Is it just me?

[Daniel Barlow]

Luis Motta Campos wrote:
>   Hum. Not necessarly. Static / read only pages scale quite well with 
> just the addition of more hardware. But the guy should have a number for 
> this before creating pages. 

Honestly, I don't see why.  Either it's small enough to be negligible 
(and judging from Andy's past experience, this is probably a reasonable 
assumption) or the whole thing will be a massive unexpected and 
unpredicted success.

My point is: as IT professionals we protest when we don't know the 
answer to something and are asked to come up with some bullshit number 
anyway (I'm thinking mostly about timescales[*] here): why do we expect 
the same from the client?  Of course, if he _does_ know this information 
then he should say, but if not then exactly how much use in practice is 
his wild guess going to be?  Better to know it's unknown, then at least 
you can think about how you'd find out ("soft" launches, gmail-style 
invitation-only betas, etc) and make some plans.  Knowing that you don't 
know is a much better place to be in than thinking you do.


[*] yeah yeah, I know timescales are not /per se/ unknowable, but 
they're often asked for in situations where the information to provide 
them is not (yet) available.


-dan