Technology companies don't always think things through before they start coming up with concepts. Neither do I.

Everyone's making predictions for the year to come, or trying to sagely summarise the lessons of the year past. I think if we've learned anything at all from the last year, then we can only hope none of these ideas will see the light of day.

Software micromanagement tools
A big trend at the moment is tools that allow system administrators to manage large numbers of complex systems by setting policies and allowing the computer to do a lot of the repetitive grunt work that drives sysadmins crazy.

Software micromanagement tools are pretty similar. Say you're trying to reallocate some storage on a SAN, the software micromanagement tool might pop up a dialog box to say:

-What are you doing? Looks like you're trying to reallocate some storage on a SAN. How are you going to do that? Do you need any help?"

After a while it might pop up again to say: -Look, are you sure you want to do it that way? Maybe it would be a better idea if you did it this way? No? Hey, maybe I should do it for you. OK. Perhaps we should have a meeting about this and get all the relevant stakeholders to throw their ideas in the ring."

Evidently this is what Microsoft had in mind when it started developing that irritating Clippy thing.

random eula clause generator
This randomly inserts clauses such as -You must give us your firstborn child and a tenth of your kine" into end-user license agreements (EULAs). Since nobody ever reads EULAs, chances are the vendors would get away with it, and if the software business ever fails, they could always take up dealing cattle (or firstborn children).

Trough of disillusionment
This is just a large trough where people can throw away their stock options, venture capital proposals, half-baked ideas, mouse pads, space-age office furniture, bean bags, pool tables, arcade games, careers, and any other junk accumulated during the dot-com era.

Passive-aggressive clustering
Clustering systems together is a common strategy used to maintain high availability. The systems are commonly set up in either active/active or active/passive configurations. In active/active, both computers do their own tasks independently until one of them fails, whereupon the working machine takes over the tasks of the non-working one. In active/passive, one of the computers does all the work, while the second stays idle until the first one failsâ€"a sort of whole-computer backup.

In both these cases, the computers communicate with each other using a heartbeat signal, which basically says:

-Are you OK?"
-Yep, you?"
-Sure am!"
-Okely dokely!"

If the other computer fails to respond, this is the cue for the computer to failover, or take over the other computer's tasks. Passive-aggressive clustering is similar, except the computers would communicate more like this:

-Are you OK?"
-Yes."
-Are you sure you're OK?"
-Yes."
-Stop that! Are you sure you're OK?"
-Why shouldn't I be OK? Can you think of any reason why I shouldn't be OK?"
-No."
-Then I'm fine."
-I don't think you're fine."
-Just because all day I slave away here serving the database, and it's always me who does all the database work around here, like it would kill you to occasionally do a stored procedure or some indexing, but no, too busy with your J2EE applications."

You get the idea.

Josh Mehlman is features editor of Technology & Business. You can tell him how bad his sense of humour is at josh.mehlman@zdnet.com.au.

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