from wired, giant robot imprisons parked cars. nothing really to do with giant robot, silly. actually a good pointer for why you might want to check the license on that shinkwrapped software before you base your business model on it. what if your business model walks out the door with the developer? POOS! […]

copied from slashdot, this is not my story :)
A long time ago, when computers remembered using little donuts made of rust, I worked on on a mainframe computer system (CP/V) that supported batch, timesharing, realtime, the works. It had performance monitoring tools, and a large basketload of parameters for sys admins to twiddle.

One of our favorite parameters was SL:BB, documented as batch bias, an input to the process scheduler. When someone called or wrote to us saying they were having problems with performance tuning, we usually suggested they redo their tests varying the setting of SL:BB and let us know what happened. Try different values, 0, 1, 5, 20, 50, 100, things like that. Try it and get back to us.

And lo, they would go off and redo performance runs, and report back.

And we would collect their results and go and muse over them, usually over beer.

SL:BB told us a lot about the user, because SL:BB was a knob that wasn’t connected to anything. Oh, the value was range-checked by the parameter setting tool, and dutifully stored in memory, and displayed on performance displays, but it didn’t change system performance in any way at all.

That’s not what the documentation said, but who believes documentation? We had plans for SL:BB, we just hadn’t gotten around to writing the code yet.

So if the user reported that setting SL:BB to 25, but not 24 or 26 gave them incredibly better (or worse) results, we definitely factored that into our analysis.

Those that reported back […]

wow :) […]

got sad jumping
rainbows fluffy clouds
sad quite all for she
quite forgot you were
sad jumping rainbows
quite forgot you quite
i saw it i quite forgot
quite forgot you were
indeed
i think i was alone or
so

Indeed. The above an excerpt from “Got Sad Jumping” by Quaker Jack on the schubert.halo.gen.nz charts where a robotic music industry is blossoming.

I preferred “Said Alice Not The“, by Envey Lorine.
said alice not the
nigeria
i do cats eat me to
send me
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
i do cats eat me to
send me
in a sudden death of nigeria
general
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the nigeria
i do cats eat me to send me
in a sudden in a sudden death
of nigeria general
said alice not the nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said alice not the
nigeria
said […]