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SuperbNet was by no means a bad ISP. Opening during the 90’s, they offered a nice alternative to the 15 hours of "free" disks that arrived in the mailboxes of local residents. Their prices were competitive and service was very reliable. That is until one day, out of the blue, Jonathan’s Linux box would not connect to the Internet.
After firing up a terminal session, some troubleshooting revealed the culprit.
The asset management application used Alex R.'s company isn't exactly bad, but sometimes it can be a little bit of a pain.
For example, some time ago, some deveoper implemented a feature that would check if the mainframe was up and running. This was done by simply querying a column in some database table. But shortly thereafter, users noticed that there was a brief pause after entering their password. Nothing earth shattering, it was just annoying.
It was nearly impossible to find an available and fully-functioning PC in the large campus labs at West Thomson-Friedman University. It's not like the student lab administrators were lazy. Oh no, in fact the clueless-users-who-were-far-too-dangerous-for-their-own-good and the malicious-users-who-were-far-too-bored-for-their-own-good made the student admins really earn their minimum wage.
This dog's breakfast was tough to swallow for any serious users of the labs, and even more so for the poor CompSci students who just wanted to test their programming assignment before it was due. So in response to their students' pleas, the powers-that-be set up special labs in the CompSci building. These machines were configured with more RAM, more hard drive space, and bigger monitors than their utilitarian counterparts in the large labs. Since the computers had special software installed just for the CompSci students, getting access to the labs was controlled by a key card. If a CompSci student needed a card, all he needed to do was go down to the dungeon basement in the main admin buildings and pay a $10 deposit to get a card.
Ages ago, one of the business units at the corporation that Rick P. works at contracted a 3rd party vendor (in truth it was some guy in the UK) to write an inventory management system. It was written in VB6 and talked to an Access database in the back end and it worked.
Skip ahead to recently when an edict has come down from the powers-that-be declared that any VB6 apps should be brought up to date in VB.NET. The 3rd party dev was happy to make the updates and rollout the now conforming application. Unfortunately, the availability and quality of support had gone downhill as of late and in order to save on costs, the application's source code was recalled to be maintained in-house.
Michael L. felt the buzz of his phone go off. He ignored it.
Seconds later, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
It was his first job, so Kenneth couldn't really complain. His official title was Senior System Administrator and, in his role, he was responsible for such glamorous things like setting up new desktops and cleaning spyware off the administrative assistant's PC. The people were nice, they appreciated the work he did, and the commute was fine. But whenever payday would come around, he'd be reminded that he was doing entry-level work for entry-level pay, all with a big-boy title. Not too long after he started, it was time for a change.
When Kenneth tendered his resignation, his boss was legitimately happy for him and glad that he was moving up in his career. As a parting tasked, he asked Kenneth to train John, the soon-to-be Senior System Administrator, on all of their systems. As it turned out, it was John's first job, too.
Sep 09