Linux turns out to be part of the critical infrastructure for the emergency response network, capable of handling:
10,000 voice calls per minute
30,000 simultaneous inbound hotline
calls3,000 simultaneous faxes
5,000 simultaneous e-mails
5,000 simultaneous text messages
Immediate Web site changes.
And I am, for the first time sinnce moving to remote area of the Santa Cruz mountains, online at 370KB/sec via comcast cable, at the cost of not having a static ip address to run my servers. For the first time since I logged into the internet, I'm a consumer, and although I love the bandwidth, I don't know what to do about the 5 servers I run currently off of ISDN, I just don't know.
And from Spacecraft
- :
There’s a story about some people who were writing the software for an early avionics computer.
One day they were visited by the weight control officer, who was responsible for the total weight of the plane.
“You’re building software?”
“Yes.”
“How much does it weigh?”
“It doesn’t weigh anything.”
“Come on, you can’t fool me. They all say that.”
“No, it really doesn’t weigh anything.”
After half an hour of back and forth, he gave up. But twodays later he came back and said, “I’ve got you guys pinned to the wall. I came in last night, and the janitor showed me where you keep your software.”
He opened a closet door, and there were boxes and boxes of punch cards. “You can’t tell me those don’t weigh anything!”
After a short pause, they explained to him, very gently, that the software was in the holes.
All this pales before the week I just had - behind the best birthday I've ever had, and all I can think of is not typing, not being online, not reading - but being out in the Real World, again, just for one more day, to keep filling in the holes left in my life where all the meaning had gone....
¶ 2:53 PM
