First off, I'd like to say I only just read the lyrics to Californication, despite having heard the song countless times. At once strange and delightful; depressing and inspiring. Me likey.

And now, for something completely different.

I work at Sears Portrait Studio. I am an OB1 (that's Office Bitch 1st Class, for those of you not versed in Navy rates, or in this case, psuedo rates), which means I do everything that's left over. Mainly, that involves answering the phone and ringing people up. Today, due to a lack of staff, I got to do sales, which is the part of the process wherein you see all the pretty pictures you had taken, and turn them into all sorts of creations. Or, of course, you can be, you know, boring, and just buy a bunch of 8x10s. I'll give SPS one thing, they're actually fairly technically advanced. Decent cameras (Olympus E-1, if anyone cares), decent software (although it runs on Windows, which means it crashes if you attempt to do things faster than it decides is the acceptable level of the moment), and tons of options.

The only real fault I have is the connectivity. We have a VPN over 56K modem to a central website where we have our scheduling system, forms, and so on. Sometimes it comes up after a painfully slow wait. Other times, I could accomplish the deed faster with a chisel and stone tablet. Barring that, there's the intranet. We have all recent Dells (I believe the workstations are 2.4GHz P4s, 512MB RAM; all running XP Pro - the server is a Poweredge SC1420, Xeon[s?] something or other, unknown RAM and storage), but the network is terrible. Netgear 16 port 10/100 switch, and it's entirely too slow. We shoot full size (5MP - 2560x1920 at HQ JPEG, which means about 1.5-2MB files), and even those bog it down. And enhanced stuff... our software saves into the highly mysterious ".edp" file format, which Googling turned up nothing on. Best I can tell, it's a propietary layered non-compressed file format, much like Adobe's .psd. Judging by load times (the computers are all in various amounts of kiosk-esque mode. Examining file properties is locked out, for instance), they're on average, 5-7MB. If you have 20 images (an average shoot), 5 of those will most likely be discarded, and 4-6 will be enhanced in some way. (which are then saved as additional images) That's about 55MB worth of images. Using the shockingly accurate rule of 10% (100Mbps/8 = 12.5MBps, - 10% TCP overhead = 11.25MBps, - 10% random, mysterious happenings = 10MBps), that should take 5.5 seconds to load, disregarding little things like disk seek time (I'm assuming the server is running Ultra320 SCSI, but who knows... it's actually fairly zippy. Loading images locally on it is very much a treat), and actually, that's right about on par. That wouldn't be terrible, except for the fact that the software, rather stupidly, doesn't do any caching. Which means every time you jump from Presentation Mode to Edit Mode, or scroll the image list, or switch images - and so on and so on - you must endure this wait time. When you have irritable customers who just want to get reamed, er, their pictures, this is not good. What, therefore, would fix this? Let us examine the possibilities. What technology exists that allows for higher bandwidth, is backwards compatible, requires no training once in place, and is relatively cheap? If you guessed Gigabit, you're correct. Using our rule of 10%, this would result in an average speed of 100MBps, which is well below Ultra320's bandwidth (which, shockingly enough, is 320MBps). Even in the highly unlikely scenario that all three of our sales kiosks were being accessed simulataneously, Ultra320 should be able to handle it. And, of course, the Gigabit would have no problem, since it's a switched network.

I should probably submit this to a higher up. I'm sure it will receive all attention due, namely, being placed in the circular file. (which should properly be called the cylindrical file, but I digress) Possibly someone will ask what this "Gigabit" stuff is, and then the entire issue forgotten when no one knows. Even more unlikely, a bean counter will actually do some quick calculations as to the financial feasibility of it, and it will then be forgotten. In any case, it will be forgotten.

Ich spreche, aber keine hören.

/Realizes the above line sounds entirely too emo-ish for own good.
//Hates emo fags.
///Does actually know a passing amount of German.
////But is often confused with conjugation.
/////Is aware that English is much worse.
//////But knows English fluently.
///////Is wondering how many of these one can do.
////////Is seeing a pattern.
/////////Sees much better way.
////////// See below.

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