Posts by RTFM_UK

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Disc pack olympics

Obligatory not me, but whilst conversing with a Honeywell engineer back in the early 90s, he recounted a tale of repeated call-outs to a certain customer. A litany of pack and head failures. No-one could work out why the drives/packs kept having so many issues. One day, he was on-site for an unrelated issue and was busy in the bowels of a printer and as many of you of a certain age will remember, printers were never simple desktop items. They were often large big beasts - as this one was. It was a large room and the printer was some way back and not easily visible.

Coincidently, this occurred over an operator shift change. As luck would have it, the outgoing shift didn't tell the incoming shift he was there and being hidden, it meant they didn't know he was in the room. Health & safety? Pah.

He busied away for a while until he heard a shout of: "Yeeessss!" and some mild applause. Curious, he peaked his head around the printer, until he could see the operators. He was just in time to see one of the operators throw a pack on to a disk drive from a few metres. This was apparently their thing. Seeing who could throw a pack on to the drive from the furthest distance. Not exactly the best way to treat the tech.

He obviously made himself immediately visible and proceeded to challenge the operators. Red faces all around.

After the engineer reported all this to his manager, the customer got a very large back-dated invoice given it was not "normal" wear & tear. The operator team got re-staffed.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: Weight?

For my sins, I was once (when I was young) an IBM field engineer in Londinium. I spent my life repairing 3278/3279 keyboards. Weight wasn't the issue. It was all the crud and detritus that got inside, preventing keys from working. A special hatred for those that smoked a lot and ate their lunch at their desk.......

Salesforce's new hires are less productive, says CEO Benioff

Re: A dissenting opinion

Not unpopular as you share some basic truths in a world of noise and bluster. There are absolutely a ton of jobs where WFH is both sensible and practical. But that does not apply to all jobs and a reality filter needs to be applied to the great WFH entitlement. Knowledge is gained via osmosis, which includes from your team around you. There are a good many jobs where being physically with the team, accelerates knowledge and therefore productivity. Work is an outcome, not a place, but in many instances, the place (and people) is required to do the work. WFH is not the great panacea preached by the Social Media masses.

IBM Hursley Park: Where Big Blue buries the past, polishes family jewels

Memories

I worked for I've Been Moved in the 80s and spent my life fixing the current systems at the time: 370, Midrange, etc.Until the day came when a "PC" appeared in our office to be fixed. We had to volunteer someone to learn all about his new 'thing'. I also had the privilege of being on a program where we were sent to Hursley, Winchester, etc on a regular basis, being shown emerging tech - just to open our minds about it all. No payback expected, just enrichment. Wonderful times. Hursley was always a maze, but full of wonder in each building - sounds like it still is.

IBM handing pink slips to Israel-based Diligent devs - reports

Aww - most kind of you Sir. Anything to uphold England in the modern world, even though many are trying to dumb us (and our language) down.......

Pink Slips?

I am just going to miss the point and focus on something trivial - Pink slips? Really? Are we in the US now? You'll next be saying they should have expected this from the 'get go'.....

Cloud storage & legacy storage supplier vertical disintegration

Meanwhile in the real world....

I work for a large storage vendor, so this is an interesting topic to me. Some of the other comments echo my thoughts, but having been in IT for a very long time (I remember the birth of the internet) and more recently specialising in storage, I am not sure that world + dog will willingly host their data in the clouds you describe.

Thoughts I have are:

- That performance of access to the data in the clouds you mention, will never meet the demands of large databases engines. Unless of course, we all get as much bandwidth as we want - to anything - cheaply or free. Utopia I suspect. Can't see it whilst telecomms companies can make money from it.

- Businesses serious about their data will not look to put it in someone else's domain. Much is propriety and lodging your crown jewels elsewhere is a tough act to justify. Factor in the auditing requirements and it looks tough responding to a Sarbanes-Oxley based investigation, only to be able to offer "Err, Amazon has the data - honest! - we just can't get it out of them very quickly".

- I think that business or private clouds will certainly prevail, although they could be run by partners/SIs. The point is that it keeps the data 'in house'.

- Innovation. The capabilities these Cloud offerings use came from the storage vendors who collectively throw a lot of money looking for better ways of handling the huge volumes of data, securely and at the best price point. I have personally seen the "use the cheapest simple kit" approach in action - it is a nightmare to manage, which increases risk and ultimately cost. Keeping your data in kit you own/lease is a much safer bet - even looking out so very far ahead.