Tuesday, June 8, 2010

The World Cup for Computers

The biggest sporting event in the world, the FIFA World Cup, is just a few days away. Coaches from around the world are putting their teams through the paces in last minute friendly matches that are meant to serve as final dress rehearsals for the impending big event.

Sadly, many of the finest players in the game of football (soccer if you must) are getting injured in these last minute warm-up games. As a consequence quite a few of them will now be missing the tournament entirely.

Ironically in trying to fine tune and maximize their players performance as a team, coaches everywhere have inadvertently wound up depriving themselves of the very players that are considered key to their teams chances of success. From a computer point of view it could perhaps be seen as having your CPU burn out while you are attempting to perform a system optimization.

Unfortunately for sports fans, and in particular the people of Portugal, England and the Ivory Coast, international football players take longer to heal than even burned out hard drives. For while a computer on the fritz might mean a trip to the repair shop or a visit from the Geek Squad, top scoring strikers and key central defenders are not so easy to mend.

But what can you do? After all, whether it's our 3G laptops or our national World Cup team, we all want optimal performance don't we? Dialing in your computer's performance is important. However it's not without it's risks either.

Sure computers aren't susceptible to torn hamstrings, broken arms, or bruised collarbones. But downloading system upgrades is one of the most common ways to encounter bugs and glitches. And while such bugs and glitches don't usually take 4 to 6 weeks to heal, they can and will take your computer out of the game for a while.

So is there a lesson to be learned in this? I'm not sure. If there is it's that maybe like our nation's World Cup team, we all want to make sure our computers are performing at their best possible level. And no matter how smart you train, to be the best, sometimes maybe you just have to take the risk.

No comments:

Post a Comment