• luptatum (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    dkallen:
    Rootbeer:
    So in the best-case scenario, the recovery plan required the offsite backup tapes to be transported across 6 states before they could be mounted and restored from?

    How many hours of downtime would that translate to?

    Our off-site storage was 100 miles away, and the recovery site about 3 states away. We had a commitment to restoring full service within 48 hours of the initial downtime event.

    Getting a truck of backup tapes from off-site storage to the recovery center does take hours... but that entire paradigm assumes that 48 hours is expensive, but not disastrous.

    There are still many sectors of the industry where this is acceptable.

    And, how much time does it make to copy the backup tapes, so that you're not risking of damaging or destroying them during transport? I doubt you'll be able to copy them all, and transport them, and restore them, all in 48 hours. Unless you have, like, 1.

  • (cs) in reply to Howard

    We also know that business clients are more important than individuals, in particular when it comes to ISPs.

    I am with the only UK ISP that provides fibre-optic cable broadband. When I had no connection at all, I called up and got fobbed off with nonsense about engineers working on it, that it was a fault in my area, and other nonsense about overloading.

    Finally when an engineer did come to install me a new hub, he was able to locate the problem very quickly to the local cabinet and went over and fixed it within minutes.

    Of course, the people at the end of the phone were right in that they, personally, couldn't fix my problem. But they should have suggested that engineers might actually check my cabinet a bit sooner?

  • Wody (unregistered)

    There are no backups in this story except ones made by accident. This is, because a backup is only a backup when after the backup, the medium is removed, to force the system to acknoledge and end of procedure, and then replaced and the data can be entirely restored and verified to be the same with the original data.

  • (cs) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.
    6 states isn't necessarily 2000 miles away. You could travel through 6 states in new england and not make it across texas in the same mileage.

    And with internet speeds back then it seems to me that it musta been worth the effort to physically ship the stuff.

    And when it comes to data loss, you plan for it to come from everywhere 'cause you never know. It could be anything from natural disasters to solar flares to industrial espionage. If you have an employee maliciously destroy a lot of data, an off site backup makes quite a bit of sense.

  • (cs) in reply to Some Jerk
    Some Jerk:
    And I might add... it doesn't count unless it is something that you PAY for.

    You mean you don't pay to use TheDailyWTF??? wow, I'm getting doubly ripped off here...

  • dkallen (unregistered) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.

    Fucking data centers are fucking expensive, so it was fucking common for several geographically fucking diverse organizations to purchase 'slots' at a fucking backup site. Since backup sites are also fucking data centers and therefore, fucking expensive, there weren't that fucking many of them, so it was common for them to be fucking far away.

    Generally, the fucking support staff were expected to travel to the fucking hot site during a drill, or during a fucking emergency, to reload the fucking operating system, then the fucking libraries, and then the fucking data. Operators would be flown to the hot site as soon as the fucking system is up and running, and only then would they load the fucking tapes -- which was their basic fucking job.

    We also had these fucking things called fucking modems, so that we could run fucking communications to a fucking temporary communications concentrator which would then tie into the more fucking important terminals. The fucking users didn't care how fucking far away the mainframe was, just so long as they could get to their fucking data.

    It was also fucking common to keep a duplicate fucking set of backups in the fucking tape library 100 fucking feet away from the fucking mainframe, in case some fucking user accidentally deleted their fucking data.

    So far as I know, no one actually fucked anyone named Katrina during these tests.

    Don't comment on things you don't know the first fucking thing about. For fuck sake. Whatever that means.

    (or was that a fucking troll?)

  • (cs) in reply to Illiteracy
    Illiteracy:
    "wrinkles that needed ironed out" This phrase is not grammatically correct and makes no sense. Think about the meanings of the words. 'wrinkles that needed TO BE ironed out' or 'wrinkles that needed IRONING out' would both have been perfectly valid.
    It's a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. They say things like "my car needs washed".
  • mag (unregistered)

    Modern day computing business:

    If you want to purchase a license for tape backups, that'll be an extra Fortune top 100 company affordable figure.

  • Yet Another Steve (unregistered) in reply to A Countant
    A Countant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Those drives are capital expenditure, and we don't have any budget for that. Cloud storage services are operational expenditure, and we've got plenty of budged for that.
    So here's what I don't get. A lot of businesses think this way. We can't buy an X to streamline the work, because that's capital. But we can keep 10 wage slaves slogging through drudge work because that's just expense.

    Now, when you go to calculate the value of a company, it works like this:

    1. How much profit are they making? Does it look like they can keep bringing in profit year after year?

    2. How much stuff do they own? Buildings, land, trucks... crap we could at least sell if #1 goes south?

    So, salaries and other operational expenses reduce #1.

    Capital purchases increase #2.

    Thus, it seems, a company would rather buy equipment than pay operational expenses. Why is this not so?

    Blame it on the investors. They say "For every dollar we spend in operating expenses, we make $x in revenue. If we spend 3 dollars in operating expenses, that must mean we'll make $3x!" So they're more than happy to see companies spending in the form of operating expenses, assuming that it will translate into short-term profits. So, the stock price goes up.

    When they hear "capital expense" they think "We're spending this money now and maybe we'll see some increase in revenue 2 or 3 years from now. But what do I care, I'm not going to own this stock in 6 months anyway!" So, they don't like capital expenses as much and the stock price goes down, or doesn't go up as much.

    Remember, most of Wall Street valuation is all about how the next quarter is going to look, not the long term picture. And most (public) companies operate from the perspective that they need to keep the investors happy, at any cost.

  • (cs) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.
    Perhaps the story didn't have enough swear words, so you couldn't gauge the emotion. Let me rewrite it for you:

    Fcking company haz fcking backup system that is way fcking retarded. They thought they wear so fcking cool by sending there tape like someplace else, but they is two fcking retarded to notices that there fcking backups of the small, 99% cleints is fcking overwritten, compleatly defeting the fcking purpose.

    Did you get that?

  • GahAlwaysWithTheScrewups (unregistered)

    "Are you sure you it's not on some different shelf?"

    Seriously? What that hell does that even mean? After all of the flak that these posts get over grammar, punctuation, and general nonsense statements, we still can't get anybody to at least have one other person proofread an article before submission?

    Come on guys.... A little effort please....

  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to Yet Another Steve
    Yet Another Steve:
    Blame it on the investors. They say "For every dollar we spend in operating expenses, we make $x in revenue. If we spend 3 dollars in operating expenses, that must mean we'll make $3x!" So they're more than happy to see companies spending in the form of operating expenses, assuming that it will translate into short-term profits. So, the stock price goes up.

    When they hear "capital expense" they think "We're spending this money now and maybe we'll see some increase in revenue 2 or 3 years from now. But what do I care, I'm not going to own this stock in 6 months anyway!" So, they don't like capital expenses as much and the stock price goes down, or doesn't go up as much.

    Remember, most of Wall Street valuation is all about how the next quarter is going to look, not the long term picture. And most (public) companies operate from the perspective that they need to keep the investors happy, at any cost.

    A few years ago, our small software development company was swallowed up by a mid-size, publicly healthcare company. Each time we needed another developer, the guys back in Nashville would send us another InfoSYS (read:Indian) contractor.

    One day we had an audience with our mid-level executive PHB, and when asked why they were so committed to using contractors who leave after 6-8 months and take their knowledge with them, he immediately gave us a lecture about capital costs vs. operating costs. Message simply was that our real boss was the shareholders.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to A Countant
    A Countant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Those drives are capital expenditure, and we don't have any budget for that. Cloud storage services are operational expenditure, and we've got plenty of budged for that.
    So here's what I don't get. A lot of businesses think this way. We can't buy an X to streamline the work, because that's capital. But we can keep 10 wage slaves slogging through drudge work because that's just expense.

    Now, when you go to calculate the value of a company, it works like this:

    1. How much profit are they making? Does it look like they can keep bringing in profit year after year?

    2. How much stuff do they own? Buildings, land, trucks... crap we could at least sell if #1 goes south?

    So, salaries and other operational expenses reduce #1.

    Capital purchases increase #2.

    Thus, it seems, a company would rather buy equipment than pay operational expenses. Why is this not so?

    Because it isn't.

    Capital purchases dramatically drop in resale value the minute the box is opened. cf. the 60% drop in value when you drive a new car off the dealership lot.

    That drop in value is amortized across the depreciation cycle of the equipment (usually linearly, over 3-5 years for computer equipment) from an accounting perspective, but that doesn't accurately reflect the "real value" of the equipment in a liquidation. So for the first half of the capital's lifecycle, it's actually overvalued by the accountants.

    Also, that depreciation cost is often treated as part of the operational expense, at least for budgeting purposes, so you might be able to buy $1M of capital equipment and not be able to budget for the $200k/year opex to pay for it the next 5. Or you might have to lay off 2 average employees to cover the depreciation.

  • Abe Zook (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Illiteracy:
    "wrinkles that needed ironed out" This phrase is not grammatically correct and makes no sense. Think about the meanings of the words. 'wrinkles that needed TO BE ironed out' or 'wrinkles that needed IRONING out' would both have been perfectly valid.
    It's a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. They say things like "my car needs washed".
    I see nothing wrong with that syntax.
  • jay (unregistered) in reply to A Countant
    A Countant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Those drives are capital expenditure, and we don't have any budget for that. Cloud storage services are operational expenditure, and we've got plenty of budged for that.
    So here's what I don't get. A lot of businesses think this way. We can't buy an X to streamline the work, because that's capital. But we can keep 10 wage slaves slogging through drudge work because that's just expense.

    Now, when you go to calculate the value of a company, it works like this:

    1. How much profit are they making? Does it look like they can keep bringing in profit year after year?

    2. How much stuff do they own? Buildings, land, trucks... crap we could at least sell if #1 goes south?

    So, salaries and other operational expenses reduce #1.

    Capital purchases increase #2.

    Thus, it seems, a company would rather buy equipment than pay operational expenses. Why is this not so?

    Sunk costs.

    We're paying these people to be here whether they do any useful work or not. If we're paying Bob, say, $40,000 a year and he gets the job done, it costs us $40,000. If we buy a machine that costs $10,000, then we're spending $50,000 to do the same job that we could have done for $40,000.

    You might reply that the reasoning is flawed. If the machine lets Bob do the same job in half the time, then Bob can now do twice as much work, so instead of paying $40,000 for X units of work we're paying $50,000 for 2X units of work. That is, we're getting work done for $25,000 per X instead of $40,000 per X.

    But not necessarily. If the machine lets Bob get the job done in half the time, maybe he does twice as much work. Or maybe he spends more time chatting with his buddies, reading posts on thedailywtf.com, etc.

  • Wonk (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    dkallen:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.

    Fucking data centers are fucking expensive, so it was fucking common for several geographically fucking diverse organizations to purchase 'slots' at a fucking backup site. Since backup sites are also fucking data centers and therefore, fucking expensive, there weren't that fucking many of them, so it was common for them to be fucking far away.

    Generally, the fucking support staff were expected to travel to the fucking hot site during a drill, or during a fucking emergency, to reload the fucking operating system, then the fucking libraries, and then the fucking data. Operators would be flown to the hot site as soon as the fucking system is up and running, and only then would they load the fucking tapes -- which was their basic fucking job.

    We also had these fucking things called fucking modems, so that we could run fucking communications to a fucking temporary communications concentrator which would then tie into the more fucking important terminals. The fucking users didn't care how fucking far away the mainframe was, just so long as they could get to their fucking data.

    It was also fucking common to keep a duplicate fucking set of backups in the fucking tape library 100 fucking feet away from the fucking mainframe, in case some fucking user accidentally deleted their fucking data.

    So far as I know, no one actually fucked anyone named Katrina during these tests.

    Don't comment on things you don't know the first fucking thing about. For fuck sake. Whatever that means.

    (or was that a fucking troll?)

    Blue, please.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to C-Derb
    C-Derb:
    A few years ago, our small software development company was swallowed up by a mid-size, publicly healthcare company. Each time we needed another developer, the guys back in Nashville would send us another InfoSYS (read:Indian) contractor.

    One day we had an audience with our mid-level executive PHB, and when asked why they were so committed to using contractors who leave after 6-8 months and take their knowledge with them, he immediately gave us a lecture about capital costs vs. operating costs. Message simply was that our real boss was the shareholders.

    The last sentence doesn't follow from the rest of the story. If the company procedures result in inefficient use of resources, the people who most directly bear that cost are the shareholders. More than anyone, the shareholders want to see the company efficiently run. Employees may have conflicting interests: they want the company to make enough money to stay in business, but they also want high salaries, and they certainly don't want to lose their jobs even if that would be to the benefit of the company as a whole. But shareholders have no such conflict of interest.

    People do not make poor resource allocation choices because they are greedy. The greedier they are, the more they should want to see the best allocation of resources. People make poor resource allocation choices because they are misinformed or foolish.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    dkallen:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.

    Fucking data centers are fucking expensive, so it was fucking common for several geographically fucking diverse organizations to purchase 'slots' at a fucking backup site. Since backup sites are also fucking data centers and therefore, fucking expensive, there weren't that fucking many of them, so it was common for them to be fucking far away.

    Generally, the fucking support staff were expected to travel to the fucking hot site during a drill, or during a fucking emergency, to reload the fucking operating system, then the fucking libraries, and then the fucking data. Operators would be flown to the hot site as soon as the fucking system is up and running, and only then would they load the fucking tapes -- which was their basic fucking job.

    We also had these fucking things called fucking modems, so that we could run fucking communications to a fucking temporary communications concentrator which would then tie into the more fucking important terminals. The fucking users didn't care how fucking far away the mainframe was, just so long as they could get to their fucking data.

    It was also fucking common to keep a duplicate fucking set of backups in the fucking tape library 100 fucking feet away from the fucking mainframe, in case some fucking user accidentally deleted their fucking data.

    So far as I know, no one actually fucked anyone named Katrina during these tests.

    Don't comment on things you don't know the first fucking thing about. For fuck sake. Whatever that means.

    (or was that a fucking troll?)

    I once commented to a friend in college that he could cut the amount of time it took him to say anything by about 25% if at the beginning of the conversation he would just say, "Every time I use a noun, assume that by default it is modified by the adjective 'f---ing'." Then not actually say the adjective but let the listener fill it in mentally.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    dkallen:
    Rootbeer:
    So in the best-case scenario, the recovery plan required the offsite backup tapes to be transported across 6 states before they could be mounted and restored from?

    How many hours of downtime would that translate to?

    Our off-site storage was 100 miles away, and the recovery site about 3 states away. We had a commitment to restoring full service within 48 hours of the initial downtime event.

    Getting a truck of backup tapes from off-site storage to the recovery center does take hours... but that entire paradigm assumes that 48 hours is expensive, but not disastrous.

    There are still many sectors of the industry where this is acceptable.

    And, how much time does it make to copy the backup tapes, so that you're not risking of damaging or destroying them during transport? I doubt you'll be able to copy them all, and transport them, and restore them, all in 48 hours. Unless you have, like, 1.

    Well, I presume that how long it takes to process and handle the tapes depends on how many people and how much equipment you have to do the job. If you have 10,000 backup tapes and one guy with one out-dated tape drive to do the job, yes, you're going to have a problem. But I'd assume in general that the more data you have, the more people and equipment you will have on hand to process it. If you make a million sales a day you'll have some big sales history files, but you should also have the income to hire enough people to handle it.

  • JJ (unregistered) in reply to Stewart Larsen
    Stewart Larsen:
    This, Friends, is _WHY_ we test. This is actually an example of the system working as it is supposed to.
    Or, more specifically, it's an example of testing working as it's supposed to by discovering that the system is not working as it's supposed to.
  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    The last sentence doesn't follow from the rest of the story. If the company procedures result in inefficient use of resources, the people who most directly bear that cost are the shareholders. More than anyone, the shareholders want to see the company efficiently run. Employees may have conflicting interests: they want the company to make enough money to stay in business, but they also want high salaries, and they certainly don't want to lose their jobs even if that would be to the benefit of the company as a whole. But shareholders have no such conflict of interest.

    People do not make poor resource allocation choices because they are greedy. The greedier they are, the more they should want to see the best allocation of resources. People make poor resource allocation choices because they are misinformed or foolish.

    I think that you are assuming the shareholders were knowledgeable about the company beyond the financial statements. Shareholders didn't know/care that 2 years of development knowledge by 12 different contractors walked out the door the moment they decided to go back to India (one by one, not en masse). PHB's explained that shareholders would see the number of Full Time Employees and their salaries as committed long term costs, but contractor salaries were lumped into the OpEx budget and written off as one time expenses. So if an FTE left, they replaced that person with a contractor who had no vested interest in the company beyond the contract term.

    He basically said, "We'd rather use contractors because it looks better on the financial statements." Which was a slap in the face to all the developers because it was implied that the results of our work was less important than what the financial reports would show.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    It's a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. They say things like "my car needs washed".
    Everyone knows the correct form is "my car needs-a-be washed".
  • dkallen (unregistered) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    dkallen:
    Rootbeer:
    So in the best-case scenario, the recovery plan required the offsite backup tapes to be transported across 6 states before they could be mounted and restored from?

    How many hours of downtime would that translate to?

    Our off-site storage was 100 miles away, and the recovery site about 3 states away. We had a commitment to restoring full service within 48 hours of the initial downtime event.

    Getting a truck of backup tapes from off-site storage to the recovery center does take hours... but that entire paradigm assumes that 48 hours is expensive, but not disastrous.

    There are still many sectors of the industry where this is acceptable.

    And, how much time does it make to copy the backup tapes, so that you're not risking of damaging or destroying them during transport? I doubt you'll be able to copy them all, and transport them, and restore them, all in 48 hours. Unless you have, like, 1.

    Every night, we did differential backups. Twice. Every weekend, we did full backups. Twice. One copy was kept onsite, one was shipped offsite.

    The only thing we had to do in 48 hours, was contact the backup site to ship specific boxes via airmail (or even via chartered jet) ASAP to the recovery site. Generally, we could expect the tapes to get there before we did, as we had to pack, buy tickets, wait for the next flight, etc. If the next flight was too far in the future, again we had the option of a chartered jet.

    Generally, getting everything to the hot site on time wasn't problematic.

    Mis-keying the command to restore the security database from the backup tape, such that the empty database was written to the backup tape... that was a problem (and led to the requirement that write rings be removed from all tapes before being shipped offsite).

  • consequat (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    dkallen:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.

    Fucking data centers are fucking expensive, so it was fucking common for several geographically fucking diverse organizations to purchase 'slots' at a fucking backup site. Since backup sites are also fucking data centers and therefore, fucking expensive, there weren't that fucking many of them, so it was common for them to be fucking far away.

    Generally, the fucking support staff were expected to travel to the fucking hot site during a drill, or during a fucking emergency, to reload the fucking operating system, then the fucking libraries, and then the fucking data. Operators would be flown to the hot site as soon as the fucking system is up and running, and only then would they load the fucking tapes -- which was their basic fucking job.

    We also had these fucking things called fucking modems, so that we could run fucking communications to a fucking temporary communications concentrator which would then tie into the more fucking important terminals. The fucking users didn't care how fucking far away the mainframe was, just so long as they could get to their fucking data.

    It was also fucking common to keep a duplicate fucking set of backups in the fucking tape library 100 fucking feet away from the fucking mainframe, in case some fucking user accidentally deleted their fucking data.

    So far as I know, no one actually fucked anyone named Katrina during these tests.

    Don't comment on things you don't know the first fucking thing about. For fuck sake. Whatever that means.

    (or was that a fucking troll?)

    At least you're a fucking expert.

  • consequat (unregistered) in reply to TGV
    TGV:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.
    Perhaps the story didn't have enough swear words, so you couldn't gauge the emotion. Let me rewrite it for you:

    Fcking company haz fcking backup system that is way fcking retarded. They thought they wear so fcking cool by sending there tape like someplace else, but they is two fcking retarded to notices that there fcking backups of the small, 99% cleints is fcking overwritten, compleatly defeting the fcking purpose.

    Did you get that?

    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar. Fuck you. Fuck all who mean "fuck" and don't say it when they mean it.

  • consequat (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    luptatum:
    dkallen:
    Rootbeer:
    So in the best-case scenario, the recovery plan required the offsite backup tapes to be transported across 6 states before they could be mounted and restored from?

    How many hours of downtime would that translate to?

    Our off-site storage was 100 miles away, and the recovery site about 3 states away. We had a commitment to restoring full service within 48 hours of the initial downtime event.

    Getting a truck of backup tapes from off-site storage to the recovery center does take hours... but that entire paradigm assumes that 48 hours is expensive, but not disastrous.

    There are still many sectors of the industry where this is acceptable.

    And, how much time does it make to copy the backup tapes, so that you're not risking of damaging or destroying them during transport? I doubt you'll be able to copy them all, and transport them, and restore them, all in 48 hours. Unless you have, like, 1.

    Well, I presume that how long it takes to process and handle the tapes depends on how many people and how much equipment you have to do the job. If you have 10,000 backup tapes and one guy with one out-dated tape drive to do the job, yes, you're going to have a problem. But I'd assume in general that the more data you have, the more people and equipment you will have on hand to process it. If you make a million sales a day you'll have some big sales history files, but you should also have the income to hire enough people to handle it.

    Yeah, right. No matter how big the company is, there will always be only one or maybe two guys that operate tapes (maybe per location) - but definitely not proportional to the number of clients, types, etc.

  • dkallen (unregistered) in reply to consequat
    consequat:
    dkallen:
    luptatum:
    ... stripped ...
    ... stripped ...

    At least you're a fucking expert.

    Yes. Yes I am. (Or was - remember, we're talking about a couple of decades ago).

  • (cs) in reply to consequat
    consequat:
    TGV:
    Perhaps the story didn't have enough swear words, so you couldn't gauge the emotion. Let me rewrite it for you:

    /something straight from a Tarantino movie/

    Did you get that?

    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar. Fuck you. Fuck all who mean "fuck" and don't say it when they mean it.

    That's because I didn't mean it. Nobody means "fuck" when they say "fucking Katrina". Well, perhaps someone who wants to lose his genitals to a hurricane, but most of the population just tries to show their anger by inserting expletives.

    And when you take a close look at yourself, you didn't mean "fuck" when you wrote "fuck you, fuck all". I would wholeheartedly recommend that you now go masturbate a bit, as I suspect that suggesting someone have sexual intercourse with you would be too unpleasant for the other party.

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    Some Jerk:
    And I might add... it doesn't count unless it is something that you PAY for.

    You mean you don't pay to use TheDailyWTF??? wow, I'm getting doubly ripped off here...

    I'd feature this comment, just for the sake of an overload of irony.
  • Anonymous Bob (unregistered) in reply to A Countant
    A Countant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Those drives are capital expenditure, and we don't have any budget for that. Cloud storage services are operational expenditure, and we've got plenty of budged for that.
    So here's what I don't get. A lot of businesses think this way. We can't buy an X to streamline the work, because that's capital. But we can keep 10 wage slaves slogging through drudge work because that's just expense.

    Now, when you go to calculate the value of a company, it works like this:

    1. How much profit are they making? Does it look like they can keep bringing in profit year after year?

    2. How much stuff do they own? Buildings, land, trucks... crap we could at least sell if #1 goes south?

    So, salaries and other operational expenses reduce #1.

    Capital purchases increase #2.

    Thus, it seems, a company would rather buy equipment than pay operational expenses. Why is this not so?

    Thank our tax system. Salaries can be written off 100% this year. Capital expenses have to be depreciated.

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    and led to the requirement that write rings be removed from all tapes before being shipped offsite

    We had a safer approach, NO reels had write rings, there was a very limited supply that would be placed on the reel as it was mounted if the request so indicated. A reel on the rack with a ring was a firing offsense.

    ps: Helical recording was done (though not on 9-track] as early as 1971 (I still have two working drives]

  • Anonymous Bob (unregistered) in reply to TGV
    TGV:
    consequat:
    TGV:
    Perhaps the story didn't have enough swear words, so you couldn't gauge the emotion. Let me rewrite it for you:

    /something straight from a Tarantino movie/

    Did you get that?

    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar. Fuck you. Fuck all who mean "fuck" and don't say it when they mean it.

    That's because I didn't mean it. Nobody means "fuck" when they say "fucking Katrina". Well, perhaps someone who wants to lose his genitals to a hurricane, but most of the population just tries to show their anger by inserting expletives.

    And when you take a close look at yourself, you didn't mean "fuck" when you wrote "fuck you, fuck all". I would wholeheartedly recommend that you now go masturbate a bit, as I suspect that suggesting someone have sexual intercourse with you would be too unpleasant for the other party.

    Fuck Katrina? I know her. She's cute!

  • neminem (unregistered) in reply to consequat
    consequat:
    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar.
    Frack you too. It's way more gorram fun saying "frelling" than "fucking", and if you don't like it, you can go frack yourself.
  • ingenium (unregistered) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    consequat:
    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar.
    Frack you too. It's way more gorram fun saying "frelling" than "fucking", and if you don't like it, you can go frack yourself.

    Right. It's way more polite to mask the word "fuck" - whichever way you can imagine, as long as it's clear that you actually meant the use the word "fuck" in place of whatever replacement word you used. That way you can be considered polite, versus that redneck over there who doesn't even try. The difference? It's that you are polite, and he's not. Or, at least, you THINK that you are, and he's not. The truth is, you're both rednecks who swear unnecessarily and complain about the other swearing unnecessarily. You should both shut the FUCK up (or, we).

  • ingenium (unregistered) in reply to ingenium
    ingenium:
    neminem:
    consequat:
    A you're a f*king polite retard because you mask your swear words by wildcarding characters or using "freaking" or "frigging" or similar.
    Frack you too. It's way more gorram fun saying "frelling" than "fucking", and if you don't like it, you can go frack yourself.

    Right. It's way more polite to mask the word "fuck" - whichever way you can imagine, as long as it's clear that you actually meant the use the word "fuck" in place of whatever replacement word you used. That way you can be considered polite, versus that redneck over there who doesn't even try. The difference? It's that you are polite, and he's not. Or, at least, you THINK that you are, and he's not. The truth is, you're both rednecks who swear unnecessarily and complain about the other swearing unnecessarily. You should both shut the FUCK up (or, we).

    I don't understand why some are insulted by the mention of the name "Katrina", regardless of the "beautifier" "fucking" - when the reference to it clearly wasn't to embrace that hurricane or anything similar. Yes, fuck the fucking Katrina! So, what.

    And, you all use the word "fuck" at least once per day, almost every fucking day, so what the fuck are you all fucked up about all of a sudden? Fuck you.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Esse:
    Manual tape switching on such a large scale operation? Tape library anyone?
    This would be from a time when "tape" meant a reel about a foot across full of tape about half an inch wide.

    I worked one summer (1985) in the computer room of the Boston(*) office of a minicomputer maker, and I had to deal with this kind of tape. And no, they didn't have libraries where you could just stick half a dozen reels. Do you realise how big that would have been?

    I'd estimate that it would be about as big as tape libraries that were made by Storage Technology Corp. No wait it would be smaller, because the one I saw had a few hundred reels.

    <offtopic> By the way, freezing weather destroys data on magnetic tapes just like it does on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. </>
  • Friedrice the Great (unregistered) in reply to dkallen

    [quote user="dkallen"][quote user="luptatum"] (or was that a fucking troll?)[/quote]

    Fucking trolls are too busy reproducing to post.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to dkallen
    dkallen:
    Mis-keying the command to restore the security database from the backup tape, such that the empty database was written *to* the backup tape... *that* was a problem (and led to the requirement that write rings be removed from all tapes before being shipped offsite).
    Wow, I thought I was the only person who ever removed a write ring from a tape when intending not to write to it, so my fat fingering couldn't accidentally write to it.

    I wonder if the inventor of write rings was fired for inventing them.

  • ai- (unregistered) in reply to A Countant
    A Countant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Those drives are capital expenditure, and we don't have any budget for that. Cloud storage services are operational expenditure, and we've got plenty of budged for that.
    So here's what I don't get. A lot of businesses think this way. We can't buy an X to streamline the work, because that's capital. But we can keep 10 wage slaves slogging through drudge work because that's just expense.

    Now, when you go to calculate the value of a company, it works like this:

    1. How much profit are they making? Does it look like they can keep bringing in profit year after year?

    2. How much stuff do they own? Buildings, land, trucks... crap we could at least sell if #1 goes south?

    So, salaries and other operational expenses reduce #1.

    Capital purchases increase #2.

    Thus, it seems, a company would rather buy equipment than pay operational expenses. Why is this not so?

    Because the numbers are generally bigger in #1 than #2, and when they're not, then #2 will probably need an increase in #1....

    You buy a new building for $1 million. That may or may not increase the company value by something around $1 million (quite possibly less). Now you need to do something with this building - even if it stays empty, it runs to ruin if we don't at least have regular maintenance. This needs us to spend more money from #1 - and this money won't necessarily increase the profit we're making - it is merely maintaining the current value....

    While I think people get a bit obsessed with avoiding capital purchases, I can sort of understand where the attitude comes from.

    Perhaps in this case they should have added the price of a 1TB drive as a yearly operational expense.

  • Nagesh (unregistered) in reply to Friedrice the Great
    Friedrice the Great:
    (or was that a fucking troll?)
    Fucking trolls are too busy reproducing to post.
    I'm afraid you're mistaken about the reproductive cycle of the TDWTF troll.

    Trolls are not conceived, gestated and born -- they are made. And the way trolls make more trolls is by posting.

    The victim is a reader who reads the trollish posts. The first one or two times, he is perhaps amused. Then he is indifferent -- seen that before. Then he is bored. Then annoyed. And then exasperated. Finally his exasperation demands an outlet. The victim conceives of a funny idea: Since I've seen those trolls so many times, I know their shtick forwards and backwards. Wouldn't it be amusing if I showed my fellow sufferers here -- other readers who have to wade through oceans of trollish crud -- how perfect an impression of a troll I can do after all of this observation? It will be ironically funny, and it will teach those trolls that what they do is nothing particular to be proud of. See, even I can do it!

    Then the victim makes one little innocent wisecrack about a wooden table that has no file system, so FILE_NOT_FOUND, which is no laughing matter. Thus it starts.

    And that, boys and girls, is how trolls are made.

    Goodnight, and sleep tight.

  • soei (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    Your least important client is the one who is about to leave your service but has to get through to the disconnections team first.

    So what you do is put them on hold forever, or close to it, and hope they choose to give up and not leave your service.

    When my wife wanted to leave 3 network about a month ago and needed a PAC code we were put on hold for 1 hour and 12 minutes. The consequence of this is that when I will be leaving Orange at the end of the year I will not choose 3 as my new network even though they offer the best package at present for what I want.

    WAITER!!! A cigar, for such a fine story....
  • Mick (unregistered) in reply to Howard
    Howard:
    Cbuttius:
    Your least important client is the one who is about to leave your service but has to get through to the disconnections team first.
    This happened to me with a certain satellite radio service whose proprietary receivers were crappy beyond belief. I tried several times to call customer service and unsubscribe. They made it nearly impossible.

    As it happened, they were the only company automatically billing a certain credit card of mine. So I called the credit card company and had them change my card number. Figured the radioheads would go ahead and unsubscribe me once they realized there was no more money to grab.

    Surprise! My credit card company told the assholes my new card number! Because we certainly want those robocharges to keep flowing no matter what, right?

    I called my card company and told them in no uncertain terms that these charges were vehemently not authorized. Finally the bleeding stopped.

    I still get emails from the satellite radio company, years later, begging me to come back. I don't care if they have the most entertaining jock in the world. I'll cut off my own foot before they get another penny of mine.

    That's interesting - I've had a bank tell me that they can't stop such payments - even after I've insisted that they're not authorised. Apparently their view is that if you have set up a regular payment with a company, then you have authorsied the payment (which is kind of interesting if the bank has no access to any documentation that might suggest what term any agreement might be for). Of course, I've found that having a lawyer contact the charger (read document with fake lawyer letterhead) to advise the transaction is no longer authorised seems to stop the issue....

    (FTR: Not in the US for those that will argue the US has laws saying the bank has to stop the transaction as requested - although TBH I was surprised that apparently we don't have equivalent laws)

  • (cs)

    Trolls, trolls and more trolls:

    As was said to me over 35 years ago in a place far far away: "Remember the word F**K is not a comma!"

    Words to live by.

  • Dingle (unregistered) in reply to PiisAWheeL
    PiisAWheeL:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.
    6 states isn't necessarily 2000 miles away. You could travel through 6 states in new england and not make it across texas in the same mileage.

    And with internet speeds back then it seems to me that it musta been worth the effort to physically ship the stuff.

    And when it comes to data loss, you plan for it to come from everywhere 'cause you never know. It could be anything from natural disasters to solar flares to industrial espionage. If you have an employee maliciously destroy a lot of data, an off site backup makes quite a bit of sense.

    I don't know, 6 states is most of Australia

  • (cs) in reply to Dingle
    Dingle:
    I don't know, 6 states is most of Australia
    Creating a sane path from any a to other b that would involve crossing 6 states would be some accomplishment! Including territories, Darwin to Hobart via Canberra might work.
  • Friedrice the Great (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    Friedrice the Great:
    (or was that a fucking troll?)
    Fucking trolls are too busy reproducing to post.
    I'm afraid you're mistaken about the reproductive cycle of the TDWTF troll.

    Trolls are not conceived, gestated and born -- they are made. And the way trolls make more trolls is by posting.

    The victim is a reader who reads the trollish posts. The first one or two times, he is perhaps amused. Then he is indifferent -- seen that before. Then he is bored. Then annoyed. And then exasperated. Finally his exasperation demands an outlet. The victim conceives of a funny idea: Since I've seen those trolls so many times, I know their shtick forwards and backwards. Wouldn't it be amusing if I showed my fellow sufferers here -- other readers who have to wade through oceans of trollish crud -- how perfect an impression of a troll I can do after all of this observation? It will be ironically funny, and it will teach those trolls that what they do is nothing particular to be proud of. See, even I can do it!

    Then the victim makes one little innocent wisecrack about a wooden table that has no file system, so FILE_NOT_FOUND, which is no laughing matter. Thus it starts.

    And that, boys and girls, is how trolls are made.

    Goodnight, and sleep tight.

    Thanks for the explanation of troll reproduction, but I was being a bit more literal about what trolls were too busy doing to be posting ...

  • Dingle (unregistered) in reply to robbak
    robbak:
    Dingle:
    I don't know, 6 states is most of Australia
    Creating a sane path from any a to other b that would involve crossing 6 states would be some accomplishment! Including territories, Darwin to Hobart via Canberra might work.
    you're right - sorry, didn't realise there was a requirement for sanity...
  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    C-Derb:
    Message simply was that our real boss was the shareholders.
    The last sentence doesn't follow from the rest of the story.
    You misunderstand modern high finance. Investors don't understand the company, and a very large fraction of them don't want to understand the company either. For a very large fraction of them, as long as the share price goes up over the (very short) period of their holding, they don't care. But if the share price doesn't go up, they want to prosecute senior management (though I suspect their lawyers tell them they've not got a chance of winning if, as normal, senior management hasn't actually said or done anything). Some managements interpret this as meaning that the share price — a value determined in large part by a pack of rabid gamblers with ADHD — is the only metric worth following, and that's when the colossal management WTFs start flowing.

    Of course, some managements avoid this trap and instead concentrate on doing the right thing for the company. They tend to have large investors who actually care about the company involved, instead of just the casino financial institutions…

  • Mr Spiggott (unregistered) in reply to MrDaniil
    MrDaniil:
    Ron:
    MrDaniil:
    We cannot unplug twitter. We need it to keep younglings indoors so they don't disrupt the traffic. Playgrounds are dilapidated and cannot handle the load. Twitter needs to stay online and keep the young ones busy.
    I disagree. Better that they form roving troublemaking packs, or attempt to drive. That way we can weed out the stupidest / most aggressive ones before they get a chance to breed.

    That's how it used to work.

    Agreed. However with cars getting safer and laws protecting the dumbest its getting harder and harder to weed out.

    This is why Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded.

  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    dkallen:
    luptatum:
    What the fuck am I not following here?! The backups are made (irrelevant how and on what media) and then shipped 2000 miles away from where the related apps are - ok. So, in case of disaster, the data is restored how? By calling some operator and he does something, then data gets shipped back how? By being transferred over the wire, or what? What the fuck did they plan for? I understand keeping a copy that far in case of a fucking Katrina, but keep one at home, for fuck sake, so that I you can recover quicker.

    Fucking data centers are fucking expensive, so it was fucking common for several geographically fucking diverse organizations to purchase 'slots' at a fucking backup site. Since backup sites are also fucking data centers and therefore, fucking expensive, there weren't that fucking many of them, so it was common for them to be fucking far away.

    Generally, the fucking support staff were expected to travel to the fucking hot site during a drill, or during a fucking emergency, to reload the fucking operating system, then the fucking libraries, and then the fucking data. Operators would be flown to the hot site as soon as the fucking system is up and running, and only then would they load the fucking tapes -- which was their basic fucking job.

    We also had these fucking things called fucking modems, so that we could run fucking communications to a fucking temporary communications concentrator which would then tie into the more fucking important terminals. The fucking users didn't care how fucking far away the mainframe was, just so long as they could get to their fucking data.

    It was also fucking common to keep a duplicate fucking set of backups in the fucking tape library 100 fucking feet away from the fucking mainframe, in case some fucking user accidentally deleted their fucking data.

    So far as I know, no one actually fucked anyone named Katrina during these tests.

    Don't comment on things you don't know the first fucking thing about. For fuck sake. Whatever that means.

    (or was that a fucking troll?)

    I once commented to a friend in college that he could cut the amount of time it took him to say anything by about 25% if at the beginning of the conversation he would just say, "Every time I use a noun, assume that by default it is modified by the adjective 'f---ing'." Then not actually say the adjective but let the listener fill it in mentally.

    It often does not work like that. Frequently (not always, obviously) the reason for using an expletive is to fill the silence while you think of the next word to say.

    An alternative is to use multisyllabic lexological constructions which require that considerable quantities of temporal resource should elapse during their vocalization. Hencewise an adequate sufficiency of said temporal resource is exploited in order to expedite the appropriate selection of the succeeding instance of the aforementioned lexicological construct.

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