• SQZ (unregistered)

    fraberge

  • Tomtana (unregistered)

    The story, it's so familiar, I, I think I'm Tatiana! and the memories were so traumatic, I had repressed them, all of them. Thanks a lot for shattering my fragile psyche, TDWTF.

  • Ziplodocus (unregistered)

    She kept playfully toying with the mail queue and, as she anticipated, it started to grow, slowly but surely. Rather than wait for the inevitable, Tatiana decided to prophylactically tackle the issue.

  • Fry Am The Egg Man (unregistered)

    Fourteen years into this century, an overloaded mail queue can happen just as easily in The Cloud. Mail server software hasn't changed much, and a bottom-of-the-line cloud instance isn't more impressive today than an old Linux box was in 2000.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered)

    So what if you have a thousand times the disk space, that only takes 10 generations to chew up when you're doubling the email messages every time. (Not to mention the insane amount of disk churn.)

    But... "prophylactically"? Bruce, you do know what that means, right? It has nothing to do with "proactively", although a prophylactic might be a useful proactive security measure.

  • Zeke (unregistered)

    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?

  • QJo (unregistered)

    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.

    Tatiana sounds like a positive asset to any company to which she finds herself attached. Not only can she troubleshoot and proactively solve problems, she can also work effectively after coming in from a night out on the town with her friends. This either means that she is abstemious and orderly in her lifestyle, or that her skills are such that they function adequately with a head muddled by alcohol and whatever else a young person experiences on a night of recreation.

  • Dr D Ildo (unregistered) in reply to Zeke
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    Tatiana has a gay lesbian egg fetish.
  • BusDriverMan (unregistered)

    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

  • Ziplodocus (unregistered) in reply to BusDriverMan
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

  • Mike D (unregistered)
    I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.

    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.

    (Akismet claims this comment is spam if I put in a link to Intel_80186 on Wikipedia.)

  • quat (unregistered) in reply to BusDriverMan
    BusDriverMan:
    It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers.
    Had it sent 4000 duplicates to each and every one of your 110 colleagues and 0 of your managers, no one would care. Yet sending 4000 duplicates to even 1 manager is the reason you drive a bus now.
  • va bene (unregistered) in reply to Ziplodocus
    Ziplodocus:
    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.
    At my school, the professors were the miscreants who would spam each other and then claim professorial immunity.
  • Ziplodocus (unregistered) in reply to va bene
    va bene:
    Ziplodocus:
    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.
    At my school, the professors were the miscreants who would spam each other and then claim diplomatic immunity.

    FTFY (but MUST be read in a South African accent)

  • (cs) in reply to Zeke
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    I was wondering that too. I suspect that Tatiana acquired that pseudonym by virtue of a weak analogy between recursive error mail sending and Russian dolls, but I hope that the reason for Fabergé wasn't stretching that link beyond breaking point.
  • Bildert (unregistered)

    <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-06-16/"" target="_blank" title="http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-06-16/"">[image]

    Publication date 2000-06-16

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered)

    "So I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on..."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgDxWNV4wWY

  • Rudolf (unregistered) in reply to Mike D
    Mike D:
    I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.

    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.

    You beat me to it.

    I suspect he was thinking of 8088 (the 8 bit bus version of the 16 bit 8086 predecessor to the 80286)

  • Pista (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.

    Tatiana sounds like a positive asset to any company to which she finds herself attached. Not only can she troubleshoot and proactively solve problems, she can also work effectively after coming in from a night out on the town with her friends. This either means that she is abstemious and orderly in her lifestyle, or that her skills are such that they function adequately with a head muddled by alcohol and whatever else a young person experiences on a night of recreation.

    I bet you wrote all this just so you can use the word 'abstemious' :) Kudos!

  • I prefer the straight lesbians (unregistered) in reply to Dr D Ildo
    Dr D Ildo:
    Tatiana has a gay lesbian egg fetish.

    Gay lesbians, eh?

  • (cs) in reply to Mike D
    Mike D:
    I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.

    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.

    (Akismet claims this comment is spam if I put in a link to Intel_80186 on Wikipedia.)

    But you didn't read the article on Wikip, or you'd have seen the list of desktop- and laptop-scale machines in it. Of course, maybe you mean "100% IBM compatible" desktop machines, which I'll give you. Note in passing that the incompatibility with the standard PC architecture was of a sort that would cause problems - in the early 90s I worked with a 80188-based embedded system, and there were all sorts of extra widgets built in to the chip in order to reduce the number of support chips required, and the interrupt controller was on-board and not quite compatible with the PC's interrupt controller.

  • MikeG (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    perfectly cromulent
    Just like that, you made my day. Embiggened it, even.
  • (cs) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.

    Tatiana sounds like a positive asset to any company to which she finds herself attached. Not only can she troubleshoot and proactively solve problems, she can also work effectively after coming in from a night out on the town with her friends. This either means that she is abstemious and orderly in her lifestyle, or that her skills are such that they function adequately with a head muddled by alcohol and whatever else a young person experiences on a night of recreation.

    Hey Man, You should write recommendations on LinkedIn...

  • chrisjfinlay (unregistered) in reply to Zeke
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?

    They're fragile as shit.

    Captcha: feugiat. Whoever set up that mail system was a complete feugiat.

  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered)
    Ziplodocus:
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

    Ziplodocus:
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

    You expect us to reply 4 times now?

  • ComputerForumUser (unregistered)
    Suggestions for a better collective noun can be made in the comments.
    The obvious answer would be "e-maelstrom".
  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.
    Not even metaphorical (but very cromulent anyway), http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prophylactic:
    2: tending to prevent or ward off : preventive

    Synonyms precautionary, preventative, preventive

  • Balu (unregistered) in reply to I prefer the straight lesbians
    I prefer the straight lesbians:
    Dr D Ildo:
    Tatiana has a gay lesbian egg fetish.
    Gay lesbians, eh?
    Of course! She likes men.
  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered)
    What was the source of the maelstrom of emails? Suggestions for a better collective noun can be made in the comments.
    Wow, what a breach of style (first person narrative to author's meta comment)! I recommend this paragraph for the Ig Bulwer Razzie Oscar!
  • VAXcat (unregistered)

    The email behavior reminds of of the lyrics of a Reggae song I heard last week.

    "In time of peace I smoke two joints In time of war I smoke two more I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints... And then I smoke two more."

  • neminem (unregistered)

    Reminds me of a time our college's mail server got shut down for most of a day back when I was an intern in the IT department one summer. It was sudden rather than gradual, but similar: there was a webform on the site somewhere, not used that much, for requesting the use of school A/V equipment. When submitted, it sent an email notification to an internal address. Attempting to email that address directly would send a notification to the sender that you shouldn't email it directly.

    A clever spambot found this page, submitted the form, and for some reason decided to claim that its email was a random email from the page, namely that internal email. Cue infinite looping of the internal address sending itself a message that you shouldn't email it, which triggered sending another one, which triggered sending another one, and so on until we finally managed to get into that server and kill the process. That was a fun day.

  • Florent (unregistered)

    I'll just pop in here to note that this is a good story about the president's daughter were nobody ends up resigning, and the WTf is actually solved.

    So refreshing.

  • (cs) in reply to Mike D
    Mike D:
    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.
    Except they were used anyway. My school at the time had some. I really hated them, as they had no interesting software on them at all.
  • Yazeran (unregistered)
    Ziplodocus:
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of when we switched from Pegasus to Outlook (looking aside that half of all office computers had to be replaced with newer models to be able to actually run Outlook...).

    In outlook was this new 'out of office autoreply' thing.

    (you gan properly guess what happens)

    Yes someone set up an autoreply and wanted to test it. On top of that, the exchange server was not (yet) configured correctly allowing autoreplies to one self....

    Result: Half a day without any emails to approx 800 employees and some 100k+ emails for the IT-department to sift through to purge the autoreplies.

    Fun times :-)

    Yazeran

    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

  • Dan Mercer (unregistered) in reply to Mike D

    "That's not entirely true" (Albert Nimziki). In the 80's I had an 80186 based desktop that also functioned as an IBM 3270 terminal. The 3270 mode connected us to our mainframes, the PC mode was used as a terminal to connect to our Unix boxes (NCR Towers) and various networking devices (Wellsfleet, etc) - we were a reseller and system integrator. Had 256 K memory. We used PCWRITE as a word processor. When PCWRITE came out with a new version, we couldn't run the print program and the word processor at the same time - had to swap floppies in between.

    Dan Mercer

  • (cs) in reply to I prefer the straight lesbians
    I prefer the straight lesbians:
    Dr D Ildo:
    Tatiana has a gay lesbian egg fetish.

    Gay lesbians, eh?

    No, lesbian eggs.

  • (cs)

    Whaddya mean "the early part of this century" ? We're still in the "early part" and will remain there until at least 2025, you young punk (and get offa my lawn^H^H^H^Hcalendar).

  • (cs) in reply to Zeke
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    Perhaps Tatiana's predecessor had a $1500 dollar a day habit.
  • Chuck Ritter (unregistered) in reply to ComputerForumUser
    ComputerForumUser:
    Suggestions for a better collective noun can be made in the comments.
    The obvious answer would be "e-maelstrom".

    I have generally used the term e-maelstrom to refer to one of those emails that got sent out to more than the necessary number of people, all of whom feel they must add both their opinion and their immediate coworkers to the discussion. They get especially big when they start out with someone looking for a scapegoat.

  • ih8u (unregistered) in reply to foo AKA fooo
    foo AKA fooo:
    QJo:
    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.
    Not even metaphorical (but very cromulent anyway), http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prophylactic:
    2: tending to prevent or ward off : preventive

    Synonyms precautionary, preventative, preventive

    Dammit, QJo. I'm sick of your "Definition 2" bullshit. penny-arcade comic/2013/03/15

  • Anynomous (unregistered)

    Minimal spec for Linux was 386 with 2M of memory (in 1996).

    You could even start up x11 with 4M.

    But frankly, a 80386SX at 16MHz would have been a rather sluggish chugger even as an email server.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Ziplodocus
    Ziplodocus:
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

    Feh, amateurs. Mere messages being duplicated. Knew a person at college who found that on a Prime system, he could spawn a sub-user (or whatever they were called on Prime systems) to login, perform a task, then logout. Great. Code your assignment, save, spawn the task build and run it while you continue with other tasks. We all used the capability.

    But, being high on curiosity, but low on forethought, this guy had his task create, guess what? Oh no, not one but two instances of itself.

    The Dean was not amused.

  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered) in reply to ih8u
    ih8u:
    foo AKA fooo:
    QJo:
    "Prophylactically" is perfectly cromulent if metaphorical, when used with a view to continuing good health by means of preventative / proctective maintenance.
    Not even metaphorical (but very cromulent anyway), http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prophylactic:
    2: tending to prevent or ward off : preventive

    Synonyms precautionary, preventative, preventive

    Dammit, QJo. I'm sick of your "Definition 2" bullshit. penny-arcade comic/2013/03/15

    Keep it cool. QJo didn't forbid the word, unlike that PA guy, in fact he called it perfectly cromulent, he just thought it was metaphorical which is isn't.

  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    But... "prophylactically"? Bruce, you do know what that means, right? It has nothing to do with "proactively", although a prophylactic might be a useful proactive security measure.

    It was a fair usage: prophylactic has a broader meaning these days; see entry 3 under noun and entry 1 under adjective.. (It was also humorous, which is the whole reason the term has come to the broader usage.)

  • J (unregistered)

    Ah...so Tatiana is the president's daughter.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Not quite the same thing, but: I once worked on a system that sent emails to users when certain events happened related to equipment which that user was supposed to use or maintain. We had about 20,000 users and several hundred thousand pieces of equipment we tracked. The average user probably got several messages per week.

    One day someone made a change to the database query that retrieved the appropriate notifications for each person. This change messed up the test, so that instead of sending each user the notifications appropriate to him, it sent every user every notification, once for each person who was supposed to receive it. It was in the development region, but she was working with a copy of the production database, so it had all the live user accounts.

    It sent every user ten of thousands of notification emails before we got it shut down. The users were unhappy.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Zeke
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?

    I'll go out on a limb here and guess: Because eggs are fragile. Faberge eggs were very fancy and expensive. The new system was fancy and expensive, but she feared it would be just as fragile as the old system?

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Mike D
    Mike D:
    I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.
    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.
    Tandy did, in the Tandy 2000.
  • Miriam (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    Ah...so Tatiana is the president's daughter.
    Well, of course. It is written in the first two paragraphs!

    It was a nice story, albeit not all that super-exciting.

  • Donald Knuth (unregistered) in reply to Mike D
    Mike D:
    I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.

    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.

    (Akismet claims this comment is spam if I put in a link to Intel_80186 on Wikipedia.)

    We sold quite a few Altos 486s back in the 80s. Depends on your definition of desktop. They easily fit on a desktop and did not need the environment conditioned. With 4 RS-232 ports they made fine mail servers. 1 for the console and 3 2400 baud modems and you're good to go. They had a 25MB hard drive and 512K, though, not a cassette deck and 8K.

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