I worked at Stratus Computer (the first incarnation) for many years, part in Engineering and part in Customer Service, both supporting Networking products, so this is at the beginning of the '90s. Stratus, founded in 1981, was a manufacturer of symmetric, truely fault-tolerant multiprocessors (at that time transitioning from an MC68k to an i860 processor base). Stratus was #2 in volume to Tandem. Stratus was selling into markets where it was bad mojo if machines fell over or just didn't do the right thing. Front-ends for ATMs in the field, for interbank wire transfers, running software than _ran_ paper mills, casinos, Enhanced 911 and 999 services. Machines that made sure two chunks of plutonium never got too close together at the processing plant. Stuff businesses, and sometimes people's lives _really_ depended on. They strove to have a first-class customer service organization, and to keep and retain that caliber of people, they we're pretty good to us, more than just lots of t-shirts.
Back when 'mobile' phones were 'transportable' or 'bag phones'. It was expected that you'd carry a pager (all business days), and most folks carried 'em 7x24 anyway. When on-call there were actual service levels that had to be provided to the customer, that meant no more than 15 minutes to a phone (and the customer) & 30 minutes to a terminal (dialed into to their system), 7x24, and you would work or manage the issue until it was resolved, or you could pass it on to the day crew...
At a movie ? leave. Just ordered dinner, get the bill and head home. There were two levels of on-call, and they were front-ended by 24x7 front-line dispatchers who took calls, and could get a system up and running from a down state. Within each specialty (OS, DB, Comms, etc.) there were usually one 'Primary' on-call person, and one or more secondary on-call persons.
The primary had the stringent guidelines as above, and in return for a one-week on-call would be compensated 5% of what they made in a quarter per week of on-call - that comes out to be your salary for a week plus 65% of your salary if you were on-call that week. Secondary was half the compensation, and slightly longer response times - you were there primarily because of your depth of knoweldge to back up the primary on-call. Some of the highest level technical people were basically on-call 365x24, and paid for it.
The company had on-call personal both in North American as well as in multiple customer service centers around the world.
I don't think I've heard or seen of any on-call compenstation like it since.
I've used iCab occasionally for most of this year.
Usually I use navigator 4.7 (from suns, windows or the mac), with 'ask me about cookies turned on' but there are some advertisement heavy sites like redherring.com an ipo.com that I wouldn't bother going back to were it not for iCab. They work really well in iCab, 'cause once all the filters are configured, it never even attempts to download those advertising gifs:-) The pages end up downloading much faster (w/o going to adservers), and screw the ad servers.
Yeah, I could do *similar* things with IE, but with all the security problems of the inbred MicroSoftware, I'd just rather stay away from it.
Earlier this year we installed Accrue (a high-end, high-cost web reporting package), and discovered that their sniffs-the-wire to monitor web-usage technology had a pre-configured limit of distinct sites per IP Address (we were at 40 sites when we installed, and have 80+ sites now). After jumping through far-too-many hoops with the installer person and customer service, they realized that yes, indeed, our many virutal hosts per IP Address had blown out an array of 32. Once the problem was identified Accrue quickly supplied a patch to increase the array to 128, but were reluctant to make it larger, 'for performance reasons'. We expect to surpass the 128 limit by the end of the year.
I know that not every reporting package is written with the same limitations, but if they didn't write it to deal with large numbers of virtual hosts, will it efficiently deal with them? or deal with them at all ?
If you're in the U.K., I would think you'd have less cause to be concerned about the U.S. deployment of Carnivore's than MI5's own Omnivore-type boxes permitted under the RIP bill, which basically would allow "the Government to intercept internet traffic and to demand the codes for encrypted messages." (from the Telegraph, June 13, 2000) Initial versions of the bill would have allowed the authorities to "to scrutinise all "traffic data" - internet sites a person or business contacts. It can then build "friendship trees", check for patterns, and log contact with black-list sites."
Seems as though it would be fare easier to 'control' what is sent, seen and viewed in the U.K. than in the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
a couple decades ago there was a lot of DARPA research into autonomous routing and re-configuration in support of then-called 'packet radio' networks.
:-)
It doesn't seem like much more than VoIP over a ham packet radio network, only without having to be a geek to use it
I worked at Stratus Computer (the first incarnation) for many years, part in Engineering and part in Customer Service, both supporting Networking products, so this is at the beginning of the '90s. Stratus, founded in 1981, was a manufacturer of symmetric, truely fault-tolerant multiprocessors (at that time transitioning from an MC68k to an i860 processor base). Stratus was #2 in volume to Tandem. Stratus was selling into markets where it was bad mojo if machines fell over or just didn't do the right thing. Front-ends for ATMs in the field, for interbank wire transfers, running software than _ran_ paper mills, casinos, Enhanced 911 and 999 services. Machines that made sure two chunks of plutonium never got too close together at the processing plant. Stuff businesses, and sometimes people's lives _really_ depended on. They strove to have a first-class customer service organization, and to keep and retain that caliber of people, they we're pretty good to us, more than just lots of t-shirts.
Back when 'mobile' phones were 'transportable' or 'bag phones'. It was expected that you'd carry a pager (all business days), and most folks carried 'em 7x24 anyway. When on-call there were actual service levels that had to be provided to the customer, that meant no more than 15 minutes to a phone (and the customer) & 30 minutes to a terminal (dialed into to their system), 7x24, and you would work or manage the issue until it was resolved, or you could pass it on to the day crew...
At a movie ? leave. Just ordered dinner, get the bill and head home. There were two levels of on-call, and they were front-ended by 24x7 front-line dispatchers who took calls, and could get a system up and running from a down state. Within each specialty (OS, DB, Comms, etc.) there were usually one 'Primary' on-call person, and one or more secondary on-call persons.
The primary had the stringent guidelines as above, and in return for a one-week on-call would be compensated 5% of what they made in a quarter per week of on-call - that comes out to be your salary for a week plus 65% of your salary if you were on-call that week. Secondary was half the compensation, and slightly longer response times - you were there primarily because of your depth of knoweldge to back up the primary on-call. Some of the highest level technical people were basically on-call 365x24, and paid for it.
The company had on-call personal both in North American as well as in multiple customer service centers around the world.
I don't think I've heard or seen of any on-call compenstation like it since.
I've used iCab occasionally for most of this year. Usually I use navigator 4.7 (from suns, windows or the mac), with 'ask me about cookies turned on' but there are some advertisement heavy sites like redherring.com an ipo.com that I wouldn't bother going back to were it not for iCab. They work really well in iCab, 'cause once all the filters are configured, it never even attempts to download those advertising gifs :-) The pages end up downloading much faster (w/o going to adservers), and screw the ad servers.
Yeah, I could do *similar* things with IE, but with all the security problems of the inbred MicroSoftware, I'd just rather stay away from it.
I know that not every reporting package is written with the same limitations, but if they didn't write it to deal with large numbers of virtual hosts, will it efficiently deal with them? or deal with them at all ?
Initial versions of the bill would have allowed the authorities to "to scrutinise all "traffic data" - internet sites a person or business contacts. It can then build "friendship trees", check for patterns, and log contact with black-list sites."
Seems as though it would be fare easier to 'control' what is sent, seen and viewed in the U.K. than in the U.S.