Back in the dim dark ages when VMS was state-of-the-art (cue Enya Latin chant, duck the flying missiles) I asked - why would anyone need anything other than VMS Mail to send a memo? After all it had EDT, you knew who was sending it, and you could save paper.
I was told firmly by the Power In Command that until an electronic memo could produce printouts in three colours (original, file copy, and Auditors) it would never be permitted to act as an official memo.
I had on my desk a VT100 (blue), my Heathkit-Lear Siegler dumb terminal (green) and a VT220 (amber) at the time, and pointed that out to the manager in question. He nodded, said "too confusing" and left the room. I never did find out if he got the joke or not. But it was true then that anyone not an Auditor caught with a green-ink pen was subject to dismissal. Since then I have always quashed any impulse I might feel toward believing users live on the same planet I do.
If you modelled the space elevator via say, a flat disc spinning on an air bed (the way they used to test the SS Canadarm) with a disk on the end of a tether, you might have some indication of how the forces would work wrt. a car moving up the cable, wouldn't you?.
Then, imagine some form of spring tension on the car to emulate the force of gravity (electronic? magnetic? a column of compressible gas? Someone with enough clue, time and resources to build a digital simulator?). Could this be scaled to give us an idea of the dynamics involved?
Would there be one point during the travel of the car running along the tether where the car would assume the same tendency for outward travel as the counterweight? After all, it's a tethered mass too, with it's own tendency to tangential travel. At some point, would the car start to race toward the counterweight on its own? And what would be the energies that would need to be dissipated on contact with the counterweight if this were true? What impact on the energies used for the lift and the point of greatest tension of the ribbon would this effect have?
I think this could be worked around fairly easily. Heartbeat ping to cabin device with encoded id would do it. If the personal transponder stops signalling (or if they all do) have a look through one of the the aforementioned discretely-placed cabin-cams. Analogue-only alarm signals are so last century.
I mean, I'd like it to happen, but we all know it won't, right?
Geez I wish it would though.
The last moon shot brought us teflon, velcro, the microelectronics industry, biotelemetry, boosted international communications, an image of the planet as a fragile, whole unit (borders were nowhere to be seen), heroes, a few bits of curious rock (olivine, orthoclase & other chewy selenological terms many would never have heard of otherwise, as well as David Bowie's early efforts). Oh, and an elevated level of investment in science and engineering, and the first attempts at a science of quality control*.
I want more.
*"Okay, so your defect rate is down to one in a million. The Saturn complex has 12 million parts. Which 12 parts are going to fail?"
Originally it meant the use of Italian, not Latin, for church services. The "Vulgate" was spoken by village dwellers, or "Villeins". Poor and common == bad guys.
Quoting a reference from the 1940's (ok, it was Doc Smith, but he was a product of his time and highly idiomatic in his choice of language) a pre-modern perception was that men swore and women didn't. "Men swear to keep from crying, women cry to keep from swearing" quoth Kinneson. Both functions were considered equivalent mechanisms for blowing off steam.
I'm wondering when we'll see real, cross-border wars between various divisions of Microsoft - guns & all - like Heinlein's fictional Shipstone Corporation in Friday.
True. Although you will find a lot of people who are both musicians and programmers. I've never figured out quite why, but most of the better programmers in my employ were at least half-decent musicians too.
I think it's like video cards -- visual thinkers take too much cooling to keep programming skills in the same cranium. Let me know if you hear of any decent case mods, though -- I'd like to focus on pretty software next.
Whups, business hat on here -- how do you know that? 100 employees in three firms might be 100 corporate attorneys each of whom believe a 450SEL is a minor expense. In that case, reliability and ability to get the caseload connections would be far more important.
My point - look at what your users want to do, first. See who they have to interact with, first. Choose your options based on whatever gives you the lowest aspirin bill. If it doesn't matter who they talk to, then you get to make your choices. But don't presume what your end users want, find out first. Applications determine infrastructure.
If your 100 user firm exclusively provides services to a 10000 seat government that's gone Open Office, then that's probably the way to go. If you trade Notes docs a lot, go Domino. If your major client base is Microsoft-only, you go that way.
I have some very clear ideas as to which is better, but I'd rather give my customers a vote in how they want to spend their money. If they're clueless, then there's an opportunity to educate. If I want to sell a technology, I'll find out what their priorities are first and then find the best match I can.
Don't forget geography, either. If you're surrounded by university campii, it's not such a reach to go Linux/OSS. If you're in Medicine Breath or Oatlands and the nearest tech suppliers / support office is a short plane trip away, you go with what they have.
Any decent model shop will have it as this is what is used to power IC (internal combustion) radio controlled cars.
Used to be sold under the trade name "Thimble-Drome", the stuff that taught us how to bruise fingers on tiny propellors and all about simple high-RPM two-stroke engines. Nitromethane and methanol, pretty much the same mix used in Top-Fuel Dragsters. WoOT!! Gimme some music FAST!!
More useful to the OS than apps, I'd think. Extra registers would be more useful the more processes and threads you had to support -- anything that needs a context switch would be faster if you could cache register sets that define the context in the registers themselves, rather than having to swap the register data in from slower RAM or (shudder) disk. So a good test might be to compare how the two architectures could handle massive numbers of processes and threads. More registers would favor a Citrix server over a game, perhaps. More a matter of the right usage profile than a footrace?
I am not familiar with Oracle's technical support, but it can't be worse than Siebel's, so I'm looking forward to this.
It may be a bit naiive to presume anything will change other than the rebranding of the original Siebel technical support team. I've known people in Siebel technical support, and although they're good people, they get nothing from the product engineers. It's a black box to them, too.
I hope I'm not being unfair -- my knowledge of this goes back a few years and may be out of date by now.
A mail system of a million or so users is likely to see them geographically distributed, too -- it might not be a great idea to have everyone pipe through the same ISP without a bit of soul-searching. Consider the network, and strategies for which bits reside where, or you'll be up for some fairly hairy replication costs. You have been warned. An institution of that size will probably have Sev-1 failover to an alternate geographic location as a post-911 business risk mitigation policy. Good high-end NAS with a high-bandwidth off-site replica will need to be part of your storage infrastructure, whatever tool you use. You'll need to consider how you'll handle single-instance storage too, to avoid attachment bloat. Internet usage is key to an email system but primary usage will generally always be person to person within the organisation, and you'll need to optimise that.
It's very clear that we're selecting for the ability to produce money, read the correct magazines, and our inability to spot prophylactics in the wild. And drive cars with large integral flat surfaces.
As much as I despise Lotus Domino (see earlier post) I will suggest that if you want scale, scale up rather than out. I think you can get the dog to run on a mainframe, so if you have some big iron to recycle go that way. But I still would not recommend the product to anyone -- I'd be worried about that heart-weighing moment in the afterworld.
I've designed and administered Exchange, Notes, DEC All-In-One, a few *nix based mail systems and a few others, some of them quite large (water utilities, national postal systems among them). Notes took over the role of most egregiously unpleasant mail system to set up or administer when MS Mail died. Very admin-hostile.
Argue for your favorite all you want, but friends don't specify Lotus Notes to friends.
What kind of M$ fantasy world are you living in? VB business systems? Bullshit.
Over A$35B funds under custody running through that stuff, last week -- and that's just one division of the bank. Seems real enough to me, mate. Are you going to tell the bankers they can't have it? I try that and they give me funny looks and award the contract to the next guy. Each doc has several thousand lines of code in it doing strange things like AS400 SWIFT conversions to command line based legacy systems from the opposite quarter. Generally each little bit of this cyber-duct tape takes about a half-day to write, and the users are rapt. If it looks any bigger than that the job goes to India. Users see it as a quick way around a problem, I see it as one of the few ecological niches where a programmer can still make a quid. Go figure.
Yes, there are cubic miles of it in banks. I work in a bank (one of the top 3 in our country) among cubic miles of it.
Like it or not, a startling amount of the worlds wealth resides purely as numbers in columns on Excel spreadsheets. This is particularly true of bulk investments such as managed funds, where you have hundreds of different independent fund managers sending financial data - real value, financial instructions -- to each other. Yes there are controls, but Excel is lingua franca in the halls and one of the few things consistent about the business. A VBA macro can actually keep the errors down when the alternative is massive amounts of hand-entry of figures. Ugly or not, they work, the fund accountants couldn't care a fig about version control and they're by and large happy to have their own customised copy. Means more work for us, I'm not complaining, and I'm brilliant at commenting the code.
In a way, it's back-to-basics computing -- accessible, irreverent, and sometimes a lot of fun to do. Whack Alt-F11 on the user's PC and your IDE is right there -- make a change in seconds and be the hero. The FA's trust us, but they don't trust the "IT Department" and they are cluey enough about their business to challenge us if the result is not exactly 100% spot on correct.
First (but not foremost) in my opinion the sooner "compatibility with Microsoft" is dropped as the IT yardstick (really it is just a canard)
Sorry, *ding* thank you for playing, join us in reality as soon as you're ready. In your own time, don't rush.
It isn't compatibility with Microsoft that's at issue, but compatibility with business systems that are bulwharked with rivers of existing code. VBA code stuffed inside the gentle spreadsheet and word doc. There are cubic miles of it in banks. This must be managed, and it's a massive change. Yes, they will be far better off from the experience, but there are up-front costs to convert that must be addressed and not to do so would be seen as grossly negligent. Bureaucrats (and yes, I speak fluent Bureaucrat) must be seen as covering all the bases before they make the change. MS standards (particularly document standards and those devilish EULA's) are ugly on so many levels, but nobody wants to push their existing business systems over a cliff to accomplish the change any quicker than they can.
In any large organisation who must keep accounts, budgets etc. there is usually enough VBA in circulation to sink a battleship. Anyone up for a decent VBA emulator or transition/conversion product?
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I was told firmly by the Power In Command that until an electronic memo could produce printouts in three colours (original, file copy, and Auditors) it would never be permitted to act as an official memo.
I had on my desk a VT100 (blue), my Heathkit-Lear Siegler dumb terminal (green) and a VT220 (amber) at the time, and pointed that out to the manager in question. He nodded, said "too confusing" and left the room. I never did find out if he got the joke or not. But it was true then that anyone not an Auditor caught with a green-ink pen was subject to dismissal. Since then I have always quashed any impulse I might feel toward believing users live on the same planet I do.
Then, imagine some form of spring tension on the car to emulate the force of gravity (electronic? magnetic? a column of compressible gas? Someone with enough clue, time and resources to build a digital simulator?). Could this be scaled to give us an idea of the dynamics involved?
Would there be one point during the travel of the car running along the tether where the car would assume the same tendency for outward travel as the counterweight? After all, it's a tethered mass too, with it's own tendency to tangential travel. At some point, would the car start to race toward the counterweight on its own? And what would be the energies that would need to be dissipated on contact with the counterweight if this were true? What impact on the energies used for the lift and the point of greatest tension of the ribbon would this effect have?
I think this could be worked around fairly easily. Heartbeat ping to cabin device with encoded id would do it. If the personal transponder stops signalling (or if they all do) have a look through one of the the aforementioned discretely-placed cabin-cams. Analogue-only alarm signals are so last century.
Geez I wish it would though.
The last moon shot brought us teflon, velcro, the microelectronics industry, biotelemetry, boosted international communications, an image of the planet as a fragile, whole unit (borders were nowhere to be seen), heroes, a few bits of curious rock (olivine, orthoclase & other chewy selenological terms many would never have heard of otherwise, as well as David Bowie's early efforts). Oh, and an elevated level of investment in science and engineering, and the first attempts at a science of quality control*.
I want more.
*"Okay, so your defect rate is down to one in a million. The Saturn complex has 12 million parts. Which 12 parts are going to fail?"
Originally it meant the use of Italian, not Latin, for church services. The "Vulgate" was spoken by village dwellers, or "Villeins". Poor and common == bad guys.
Quoting a reference from the 1940's (ok, it was Doc Smith, but he was a product of his time and highly idiomatic in his choice of language) a pre-modern perception was that men swore and women didn't. "Men swear to keep from crying, women cry to keep from swearing" quoth Kinneson. Both functions were considered equivalent mechanisms for blowing off steam.
I'm wondering when we'll see real, cross-border wars between various divisions of Microsoft - guns & all - like Heinlein's fictional Shipstone Corporation in Friday.
I think it's like video cards -- visual thinkers take too much cooling to keep programming skills in the same cranium. Let me know if you hear of any decent case mods, though -- I'd like to focus on pretty software next.
But... I iz a code artiste !
Whups, business hat on here -- how do you know that? 100 employees in three firms might be 100 corporate attorneys each of whom believe a 450SEL is a minor expense. In that case, reliability and ability to get the caseload connections would be far more important.
My point - look at what your users want to do, first. See who they have to interact with, first. Choose your options based on whatever gives you the lowest aspirin bill. If it doesn't matter who they talk to, then you get to make your choices. But don't presume what your end users want, find out first. Applications determine infrastructure.
If your 100 user firm exclusively provides services to a 10000 seat government that's gone Open Office, then that's probably the way to go. If you trade Notes docs a lot, go Domino. If your major client base is Microsoft-only, you go that way.
I have some very clear ideas as to which is better, but I'd rather give my customers a vote in how they want to spend their money. If they're clueless, then there's an opportunity to educate. If I want to sell a technology, I'll find out what their priorities are first and then find the best match I can.
Don't forget geography, either. If you're surrounded by university campii, it's not such a reach to go Linux/OSS. If you're in Medicine Breath or Oatlands and the nearest tech suppliers / support office is a short plane trip away, you go with what they have.
Used to be sold under the trade name "Thimble-Drome", the stuff that taught us how to bruise fingers on tiny propellors and all about simple high-RPM two-stroke engines. Nitromethane and methanol, pretty much the same mix used in Top-Fuel Dragsters. WoOT!! Gimme some music FAST!!
These sort of scams date from the early 1930's. Perhaps people forget after a while, and they re-emerge.
Nothing you can code but what you know
Nothing you can type that doesn't load
Nothing you can write that doesn't look like a clean compile
It's Easy (dum dah dum dah dum dah dee)
All you need is VI (LAH DAH Dah dah dah dee)...
Thank you John, and I hope we passed the audition.
More useful to the OS than apps, I'd think. Extra registers would be more useful the more processes and threads you had to support -- anything that needs a context switch would be faster if you could cache register sets that define the context in the registers themselves, rather than having to swap the register data in from slower RAM or (shudder) disk. So a good test might be to compare how the two architectures could handle massive numbers of processes and threads. More registers would favor a Citrix server over a game, perhaps. More a matter of the right usage profile than a footrace?
It may be a bit naiive to presume anything will change other than the rebranding of the original Siebel technical support team. I've known people in Siebel technical support, and although they're good people, they get nothing from the product engineers. It's a black box to them, too.
I hope I'm not being unfair -- my knowledge of this goes back a few years and may be out of date by now.
What did you think he was trying to do? Microsoft has been using Siebel for years. Sapper technique.
A mail system of a million or so users is likely to see them geographically distributed, too -- it might not be a great idea to have everyone pipe through the same ISP without a bit of soul-searching. Consider the network, and strategies for which bits reside where, or you'll be up for some fairly hairy replication costs. You have been warned. An institution of that size will probably have Sev-1 failover to an alternate geographic location as a post-911 business risk mitigation policy. Good high-end NAS with a high-bandwidth off-site replica will need to be part of your storage infrastructure, whatever tool you use. You'll need to consider how you'll handle single-instance storage too, to avoid attachment bloat. Internet usage is key to an email system but primary usage will generally always be person to person within the organisation, and you'll need to optimise that.
"If the human brain were simple enough to understand, humans would be too simple to understand it." Kurt Goedel? Can't remember, brain's too small.
It's very clear that we're selecting for the ability to produce money, read the correct magazines, and our inability to spot prophylactics in the wild. And drive cars with large integral flat surfaces.
As much as I despise Lotus Domino (see earlier post) I will suggest that if you want scale, scale up rather than out. I think you can get the dog to run on a mainframe, so if you have some big iron to recycle go that way. But I still would not recommend the product to anyone -- I'd be worried about that heart-weighing moment in the afterworld.
Argue for your favorite all you want, but friends don't specify Lotus Notes to friends.
Over A$35B funds under custody running through that stuff, last week -- and that's just one division of the bank. Seems real enough to me, mate. Are you going to tell the bankers they can't have it? I try that and they give me funny looks and award the contract to the next guy. Each doc has several thousand lines of code in it doing strange things like AS400 SWIFT conversions to command line based legacy systems from the opposite quarter. Generally each little bit of this cyber-duct tape takes about a half-day to write, and the users are rapt. If it looks any bigger than that the job goes to India. Users see it as a quick way around a problem, I see it as one of the few ecological niches where a programmer can still make a quid. Go figure.
Like it or not, a startling amount of the worlds wealth resides purely as numbers in columns on Excel spreadsheets. This is particularly true of bulk investments such as managed funds, where you have hundreds of different independent fund managers sending financial data - real value, financial instructions -- to each other. Yes there are controls, but Excel is lingua franca in the halls and one of the few things consistent about the business. A VBA macro can actually keep the errors down when the alternative is massive amounts of hand-entry of figures. Ugly or not, they work, the fund accountants couldn't care a fig about version control and they're by and large happy to have their own customised copy. Means more work for us, I'm not complaining, and I'm brilliant at commenting the code.
In a way, it's back-to-basics computing -- accessible, irreverent, and sometimes a lot of fun to do. Whack Alt-F11 on the user's PC and your IDE is right there -- make a change in seconds and be the hero. The FA's trust us, but they don't trust the "IT Department" and they are cluey enough about their business to challenge us if the result is not exactly 100% spot on correct.
Hey, I just polished those shoes!
Sorry, *ding* thank you for playing, join us in reality as soon as you're ready. In your own time, don't rush.
It isn't compatibility with Microsoft that's at issue, but compatibility with business systems that are bulwharked with rivers of existing code. VBA code stuffed inside the gentle spreadsheet and word doc. There are cubic miles of it in banks. This must be managed, and it's a massive change. Yes, they will be far better off from the experience, but there are up-front costs to convert that must be addressed and not to do so would be seen as grossly negligent. Bureaucrats (and yes, I speak fluent Bureaucrat) must be seen as covering all the bases before they make the change. MS standards (particularly document standards and those devilish EULA's) are ugly on so many levels, but nobody wants to push their existing business systems over a cliff to accomplish the change any quicker than they can.
It ain't ideology, it's survival.
In any large organisation who must keep accounts, budgets etc. there is usually enough VBA in circulation to sink a battleship. Anyone up for a decent VBA emulator or transition/conversion product?