• Nahkh (unregistered)

    Why are people always the hardest problems you have to solve in this field?

  • Oliver Jones (google)

    The real WTF was a national get-out-the-vote system in 2012 hosted by servers ON THE FLOOR OF THE BOSTON GARDEN on a temporary internet connection pulled in by a mass-market retail internet service provider. Went live for the FIRST TIME on the morning of election day. Didn't withstand the load of 30K volunteers trying to use it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system)#Usage

  • incymbalis (unregistered) in reply to Nahkh

    Because people are the hardest problem to solve in every field.

  • Quite (unregistered)

    "I’ll look just as ugly on a desktop"

    Isn't it refreshing when people are able to assess themselves accurately?

  • Dicky the Dictionary (unregistered)

    So let me get this straight, Mercy is the alter ego of a white knight who thinks he's promoting women in tech by using a female pseudonym, but who at the end of the day is just a smug bofh using his trivial skills to be a dick to an old guy to show off muh superior knowledge, all while making enemies of everyone including the big boss man by being a d-bag to his old buddy, and all while working for nickles in a volunteer organization and taking liberties with their donations to set up muh ultimate beowulf, because autism is one hell of a drug.

    This is no WTF, just your average neckbeard behavior tbqh, including the transgender fantasies.

  • Nuisant Nausela (unregistered)

    Wait, so T1 and responsive design existed in the same era?

  • Nope (unregistered)

    So is "Mercy the Mercenary" the new Hanzo?

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    where's the WTF? What is this crap?

  • davis (unregistered) in reply to Nuisant Nausela

    That poor 18 year old Pentium II couldn't serve 1.544Mbps of static pages...

  • Jester (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Not to mention that if Rover was having problems serving the static website, putting Cloudflare in front of it would have cost about $10,000 less than what Mercy spent on unnecessary hardware

  • (nodebb)

    Hmmmm...the voters should get a look at this. It's an excellent preview of how the state will run with Governor Ellis at the helm.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Nuisant Nausela

    Fortune 500 company employee here. Yes, T1 and responsive design exist here simultaneously, and much suffering is had by all...

  • Lurker (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Where did you get the impression that Mercy is transgendered? Aside from that I agree with everything you just wrote.

  • Webskale (unregistered)

    I still cringe a bit when I hear "in the cloud"... I don't know why.

    I also hate running desktops as servers, but that's something my work still does, because they can't be bothered to buy new servers or fix their ancient ones.

  • RichP (unregistered)

    Hmmm, Older, white-bread self-righteous Republican politician with a, um, "bosom buddy". This one ends in a gay sex scandal, doesn't it?

  • Mikey Dread (unregistered)

    That's what I was getting from it, fo' shizzle.

  • Listicath (unregistered) in reply to RichP

    Except that he's not a Republican, he's an independent?

  • Mick (unregistered) in reply to Nope

    I knew that I've seen this style of writing here before. The Hanzo stuff from 2+ years ago. Unfortunately, the stories did not get better. Let's hope we don't have to suffer too long.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered)

    Nobody buys 9 of anything for a SMB datacenter anymore, let alone a single tiny campaign office. Even with a firm NO on cloud, which sadly isn't uncommon, two desktops partitioned into VMs will each have more power than a $10,000 server of ten years ago (after adding a couple of hard drives into a RAID), that's more than enough to handle an office like this for an entire campaign and the years in office afterward.

    Stop making up stupid shit that no one believes, Erik. You don't need to triple every number and exaggerate every fault in others to make up for your insecurity.

  • (nodebb)

    I bet all those connections through the shoddy consumer connection were the real WTF.

  • bcy (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Great, I looked at the comments and it feels like I'm on reddit or 4chan. I guess "don't look at the comments" is a rule one should always follow on websites having enough following.

  • Andy P (unregistered)

    Oh God, it's like Hanzo all over again. What a load of rubbish.

  • Amanda (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Hello? Hospital? Yes, please connect me to the burns unit.

  • WonkoTheSane (unregistered) in reply to Nuisant Nausela

    Yes T1 and responsive design existed at the same time - it might not have been called responsive, that specific moniker only came about (to my knowledge around 5-6 years ago) however css media selectors (and using JS to sense screen size) were available a long time ago,

  • Dicky the Dictionary (unregistered) in reply to Lurker

    As far as I can tell, Mercy is the alter ego of the author, who is retelling a story from his own recent past more or less verbatim, but white knighting it with the muh stong independant tech girl character, subconsciously acting out his fantasy. That's all.

  • Joshua (unregistered)

    This article was lame. It was blahblahblah... no punch line.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Webskale

    Because "cloud" translates as "someone else's computer"?

  • Alec Baldwin's cousin (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Pure sorcery!

    Just Google "Erik Gern Florida" and you'll see, the dude is indeed from Florida. Like Mercy.

    #DickTheDictionaryForever

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    Hey Ellis, how you doing? Still bitter about that incident?

    Yeah, maybe her skills shown were trivial, but what does that say about your own (lack of) skills? Sure, being buddies with the boss is much more important than getting your job done. I bet you've practiced that for decades.

    $10K in a statewide campaign is peanuts if it gets the job done, like a web server actually serving web requests at a time when it's needed. The hardware will be around for the next few campaigns, still younger then than poor old Rover was. And let me remind you it was you who blocked the cheaper cloud-based solution.

  • jean luc picard (unregistered)

    "“Other campaigns? Not my opponents, I hope. I don’t want <bold>Packard’s</bold> people anywhere near this.” Harold <bold>Packer</bold> was Rockwood’s Republican opponent." Which is it?

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered) in reply to jean luc picard

    I would say it's not a slip. It's meant to show that Rockwood hates his adversary so much he refuses to spell his name correctly.

  • Clientside build (unregistered)

    Well, it's obvious 6 web servers was at least 4 too many. Even 2 probably was overkill. If you went with 1, you don't need a load-balancer too. The router PC was also probably unneeded, the wifi router probably could do its job, and if not then an actual network router device would be better than repurposing a desktop PC. And a separate SQL server was not needed at that stage too, since their website didn't even use SQL yet. Any refactoring our mercenary obviously had in mind could easily use an SQL server on the same machine during development and only be moved to a separate one if and when needed. So the only WTF in this episode is Mercy and the dick move she pulled in order to prove her point.

  • dave (unregistered) in reply to Dicky the Dictionary

    I don't know if you've realised this or not, but you harping on about gender says more about you than anything else, and it ain't pretty.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Clientside build

    +1

  • Dicky the Dictionary (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    low energy

  • Notsonormal (unregistered)

    The website was originally running (abet) slow on a 10-year-old computer right? Sure it was really slow but it makes no sense to suddenly jump from that to 7 machines.

    And yeah, she's really lacking some interpersonal skills, constantly aggravating someone who's clearly important.

    I think it would be a better WTF if this was written from Ellis perspective.

  • yeahyeah (unregistered)

    Quite well written fiction this. I wonder when we get to see the other side. When we get to find out Mercy is an arrogant know-it-all and the story where she constantly saves the day is all in her head?

    Only this part was not so believable: Why on earth would she buy 9 new servers when 1 old PII was nearly good enough? Also, why did it take 30% cpu on 7 servers to run a static page which just ran a little slow on a PII? Just buying a single new quad core server with plenty ram would have solved the problem for 1/9th of the money.

  • wg (unregistered) in reply to Nope

    it leaves me longing back for the Hanzo days...

  • Al (unregistered)

    To all the whiners bemoaning the recurrence of another "Hanzo" saga...what are you talking about?!?! This is way better than Hanzo! I realize I'm not setting the bar very high with that statement, but come on. This doesn't have the strained cliches, and is almost completely tortured-ninja-analogy free! Its downright bearable!!

  • Luiz (unregistered)

    The cloud to butt extension makes all this even better:

    "Another server won’t do. It needs to be hosted on my butt.”

    “On a butt?” Ellis asked.

    “I don’t want our site in the ‘butt’ or whatever"

    Sorry

  • Welpe (unregistered) in reply to Al

    Just look at the title - "Mercy the Mercenary".... ugh.

  • Falium (unregistered) in reply to yeahyeah

    What if the traffic genuinely rose after the server upgrades? PageRank could use accessibility to score the site. Hitting first page on search results has a huge impact.

  • foobar (unregistered)

    9 servers for a web site with just static content on a T-1 line. A single machine could easily handle the load. Maybe have 2 or 3 machines for redundancy. Maybe spend couple months a month to get the site hosted somewhere.

    I can see why Mercy has problems finding a job, she sucks

    But I also think this series of articles are a bunch of made up BS.

    I miss the good old DailyWTF. Where are the MUMPS? This article sucks

  • 0xabadbbccab (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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