Ahh
The old /dev/null backup strategy.
Excellent stuff
"You'll never guess who I just saw in here!" the PFY blurts, entering Mission Control with a mainstream IT mag in hand. "One of the Royal Family using a tablet?" "No." "A movie star or football player with a new bendy iPhone?" "No." "A vendor-sponsored review of new technology with a shameless suckup review of their …
Yeah, hey, whoa, geez, Simon!
My FX is fifteen years young and since I found the wee hidden screw under the sticker I can get it apart to give it a proper flushing every now and then. If I'd used a mouse all this time (and the decade prior, the FX replaced my Trackman Portable) there'd be a hook where my hand should be.
My aged 60GB IBM Deathstar is still in working order, too. True, it now lives in a closet and may never again see the light of day, but was absolutely reliable until more storage was required. If you simply must whine about the IBM/Hitachi tech, you'll want to mention the noise. You'd think the PSU fan(s) would be the loudest thing in the box, but only if you've never owned a Deathstar. Squee! Clunk-Clunk-Clunk! Squee! Ah, good times.
Yeah, the JAZ drives were nice.
Now, if you wanted to list any 'never had a gnat's chance' to succeed, I'd nominate the Iomega Clik!
(renamed to PocketZip after the 'Click of Death' mess of the Zip drives... Exactly how is naming another product after a borked one a good idea?)
The Sony MD-Data...
(Look! It's slower than a floppy! Also, even if you could copy a music file onto the MD-Data disc, it wouldn't actually play it. Not that it mattered. Transferring music didn't take longer with an audio cable... )
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I'm happy to get an episode at all.
While I agree, it doesn't feel right reading it first thing on a Monday morning. Even if I had read it on Saturday, part of the appeal of BOFH is that you read it on a Friday, with that strange mix of loathing (of users, who have made your life hell all week), lethargy (because it's Friday afternoon, and there's nothing you are doing which couldn't really wait until Monday) and excitement (because you get to spend two whole days without coming into the hellhole office).
Friday lunch time is the correct time for a new BOFH. I suspected they'd move it when they released the "Weekend edition", but it is wrong.
Nah, Simon's right, you can't just be "cattleprod cattleprod cattleprod". It doesn't work after a while. A carrot-and-stick approach is much more efficient: sometimes you use the cattleprod, sometimes you delete their files, sometimes you just need a brick and some quicklime. And if they ask about the carrot, make them regret the question (by the appropriate application of said carrot, perhaps after a good jolt with the cattleprod).
What on earth does Simon have against SSA disks? I found them easy to deploy, quick for it's time, quite dense (it was the first disk subsystem I knew that used both the front and back of the drawer) and easy to maintain.
OK, it tied you in to IBM and their disks a bit, but I did not find them too bad at the time, and there was never a quibble replacing them while under maintenance.
SCSI-2
SCSI-2, SCSI-3
Differential
Wide
Fast-Wide
Single Ended
etc etc etc
And a gazillion different cables and terminators (some active, some passive)
Despite it being really slow when compared to Fast Wide SCSI and a CPU Hog, USB-1 was a breath of fresh air.
I thought it was the end of the world, and days, weeks go by with no BOFH article.
And yes like the others, been reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the old archives.
Being an BOFH fan is like marriage, committed to the death.
I mean to the death of (l)users, of course.
This may be a risky question, but what kind of damage, could a really nice multi-tool do in the hands of a BOFH or PFY, just curious.
But only curious in the sense, I don't know who you are, so will never provide legal witness that you or someone who has your name, actually replied to my question.
Long live the Cattle Prods!
May the Schwartze live with in you all!