"No Knobs"

Here is a great excerpt from the MIT paper entitled "The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)":
"Current systems were built in an era where resources were incredibly expensive, and every computing system was watched over by a collection of wizards in white lab coats, responsible for the care, feeding, tuning, and optimization of the system. In that era, computers were expensive and people were cheap. Today we have the reverse. Personnel costs are the dominant expense in an IT shop."