Archives
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The "Engineer's Fatal Flaw"
Michael Kanellos - in a well-reasoned piece titled What happens if SCO wins? - talks about coining the phrase "Engineer's Fatal Flaw" with his college roommate, illustrating it with "the belief that you passed physics, so you think you know everything." His roommate "had an answer for everything, and often it involved the death penalty, a flat tax or some other clean, simple solution that would have been absolutely insane to try in real life." He then goes on to say that "there is arrogance inside the scientific mind, and it rarely knows when to stop."
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The wrong room
Jon Box commented in my previous post about name confusion that he was almost checked into Don Box's room. Which reminded me of this story (hotel part comes at the end)...
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Email on planes?
There's a story in today's Wall Street Journal about United Airlines installing in-flight e-mail by the end of the year. $15.98 per flight, plus $.10 per KB over 2KB. You're going to plug into the phones already on the plane and configure Verizon as a dial-up ISP. Gee, they did such a good job getting power to the seats (industry joke there) that I can hardly wait.
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VB and C#: Some perspective
I just got done writing the editor's note for VSLive! Orlando (I'm the conference chair for VBITS and VSLive!), which helped clarify in my own mind something that I observed last week while doing a couple of INETA user group presentations.
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Ideal n-tier hardware config for *devs*
Ever notice that the n-tier samples for developers are not truly intended for tiered distribution? Of course, that's because us devs don't have multi-machine environments to mirror what's actually used by our businesses (or customers). So, while the sample apps don't mirror real world, they do make handy demos. Can you imagine telling your boss / customer / spouse <g> that you need to have a dedicated development and test setup with, say, 4 machines and associated networking equipment? Would you really want to set up, configure, and manage this infrastructure?
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People Confusion (fluff alert)
Jesse commented to my previous post that the name of new INETA speaker 'Jon Box' was "way too close" to 'Don Box'. (he then went on to mention a BillG confusion). Of course, there are at least a couple of other 'Don's in our small industry - though perhaps none that are commonly referred to as "the Don" - but it does highlight the potential for confusion (not only that, but Jon Box is a coworker of similar-sounding Dan Fox). Maybe, like the Screen Actors Guild, we need more clearly unique names? Maybe Jon should change his name to Johanne. <g>