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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#41

Post by vonmoltke »

rjsw wrote: post #40
vonmoltke wrote: post #2

Not nearly as bad, but this reminds me of some of the ridiculous requirements at the last program I worked at my previous employer. One of those was that our code had to compile on a 32-bit SPARC pizza box running Solaris 2.6. This was in 2009. It was all about some stupid metric: our code portability was measured by how many different platforms we could compile and run on. It didn't matter how obsolete or inappropri…

TBF, testing on SPARC is a good way of finding endian and alignment bugs.

It would be, if our two target platforms hadn't already been x86-64 and POWER.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#42

Post by justinlardinois »

Killswitch wrote: post #28
dexterdog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.

Until it dies and you start over from scratch. I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.

Never quite expected these words to be typed on my keyboard, but the porn industry is something I'd like to read a tech article about.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#43

Post by hga »

rietta wrote: post #39
ddoscampaign wrote: post #25

Reminds me of a contract gig I passed on to support Microsoft's creaky inheritance of Danger's Hiptop/Sidekick stuck in cheapest maintenance mode. Everyone associated were trying to rotate out and it seemed like morale was less than zero. Also never work for slave-driving shops like Taos (aka Tause Mountain) unless you really need the money because it will crush your soul. (eg master cool techs and be awesomely perso…

That transition was a real mess. We had some games in the T-Mobile Sidekick store and getting paid the royalties by Microsoft was way more difficult than it should have been after the transition. It took months to get added as a vendor and I had to even send them a "final invoice" using the numbers that they had provided. The next collection step was going to be at least small claims court. The Danger team did built…

The Danger team did built a great system for its time and by the time Microsoft took over, it went downhill fast.

Microsoft managed one of the biggest cloud computing screw ups in history to date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss

The incident caused a public loss of confidence in the concept of cloud computing, which had been plagued by a series of outages and data losses in 2009. It also was problematic for Microsoft, which at the time was trying to convince corporate clients to use its cloud computing services, such as Azure and My Phone.

I've heard good things about Oracle's RAC, but it's understandably intolerant of your screwing up its disks (SAN mis/re-configuring) when you aren't properly maintaining backups. I also heard the consultants you have to hire after you manage such a feat are expensive.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#45

Post by hga »

justinlardinois wrote: post #42
Killswitch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it dies and you start over from scratch. I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.

Never quite expected these words to be typed on my keyboard, but the porn industry is something I'd like to read a tech article about.

I've read in passing that in times past they were web technology pioneers. Seem to remember some were using Freebsd when the canonical approach was Sun etc. big iron and UNIX(TM), and Linux was perhaps not quite yet mature enough.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#47

Post by ErikRogneby »

Kalium wrote: post #17
mring33621 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear %prospect_name%; I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you. Sincerely, %recruiter_sig%

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

Where is the national do-not-call list for clueless tech recruiters?

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#48

Post by wtallis »

nasalgoat wrote: post #8
kenko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?

That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.

That Pentium 90 is a 9W processor. Even after accounting for the inefficiency of a 90's era PSU, there's not much power to be saved.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#49

Post by Kalium »

ErikRogneby wrote: post #47
Kalium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

Where is the national do-not-call list for clueless tech recruiters?

I don't know. And half of appear to be operating out of India anyway, judging by the noise in the background on the lines.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#50

Post by tromobne8vb »

Kalium wrote: post #17
mring33621 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear %prospect_name%; I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you. Sincerely, %recruiter_sig%

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

>You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

The first time I read that, I thought it said "emails like they were from a six-year-old". Which is probably also true.

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