Back in the bad old mainframe days, when IBMs and the seven dwarves roamed the world, this was the norm. When you "purchased" (ie. leased) a product from a major vendor, you paid by capacity. Regardless of the capacity you leased, the vendor installed the high end box at your location, and crippled it with a restraining lever, CPU limiter, or some similar governor.
In one shop I was in, the shop was paying IBM for a line printer that could print X lines per hour. They needed to upgrade to 2*X capability. They paid the upgrade price, and an installation date was set. The shop set aside the loading dock and etc. in anticipation of the new printer. Come installation day, an IBM rep showed up, went into the printer room, opened the printer, and removed a restraint pin. He locked the printer up again, and lo and behold, the printer now had 2*X capacity.
On the technical side, this seems dishonest. On the business side, it's simply a logical step. If you're selling capacity, it doesn't make any sense to use different devices if you don't have to: support and installation are the same, etc.
The problem with the argument "if it's the same media, then it should be the same price" is that it doesn't have the result most people expect. If Windows XP workstation is $150, and Windows XP Server is $500, even though they come on the same media, demanding that the price distinction be eliminated won't result in a $150 Server; it will result in something closer to a $400 Workstation. The high price of the servers helps underwrite some of the cost of the workstations. Break that distinction, and you end up with cheaper servers but more expensive workstations. Then people complain that they're paying for server functions they don't want or need.
As for carrying around an extra eight cylinders, that's not really a valid analogy. Limiting connections and etc. doesn't require additional components, and installation of server specific functions doesn't (or shouldn't, anyway) be part of the install process for the cheaper workstation.
That's not to say you don't have a valid point, but you're applying technical expectations to a business decision, and they don't match up well.
Personally, I had no issue with a distinction of server/workstation. But when you start seeing things like "Home Basic", "Home Advanced", and "Home Premium", where even the vendor can't keep it all straight, it's out of control.
If Microsoft were smart (always a risk), they'd break the product line down using human readable expectations. By that, I mean having home versions like "Gamer" (loaded with DirectX goodies), "Web Surfer" (enhanced firewall, aimed the email/web only user), "Photo/Video Editor", and "Media Center" (all the audio/video/DVD stuff). There would be as many versions as they are currently proposing, but it might cut down on the confusion a tad.
Frequently engineers may know how things physically work, but are not familiar with things beyond their narrow specialty
That reminds me a of classic line from a frustrated contract lawyer I once worked with:
"I don't care how smart our engineers are. No customer is going to accept a contract only using mathematical equations, Venn diagrams, and anime and Star Trek references!"
I dont know a fucking thing about how to design an embedded software application, but I'm a computer guy.
I understand your point. I do know how to design an embedded software app, and how to program mainframes, because I've spent years doing both in the past. But by the same token, I know very little about web design, or object oriented databases. I certainly know less about Java than any recent graduates. Being in a profession does not make you a master of all aspects of it.
Maybe being a nurse means a fucking bit more then just knowing details about medications (hint, that is the doctors job, not the nurse)
My mom's a nurse, and the RNs routinely catch doctors, especially the younger doctors, tripping up medications. Nurses cannot prescribe meds, but they administer them. YMMV based on state/country laws, of course. Of course, there are doctors that do incandescent when a nurse points out to him that he's prescribed something lethal, and there are doctors who thank the nurse profusely for catching their mistake. Guess which doctors the nurses prefer, and go out of their way to help.
That brings up another point. Job stress tends to be self reinforcing. People that are stressed out are often highly unpleasant to work with (to be polite about it), so other people don't go out of their way to make life easier for them. They won't try to make it harder, but they don't give the benefit of the doubt. That, in turn, leads to more stress, because they have to do everything on their own, since no one really wants to work with them.
When the T&V or QA guys find a problem in my code, I usually get a call from them before they start writing up the paperwork. Sometimes they made a mistake in their test, sometimes it's a fuzzy requirement, and sometimes it's a bug in my code. We talk about it, and usually we figure out what it is together. If we agree it's a bug of mine, I start looking into it before they've offically written it up, so I often have a fix ready by the time the paperwork hits my desk informing me of it. Therefore, I tend to make my deadlines. I also get assigned very few unreproducable bugs.
Another coder I know utterly detests T&V people ("they're morons; the only reason anyone would be a tester is because they aren't smart enough to be a developer"), and treats them with complete contempt. And so when T&V finds a problem in the code from this developer (who I have no qualms about saying is stronger technically than I am), nobody calls him, because he's so unpleasant to deal with. Whether it's a requirement issue, a testing problem, or a real bug, they always submit it as a bug. He gets no warning ahead of time, and unlike me, a lot of the bug reports that are submitted against him really are not his bugs.
As a result, it reinforces his opinion that the T&V people are morons, and that he's the only one in the company who has a clue. And, of course, the fact that he is a stronger developer than many of the rest of us, combined with the fact that he gets more false positives, just proves to him that the world is out to get him. It's a vicious circle.
You've paraphrased something I've being saying for decades. Back in my university days, I was a TA. I quickly learned that if 1 or 2 of my students (in a class of 15) didn't get it, it was them. If 12 or 13 didn't get it, then it was me. It meant I hadn't explained it properly, or I'd made a false assumption about what they knew.
The other important thing is that even when it was one student who didn't get it, it didn't mean that the student was an idiot. It often meant he or she simply marched to a different drummer. I had one student pass by the skin of her teeth, and even that was only after considerable tutoring. But that same student went on to get a PhD in a totally different discipline. There's a difference between being a fool and being a fish out of water.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in. Engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this, because unlike writers, musicians, or artists, we deal with deterministic systems. We design, build, and fix things so that they are reliably predictable. But people aren't reliably predictable, and expecting them to be is going to stress you out.
I've seen people get bitterly angry because someone didn't know the difference between an AMD processor and an Intel one. I know one person who, when a co-worker on a project casually asked why Linux would be a better choice than Windows, got so angry his hands were physically trembling with rage, and he had to walk out of the room, because "otherwise I'd have to punch that stupid bastard in the face for such a retarded question". I know one person who has exploded in a rage in a restaurant, because the waitress brought his sandwich on the wrong type of bread.
Not surprisingly, two of the people I know like this have already had heart attacks.
The problem with stress like this isn't that there are foolish or annoying questions about. Of course there are. Always have been, always will be. The problem is how seriously you take it. If you treat foolish questions as personal insults, if you expect everyone to have your level of expertise in your field, then you're going to be stressed out. Let's face it; if you get angry about bread, the problem isn't with the bread.
If a discussion of bracing styles forces you to leave the room because you're going to hit someone, you're either wound too tight, or you're in the wrong profession. Possibly both.
Sit back, take a break, and wonder why it is that you're always so angry about everything, when everyone else seems to take it in stride. And if you come to the conclusion that "that's because everyone is stupid and I'm not", resign yourself to be miserable and angry for the rest of your life, cause life isn't going to change any time soon.
Thirded. I have a friend who is a brilliant photographer, but she is, in her own words, "so not a computer person". Her 2002 era PC started to go (hard drive was reporting SMART errors on boot), plus with all of her new cameras and printers, the old 1GB memory in that PC just didn't cut it. So, we went to get a new PC.
She picked up a Gateway from Tiger Direct. Not bad specs: 500GB disk, 4GB ram, and I believe it was either 2.4 or 2.8Ghz. More than enough power to run her Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird.
Or so I thought.
First off, her HP printer explicitly did not support Vista. Fortunately, a similar HP printer did, but that printer didn't have a compact flash reader, so that functionality was lost. It didn't really matter, since my friend never prints direct from the ram card anyway, preferring to touch up things with Photoshop, but still, it was a loss of function.
Secondly, and more importantly, we couldn't install the scanner software. No way, no how. The Samsung site claimed that the existing driver supported Vista, so we had no clue. No error messages, nothing in the event viewer, nothing.
But worst of all, the copy of Photoshop CS3 wouldn't validate. It would install, but only in 30 day demo mode. All attempts to validate with the Adobe licence server died silently, with no details logged. We even tried going back to the old CS2, but that failed, too.
Finally, a Google search found a number of people with similar problems. Most were tearing their hair out, having uninstalled and reinstalled both Photoshop and Vista a dozen times, with both Microsoft and Adobe tech support completely unable to resolve it.
Finally, one bloke posted the answer. "Are you running PC-cillin?". Lo and behold, the preinstalled crapware included PC-Cillin, which considered Photoshop's attempt to connect to the licence server to be a trojan horse, which it blocked. Likewise, the installation of the scanner software service was considered an attack.
By removing the vicious little piece of code, suddenly all of my friend's programs worked, CS3 could be registered, the scanner functioned, and the PC ran about 50% faster, as well.
My only question is why on earth are vendors willing to drown their PCs with this type of crap that makes using their machines feel like sucking mud through a straw? I know the answer; the crapware vendors pay them to install their stuff. But it's still a pathetic situation.
In the final analysis, my friend's poor impression of Vista was completely attributable to non-Vista issues. I wonder how much of Vista's image problem is due to non-Vista crapware.
Since people either have to install Vista on existing hardware (with legacy device driver problems), it's usually recommended that if you want Vista, you get a new machine. But with almost(?) all new Vista PCs being weighed down with performance-sucking crap installed at the dealership (so to speak), that's just as bad a situation as getting bad drivers on existing hardware.
Heard this on 680 News (www.680news.com, though I can't find the story online) on the way to work this morning. Evidently, some rocket scientists did exactly that. One was using a cell phone at the time, and a 14,000 volt arc decided to phone home, right through his head. He "suffered neurological damage", and apparently feels his head is burning whenever he lowers his arm, or something like that (I was paying more attention on driving than listening).
Anyone heard this one? A quick google search didn't find anything, but 680 usually plays things straight in their news reporting, at least.
A more popular example for the under-25 set would be the Kryptonians in John Byrne's rebooted Superman series. The Kryptonians were so isolated that it was practically a crime to interact face to face; even the act of mating was done through genetic sampling in a lab.
As Byrne said, he wanted to show a Krypton that deserved to blow up.
Looking at Vista vs XP, I've got a sense of deja vu from the old OS/2 v2 vs Windows days. In both cases, the newer OS (OS/2, Vista) was internally a better operating system than the predecessor/competition, but suffered a reputation of being slow and unfriendly to use, which generated a stigma against the new OS.
In both cases, the newer OS (OS/2, Vista) actually was a superior operating system, but lost points with users due to UI problems. Both were considered confusing and slow by a large part of the user community, including the tech press. But looking at the fundamentals, like kernel robustness, stability, security, etc., the newer OS actually was/is better. The achilles heel was a weaker user "experience": poor or nonexistant device drivers, annoying GUI features that couldn't be disabled, etc. And in both cases, the vendor produced a successor (Warp, Windows 7) that was basically the previous OS with the serial numbers filed off, but with UI enhancements/bug fixes, rather than base OS changes. Just as Warp was OS/2 v2.2 under the covers, Windows 7 is Vista 1.1, or however the hell you'd represent an incremental upgrade using Microsoft's version number of the week scheme.
I remember when OS/2 v2.0 came out, it was panned for its' horrid installation procedure. This was back in the days when everyone installed their own operating systems, so this was a big deal. For many, it was a deal breaker; people who failed to install OS/2 would try to install Windows 3.0 (and a week later, 3.1), and if successful, became Windows users instead of OS/2 users.
IBM spent a lot of time on this issue, as you can imagine. I installed OS/2 and Windows 3.x more times than I care to admit, logging the time and my reactions to it. And now, we come to the actual point of this post.
The most interesting statistic that I remember was that despite the most common complaint being that the OS/2 install was horribly slow compared to Windows, wall clock time spent was almost exactly the same. Depending on the hardware configuration, OS/2 install time was almost always within 5% of the Windows install time. And yet, Windows installation got glowing reviews as being speedy, while OS/2 installation was a chore.
The difference was the user experience. People installing Windows got coloured screens, filled with information about the new OS ("did you know that..."). Microsoft put enough text on the screen that users read while doing the install. In comparison, OS/2 just put up a dead, black screen, with a textual process bar at the bottom, saying "1%... 2%", etc.
Functionally, there was no difference. If it took OS/2 93 seconds to install drivers for an Adaptec SCSI card, it would take Windows 90-95 seconds to install drivers, as well. But during those 90+ seconds, the Windows user was scrolling through two pages of text explaining some new Windows feature, while the OS/2 user watched a dead black screen, while his watch went tick... tick... tick.
If I interrupted someone installing OS/2, they'd appreciate the distraction. If you interrupted someone installing Windows, they'd usually ask me to come back in half an hour; they didn't want to miss anything during the install. OS/2 users *did* want to miss the install.
I think that Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 7 that they did so long ago with Windows 3. They're not changing the underlying OS in any way. They're responding to the user reaction to the OS, and fixing the bad user experience. And that's a good thing.
When addressing the installation issue a lot of IBMers (read: execs) completely ignored what I've said above, instead pointing out that the wall clock time spent installing OS/2 was the same as Windows, and therefore complaints were due to whiners, people prejudiced against IBM, etc. Fortunately, Microsoft appears, at least on the surface, to be responding to user complaints and reacting to them.
Windows 7 will not be simply a new paint job and some detailing on Vista; there will be some new features added. But the base operating system will be the same, just as OS/2 Warp was an improvement over OS/2 2.x (especially in TCP/IP networking). But the end result will hopefully be a win for end users, and that will be a good thing.
A few years ago, I applied to a Fortune 500 company for a specific position. The posted job requirements and my resume were practically mirror images of one another. The interviews went well, and then came... the test.
The test was done online. It was one of these idiotic automated C++ tests with multiple choice questions. Most of the questions, about 80%, were parlor tricks, ie. syntax arcana. It was multiple choice, so the questions all had predetermined solutions, even when the correct answer was something totally different. What do you do when the Solaris 2.4 compiler throws an error 5718 on multithreaded code? Well, I don't know what you do, but when I get an error message I've never seen before, I read the compiler manual and/or help file, and check Sun's website and comp.lang.c++. Of course, none of those were options. You were expected to know, off the top of your head, what compiler option to add to suppress the error. The fact that suppressing a meaningful error was a bad thing to do was obviously lost on the test maker, as well.
Needless to say, I bombed. Apparently, so did everyone applying for this position who was over the age of 30. The ones who passed were those who were two years or less out of school, ie. fresh from an academic environment. Consequently, they hired a cadre of programmers exclusively under 25, and had an 18 month development cycle that would be kindly called disastrous.
What struck me about this test, which the company put great stock in, was that there was absolutely no way for anyone to show initiative, ingenuity, or creativity, which is what they were supposedly looking for. It was a coding test that didn't permit you to actually code. The presumption was that good coders were keen on arcane syntax, and those who were keen on arcane syntax (ie. language lawyers) were excellent programmers.
In my experience, that's not only untrue, it's completely inverted. Coders who delve into the arcane aspects of multiple inheritance while creating polymorphic templates are the sort of coders that build disastrously over-architected systems that no one but they (and sometimes not even they) can understand. Testing to see if the candidate was a "clever" coder was a recipe for disaster.
Since then, if I've ever been asked to take tests in interviews (and I have), I insist that it be a human-reviewed test. When people ask why, I show them the printout of that online test.
Now, I've got 20+ years under my belt, so I realized that this was nonsense. I feel sorry for the guys who were 5 years out of school who were crushed by that test; I met one who felt he must be a complete incompetent because he flunked it.
I would have loved to get my first DVD player for $500; that was about $150 cheaper than the one I ended up with. It was a 5 disc Sony, ironically enough. I still have it, but it's not plugged in, having been replaced by a cheap ($59) Philips 642.
I was originally going to wait a few years to go to DVD, except I'm an anime geek, and all the anime vendors simply stopped subtitling tapes around 1999/2000. Either you went with horrible dubs, or you took the plunge and bought a DVD player.
Outside of the superb sound, which beats all the other DVD players I've used into the ground, that $650 beast, which was a major win back in 1998, loses in almost all respects to even modern $30 players. It doesn't support DVD-RW. It doesn't support DVD+RW. It doesn't support 700MB CDRs. It doesn't support 700MB CD-RWs. It doesn't support SVCD. It doesn't support DiVX or MP3, let alone OGG.
Back in the day, if I wanted to show my own content, I had to convert it to VCD format (not SVCD), burn it to a 650MB (not 700MB) CD-RW (not a CDR), and *that* would work. Other than that, it was purchased/rented media or nothing. Remember, this was a $650 high-end player.
Today, it's obsolete. It's as good as a the day I bought it, and for playing musical CDs, it's superb. But it's been surpassed by an order of magnitude by cheaper no-name knockoffs.
Today's DVDs are far superior to any VHS tape, and the DVD experience itself is vastly superior - no rewinding, no stretched tapes, no degradation of video on replay, no fast forward/rewind for 10 minutes to find the scene you're looking for, etc.
For Blu-Ray to supersede DVDs, it's going to have to provide an equally compelling argument. I doubt that's currently possible. I certainly doubt it will happen when Blu-Ray disks are still four times the cost of DVDs, and players are upwards of twenty times the cost of an entry-level DVD player.
The disks and players will drop in price. It's just an issue of time. If they don't, the Blu-Ray camp may find itself outflanked by digital distribution rather than a competing disk format.
Like many./ geeks, I'm an anime fan. I also watch a lot non-animated movies with subtitles.
I'm an old fart, got my first Betamax back around 1983 or so. Eventually, in 1990 I switched to VHS because I wanted to, you know, be able to rent movies.
As anyone who watched/rented foreign language films can attest, just getting a subtitled tape was often a pain. The stores had to stock two different copies of the title: one subtitled, one dubbed. For anime titles, this was extremely difficult, because 90% of the public prefers dubs, no matter how bad. So, a lot of the big chains simply didn't carry subs. And for the stores that did, the cost of a subtitled version was often 25% higher than the dub, despite the fact that subtitling costs are insignificant compare to the cost of dubbing and remastering audio.
And of course, you'd often rent a sub, go home, and find that the clerk had accidentally given you the dub anyway.
DVDs made that all go away. The dub and the sub were the same disk.
Sure, it didn't hurt that DVDs also had higher capacity; most series that were released with 2-3 episodes per VHS tape came out with 4 episodes on the DVD. And of course, the DVD was higher quality. And DVDs didn't stretch/degrade, and they didn't need to be rewound, etc. But all those factors were secondary to the fact that DVDs ended the sub/dub wars.
Originally, around 1999, that was a strong argument to go DVD. It wasn't a killer argument; remember that entry level DVD players then were about $500-$1,000; the cost of HD-DVD and Blue Ray players today.
However, in somewhere around July of 2001, many studios simply stopped releasing subtitled VHS tapes altogether. You had a choice of dubbed VHS tape, complete with annoying squeaky voice actors, or DVD. Deal with it.
That's what pushed me, and a lot of my geek friends, into going to DVD.
Now, looking to BR/HD, what compelling argument is there to switch from DVD? Hell, I've still got a 17 year old 27" TV set. I'm still waiting for prices to drop on the flat screen TVs before I bother to shell out the cash, never mind HD/BR.
Also, from the article itself, you need to have a 40" or larger 1080p set to enjoy the benefits. That rules out anyone with a 37" set or lower. Keep in mind that anyone (like me) who purchased a wall unit in the 1980s or 1990s would have to replace it, since no TV back then was more than 35", so anything larger than 37" won't fit. Not a lot of people are going to completely gut their living room, in addition to everything else.
The bottom line is that in addition to video quality, DVD solved a number of problems with VHS tapes, both at the consumer and retailer level. HD/BR are higher quality, but they don't really solve any outstanding problems with DVD. They may be a boon to retailers, but consumers aren't going to get a lot out of it.
Once HD/BR readers and burners become common on new PCs, and media becomes cheaper, you might see a migration. But at the moment, it's only the lunatic fringe/beta tester/videophile types that are bothering.
You can check out the Howard forums (www.howardforums.com) to see what the natives think. Basically, every carrier has some gripes and poor service complaints. There's also www.comparecellular.com and www.cellphones.ca that compare rate plans for the Canadian markets.
Look before you leap. I was pretty fed up with Bell Mobility, so I moved one line over to Virgin, only to discover that Virgin's keystone kops antics make Bell look like a paragon of competence in comparison.
I had an almost identical experience. Paychecks were bouncing, and the company was continually living on the edge. Eventually, a competitor offered to hire a group of developers en masse, and suddenly our employer was able to pony up the cash to threaten us with collusion and conspiracy to defraud the stockholders.
Needless to say, that just pissed us off. They didn't have money to pay our paychecks, but they had money to hire $300 an hour lawyers. That's when the offer stopped being idle talk and became a serious plan.
Essentially, their argument was the R&D work in our heads belonged to the shareholders (it was a public company listed on the VSE), regardless of whether we were paid or not. This wasn't just mouthing off, we all got a threatening letter from the corporate law team.
Fortunately, the new company also had lawyers, who told us not to worry, and that they would cover it. At that point, they backed down, claimed they were in the right, and were never heard from again (at least by me).
This happened in 1986 in Canada, so it's neither a recent problem nor a Texas or America specific issue.
This is my #1 peeve about theatres, and the reason I don't go any more. Theatres have always been loud, but over the past fews years, they've simply gone berserk. When I do attend a movie with friends (about three or four times a year), I routinely see people with their hands cupped over their ears in self defence. That's absurd.
For my birthday a few years ago, my buddies took me to a gun range and then a movie (followed by much drinking, of course). When you just come off of a gun range and complain that the THEATRE is too loud, it's gotten out of control.
Maybe one of the reasons that people don't bother with theatres much any more (outside of the normal complaints about absurd prices and spending 30 minutes being force fed commercials) is that the movie houses are TOO FUCKING LOUD, to the point of physical pain. Who wants to see a movie when their ears are ringing for two hours after leaving the theater?
The train designers consider everything fundamental to running the train to be vital
Not quite. I said VITAL, not "vital". A VITAL system is: Validation of Integrated Telecommunication Architectures for Longterm, if I remember the acronym correctly. It's an industry specific term with a very exact definition and metrics.
There is a VITAL certification system that is required (in most countries) before any such system goes live.
I wish I could say that you are correct, but times are changing
Well, I kind of figured that I wouldn't be talking with any more OS/2 consoles any time soon...
Is Windows a bad choice for SCADA? Yes, that was my original point. No desktop PC OS is suitable. This isn't an MS/Linux (or MS/IBM, or MS/DEC) pissing contest, it's an issue of real time control. I *have* seen QNX based SCADAs, but QNX is not exactly a typical desktop, anyway.
As for whether or not MS is a problem, it's moot. If an MS-based (or Linux-based, or Apple-based) system can take down a SCADA, then the SCADA is not properly designed. SCADA components are compartmentalized and redundant; if your subsystem drops for whatever reason, mine is designed to survive that, and vice versa.
When the monitoring system croaks, the braking systems degrade gracefully. A train in the middle of a 300km run doesn't freak out when it loses contact with the base SCADA (god knows that happens enough in tunnels), but when it *does* stop at the next station or switch, it won't be starting up again until the SCADA is back online.
I've worked with VITAL control systems - train brake systems, landing gear, flight recorders, etc., and those systems are in a completely different space than PCs (or Suns, or IBM, etc). You're more likely to find Vertix Ada than you are MS C++ or any Java implementation. The likes of Sun, IBM, and Microsoft never even bid on the control systems I worked on.
Having said that, while the PC commercial vendor types like MS and Sun stay a far distance from control side (and rightly so), they definately bid on the monitor boxes. That SCADA may well be running a custom RTK, but the console that the operator back at base has in front of him could well be an XP system.
I've never used MS-based front ends myself, but I've written interfaces to OS/2-based consoles that talked to my onboard stuff, and I can't see any reason why a Win2K or XP front end would be any more or less contentious than an OS/2 one.
The problem is not the SCADA or braking system itself; it's the remote monitoring station. Often, those things are connected to the net to synch the
atomic clocks, and sometimes for remote logging purposes. If *those* get compromised, the control systems may be affected, but they are not compromised. Which is to say, it's a major fscking PITA, but the brake system will still work on the train without remote intervention or monitoring; it's just not going to start again after it stops.
From an Atari salesman at a computer fair: "The Atari 1200XL has more than
800 applications for it; the Apple ][+ has more than 500". Technically true,
the Apple application count was considered to be about 20,000 by that point,
which is more than 500... (1983).
From Microsoft: "Our Pascal compiler is faster than Turbo Pascal" (1985,
when this $900 compiler took 3X as long to compile on a hard disk equipped IBM
AT compared to the $49 Turbo Pascal compiler running on a floppy based 8088).
From a VMS-based Ada language vendor: "you need to go with Ada for embedded
systems, since the C language is clearly being phased out". (1988) Riiight.
From Sun: "Open Look is the way to go; Motif is just a fad". (1991) Similar claims about News obsoleting PostScript were made.
From Atari: "the Jaguar will definately blow away the Amiga" (199...2?)
From Sun: When faced with a Sun IPX running at 99% CPU usage versus the
equivalent HP model running at 40%, the Sun rep's answer was the 99% usage was a
good thing because we "were getting your money's worth" [sic]. No, he was
not kidding, he actually thought his machines being 60% slower was a good thing. (1994)
From IBM: "OS/2 will be available whereever DOS is sold" (1992). And of
course, "IBM is firmly committed to OS/2" (1997, two weeks before IBM
Germany announced they were discontinuing marketing of the product).
From Oracle: "by the year 2000, PCs will be solely legacy systems" (1998). Our rep was nothing if not faithful to the party line about NCs.
From a DSL provider, explaining why the service was performing at below 30% of
promised speeds: they were "cleaning the pipes" (eh?) and that DSL speeds
worsen in August because "the summer heat makes the wiring stretch".
(2002)
One of the best lies I ever managed to catch vendor making redhanded was a
multimillion dollar bid where their product was clearly inferior. They promised
the new super duper version would be done by year end. This was in November, and
no one had seen so much as a specification of it. We had a teleconference with
their VP, who obviously was unaware of what the salescreature had promised; the
VP said point blank that the beta program was not even scheduled to start
until March...
Long ago, a bat got into our house during the day and decided to have a snooze behind the TV set (it was an old, 1950s era RCA monster). When the bat woke up, it promptly went berserk, scaring everyone. My cat woke up, casually eyeballed it, then calmly disembowelled it on its' next flyby.
Of course, kitty then wanted to eat said bat, something my parents were not fond of a couple of five year olds witnessing. So, my granddad dragged the cat away from the squealing bat, broke the bat's neck, and in the kitchen, gave the cat a nice, inch thick piece of ham steak as a reward. The bat's remains were disposed of via incinerator.
The next day, the cat appears on doorstep, yowling he wants in. We open the door, and the biggest fscking bat I have ever seen is dragged into the living room. Said bat is deposited at the foot of my granddad, while kitty trots off to the kitchen, and sits in front of the fridge door, waiting for ham steak.
So yeah, I won't be overly surprised if and when Flo figures out how to get things into the house and outwit the recognition center. Cats are tricky.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything old is new again, it appears.
Back in the bad old mainframe days, when IBMs and the seven dwarves roamed the world, this was the norm. When you "purchased" (ie. leased) a product from a major vendor, you paid by capacity. Regardless of the capacity you leased, the vendor installed the high end box at your location, and crippled it with a restraining lever, CPU limiter, or some similar governor.
In one shop I was in, the shop was paying IBM for a line printer that could print X lines per hour. They needed to upgrade to 2*X capability. They paid the upgrade price, and an installation date was set. The shop set aside the loading dock and etc. in anticipation of the new printer. Come installation day, an IBM rep showed up, went into the printer room, opened the printer, and removed a restraint pin. He locked the printer up again, and lo and behold, the printer now had 2*X capacity.
On the technical side, this seems dishonest. On the business side, it's simply a logical step. If you're selling capacity, it doesn't make any sense to use different devices if you don't have to: support and installation are the same, etc.
The problem with the argument "if it's the same media, then it should be the same price" is that it doesn't have the result most people expect. If Windows XP workstation is $150, and Windows XP Server is $500, even though they come on the same media, demanding that the price distinction be eliminated won't result in a $150 Server; it will result in something closer to a $400 Workstation. The high price of the servers helps underwrite some of the cost of the workstations. Break that distinction, and you end up with cheaper servers but more expensive workstations. Then people complain that they're paying for server functions they don't want or need.
As for carrying around an extra eight cylinders, that's not really a valid analogy. Limiting connections and etc. doesn't require additional components, and installation of server specific functions doesn't (or shouldn't, anyway) be part of the install process for the cheaper workstation.
That's not to say you don't have a valid point, but you're applying technical expectations to a business decision, and they don't match up well.
Personally, I had no issue with a distinction of server/workstation. But when you start seeing things like "Home Basic", "Home Advanced", and "Home Premium", where even the vendor can't keep it all straight, it's out of control.
If Microsoft were smart (always a risk), they'd break the product line down using human readable expectations. By that, I mean having home versions like "Gamer" (loaded with DirectX goodies), "Web Surfer" (enhanced firewall, aimed the email/web only user), "Photo/Video Editor", and "Media Center" (all the audio/video/DVD stuff). There would be as many versions as they are currently proposing, but it might cut down on the confusion a tad.
Frequently engineers may know how things physically work, but are not familiar with things beyond their narrow specialty
That reminds me a of classic line from a frustrated contract lawyer I once worked with:
"I don't care how smart our engineers are. No customer is going to accept a contract only using mathematical equations, Venn diagrams, and anime and Star Trek references!"
I dont know a fucking thing about how to design an embedded software application, but I'm a computer guy.
I understand your point. I do know how to design an embedded software app, and how to program mainframes, because I've spent years doing both in the past. But by the same token, I know very little about web design, or object oriented databases. I certainly know less about Java than any recent graduates. Being in a profession does not make you a master of all aspects of it.
Maybe being a nurse means a fucking bit more then just knowing details about medications (hint, that is the doctors job, not the nurse)
My mom's a nurse, and the RNs routinely catch doctors, especially the younger doctors, tripping up medications. Nurses cannot prescribe meds, but they administer them. YMMV based on state/country laws, of course. Of course, there are doctors that do incandescent when a nurse points out to him that he's prescribed something lethal, and there are doctors who thank the nurse profusely for catching their mistake. Guess which doctors the nurses prefer, and go out of their way to help.
That brings up another point. Job stress tends to be self reinforcing. People that are stressed out are often highly unpleasant to work with (to be polite about it), so other people don't go out of their way to make life easier for them. They won't try to make it harder, but they don't give the benefit of the doubt. That, in turn, leads to more stress, because they have to do everything on their own, since no one really wants to work with them.
When the T&V or QA guys find a problem in my code, I usually get a call from them before they start writing up the paperwork. Sometimes they made a mistake in their test, sometimes it's a fuzzy requirement, and sometimes it's a bug in my code. We talk about it, and usually we figure out what it is together. If we agree it's a bug of mine, I start looking into it before they've offically written it up, so I often have a fix ready by the time the paperwork hits my desk informing me of it. Therefore, I tend to make my deadlines. I also get assigned very few unreproducable bugs.
Another coder I know utterly detests T&V people ("they're morons; the only reason anyone would be a tester is because they aren't smart enough to be a developer"), and treats them with complete contempt. And so when T&V finds a problem in the code from this developer (who I have no qualms about saying is stronger technically than I am), nobody calls him, because he's so unpleasant to deal with. Whether it's a requirement issue, a testing problem, or a real bug, they always submit it as a bug. He gets no warning ahead of time, and unlike me, a lot of the bug reports that are submitted against him really are not his bugs.
As a result, it reinforces his opinion that the T&V people are morons, and that he's the only one in the company who has a clue. And, of course, the fact that he is a stronger developer than many of the rest of us, combined with the fact that he gets more false positives, just proves to him that the world is out to get him. It's a vicious circle.
You've paraphrased something I've being saying for decades. Back in my university days, I was a TA. I quickly learned that if 1 or 2 of my students (in a class of 15) didn't get it, it was them. If 12 or 13 didn't get it, then it was me. It meant I hadn't explained it properly, or I'd made a false assumption about what they knew.
The other important thing is that even when it was one student who didn't get it, it didn't mean that the student was an idiot. It often meant he or she simply marched to a different drummer. I had one student pass by the skin of her teeth, and even that was only after considerable tutoring. But that same student went on to get a PhD in a totally different discipline. There's a difference between being a fool and being a fish out of water.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in. Engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this, because unlike writers, musicians, or artists, we deal with deterministic systems. We design, build, and fix things so that they are reliably predictable. But people aren't reliably predictable, and expecting them to be is going to stress you out.
I've seen people get bitterly angry because someone didn't know the difference between an AMD processor and an Intel one. I know one person who, when a co-worker on a project casually asked why Linux would be a better choice than Windows, got so angry his hands were physically trembling with rage, and he had to walk out of the room, because "otherwise I'd have to punch that stupid bastard in the face for such a retarded question". I know one person who has exploded in a rage in a restaurant, because the waitress brought his sandwich on the wrong type of bread.
Not surprisingly, two of the people I know like this have already had heart attacks.
The problem with stress like this isn't that there are foolish or annoying questions about. Of course there are. Always have been, always will be. The problem is how seriously you take it. If you treat foolish questions as personal insults, if you expect everyone to have your level of expertise in your field, then you're going to be stressed out. Let's face it; if you get angry about bread, the problem isn't with the bread.
If a discussion of bracing styles forces you to leave the room because you're going to hit someone, you're either wound too tight, or you're in the wrong profession. Possibly both.
Sit back, take a break, and wonder why it is that you're always so angry about everything, when everyone else seems to take it in stride. And if you come to the conclusion that "that's because everyone is stupid and I'm not", resign yourself to be miserable and angry for the rest of your life, cause life isn't going to change any time soon.
Thirded. I have a friend who is a brilliant photographer, but she is, in her own words, "so not a computer person". Her 2002 era PC started to go (hard drive was reporting SMART errors on boot), plus with all of her new cameras and printers, the old 1GB memory in that PC just didn't cut it. So, we went to get a new PC.
She picked up a Gateway from Tiger Direct. Not bad specs: 500GB disk, 4GB ram, and I believe it was either 2.4 or 2.8Ghz. More than enough power to run her Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird.
Or so I thought.
First off, her HP printer explicitly did not support Vista. Fortunately, a similar HP printer did, but that printer didn't have a compact flash reader, so that functionality was lost. It didn't really matter, since my friend never prints direct from the ram card anyway, preferring to touch up things with Photoshop, but still, it was a loss of function.
Secondly, and more importantly, we couldn't install the scanner software. No way, no how. The Samsung site claimed that the existing driver supported Vista, so we had no clue. No error messages, nothing in the event viewer, nothing.
But worst of all, the copy of Photoshop CS3 wouldn't validate. It would install, but only in 30 day demo mode. All attempts to validate with the Adobe licence server died silently, with no details logged. We even tried going back to the old CS2, but that failed, too.
Finally, a Google search found a number of people with similar problems. Most were tearing their hair out, having uninstalled and reinstalled both Photoshop and Vista a dozen times, with both Microsoft and Adobe tech support completely unable to resolve it.
Finally, one bloke posted the answer. "Are you running PC-cillin?". Lo and behold, the preinstalled crapware included PC-Cillin, which considered Photoshop's attempt to connect to the licence server to be a trojan horse, which it blocked. Likewise, the installation of the scanner software service was considered an attack.
By removing the vicious little piece of code, suddenly all of my friend's programs worked, CS3 could be registered, the scanner functioned, and the PC ran about 50% faster, as well.
My only question is why on earth are vendors willing to drown their PCs with this type of crap that makes using their machines feel like sucking mud through a straw? I know the answer; the crapware vendors pay them to install their stuff. But it's still a pathetic situation.
In the final analysis, my friend's poor impression of Vista was completely attributable to non-Vista issues. I wonder how much of Vista's image problem is due to non-Vista crapware.
Since people either have to install Vista on existing hardware (with legacy device driver problems), it's usually recommended that if you want Vista, you get a new machine. But with almost(?) all new Vista PCs being weighed down with performance-sucking crap installed at the dealership (so to speak), that's just as bad a situation as getting bad drivers on existing hardware.
Heard this on 680 News (www.680news.com, though I can't find the story online) on the way to work this morning. Evidently, some rocket scientists did exactly that. One was using a cell phone at the time, and a 14,000 volt arc decided to phone home, right through his head. He "suffered neurological damage", and apparently feels his head is burning whenever he lowers his arm, or something like that (I was paying more attention on driving than listening).
Anyone heard this one? A quick google search didn't find anything, but 680 usually plays things straight in their news reporting, at least.
A more popular example for the under-25 set would be the Kryptonians in John Byrne's rebooted Superman series. The Kryptonians were so isolated that it was practically a crime to interact face to face; even the act of mating was done through genetic sampling in a lab.
As Byrne said, he wanted to show a Krypton that deserved to blow up.
Looking at Vista vs XP, I've got a sense of deja vu from the old OS/2 v2 vs Windows days. In both cases, the newer OS (OS/2, Vista) was internally a better operating system than the predecessor/competition, but suffered a reputation of being slow and unfriendly to use, which generated a stigma against the new OS.
In both cases, the newer OS (OS/2, Vista) actually was a superior operating system, but lost points with users due to UI problems. Both were considered confusing and slow by a large part of the user community, including the tech press. But looking at the fundamentals, like kernel robustness, stability, security, etc., the newer OS actually was/is better. The achilles heel was a weaker user "experience": poor or nonexistant device drivers, annoying GUI features that couldn't be disabled, etc. And in both cases, the vendor produced a successor (Warp, Windows 7) that was basically the previous OS with the serial numbers filed off, but with UI enhancements/bug fixes, rather than base OS changes. Just as Warp was OS/2 v2.2 under the covers, Windows 7 is Vista 1.1, or however the hell you'd represent an incremental upgrade using Microsoft's version number of the week scheme.
I remember when OS/2 v2.0 came out, it was panned for its' horrid installation procedure. This was back in the days when everyone installed their own operating systems, so this was a big deal. For many, it was a deal breaker; people who failed to install OS/2 would try to install Windows 3.0 (and a week later, 3.1), and if successful, became Windows users instead of OS/2 users.
IBM spent a lot of time on this issue, as you can imagine. I installed OS/2 and Windows 3.x more times than I care to admit, logging the time and my reactions to it. And now, we come to the actual point of this post.
The most interesting statistic that I remember was that despite the most common complaint being that the OS/2 install was horribly slow compared to Windows, wall clock time spent was almost exactly the same. Depending on the hardware configuration, OS/2 install time was almost always within 5% of the Windows install time. And yet, Windows installation got glowing reviews as being speedy, while OS/2 installation was a chore.
The difference was the user experience. People installing Windows got coloured screens, filled with information about the new OS ("did you know that..."). Microsoft put enough text on the screen that users read while doing the install. In comparison, OS/2 just put up a dead, black screen, with a textual process bar at the bottom, saying "1%... 2%", etc.
Functionally, there was no difference. If it took OS/2 93 seconds to install drivers for an Adaptec SCSI card, it would take Windows 90-95 seconds to install drivers, as well. But during those 90+ seconds, the Windows user was scrolling through two pages of text explaining some new Windows feature, while the OS/2 user watched a dead black screen, while his watch went tick... tick... tick.
If I interrupted someone installing OS/2, they'd appreciate the distraction. If you interrupted someone installing Windows, they'd usually ask me to come back in half an hour; they didn't want to miss anything during the install. OS/2 users *did* want to miss the install.
I think that Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 7 that they did so long ago with Windows 3. They're not changing the underlying OS in any way. They're responding to the user reaction to the OS, and fixing the bad user experience. And that's a good thing.
When addressing the installation issue a lot of IBMers (read: execs) completely ignored what I've said above, instead pointing out that the wall clock time spent installing OS/2 was the same as Windows, and therefore complaints were due to whiners, people prejudiced against IBM, etc. Fortunately, Microsoft appears, at least on the surface, to be responding to user complaints and reacting to them.
Windows 7 will not be simply a new paint job and some detailing on Vista; there will be some new features added. But the base operating system will be the same, just as OS/2 Warp was an improvement over OS/2 2.x (especially in TCP/IP networking). But the end result will hopefully be a win for end users, and that will be a good thing.
A few years ago, I applied to a Fortune 500 company for a specific position. The posted job requirements and my resume were practically mirror images of one another. The interviews went well, and then came... the test.
The test was done online. It was one of these idiotic automated C++ tests with multiple choice questions. Most of the questions, about 80%, were parlor tricks, ie. syntax arcana. It was multiple choice, so the questions all had predetermined solutions, even when the correct answer was something totally different. What do you do when the Solaris 2.4 compiler throws an error 5718 on multithreaded code? Well, I don't know what you do, but when I get an error message I've never seen before, I read the compiler manual and/or help file, and check Sun's website and comp.lang.c++. Of course, none of those were options. You were expected to know, off the top of your head, what compiler option to add to suppress the error. The fact that suppressing a meaningful error was a bad thing to do was obviously lost on the test maker, as well.
Needless to say, I bombed. Apparently, so did everyone applying for this position who was over the age of 30. The ones who passed were those who were two years or less out of school, ie. fresh from an academic environment. Consequently, they hired a cadre of programmers exclusively under 25, and had an 18 month development cycle that would be kindly called disastrous.
What struck me about this test, which the company put great stock in, was that there was absolutely no way for anyone to show initiative, ingenuity, or creativity, which is what they were supposedly looking for. It was a coding test that didn't permit you to actually code. The presumption was that good coders were keen on arcane syntax, and those who were keen on arcane syntax (ie. language lawyers) were excellent programmers.
In my experience, that's not only untrue, it's completely inverted. Coders who delve into the arcane aspects of multiple inheritance while creating polymorphic templates are the sort of coders that build disastrously over-architected systems that no one but they (and sometimes not even they) can understand. Testing to see if the candidate was a "clever" coder was a recipe for disaster.
Since then, if I've ever been asked to take tests in interviews (and I have), I insist that it be a human-reviewed test. When people ask why, I show them the printout of that online test.
Now, I've got 20+ years under my belt, so I realized that this was nonsense. I feel sorry for the guys who were 5 years out of school who were crushed by that test; I met one who felt he must be a complete incompetent because he flunked it.
I would have loved to get my first DVD player for $500; that was about $150 cheaper than the one I ended up with. It was a 5 disc Sony, ironically enough. I still have it, but it's not plugged in, having been replaced by a cheap ($59) Philips 642.
I was originally going to wait a few years to go to DVD, except I'm an anime geek, and all the anime vendors simply stopped subtitling tapes around 1999/2000. Either you went with horrible dubs, or you took the plunge and bought a DVD player.
Outside of the superb sound, which beats all the other DVD players I've used into the ground, that $650 beast, which was a major win back in 1998, loses in almost all respects to even modern $30 players. It doesn't support DVD-RW. It doesn't support DVD+RW. It doesn't support 700MB CDRs. It doesn't support 700MB CD-RWs. It doesn't support SVCD. It doesn't support DiVX or MP3, let alone OGG.
Back in the day, if I wanted to show my own content, I had to convert it to VCD format (not SVCD), burn it to a 650MB (not 700MB) CD-RW (not a CDR), and *that* would work. Other than that, it was purchased/rented media or nothing. Remember, this was a $650 high-end player.
Today, it's obsolete. It's as good as a the day I bought it, and for playing musical CDs, it's superb. But it's been surpassed by an order of magnitude by cheaper no-name knockoffs.
Today's DVDs are far superior to any VHS tape, and the DVD experience itself is vastly superior - no rewinding, no stretched tapes, no degradation of video on replay, no fast forward/rewind for 10 minutes to find the scene you're looking for, etc.
For Blu-Ray to supersede DVDs, it's going to have to provide an equally compelling argument. I doubt that's currently possible. I certainly doubt it will happen when Blu-Ray disks are still four times the cost of DVDs, and players are upwards of twenty times the cost of an entry-level DVD player.
The disks and players will drop in price. It's just an issue of time. If they don't, the Blu-Ray camp may find itself outflanked by digital distribution rather than a competing disk format.
Like many ./ geeks, I'm an anime fan. I also watch a lot non-animated movies with subtitles.
I'm an old fart, got my first Betamax back around 1983 or so. Eventually, in 1990 I switched to VHS because I wanted to, you know, be able to rent movies.
As anyone who watched/rented foreign language films can attest, just getting a subtitled tape was often a pain. The stores had to stock two different copies of the title: one subtitled, one dubbed. For anime titles, this was extremely difficult, because 90% of the public prefers dubs, no matter how bad. So, a lot of the big chains simply didn't carry subs. And for the stores that did, the cost of a subtitled version was often 25% higher than the dub, despite the fact that subtitling costs are insignificant compare to the cost of dubbing and remastering audio.
And of course, you'd often rent a sub, go home, and find that the clerk had accidentally given you the dub anyway.
DVDs made that all go away. The dub and the sub were the same disk.
Sure, it didn't hurt that DVDs also had higher capacity; most series that were released with 2-3 episodes per VHS tape came out with 4 episodes on the DVD. And of course, the DVD was higher quality. And DVDs didn't stretch/degrade, and they didn't need to be rewound, etc. But all those factors were secondary to the fact that DVDs ended the sub/dub wars.
Originally, around 1999, that was a strong argument to go DVD. It wasn't a killer argument; remember that entry level DVD players then were about $500-$1,000; the cost of HD-DVD and Blue Ray players today.
However, in somewhere around July of 2001, many studios simply stopped releasing subtitled VHS tapes altogether. You had a choice of dubbed VHS tape, complete with annoying squeaky voice actors, or DVD. Deal with it.
That's what pushed me, and a lot of my geek friends, into going to DVD.
Now, looking to BR/HD, what compelling argument is there to switch from DVD? Hell, I've still got a 17 year old 27" TV set. I'm still waiting for prices to drop on the flat screen TVs before I bother to shell out the cash, never mind HD/BR.
Also, from the article itself, you need to have a 40" or larger 1080p set to enjoy the benefits. That rules out anyone with a 37" set or lower. Keep in mind that anyone (like me) who purchased a wall unit in the 1980s or 1990s would have to replace it, since no TV back then was more than 35", so anything larger than 37" won't fit. Not a lot of people are going to completely gut their living room, in addition to everything else.
The bottom line is that in addition to video quality, DVD solved a number of problems with VHS tapes, both at the consumer and retailer level. HD/BR are higher quality, but they don't really solve any outstanding problems with DVD. They may be a boon to retailers, but consumers aren't going to get a lot out of it.
Once HD/BR readers and burners become common on new PCs, and media becomes cheaper, you might see a migration. But at the moment, it's only the lunatic fringe/beta tester/videophile types that are bothering.
You can check out the Howard forums (www.howardforums.com) to see what the natives think. Basically, every carrier has some gripes and poor service complaints. There's also www.comparecellular.com and www.cellphones.ca that compare rate plans for the Canadian markets.
Look before you leap. I was pretty fed up with Bell Mobility, so I moved one line over to Virgin, only to discover that Virgin's keystone kops antics make Bell look like a paragon of competence in comparison.
I had an almost identical experience. Paychecks were bouncing, and the company was continually living on the edge. Eventually, a competitor offered to hire a group of developers en masse, and suddenly our employer was able to pony up the cash to threaten us with collusion and conspiracy to defraud the stockholders.
Needless to say, that just pissed us off. They didn't have money to pay our paychecks, but they had money to hire $300 an hour lawyers. That's when the offer stopped being idle talk and became a serious plan.
Essentially, their argument was the R&D work in our heads belonged to the shareholders (it was a public company listed on the VSE), regardless of whether we were paid or not. This wasn't just mouthing off, we all got a threatening letter from the corporate law team.
Fortunately, the new company also had lawyers, who told us not to worry, and that they would cover it. At that point, they backed down, claimed they were in the right, and were never heard from again (at least by me).
This happened in 1986 in Canada, so it's neither a recent problem nor a Texas or America specific issue.
your eardrums will get blown out
This is my #1 peeve about theatres, and the reason I don't go any more. Theatres have always been loud, but over the past fews years, they've simply gone berserk. When I do attend a movie with friends (about three or four times a year), I routinely see people with their hands cupped over their ears in self defence. That's absurd.
For my birthday a few years ago, my buddies took me to a gun range and then a movie (followed by much drinking, of course). When you just come off of a gun range and complain that the THEATRE is too loud, it's gotten out of control.
Maybe one of the reasons that people don't bother with theatres much any more (outside of the normal complaints about absurd prices and spending 30 minutes being force fed commercials) is that the movie houses are TOO FUCKING LOUD, to the point of physical pain. Who wants to see a movie when their ears are ringing for two hours after leaving the theater?
Not quite. I said VITAL, not "vital". A VITAL system is: Validation of Integrated Telecommunication Architectures for Longterm, if I remember the acronym correctly. It's an industry specific term with a very exact definition and metrics.
There is a VITAL certification system that is required (in most countries) before any such system goes live.
Well, I kind of figured that I wouldn't be talking with any more OS/2 consoles any time soon... Is Windows a bad choice for SCADA? Yes, that was my original point. No desktop PC OS is suitable. This isn't an MS/Linux (or MS/IBM, or MS/DEC) pissing contest, it's an issue of real time control. I *have* seen QNX based SCADAs, but QNX is not exactly a typical desktop, anyway. As for whether or not MS is a problem, it's moot. If an MS-based (or Linux-based, or Apple-based) system can take down a SCADA, then the SCADA is not properly designed. SCADA components are compartmentalized and redundant; if your subsystem drops for whatever reason, mine is designed to survive that, and vice versa.
When the monitoring system croaks, the braking systems degrade gracefully. A train in the middle of a 300km run doesn't freak out when it loses contact with the base SCADA (god knows that happens enough in tunnels), but when it *does* stop at the next station or switch, it won't be starting up again until the SCADA is back online.
I've worked with VITAL control systems - train brake systems, landing gear, flight recorders, etc., and those systems are in a completely different space than PCs (or Suns, or IBM, etc). You're more likely to find Vertix Ada than you are MS C++ or any Java implementation. The likes of Sun, IBM, and Microsoft never even bid on the control systems I worked on.
Having said that, while the PC commercial vendor types like MS and Sun stay a far distance from control side (and rightly so), they definately bid on the monitor boxes. That SCADA may well be running a custom RTK, but the console that the operator back at base has in front of him could well be an XP system.
I've never used MS-based front ends myself, but I've written interfaces to OS/2-based consoles that talked to my onboard stuff, and I can't see any reason why a Win2K or XP front end would be any more or less contentious than an OS/2 one.
The problem is not the SCADA or braking system itself; it's the remote monitoring station. Often, those things are connected to the net to synch the atomic clocks, and sometimes for remote logging purposes. If *those* get compromised, the control systems may be affected, but they are not compromised. Which is to say, it's a major fscking PITA, but the brake system will still work on the train without remote intervention or monitoring; it's just not going to start again after it stops.
From an Atari salesman at a computer fair: "The Atari 1200XL has more than 800 applications for it; the Apple ][+ has more than 500". Technically true, the Apple application count was considered to be about 20,000 by that point, which is more than 500... (1983).
From Microsoft: "Our Pascal compiler is faster than Turbo Pascal" (1985, when this $900 compiler took 3X as long to compile on a hard disk equipped IBM AT compared to the $49 Turbo Pascal compiler running on a floppy based 8088).
From a VMS-based Ada language vendor: "you need to go with Ada for embedded systems, since the C language is clearly being phased out". (1988) Riiight.
From Sun: "Open Look is the way to go; Motif is just a fad". (1991) Similar claims about News obsoleting PostScript were made.
From Atari: "the Jaguar will definately blow away the Amiga" (199...2?)
From Sun: When faced with a Sun IPX running at 99% CPU usage versus the equivalent HP model running at 40%, the Sun rep's answer was the 99% usage was a good thing because we "were getting your money's worth" [sic]. No, he was not kidding, he actually thought his machines being 60% slower was a good thing. (1994)
From IBM: "OS/2 will be available whereever DOS is sold" (1992). And of course, "IBM is firmly committed to OS/2" (1997, two weeks before IBM Germany announced they were discontinuing marketing of the product).
From Oracle: "by the year 2000, PCs will be solely legacy systems" (1998). Our rep was nothing if not faithful to the party line about NCs.
From a DSL provider, explaining why the service was performing at below 30% of promised speeds: they were "cleaning the pipes" (eh?) and that DSL speeds worsen in August because "the summer heat makes the wiring stretch". (2002)
One of the best lies I ever managed to catch vendor making redhanded was a multimillion dollar bid where their product was clearly inferior. They promised the new super duper version would be done by year end. This was in November, and no one had seen so much as a specification of it. We had a teleconference with their VP, who obviously was unaware of what the salescreature had promised; the VP said point blank that the beta program was not even scheduled to start until March...
Of course, kitty then wanted to eat said bat, something my parents were not fond of a couple of five year olds witnessing. So, my granddad dragged the cat away from the squealing bat, broke the bat's neck, and in the kitchen, gave the cat a nice, inch thick piece of ham steak as a reward. The bat's remains were disposed of via incinerator.
The next day, the cat appears on doorstep, yowling he wants in. We open the door, and the biggest fscking bat I have ever seen is dragged into the living room. Said bat is deposited at the foot of my granddad, while kitty trots off to the kitchen, and sits in front of the fridge door, waiting for ham steak.
So yeah, I won't be overly surprised if and when Flo figures out how to get things into the house and outwit the recognition center. Cats are tricky.