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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

#31

Post by emidln »

nasalgoat wrote: post #19
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?

I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days? Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?

I had a good backups business for adult websites going around 2008. It was nothing more than rsync over ssh with a couple duplicates and I would burn some dvds and drop them in the post once a month. Was a very good business. Probably still viable, because those companies valued having physically possessable images of their config files and source code.

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

#32

Post by ddoscampaign »

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.

OWH. OWH. OWH.

Since I'm anon, I'll say that I did a few ivy league SharePoint implementations. Thankfully, their IT/IS shops had to inherit the content and provisioning responsibilities.

Btw, anyone needing Exchange or similar implementations should use http://www.coyotecrk.com/. They did Cisco's and Stanford's implementations. They'll charge arms/legs, but they'll deliver something production supportable for real shops.

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

#33

Post by afarrell »

Vexs wrote: post #15
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…

Reminds me a bit of VIM. I love vim as much as the next guy, but I can't wait for neovim to get stable.

I was running neovim without issue on OSX until about a month ago when I switched to nuclide

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

#34

Post by api »

webjprgm wrote: post #23
ethbro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these are important observations. And, as far as I can tell, both of them exist largely because of corporate politics. If you could design a corporate culture that minimized the incentives towards both, I think you'd be a long way towards having a more sustainable company viz technology.

There was one time (2006 at a company of less than 50 people) where I absolutely refused to build the new pricing features in a billing system (which would have been a big hack on a long series of smaller hacks) unless they let me refactor it (meaning rebuild it from scratch). After waiting for a few months without their new pricing features they finally gave in. That's at a young, nimble company where the co-CEO had…

I've worked for a government data center where they ran instances of Ultrix in a commercial VM to run old data processing software that ingested and barfed out CSVs that contained UUencoded blobs of image data. All this was written in a mixture of very very old Perl, shell scripts in some gawd-awful Ultrix shell CSH script, and C code full of weird -isms that made it difficult to port to anything made after the rise of mammals. This was of course mission critical. At least they virtualized it instead of continuing to run physical Ultrix boxes, which was apparently a huge fight with management.

A side dish of LULZ was that they were experimenting with moving the VMs to EC2, so there is probably Ultrix in EC2 now.

This stuff is really, really common in large "mature" industries and government.

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

#35

Post by steve-howard »

webjprgm wrote: post #23
ethbro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these are important observations. And, as far as I can tell, both of them exist largely because of corporate politics. If you could design a corporate culture that minimized the incentives towards both, I think you'd be a long way towards having a more sustainable company viz technology.

There was one time (2006 at a company of less than 50 people) where I absolutely refused to build the new pricing features in a billing system (which would have been a big hack on a long series of smaller hacks) unless they let me refactor it (meaning rebuild it from scratch). After waiting for a few months without their new pricing features they finally gave in. That's at a young, nimble company where the co-CEO had…

What fight? The way those battles are waged in large, slow companies is that the political decisions are made over your head, without your input, and decided before you're made aware of them. It's a lot harder to try and fight a decision when the decision-makers don't know or care what you have to say.

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

#36

Post by myth_buster »

I'm wondering whether the use of

  ingenious (adj)
  (of a person) clever, original, and inventive.
in place of

  indigenous (adj)
  originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.
is a Freudian slip or sarcasm.

Edit: Never mind; they used it with in-house

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

#37

Post by russell »

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 some googling to see when it actually occurred. My god, it's now. We are in the middle of it. The upgrade was responsible for the recent air traffic meltdown. Please somebody, point out my flawed research skills. I cant believe this.

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

#38

Post by kelvin0 »

myth_buster wrote: post #36

I'm wondering whether the use of ingenious (adj) (of a person) clever, original, and inventive. in place of indigenous (adj) originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native. is a Freudian slip or sarcasm. Edit: Never mind; they used it with in-house

Sarcasm would be my bet ...

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

#39

Post by rietta »

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 a great system for its time and by the time Microsoft took over, it went downhill fast. And then Microsoft's Kin flopped too.

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

#40

Post by rjsw »

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.
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