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cite="mid:5c8083d5-f1ca-8084-4d23-96847dcd8e19@neurotica.com">
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<hr width="100%" size="2">On 1/23/21 11:54 AM, Thomas DeBellis
wrote:
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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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<hr width="100%" size="2">On 1/23/21 12:40 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:<br>
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In that case, please stay far, far away from soldering irons. ;)
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<p>Funny you should say that... Back in the early '90's, I was
co-founder of a company called Digital Dynamics and we made the
first 64 track disk based recording system available anywhere, the
ProDisk-464. The maximum any competitor could do at the time was
24, at nearly four or 5 times our cost. I designed and
implemented the crash proof file system used for the sound
storage. So, lots of cool b-tree indexing code, real time
requirements, device drivers. Fun stuff.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...But...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wire-wrap prototypes, flaky interrupts (did I mention how much I
hate the 8259?) and other oddities. One day, I couldn't quite
hear some audio, so I reached into the wire bay with a long screw
driver to adjust a pot on a particular DA converter. <i>And</i>
I happened to cross the leads on this <i>really</i> big capacitor
in the power supply... The shock knocked me off my feet and 6
feet away flat out on my back. Oddly enough, I didn't actually
break anything on the test system and only had a sore bottom for
about two days. And I didn't get that big a lecture from the
hardware designer, either.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:5c8083d5-f1ca-8084-4d23-96847dcd8e19@neurotica.com"> 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?
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<sup>nd</sup>
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, <i>never</i> have them"</p>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...Except...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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, <u>nothing</u>
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.</p>
<p>Yep; there is nothing like doing something you're not qualified
to do, whether or not you're a scoundrel.</p>
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