Posts by PM from Hell

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: Once in the rain ...

Working in a rural location I got used to new suppliers arriving late as they would not believe they would spend 20 miles behind tractors on a regular basis but also the 'oops I've had an RTA phone call as they ditched the car trying to overtake said tractors.

Funniest occurrence was the salesman who drowned the demo printer he was delivering when he slid off the road into a dyke on an icy road, thankfully he was OK but the printer and the car carrying it both ended up submerged in 5 meters of water.

I would ignore late arrivals for the first visit with no penalty but after that would expect them to listen to me when I would tell them to allow 1 1/2 hours for a 40 mile journey during harvest. Beer icon as its friday.

Microsoft Surface to die in 2019? Not while Redmond keeps making it, er, blush

Re: Surface phone?

You mean yet another good device launched with a fanfare then abandoned a year later with no mainstream apps working?

I still have a Microsoft Lumia in my bedside table. Occasionally I even power it up to use as a media player. This was the device which finally drove me into the arms of Apple.

Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

Steak and Kidney puddings

I can just about manage without gravy at the chippy here in the midlands but have to return back to the northwest on a regular basis to get a steak and kidney pudding fix.

It seems completely unknown elsewhere in the country and the efforts served up by gastro pubs cant complete with a Hollands steak and kidney pudding chips peas and gravy

Indiegogo pulls handheld airport pervscanners off crowdfunding platform

Wrist Mounted?

Bearing in mind what its going to be used for it may need some very very good image stabilisation

US JEDI military cloud network is so high-tech, bidders will have to submit their proposals by hand, on DVD

Re: How many bidders...

Ironically I have a couple of internal DVD burners in my spares case plus cables, I just don't have a desktop PC to house them in any more

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

It's not always the cleaners

I was a newish Tech Support Manager running an established DC where we were getting unexpected disk failures.

Its environmental said my mainframe supplier, when were the floor and roof voids last cleaned. The response from the ops team was 'never' I paid about 10K to get that done.Fantastic not only that mainframe but all the other systems but one became more reliable.

For some reason I had to be in the office at 6:30 one morning so popped into the DC to check everything was OK. leaning against the one system with problems was the ops team leaders bicycle. It turned out when it rained on the way to work he liked to bring it into the DC to let the AC dry it off. Needless to say the AC was also sucking road grit off it and recycling it through £250,000 worth of disk array. One rather shouty conversation later we had another line added of things not to be brought into the data center. Believe it or not the bottom 2 lines above bicycle were Fireworks & Rocket Motors.

'Men only' job ad posts land Facebook in boiling hot water with ACLU

Re: I think some people might have missed something...

There is a world of difference advertising in a periodical which is read by professionals or on a similar website and restricting visibility of the ad's.

Whilst the majority of computer weekly subscribers were male, our female colleagues were not restricted from subscribing and did so. Similarly I'm sure the vast majority of IT job seekers in the up registered with jobserve are male, but my female colleagues also register when job hunting.

It would never offer to me that when Facebook show me a job advert about a PM role that the female colleague at the next desk would not also be presented with the ad.

A boss pinching pennies may have cost his firm many, many pounds

Re: Developer PC

I always try and make sure my devs have the appropriate tools for the project and will go to bat if need be.Sometimes even the PM is at the mercy of the PHB's I took over a project many years ago the week TOAD became a commercial product. Just my luck that it needed to be licensed separately for the farcical price of £1500 per copy. My poor devs were given brand new top of the range machines but were forced to use the Oracle development set and vt100 terminal emulators.

I did have a huge bust up with a dev team manager once when I was a tech support manager. He got hold of an evaluation copy of the COBOL compiler for my IBM VM mainframe (*1 off offer 30 day license) because he appointed a contractor who only wrote COBOL (in 1990 when were were a SQL developer shop). He had the contractor in for 4 weeks developed the code and de-installed the compiler. Then it failed User Acceptance Testing. Unfortunately for him I wasn't willing to pick up the £30,000 PA cost of the compiler licence for one module in one app and one of the other devs had to reverse engineer it in Oracle.

Experimental 'insult bot' gets out of hand during unsupervised weekend

Re: Feiertage

I got caught out on a contract in Germany. TMobile were booked to install a couple of ISDN lines to put my test centre on the network and the visit was booked on a holiday. I was assured that TMobile would attend even though the business the building was in would be closed. End result 12 hours sat in an office waiting for TMobile who never turned up followed by a phone call to TMobile customer services the following day who told me I should have just ignored the appointment letter, reminder letter and the reminder reminding me we would pay a default charge if there was no access, "because everybody knew the visit would not take place". I then had to re-book the installation and yes that did mean waiting for a new order form to arrive by snail mail, signing the new order and faxing it back. Oh yes, German efficiency cannot be beaten. I was PM on a Euro Conversion project and had my hire car trapped in the city car park for 4 days as they could not take card payments or notes after their conversion (mine went fine) and the car park bill increased slightly faster than my collection of euro coins was growing. I finally managed to retire the car when my hotel received a delivery of coins from the bank.

Re: Costly? No...

The actual restrictions were CoCom, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls organized to restrict Western exports to COMECON countries.

During this period I once had to get an export licence from the American Department of Defence for an IBM RD6000 as it was classed as being powerful enough to run ICBM simulations for design purposes. It had more processing power than the combined CPU's of the 7 mainframes I had installed in the datacentre and more total Ram (an incredible 64 MB).

Re: At Korev, re: tuning a vacuum...

Well your comment was a bit fishy

GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

Great more automated non-perfomant code

"There used to be this pride in being super technical and getting into the weeds," he said. "That's kind of not cool anymore. What's cool is getting stuff to your users." ®

I think I'm on cycle 5 of this theory in my career, product after product which allows devs to put together flaky prototypes which are then released into the production environment and amazingly, don't scale. Then one of the less fashionable 'geeks' has to strip out the auto generated code which is making the product I/.O bound, disassemble the queries join the same table 6 times and fix the error reporting so it means something to the end user.

Of course this is normally done at 10 pm on a thursday night when everyone but myself and a couple of old techies are sat in a dark office trying to make sure we can get the app in a fit state to restart by morning.

Why is my cheapo Android red hot and switching off Wi-Fi?

Move to the dark side

The lack of android updates (without rooting the device and installing a custom rom) was what made me move first to Windows 10 Mobile and then (when most of the apps I wanted had disappeared) to an iphone.

IF we ever see a manufacturer moving to a support model which is network independent and committing to the support cycles Apple do then I may move back but there's no sign of it so far and historically manufactures and networks have never delivered this for Android.

The off-brand 'military-grade' x86 processors, in the library, with the root-granting 'backdoor'

It may have been built by the lowest bidder but it was the lowest bidder to offer the MIL spec. I managed a roll out to gas and electricity network engineers, the guys who work on the high tension services and high pressure mains. They could destroy an ordinary laptop in days (being thrown around the van, used in wet conditions etc. The MIL grade laptops we replaced them with were just about indestructible and the guys loved the fact that they were washable. I can appreciate that battlefield use is an order of magnitude more extreme whilst our guys needed a lappy that could be perched on the edge of a trench so they could look at valve diagrams etc, drop it in the trench then carry on, no-one was shooting at them .

Devon County Council techies: WE KNOW IT WASN'T YOU!

Re: Actually back in the 1990s I was at a company...

I think I remember that issue, didn't HP provide a clip on tray to collect the dropped letters

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

Architect Smartitect

I find new build installs are a;;ways a disaster in the making and every time it could have been avoided if the ICT team were allowed to speak directly to the contractors.

Amongst the issues I've experienced were:

A computer suite which overheated as the aircon outlet fed into a dummy clock tower. the builders decide to put plywood panels behind the openings to prevent pigeons nesting there making the tower almost airtight and preventing the heat exchanges working.

The system ran for 48 hours before the heat buildup caused the environmental systems to power down the suite.

A new library with public access computers and staff network on every floor where the inter floor ducting was made by embedding 6 inch waste pipes into the concrete floor. this meant that there was no space for the 100+ cables needing routing thorough the floors and we had to go to fibre, not a bad move but a very expensive option at the time and one which wasn't budgeted for,

Finally getting on site to find the comms room was actually in the roof void and had sloping ceilings, we ended up with 6 different comms cabinets each of a different size and all crammed with equipment rather the 6 full height cabinets.

A university where the comns 'cabinets' were actually doorways into a service void which ran the whole height of the building making installing equipment far more perilous than expected.

Finally every single new build I have been involved in leaked. For some reason leaks always end up directly above racks of very expensive IT equipment, nylon sheeting is not part of my supply list for any new build.

We even had an issues where network cables were laid in a hurry as the building was handed over late, cables were pulled thorough quickly, connected up to network points and tested, PC's installed over night and the room handed over the following morning as staff training was starting By 07:30 all the network points failed ad t turned put the cables had been under tension and had 'shrunk' overnight.

Another item in my new build kit is now a 24 port switch and long Ethernet cable as at the network always seems to fail in at least one room when live use starts.

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Sometimes violence is the only answer

At the opposite end of the scale was a large rogue Laser printer in one of our offices. We had many of these devices and most were loaded by users successfully, having trained them to be gentle, careful about engaging toner cartridges in the right slots etc. The exact same model in one office would only respond to extreme force. Follow the guidance properly and the damned thing would throw errors on every tray, ask you to check for non existent paper jams and insist on the whole rigmarole of opening and closing doors and trays in its preferred sequence before condescending to print anything. The only way to guaranteed instant performance was to shove the toner cartridge in with force, this seemed to cow the thing into good behaviour.

it never once misbehaved when an engineer attended and even an internal investigation failed to reveal any issues. It became the one printer in the building which required a service desk visit to change the cartridge. I assume the annoyance of having to walk 300 yards to slam in a toner cartridge resulted in the appropriate force being generated. Just as well it was in the HQ offices and not at the other end of the county.

That went well – not! Broadcom’s value dives after CA biz gobble

CA Bought my disk compression company

Back in the day when I managed IBM Mainframes I used a clever disk compression technology to reduce the amount of physical DASD I required. I had been fighting CA of for several years when they acquired the company. The CA salesman then scheduled an urgent meeting to discuss the new licencing arrangements on renewal. Typically for CA he wanted to increase the licence cost 6 fold.

I was luckily in the position to be able to point out that the price of second user dads had tanked and it was hardly worth me continuing to operate the software anymore as I now had space for another couple of rows of disks. I was in the rare position of being able to dictate terms to him, carry on with the current arrangement of an RPI increase each year and the Kudos of being able to add us to his list of sites or I would simply commission more physical DASD. The look on his face was something to behold.

Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

****** Tracing code

I remember being called in to the data center years ago because" the upgraded processors on the payroll system were running at 1% of the throughput of the old system".

While the payroll developer was fighting with my staff over their stupidity and the fact they had obviously mis-configured the system (there was no configuration performed by my team it was installed by the vendor) I wandered over the system console, in the middle of the screen there was a grey flickering box. "Hey Dave I asked, did you turn off your debug mode before setting off the live payroll"?

Cue a very quiet withdrawal of said Dave from the data center. Luckily he had decided to run the smallest payroll first, unluckily for us it still took 6 hours to run instead of 15 minutes so yet again tech support and ops had to work through the night to catch up ad we did want to get paid ourselves.

Shatner's solar-powered Bitcoin gambit wouldn't power a deflector shield

Re: Too late...

I say old boy, have you forgotten to take your dried frog pills again?

Microsoft Azure Europe embraced the other GDPR: Generally Down, Possibly Recovering

Re: MTBF vs Blast Radius

=Thats the most idiotic thing I have ever seen anyone publish, Most of us will never go further than stating that "things are OK" or there has not been a major incident for "a while" for fear of offending the gods of hardware or the demons of database recovery. Good look with your weekend outage by the way & I hope you have the phone numbers for a 24 hour pizza delivery service.

Oracle: Think our DB sales are great now? Wait until we actually get the new product out...

Re: What does 'licensing support' mean

Oh And the instructions to turn on binocular reading was included in the release install guide, but you really should not have turned it on if you didn't want the license cost to increase. What do you mean your DBA/ Unix admin / gap year student isn't a licencing expert???

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

Re: Not an "autopilot"

I'm surprised by the fact you got any up-votes and can only assume these were from people who live in a metropolitan area who only work at a single site. I'm a Contractor who works all over the country. At the moment I'm fortunate in working close to home. I live in a rural location only 17 miles from my office but could not use public transport to get to work and actually work a full day. Taking the earliest bus in the day out and the last bus home I would arrive at work after 9 am and have to leave by 4:30. The commute would take about 3 hours a day, and yes I am serious. There used to be far more frequent buses but those days are long gone, unfortunately I have also committed the 'crime' of living in one county and working in the next. This means that the bus from my village actually takes me in the wrong direction so I need to travel 30 minute to the next town, wait 15 - 20 minutes for the bus in the right direction then off we go again for another 45 minutes (don't forget the first 30 minutes were in the wrong direction). Driving gets me to work in under 30 minutes and costs a fraction of the bus price. This is true for a large proportion of the people who live in my village. Even people living closer to town need to use cars, parents who need to drop children off at childcare or school cannot use public transport.

And as an aside to the luddites who feel the use of cruise control is insane I do use it to control my speed when traffic is light as I see a benefit in fuel efficiency. This does not mean I give up control or responsibility for driving.

British egg producers saddened by Google salad emoji update

Re: I don't get it

The sky is a lovely shade of light grey here today, there's no sign of the big yellow shiny thing at all

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Re: And it's even worse today...

I had this experience as a customer, a certain world wide software company had agreed to partner with us developing a property management system. they were about to miss the code delivery milestone and faced some financial penalties. The software was being developed on an AIX platform, amongst the cartridges they sent was a 3480 mainframe cartridge which we knew they couldn't have written to. on the third attempt they actually sent a cartridge which we had a drive for on a different machine (But there were no IAX drivers available for it). We could finally unpack the tar file to discover that surprise surprise all it contained was an empty directory structure.

Even then they refused to admit the code wasn't ready.

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

So many credentials so many sites

I'm currently implementing a system where the software vendor has recently been taken over. Apart from the fact that i's now impossible to see status updates on tickets on the call management system, when they do provide a fix the technical team cannot get the fix to an FTP site/ Portal / document repository or forum. They issue them but don't know where they are published. They now have to email me the objects. Of course being inside a corporate network I can't receive very large files, zipped files or executables. I can see this ending in tears shortly. Don't even let me get started about the degradation in service from Business Objects since the SAP takeover where I now have to speak to a salesman if i want a technical whitepaper, or the monster that MyOracleSupport has become since replacing metalink. Sometimes I long for the old days of ICL where I would receive the known error log on 32 microfiche each month.

JEDI mind tricks: Brakes slammed on Pentagon's multibillion cloud deal

US Navy tech history

Dont forget an early tech heroine. Grace Hopper. Born in1906 Grace Hopper was a leader in the devlopment of early compilers. Grace had the vision of computers being proggeammed in English rather than strings of machine code. She was highly influential in the development of CODASYL specification for a machine and operating system independent programming language. This lead to the development of COmmon Business Oriented Language. Under the hood the majority of large enterprise legacy systems still have their business rules coded in COBOL. Grace retired from the US Nave as a Rear Admiral.

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

GDPR| Changes the rules on data loss.

With the fines for data loss within the EU now reaching up to 4% of Global Turnover corp orates are taking it more seriously

Deja Vu

This feels like a return to the olden days when I had to provide an office terminal and phone for my 'on-site' engineer. TBH its not much of a problem top provide a pc and some encrypted memory sticks for the IBMer to use if you are a medium sized site, if you just have one server it would be ridiculous.

Of copurse IBM corporately and the engineer personally would have to sign up to my computer usage policy before I could allow access.

Power spike leads Chinese police to 600-machine mining rig

Re: Maybe marijuana growers will mine instead?

I'll have two of whatever you are smoking

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Re: Feeling Old...

I'm afraid your memory has blotted out some of the pain

Kids these days don't understand that we used to have to buy a card specifically to get sound out of a computer, then re-configure each application for it. Then change the card config setting each time we switched applications.

FTFY

Your mouse can't reach that Excel cell? Buy a 'desk extender' said help desk bluffer

mouse balls

I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the IBM technical bulletin on delinting mice balls. I only got halfway down before collapsing in tears.

I'm pretty sure it was a real attempt to describe the process to engineers who had only ever worked on mainframe computers.

Apple 'wellness' unit launched for staff: The genius will see you now

Food Services HQ

I had one contract at a food services company H.Q. a few years ago. They set up a new HQ 'flagship' and decided to use this to show customers how to save money and improve staff health. Whilst there were a couple of naughty vending machines, you had to go past large baskets of fruit to get there and most people would settle for a few grapes an applet etc rather than the chocolate bar they got up for. Lunches were not subsided but only cost £2.50 for which you could get a full meal, salad or soup and a sandwich. The menu was carefully constructed to be healthy and return a small operational profit. Almost every day you'd think that you would be hungry after eating the modest sized meals but the reality was they were perfectly sized to get you through the afternoon and not leave you feeling sluggish. They were also delicious. Almost everyone lost weight without trying and both the company and staff saved money, pity more companies can't seem to offer this. Paris icon to reflect the sylph like figure I ended up with (and subsequently lost again)

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

Diagnostic disasters

Many years ago I worked with a software engineer a few years older than me. He would often mention that his previous experience as a level 3 hardware engineer. Telling me war stories where he was usually the hero. Once my skill levels hit the point where I was trusted to go solo commissioning new mainframes I was working directly with his old

colleagues. It turned out that while he was a fantastic diagnostician the second he started trying to repair something all hell broke loose. Apparently he was called out to help out with complex issues but was not allowed within 3 feet of the failing hardware and was banned from even holding a screwdriver in the data centre.

Microsoft's 'Surface Phone' is the ghost of Courier laughing mockingly at fanbois

Re: Am I the only Windows Phone User Left?

My window 10 phone is now used purely for web browsing and listening to podcasts / music in bed. It doesn’t matter if it falls out of bed and breaks as it has no residual value. It’s the only handset I have replaced before end of contract. I liked the phone but the number of apps I wanted which were no available got too large.

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

Wet Aluminium & FTTV

A great deal of discussion has taken place recently about the benefits and costs of Fibre To The Cabinet vs Fibre To The Home. I'm making a plea here for BT to upgrade the remaining 'wet aluminium' links still present in many rural communities with Fibre To The Village( FTTV). I'm fortunate that the village I live in received a fib re connection 2 years earlier than scheduled and we no longer lose service when the village duck pond overflows, but there are hundreds of communities still in that position. I'm still delighted to get 17mbps rather than the 1.5 - 2 mbps I used to receive. Video on demand is now just that rather than a download service which would deliver a watchable film after a couple of hours waiting (or in one case 24 hours)

VMware UK boss quits 'suddenly' – sources

Re: But I thought the virtualised cloud made everything wonderful

Why the Joke Icon

Yes, I took Putin's roubles to undermine Western democracy. This is my story

Re: I don't get it?

Shurely you mean the word Saltire

Off-brand tablets look done, but big players are growing

Re: Been there, done that...

I have a similar experience with my lenovo MIIX 310, I bought the 2GB / 32 version and its been fine for email, web browsing, simple documents editing & small spreadsheets. It has a clambshell design with half decent keyboard. The tablet is attached at the hinge rather than being slotted in so it works well as a laptop.

They have since released a 4gb 64 version but I don't know if they upgraded the processor. It does have limitations but if I want to do anything more complex I don#t want to use a 10 inch screen.

Essex drone snapper dealt with by police for steamy train photos

Rcing licence

I think you will find that racing divers are required to hold a licence from the BRDC. This determines what events they are allowed to compete in, what warning logos need to be displayed on the car etc. A racing driver also has to abide by racing regulations and point can be added to the license for breaching the rule see. This can result in a ban. Ra ing cars are also scrutinised for conformance to safety rules. Even amateur track days have rules and drivers are black flagged for breaking them

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

Re: What are your thoughts on...

.You are actually talking about about Attribute exchange, the technology is in development and there are standards currently being defined see www.openidentityexchange.org/ for further information. The combination of attribute exchange coupled with User Managed Access where users are given a portal to manage which explicit permissions they have granted for organisations to use data could provide a way to mitigate issues like this. Or it may provide a huge attack face for the back hats.

The Concept of the secure enclave does exist with the GOV.UK Verify ID service which is in production and used to establish user identification for a number of central government services (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify/introducing-govuk-verify), the number of Central Government services using GOV.UK Verify to authenticate users is increasing and there are pilots taking place to allow the online checking of eligibility to services within Local Government are taking place at the moment. Usage will grow over time and access to the service for commercial organisation is in the pipeline.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

Hanging by a thread

I was a big Psion 5 user back in the day, paired up with a Ericsson SH888 and the infra red connection I did a ridiculous amount of work on it when away from my office even sending printed ourput to customer fax machines.

I also managed to astound some friends and colleagues by emailing them from a Swiss cable car and from on top of a mountain. Unfortunately life has not been kind and like another commentor I lean now towards my 10 inch Lenovo MIIX 2 in 1 as my poor eyesight and thick fingers make using a phone sized device for typing rather too painful. However my phone contract is coming to an end in the next few months to if this supports wifi calling I may end up going this way rather than a ludicrously priced Samsung or an Iphone, as long as I can be sure that the O/s will receive updates for a couple of years unlike my last couple of Android handsets.

User demanded PC be moved to move to a sunny desk – because it needed Windows

there are a few tweets

https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/906050464508125188

Apparently elreg were DDOS'D

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

Re: Praise or accusations of work not done?

The Hawthorne effect was described as part of a long running experiment performed in the 1930s.at the Chicago Electrical works. To precis it the company had severe productivity issues and sought help from the University of Chicago. A team of social scientists went in and found a physically unpleasant work environment. Over a period of time the made marginal improvements to lighting etc and found that the worker performance improved each time as did worker satisfaction. This was even true when some minor changes were made which degraded working conditions at the end of the experiment. In essence it demonstrated that worker performance improves when employees believe the company cares about them and bothers to seek their views. There are many accessible articles about the experiments on the web and I really recommend people read a few.

Take that, gender pay gap! Atos to offshore hundreds of BBC roles

Re: Not Wanted - Engineering Roles

I'm irritated by the scorn poured on media degrees by ill informed commentators. I am extremely proud of my son who completed a media degree and has now worked on location production in over 50 mainstream films in the UK (as of yesterday he has 49 credits on IMDB). Like 90% of people in the film industry he took years to get established after his degree. Working initially for nothing, making music videos for new bands or filming indy films for new producers, then working purely for expenses before finally breaking in to paid work. His degree was 3 years of intensive practical work giving him the skills he would require operating and maintaining recording equipment, filming and producing in studio and externally, and in his case, hosting a weekly overnight radio programme. This new generation of film makers is generating billions of pounds each year for the UK economy and will produce the next generation of producers and directors who may lead a resurgence of British produced films in the future.

Fresh cotton underpants fix series of mysterious mainframe crashes

Re: Humidity control

I worked for ICL as a Mainframe systems consultant in the 80's and 90's working in ICL customer services (SSC & S39SC) at that point all mainframe vendors insisted on air conditioned and humidity controlled environments. We did perform site audits as part of the pre-sales process for new customers and I have worked with customers who were experience higher than normal failures to commission floor and ceiling void cleaning and aircon overhaul's (e.g. where a site was experiencing regular system crashes / disk head failures). The original posted doesn't seem to realise what access we had to engineering data when investigating faults and the level of skill and the persistence the engineering teams when trying to resolve reliability issues. Mainframe computers were the Rolls Royce of IT during this period and the running costs reflected this. Even as a fairly junior consultant I could mobilise whatever technical resources I required from our engineering teams as long as I could provide a viable hypothesis which was backed u by the diagnostic data.

While I was with ICL we did market a range of mall mainframes (S39 30's) for use in office environments but even these were more reliable in a Data centre environment.

Several vendors did marker mid range systems which could operate outside the data centre but no-one would call these mainframes.

Blinking cursor devours CPU cycles in Visual Studio Code editor

Re: Rule #1 for the user-facing components development

From my own experiences as a Tech Support / Ops Manager then PM giving Devs Top end machines then testing on lower powered devices just delays tuning until UAT or even worse production.

there is a strong argument that devs need a higher powered machine than end users but they need to feel the hit if they are developing inefficient code other wise something which runs a 'bit slow' using test transaction volumes is unusable in production.

Squirrel sinks teeth into SAN cabling, drives Netadmin nuts

Ants

Earlier in my career I was managing the implementation of the first public access information system in local government (yes that long ago)

It had been the project from hell from day 1. The system vendor nearly went bust on several occasions, delivery deadlines were consistently missed by them but somehow we managed to hit the published go live date.

Time was tight, the cabinet provider had delivered the cabinets late and to the wrong address and I'd already had to ferry the cabinets out in my car when we found out the application vendor had also managed to introduce a bug which meant that the client pc's which should have been installed in the cabinets were borked.

My team and I came up with a quick solution to install the systems server in the bottom of the kiosk and use laptops with terminal emulators to replace the the clients, transparent for the launch and it bought us some time for the vendor to fix the bug before we went truly multi site.

I then went to retrieve the server from the head office. I noticed that there was a significant amount of white powder on the floor by the server but was in too much of a hurry to think about it, a quick dash across the county and we were set up. I then had to stand through an hours presentation to politicians and the press as the ant poison that had been generously sprayed around was absorbed through my skin. By the time I was able to break away my hands had swelled up to double their normal size and turned a very angry red. This got me some very strange looks as I was shaking hands with the VIP’s.

A quick scrub in the gents at the pub followed by many pints of lager with the project team soon brought me back to rights.