We could all stand to slow down just a little bit, even as the Web and the cloud and the Internet promise to hurtle us ever-faster into the future. As different as that tomorrow will be, many things will remain ever the same. What we need more of are laggards, but a new sort of that sort of pro who’s the very last to change.

One that that won’t change is testing, as un-sexy a subject as anything that ever unreeled off an episode of Lost in Space. Developers dislike it, designers hate it, users outwait it. Only the auditor loves testing, as it lets him assure his masters that all is as to be as it ever was. Testing must now embrace emulation, or virtualization, or whatever phrase you want to use for making one computer behave like it’s using another’s personality.

These doppelgangers of data delivery are now afoot in the world of the HP 3000. Some day they will be in the cloud, a concept we all hooted at from our 1990s office chairs sitting in early 2000s cubicles, hoping we’d be employed after the economy’s crash dust started to settle in the early Teens. The cloud: now it will save our budgets with computers that run anywhere, at least anyplace except the office space of our organization — real estate the corporation would like to reduce, if it could, along with headcounts.

However, the heads of 3000 managers has been wrapped around servers right down the hall or across the plaza or at least in the same city. Now these servers can be racked someplace in a hosting farm and the everyday province of another company. We can see the badge Dell, or Acer, or even IBM, and know that inside beats the heart of MPE. The Stromasys CHARON software makes that kind of magic happen, the sort that makes possible, as our Q&A subject Stan Sieler said in our November print issue, MPE Forever.

But not so fast; remember we are a community made of many laggards by today, even as oracles and wizards like Sieler work in our world.