Ken posts a letter from the editor at the Microsoft MSDN Visual FoxPro site.
Archive | August, 2003
Emergency Broadcast System….
So I’m in my car on the way home from work, listening to some jazz, and the radio is interupted with the eerie beep-beep-beep of the Emergency Broadcasting System. A computerized voice intones:
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MORRISTOWN HAS ISSUED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR… KNOX COUNTY IN EAST TENNESSEE LOUDON COUNTY IN EAST TENNESSEE UNTIL 745 PM EDT. AT 635 PM EDT… NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM 6 MILES NORTH OF EATON CROSSROADS… OR 4 MILES SOUTHWEST OF OAK RIDGE… MOVING EAST AT 20 MPH.
THE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WILL BE NEAR… FARRAGUT AROUND 645 PM EDT KARNS AROUND 655 PM EDT BEARDEN AROUND 705 PM EDT KNOXVILLE AROUND 710 PM EDT 7 MILES SOUTH OF HALLS AROUND 715 PM EDT
THE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM IS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING… WINDS UP TO 60 MPH… WHICH COULD PUSH OVER SHALLOW ROOTED TREES AND BREAK TREE LIMBS ABOUT THE SIZE OF YOUR WRIST. HAIL UP TO 1 INCH IN DIAMETER… OR THE SIZE OF QUARTERS. VERY HEAVY RAINFALL WHICH MAY CAUSE LOCALIZED FLOODING. FREQUENT AND DEADLY CLOUD-TO-GROUND LIGHTNING.
SEEK A STURDY SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!
STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS.
Yikes. I’m a New Englander. I don’t think I had ever heard the EBS before, other than “This is a test. This is only a test.” And where in the car do I get away from the windows?
Made it home safely, and watching the storm from within the apartment, but staying away from the windows!
… later…
Quite the show! No sooner posted than I shut down the computers and yanked the power cords from the walls. The sky went black and the winds whipped the trees around. Power went out three times. Water just poured from the skies. Pretty impressive!
Fifteen minutes later, the sun’s out. Man!
In New England, we get about four days warning when a blizzard is coming. Probably why I’ve never heard the EBS up there.
Close Encounters of the Microsoft Kind…
So, I’m plodding along, running the usual half-dozen apps on my machine (oh, and a webcam capture to AVI). I try to save the AVI after a half-hour (yes, a huge file) and the disk thrashes for a while. (Not surprisingly. It turned out the AVI was 1.4 gigabytes. May have to reconsider this as a video-capture technique). I try to cancel an Outlook Send/Receive session, since it seems to be stuck, and I get the “Unresponsive application” dialog and terminate the app. Microsoft’s Online Crash Analysis (OCA) tool comes up and asks if it can send the data to Redmond. Sure, I say, and I encourage you to do the same. Bill Gates recently talked about how often Windows crashes, and I recall Steve Ballmer mentioning a while ago that they were surprised at the data they were getting. Let’s get them to clean up their acts, at least on this point.
So, off my data goes to Redmond, and I get a dialog telling me that more information is available, click here. I click, Mozilla starts, and I get an html page informing me that I need IE 5 or higher and a Passport account to continue. I know there’s a trick to tell Moz to pretend to be IE, but I don’t know it off-hand, so I have to switch my default browser from Moz to IE, click the link, and get taken to the page.
Which tells me they have no idea what the problem is, but there’s a new Service Pack for Office I might want to consider.
Now, really, did I have to switch default browsers (don’t forget to switch back!) just to be given a dumb look? Honestly.
It’s Upgrade Day!
Two of my current vendors emailed me this morning with new version announcements. Why now? Trying to beat the heat and get the new version out before vacationing for the rest of the month? Trying to beat the review deadlines and get your product publicized in the September back-to-work rush? Or maybe it just finally compiled and ran and got past the beta testers. Here are the two new versions:
What’s New in Sonic Stylus Studio ™ 5.0
Woah! Ximian purchased by Novell….
Register: Novell buys Ximian. Wow. [Scripting News]
Sluggish WiFi Connections Hurt Everyone
ZDNET: Microsoft Should Rewrite Windows David Coursey editorializes:
Microsoft said last week it plans to hire 4,000 to 5,000 new workers and to increase research spending by about 8 percent, to $6.9 billion per year. The company also said it has $49 billion lying around collecting interest.
SO WHAT should Bill and Steve do with these wondrous resources? My suggestion: Start over.
Link via OSNews
Sluggish WiFi Connections Hurt Everyone
I recently recommended a client consider wireless, and a pilot roll-out proved disappointing, with severely degraded performance with as few as six users. Perhaps this helps to explain the problem, and will encourage more analysis.
Sluggish WiFi Connections Hurt Everyone MindNumbingOblivion writes “Wireless technology has revolutionized access to local area networks when one can’t always be close to an ethernet jack. But a recent research paper from the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique tells how one slow user accessing a hot point can hurt the whole group. Apparently the very nature of CSMA/CD guarantees such anomalies.” From Slashdot
The Economic Reality Tour
Job For John: “Last Thursday, July 24th I was downsized from my job of 3 years at a software company. Later the same day I heard that President Bush’s economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush’s tax cut and its prosperous economic effects. ‘What a bunch of BS. I’d like to give their PR tour a dose of reality,’ is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts — that this economy stinks, and Bush’s tax cuts are making it worse.” [Scripting News]
Lao Ts’u says ‘He who knows doesn’t say, he who says doesn’t know.’
From Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware blog:
I’m sure I’ve ranted about this before, but remember, only two types of people brag about being in Microsoft beta programs: liars and cheats. Well, OK, maybe there’s a third category: careless people. Read the NDAs you signed, people. From time immemorial, Microsoft beta program NDAs have prohibited discussing the beta program, or even the fact that you are involved in the beta program.
Linked via Anita Rowland via Garrett
NYT: Mission-Critical Jargon Reduction
Geoffrey Nunberg is one of my favorite NPR commentators and makes some great points in this New York Times: Business column: Initiating Mission-Critical Jargon Reduction. “Over the past 20 years, business has replaced government in the public mind as the chief perpetrator of doublespeak.” The killer sentence, for me:
The corporation was created as a legal fiction to reduce personal responsibility.