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Admin
Or even easier still, turn all the buildings and structures around 180 degrees.
Admin
It's like a monster movie. At the end you think everything's okay. Then, as the survivors walk away, the camera plans and you realize that the monster's still alive.
Admin
PUNCHLINE_NOT_FOUND
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FTFY
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public enum Booleany { TRUE, FALSE,
}
There, fixed.
Admin
A lot of windows bashing in this thread coming from people who can't even get basic facts right.
Admin
This is the kind of work product I lovingly call the "forgasm". You were better off not trying at all.
Admin
Nope, not too long, only 20 years.
The quickest and simplest way of moving systems like this is to label the end of each cable as you unplug it. You then end up with a pile of cables with both ends marked as to where they go - voila instant mapping!
Admin
Dunno, sounds just like quite a few data centres I have been in - even down to the DECNET and X25 over TCP cludges to fool everyone into thinking that it is all running on IP (for M$ people, think Netbios over TCP only much, much more clunky).
Admin
As an old fart I can tell you that I would love to work in a mainframe dungeon again.
Give me the soft hum (hey, I'm nearly deaf from the impact printers that stood outside my 'office' for ten years) of those magical mystery machines over the rows of cold hearted bland NT servers.
Admin
Bah. Any amateur could get TCP/IP running on VMS. (Hint: Pathworks). A real hardcore system administrator could get a VAX print queue to communicate with a legacy HP LaserJet-4 printer, using Appletalk.
Admin
That is spoken like someone who hasn't been on unemployment for a year.
Admin
Litotes, that's what.
Admin
Technically, it's called a pan... If the camera is making plans you've got a whole different problem.
Admin
Actually, you hire a bunch of HPCs to build you a small lookout rest stop on the other side of the village, then get them to put a massive billboard sized plasma screen right in front of it with a webcam image coming from the mountain on it. You then cover it with weather resistant clear gel.
That way, your entire village rocks up, they LOVE the new gooey interface, and they really know that the whole thing is still only working because of the mountain behind them but they don't care - it looks pretty and it cost them about what they were prepared to pay.
At least, that's what every outsourced consolidation project I've ever seen seems to do.
Admin
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You were meant to say "My eyes !! these goggles do nothing !!" And anyway you picked the wrong article to post that anyway !! :)
Admin
Yep, just like Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen Beetle - exactly the same car as those Porsche sports cars isn't it?
In other words, NT is not any kind of VMS.
Admin
So, the WTF is that Frank and rest of these 200 people took big money for making old hardware look new and cleaning the dust off just to trick The Board into happiness? I need to sign up for one of those contractor jobs some day...
Admin
Actually, you could spread a rumor that there's a large gold deposit underneath the mountain and watch everyone go bananas trying to find it.
Admin
No, you rotate the village 180 degrees.
Admin
Admin
Well, you create the village graveyard on the other side of the mountain. Then wait; giving it enough time...
CYA
Admin
Admin
You are implying that VMS is like a VW, and NT is like a Porsche.
NEITHER is true.
VMS you get a repair manual for, NT is a sealed unit that works on hope (or change). Oh, and VMS didn't take up all of the road, and then demand you build a bigger road to use that as well.
No, NT is like a Ford Pinto, it will blow up when rear ended. VMS is like a big LIMO, it gets you there in style, but it is big and clunky. Unfortunately they stopped making them a few years ago. Yes, both were built in Detroit (thus the connection)
p.s. driven both a Porsche (356) and a VW (Beetle).
Admin
"Hitchhiker" is one word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhiker
Admin
"...Frank had all the traits of a young man in IT – beyond his physical appearance, he was brash, overconfident, and narcissistic..."
Best part.
A lot of Franks here...
Admin
Admin
Admin
No, you rotate the earth 180 degrees.
Admin
Terrible example. Porsche is Volkswagen's high-end line, like Lexus is to Toyota. The internals of the first Beetles and Porsches were EXTREMELY similar, even in the 1930s.
And NT might not be "any kind of VMS", but their internals are extremely similar. Even Dave Cutler has said NT is a successor to VMS.
Admin
IT like you are the reason I have a job. My company gets hired after you get fired when the system goes down and you can't figure out why because there's no documentation, no mapping, no logic to the layout; it's simply whatever worked.
The first lesson of a project like this is that there's three variables: cost, time, and scope. The people requesting the project get to set two of those, the PM sets the other. If the requester insists on setting all three it's the PMs job to warn of impending failure and quit the project or get some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. When you don't, that's how you get fired, because they asked the impossible and you agreed.
Admin
Depending on the requirements you might even be able to get away with just rotating the village 180 degrees.
Admin
Wow, I never expected so many other people to have stated this or variations on such. Ah well.
Admin
You better bend space-time then it looks like the mountain was on the other side.
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TRWTF is that you lied to the board.
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How do you spell pyjamas?
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How do you write code with a Rocket-Propelled Grenade?
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carefully
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and yet...I'd give my right arm to be working on MPE again, instead of the unreliable crap that I have to support now. Sure, there are negatives to AS400, MPE/iX, etc, but you get to sleep at night.
Admin
Ah, the Facade pattern meets the Ravioli code anti-pattern :)
Admin
slightly backwards. Volkswagen is Porsche's low-end, as Volkswagen is majority owned by Porsche.
Similarly amusing, Lamborghini is owned by Porsche, by way of Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen.
As an aside on VMS, when I worked at a certain government's department of corrections, the main software ran on openVMS 8.2 on an alphaserver (previously ran on 6.something on a VAX) accessed via PuTTY. not a pretty program, but it was reliable and fairly easy to use.
Admin
It was a fun story, evoking scary aspects we have all seen at some point in our careers, but my experience in bank data processing was very different. I worked at Western Bancorp, where nothing was done in a mysterious or haphazard way. Nothing happened that was not understood and approved of by a team of auditors that were at least as smart as the programming staff, and I expect well beyond them.
It is fun to think you can pull the wool over management's eyes. There is a good possibility that management would have approved moving all the data centers into one room as they eventually did.
What I am getting at is that all of this stuff is in motion. Hardware comes and goes, and software enhancements roll out on a constant basis. Periods where things stay the same are nothing more than chanced to breath and catch up on sleep before the next major rollout.
I guess what unsettles me about the story is that ultimately, responsibility for the efficient and reliable operation of the overall system belongs to the corporate officers who control and pay for everything. Anything that happens behind their backs leads to them having a less than perfect understanding of the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a particular solution.
While they did stabilize the systems somewhat, they only pushed meaningful evolution out to the future. Oh I agree that what happens next will be easier with everything in one room, but the moral of the story is what they don't know won't hurt them, and I think it ultimately will. The guy who is the whatever of data processing, the one with "Data Processing" on his door... He will live with the fear and an ulcer that upper management will ask something which appears to be reasonable from their distorted point of view, and everything will fall apart with him in the middle.
Perhaps the best thing is for the bank to sell its operations to a backwater bank who will keep it as-is for the next thirty years. Then they can set up new, contemporary hardware and software and get the reorganization they will ultimately need.
This is a legacy system and those that understand it will have a job for life most likely, but when they die, the bank will be in serious trouble. No amount of key man insurance will pay for what has to happen if something catastrophic happens to the data center. It is a ticking time bomb.
Admin
Bank got incredibly lucky. 95 out of 100 guys with all the traits of a young man in IT – beyond his physical appearance, he was brash, overconfident, and narcissistic would have come up with a solution that would blow the bank and put a considerable dent into country wide economy.