Quote:
|
Originally Posted by unregistered
quite agree with Joe
what the DIY market accepts - and even lauds - is intolerable in the 'real world'
|
I fully agree. Most business desktops are expected to live 3-5 years or more with zero maintenance. Not even a cleaning of filters and heatsinks. As for servers, they get mucked around with more often because of upgrades, but they are usually off in a separate space where hearing protection is recommended. Outside the fortune 500-type setups servers become more like desktops - expected to just work with no maintenance. Heck, you aren't going to find many companies that will EVER open a destop case, and quite a few that have desktops with case locks or security screws to hinder users from openning the case.
One of the things that is easy to forget as a computing enthusiast is that most people, even in technical professions, haven't a clue how the stuff works. You've got hardware, software, and wetware in order of reliability, and any tweaks to the hardware requiring software monitoring for failsafes dramatically increase the chances for failures, and once you bring the wetware into it, failure is assured.
Probably the toughest part of w/c is the potential for catastrophic or cascading failures. That alone would require it to be much more reliable than other hardware since otherwise it would be inducing failures of the other hardware. Hell, know why business desktops don't have blow holes? Because if you can spill on a $15 keyboard by golly you can spill into the blowhole of a $1500 system.
Here's a twist on the thought of the thread. Imagine for the moment the article is symptomatic of the arrogant meglomania of the enthusiast community. Perhaps the problem isn't that there are crap products, but that innovation is being squelched by the enthusiast community's self-important rants about how many crap products there are. What is hurting w/c is enthusiasts that blast the "barely adequate" solutions and advocate high flow large tube systems with bigger pumps. It should be obvious with a little thought that reliabilty would be higher and maintenance lower on a well designed lower flow smaller system. The very products the enthusiast community loves to bash are the ones that are required to move w/c forward, we need to help them mature not ridicule them - build better minivans and economy cars instead of denigrating them because they aren't Formula-1 or NASCAR.