I managed to DOS one of the regions of an IBM mainframe back end (plus assorted MQseries queues) a few years ago, brought the entire production environment to its knees for roughly 12 minutes. Every pager in the place went off and they eventually figured out it was me, found me, whacked me in the head and said knock it off.
Two things to consider: I never did it again. I got to do it once, which was plenty to run the tests that I needed to run. My code held up under load, which was what I needed to find out.
Sometimes it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. Just don't make it a habit.
(Haiku disclaimer:) I will summarize: You can do it once or twice; Don't do it a lot.
Actually what I meant was (after having read through the early stack of discussion threads) early impressions were that the method of access to the Exchange Server was to come in through the same interface that OWA uses, necessitating the install of OWA / IIS accessing the Exchange data and getting the data by 'pretending' to be an OWA user coming in over regular HTTP traffic via TCP/IP. The phrase 'OWA backdoor hack' was used in a positive manner, the word 'hack' a respectful term of endearment as associated with the original use of the word 'hacker' (back when 'hacker' meant something entirely different than 'cracker'.
Lest I didn't express it well enough or came across as negative, I think the 'OWA backdoor hack' is very cool, if that's what they did.
Reading more of the articles now that they aren't quite as slashdotted, it isn't entirely clear how they do it - so it may / may not be the hack I envisioned. But you have to admit that emulating OWA over HTTP to get at the data would be a cool hack.
Actually, understanding the teachings of Faraday you would obviously not try to create a lightning 'rod' but would be much better off creating an environment that allowed the energy to come from any direction be dispersed over a large surface area and then be shunted into the common ground.
Given this, I recommend you liberally wrap all the buildings in a highly conductive material such as copper or aluminum foil and perhaps put a nice big electricity conducting rod on top of that to try to attract the electrical surges. Additionally, because you want the electricity to remain on the surface (see again Faraday, above) it would be a good idea to wet the walking areas with water (use clean water - non conductive!)
Stay tuned, tomorrow's lessons are 'Putting out house fires with a liberal application of Propane' and 'Treating a hangover with alcohol.'
I looked it up, $31.32 for Server 2000 CAL (bought as part of a 5 pack for $156.60 at Provantage) and $75.34 for an Exchange CAL (once again, bought in a group of 5 for $376.72 at Provantage) Net cost : $106.66 per seat.
I stand by my original statement - I have a real hard time believing that the Linux crew is going line up to fill out Purchase Orders to send Microsoft a hundred bucks a seat for each of the Linux installs they have across organization running Ximian email clients. Good luck convincing me otherwise. For the record, I really like Microsoft - this isn't about what I like / dislike, it is totally about envisioning the Linux users (the kind of Linux users that would be eager early adopters of this Exchange adapter) getting this to work and remembering 'oh yea, maybe I need to send MS a nice Benjamin Franklin plus change because... that's the rule.' Not.
So a Linux user needs to send Microsoft $199 for a seat of Windows (CAL) plus whatever an additional seat for Exchange costs in order to use this free Outlook Web Access backdoor hack to enable their Ximian email client to get data from their corporate Exchange server?
The spread of English to Africa, India, Australia, Ireland, Brazil(?), and the like... all of those I attribute to England. I agree with you though, all through out Europe the 'doing business with the US' side of the house has driven the English language equally well.
Actually as a side project in college I wrote a Pascal to C compiler (wrote it in Pascal) as a hack to get my way through all those pesky C coding homework problems in a hurry. I was a long time Pascal coder and fairly new to C, didn't particularly care for the syntax of C. I would do the C homework in Pascal, run it rhrough my pre-processor to convert the Pascal versions of the homework to C, compile the output in TurboC and Voila! I was done in half the time.
I have hence learned to love C, for the record.
I guess someone could do the same thing, take all the keywords and translate them, write your own 'language' using those, and write a YourLanguage to C compiler to pre-process the source code before compiling it as regular C in your C compiler.
It may not be the most 'common' language on Earth by counting the people that actually speak whatever language... but it is easily the 'common denominator' language in that regardless of where you are, -somebody- there will also speak it.
May not speak it well, but you will be able to get across your general ideas. I attribute this not to anything the Americans have done, but mostly to the British attempted colonization of just about any flat dry land area over the previous two or three centuries.
It also might have something to do with the origins of the technology, most of the original inventing engineers coming from English speaking backgrounds.
Perhaps had Grace Hopper been German she would have coined the phrase 'Computerwanze' instead of 'Computer Bug'.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't say Win2000 was secure - I only said it was a hell of a lot better than the Win98 setup he was sharing with two other users that he didn't particularly trust.
I suggested it instead of Linux because he was already semi-familiar with Windows and it would be familiar, and because all the support infrastructure he has available on a college campus is going to be Microsoft-centric. Also, it would be a little more work on his side, securing the system so they could use it as 'users' but not break anything... but how bad does he need to lock it down if they haven't managed to thrash his current Win98 system.
Put a Linksys firewall between his computer and the RJ45 hole in the wall to keep out most of the bug-a-boos and use regular users (not Admin, not power users) for his roomies and that is about as good as he is going to get and still be able to play Everquest / SWG / UT2004 on the machine. And a lot better than his current situation.
Install Windows 2000 Professional instead of WinXP - it is much less resource intensive (more likely to run (semi-well) on a machine that was current when Win98 came out.) And it is free (not free as in beer, nor free as in herpes - more like free as in pirated.)
Give each of your buddies regular 'user' accounts so a) they can't install crap, b) they can't directly access your files, and c) they can't screw it up. Each user has a profile and when they run whatever email client they want the files are stored in their profile. Sort of like... it was designed to do.
Blarg! Between the Roadstor and the Kanguru I publicly admit to being entirely without a clue.
That said, unless the OP is going to be saving all his CDs and posting pictures to the web once he gets home, he is going to need to find a computer to read the CDs he creates while he is on the journey and the computers he finds will likely be able to read the CD directly with either a CF to PCMCIA adapter, or a USB CF reader - and both of these are incredibly light and cheap. Put the $199 from the RoadStor or Kanguru into another Gig of CF and get either adapter (USB reader, or PCMCIA adapter) and brain dump the entire thing when he finally does find a PC with a burner.
Look for a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter and all of a sudden your problem changes to 'find a machine with a CD reader so I can upload my pictures' to find a laptop that has a PCMCIA slot available so I can upload my pictures. In a pinch, consider a USB CompactFlash reader and all of a sudden any computer built since 2000 can probably read your files.
I am guessing that you were planning on finding some sort of computer to send the pictures to the Internet once you had them on CD, so just short circuit the equation. Also, the machines you run into along the way may very well be able to burn the files onto CD once you can pop the CF card in and let them read your files, which is your plan in the first place.
I doubt you will find a portable CF to CD device that doesn't also double as a laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just bitter. That said, lets play 'Envision'.
Envision that the world likes Diamonds. Not hard to envision.
Envision that over the past 30 years Africa had been the sole supplier of Diamonds to the world, had been able to command high prices and for whatever reason built a massive infrastructure to protect the country from invasion, to provide healthy food and water to everybody, to insure that everyone had their medical needs met, to insure that it evolved into a country of laws and clean living, for the most part.
Envision that a large portion of the Diamond revenues were returned to the people, but 50% of their annual income must be given to the government in order to maintain this lifestyle for everyone. Lets put a random number to it, say $50,000 income, of which $20,000 goes back to the government each year, and homes cost $75,000.
Now envision someone finding Diamonds in the Arctic Circle, millions of Diamonds laying on the ground driving the price down by 90%.
The last thing to envision : regardless of the fact that the money trickling into the country to the Diamond miners has dropped by 90%, lets envision that the people still had to pay $20k per year in infrastructure (taxes) and that they still had to make $1k / month payments on homes. It isn't about wanting to price themselves competitively, it is about paying for the infrastructure that was created in order to create the global demand for Diamonds in the first place.
In order for the demand for programming labor to even exist (locally or globally), a massive infrastructure (and tax base) must exist and be continually paid for - for the tech world, most of it in the USA. If all of the developers in (insert country here) were all working for local companies developing goods for resale within their country or even for resale to the world at large - this wouldn't be happening. But that's not the case, because the infrastructure hasn't been developed (and paid for) in their country. The businesses to create those products, to use those products, and to pay for those products don't exist in those countries - the demand and the infrastructure that creates and supports that demand is by and large in the US and paid for by taxing US citizens (both in the form of taxes and real estate prices.)
I am not saying that SAfrica can't / won't contribute to the F/OSS movement. What I am saying is that in outfitting them to do so we are opening yet another Pandora's box that is going to magnify the destructive outsourcing effects that have been running rampant through the US in the past few years and once open that box can't be closed.
Rome didn't see the collapse of Rome coming, but I bet it was their own doing. Egypt didn't see the collapse of Egypt coming, but I bet it was their own doing. The USSR didn't see the collapse of the USSR coming, but I know it was their own doing.
The USA doesn't see the collapse of the USA coming, but I bet this massive outsourcing movement is the foundation upon which that failure will be built. And they are doing it to themselves, with many of their citizens encouraging it all the while.
When I first saw the header I thought to myself 'man, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.
Ouch! Then I RTFA and I felt like I had been stabbed in the throat AGAIN!
Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!
Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this? Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?
I honestly don't envision the long term effects of this as 'a good thing'. Jesus H. Christ - how's this for an idea : how about I go to some third world country where the wage scales make Indian off-shore wages look like a king's ransom and teach all the indigenous inhabitants how to be 'computer guys'. These guys would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and a chicken, just envision what they would do for $2/hr. Anybody that thinks their long term employment prospects are bad now, just wait until this little project comes to fruition.
And the hits just keep on coming.
My first impressions were probably right, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass. Invested at 5% that is pretty close to $80k a day - that ought to be plenty to keep a mansion full of the best 'tangs in life.
The way I understand it the system shadows the entire hard drive in DRAM. Reads come from the DRAM, writes first update the DRAM and are written back to the drive.
Envision an 8G SCSI hard drive with 8G of cache, pre-populating the cache when you turn on the computer. Same idea.
In fact this is a hardware manifestation of the Superspeed software that used to be marketed by Cenatek (not sure if they still do - Google it.)
I have actually considered a.com type company to do exactly that : OnGoogle. Sort of like OnStar it would be on quickdial on your cell phone - one second later one of our trained professionals would be your invisible link between you and the world of knowledge. Driving along and thinking 'damn, what should I know about Manet (the painter) so I can impress my date tonight?' and we will hook you up. Out in the courtyard having a discussion about unladen swallow speeds, just use OnGoogle. In a tough exam and can't remember Avagadro's number? We are the direct connect to over6.023x10^23 different answers.
I mean how hard would that be? We already have call centers with computers - just set Google as the home page and you are all set.
That depends. We talking animals with other animals, or animals with people? The former you can find on the Discovery Channel; the latter, not so much.
Just remember, you get almost a 100% increase in performance every year for free - hardware pretty much doubles in performance every year. I remember reading somewhere some really big dataset was being processed (recreating at the molecular level everything within a couple hundred yards of a nuclear explosion or something like that) that was expected to run for 12 years. After four years they stopped the run, ported everything to a new computer that was four times faster, re-ran the program and it was done in 3 years, five years ahead of schedule - and they didn't change a line of code. Granted that was probably a fabricated story but it does make a point.
Problem is that your client is still running on the prototype of their project, not the real release. They just don't know it, and I'm guessing the original programmers don't know it.
The most effective, well used (if unintentionally used) development methodology is the prototype methodology. The first pass is simply a reality check, can we even accomplish what needs to be accomplished on the hardware and development tool we have available? The prototype is then shown to management as a proof of concept, show them that their ideas are possible, and then a second generation is re-engineered from the ground up using the lessons learned in the first generation as a foundation for a solid, well engineered deliverable product. This breaks down in one of two ways : management says screw the rewrite, lets just run what we have - or the developers are not smart enough to understand that their first pass at it wasn't production quality code, only a prototype.
What your client has right now is a prototype, a proof of concept. It 'works' inasmuch as a kite flys - as a demonstration that the concept is viable, but not meant for real work. You could probably push a big kite hard enough to 'fly' two people, but that doesn't make it a good idea. You could continue to 'tweak' a kite in order to even double the performance, get 4 people off the ground - but I wouldn't recommend using it for commercial applications.
Odds are the app needs to be understood from top to bottom so a set of software engineers know the concepts, what the package is intended to do, how it currently does it, what the expectations are for performance and growth - and then the SE's that understand it need to rewrite it from the ground up developing performance engineered code that is production quality.
I'm writing this on an old-as-dirt HP Jornada 680, also a WinCE 2.11/3.0 machine. Popped a compactflash 802.11b card into it, connect to my Windows 2003 Server EE via TermServer and I have a 640x240 screen version Win2003 at my fingertips, latest version of all the apps running full speed. If it runs in Windows and fits in 640x240, this thing runs it quite nicely (as long as I am within wifi range of my office.)
If his WinCE rig can run wifi and termserver client, there is still plenty of life left in it.
That said, this new toy is interesting simply because of the 640x480 screen, twice as nice as my 640x240. Wish it wasn't/.'ed so I could see how big the keyboard is - the kb on this HP is about 75%, big enough to almost work for a touchtypist.
Simple, same thing that happened at HP / Compaq : greedy asshats at the helm that are able to make a gazillion dollars while destroying two companies in the process, destroying the shareholder value of those two companies in the process. Ask Carly about that one, and Mr. Case.
Slashdot Mirror
I managed to DOS one of the regions of an IBM mainframe back end (plus assorted MQseries queues) a few years ago, brought the entire production environment to its knees for roughly 12 minutes. Every pager in the place went off and they eventually figured out it was me, found me, whacked me in the head and said knock it off.
:
Two things to consider
I never did it again.
I got to do it once, which was plenty to run the tests that I needed to run. My code held up under load, which was what I needed to find out.
Sometimes it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. Just don't make it a habit.
(Haiku disclaimer:)
I will summarize:
You can do it once or twice;
Don't do it a lot.
Actually what I meant was (after having read through the early stack of discussion threads) early impressions were that the method of access to the Exchange Server was to come in through the same interface that OWA uses, necessitating the install of OWA / IIS accessing the Exchange data and getting the data by 'pretending' to be an OWA user coming in over regular HTTP traffic via TCP/IP. The phrase 'OWA backdoor hack' was used in a positive manner, the word 'hack' a respectful term of endearment as associated with the original use of the word 'hacker' (back when 'hacker' meant something entirely different than 'cracker'.
Lest I didn't express it well enough or came across as negative, I think the 'OWA backdoor hack' is very cool, if that's what they did.
Reading more of the articles now that they aren't quite as slashdotted, it isn't entirely clear how they do it - so it may / may not be the hack I envisioned. But you have to admit that emulating OWA over HTTP to get at the data would be a cool hack.
Actually, understanding the teachings of Faraday you would obviously not try to create a lightning 'rod' but would be much better off creating an environment that allowed the energy to come from any direction be dispersed over a large surface area and then be shunted into the common ground.
Given this, I recommend you liberally wrap all the buildings in a highly conductive material such as copper or aluminum foil and perhaps put a nice big electricity conducting rod on top of that to try to attract the electrical surges. Additionally, because you want the electricity to remain on the surface (see again Faraday, above) it would be a good idea to wet the walking areas with water (use clean water - non conductive!)
Stay tuned, tomorrow's lessons are 'Putting out house fires with a liberal application of Propane' and 'Treating a hangover with alcohol.'
I looked it up, $31.32 for Server 2000 CAL (bought as part of a 5 pack for $156.60 at Provantage) and $75.34 for an Exchange CAL (once again, bought in a group of 5 for $376.72 at Provantage) Net cost : $106.66 per seat.
... that's the rule.' Not.
I stand by my original statement - I have a real hard time believing that the Linux crew is going line up to fill out Purchase Orders to send Microsoft a hundred bucks a seat for each of the Linux installs they have across organization running Ximian email clients. Good luck convincing me otherwise. For the record, I really like Microsoft - this isn't about what I like / dislike, it is totally about envisioning the Linux users (the kind of Linux users that would be eager early adopters of this Exchange adapter) getting this to work and remembering 'oh yea, maybe I need to send MS a nice Benjamin Franklin plus change because
So a Linux user needs to send Microsoft $199 for a seat of Windows (CAL) plus whatever an additional seat for Exchange costs in order to use this free Outlook Web Access backdoor hack to enable their Ximian email client to get data from their corporate Exchange server?
Like that's going to happen. Not.
Just use the BSD section - they are basically the same thing.
The spread of English to Africa, India, Australia, Ireland, Brazil(?), and the like ... all of those I attribute to England. I agree with you though, all through out Europe the 'doing business with the US' side of the house has driven the English language equally well.
Oh man that is hilarious.
Actually as a side project in college I wrote a Pascal to C compiler (wrote it in Pascal) as a hack to get my way through all those pesky C coding homework problems in a hurry. I was a long time Pascal coder and fairly new to C, didn't particularly care for the syntax of C. I would do the C homework in Pascal, run it rhrough my pre-processor to convert the Pascal versions of the homework to C, compile the output in TurboC and Voila! I was done in half the time.
I have hence learned to love C, for the record.
I guess someone could do the same thing, take all the keywords and translate them, write your own 'language' using those, and write a YourLanguage to C compiler to pre-process the source code before compiling it as regular C in your C compiler.
It may not be the most 'common' language on Earth by counting the people that actually speak whatever language ... but it is easily the 'common denominator' language in that regardless of where you are, -somebody- there will also speak it.
May not speak it well, but you will be able to get across your general ideas. I attribute this not to anything the Americans have done, but mostly to the British attempted colonization of just about any flat dry land area over the previous two or three centuries.
It also might have something to do with the origins of the technology, most of the original inventing engineers coming from English speaking backgrounds.
Perhaps had Grace Hopper been German she would have coined the phrase 'Computerwanze' instead of 'Computer Bug'.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't say Win2000 was secure - I only said it was a hell of a lot better than the Win98 setup he was sharing with two other users that he didn't particularly trust.
... but how bad does he need to lock it down if they haven't managed to thrash his current Win98 system.
I suggested it instead of Linux because he was already semi-familiar with Windows and it would be familiar, and because all the support infrastructure he has available on a college campus is going to be Microsoft-centric. Also, it would be a little more work on his side, securing the system so they could use it as 'users' but not break anything
Put a Linksys firewall between his computer and the RJ45 hole in the wall to keep out most of the bug-a-boos and use regular users (not Admin, not power users) for his roomies and that is about as good as he is going to get and still be able to play Everquest / SWG / UT2004 on the machine. And a lot better than his current situation.
Install Windows 2000 Professional instead of WinXP - it is much less resource intensive (more likely to run (semi-well) on a machine that was current when Win98 came out.) And it is free (not free as in beer, nor free as in herpes - more like free as in pirated.)
... it was designed to do.
Give each of your buddies regular 'user' accounts so a) they can't install crap, b) they can't directly access your files, and c) they can't screw it up. Each user has a profile and when they run whatever email client they want the files are stored in their profile. Sort of like
Blarg! Between the Roadstor and the Kanguru I publicly admit to being entirely without a clue.
That said, unless the OP is going to be saving all his CDs and posting pictures to the web once he gets home, he is going to need to find a computer to read the CDs he creates while he is on the journey and the computers he finds will likely be able to read the CD directly with either a CF to PCMCIA adapter, or a USB CF reader - and both of these are incredibly light and cheap. Put the $199 from the RoadStor or Kanguru into another Gig of CF and get either adapter (USB reader, or PCMCIA adapter) and brain dump the entire thing when he finally does find a PC with a burner.
Look for a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter and all of a sudden your problem changes to 'find a machine with a CD reader so I can upload my pictures' to find a laptop that has a PCMCIA slot available so I can upload my pictures. In a pinch, consider a USB CompactFlash reader and all of a sudden any computer built since 2000 can probably read your files.
I am guessing that you were planning on finding some sort of computer to send the pictures to the Internet once you had them on CD, so just short circuit the equation. Also, the machines you run into along the way may very well be able to burn the files onto CD once you can pop the CF card in and let them read your files, which is your plan in the first place.
I doubt you will find a portable CF to CD device that doesn't also double as a laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just bitter.
That said, lets play 'Envision'.
Envision that the world likes Diamonds. Not hard to envision.
Envision that over the past 30 years Africa had been the sole supplier of Diamonds to the world, had been able to command high prices and for whatever reason built a massive infrastructure to protect the country from invasion, to provide healthy food and water to everybody, to insure that everyone had their medical needs met, to insure that it evolved into a country of laws and clean living, for the most part.
Envision that a large portion of the Diamond revenues were returned to the people, but 50% of their annual income must be given to the government in order to maintain this lifestyle for everyone. Lets put a random number to it, say $50,000 income, of which $20,000 goes back to the government each year, and homes cost $75,000.
Now envision someone finding Diamonds in the Arctic Circle, millions of Diamonds laying on the ground driving the price down by 90%.
The last thing to envision : regardless of the fact that the money trickling into the country to the Diamond miners has dropped by 90%, lets envision that the people still had to pay $20k per year in infrastructure (taxes) and that they still had to make $1k / month payments on homes. It isn't about wanting to price themselves competitively, it is about paying for the infrastructure that was created in order to create the global demand for Diamonds in the first place.
In order for the demand for programming labor to even exist (locally or globally), a massive infrastructure (and tax base) must exist and be continually paid for - for the tech world, most of it in the USA. If all of the developers in (insert country here) were all working for local companies developing goods for resale within their country or even for resale to the world at large - this wouldn't be happening. But that's not the case, because the infrastructure hasn't been developed (and paid for) in their country. The businesses to create those products, to use those products, and to pay for those products don't exist in those countries - the demand and the infrastructure that creates and supports that demand is by and large in the US and paid for by taxing US citizens (both in the form of taxes and real estate prices.)
I am not saying that SAfrica can't / won't contribute to the F/OSS movement. What I am saying is that in outfitting them to do so we are opening yet another Pandora's box that is going to magnify the destructive outsourcing effects that have been running rampant through the US in the past few years and once open that box can't be closed.
Rome didn't see the collapse of Rome coming, but I bet it was their own doing.
Egypt didn't see the collapse of Egypt coming, but I bet it was their own doing.
The USSR didn't see the collapse of the USSR coming, but I know it was their own doing.
The USA doesn't see the collapse of the USA coming, but I bet this massive outsourcing movement is the foundation upon which that failure will be built. And they are doing it to themselves, with many of their citizens encouraging it all the while.
When I first saw the header I thought to myself 'man, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass.
Ouch! Then I RTFA and I felt like I had been stabbed in the throat AGAIN!
Disclaimer : I am going to try and keep this civil and troll / flame free, expressing my honest feelings - but damn!
Does nobody see the long term ramifications of this?
Is there nobody that can see the writing on the wall?
I honestly don't envision the long term effects of this as 'a good thing'. Jesus H. Christ - how's this for an idea : how about I go to some third world country where the wage scales make Indian off-shore wages look like a king's ransom and teach all the indigenous inhabitants how to be 'computer guys'. These guys would sell their own brother into slavery for a cow and a chicken, just envision what they would do for $2/hr. Anybody that thinks their long term employment prospects are bad now, just wait until this little project comes to fruition.
And the hits just keep on coming.
My first impressions were probably right, Mark Shuttleworth needs to take his $575M and spend the rest of his life like Hugh Hefner, set up a mansion and tap a LOT of high quality ass. Invested at 5% that is pretty close to $80k a day - that ought to be plenty to keep a mansion full of the best 'tangs in life.
The way I understand it the system shadows the entire hard drive in DRAM. Reads come from the DRAM, writes first update the DRAM and are written back to the drive.
Envision an 8G SCSI hard drive with 8G of cache, pre-populating the cache when you turn on the computer. Same idea.
In fact this is a hardware manifestation of the Superspeed software that used to be marketed by Cenatek (not sure if they still do - Google it.)
"We have a fiduciary obligation to our shareholders to do something about this"
Ok from now on whoever says this, gets stabbed in the throat. That phrase is hereby forbidden, under penalty of Throatgestabben.
I have actually considered a .com type company to do exactly that : OnGoogle. Sort of like OnStar it would be on quickdial on your cell phone - one second later one of our trained professionals would be your invisible link between you and the world of knowledge. Driving along and thinking 'damn, what should I know about Manet (the painter) so I can impress my date tonight?' and we will hook you up. Out in the courtyard having a discussion about unladen swallow speeds, just use OnGoogle. In a tough exam and can't remember Avagadro's number? We are the direct connect to over6.023x10^23 different answers.
I mean how hard would that be? We already have call centers with computers - just set Google as the home page and you are all set.
An African Alcatel 8100 series router or a European Alcatel 8100 series router?
That depends. We talking animals with other animals, or animals with people? The former you can find on the Discovery Channel; the latter, not so much.
Just remember, you get almost a 100% increase in performance every year for free - hardware pretty much doubles in performance every year. I remember reading somewhere some really big dataset was being processed (recreating at the molecular level everything within a couple hundred yards of a nuclear explosion or something like that) that was expected to run for 12 years. After four years they stopped the run, ported everything to a new computer that was four times faster, re-ran the program and it was done in 3 years, five years ahead of schedule - and they didn't change a line of code. Granted that was probably a fabricated story but it does make a point.
Problem is that your client is still running on the prototype of their project, not the real release. They just don't know it, and I'm guessing the original programmers don't know it.
The most effective, well used (if unintentionally used) development methodology is the prototype methodology. The first pass is simply a reality check, can we even accomplish what needs to be accomplished on the hardware and development tool we have available? The prototype is then shown to management as a proof of concept, show them that their ideas are possible, and then a second generation is re-engineered from the ground up using the lessons learned in the first generation as a foundation for a solid, well engineered deliverable product. This breaks down in one of two ways : management says screw the rewrite, lets just run what we have - or the developers are not smart enough to understand that their first pass at it wasn't production quality code, only a prototype.
What your client has right now is a prototype, a proof of concept. It 'works' inasmuch as a kite flys - as a demonstration that the concept is viable, but not meant for real work. You could probably push a big kite hard enough to 'fly' two people, but that doesn't make it a good idea. You could continue to 'tweak' a kite in order to even double the performance, get 4 people off the ground - but I wouldn't recommend using it for commercial applications.
Odds are the app needs to be understood from top to bottom so a set of software engineers know the concepts, what the package is intended to do, how it currently does it, what the expectations are for performance and growth - and then the SE's that understand it need to rewrite it from the ground up developing performance engineered code that is production quality.
I'm writing this on an old-as-dirt HP Jornada 680, also a WinCE 2.11/3.0 machine. Popped a compactflash 802.11b card into it, connect to my Windows 2003 Server EE via TermServer and I have a 640x240 screen version Win2003 at my fingertips, latest version of all the apps running full speed. If it runs in Windows and fits in 640x240, this thing runs it quite nicely (as long as I am within wifi range of my office.)
/.'ed so I could see how big the keyboard is - the kb on this HP is about 75%, big enough to almost work for a touchtypist.
If his WinCE rig can run wifi and termserver client, there is still plenty of life left in it.
That said, this new toy is interesting simply because of the 640x480 screen, twice as nice as my 640x240. Wish it wasn't
Simple, same thing that happened at HP / Compaq : greedy asshats at the helm that are able to make a gazillion dollars while destroying two companies in the process, destroying the shareholder value of those two companies in the process. Ask Carly about that one, and Mr. Case.