have students show up and say that they owe 10 hours of helping first year students or helping in labs. Such a system requires a good auctioneer; we are lucky to be able to entice Rob Kolstad of LISA quiz show fame to come up and be our auctioneer.
27.13 SOFTWARE PATENTS
Software patents continue to dog the computer industry. Although they do not have much to do with system administration, we’re sneaking in a short diatribe anyway.
In the beginning, the patent office ruled that you could not patent a mathematical theorem. Then the theorem became an algorithm, and it still could not be patented. Then the algorithm was implemented in hardware, and that could certainly be patented. Firmware, maybe. Software, still no. But patents can be appealed, and one of the lower courts liked software patents. Against its will, the patent office started issuing them, in some cases for applications that were filed 10 to 15 years earlier.
Unfortunately, the patent office has historically had scant comprehension of the state of the art in software and has issued many inappropriate (some would say, stupid) patents. Five different patents exist for the Lempel-Ziv data compression algorithm. That algorithm was published in a mathematical