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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

#81

Post by russell »

q4814 wrote: post #62
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…

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.

I looked at several articles before I posted and I saw several mentions of "computers and radars", which matches my recollection from the time. The computers were a special purpose design, not commercially available systems, so they could have been controllers as opposed to large data processors, but the controversy was definitely about computers and not about the high-power tubes used by the radars themselves.

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

#82

Post by nasalgoat »

wtallis wrote: post #64
nasalgoat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 migr…

When I last saw it, it was one site per tower box. So one rack held about 8-10 individual sites.

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

#83

Post by smackfu »

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…

For more context, the vacuum tube computers were only around in 1995 because a massive decade-long upgrade project failed in 1994.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/1993-04-25/flying-in-pla...

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

#84

Post by russell »

userbinator wrote: post #78

Aside from the bureaucracy, that actually sounds like a fun job to me, solving obscure problems and working with things almost no one has heard of, instead of churning out and maintaining boring "cookie-cutter" applications. Then again, I do like retrocomputing, reverse-engineering, and the demoscene... I imagined myself in a job interview in 2010, trying to explain how useful my extensive knowledge of Xenix, PL/M bu…

I first read the term as "necrocomputing" instead of "retrocomputing". I think I have a preference for "necrocomputing", but then I may have been reading too much fantasy lately.

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

#85

Post by bro-stick »

mattzito wrote: post #71
bro-stick wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you do RAC on AWS without shared storage?

Thanks, fixed in edit. I was mistaken, it was dataguard and better snapshots using archive log mode.

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

#86

Post by stdbrouw »

userbinator wrote: post #78

Aside from the bureaucracy, that actually sounds like a fun job to me, solving obscure problems and working with things almost no one has heard of, instead of churning out and maintaining boring "cookie-cutter" applications. Then again, I do like retrocomputing, reverse-engineering, and the demoscene... I imagined myself in a job interview in 2010, trying to explain how useful my extensive knowledge of Xenix, PL/M bu…

Wouldn't the sheer pointlessness of it all bother you after a while? If someone wanted to pay you to dig a ditch and fill it up again, for the right price, would you do it? I mean, I'm not trying to claim that working for that hot new startup which is going to revolutionize ___ or endlessly tweaking some megacorp's ERP system is necessarily such a boon to humanity, but still.

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

#87

Post by logfromblammo »

breischl wrote: post #58
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.

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that was back when I still put my phone number on my resume, so I imagine the unlucky guy in area code 773 that got my old number is still getting calls about it.

And that is why when I got a job with a company that actually used Crystal Reports, I was very careful to not work on those portions of the code, on the off chance that some recruiter would smell some whiff of it on me, chase me down, and sit on me until I coughed up a resume in Word format.

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

#88

Post by rodgerd »

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…

> 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

There are a number of problems with RAC, some of which are people using it wrong, and some of which are inherent to RAC. "Using it wrong" covers things like people not understanding it's on shared storage so it's providing compute node resilience, not storage resilience, so they probably sould spend on some Dataguard (or equivalent) unless they want to be the DBA equivalent of the server admin who thinks you don't need backup because you've got RAID.

The built-in problems come from the fact Oracle ASM doesn't check[1] the signatures on disks/LUNS presented to it. So if the SAN admin, I don't know, manages to somehow reverse the mappings for one LUN of 30 between the stress RAC and the dev RAC, Oracle will not start and say "that ASM disk has the stress signature on it"; Oracle will overwrite the stress LUN with dev data for a while, then go to read it, then discover it doesn't have the on-disk structure it expects, then crash with a SEGV or other entertaining but unhelpful error. But only after it's irretrvably corrupted the ASM group, of course.

[1] as of 10g, the last time I hit this problem.

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

#89

Post by crystalmeph »

Not for technical reasons, but my worst job in software was also my first, a part time gig in college back in the late 90s.

It was a software company owned by two people that didn't write code or do anything on a computer other than send email. They had somehow managed to hire somebody to make a moderately successful version 1.0 of their product, but now none of the original programmers were there and they were trying to come up with a brand new release.

They mentioned during the interview that they had been "burned" by every programmer they'd ever hired. In retrospect, this was a red flag that the business owners were the only common denominator there, but again, this was my first ever software job, I had no idea what to expect.

They stopped paying me after 1 month, and kept promising that I'd get paid as soon as the big contract they were pursuing landed. I quit shortly after I took a phone call from one of their creditors demanding that they fax over a check.

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

#90

Post by gaius »

mattzito wrote: post #68
trhway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Quite. Systemtap is a joke compared to dtrace.
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