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.