I have this recurring vision of people tripping over this huge data cable and dislodging the little nub at the end that was the data centre.
Data storage densities may continue to improve for a bit. Until we're reading the RFC's for a new RS-nnnn spec for DTE communication via quantum entanglement and metal telepathy* though, we're going to be building data centres for bandwidth and reliable power as much as for cubic volume required to house binary digits.
Which brings up another point -- when HDD's are approaching the terabyte range, does it still make sense to use single large disks when they're inherently throttled to IDE or SATA IO rates?
*First pun I ever encountered.. Felix the Cat's defense vs. The Master Cylinder, early 50's.
Forget the warehouse walls and ceiling. Pick a large one and build your data centre as a complete building within it. Use the slab only, and post furtive-looking plain clothes guards at the outside warehouse walls to help blend in to the surroundings (STCA).
Ok, you moved from Mountain View to Texas. I agree it's an improvement (I moved from Mountain View to Melbourne and I spent a year in Houston one week, too) but... it's winter, right? You haven't actually gone outside in the summer yet? I recommend you install redundant air conditioning systems in your car, with battery backup.
...they shouldn't use the top engineers, they're (we're) mostly paper shufflers. To solve the problem you need to find people closer to the coal face; find the support guy who get yelled at the most for not having gotten around to someone's pc yet (grammar apology is in the mail, I'm in a hurry).
I think the ultimate aim of the RIAA etc. is the death of music. If they can't enjoy it (assumption: that the soulless cannot appreciate music, which is inherently holy) they don't want anyone else to either. I am morally certain these people doggedly listen to commercials on their car radio instead of pressing the button to change channels, too.
Upgrade from WSS to SPS -- base Sharepoint services to the full portal, which has versioning and other document library goodies. New version uses full sql server, can scale decently now.
I've never had anything but ill luck in organisations that tried to use a decent code library versioning system (pick your favourite) as a word/excel document mangement system. BA's end up hating a product that works perfectly well in a development environment. Office 2003 has "File / Publish To.." as well as "Save As.." which is a nice shortcut if you just want to press the buttons and don't care what makes the radio work.
Remember that BA's and Developers are as different as folks who buy a car for its style, vs. folks who buy a car for the engineering. A place for everyone, but don't confuse yourself with the rabble;-)
Does Microsoft Word automatically adjust column widths to fit data?
In a sense, yes. Either select the column and double-click the vertical bar if you're being clever, otherwise just Table / Autoformat and pick one of the options. I like grid 8 as a good general purpose choice.
User's comments page -- clicking on your name -- sections show serially, instead of properly placed on the page (say that with your mouth full of marbles!). Huge amounts of white space that don't belong.
Does anyone see this move plus the Apple-India pullout as dawning awareness of the idea that off-shoring does not perform as originally thought?
Sigh... which is good, because I really wish I could afford to write software again. I enjoyed it.
Be that as it may, I've run development efforts where the Russian development contacts were very bright and well-educated but utterly useless for the job at hand because of the constant need to redefine terms. Communications problems hurt. More effort went into communications than a tight-knit local team would have needed, to be sure. And just like short wire paths mean faster circuits, short communications paths mean performance.
Core teams need to be close to work fast. Call it "people cache" for want of a better term (hmm.. I like that better than Human Resources, which always makes me feel like I'm part of nonpaged pool)
Yep, that was him. When he retired, the guys at the Burbank studio drew a large card of a risque Minnie Mouse robot (Think Jessica Rabbit, with mouse ears & not much else on) with him as a mad scientist working at a panel in the back.
Geeks are geeks, irrespective of era, I think. If we ever lose that sense of fun, of wonder, if we ever let the accountants rule the creators completely, the belief will stop and nothing will hold back the grey tide.
We have to remember that, to stay alive.
My daughter picked it up I think... she's an absolutely wild-ass gifted animator plowing through university as if she owns it, and she's on to the physics and the raw humour too -- and she is already way ahead of me in comp as well, even with my 35 years in the industry. When she was tiny, she was fixated on Dumbo and a few other Disney vids -- the ones from the 30's mostly. Early Disney is a core and thread of essential good, and has a very long legacy. When she showed me her first and entirely politically-incorrect Flash animation -- of a space shuttle landing in Cheltenham with trash cans flying everywhere to bouncy music, it all clicked together. She wants to make computer games "that make you miss school and starve" (her quote).
When we were in the early times of computing, everyone followed us around. Now it's the content makers, the artists, who rule, and us computing types are going to be following them around for a while. I think that's good, and about time the pendulum swung around that way again. One gets so tired of commercial drivel. Don't give up hope. And if you do, pretend you haven't. It's the best we can do for them.
Glad you mentioned the multiplane animation camera. Walt's idea was to bring a bit of physics to animation, make it more believable. Had to do with moving multiple transparent gel cells across the camera at different speeds, so the background moved slower than midrange or the foreground. Back then physics meant gears. Uncle Lee was particularly proud of that piece of work, took him a fair bit of time to get it right.
I was very small (about 5) when he was explaining all this to Dad, but I remember the moment because Uncle Lee really enjoyed his work -- he was really, really enthused about the work he did.
When was the last time I was that excited by a bit of engineering? Can't remember (hmm... cable pinouts today - yay fun wow) But my uncle would laugh and wave his arms a lot when he spoke of what he was doing. I guess if you get that excited about what you do for a living, keep an eye on your five-year old audience. You may have an effect.
An interesting aside to Mad King Ludwig -- he was nuts about Wagner's Ring cycle, to the point of having a diorama built into the basement. This was highly influential to a young animator named Walt Disney.
Keeping to the thread -- Disney may not have been an engineer, but his start-in-a-garage enterprise hired good ones early (including my late uncle Lee Adams). A lot of very geeky stuff came out of Animation, long before nVidia etc. Fine old tradition.
Didn't someone have a design for a dime-sized rotary engine that ran off methanol? If you stuck a bit of magnetised ferrite into the lobes of the rotor of such a thing, you could wind a coil around the outside and it could double as a generator. There's be your energy density issue solved.
Of course there'd be a minor issue of engine capacity escalation among competitors, noise regulations, smog, parking...
Bring suit against the State then for anticompetitive practices. Aren't there laws controlling monopolies? I mean, it worked so well against Microsoft, didn't it?
Actually, I heard they put out most of the oil well fires in Kuwait with a jet engine mounted on a tank chassis, with fire hoses blowing into the jet exhaust.
Yes, transport the energy as gas. Home cogeneration is cool. Buch 'o' New Zudlunders came up with a nice one. Check out Whispertech at http://www.whispergen.com/
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I can't wait to see what Groklaw has to say about this precedent. Or who owns the game...
I have this recurring vision of people tripping over this huge data cable and dislodging the little nub at the end that was the data centre.
Data storage densities may continue to improve for a bit. Until we're reading the RFC's for a new RS-nnnn spec for DTE communication via quantum entanglement and metal telepathy* though, we're going to be building data centres for bandwidth and reliable power as much as for cubic volume required to house binary digits.
Which brings up another point -- when HDD's are approaching the terabyte range, does it still make sense to use single large disks when they're inherently throttled to IDE or SATA IO rates?
*First pun I ever encountered .. Felix the Cat's defense vs. The Master Cylinder, early 50's.
Forget the warehouse walls and ceiling. Pick a large one and build your data centre as a complete building within it. Use the slab only, and post furtive-looking plain clothes guards at the outside warehouse walls to help blend in to the surroundings (STCA).
Horse hocky. The operative measure is the speed of the dark. Dark fibre, fewer hops, acceptable response.
Ok, you moved from Mountain View to Texas. I agree it's an improvement (I moved from Mountain View to Melbourne and I spent a year in Houston one week, too) but ... it's winter, right? You haven't actually gone outside in the summer yet? I recommend you install redundant air conditioning systems in your car, with battery backup.
Yes, I sometimes go out of my way to defend the often-villified, too. But honestly, it's stretching credibility a bit thin here.
...they shouldn't use the top engineers, they're (we're) mostly paper shufflers. To solve the problem you need to find people closer to the coal face; find the support guy who get yelled at the most for not having gotten around to someone's pc yet (grammar apology is in the mail, I'm in a hurry).
I think the ultimate aim of the RIAA etc. is the death of music. If they can't enjoy it (assumption: that the soulless cannot appreciate music, which is inherently holy) they don't want anyone else to either. I am morally certain these people doggedly listen to commercials on their car radio instead of pressing the button to change channels, too.
I've never had anything but ill luck in organisations that tried to use a decent code library versioning system (pick your favourite) as a word/excel document mangement system. BA's end up hating a product that works perfectly well in a development environment. Office 2003 has "File / Publish To.." as well as "Save As.." which is a nice shortcut if you just want to press the buttons and don't care what makes the radio work.
Remember that BA's and Developers are as different as folks who buy a car for its style, vs. folks who buy a car for the engineering. A place for everyone, but don't confuse yourself with the rabble ;-)
In a sense, yes. Either select the column and double-click the vertical bar if you're being clever, otherwise just Table / Autoformat and pick one of the options. I like grid 8 as a good general purpose choice.
Hey, it's a classic. You don't have to laugh. The Meme Monster made me do it.
User's comments page -- clicking on your name -- sections show serially, instead of properly placed on the page (say that with your mouth full of marbles!). Huge amounts of white space that don't belong.
Sigh... which is good, because I really wish I could afford to write software again. I enjoyed it.
Be that as it may, I've run development efforts where the Russian development contacts were very bright and well-educated but utterly useless for the job at hand because of the constant need to redefine terms. Communications problems hurt. More effort went into communications than a tight-knit local team would have needed, to be sure. And just like short wire paths mean faster circuits, short communications paths mean performance.
Core teams need to be close to work fast. Call it "people cache" for want of a better term (hmm.. I like that better than Human Resources, which always makes me feel like I'm part of nonpaged pool)
Ahh, but not if you have studied your Agrippa...
Geeks are geeks, irrespective of era, I think. If we ever lose that sense of fun, of wonder, if we ever let the accountants rule the creators completely, the belief will stop and nothing will hold back the grey tide.
We have to remember that, to stay alive.
My daughter picked it up I think ... she's an absolutely wild-ass gifted animator plowing through university as if she owns it, and she's on to the physics and the raw humour too -- and she is already way ahead of me in comp as well, even with my 35 years in the industry. When she was tiny, she was fixated on Dumbo and a few other Disney vids -- the ones from the 30's mostly. Early Disney is a core and thread of essential good, and has a very long legacy. When she showed me her first and entirely politically-incorrect Flash animation -- of a space shuttle landing in Cheltenham with trash cans flying everywhere to bouncy music, it all clicked together. She wants to make computer games "that make you miss school and starve" (her quote).
When we were in the early times of computing, everyone followed us around. Now it's the content makers, the artists, who rule, and us computing types are going to be following them around for a while. I think that's good, and about time the pendulum swung around that way again. One gets so tired of commercial drivel. Don't give up hope. And if you do, pretend you haven't. It's the best we can do for them.
I was very small (about 5) when he was explaining all this to Dad, but I remember the moment because Uncle Lee really enjoyed his work -- he was really, really enthused about the work he did.
When was the last time I was that excited by a bit of engineering? Can't remember (hmm... cable pinouts today - yay fun wow) But my uncle would laugh and wave his arms a lot when he spoke of what he was doing. I guess if you get that excited about what you do for a living, keep an eye on your five-year old audience. You may have an effect.
Keeping to the thread -- Disney may not have been an engineer, but his start-in-a-garage enterprise hired good ones early (including my late uncle Lee Adams). A lot of very geeky stuff came out of Animation, long before nVidia etc. Fine old tradition.
I like how clicking the link "operating system" in an article about Vista brought up a mini-advert for Sun.
Of course there'd be a minor issue of engine capacity escalation among competitors, noise regulations, smog, parking...
Never mind.
Oh, wait...
if Google and Clippy fell in love...
Astonishing!
Amazing what you can do under pressure...
Oh, wait...
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