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Search - "never change a running system"
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I used to work in a role that was basically tech support for engineers. Folks would call, we'd look at their code and see where things were going wrong.
One customer calls in, they're having timing problems with a satellite control system.
I dig down through their code, and buried in one of the modules is a comment to the effect of:
"Once we upgrade to Windows 98, we'll need to change this call to the precision counter"
They never did.
This system was running XP.
Somehow, they'd avoided destroying satellites despite having the code run on Win98, and ME without fixing that call. It wasn't until they upgraded to a multi core system and XP that their gyros stopped responding correctly.
Holy shit.9 -
Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.
Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".
Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.
They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.
Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...
Now....
I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...
Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.
It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....
Never change a fucking running system....
Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 87 -
sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.1 -
Context: We have a 96-port wall-mount patch panel. We're not even using half of those ports. "We" (read: "I") are completely redoing our network rack, as it's an ancient nest of wires. Currently all the ports in use on the patch panel just have random-length cables which are just drooped down beside the rack before running to switches. When I need to trace a cable from patch panel to switch, it's a complete nightmare. However, the cables going to the patch panel do have enough of extra length to do a rack-mount patch panel. I suggest this...
MGR: "Ehhh... I don't really like the idea of tying the rack to the wall... What if we want to move it or something?"
(this rack is in a tiny room and has been there since probably the 1800's.)
ME: "Well the problem currently is that it's all but impossible to trace cables. And even if I rewire it and bundle them nicely, it will still be a headache. With a rack-mount panel, we could just have super short patch cables and so it's super easy when I need to move stuff around."
MGR: "Okkkk..... So what if we would purchase like 3 or 4 switches to get 96 ports, then we run a cable to every patch panel port. That way we never need to change anything :)))."
Dude. Great idea. Let's drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on switches we don't need, rather than just doing a single patch panel. Brilliant. Also another great idea that, running thirty or forty unnecessary cables that we aren't even using. That won't clutter up the rack or use up valuable space or get confusing which ports on the switches are/aren't in use.
I'm trying so hard not to scream right now. I can't deal with this.
EDIT: It gets worse. Apparently part of the reason he wants to do this is "to make it simple". Currently we have our POS system running to its own switch, the printers are on another switch, etc. (yes I know some of this could be accomplished with a VLAN, this was set up before my time). But apparently "if we just had every single port wired then we could plug in whatever we want wherever we want and it wouldn't matter." I just... That's... That's not how you do a network.1 -
I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.
Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'? -
SOAP UI changed their icon in the latest update,
Still don't get the need of that
and i still remember the icon change of VS Code which was reverted shortly after1