You may be wondering where many of the stories and comments that were posted yesterday went. Well, it seems that we were attacked by the Transformers you see in the video above. Our sys admin, Marc, claimes it’s related to an upgrade to the SQL database that is causing him fits, but we think he’s covering up his lack of foresight to enclose our servers in Transformers-hardened cases. He claims we will be back up and running smoothly more or less soon-ish, but we think it won’t be until John hires Master Chief (the ass kicker from Halo) to protect us from the Transformers. Whatever.
In short, Marc fucked up.
Marc, all the best buddy and I hope you get it going soon.
Don’t ya just hate those self righteous assholes as evidenced in #1.
Oh the humanity. You realize that the secrets of the Universe was revealed in yesterdays posts. You have condemned the human race to ignorance and oblivion.
MySql… serves you right. Why do you guys go through so much trouble NOT to use MS SQL?
Ahhhhh… back in the days of paper tape and Nixie tubes, we would sometimes do ridiculous, useless things – like, when any serious changes were to be made to a live production system, the new version would be run in parallel with the live system, but offline to users – and when it blew up – offline to the users – system availability and data integrity were unaffected, allowing us plenty of time to figure out what was wrong with the upgrade – then, when it finally appeared that the new was as stable as the old, swapping users over to the new system, while keeping the old going as backup.
It would appear that it’s OK these days to just blindly apply sw revisions to live production systems, since nothing can go wrong, eh? That way, no valuable time is squandered ensuring it won’t send the sole existing copy of users’ data to the Great Bitbucket In The Sky.
Besides, redundancy is too costly to implement, what with the incredibly high prices of hard disks these days…
I seem to faintly recall once having read some nonsense somewhere about prophylactic measures being significantly preferable to repair and recovery. Something about ‘ounce of prevention = pound of cure’ – probably completely irrelevant, no doubt.
[\mordant sarcasm]
BTW, that last is to be read more as gentle chiding than snarkiness…
If there’s some legitimate reason for not running a test system in parallel, I’d be interested in hearing it.
#2 – re-fucking-lax, I’m just fucking with Marc. Nothing personal.
Here I thought this must have been my fault. I cursed God and dared him to strike your server with lightning (or very strong static). It was really just a trial run before I dared him to strike something belonging to me 😉
Speaking of transformers, did anybody else notice the “Transformers” logo appearing at random moments during the baseball playoffs on TBS and FOX this week? Almost subliminal, which I thought we outlawed years ago, or was that only at the movies? Doubt anybody reading this is old enough to remember that furor, anyway.
Okay, continue with your Linux dissing.
Witness the effects of Global Warming on Cyberspace.
#9 Airman Basic, I do remember that furor over subliminal advertising, and I even happen to know one of the people who is partly responsible for bringing it to the public’s attention. Dr. Wilson Bryan Key, author of the fairly popular book Subliminal Seduction from the early 70’s, happens to live across town from me (at least he did about a year ago).
I’ve also seen his work debunked in what seemed to be a fairly credible manner, but without studying the issues closer, I’ve reserved any final judgment. At most, I think there’s significantly less to it than what he claimed, but there is probably at least a minimal level of efficacy in some of those subliminal methods. However, even that minimal effect spread across millions of people could result in major success. All an advertiser sometimes needs is a tiny sliver of an edge.
Mind control of any kind has always been a Holy Grail of sorts, and even our own government has not been above testing drugs on unwitting subjects for mind control purposes, as anyone familiar with the Church hearings (named after Sen. Frank Church) from the mid 70’s knows. The CIA’s MK-ULTRA project turned out to be a major embarrassment for our government, and showed that a large budget plus highest secrecy often equals a moral vacuum.
That’s what the staff at PC Magazine wears during casual Fridays.
Now I know you’re not only a hack, but a dumb ass: Everyone knows Optimus Prime > Master Chief.