I wasn't working alone tonight and while I was in back, my server sold a beer to some schmuck that she shouldn't have. I ended up having to call the cops. This is a very Not Good Thing on many levels.

Blame poll inside.

You learn to live with buzzwords. You get used to Aunt Betty asking how much upgrading to Net 2.0 will cost. You try not to shake your head When Uncle Bill asks about changing providers in order to get Rich Content. You explain to your friend's techno-tard father that even though there are things to be said for a net fridge that after a week he's going to get tired of programming in every one of his purchases and that even if there was a barcode scanner, it would still take more time than it's worth. And no, Cousin Lucy, I know the commercial said how great a wireless home router is but you live in a one-bedroom flat and connect with a modem. You don't need a router and it can't do all the great things for you that the commercial promised.

When administrators fall for the latest buzzwords and ideas, things are different. It's all about performance, anything to speed communication up. I agree. I used to be able to read the text files while they downloaded faster than my 300baud modem could pull them from a BBS. Speed is good. $OurBigApp used to take up to 20 seconds to pull up certain screens; we got that down to a norm of 2-3 seconds on a good connection, normally comprising <50KB of data. That's apparently not fast or small enough. Companies with really remote offices have big latency problems, especially when stuck using 1000km of copper to the next CO or connecting via satellite.

Lenny's got latency problems. Serious latency problems. His remote offices ping no better than 450ms and we normally require a max of 250ms. Lenny had an idea:

We research in the internet and run into some vendor's web application acceleration product that cliams it can help to accerate $YourBigApp connections to overcome the network latency.

Lenny has no idea about what "web acceleration" is nor how it works, but a few companies are telling him they have it and it works. They're even claiming it works specifically with $OurBigApp. We, on the other hand, don't necessarily agree. Lenny was probably drooling as he filed his ticket.

x-posted to the blog, sans poll which no one ever votes in anyway.

A lot of doctors' offices are using computers to keep track of things these days.