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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

#101
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ECM is presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure ...

(if dear reader, like me, had no idea what ECM meant in this context).

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

#102

How 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.

"I do not have time to get into this new .... thing" is pretty much the kind of thing that leads to problems like the original article.

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

#103

How 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.

> Call me a simpleton but I am happy with better package management and config systems.

Fundamentally (in terms of process, not technical implementation) that's all containers really are.

Run this, with this config file, and everything is pre-packaged for you in a bundle you can ship to your prod server if you like (or not, run it locally, whatever).

It's quite nice. I shared the skepticism ("so.. it's just VM's then? So what?") but having switched to a dev toolchain using it - it's actually a LOT simpler than developing locally normally.

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

#104
post #91
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting time when one can build a living/breathing piece of engineering that can outlive us indefinitely.

This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.

I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.

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

#105

I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations. First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough. Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is signif…

What often happens is that a company no longer wants to support a product that's still in use running production stuff. So the company sells off the support accounts to some other company which makes money supporting that product. This is how dBASE, filePro, and Framework (Ashton-Tate software) are still around. It's how OS/2 morphed into eComStation.

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

#106
My first job in software was also my worst. I was learning a lot by building and enhancing a SaaS applicant tracking system for a small firm in Denton. But it was run by really shady people; our CEO would hire grossly unqualified people that he was friends with back in his home country... Our director of QA had previously been a high school history teacher, and had never used a computer before... it was nuts.

We were also actively screwing one of our business partners. They sued us, and my boss considered me a very dangerous witness, so he sent me on a paid vacation so I couldn't be subpoenaed. Crazy place.

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

#107

How 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.

Think of both as ways to get a consistent baseline system which your configuration will be applied to. It's faster to spin up a VM or container than it is to do a fresh install on bare metal so you can realistically test that you really could do a clean install from the documented starting point.

Containers add even faster startup time and the option of isolation so you can have multiple containers which think they're writing to the same location but actually aren't. That's not terribly important in a one-app-per-system model but it's awesome for testing or running multiple instances of an insufficiently-configurable app on the same system.

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

#108

I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations. First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough. Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is signif…

What often happens is that a company no longer wants to support a product that's still in use running production stuff. So the company sells off the support accounts to some other company which makes money supporting that product. This is how dBASE, filePro, and Framework (Ashton-Tate software) are still around. It's how OS/2 morphed into eComStation.

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

#109
Not as vintage as this, but back in '10, I, along with a couple of other freelancers that I'd worked with in the past got asked to work in a in a big, old mill in Yorkshire.

We were immediately isolated from the modern-ish IT department and placed in a room at the end of the mill that contained a couple of dozen vacuum drive tape machines. So loud that they silenced the room when they were warming up.

Our task was to "check for security problems" in their ecommerce platform because there was some serious financial motivation from the men upstairs.

Their 'platform' was a decade-ish old install of osCommerce that had been hacked to death to make it support multi-side and multi language, together with some customisations to it's templating engine to provide asset reuse across sites.

It was immediately apparent that all the SQL injection and most other vulnerabilities present years ago in that old version of OSc were still there. They were alongside the many, many vulns that were introduced with the hacks. Oh, and most of the hacks were done by a mixture of programmers on the continent, so variable names and comments were easy to understand.

They didn't want to even consider upgrading, just patch it up and get outta there.

Out of professionalism it was necessary to document the many times management passed on our recommendations to fix issues we found. Looking through that file, most of those issues seem to be present even today.

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

#110
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…

Probably Raytheon's STAR program. I wasn't involved but one from inside it was rumored to be one of the biggest boondoggles there (and thats saying something). I think it inspired the "yesterdays technology tomorrow" motto.
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