westajay

Your efforts are noticeable and appreciated! It was always a mystery to me why the Windows console was stuck in time from the NT days, and your work sends a signal to all those doing sysadmin and programming work that Microsoft is supporting these use cases in Windows.

I found this talk to be really interesting, as SuperH chips were used in so many applications in the 90's. One significant application I'm familiar with were Roland synthesizers. It's very interesting that this group decided to implement this for their own application.

But, I'm curious why it wouldn't be easier to order SH CPU's from Renesas for modern applications, although I understand the implementation wouldn't be open all the way down? Does anyone have thoughts on this?

When I wrote my comment I wasn't thinking of lots of up-front planning. I was thinking along more simple lines like root cause analysis using a human factors or equipment taxonomy (much more affective then 5-whys).. and simple logging of incidents for later analysis.

I think some of these kinds of processes can be adopted with small investments in training and change.

Also, a lot of these kind of failures seem to stem from changes at the networking layer.. which should be more planned and tested given their place in the stack (we're not talking about crazy app behaviour).

In other industries, such as petroleum refining, pipelines and nuclear power, their are structured methodologies for determining root causes. Some of these take into account equipment failure, and modelling is often done on equipment life cycles to determine replacement and inspection schedules in oil refineries.

These industries also employ strict management of change processes so that an ad-hoc decision or improvisation doesn't cause an incident.

What puzzles me is why you don't see these kind of practices applied in data center operations.

Are data centers really more complex.. then say.. a nuclear plant?

This reminds me of Gerstner's OS/2 move with IBM in the early 90's.

Does anyone have insight into why Palm (pre & post HP) struggled to get the hardware right and remove glitchy behaviour from the OS?

I think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt.

They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this game too..

That's a good point, and poor cost accounting practices..

I have a friend (an engineer) who is doing his MBA right now. At his school he said there is a big focus on ethics and ethical behaviour. Based on what I've witnessed in business, I wish some of that was maintained once people entered the work world!

A counter argument to this was Carlos Ghosn's experience with Nissan. He said that one of Nissan's problems was engineers making cars for engineers, but that people did not want to buy.

In reality creating, marketing and being successful with a product requires diverse perspectives.

I think engineers beating up on MBA's is no different from MBA's beating up on "propellerheads." It's counter productive.

And just because you have an MBA, should you then be typecast by engineers? Why does having an MBA reduce someone's potential to be a passionate product person, or to have productive relationships with the makers?

I've performed some of those audits, and that was not my response.

It's sad when you can't be candid in a company and have to resort to sending an external letter to get through to management.

I think lack of candour when problems abound is the kiss of death for many companies.

One of the reasons I ditched my Torch was I would often get "java.lang.NullPointerExceptions" dialogs when I received SMS's. Pretty bad from a user experience standpoint.

Also lots of other quirkiness in the OS drove me batty.

BTW, the RIM webkit browser implementation is excellent, just the horsepower of the phone letting things down. And I miss the physical keyboard!

BES is yet another piece of software to manage if you are a mail administrator, and it is a pretty complex beast at that. You can have just as secure a sync solution with straight iphone/exchange by using Exchange Activesync with a VPN client, and you don't have the overhead of managing a BES install.

This reminds me of when Microsoft was hyping touch user interface features in the run-up to the Windows 7 launch (without anything tangible in the field). Then Apple released multi-touch gesture pads on their laptops and furthered the reach of iOS.

RIM has been releasing products with terrible software and usability bugs for a while. My torch would regularly report java.lang.NullPointerExceptions when receiving SMS's.

Playbook apps have lots of glitches.. crash for no reason. Users are also getting 0.5 gig software updates every couple of days that brick the device for 30 - 60 mins.

This all indicates poorly managed software teams that are under too much schedule pressure to produce reliable results. Also indicates a broken QA process where RIM thinks it's fine to ship kit that doesn't work properly.

I call deep cultural problems that can't be fixed without leadership changes.

This topic could be boiled down to "nerds crapping on other peoples work". I've had a few direct emails with rim, and regarding playbook, they're listening.

This is a new platform, analogous to apple when they migrated to osx.

If this was 1998 you could replace every RIM with Apple in these threads.

It's a very easy thing to throw stones.

I went through the same process, but didn't think it was that bad.

RIMs web signup download process needs to be cleaned up, and the Mac installer thing was a bit weird, but I thought the docs were straightforward, and only took me a couple mins to get the sample app deployed.

My gosh.. A command line program to remote install to the vm image! At least there is a full intel compiled image, and not some buggy emulator.

You can also build decent apps using HTML and JavaScript, much like webos.

Is it just me, or has the HN crowd deteriorated to "enterprise-ey bad, apple good"

There is a lot of opportunity in this platform, but not for consumer apps. They will be very prevalent in business environments, and the os is damn responsive.

Offshoring is an economic phenomenon involving organizations that only know how to measure their IT effectiveness using cost.

Personal experience is that I've never seen it work, but that's only from my own sample set.

Have also seen a lot of "in-shoring" activity, where consultants are brought in to try and rebuild after a disastrous outsourcing scenario where agreed to service levels could not be maintained.

I've been horrified at the skill level of outsourced resources, not just technically, but chronic deficits in communication, planning and analysis skills.

It feels to me like a big Ponzi scheme that in the end costs clients more, but wish I had more data to back up this assertion.

I have seen some offshore people that are skilled let down but unskilled managers that have been brought into manage IT from other industries, such as manufacturing. Or, offshoring teams put into a skapegoat role by clients that couldn't fix their own problems.

This is really about conflict of interest. Perhaps it is time for regulation mandating the split of telecom from media content ownership.

In Canada, the telecoms own most of the major media assets (Shaw, rogers, bell).

They also operate their own internet backbone and sell access to corporate clients.

It is bad. We never started with caps in Canada so we're losing a lot.

In australia you get ripped so badly for broadband it is not funny.

This affects not only consumers, but also the whole tech ecosystem.. For example business models that rely on unmetered internet (think netflix, or offsite backup).

It also affects people like me who have to host services in Canada (for regulatory and/or data security reasons). If I get nailed on wholesale bandwidth, I have to pass that cost onto my customers.

This ruling appeared out of the blue.. Without much time to prepare contigencies.

This could snowball with a nasty public backlash.

Can anyone tell me if this is specific to bell? If so, how would this affect us out west where our wholesale provider might be telus, shaw or allstream?

I think that's a good point. The scale of the gulf weather events on urban populations (also thinking of Rita and the Houston evacuation) is just astounding.

I guess all reminders of our planet's volatility no matter where we choose to settle.

I think your poke at Rudd was somewhat justified, since we all know Rudd as a media whore. :-) But yeah, nice to see the politicos getting dirty, and I think it's pretty clear even from press conferences that there is sincerity involved on all sides.

As an ex-pat aussie looking at this from abroad, at appears as if various levels of Australian government are pulling together and focusing on clean-up. In many other places, things descend into blame and confusion pretty quickly, which is what happened in the US. I'm sure Bush did care what was happening on the ground, but the confused response between the different levels of government was astounding (and surely wasn't the feds fault alone).

For all the internal complaining about who is running the show in oz at various times, the country has a healthy and functional democracy in many ways. And Queenslanders will pull through.. the state is full of tough buggers. Best wishes to all affected back home.

Ex-PM assisting with flood clean-up. Compare with Bush response.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqTnJK3uEi8

This kind of platform volatility doesn't bode well for developers. Who wants to invest their time learning something that will just be deprecated shortly after? Before RIM started hyping playbook, 8 months ago they were hyping OS 6. Now you don't hear anything about OS 6.

My primary phone is a Torch 9800. I wanted an e-mail processing device with a real keyboard and decent browser. This is my third blackberry and I wonder why I persist with the bugs.

In Canada the phone cost about the same as an iPhone. The build quality is dreadful.. silver plastic bezel is peeling. The software is buggy and glitchy (I get a dialog with a java.lang.NullPointerException sometimes when I receive an SMS.. wtf!?).

My last blackberry also had a ton of bugs and glitchy UI behaviour.

I think the problem with RIM is when it comes to software implementation, they just aren't as good as their competitors.

My town had a lot of early agile projects in the first part of the decade. The consultants only talked about the successes and not the many failures at conferences. Specifically WRT scrum and XP. I can tell you about a scrum failure that was in the 10's of millions of dollars.

I've had many negative experiences with less effective consultants using agile as a way to convince the client that they are all wrong and the only way out is more consulting guidance. In fact, I worked for some time at a consultancy where I am sure this was their business model.

There's more than one path to the finish, and "agile" sold itself out as a vapid marketing term years ago.

Buy the CD, install it on an old machine and play with it over a weekend. OpenBSD has some unique and fantastic features.. everything from PF (its firewall) to spamd (Spam trapping daemon).

It's also nice to use a finely crafted piece of software that doesn't feel like it has been bolted together haphazardly (like your typical Linux distro).