What the heck?

Well, I'm making a statement about blogging.  How does a frog laugh?  I'm sure you can fing it on someone's blog somewhere.  I can tell you that the frogs in a backyard pond in Hawaii make a more raspy croaking sound when they think they can attract a mate.  Now I bet if you go search Google for laughing frogs, you'll come across this posting.

I have a new job.  And since blogging is nothing more than the dumps of our brains to an audience of one (our own minds), I'll talk about my thoughts ont he matter.

I joine Microsoft almost 6 years ago.  At the time I joined what was then the newly formed MSXML team.  Their job was to ship XML technologies (the very first from Microsoft).  In the intervening years, I've had the pleasure of helping drive the XML strategy and technologies for Microsoft, ranging from what to put into the System.Xml managed code, what to do with XQuery, when to create XML tools, and how to incoroporate XML and data programming into our core languages (C#, VB).

As we used to say in the group "Webdata is at the center of the universe, and it's hot at the center of the universe".  You can't imagine getting an angry email from the likes of Brian Valentine, or worse David Cutler telling you how some mistake in your little component is costing the company millions of dollars because it has haulted the smooth functioning of the build system for Windows.  Or better yet, trying to survive the onslaught of seething hatred stired by the admission that the cause of the slammer virus, and subsequent shutdown of the Korean internet, or Ford Motor company assembly line, was all your fault.

Yes, it's hot a the center of the universe, but, from within such a furnace are forged the most awesome and effective components that have had more impact on shaping data access and data interchange than any other components in recent programming history.  So, although it was challenging in the extreme, I loved almost every minute of it.

What now then?  Well, here at Microsoft, we have this little team known as "Engineering Excellence".  Identifying, developing, consolidating, disseminating, and otherwise synthesizing best practices for engineering, to improve the engineering process across all of Microsoft, that's what we're about.

What a job!!  I get to help program Microsoft itself.  Much more than writing code for a small component that is part of a larger component, which is in turn a part of a larger component, which ships in Windows, I'm engaged in engineering the very DNA of Microsoft.  What does success look like?  Well, that we ship fewer bugs to begin with.  That we ship products in a predictable and replicatable way.  That our customer satisfaction is the highest in the industry, and we are held up as a beacon for innovation as well as quality much as Nasa had been in the past as they created the space program.

So, with my new job, I have a new tablet PC, a nifty new office (half the size of my old one), and a new level of energy and excitement about changing the world (at least Microsoft) through better software development.  That's whta's on my mind, so that's what I'm sharing.

Right now I'm listening to the local radio station http://www.kuow.org online.  I could just as easily be listening to some Brazilian music from half way down the other end of the planet.  I only have a lowly DSL connect at 384K download.  I could have a high speed cable internet connection at 3Mb, but hay, the current speed is just fine for listening to voice, and even music, over the internet.

Why would I ever buy another radio receiver in my life?  The last one I bought, a nice Denon amplifier with the radio receiver built in, seems quaint.  I probably never listened to the radio receiver part anyway.  Now, I'll never even bother to fire up that side of the 'receiver'.  So, Denon, you might as well stop including that part of the receiver, and lower the price.  As a matter of fact, you might as well cut receivers out of the loop completely because I can get it from the internet now.

I'm on the verge of getting my videos that way as well.  Comcast digital cable/internet, offers video on demand.  I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, almost.  No more wasting time with DVDs, NetFlix, BlockBuster, nothing.  I'll just get it all over the internet.

Oh, and QWest communications?  I'll be getting my phone calls through VOIP with my Comcast connection as well.  So, you might as well just take down those phone lines and get rid of all those employees manning those empty buildings, because I won't be needing you anymore.

And, Fry's Electronics, as much as you've been a part of my geek upbringing, I'm now getting my stuff through J&R Electronics, because they offer two day delivery, with no taxes, and they have everything in stock, at lower prices.  So, roll on back with your unknowledgeable sales people, take away your mega stores, and turn those parking lots into nice parks will yah?

The internet is an industry killer!  Whole towns will begin to shut down as the internaut's all consuming economic wrecking tentacles squeeze every last ounce of efficiency out of those little fiber optic wires running all over the planet.

It has been sneaking up on us slowly, but I see it for what it is now.  The internet causes inactivity in otherwise thriving sectors of our world economy.  Well, of course there's Vonage, and they're making money, and they're a new business, and there's the coffers of UPS and FedEx which will be ever expanding.  And who knows how many J&R Electronics distributers will sprout up to claim the mantle of best internet electronics retailer.  And don't even get me started about what's going to happen to the music recording industry.

Yes, the internet killed the radio star, but in it's place, there is emerging a new constellation of opportunities and possibilities.

Say that a few times fast, and you begin to understand the fun you can have with a 9 year old with just 5 words of English.

So, build vs buy.  Recently I decided to build a PC for Yasmin.  I had purchased her one a few years back.  It was from a British company I think “Tiny PC”.  No longer in business, at least no longer in the mall.  It wasn't particularly cheap at the time, and it took a week for them to produce it.  That was before the existance of Fry's in the great Pacific Northwest.

That machine was way noisy, not particularly powerful, and I think Yasmin used it a total of less than 10 times in her life so far.

Enter the modern age.  Now there's these tiny machines like the Shuttle PC.  So, a couple of weeks ago, Yasmin and I headed out to Fry's Electronics and we purchased one of their barebones systems.  It was nice because the basic systems is about the size of two shoe boxes stacked atop each other.  Maybe smaller depending on your shoe size.  We bought the Memorex DVD burner, one of those multi-card readers, and AMD 2600, and 512Mb RAM.  We topped it off with a Maxtor 160Gb HD.

This was Yasmin's first build.  I let her put some screws in, and she got to see all the various parts of the machine.  She was quite proud of her accomplishment, then we turned it on.

The darned thing didn't work!  It would come one, then after a couple of minutes, it would just shut down.  I checked the bios for the heat shutoff timing, I set that to never shut off.  But, the thing just kept shutting off.  After a while, it wouldn't even stay on for more than about 30 seconds.

I stayed up all night with this thing.  Literally, I didn't get to bed until about 4am.  Given my going rate of $50/hour, this thing cost me about $400, and I got nothing to show for it.

Alright.  I took it all apart, packed it all nicely back into the boxes, instead of dropping it from my roof, and returned it to Fry's.  The return guy said “it's probably a bad power supply, you should just go get another one”.  After I got over my frustration, I figured it was worth another try, because I truly am a geek, and I did want Yasmin to have the pleasure of assembling her own PC.

Second time around, no real problems.  It all went together nicely, and it just worked as soon as I turned it on.  I loaded Windows XP onto it, and then proceeded to download about 100 Windows updates.  Yasmin found this rather amusing because the whole process took much of the night, into her bed time, and it caused lots of reboots.  It's so amusing that even a child laughs at the process.

But, then we loaded Encarta, MS Works, a Midi Keyboard thing, and a couple of photo editing pieces.  Then I topped it all off by giving her my office desk, and the new Canon i900D printer we had recently purchased, and my very own Canon S50 digital camera (yah, it was her birthday recently, and yes she's daddy's little girl).  I figure with all that gear, she should be set for producing college quality papers and science fair projects for her third grade class.  Never can be too prepared.

Of course, without an office disk, I don't have enough room for the very large PC and CRT that now need to share the smaller desk that are still in my office, so what am I to do?

Buy another one of those Shuttle systems I guess.  So, this past weekend we did.  We had quite a runaround trying to find the right Sony monitor with speakers, and I finally had to just get it online.  It was cheaper by $30, and will ship within a couple of days.  That's after going to Fry's and buying their last unit and having exactly 1 pixel not work on the blasted thing!

So, now I have another of those Shuttle PCs sitting on my desk waiting for it's mated monitor to arrive so that I can toss the ViewSonic17PS off the room.  I've had this monitor for about 10 years, but when it's time has come, it's time has come.

This is actually a part of the decluttering process.  I got rid of a desk (or at least put it into alternative service).  I'm getting rid of two CRTs.  I bought Yasmin one, and I'm getting one to replace my monitor.  That will save on power and waste energy.  I'm getting rid of two under powered PCs, and replacing them with two modern day units that consume less power, make less noise, take up less room, and simply look better.

It's like the path in my back yard.  Sometimes you've got to build a little to get rid of a little.

I'm sure there's a story in here about software... Oh yah, sometimes you've got to add to your APIs a little to get rid of a little bit of clutter.  How can we create the perfect API without introducing the new thing in its perfected form?  Trouble is, once you introduce the new one, you can't simply toss the old one off the roof.  If only we could...

At any rate, I have a new standard workhorse PC for the home.  I can truly see these little boxes popping up all over the house with their attendant wireless mice and keyboards.  Some wired, some wireless.  Some with TV tuners, some with DVD drives.  Some with 5.1 speakers hooked up, some with nice big monitors or projectors hooked up.  It's a wonderful world we live in, and all this technical complexity can not match the simplicity of “Little Legs Like Little Eggs”, but that's another story.

During the winter in my neighborhood, the begetation looks pretty baren.  Things become really simple.  Everything but the evergreens, loses it's leaves, dries up, and kinda disappears.  You can see everything clearly without all the clutter in the way.  Without the leaves, it is relatively easy to see the broken and dying branches.  You go in with your pruning shears, saw, and whatnot, and you just clear everything out that doesn't look like it belongs.  Order is the word for the day, and I am happy.

Spring comes along, and all the plants decide to take on new “features”.  All the little blooms are blooming.  The grass begins to grow again, the leaves, following the blooms, start poking out again.  Soon enough, the inner branches of the trees and bushes will be hidden, their stark simplicity replaced by a cacophony of colors and a blanket of clorophyll producing/consuming energy systems.  It all looks good, but man!  What a mess!!

Just so you can understand what follows, I will give you a brief inventory of the flora around my house:

5 50 foot pine trees.  Always shedding needles, year round.  1 Giant Poplar.  2 dwarf Cherry (Rainier, Bing).  1 Prune plum, 3 large Bogenvalia, 1 large Cherry blossom, several Rhododendron and Azalia, ground cover here and there, raspberries, Rhubarb, a full vegatable garden, some large hedge type bushes (non descript), holly, this that and the other thing... And that's just the back yard.

The front yard is similarly equipped, although the trees are dogwood, magnolia, 20 roses, several fruit trees (apple, plum, pear), and again with the nasty ground cover I'd like to rip out.

The sides of the house feature more Rhodies, bamboo, of a couple different varieties, japanese maples, juniper type stuff, and some pretty flowering weed that I don't know, but they look like peas.

Now.  It's almost a full time job to keep up with all this stuff.  At least on the weekends.  Oh yah, and there's a full complement of grass in both the front and back.  Anyway, keeping up with this stuff is a full time job.  I have two large 50 gallon “yard waste” cans, and they find themselves full every week.  They only get picked up every other week, so there's no way to keep up really.  You have to fill up extra bags and put them out, or take them to the dump separately.

What's striking about all this stuff is, during the winter, it's all completely ignored.  I mean zilch, zip, nada.  After about October, everthing just shuts down.  The temperature drops, the plants die off or go dormant as they see fit, and I turn my attention to wood working, and selling off books.  But come spring time, Padow!!  There it all is.

This weekend, in order to tame some of the beast, we decided to take out some of the grass in the back yard and build in a perimeter walkway.  A very nice idea indeed.  Since we want to have strolling brunches sampling of the various fruits and veggies in the garden, we might as well have a nice walking path to make the stroll a pleasant one.

Well, this of course takes a trip to Lowe's.  We have to look at what type of path trimmings are available that we like.  We decide on these scalloped brick things, because Yasmin thinks they will look cool and are more instresting that the plain old ordinary bricks.  OK, we don't buy them immediately, but we do buy a ball of twine to mark the path.  Then, back home, stake the path, get out the tape measure, mark it all off.  Turns out to be about 130' worth of walkway.  This all happened after I used the weed wacker and lawn mower to essentially cut the grass down to dirt so we could actually see what the path might look like.

While I'm busy with this process, Yasmin is clipping some of the the bushes away from the path.  It's one of the giant non descript bushes that generates white flowers, then red barries later in the summer.  That, and the prune plum tree.  This generates another pile of twigs and leaves, that of course won't fit into the already full yard waste container.  So, they'll have to be stuffed into bags.  But, we have a new feature now, it is a staked out path that almost looks like a path.  One or two or three more milestones may be needed to finish the task.

Having staked out the path, we went off to Costco to buy a dvd, and then made a side trip to Home depot to see what they had going in the pavers department.  Not as wide a selection as Lowe's so back to Lowe's.

Alright.  We need exactly 128 of the 1 foot scalloped things, and 24 of the curved ones to make our curves.  Just a little more than we need to account for breakage, and design changes.  The nice thing about Lowe's is that they help you with “load out”.  That is, the nice guy helped me put all those bricks into the back of my truck so I could get home quickly...

And then... All by myself, I had to take all those bricks and move them up a staircase from the driveway, across the front lawn, up the path, into the back yard, and stack them all nice and neat like.  Tenacity, perseverance, perspiration, and a sheer determination, and I had the task done in about an hour.

Now what do we have?  In order to clean up the trash, that is, in order to eliminate a bit of green from my back yard, I've increased the yard waste, but chopping down some bushes, generated some grass clippings from clearing out the path, put a huge amount of brick dust in my car, and deposited a number of bricks in a pile to be dealt with.  Not to mention the introduction of 20 or so stakes and the accompanying twine.

After the next milestone, this stuff will all be put in its proper place, and all the trash will eventually get cleaned up, even if it does take a couple more seasons.  In the end, we'll have a wonderfully organized yard with minimized waste, all nice and tidy and orderly.

As I tucked Yasmin into bed tonight, we started thinking about the things we'll be doing with our newly organized space.  Word of forts, with water features dividing them.  Park benches, with arbors, gazebos, and waterfalls.  In the fullness of time, we'll actually implement all these features.  For now, we're just going to have to deal with all the trash we've just generated. 

As Jimmy Carter used to do, I consult my daughter Yasmin on many an issue of great and deep importance.  The subject this weekend was why computers crash, have bugs, and all that sort of stuff.  I made a bold statement because I wanted to see where we could take it.  I said “they have problems because they have no sense of identity“.

A while ago, she raised the question “Who is the 'I' that says 'I'“.  We've gone into philosophical and religious discussions based on this very topic.  Today, she basically said, “that's a lot of difficulty caused by a single letter“, and then she went back to reading “Dragon Singer“, which isn't about a singing dragon at all.

At any rate, we went on about our day, and on the way over to Krispy Kreme, we broached the subject again, “why don't computers always work?“  This time, I had an even better angle.  I said the following.

“This car is transporting us to Krispy Kreme.  Without using the words “I“, “We“, or “Us“, can you describe why this is happening?“.  She struggled mightily, figuring, refiguring, recasting, and in the end came up with “it's too hard“.  I thought to myself “just like when the WHOPPER figured out that there was no good end in thermonuclear war“.  That was just the hook I needed.  I said, computer programs are like us in the car without identity.  The car is like the computer itself.  Or visa versa.  It's doing whatever it's doing, no matter what.  I said, if the car suddenly veered off course, and went off the side of the road, we wouldn't care, and the car would do nothing to correct its course.  We're just along for the ride.  Without identity, we can't say things like “NO!!  We want to go to Krispy Kreme!!“, and recorrect the errant path.  There's no “We“ to express such a thought, and the car has no real will of its own.  It's only because I have strong desires to get to the donut place that I will make corrections to the car along the way, accounting for adversities of all sorts as they come up.  I am adaptable, and I have desire.

Similarly, I said, there's no sense of identity in the computing system, so when a virus comes along and messes with the program, the computer happily continues to execute the infected program because it has no sense or desire to do anything else, because it has no identity of its own.  It's just going wherever the code takes it.

To go further, I described the current state of computing as working very hard to make the car more reliable.  Random acts are less likely to take us off course.  A popped tire is unlikely.  An overheated radiator, a tweaked steering system.  But, a random asteroid, or drunk driver can always hit us, and since we're merely passengers, we're not going to do too much to correct our course, because we have no desire other than to ride along with wherever the car is going to take us.

We then worked out that it would be nice to put some amount of knowledge/mind into the machine such that it can make some basic decisions.  That's when we stumbled on the word “epistemology“.  How do you remember such a word?  Well, I said “epi“ can be remembered because it's at the center of things, like “epicenter“ of an earthquake.  Then there's stem, which is the center of a plant.  Then, ology is easy because she already knows things like biology as being the study of something.  So, now Yasmin knows the word epistemology as the study of things that are at the center.  Good enough, we'll get to the theory of thinking and knowledge soon enough.

Having planted this seed, I'm assuming that Yasmin will come up with the method and aparatus for infusing machines with a mind.  Perhaps we'll follow Freud and create an Id, Ego, and Superego system.  Who knows.  All I know is that in the past (when she was 4) when she was asking the questions like “why is the sky blue, why does the moon appear larger when it's low in the sky“, and the like, I had to turn to the “Handy Physics Answer Book“.  I figure by turning these problems over to her early, we'll get a generational head start on solving them.

Well, we got our donuts, we headed home, and Yasmin finished the “Dragon Singer“ for the fifth time before turning in.  I'm glad she's on my side, and I hope the pity she feels for the poor dumb computers leads her to answering the “who am I?“ question for them.

I've archived a large number of DVDs to my hard disk.  If you have non-copyrighted material, say weddings and whatnot, on DVD, you can use DVDDecrypter to store the content on your hard disk.  It has this neat mode (ISO Read) that pretty much just copies the entire disk to your machine as an ISO image.  You could then write that image file out to a DVD Writer, and you'd have a duplicate of your most precious wedding DVD.

The interesting thing to me though, is the other things you can do with your content.  For example, using the same program, you can demux the DVD into its constituent parts.  In particular, you can split out the video as MPEG-2, and the audio as .AC3, or whatever the encoding so happened to be.  Once you do that, you can do other things.

Now, I'm trying to make my media content available over my home network so that I can watch a movie or play music from anywhere in the house.  I want to store it all on the “media server”, which is to be a fairly beefy machine running Windows 2003 Server, with Media Services enabled.  The media services basically allow for media streaming, either as broadcast, or unicast.

If I can turn my content into Windows Media Video 9 format, then I'll be golden.  It turns out that part of the free downloads for Windows Media 9 is the Windows Media Encoder program.  This is a really neat piece of machinery.  You simply indicate where your audio is stored, and where the accompanying video is, and tell it what data rate, video sight, and other parameters you like, and start encoding.  At the end of what may be a very long session on an underpowered machine such as mine, you will get this nice .wmv file that will be a nice representation of your content in streaming media format.

This is way cool.  There is one step you have to perform once you get your content from your original DVD though.  You have to convert the .AC3 stream into a .wav file, but there's a utility program called AZid that helps you do that part.

So, I've got a strategy.  Copying the original content of my DVDs to the hard disk in the entirety seems like a good idea.  It's a permanent record that's a bit more easily accessible than the original DVDs.  Since my hard disk is faster than my DVD drive, it makes further processing much faster.  It's also a legitimate archiving mechanism because if I lose, break, burn, or otherwise destroy one of my $15 DVDs, I can press a new desk from my desktop.  That seems like a good thing.  Also, whenever  I want to create a movie of a specific size for a specific purpose, I can always transcode from the original sources.

Now, I'm looking back at the 100 or so CDs that I've archived, and I'm thinking I will go through the whole process all over again.  When I first archived them, I used one of the lossy compression ratios.  I was thinking I would be archiving them for playback.  But, after doing this little job on the DVDs, I'm thinking it would be good to have the CDs as pristine copies of originals as well.  it takes up more space, but that's why I keep buying 100Gb disk drives.

At the same time that I'm archiving my wedding DVDs, I'm getting the sub title information off them at the same time.  I plan on putting those into a database so that I can do content searches to find interesting stuff.  Given that the DVDs will be available online, it begins to get interesting.  I can imagine being able to archive some National Geographic, or Discovery Channel DVDs and pull up scenes by content for Yasmin's various reports.  That will be way cool.

Basically, I'm turing my media into searchable content that can be used for more than just entertainment.  This is a good thing for book/learning people such as ourselves, we have ready access to a library of Congress amount of information right here on our little server at home.

So, that's how it is.  Rip snortin fast archiving and retrieval of massive amounts of information.  I wonder if I can query and present this information in a better way...

I guess that's another story.

So,

This past weekend, I pushed further ahead with my home office rearrangement project.  Having detreasured the downstairs, and having move my center of computing upstairs, there was just one more thing to move.  I left one of the computers downstairs (the media archiving PC) because that's where the cable was running.  There, and into my bedroom.

I really had no other reason for having the PC down there other than the fact that the cable was available down there.  So, I endeavored to install a cable line into my new office space.  Seeing as how I did so well while installing the phone line, I figured this would be a piece of cake.

Well, I didn't drill a hole through any existing cables this time, but I did have my challenges.  I went to Fry's Electronics because I figured they have everything.  I thought I'd pick up the coax cable, the connectors, and the special crimping tool.  Well, they had the cable, but it was expensive.  They had the connectors, but not the crimping tool.  Ah well, why don't I pick up a DeskStar disk drive while I'm here... Nah, it's a wash.

So, off to the Fremont district to look into some hydroponics equipment.. But, that's another story.

So, I eventually went to the hardware store.  I was able to get 500' of cable for $38, and they had the connectors, and the special crimping tool.  Fry's has dropped in my estimation as the be all end all destination for electronics.  I got the cable, drilled a hole in my garage wall, ran the cable up top, into the hole that I drilled, up into the closet.  Sounds easy yes?  Well, yah, except I initially had the wrong connectors, I cut the cable too short, I didn't have an extension fitting to finish the job, and the computer was downstairs.

Well, today, all is well.  I moved the computer upstairs, I connected the extra length of cable that was needed, and now my archiving PC sits, humming peacefully, in the closet, with it's cable attached.

This is really cool because the way things are setup, I can be busily typing on my computer while Yasmin's using the other one at the same time.  I can easily watch TV while I work if I like (I could already do this with the laptop anyway), and my basement is devoid of computer equipment.

Now that the basement is more open, having stripped the shelves of aging books, and removed the computers, and other various and sundry items, what will I do?

Well, now it's time to get one of those projectors, some nicer movie couches, and beef up the whole entertainment system with large scale noisy speakers and the like.  That, or I'll increase my investment in exercise equipment, adding a rowing machine, and universal weight machine to the bike rollers.  That, or rent the space out to a starving artist.  That, or setup the hydroponics down there and start growing stuff during the non-sunny season.

Who knows.  For now, I have my computing center setup in one place.  I have that room nice and decluttered.  I'm happy as a pig in slop, and I want to write some code.

Through the closets and shelves downstairs, what do I find?  Selective issues of  Dr. Dobb's Journal, dating as far back as 1993, to 1998.  At some point I think I had a subscription, and I thought I'd be referring to these things over time.  Turns out that you can get it all online, on CDs, and various other venues.

Interesting headings:

Unlocking Encryption Algorithms - Well Bruce Schneier created a few books on the subject, and runs Counterpane Software (http://www.counterpane.com).  I bought his “Applied Cryptography” book (1st and 2nd Editions).  Then of course there's the TwoFish book.  Now I'm ready to recycle them because the work has advanced and these references can all be had online.  Bruce Charges a lot of money to get his software on a CD, but, you can find it all online if you're industrious.

Morphing Magic - Became a book, I bought it, then replaced it with a more rigorous book later.

Visual Programming - Used to be big, and there were probably big conferences on it.  Nowadays.  With the advent of Java and sloppy programming, we can produce many more bugs more quickly with a simple editor, so we don't need this visual assistance.  I'm thinking Intentional Programming will actually be the next big breakthrough in this area.

Object Oriented Programming - Now that's gotta be hot.  I wonder if I should keep that one?

Oh, and look, there's one on this thing called XML.  That one might be hot one day.  I better hold onto it just in case I need to refer back to that complex syntax they talked about.  And on and on it goes.  10 years of magazines that seemed extremely interesting at the time, but are nothing more than online references at this point.

Well, I'm a programming guy, and I'm sure there's some sort of programming analogy I can draw here.  One trend I see by investigating this past is what turned out to be truly important, and what turned out to be more short term fads.  Undocumented NT and Netware core protocol?  Net What?

How about Persistence for C++, Distributed computing and component objects?  And my favorite, Optimizing VRML!!

I guess the point would be, when things get really good, they get preserved.  Yah some things that aren't particularly good get preserved some time too, but in general I think this is true.

Since I work on XML, I wonder, what parts of it will be the parts that I'll be throwing away as esoterica, and which parts will be getting preserved in a more permanent form, perhaps as part of a language.  Looking into this crystal ball, and making good choices for the future is what our jobs are all about.

SGML, the genesis of XML, has a lot of crufty esoteric stuff.  If it didn't, there never would have been a need for XML.  XML itself is even starting to get some cruft.  There is now this 1.1 thing, namespaces, XSD, and whatnot.  What do you make of it?  What parts of this will be the Dr Dobb's 1993 issue on the beauties of Netware, and which parts will be longer lasting?

Only time will tell for sure, but in the meanwhile, we'll influence and shape the outcome, doing enough things right such that history will have plenty to choose from in determining how foresightful we were today.