Anatoliy Dyatlov had been working as a nuclear engineer at the same plant for quite some time. Generating cheap, safe, and efficient electricity for millions of users for important things like idling computers, powering DSL modems when nobody is home, keeping refrigerators full of moldy leftovers operational. Avoiding brownouts so that important devices like electric toothbrush chargers, xbox 370s, and iPhones http://www.apple.com/iphone do not become permanently damaged. As you know keeping a nuclear reactor is not a trivial task suitable for just anyone like those who head up customer service departments.

With his serious training it was obvious Anatoliy was serious about safety. He decided it was time to upgrade the computers from the “old fashioned” main-frame and dumb-terminal based system to a Windows XP system (replacing the terminals). MS-SQL server running on Windows XP Server spread across 4 or 5 machines would replace the clunky old reliable main-frame.

Thanks to windows XP he and his crew was reminded about very important occurances on their computers they would never have been aware about previously under the old setup. While running computer simulations of various reactor states the Taskbar usefully notified a crewmember that “You Have Unused Icons”. This Windows spread the responsibility of marginally important computer tasks to everyone, not just the nerdy IT guys. It was a breakthrough and perhaps after so long the help desk could be phased out entirely thanks to Windows. It was a Wednesday morning, and another of his crew was notified during examination of controls that there was a “Critical Update” and that “You’ve received an Instant Message”.

These were surely important events because they came from the computer, and Windows was designed to make sure these events seemed every bit as important to a user as the applications a user actually chose to run on their own. This is another great feature. The users aren’t trusted to know what is the most important, nor are the applications themselves (especially non Microsoft affiliated applications, like the nuclear simulators). Its kind of a breakthrough because before the user would just be lost in their own world of whatever program they were using, not realizing they had unused icons or mysterious software “updates” that are so critical to the modern computing experience. Upon turning on the interface to the reactor (which was a USB device) users learned that “This device could perform faster with USB 2.0”. So now the engineers can spend time figuring out what the hell USB 2.0 is and if it really has anything to do with how they plugged it in. Perhaps the cord is too long? Perhaps the hub they are using is antiquated? Oh wait, it’s the device itself? Well now what. Nevermind. Employees devote time to use the world wide web and see if they have updated the nuclear reactor USB 2.0 interface cards through Shopping.Yahoo.Com. Thankfully Yahoo has installed so many toolbars on internet explorer there is not much room to view the web pages themselves, content can be distracting.

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