Growing up in Texas, we used to have a stupid joke that went like so:

Q: Why doesn’t Texas fall into the Gulf of Mexico?
A: Because Oklahoma sucks

I know thats a terrible joke! Is it true? Well, lets look at the following example.

A man who claims to have a commanding 22 years in the IT field thought that his servers had been hacked by a hacked group called CentOS. Yes, those evil CentOS bastards are at it again! Repackaging RedHat Enterprise Linux for free like they do; it’s almost communist.

Oklahoma City Manager threatens CentOS with the FBI.

The gist of the story, which is too good to be true: The City Manager, one Jerry A. Taylor, thought his sites had been hacked because he saw the default Apache page instead of his websites. He then proceeds to send a string of angry, insipid, and downright ignorant, emails to the CentOS team. Hilarity ensues.

I think the larger problem is that there are millions of people like Jerry all over the world. People who claim they have vast IT experience, who actually in fact couldn’t tell a decently build system from a remake of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

I think, as with anything, there is a fear of embracing change. This Oklahoma idiot probably has been doing the same thing, and using the same ancient systems for 22 years. But the world has changed. The problem is, change is difficult to embrace when you don’t really understand the systems you run today. If you didn’t understand mainframes all too well, how are you supposed to embrace distributed systems?

I wish people could be more like my step-father whose in his 70’s. He used to program mainframes and programs for a phone company using Fortran, and Cobol. From a professional view he retired years ago. He’s visiting me and has started reading my copy of Agile Web Development with Rails. Now how many 70 year olds could understand, and want to learn something like Rails?

The only constant is change. The only problem with change is that people can’t understand that the square peg solutions of yesterday have to be refactored into the round hole systems/solutions of tomorrow.