24 Jan
2021
24 Jan
'21
5:28 p.m.
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On 1/23/21 11:54 AM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
Well, as a matter of fact, I myself told myself this, based on my
anecdotal experience of 45 years in the field.
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On 1/23/21 12:40 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
? In that case, please stay far, far away from soldering irons. ;) ? A funny story about that.? In a large ISP
environment in the
mid-1990s, suits smelled money and started infiltrating the company.?
Of course, the predictable thing happened, everything went to shit.?
Part of that process, though, was amusing.? The suits whined and
whined about "all of these overpriced Sun Microsystems computers that
we've never heard of". (we had over two thousand of them at that
point)? They whined that a PC costs $300, so why should we be buying
$15,000 Sun computers?
? So they started buying PCs, just a few, maybe a dozen.? The $300
price they'd mentioned before was for eMachines garbage at Best Buy,
but what they actually ended up buying were monstrous $20,000 Compaq
ProLiant machines.? About 25% of the computing power in 5x the rack
space at a higher price, wow what a great decision! Idiot suits.? At
least they didn't break very often...only about twice as often as the
SPARCs.
This jogs another memory: at a hospital, I managed support for a number
of medical practices on the campus and handled communications with the
main hospital network.
Medical practices have similar requirements and these particular ones
all ran the same scheduling, billing and records software. The initial
meeting with each ran along similar lines, "Please explain how you make
money" and after this was answered, "How much downtime can you afford?"?
Invariably, the answer to the 2^nd was a wide eyed, "None",? to which I
responded, "OK, so go buy X, Y and Z and you pretty much won't
experience any kind of extended outage or, more likely, /never/ have them"
X, Y and Z were an IBM eServer with RAID and backup, redundant
conditioned power supplies and separate HVAC.? Now, the 8668 is in no
way the answer to the world's ills, but in this case, due to other
circumstances, it really was ridiculous to even consider anything else.?
Again, unique circumstances, likely unrepeatable. Yet the practices that
did this got exactly what I told them. Zero outages.? Not a single one
...Except...
Talking to one particular owner was like talking to an open window.?
He'd nod sagely and then go do whatever he felt like.? So he went and
bought a (you guessed it) Compaq workstation, _nothing_ else and then
ran the entire office office off that, a task that it was utterly
unsuited for.? So, short term, Yes--they saved the up front costs.? On
the other hand, they were forever having capacity issues until the poor
thing finally gave up the ghost, turning the entire practice into a
paper operation for the several days it took to put everything back
together.
Yep; there is nothing like doing something you're not qualified to do,
whether or not you're a scoundrel.