Seriously. If you find you have less to do with, do a bit of project triage and abandon the bits that are desirable but have no hope of success in your current financial climate. Put 'em in a shoebox, they'er not going anywhere -- no matter how badly they're needed or who wants them. Save the money. Raise the quality of what's left because if you do even one thing well, you can generally market that.
If the company is having trouble they need to realign their strategic focus, not dim the lights.
The operating principle here is that if you make people wait, they'll generally forgive and forget -- people are used to waiting and not getting stuff. But if you screw something up they'll remember you forever.
Heck yes. I've been in IT thirty five years and in the SCA for about ten. I advanced in my mundane job more quickly as a result of my medieval pursuits (primarily due to learning how to herd cats) than I did by learning another package or gaining another cert.
I suppose that indicates modern corporate culture is primarily Feudal in nature. Hmmm....
Actually, I think modern digital music was inspired by early data processing rooms where a number of interpreting card punches were working. Think of a dozen or so industrial-grade washing machines all out of balance going thump-thump-thump, each in a slightly different frequency, plus a few 132 column heavy drum printers driven by forms control tapes. The beat frequencies in the next office (where I had a desk) were nearly enough to induce a person to suicide or a career in higher mathematics.
Get one pin bent on a CRT display cable and you can surely and silently fry your mobo as well. That lesson cost me (okay, the client) about 3 pc's. Lesson -- check the cable pins before you plug it in.
Of course there was the national retailer a few years back who installed their own air conditioning -- their house brand -- because it met the BTU rating we required. They killed a lot of hardware with it, across the country.
Nothing wrong with the air conditioners, but it helps if you don't plumb both the fresh air intake and outflow into the well-insulated server room...
Do you actually thing that anybody would be stupid enough to pay for a study with flawed data?
You're joking, right? It's called "cooking the stats" and it's done regularly by marketing firms. Greater than 95% of all terrorists are regular users of orange juice. Read "How to Lie with Statistics" (Stanley Erickson) if you can find a copy.
I'm not comfortable that the question is closed yet. Would slowing down the Earth's rotation a nanosecond or two provide enough energy? Could ocean currents provide the necessary energy for launch?
What if you could control the effective length of the cable so you could launch it with a shorter length, then unreel it to geostationary orbit after escape velocity is reached? What if the cable was built in two pieces, one on the ground and a spinning section dropping down from orbit?
Maybe I should go back to fly fishing and flying my kite, but I can't help thinking that when our descendants use their elevators they'll know that the ultimate solution was something clean and elegant, if colossal.
Actually, my wife's Nikon does have virtual address capabilities. Not LRU page management, but it shows up as a tree under Windows Explorer when she plugs it it. So it seems Nikon at least has already been subverted to the world of GUI. Works quite well, anyhow.
Cutler's original kernel was written in assembler. I assume that it was completely replaced with something in C.
It was rewritten in Bliss-32. VMS seemed to be 75% data structures, 10% interrupts, 10% code and 5% Tibetan prayer wheel.
Was VMS designed with clustering in mind from the start? Did clusters really get going with v5?
IIRC clustering started showing itself around V4.6. V5 brought in a new memory manager, global buffering and a few more odds & sods.
Memory from long-ago very long weekend, doing VMS upgrade. Someone asked me "what are you doing now?" as I was taking the second tape backup of the system disk. I replied "I'm standing here watching the tape drive spinning around and talking". Try that sentence a few times with different punctuation. Lack of sleep has its hazards...
By many reports, VMS was killed by Ken Olson, the founder of DEC. He believed in proprietary hardware, which kept the market closed and proprietary as well -- the competition had cheaper disk available, so down went the VAX and it's closely-locked four-mode operating system. Mind you the standards of the day (or lack thereof) sort of encouraged it, but FUD was alive and well at The Mill in Maynard and had a lot to do with their gradual decline. (I jumped ship when they sold off RDB and AltaVista). DCL was pretty amazing for a command language back then -- especially compared with JCL or the clattering monstrosities that ran GCOS. DCL had elegant lexical functions, if-then-else controls. Batch control was a pig, but worked after a fashion as long as you didn't try to control batch queues with batch queues.
The killer blow was when the architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, moved over to Microsoft.
Security suffered from the transition because Vax/VMS had KESU shells and the Intel platform didn't support the Exec mode. Each shell had specific instructions that could only run in that shell, and it's own discrete address space. A user program couldn't write to the kernel, or to a device driver, or to any structures managed by the Supervisor layer. Since user mode exe's were not able to reach protected address spaces where the other bits lived, exploits were few and far between.
You could start the thing out as a very large kite to get the initial velocity going. By the time it reached the outer atmosphere shortening the cable could do the rest. Perhaps a deep ocean current could act as the source of energy for shortening the cable.
I meant a tension lift, not a compressive lift... think Tibetan prayer drum, spinning between hands, the little clapper swinging up as the drum begins to spin... a change in the moment arm of a sufficiently long weighted cable stretched out across the equator should lift the end of the cable into orbit without compressive structures or direct thrust to orbit.
...basically build the elevator on the ground, make it long enough (say, would 500 miles long do it? 1000? I'm thinking in terms of Pak Protector scale projects here) -- presupposing you could get that much land to lay it out, etc. could you just anchor one end, weight the other, shorten the cable and let the change in the moment of intertia fling the sucker up?
Not all nanotech is rosy. Even if we avoid the green goo problem, we have to worry about our adaptations. Stephenson's story about nano/meat interfaces in pursuit of justice are a *lot* scarier than Robocop.
Yeah... you sell the solution and let the little people work out the details.
I've been on more than one project where the high-end technical architecture was decided at the golf course -- after which, half the little people were burned by trying to make it all work, and the other half were burned by saying it wouldn't work. Nobody thought to blame the bloody golfer.
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If the company is having trouble they need to realign their strategic focus, not dim the lights.
The operating principle here is that if you make people wait, they'll generally forgive and forget -- people are used to waiting and not getting stuff. But if you screw something up they'll remember you forever.
I suppose that indicates modern corporate culture is primarily Feudal in nature. Hmmm....
Actually, I think modern digital music was inspired by early data processing rooms where a number of interpreting card punches were working. Think of a dozen or so industrial-grade washing machines all out of balance going thump-thump-thump, each in a slightly different frequency, plus a few 132 column heavy drum printers driven by forms control tapes. The beat frequencies in the next office (where I had a desk) were nearly enough to induce a person to suicide or a career in higher mathematics.
Nawp. It was Edgar Froese, of Tangerine Dream.
Get one pin bent on a CRT display cable and you can surely and silently fry your mobo as well. That lesson cost me (okay, the client) about 3 pc's. Lesson -- check the cable pins before you plug it in.
Nothing wrong with the air conditioners, but it helps if you don't plumb both the fresh air intake and outflow into the well-insulated server room...
Depends on the size of the room. If it's a few petameters in width, perhaps.
My bad ... author is Huff, Darrell, and Geis, Irving
(1993) ISBN: (0-393-31072-8)
You're joking, right? It's called "cooking the stats" and it's done regularly by marketing firms. Greater than 95% of all terrorists are regular users of orange juice. Read "How to Lie with Statistics" (Stanley Erickson) if you can find a copy.
Perhaps not, but it will cease to be the default after a while. Copper will be sold for it's relative security, perceived or not.
What, for not telling the marketing flacks who insisted on that spec they were being silly? I suspect a "white muntiny" (ref NOTB, Heinlein).
Hey, think of it as spray-on undies. You can wear your fashions over it. Think of it... Too Sexy For the Spacewalk...
Google is known for trying to attract the best people, not the best products. I suspect they were hiring the brain, not the browser.
What if you could control the effective length of the cable so you could launch it with a shorter length, then unreel it to geostationary orbit after escape velocity is reached? What if the cable was built in two pieces, one on the ground and a spinning section dropping down from orbit?
Maybe I should go back to fly fishing and flying my kite, but I can't help thinking that when our descendants use their elevators they'll know that the ultimate solution was something clean and elegant, if colossal.
Actually, my wife's Nikon does have virtual address capabilities. Not LRU page management, but it shows up as a tree under Windows Explorer when she plugs it it. So it seems Nikon at least has already been subverted to the world of GUI. Works quite well, anyhow.
Awww.. darn. And I so wanted to $run/detached a job to $purge old versions of the updated images after each scan. Could have been fun.
It fit on an RA-81, didn't it? 456MB. My daughter was given a 512MB USB memory stick with her laptop.
It was rewritten in Bliss-32. VMS seemed to be 75% data structures, 10% interrupts, 10% code and 5% Tibetan prayer wheel.
Was VMS designed with clustering in mind from the start? Did clusters really get going with v5?
IIRC clustering started showing itself around V4.6. V5 brought in a new memory manager, global buffering and a few more odds & sods.
Memory from long-ago very long weekend, doing VMS upgrade. Someone asked me "what are you doing now?" as I was taking the second tape backup of the system disk. I replied "I'm standing here watching the tape drive spinning around and talking". Try that sentence a few times with different punctuation. Lack of sleep has its hazards...
The killer blow was when the architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, moved over to Microsoft.
Security suffered from the transition because Vax/VMS had KESU shells and the Intel platform didn't support the Exec mode. Each shell had specific instructions that could only run in that shell, and it's own discrete address space. A user program couldn't write to the kernel, or to a device driver, or to any structures managed by the Supervisor layer. Since user mode exe's were not able to reach protected address spaces where the other bits lived, exploits were few and far between.
You could start the thing out as a very large kite to get the initial velocity going. By the time it reached the outer atmosphere shortening the cable could do the rest. Perhaps a deep ocean current could act as the source of energy for shortening the cable.
I meant a tension lift, not a compressive lift ... think Tibetan prayer drum, spinning between hands, the little clapper swinging up as the drum begins to spin... a change in the moment arm of a sufficiently long weighted cable stretched out across the equator should lift the end of the cable into orbit without compressive structures or direct thrust to orbit.
...basically build the elevator on the ground, make it long enough (say, would 500 miles long do it? 1000? I'm thinking in terms of Pak Protector scale projects here) -- presupposing you could get that much land to lay it out, etc. could you just anchor one end, weight the other, shorten the cable and let the change in the moment of intertia fling the sucker up?
Not all nanotech is rosy. Even if we avoid the green goo problem, we have to worry about our adaptations. Stephenson's story about nano/meat interfaces in pursuit of justice are a *lot* scarier than Robocop.
I've been on more than one project where the high-end technical architecture was decided at the golf course -- after which, half the little people were burned by trying to make it all work, and the other half were burned by saying it wouldn't work. Nobody thought to blame the bloody golfer.
Whups, sorry, should have clicked on the link. Thought he was talking about Prof. Julius Sumner Miller, known later as "Professor Wonderful".