Acme Industrial Distributors is a subsidiary of Gewürztraminer GmbH. Their IT organization runs a complex mix of enterprise applications including, at the operating system level, Sun Solaris, x86 Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, and an IBM mainframe running some crucial part of the business that everyone is afraid to touch. Plus there’s some old AS/400 (or VMS) rattling around, too, that they “haven’t been able to get around to replacing yet.” Continue reading
Netflix pricing strategy
Netflix recently announced that they were going to offer, for the first time, their streaming video subscription service separately from their DVD-by-mail subscription service. Streaming-only will be the default for new customers, DVD-by-mail is an optional add-on. Much of the discussion, verging on outrage, about this move centered on a price increase for the popular one-at-a-time DVD plus streaming option, which is the one my family uses. Price increases are rare and this was a large one, at least on a percentage basis; the new price is nearly double the old one. You can see by this pricing choice that Netflix is positioning itself differently, a positioning that is part of its long term strategy. Continue reading
Wall Street development
Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s blog post, Why Founding a Three Person Startup with Zero Revenue Is Better Than Working for Goldman Sachs is worth reading. One parenthetical comment, especially, rang true with me:
Regtests ran nightly, and no one could trade a model without thorough testing (that might sound like standard practice, but you have no idea how primitive the development culture is on the Street). Continue reading
Bactrian disks
Sotheby’s auction house recently had a sale of miscellaneous antiquities, including a 14″ stone disk dated to 2200-1700 BC from the “Bactrian/Margian Region.” This is the so-called “BMAC” (Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex), centered around Merv in present-day Turkmenistan, which was first described by Soviet archeologists in the 1970’s. I don’t know enough about it, but this disk — how did it end up at Sotheby’s? — is apparently not the only example of its kind. Continue reading
New 747 at San Bernardino airport
This is the plane, a Boeing 747-8F, #N5017Q, that’s been flying around Redlands; testing either the plane or the airport (San Bernardino International), or both. Photo by nmcbride13.