Daynote ,Svenson

MM-lxxxxvii     Thursday

2000-04-06

Oeps, morning frost (-2C) with ice on the windshield. Of course this is due to clear skies and they stay that way throughout the bright sunny day. That is spring, perfect porch weather, birds are singing, squirrels are courting, ... ai!

Ronny is back but before he can tackle the order-validation problem he has to sort out a problem with RoundTable (that is the version management tool used for TeleSales). Somehow the database got corrupted and an restore from backup looks like the only option left.
In the early afternoon he solves the validation problem in version-9 (ocs 7.9). I proposed to solve it only in v9 and not in v8 as well.

About an hour later a discussion with Theo reaches the question of solving problems in v8 and/or v9. Of course Theo wants to solve all problems in both versions and keep new functions in v9 only.
That is probably what we will do in the end but my point is that if all problems are solved in v8 and there are no compelling innovations in v9 there is no incentive to pull OpCos towards the new version. Whenever they want something new they will claim it is a bug or connect it to a bug to get it solved in v8. That way new functions get introduced in the old version and in the end the new version is pushed forward (like OCS 7.7 which was ultimately never released, jumping from 7.6 to 7.8).

For OMSI-3 I finished the OFI-interface adaptation, testing included. I think there will be a problem for OFI later in the process. I asked John and he said there wouldn't be one but I doubt it. The problem is a data-format issue. Two new fields contain numeric data in packed format (two digits per byte, ex 374 decimal becomes X'374D' ) while the same fields on the OFI side are in character format (one digit per byte, ex 374 becomes X'3D7D4D'). We will see.

As most of the discussion about the Microsoft trial result are now winding down (often degenerating into a kind of verbal mud-wrestling) I wan to add an observation of my own. Well, a question really. Why did the DoJ go after Microsoft like it did?
Why isn't it going after Boeing? What is the share of Boeing in the market of airliners? 80%? 90%? Does it play 'nice' in its market? The only reason I see is that the only competition comes from outside the US. Airbus is the only company which can take on Boeing even though it is smaller and less powerful. If it was an American company Boeing would have met the DoJ by now I think.
What would have happened to Microsoft if its competitors (Netscape, Oracle,...) were not American companies?
Right, no DoJ case.