Most companies follow almost the same curve of growth and decline, the differences between them being how long the cycle takes, how high they get, and how many down cycles they manage to catch soon enough to reinvent themselves before going out of business. DEC had a slow climb and a pretty slow fall from its peak in the minicomputer years of the early to mid '80's (this is a mindshare thing, not directly related to sales or profits). Compaq had a pretty steep climb to prominence through the 80's, but when I heard Compaq was buying DEC (and Pfeiffer's pronouncements about building a $50 billion company) I knew it was not a good sign for either company. Some companies manage to reinvent themselves - IBM, Microsoft, and Apple have done it at least once in the last few years. But I think Compaq+DEC has probably left it too late this time. We'll see how it all turns out.
That's why we never see the personal Bill - his minions probably treat him with pity as much as with fear. But his mannerisms (remember the rocking in the chair for the DOJ?) and the entire company's apparent lack of regard for the "human" is classic autism.
I don't believe the explanation for the low capacity of this server though - shouldn't the perl instances share most of that 2 MB/process? I can't believe processing those simple forms takes up that much memory per instance. Unless the memory is getting sucked up by a database backend - or all the processing going on to keep the stats graphics going. But even so, there weren't THAT many hits here. I suspect the problem is the thing is coded to use some kind of persistent server process that hangs around while users are dilly-dallying filling out the forms (or waiting to get the results of their last submitted form). C'mon we really should be able to do better than this!
MSNBC poll going well - /. the article rating?
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Windows Refund Wrapup
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· Score: 1
The MSNBC article has a poll that seems to be doing ok (45% in favor of refunds) - but I also noticed we could get the article seen by more people if we rate it higher - looks like you need about 500 recommendations at 6.0-7.0 to get on the top stories list -/. should be capable of that right?
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies follow almost the same curve of growth and decline, the differences between them being how long the cycle takes, how high they get, and how many down cycles they manage to catch soon enough to reinvent themselves before going out of business. DEC had a slow climb and a pretty slow fall from its peak in the minicomputer years of the early to mid '80's (this is a mindshare thing, not directly related to sales or profits). Compaq had a pretty steep climb to prominence through the 80's, but when I heard Compaq was buying DEC (and Pfeiffer's pronouncements about building a $50 billion company) I knew it was not a good sign for either company. Some companies manage to reinvent themselves - IBM, Microsoft, and Apple have done it at least once in the last few years. But I think Compaq+DEC has probably left it too late this time. We'll see how it all turns out.
That's why we never see the personal Bill - his minions probably treat him with pity as much as with fear. But his mannerisms (remember the rocking in the chair for the DOJ?) and the entire company's apparent lack of regard for the "human" is classic autism.
I don't believe the explanation for the low capacity of this server though - shouldn't the perl instances share most of that 2 MB/process? I can't believe processing those simple forms takes up that much memory per instance. Unless the memory is getting sucked up by a database backend - or all the processing going on to keep the stats graphics going. But even so, there weren't THAT many hits here. I suspect the problem is the thing is coded to use some kind of persistent server process that hangs around while users are dilly-dallying filling out the forms (or waiting to get the results of their last submitted form).
C'mon we really should be able to do better than this!
The MSNBC article has a poll that seems to be doing ok (45% in favor of refunds) - but I also noticed we could get the article seen by more people if we rate it higher - looks like you need about 500 recommendations at 6.0-7.0 to get on the top stories list - /. should be capable of that right?