• (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    they dialled 999

    this should really be thedailywtf.co.uk

  • (cs) in reply to Smouch
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    Right, and the database was probably incorrectly set up long ago by the now hardware guy. So either way, the bottleneck is known and the solution is to run said database on better hardware.

  • just stop it (unregistered) in reply to Smouch
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    You sound like one of those people we interview that when asked "Have you any experience with very large tables?" they say "oh, yes. our web site had nearly 2000 users."

  • Anymouse (unregistered)

    The real WTF is Eric. Eric is begging for hardware because he failed at budgeting. Mitch isn't giving Eric his hardware because the douche didn't put anything in the FY2013 budget to cover his broke-ass system.

    Everywhere I have worked, as long as you give the budget code, the hardware is delivered with a smile.

  • (cs) in reply to Anymouse
    Anymouse:
    The real WTF is Eric. Eric is begging for hardware because he failed at budgeting. Mitch isn't giving Eric his hardware because the douche didn't put anything in the FY2013 budget to cover his broke-ass system.

    Everywhere I have worked, as long as you give the budget code, the hardware is delivered with a smile.

    You really think that the people dealing with the hardware had any say in the budget for it?

  • A Nerd With a View (unregistered) in reply to AV
    AV:
    Ahm...

    If the new DEV server was so powerful, why not run the DB in a seperate VM on that same physical machine?

    Because then it woudldn't be a "WTF". =)

  • A Nerd With a View (unregistered) in reply to Smouch
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    It's just too bad modern operating systems won't even install on the typical 2000-era desktop, which would have been a Pentium-II or Pentium-3 PC with something like 32MB of RAM.

  • A Nerd With a View (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    find some way to cause the hard drive to fail in such a way that it appears to have died of natural causes.

    A couple of hard bounces on the desk while the platter is spinning should do the trick. Hard drives really don't like it when the read/write heads hit drive platters that are spinning at 5400 RPM.

  • A Nerd With a View (unregistered) in reply to El Ka-Ben
    El Ka-Ben:
    It's senseless to run a bunch of old desktops for development in an environment where you have have access to recently decommissioned proper hardware. Not just for speed, although waiting around for things to complete can sap productivity, but also because it is preferable to test on something resembling actual production hardware.

    I don't understand the pound foolish approach to servers (and network hardware) companies seem to have. It doesn't take long before a $10,000 server pays for itself in man-hours if 6,000 employees are waiting for it to respond dozens of times every day.

    First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

  • (cs) in reply to El Ka-Ben
    El Ka-Ben:
    It's senseless to run a bunch of old desktops for development in an environment where you have have access to recently decommissioned proper hardware. Not just for speed, although waiting around for things to complete can sap productivity, but also because it is preferable to test on something resembling actual production hardware.

    I don't understand the pound foolish approach to servers (and network hardware) companies seem to have. It doesn't take long before a $10,000 server pays for itself in man-hours if 6,000 employees are waiting for it to respond dozens of times every day.

    Not only computer hardware. We're farting around with sucky internet cables and intermittently dodgy conference phones and all sorts of other shit right now, because we (as a company( haven't invested properly in a decent fucking communications infrastructure, for cunt's sake. So no matter how state-of-the-fucking-art our pissing laptops are, if we can't set up a decent conference call with our customers, they end up thinking we're a bunch of useless fucking piss-artists.

  • vt_mruhlin (unregistered)

    ...host database on same machine as application?

  • Thomas (unregistered) in reply to Tragedian
    Tragedian:
    Good trolling attempt, but you need to find some way to work a religious debate in there.
    My I suggest that proper RDBMSs are written in Emacs to sneak a religious debate in there?
  • (cs)

    Eric uttered, "Son of a Mitch" after finding that MITCH-DB hosted an Access database...

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to Thomas
    Thomas:
    My I suggest that proper RDBMSs are written in Emacs to sneak a religious debate in there?
    An Emacs database would be the SOLServer. Vi database would be much more lean, efficient and over all useful, like Derby!
  • J-F (unregistered)

    People with such a lack of professionalism and everything else you want from a co-worker shouldn't even work as burger flippers.

  • router bgp 1337 (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Not only computer hardware. We're farting around with sucky internet cables and intermittently dodgy conference phones and all sorts of other shit right now, because we (as a company( haven't invested properly in a decent fucking communications infrastructure, for cunt's sake. So no matter how state-of-the-fucking-art our pissing laptops are, if we can't set up a decent conference call with our customers, they end up thinking we're a bunch of useless fucking piss-artists.

    Internet cables?

  • (cs) in reply to A Nerd With a View
    A Nerd With a View:
    It's just too bad modern operating systems won't even install on the typical 2000-era desktop, which would have been a Pentium-II or Pentium-3 PC with something like 32MB of RAM.
    It depends a bit on what you call modern, but back around 2003 ~ 2004, I ran a private MMO gameserver on my old desktop from the 2000-era, a P3@500MHz, with 192MB RAM.

    The OS was windows server 2003, and it used SQL server as RDBMS. Ran just fine with about 60 concurrent users. Pretty sure it would run a modern linux distro just fine as well. That old hardware really ain't so bad if your software is tweaked properly.

  • (cs)

    "Mitch stormed in the door and slammed down a recently-decommissioned blade server"

    Seeing as he was able to slam it down and all development 'servers' were desktops I presume the blade enclosure was nowhere in sight?

    I tip my hat to anyone who can get a blade server to function (correctly) outside the enclosure...

  • urza9814 (unregistered) in reply to A Nerd With a View
    A Nerd With a View:
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    It's just too bad modern operating systems won't even install on the typical 2000-era desktop, which would have been a Pentium-II or Pentium-3 PC with something like 32MB of RAM.

    I think your RAM estimate at least is a few years off; I've got a bottom-end (around $600 at the time) PC from '98 that came with 64MB. I'd expect a decent PC from 2000 to have at least 128MB...and I've installed 2010 Linux distros on that '98 PC, although you obviously can't use a heavy DM...runs WinXP just fine too, although I guess you can't call XP modern despite how prevalent it remains in corporate environments...

  • ingenium (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    I never understand it when people are angry about having to do their job.
    Careful. You're gonna get the foam-bespeckled anti-governmentalists rankled up about how this behavior could never subsist in private business.
  • This must be the only comment I ever make (unregistered)

    The topic is "curious perversions in information technology", not I-must-let-steam-off-at-one-of-millions-of-petty-chiefs-in-the-world.

    Your whole story is about a petty person in power, not about information technology. Furthermore, it has zero fun factor, we've all been there, we've all seen that, you need a hell of a better conclusion than 'petty chief one day, petty chief the next' to incite interest in your readers.

    Go back to writing classes, this piece is both off topic and without any qualities whatsoever.

    PS: 'populus' is my captcha, and as you well know 'vox populus, vox dei'.

  • Pita (unregistered) in reply to corroded
    corroded:
    Paulie:
    I'd gather evidence and shop this unprofessional idiot to senior management ASAP. Either that or punch him in the face :)

    Why not do both, it's not mutually exclusive and far more satisfying.

    Save the violence for his parents for naming him Mitch!

  • Barf 4Eva (unregistered) in reply to AV

    +1

  • rfoxmich (unregistered)

    Son of a Mitch.

  • neminem (unregistered) in reply to This must be the only comment I ever make
    This must be the only comment I ever make:
    Go back to writing classes, this piece is both off topic and without any qualities whatsoever.
    Technically speaking, "off topic" *is* a "quality".
  • Anon (unregistered)

    How exactly is a BLADE server thrown on your desk useful?

  • Jazz (unregistered) in reply to ZoomST
    ZoomST:
    Anyway, MITCH-DB sounds like a 1987's did-it-by-myself "database engine" (pay attention to the quotes), done by one of these reinvent-the-wheel stubborn guys.

    I figured MITCH-DB clearly must have been written by this guy:

    [image]
  • B00nbuster (unregistered) in reply to just stop it

    @All the Sissies out there:

    FYI, I dealt with very, very large databases, mostly Oracle, and yes, THIS HARDWARE IS STRONG ENOUGH.

    The problem is proabably the developers, bringing the database to its knees with bad design, bad queries and bad practices.

  • Romojo (unregistered) in reply to B00nbuster

    I sat through a presentation at on development site where the presenter (a friend of the owner) was demonstrating examples - all carefully chosen - showing that it's almost always bad coding rather than hardware to blame for bad response.

    Come question time, I accused him of cherry-picking his data, and said he wasn't comparing apples with apples. Owner (behind me, and a bit of a character) shouted out, "Well, one of those things is an Apple mate!".

    Loud hilarity. Next question. I don't think any attendee and possibly not even the presenter was convinced by the "it's all poor coding" argument. Still, he was friends with the owner and that must count for something ...

  • (cs)

    If you're in hardware, it's the software's fault.

    If you're in software, it's the hardware's fault.

    It's as simple as that.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    faoileag:
    they dialled 999
    this should really be thedailywtf.co.uk
    No need. .com doesn't specify a country. If you need, you can register thedailywtf.us and filter the postings you'll read.
  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Anymouse
    Anymouse:
    The real WTF is Eric. Eric is begging for hardware because he failed at budgeting. Mitch isn't giving Eric his hardware because the douche didn't put anything in the FY2013 budget to cover his broke-ass system.

    Everywhere I have worked, as long as you give the budget code, the hardware is delivered with a smile.

    Budget code is a big source of WTFs.

  • (cs) in reply to Romojo
    Romojo:
    Loud hilarity. Next question. I don't think any attendee and possibly not even the presenter was convinced by the "it's all poor coding" argument. Still, he was friends with the owner and that must count for something ...
    I'm not so sure. In my experience, when a piece of software is slow, it can almost always be optimized to run faster.

    Sure, there is a limit to how much your hardware can do, but a decade ago people were also making big (web)applications that handled a lot of data / users. Those did not run on supercomputers, so how come they were plenty fast?

    With all the abstraction, it is easy to forget how much power a single desktop has. Think about it: a modern CPU will handle several billion instructions per second. And if memory is a bottleneck, modern computers also have billions of bytes of RAM. Those numbers are staggering to the point were the human mind simply cannot properly comprehend them.

    If all that power is unable to correlate some information in a database and output at most a few thousand lines of HTML within a second, then you either deal with tremendous amounts of information, or, and this tends to be a tad bit more likely in my experience, your code is poorly written.

    Of course, when all is said and done, it is generally cheaper to grab a $50 memory stick for your developer machine than spend ten man-months reducing your memory footprint. There's a classic WTF that illustrates this quite nicely. Doesn't mean it wasn't poor coding to begin with though.

  • (cs) in reply to Norman Diamond
    Norman Diamond:
    No need. .com doesn't specify a country. If you need, you can register thedailywtf.us and filter the postings you'll read.

    I'm not in need of filtering, that was just commentary on how many people we have here from across the pond.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    RichP:
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    <snip>find some way to cause the hard drive to fail in such a way that it appears to have died of natural causes. <snip>
    The proper tool to use in this situation is a rubber mallet, preferably while the drive is running.
    *sigh* Another of those proven, good ole tech tips that will become obsolete once solid-state disks are ubiquitous...

    Ten seconds in a microwave oven should see off most of those.

  • TimC (unregistered) in reply to Aris
    Aris:
    Most RDBMS fast enough, probably, but in line with 2000-ish performances and latency. As a exercice, just remember how fast google was in 2000 and how fast it is now. It's ridiculous to expect fair performances from a desktop that's probably 100x slower than a consummer desktop from today, especially in term of latency. And latency is what makes the application "look slow", not the throughput.

    I remember it quite clearly. Google was blazingly fast in 2000. More accurate too. It didn't do stupid things like reload results on every. single. god. damn. key. press. It didn't insist I had spelled SVWXWARN as WXWARN or silently drop "r820" from "dell r820 1.4.5 bios"

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to AV

    Not to mention has "enough disk space to download all the porn on the internet" which to me means multiple disk drives some interesting opportunities to span the db across several drives. Add to that the speed boost you get for not having to cross the network and you'd likely end up way better off than a situation where you don't contend for CPUs on the same server (which has 8 so might not be much of an issue with just BizTalk at the moment anyways).

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to FragFrog

    $50 memory stick:

    Not to mention that you just change the recommended specs for your software and it is your customers spending that $50 for more ram. Generally you get away with a fair bit in terms of deploying new systems IT shops generally just look at the recommended specs and buy a server that meets them, no big analysis about how using framework X increased the memory footprint by 8GB and required an extra couple sticks of RAM just a different tick box gets checked on HP/Dell/whatevers website when ordering the new gear.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to El Ka-Ben

    I have the same argument with employers and monitors/comfortable peripherals. So how much are you paying me an hour? Okay so if it saves me 10 min a day you've made your 27" monitor back in a couple months. The next 3 years or so you get more done for "free". The problem is the artificial divide between operational and capital "money".

  • modifiable lvalue (unregistered)

    If you'd have just asked for a machine that has 1048576-bit registers, you wouldn't have needed a database!

  • That Guy (unregistered) in reply to Smouch
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    Mitch, get back to your hardware dungeon!

  • Gibbon1 (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    Also....

    I would email Mitch and be very courteous, making sure to CC in any relevant bosses, to ensure a consistently professional paper trail.

    At the same time, I would visit him personally, out of earshot of any colleagues, and ask him: "Oi cuntsocks, where is all that fucking hardware I demanded off you last week, you abject douche-master?"

    I worked with a guy who seemed easy going. When faced by things like this, he'd just go in after hours and take what piece of equipment he needed. Or he would put it on his credit card, and then expense it. His bosses kept telling him to knock it off. IT kept demanding he be fired. And in theory the company was supposed to fire him for stealing and misappropriating equipment no exceptions. Yet continued to promote him.

  • gnasher729 (unregistered) in reply to Gibbon1

    Knew a company with a guy in charge who was just tight. Saved his budget all the time, while workers couldn't get broken tools replaced (a real bummer for productivity). Every year when he went on holiday, his second in charge went around and told everyone to least everything they needed which would be bought before the guy returned.

  • eVil (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Not only computer hardware. We're farting around with sucky internet cables and intermittently dodgy conference phones and all sorts of other shit right now, because we (as a company( haven't invested properly in a decent fucking communications infrastructure, for cunt's sake. So no matter how state-of-the-fucking-art our pissing laptops are, if we can't set up a decent conference call with our customers, they end up thinking we're a bunch of useless fucking piss-artists.

    Aaaaargh!

    ))

    Phew, that was a close one.

  • (cs) in reply to router bgp 1337
    router bgp 1337:
    Matt Westwood:
    Not only computer hardware. We're farting around with sucky internet cables and intermittently dodgy conference phones and all sorts of other shit right now, because we (as a company( haven't invested properly in a decent fucking communications infrastructure, for cunt's sake. So no matter how state-of-the-fucking-art our pissing laptops are, if we can't set up a decent conference call with our customers, they end up thinking we're a bunch of useless fucking piss-artists.

    Internet cables?

    Jesus - if fucking only.

  • eVil (unregistered) in reply to A Nerd With a View
    A Nerd With a View:
    It's just too bad modern operating systems won't even install on the typical 2000-era desktop, which would have been a Pentium-II or Pentium-3 PC with something like 32MB of RAM.

    You were obviously using some very bad PCs back in 2000.

    For one thing, Pentium 2's were obsolete in 1999. Secondly, I had a PC with 32MB of ram before 1990; in 2000 I had 2GB.

    Not bragging, but just pointing out you're somewhere between 2 and 5 generations out on your dating of historical technology.

  • Gibbon1 (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    If you're in hardware, it's the software's fault.

    If you're in software, it's the hardware's fault.

    It's as simple as that.

    In my world, it's whose software is at fault, whose hardware is at fault, or whose configuration is fucked up. Or more likely which pieces of software/hardware are stepping on each others ducks.

    The WTF is, working for a company that obviously isn't re-investing money back into the business. Great way to find yourself laid off with obsolete job skills.

    "It says here you're familiar with Innotech Designer.... 2000?"

  • ZoomST (unregistered) in reply to A Nerd With a View
    A Nerd With a View:
    Smouch:
    Fact is most hardware from the year 2000 should be plenty fast enough to serve most RDBMSs, be it MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL, or even Oracle (if you can get it installed).

    The reality is that most databases are simply designed incorrectly, and the apps which query them are also crap.

    So, the performance bottleneck, is, as usual, the user - or in this case the developer, and not the hardware.

    It's just too bad modern Windows won't even install on the typical 2000-era desktop, which would have been a Pentium-II or Pentium-3 PC with something like 128MB of RAM.

    FTFY
  • (cs)

    What the hell. Do people really put up with colleagues talking and behaving like that towards them?

    Joking around is fine. Very heated debate is fine even if insults are traded as everyone apologises later, if necessary. But if people are coldly offensive and malicious to you then that's when you need to get management/HR involved.

    It's not business or a 'difficult' colleague it's just bullying.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    TRWTF is places where you need "pull" to get things done.

    Agree.

    I think that place is called "planet Earth".

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