It wasn't just load that did it, it was overall hurry. Time to market, and stuff not getting delivered before Christmas. The existing web site software was taken over by Com Tech Online, not originally developed by them. They tried to Just Grow it from there. The original code base was not particularly scalable, and the resulting application wasn't truly engineered (to be rather polite about it), not the fault of the programmers, they were given a pig and told it had to not only fly, but had to make trans-pacific flights and carry freight. And suppliers were defaulting in droves, as their supply chains weren't e-enabled either. The Mail Didn't Get Through.
Fortunately I was on another set of projects at the time and didn't get dragooned to the City Road office. I had to visit once in a while, and morale wasn't great. Painful to watch the hype curve from that close to the roller coaster, it was.
All I have to remember those days by is a really nifty shirt with a grocery cart on it and a few good friends. Oh, and of course a comprehensive education in the business of e-commerce, the hard way.
If Vista doesn't improve, and Windows 7 ends up sucking too, there will be much better alternative OS's out by then
Aye, and it may not necessarily be our favorite distro, either.
I would examine very carefully any vendor that comes out with a PC that has nothing but a hypervisor loaded. "examine" as in "where's my cheque book". And I would not be surprised if Google comes up with an operating system of their own, 90 degrees out from either Linux or Windows, something simple with rare insight that corners the market.
Linux (particularly Ubuntu) is certainly worthy and there's no question of Microsoft's market share, BEOs lost steerage a long time ago, but I can't help the feeling that there's an entirely different OS out there waiting to be invented that's going to completely blow the others away. It's been too long since we've seen one. Donkey's years.
I remember when D-Store learned that lesson in Australia (I was uncomfortably close to it). The web site was fine, but watching the supply chain dissolve as the bright hopes lost their grip was a nasty dose of reality. Some say the dot-bomb started then.
Gartner has a nice looking curve they use for technology take-up, looks like kind of a dampened sine wave.
Some agencies are better than others, I'll admit. As are some network architects. I'd like to remind all and sundry that it ain't engineering if you don't get the design independently reviewed first, and read up before you offer that bid. I've found the Sybex books pretty good for full coverage about roaming profiles etc., and I especially like the ones by Mark Minasi. The books are very detail-rich, and are heavy enough there should be warnings on the back about safe lifting.
Ahh, the grand assumption that I'm in Microsoft's pocket, combined with a bandwagon ad-hominem that attempts to tie me to your perception of a common enemy.
Option for no OS? Good idea. I understand VMWare is going to offer a bootable hypervisor supplied on a thumb drive this month, and also heard that Dell, IBM, and HP (I think) are going to offer a hypervisor in mobo firmware so you can boot up into a virtual environment just like our servers can now. I would really prefer that sort of arrangement to multi boot, so I can keep my debian, ubuntu, xp etc. experiences separate but simultaneously available without the underhead of an OS. Intel and AMD are offering CPUs than vector tier0 instructions off to use the hypervisor without all having to hit the BIOS at once to respond to IO interrupts, too -- this would make a laptop incredibly powerful, fast, simple, and useful.
Where do you want to go today? Gee, I don't know -- let's try this land called Ubuntu, sounds exotic. (Click.) Now that's windowing.
Part of the issue is that people demand batteries when they don't need them. Weight is a killer for old folk like me, and it would be nice to have a laptop that wasn't 70% battery by mass (disclaimer: I just pulled that number out of my bum). I'd be happy with a laptop that was easier to carry, but had the option of plugging into mains power and leaving the battery in your luggage for when you need it. But then, I have the luxury of doing work at a desk, not an airplane.
If you use roaming profiles correctly you can upgrade an entire bureau just by walking down the aisles and swapping out the laptops. I was told a fairly major SOE upgrade was handled this way recently, in a government agency in Canberra.
I live about 5 minutes away from a classic car broker and insurer (Shannon's) outside of Melbourne. Over the years they've had a sign outside with a clock on it that relentlessly told the wrong time.
I developed a theory about that. Their collection of very old classic cars was uniformly so immaculate they had to be sourcing them via a time warp they kept in the back of the shop. The clocks were accurate where they were, but the entire sign/time display was shifted slightly in time due to proximity to the time warp.
What really bugs me is the automatic assumption that anything people can use their curiosity on will be so misused that we have to ban it in advance of any evidence that it will actually cause any harm.
Sigh... we used to say that about computer software. Now we'll *really* need to keep our antivirus signatures up to date.
Simple -- buy a wire wrap tool, a breadboard kit and the TTL Handbook.
Can't find them? Should be on the shelf there somewhere. There must be a lot of old kit you can use to desolder TTL circuit components. You may need to build a Heathkit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit/ dual-trace CRO first though.
I have the original 4004 reference guide (blue cover), scored during an early Wescon convention in 1970. I looked at this and said -- "Oooh, a whole hexadecimal digit on a single chip. That's going to change things."
People used to consider square wave logic charts a programming tool back then, too.
Urrr... my dad told me about those 88's. He slipped off the line driving a 47-passenger convertable and heard a loud "clank" from an 88 (they used trigger plates in the road) just after the previous truck in the convoy got it -- forty years later he still turned white when he described the moment. Yep, I respect that. But he also told me about sandy conditions destroying Luger/Parabellum pistols and those strange pivoting jacks on the German tanks (used for close quarter turns) that fouled up and immobilised them.
The Dorsai spring rifles used a plastic spring under a lot of tension. The projectile was an extremely small needle fractured off of a billet, ejected at very high speeds. Sounds practical/impractical, so I remembered it, but that's good SF for you. Stuff like that turned me into an engineer.
And I guess we have been using their war tech for a while -- I think the first Redstone was just a tarted-up V2, and Von Braun just scaled the ideas up to the Saturn class launchers.
Ok, I guess I agree with you.
I wonder when people will wrap coils around the pistons, sleeve the cylinders with magnetised ferrite and let induction fire the spark (in effect turning it into a solenoid in reverse)? Would take a heck of a lot of modelling, but I think you could do away with spark plugs without the mass required by compression ignition. Completely ignore the man in the funny hat on the road trying to aim that bulky antenna at you.
Depends on the frequency, which has an impact on the size of the antenna. For -- what is it, 3 meter band? (memory fades with age)... a good directional-discontinuity ring radiator (think polygon with a gap) could pump a one-watt RF signal from California to Japan with the right ionospheric weather. Takes up a backyard. For very low frequencies, you're talking something considerably larger. But for short wave lengths (microwave) in line-of-sight, nothing beats a good old fashioned MASER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASER/) which is a type of cavity resonator that pre-dated the LASER and influenced it's invention.
Find an old ARRL (American Radio Relay League) handbook. They're highly informative, give you neat things you can make out of iron and copper, and are a lot of fun to boot.
What happens when criminals get their hands on this and start disabling police cars as well?:D
Go back to carburetors and distributors, I guess. Modern cars are nice, but I miss being able to do my own auto tune-ups.
Actually this theme reminds me of the old Gordon Dickson "Dorsai" novels, where countermeasures were so sophisticated that people went to "spring rifles" because they were hard to jam. I remember thinking that was a great convergence of complexity and simplicity. And I remember my father telling me about how WWII German technology was unbeatable by anything except their own sophistication.
Wrong side of clever? It's a theme I see daily in the bigger IT shops. Australians have a phrase for it -- "too clever by half".
They may continue to bark and exhibit aggressive behaviour from a short distance though.
Once a couple of the neighbor from across the street's rather nasty and ill-treated doberman pinschers jumped their fence and ran to attack me as I picked up my newspaper off the lawn one morning. I didn't just stop, I started pointing and loudly berating them as if I were their owner, shouting at them to "get back in that yard". They backed off. I always thought that odd -- how I came up with the idea without thinking (hardwired response? It happened awfully fast) and how effective it was in that situation. I wonder (but not too much, I don't keep dogs) if this is generally applicable as a useful response to being chased.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately I was on another set of projects at the time and didn't get dragooned to the City Road office. I had to visit once in a while, and morale wasn't great. Painful to watch the hype curve from that close to the roller coaster, it was.
All I have to remember those days by is a really nifty shirt with a grocery cart on it and a few good friends. Oh, and of course a comprehensive education in the business of e-commerce, the hard way.
Yep.
Aye, and it may not necessarily be our favorite distro, either.
I would examine very carefully any vendor that comes out with a PC that has nothing but a hypervisor loaded. "examine" as in "where's my cheque book". And I would not be surprised if Google comes up with an operating system of their own, 90 degrees out from either Linux or Windows, something simple with rare insight that corners the market.
Linux (particularly Ubuntu) is certainly worthy and there's no question of Microsoft's market share, BEOs lost steerage a long time ago, but I can't help the feeling that there's an entirely different OS out there waiting to be invented that's going to completely blow the others away. It's been too long since we've seen one. Donkey's years.
Here's a better link http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.8795.s.8.jsp
There's e-commerce for you, in a nutshell.
Gartner has a nice looking curve they use for technology take-up, looks like kind of a dampened sine wave.
Some agencies are better than others, I'll admit. As are some network architects. I'd like to remind all and sundry that it ain't engineering if you don't get the design independently reviewed first, and read up before you offer that bid. I've found the Sybex books pretty good for full coverage about roaming profiles etc., and I especially like the ones by Mark Minasi. The books are very detail-rich, and are heavy enough there should be warnings on the back about safe lifting.
You're a tool.
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes.
He was a poor boy, empty as a pocket.
Empty as a pocket, with nothing to lose
Sing tananaaa... tananana.
Downloads were the source of her blues.
Downloads were the source of her blues.
Yeah, they're great. Our SOE laptops are uncrippled, too. We're treated like adults. Gotta love that.
There was an interesting bit of speculation on Cringely's part about this back in September. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070914_002928.html/
Where do you want to go today? Gee, I don't know -- let's try this land called Ubuntu, sounds exotic. (Click.) Now that's windowing.
Part of the issue is that people demand batteries when they don't need them. Weight is a killer for old folk like me, and it would be nice to have a laptop that wasn't 70% battery by mass (disclaimer: I just pulled that number out of my bum). I'd be happy with a laptop that was easier to carry, but had the option of plugging into mains power and leaving the battery in your luggage for when you need it. But then, I have the luxury of doing work at a desk, not an airplane.
If you use roaming profiles correctly you can upgrade an entire bureau just by walking down the aisles and swapping out the laptops. I was told a fairly major SOE upgrade was handled this way recently, in a government agency in Canberra.
I live about 5 minutes away from a classic car broker and insurer (Shannon's) outside of Melbourne. Over the years they've had a sign outside with a clock on it that relentlessly told the wrong time.
I developed a theory about that. Their collection of very old classic cars was uniformly so immaculate they had to be sourcing them via a time warp they kept in the back of the shop. The clocks were accurate where they were, but the entire sign/time display was shifted slightly in time due to proximity to the time warp.
Easy, once you think of it.
Sigh ... we used to say that about computer software. Now we'll *really* need to keep our antivirus signatures up to date.
Can't find them? Should be on the shelf there somewhere. There must be a lot of old kit you can use to desolder TTL circuit components. You may need to build a Heathkit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit/ dual-trace CRO first though.
Geez I'm getting old.
People used to consider square wave logic charts a programming tool back then, too.
I'm waiting for the sequel set in medieval times, as portrayed by The Brothers Grimm -- "Hansel und Grendel"
Mod Jekler's post up.
The Dorsai spring rifles used a plastic spring under a lot of tension. The projectile was an extremely small needle fractured off of a billet, ejected at very high speeds. Sounds practical/impractical, so I remembered it, but that's good SF for you. Stuff like that turned me into an engineer.
And I guess we have been using their war tech for a while -- I think the first Redstone was just a tarted-up V2, and Von Braun just scaled the ideas up to the Saturn class launchers.
Ok, I guess I agree with you.
I wonder when people will wrap coils around the pistons, sleeve the cylinders with magnetised ferrite and let induction fire the spark (in effect turning it into a solenoid in reverse)? Would take a heck of a lot of modelling, but I think you could do away with spark plugs without the mass required by compression ignition. Completely ignore the man in the funny hat on the road trying to aim that bulky antenna at you.
Depends on the frequency, which has an impact on the size of the antenna. For -- what is it, 3 meter band? (memory fades with age) ... a good directional-discontinuity ring radiator (think polygon with a gap) could pump a one-watt RF signal from California to Japan with the right ionospheric weather. Takes up a backyard. For very low frequencies, you're talking something considerably larger. But for short wave lengths (microwave) in line-of-sight, nothing beats a good old fashioned MASER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASER/) which is a type of cavity resonator that pre-dated the LASER and influenced it's invention.
Find an old ARRL (American Radio Relay League) handbook. They're highly informative, give you neat things you can make out of iron and copper, and are a lot of fun to boot.
Go back to carburetors and distributors, I guess. Modern cars are nice, but I miss being able to do my own auto tune-ups.
Actually this theme reminds me of the old Gordon Dickson "Dorsai" novels, where countermeasures were so sophisticated that people went to "spring rifles" because they were hard to jam. I remember thinking that was a great convergence of complexity and simplicity. And I remember my father telling me about how WWII German technology was unbeatable by anything except their own sophistication.
Wrong side of clever? It's a theme I see daily in the bigger IT shops. Australians have a phrase for it -- "too clever by half".
You keep using that gene. I don't think it means what you think it means.
They may continue to bark and exhibit aggressive behaviour from a short distance though.
Once a couple of the neighbor from across the street's rather nasty and ill-treated doberman pinschers jumped their fence and ran to attack me as I picked up my newspaper off the lawn one morning. I didn't just stop, I started pointing and loudly berating them as if I were their owner, shouting at them to "get back in that yard". They backed off. I always thought that odd -- how I came up with the idea without thinking (hardwired response? It happened awfully fast) and how effective it was in that situation. I wonder (but not too much, I don't keep dogs) if this is generally applicable as a useful response to being chased.