I was completely expecting 8 inch floppies or punch cards to show up once I was half way through reading.
LOL, we debugged our PL/M with an Intel ICE ("blue box") that used 8" floppies. Good times.
The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
61–70 of 242 posts
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#62As 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…
It's possible that the computers didn't run on tubes but rather the radar systems. The two may have been conflated. I believe I've read that tubes are still quite common in high-power radio transmitters because they're more effective than solid-state components. Still a bad situation, but maybe not as sensational as it appears on the surface.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#63Earlier 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.
I'm now contemplating some kind of Markov-chain CV/resume generator that uses feedback from recruiters to evolve new versions of its output....
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's not really any significant room for improvement on any of those factors. You might be able to save a rack unit or two, and several watts by replacing hard drives with a SSD, but if you don't have 50 boxes to consolidate, you're still facing the baseline cost of having a box taking up some amount of physical space and requiring several watts of power. Unless you make the much bigger up-front investment of migrating to a shared hosting platform.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#65How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.
As a engineer I do not have time to get into this new VM/container thing. I fail to see how it leads to anything productive ( no offence ).
Call me a simpleton but I am happy with better package management and config systems.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#66As 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…
It's possible that the computers didn't run on tubes but rather the radar systems. The two may have been conflated. I believe I've read that tubes are still quite common in high-power radio transmitters because they're more effective than solid-state components. Still a bad situation, but maybe not as sensational as it appears on the surface.
Russia used tubes in a number of fighter radars because they could use a lot of power to burn through opponent's ECM.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#67Earlier 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.
I'm now contemplating some kind of Markov-chain CV/resume generator that uses feedback from recruiters to evolve new versions of its output....
This sounds like an interesting exercise. I'd love to see your results. Getting meaningful negative feedback from recruiters might be a neat trick.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Dtrace was, and still is, awesome. Linux has come a long way in this area in the last few years, but DTrace was one of the hottest systems management capabilities I'd seen in forever, particularly on the very large SMP systems that had become Solaris's sweet spot in those waning years.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#69Mine. Pick Basic, with only an ed-like line editor, in all caps, on Pick OS running inside an emulator called VMark UniVerse on HP/UX. I lasted a year.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#70The 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.
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%
Dear %recruiter_sig%
Thank you for your interest. I am currently accepting ColdFusion contracts at a base rate of $385/hr.
Thanks, %prospect_name%
(That should cover my therapy bills.)