[HN Gopher] Automated departure messages at Symbolics
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Automated departure messages at Symbolics
Author : oumua_don17
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-01-22 11:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (netsettlement.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (netsettlement.blogspot.com)
| neilv wrote:
| This is by Kent M. Pitman (KMP).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Symbolics was fundamentally the victim of an inferior performance
| doubling time. Their performance increased at a rate noticeably
| slower than more mainstream processors.
|
| That meant that their massive advantage in running lisp
| evaporated in just a few years between the mid 80s and 1990.
|
| This was coupled with an inability to simplify their product. The
| first Symbolics machine we ordered at the CRL at NMSU in '84 had
| to have a guy with a graduate degree from UT come light it up.
| The SUN 2 that arrived at the same time had everything
| preinstalled and just needed me to plug in a few cables and turn
| on the power switch. The complexity of the Symbolics was
| reflected in the maintenance contract prices and in the fact that
| you generally had to deliver an entire OS and dev tool chain
| image to deliver any program (a so-called world build).
|
| A few performance improvement doubling times later, Sun was the
| darling of the startup world and you could buy all of Symbolics
| for the price of a few of their maintenance contracts. Sun had
| been able to hitch a ride on the broader base of the 68000
| processors from Motorola and then was able to improve the Sparc
| processor at a much faster tempo than Symbolics could cycle their
| own design.
|
| Of course, about 15 years later, Sun fell victim to similar
| pressures and business model problems when the Sparc development
| team couldn't maintain tempo against Intel. Intel's primary
| advantage was broad market adoption which funded faster design
| cycles. Sun also had locked in on large banks by that time (how
| they survived the .com crash) and couldn't get back out to the
| broader market.
|
| So it wasn't really that the flood came to the desert ... it was
| that Symbolics was focused on the wrong problem because they
| thought they had all the answers.
| nabla9 wrote:
| "The day of the flood" was the Rise of Worse is Better.
| https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
|
| 80s - 90s where the era where quantity, volume and network
| externalities became more important than quality or even
| capabilities. There were good reason for that to happen, of
| course.
| jblakey wrote:
| I was waiting to see the output of the macro:)
| gnufx wrote:
| Concerning Zmacs completion allegedly being much better, GNU
| Emacs would complete M-x i-d-m to insert-departure-message, but
| there are three other possibilities in my current session.
| choeger wrote:
| Nowadays you would probably build some SaaS business around that.
|
| Start with Gmail and slack add-ons and role it from there.
|
| Given the nature of the process, better pick one-time payment and
| maybe add a corporate plan.
| searchableguy wrote:
| https://nira.com/ does this to an extent. They pivoted away
| from usefyi which provided a way to connect multiple corporate
| services like Dropbox, gsuite drive, etc and see everything in
| one place.
| capableweb wrote:
| How does Nira compose you messages that can be adjusted via
| something resembling a form? This is the headline from their
| website:
|
| > Protect company documents from unauthorized access
|
| And the tagline:
|
| > Nira is a real-time access control system that provides
| visibility and management over who has access to company
| documents in Google Workspace.
|
| Not sure how that remotely resembles being able to have text
| macros.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Sorry, I ended up thinking far beyond helping employee send
| a departure message when the original comment mentioned a
| SaaS service for it in my head and disregarded the context.
|
| I was thinking of a tool which would help companies
| departure employees smoothly. One thing that involves in
| departuring an employee is removing their access to the
| internal services related to the company. That's why I
| mentioned nira. It solves one key part of departuring an
| employee.
| cube00 wrote:
| Our company uses a provider that charges $5 per farewell
| electronic card that everyone can write their own message into.
|
| To think we were giving eCards away for free in the 90s.
| unixhero wrote:
| A macro business! Why not!
|
| Why does this not exist for legal purposes?
| rmbryan wrote:
| "you can be the lizard best adapted to life in the desert, but if
| you can't swim on the day of the flood, your time is up."
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That quotation reminds me of one of my favorite refutations of
| the idea of directed evolution. A popular misconception is that
| evolution is directed towards making each species faster,
| stronger, and more intelligent. That may be true for some high-
| visibility examples during stable conditions. As soon as a
| cataclysm hits, it's the low-maintenance generalists who
| survive to repopulate the world.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-01-23 23:01 UTC)