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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

#51

Post by justinlardinois »

hga wrote: post #45
justinlardinois wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception.

I think porn is also something where your architecture only needs to just work, so that encourages cutting corners and occasionally creative solutions.

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

#53

Post by Kalium »

tromobne8vb wrote: post #50
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.

>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.

The six-year-olds I know have a better grasp of grammar.

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

#54

Post by nasalgoat »

wtallis wrote: post #48
nasalgoat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus the hard drive(s), the space it's taking up in the DC, the cooling overhead, etc.

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

#55

Post by mekael »

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane.

Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its running. Yeahp.

We have a system written in something called "Workstation Basic" which was designed/written in '79( a decade before I was born). The original author no longer works for us and can only be contacted certain times of the year because he's a snowbird.

Millions of dollars of business is done in access databases and custom made excel workbooks.

It's a fun time.

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

#56

Post by rogerbinns »

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 maintain one at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt

My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

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

#57

Post by steve-howard »

russell wrote: post #37

As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the furor when Gingrich and Clinton discovered that the FAA was using vacuum tube computers and radar in the air traffic control system. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/clinton.htm The foreign (sole) vacuum tube supplier that Clinton mentioned was Russia. Oh, the embarrassment! I knew that there were some delays in rolling out the the replacement system, so I did so…

I found this article from Wired earlier this year: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/air-traffic-control/

It doesn't specificaly mention vacuum tubes, but it does explain why it's entirely plausible that they're still around:

>This technology is complicated and novel, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that NextGen is a project of the FAA. The agency is primarily a regulatory body, responsible for keeping the national airspace safe, and yet it is also in charge of operating air traffic control, an inherent conflict that causes big issues when it comes to upgrades. Modernization, a struggle for any federal agency, is practically antithetical to the FAA's operational culture, which is risk-averse, methodical, and bureaucratic. Paired with this is the lack of anything approximating market pressure. The FAA is the sole consumer of the product; it's a closed loop.

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

#58

Post by breischl »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

The only way to stop this madness is to go on strike against it, as you did. I work very hard to never mention online that I've had anything to do with SharePoint or ColdFusion because it will bring recruiters with a job that will kill you.

Man, you are not joking. I still get the occasional ping from someone looking for me to work on TIBCO. I did a tiny bit of work on that in ~2001. It was on my resume for about a year. I'm still getting pinged for it 13 years later.

Ironically (or perhaps predictably) I've avoided adding the same two technologies you mentioned to my own resume.

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

#59

Post by trhway »

nailer wrote: post #20
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…

There's something strange about Solaris. Around the same time, an investment bank (where the Solaris team constantly justified their existence with 'dtrace!' 'zfs!' 'zones!') was paying 50K a year per server multiplied by hundreds of servers to run Solaris 8 extended support - which didn't have any of those things, which is good, because the staff didn't know how to use them other than say they made Solaris great.

>where the Solaris team constantly justified their existence with 'dtrace!' 'zfs!' 'zones!'

they did that inside Sun as well. Most noise was about DTrace, the most useless thing for the Sun/Solaris at that moment.

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

#60

Post by bro-stick »

hga wrote: post #43
rietta wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Yup. I managed some dataguard (not RAC) instances on AWS for Palm pre HP. Thankfully we had DR plans and snapshots to cover our asses.

Edit: Fixed HA techs.

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