I'm currently reading "Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card. In it they discover that an intelligent entity has somehow gained life while living among the faster-than-light communications connections throughout the galaxy. A major plot point revolves around an 80-day deadline before all the computers in the the network are taken offline and replaced with completely new computers in an effort to eliminate this entity.
Maybe I've been in IT too long, but this sounds to me like a recipe for disaster. I guess 3000 years in the future they'll have ironed out all the bugs in IT services, but I can't even begin to imagine the complexities and risks involved in doing such a widescale change-over. There's bound to be at least one screw up where someone bring the new computer online too soon or the removes the old one too late.
And then there's the impact to the galactic economy of having everything go down for several days and then brought up with only manual data input allowed thereafter. But we won't go into that.
I know, if you're going to read sci-fi you need to suspend disbelief--and believe me, in this book that's the least of your worries there--but it did just strike me as funny that they were so confident that this complicated, high-risk system swapout would go without any problems. Ah, the future!
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But when he wrote it, it wasn't quite as unthinkable as today. But rebooting a galaxy worth of networked computers and trusting that some hacker isn't going to purposefully reinfect everyone? Nah. You're right. Couldn't happen.
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