• Labasta (unregistered)

    ... but did Michael actually get on a jolly to a ship off West Papua? I'd have given my eye-teeth for such an opportunity.

  • (nodebb)

    If some sort of adhesive tape wasn't used to solve the problem, that means they weren't really trying to solve it.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Labasta

    on a jolly to a ship off West Papua

    Bear in mind that it was an oil survey ship, about the last place imaginable for having a "jolly"...

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    Depends on how many days you can spend in e.g. Jakarta or Manila waiting for a connecting flight. There are other tasteless jokes one might make about life aboard an oil ship but I'll just dereference the Village People here and leave it at that.

    This reminds me a bit of a problem we had back in around 2008. We needed accurate to-the-second clock ticking in the client browser. The time of day didn't need to be perfect (thank goodness), but the ticking hands of the analog clock needed to tick smoothly and evenly. Naturally a rather CPU-intensive busy-loop was the only practical answer in Javascript. Even on a 2008 era PC running XP & IE this wasn't too taxing given how few other apps the user would be actively using while looking at the browser.

    Until we discovered, after deployment, that the client had a lot of users running under low-bandwidth conditions and their, IT department's solution was to have all those users running an RDC to a Terminal Server back at regional HQ. The fact they had users running browsers via Terminal Server was nowhere in the requirements or specs. We had done lots of architecting for low bandwidth users; that part was well-specified. But we thought the browser was at the far end of the low bandwidth connection. Which of course moved more processing to the client with rather less data going back and forth. Nope. Oops.

    Once they had a few dozen users running we brought their Terminal Servers to their knees. The stupid ticking clock was one of the main offenders. Fortunately that was fixable fairly quickly and the customer PHB who had insisted the clock tick perfectly "to raise user confidence in our solution" was overridden.

    Moral of that story: Never design a system without understanding, or specifying, the complete deployment environment in painful detail. Even the wacky "Who'd ever think to do that??1?" part. And remember: your customer's IT department are a bunch of lying scurvy pirates. But incompetent ones. Sadly, you and yours are no better.

  • M9dnar (unregistered)

    Referring to "the port server" on a boat risks them having that computer on the starboard side....

  • (nodebb)

    Ah, threads - they changed computing forever!

  • markm (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    Adhesive tape was part of the solution - black tape to cover the blinkenlights on the server.

    This is how I prove I'm an electrical engineer: no duct tape, just black electrical tape.

  • (nodebb)

    I wonder how he shipped the hotfix :-)

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to MaxiTB

    You boot on a boat. I say: boot on a boat. Boot on a boat. Any appearing U-Boot (submarine) may lead to a reboot of the boat. That concludes today's singing lesson.

  • trainbrain27 (unregistered)

    My computer was annoyingly bright when I got it, but I applied electrical tape and am delighted with the result!

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    Anyone hear of DTR/DSR [you don't need to send a character ad see if there is a response]

  • (nodebb) in reply to trainbrain27

    I see what you did there

  • emmavaria (unregistered) in reply to M9dnar
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Old Timer (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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