And that is called...
...outsourcing your problem resolution!
BOFH logo – telephone with devil's horns It's late on Friday afternoon and I’m having a couple of quiet beers with one of the local salesdroids. Ordinarily the only reason I’d do this is that (a) they’re paying and (b) there’s a tube station relatively near that has extremely poor CCTV coverage. It usually starts with me …
Fifteen minutes duration sounds like a solution of a plastic in isopropyl alcohol, very likely liberated from surplus stores of tape head cleaner. I think I detect a certain amount of experimentation in the correct type of plastic solute to use to achieve the correct amount of slipperiness; after all practice does make perfect in these circumstances.
We like to have fun with the guys in forensics so we use whale sperm to grease things. It's rather slick when wet, tacky when starting to dry, & may cause projectile vomiting when the tech realizes what they've got filling that evidence bag. I'll leave it up to your imagination how we collect the stuff in the first place...
I knew a company which appeared to work like that. They sold their idea to the top of the food chain but we knew they only sold non-slippery snake oil. They are strangely out of business now, something about a bankruptcy the press said. Oddly enough the top of the food chain did almost the same to our company.
"bringing people their just deserts"
As I once said to a mouthy kid who asked me who I was:
"Oh, me ? I'm just a BAD thing that happens to BAD people"
Strangely enough, he decided not to pursue that line of questioning any further. Funny, that. Not sure if it was the Stare or the deadpan delivery that shut him up.
"I think Simon sees himself more as Lucifer Morningstar (like the TV series), bringing people their just deserts, in which case heaven is most certainly where the stairway does not lead."
Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on....
though I was expecting a little more along the lines of "we're about to get medieval on your rack..."
You know the sort of thing... 4 post, binding to the lifting eyelets at the top and the floor-beam locating pins at the bottom, sealed cabinetry, acoustic baffling, some ancient GPU loaded rack mounted PC with quad FX 9590 processors and a slew of GTX480s at the bottom running audio recognition tasks on the feed from an in-rack audio pickup - the louder you scream the harder they work, a Redetec top-of-rack FPS for good measure. All plugged into either the demo PDU or the shipped PDU; are you feeling lucky, punk? Well, are you?
A little off the subject, but some years ago colleague of mine was imaging 6 or so Precision workstations simultaneously on the same circuit, actually even plugged into the same power strip. These workstations have 1300W power supplies, though they're obviously not using a lot of horsepower when an image is being applied. Still, with dual Xeons and hefty video cards, they draw a lot at all times.
The power strip was an old one that had apparently seen some shop floor use, as it was battered and filthy. It also lacked a circuit breaker. I noticed what he was doing, saw that the imaging job on all (Ghost) was over 90% complete, then touched the power strip, which was alarmingly warm. I opened my mouth to say something and the room's breaker (20A) tripped audibly, ending the imaging job, to my colleague's chagrin, and expressing the thought that was on my mind more eloquently than I could have done with mere speech.
"The name Stephen has been bandied around in a few previous episodes, but as far as I can recall, this has been the first hint of his surname starting with P."
And considering how long Stephen has been the PFY, I suspect he must have been still wearing nappies when he started or the Y part is no longer accurate. He's been around for at least 10 years.
The second description could also describe some of the reps I've had to deal with over the years.
One such rep annoyed me (and two layers of management above me) so badly, that when he saw me at InfoSecurity Europe, he hid in the toilets for nearly two hours.
Two hours in the bogs at Olympia, during a busy event, on a warm spring day. I'm trying to work out if that's dedication or desperation.
I had one that tried to sell me all sorts of tat, but never succeeded because I could see it was all tat.
That never stopped him trying, and soon as I left that gig, someone made the mistake of buying something off him.
Yes, it was complete tat, and that was the very last time they ever dealt with him.
Pretty sure the BOFH mobile has already been a thing in the past.
Also, Crazy Dave is in no way a SFH (Salesdroid From Hell). He's wayy too bad at handling his booze for that. If he was a true Bastard, he'd be trying to drink Simon under the table, manipulate him into buying their magnificent PDU's that are rated for 20 amps but can actually go up to 30 then use the signature on the form to order enough kit to outfit the entire NHS three times a year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile his underling would be trying to use the PUBG humiliation to his advantage and blackmail the PFY into giving up even more of the (already long gone) company budget.
The BOFH and PFY would wake up in the middle of a giant warehouse full of the most craptastic and outdated kit this side of the galaxy, only finding a sales order taped to the door with enough fine print to make it a lawyers wet dream and pretty much inescapable. THEN they'd find they were 3 cities over at the back of some long abandoned industrial estate, their house keys are gone, as are their cars, wallets, shoes and phones. The closing comment of the story would be: "Of course you know this means war!"
BOFH junior in the PFY
I'm pretty sure Stephan's pushing 30 by now. Maybe 35. I'm pretty sure he's neither a youth nor a junior at this point. Honestly he should really be contemplating his own unbreakable contract as a senior systems engineer at this point. And he probably would be if he weren't still paying penance for trying and failing to off Simon a while back.
>I'm pretty sure Stephan's pushing 30 by now. Maybe 35.
I think he must be at least 40, given he first appears in early 1996 when Simon was still working at the university:
http://bofharchive.com/1996/bastard96-03.html
(Was 'Stephen' still a common name for newborn boys in NZ after 1980? I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the US...)
Oh, cheers! I have now been and read about Chekov's gun.
I was reading it thinking "Chekov's Law of foreshadowing in drama and acting??? Do they mean this? But Chekov doesn't even so much as exchange a glance with Sulu during that bit... How can that foreshadow what happened to him?"
Oh, quiet beers sound absolutely lovely. Mine are always so freakin' loud, and they just will NOT shut up! "You're a failure!" "You'll never amount to anything!" "You paid $100,000 for a degree you'll never use!" SHUT UP BEERS! I could get a boyfriend, if I wanted that kind of helpful input.
“The one RICK showed you had the guts replaced – no breakers, copper contacts,” Dave insists.“He said we could trial one?” I ask, recalling a section of his presentation.
For Quantum Communications? In the New Way of Doing IntelAIgent Business Machinery is One Trial AIMaster Piloting.
PerArduaadAstra@UrService for MOD Special Operations
cc The Rt Hon Gavin Williamson CBE MP
Our rep from a Huge Peripherals and Equipment supplier liked doing final closures on the phone (That's the bit where they pile on the very expensive extra stuff onto a basic proposal that you had already discussed with them in previous meetings, and send you a "final contract" to approve). His technique was to go silent on a sticking point - The theory was that you (the punter) would fill the silence by agreeing the extras. It took me a couple of calls before I realised what he was doing, so I started doing the silent treatment back to him. My best call was after about 30 seconds of silence when his nerve cracked and I heard "Hello, Hello!, HELLO!!". I apologized and said. "Sorry, I had to cover the mouthpiece - My colleague wondered if I could take an urgent call on the other line from Some Unbelievably Nice supplier, as he thought I was on hold". After that his phone calls were just to arrange meetings, or "courtesy calls" to check that the kit had been delivered and installed.
Re. hot....servers
Thermostat calls for heat, applies power (or signal) to Server Farm / Heater. It immediately goes online (Ethernet cable, or WiFi) to auction its computational horsepower. At the same time it folds proteins and searches for alien signals for charity (because: Must. Make. Heat.). Etc. Obvious.
If this concept is implemented, then CPU cycles will be nearly free in winter. Or shared cost with heat.
Seems daft not to implement it. There's only about an order of magnitude price gap between a 1kw heater and 1kw worth of CPUs.
Hi, AC, you must be new here.
The Bastard Operator from Hell is a litany of stories of El Reg's time on the LHC to look into an alternate universe. The Bastard's universe is much like ours, but ever-so-slightly more sociopathic, where all forms of law enforcement and regulatory agencies are just, generally, somewhat more inept than here.
In that universe, you very often have to take matters into your own hands, and murder is a not-infrequent way for the BOfH and his assistant to keep things running.