Sawmill’s Revenge

13-Apr-2007

This week has been Internet access week at NBE.  It's a cool idea.  High-speed access to an optimizer screen located in South Nowhere, New Zealand or North Nowhere, Canada.  All while sitting at your desk browsing the Internet and drinking a latte.

And it is cool, except for one thing.  No mill does it the same.  So far this week, one mill used pcAnywhere, one mill used VNC, one mill used gotomyPC and one mill used GNat VPN.  Two more are expected this week, so we expect to be introduced to two more schemes.

I have some observations.

IT people are like sawfilers or graders or optimizer programmers.  They speak in their own language, they always have a reason why anyone else's ideas are wrong and they never deliver on time.  As far as response time, the best so far was only 1 week later than promised.  Though I have to admit IT people never actually make a promise directly connected to a fixed time.  They prefer a Poisson distribution that begins tomorrow and ends shortly before hell-freezes-over.

The number of options is in some ways a tribute to the free enterprise of the Internet world.  If ATT was still in control it would only run 9600 baud and if Microsoft was in control it would not be secure.  So even if it is annoying I am not in favor of forced standards or monopolies.

This could be a clever security ploy.  If every computer in the world had a unique access scheme, then it would be nearly impossible to break into them all.

Mainly I believe this to be the Sawmill's Revenge.  For years optimizer vendors have been forcing sawmills to accept the vendor's unique optimization parameters.  Why each vendor has unique parameters is whole different subject, but in spite of the years of crossbreeding and idea theft among vendors, they have not converged on one set of lumber rules.  Sawmills have been putting up with this forever.  They have had to listen to vendors explain the virtue of their parameters and why they could not possibly use another vendor's parameters.  Now it is payback time.  Optimizer vendors have to listen to IT people explain why they have to be unique.

rod nelson

"Salesmen are like trees.  They are both a little crooked, but it is hard to run a sawmill without them"