Lycos response to the qfeed group
Kimberly from the qfeed egroup has done a great job contacting Lycos... here's their response:
Below is the content of an email received at 5:35pm AZ time from Lycos VP of
Engineering:
Kimberly,
Thank you for spending some time on the phone with me, discussing your
recent letter to the management team at Lycos Quote.com. I wanted to address
some of the specific items on your letter, so that we can address the
immediate concerns that were raised by the group.
Queuing Problems: The IPFeed Server that we are deploying handles this data
better than the current production servers. We are not sure the server issue
was completely resolved so we will be running tests on the new code. We have
saved the data received on 9/22/00 in order to replay it. Once the last
issue, HotList performance, in the IPFeed development is resolved we will
focus on running this data through the server and optimizing against the
results. Our target estimate for the resolution is 31st October 2000 , since
resolving this issue may take significant reworking of a critical part of
the server.
Decimalization: We will be releasing a fix to this next week (Date to be
determined) . We have been releasing new versions of the DLL itself, but
have not bundled the fix into a new SDK. The new DLL will be released next
week and bundled into a new version of the SDK.
The 1/100 problem: Next week - This is the fix that is mentioned in #2.
Lack of Communication: The Network update page should be used as the source
of this communication. The Qfeed clients should be told about this resource:
<http://www.qcharts.com/status.> However, we recognize that the best way to
represent the "freshness" of the information is to simply date and time
stamp each update. This will then allow our customers to review the
information each hour and know that we are either resolving the issue or we
have implemented a solution. This has been recommended as a policy to Client
Services.
Incorrect Option reporting: This is an issue with the 128K feed and will be
resolved in the IPFeed deployment. Target is the end of the month for
beginning deployment. Our goal is to complete the deployment the end of
November , as we work with new feed in a production mode.
Failure of the SDK to operate as documented: This is the first that we have
heard about this and obviously we will organize a plan to address the
shortfall in our documentation. We will review the Qfeed list messages for
mention of this and would like a detailed explanation of the issue. Working
with our customers, we know that we can address this particular problem and
provide a detailed course of action that will bring our documentation
in-line with expectations.
A number of these issues were operational in nature and therefore demanded
our immediate attention. Some of the other items were already part of a
formal plan that we are working with to continue the improvements of the
technology architecture at Quote.com. We will be providing a more detailed
response with regards to our efforts and plan going forward, but in an
effort to communicate more directly with our customers. We felt that it was
appropriate to send this email in an effort to answer your immediate
questions quickly. We will follow up with another communication early next
week that we would like to pass out to the user community. I would also like
to take this opportunity to thank you for organizing the initial
communication with us.
Regards, Kaj Pedersen, VP of Engineering |
