Re: I like the idea of Schroedinger's hosting
Just a gypsy curse init!
You know what it's like. The Boss asks you some technical question, you give him a non-technical answer and he suddenly thinks you're lying to him – or worse – that you don't know what you're talking about. He needs it explained to him in a manner that sounds technical, but isn't too technical for him to stack overflow. ON A …
I had to talk someone out of taking down a server to move it to a different UPS. A server that had been running with at least a year of uptime and no maintenance.
They were worried the UPS would die and take the server down over the weekend, and I had to explain the futility of doing something like this on a Friday, when assuredly it would fail to come back up, wreck their whole evening, Saturday and Sunday too, and not get fixed until Monday anyway, just like if it were to die of natural causes over the weekend. I had to explain how the universe does not reward cocky behavior such as this except with misery and failure. Finally I managed to talk them out of it.
"the futility of doing something like this on a Friday"
This is actually OK. You just have to budget for spending your entire weekend fixing it. Providing you do that either (a) everything will work just fine or (b) you'll still not have everything fixed by 27:00 hours on Sunday evening. This is the consequence of the uncertainty principle running into time dilation.
How much shorter would this article have been if the boss' question:
"So how secure is it?"
HAD JUST BEEN FUCKING ANSWERED PROPERLY STRAIGHT OFF THE BAT.
Ha-ha and all - very funny - but this is exactly the smartarse, "you're not in on the joke" bullshit that so many techies are hated for. And rightly so.
Yup, looks like something landed close to home.
I hope the article was instructional.
The next question would be "How pointy is your hair, then?"
(Plus, if the answer had been straight, the boss would just have said "I don't believe you because my nephew says it's very secure and he's in third grade!" and this would just have resulted in an accident in the server room a bit later.)
...into an all nighter upgrading multiple SQL servers. My patience is already wearing thin and this has just bought the next person to phone and ask "when's the system going to be back up?" or "Is there a problem with the server?" or "is the new database hard drive downloaded yet?" an extra 30 seconds of life.
(yes, all legitimate questions from people today)
So, from them and me, thank you Simon :)