BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident
- Reference: 1765537215
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/12/bofh_2025_episode_23/
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He'll think nothing of back-to-backing meetings with vendors, the Head Beancounter, then the vendors again, the Head Beancounter again, a business analyst for the Beancounters, then the business analyst, the Head Beancounter, and the vendor, all in the space of a couple of days – and for no other reason than him wanting to know how much it would cost to implement some idea that he had in a fever dream.
And he wants to rope us into the meeting.
[1]
Half the time the ideas aren't about anything tangible, they're just fishing expeditions about what a vendor might be supplying for a non-existent problem – and they have racks of that sort of crap that's been gathering dust for the past five years in some distant warehouse.
[2]
[3]
I've managed to dodge several meetings by manufacturing crises – but there's only so many times I can get the PFY to reboot a distribution switch in full-diagnostic mode before someone starts noticing the coincidence.
"I'm not sure I'd have much to bring to the table on that one," I blather, when the Boss suggests I might be available to meet with a company whose stated purpose is to lighten the load of administration, but whose actual goal is to lighten the wallet of administration.
[4]
...
"I've been thinking," I say to the PFY, in the relative asylum of Mission Control, "that I'm becoming one of those crusty old farts I knew when I was starting out in computing. The ones who thought that Ethernet would never take off and that 9,600 baud was high speed. I remember them talking about how punch cards were the only safe long-term storage – of course, that was before the silverfish scourge of '84. Those guys held that no one would need more than 128k and that if you weren't entering machine code directly into memory via a hex keypad then you were a lightweight... And they made their own power supplies back then – huge metal boxes with a massive transformer that had about a hundred secondary taps and took up half the case."
"I..." the PFY says, looking concerned.
[5]
"And the cases all had fat, chassis-mounted diodes and smoothing capacitors that filled up most of the rest of the case. And they'd always output oddball voltages, like 27.3 volts – at 87 amps. No one knew why. And the cases had gaping ventilation holes in the sides – large enough to kill mice on the uninsulated mains bus that ran lengthwise down the inside of the case. Life was both simpler and cheaper back then..."
"Uh..." the PFY says, not wanting to interrupt my mental breakdown.
"It's like I've become one of them," I admit. "And being one of them, I don't want a meeting with a vendor who's just trying to take our money."
"Well, yes, but that's always been the ca-"
"I used to like technology," I sigh. "You'd get a call from a vendor, and they'd have something interesting to show you. I mean obviously the cost was about the same as a 'campaign donation' to a South American dictator, but we did get to see the hardware, and it did what it said on the tin."
"Maybe these guys actually can provide whatever it is that the Boss wants?" the PFY suggests soothingly.
"He doesn't even know what he wants."
"It can't hurt to listen..." the PFY says.
Half an hour later, a solution has been agreed upon. Everyone's happy. They sell us some hardware that will do a job that the Boss was unable to explain, we give them about a quarter of our annual budget. Everyone agrees that because the idea, whatever it is, is so novel, we'll probably have to thrash out the deliverables and milestones as we go. When the time comes – if it's needed – they'll supply a project manager for a reasonable sum. They even brought a document with them that the Boss and Head Beancounter couldn't wait to sign.
[6]BOFH : Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management
[7]BOFH : You know something's up when the suits want to spend money
[8]BOFH : Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time
[9]BOFH : Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch
Sigh.
"So how much room do you have to install our hardware?" the vendor's head negotiator asks.
"We have quite a bit of rack space," I say, leading him through Mission Control to the Server room.
...
"There's not a lot of room in that rack," he observes. "It's full of ancient hardware."
"Oh, that was in the rack when I started," I say, "It's just sitting on rails, we could pull it out. You grab that end and I'll just push it towards you."
...
"It's not budging."
"Did you push up the release arm inside the handles?"
"The handles? I thought they were ventilation holes?"
"Nah, they're handles. If you reach up with your fingers, you should just be able to reach.... >KZERT!<... the bus bar."
...
"There's been a terrible accident," I say to the Boss, as I feed a document into his deskside shredder...
[10]BOFH: Previous episodes on The Register
[11]The Compleat BOFH Archives 95-99
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/28/bofh_2025_episode_22/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/14/bofh_2025_episode_21/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/24/bofh_2025_episode_20/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/bofh_2025_episode_19/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/data_centre/bofh/
[11] http://www.bofharchive.com/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
If not entirely unsurprising
It was a bit surprising. I was expecting a nasty accident with a heavy but unstable rack.
I was wondering how manipulating the rack would lead to another defenestration.
I guess electricity is yet another weapon in the BOFH's arsenal.
Been there for a while, which is why you always check for cattle prods…
That may be waiting for when the bods from Health and Safety come to inspect…
Yup, an ancient 27.3V E-core transformer PSU could really hurt if it would fall on your head.
I thought it lit up things nicely. A toast to that negotiator!
The BOFH always was a bright spark.
He has flashes of brilliance...
I love the smell of burnt collagen in the morning
Good way to start a weekend with a scorchingly good BOFH episode
650k is enough
for everyone , was a quote famously attributed to Bill Gates , still not sure if its tru or not.
so what the current thinking on what is enough memory?
Personally I think its what we've got now , and if you need more unbloat that software .
Re: 650k is enough
The BOFH would make that "640kV is enough"
Re: 650k is enough
"2kV is enough. 640kV is 'sufficient'" maybe? ;)
Re: 650k is enough
640kV is certainty. Overkill is always advisable when seeking a more permanent solution :).
Re: 650k is enough
All it leaves behind is a carbon footprint.
Re: 650k is enough
For Giga sparks (*) you need a couple of Mega Volts at a couple of Mega Hertz modulated with the death tune announcing the march to the Pub.
(*) AKA a tesla coil; may not play well with --> icon, unless intentional
Re: 650k is enough
"2kV is enough. 640kV is 'sufficient'" maybe?
Sales droids have an incredibly thick hide that would not disgrace a pachyderm.
Wouldn't surprise me a direct hit from a lightning bolt left them bare singed.
A 650kV 1000A for half an hour through one might do the job although at the price of electricity 325MWh is probably not very cost effective certainly when compared with the open window alternative.
Re: 650k is enough
Yes, gravity will most certainly be cheaper.
Just not sure which one is more satisfying, though :)
Re: 650k is enough
Well given you used to be able to run a perfectly good word processor in 16k program memory and around 24k RAM with an 8-bit CPU at 1 MHz, I should bloody well hope the current build standards are good enough. MS Word is now 1 GB. Windows seems to need > 8 GB RAM and fibre broadband just to run Windows Updates without killing your whole UI. Bloated? Absolutely. Do today’s systems have way more processing power than the Apollo missions? Of course, but I wouldn’t let Windows anywhere near a moon mission.
Re: 650k is enough
640 kB, and it was from Billy. But you never got that much to play with on MS-DOS anyway…and even then you were still dealing with 8086 memory management, actually I think it's even older…
Still, when more memory became available, OS/2 would happily give you DOS sessions that had more than 640 kB. Which was nice, but it also removed one of the main reasons to port applications to OS/2.
Re: 650k is enough
Other interesting quotes that fell flat:
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
— Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
Talk about flash·backs…
" they made their own power supplies back then – huge metal boxes with a massive transformer that had about a hundred secondary taps and took up half the case. " … A lot of things needed —12V back then and shunt regulators waste perfectly good electrons. Laminated steel core transformers; none of this effete woke switch mode nonsense. ;)
" the cases all had fat, chassis-mounted diodes and smoothing capacitors that filled up most of the rest of the case. And they'd always output oddball voltages, like 27.3 volts – at 87 amps. "
In retrospect seem hardly credible in the age of cloudy oversell and misrepresentation that then " we did get to see the hardware, and it did what it said on the tin " even if it required a new utility substation, removing an exterior wall and hiring a forklift.
" the uninsulated mains bus that ran lengthwise down the inside of the case. Life was both simpler and cheaper back then... "— and occasionally shorter.
Re: Talk about flash·backs…
Oh my. Yes the stories about whole buildings being built around a monster computer in the basement which could never be removed without demolishing said building.
Re: Talk about flash·backs…
Twist lock connectors at the base of the rack/cabinet.
Bus bars hanging from threaded rods through the ceiling tiles
Drum printers staring up in the morning sonding like jet engines warming up
Motor/generators in the basement (for the 400 Hz power)
"These are a few of my favourite things..."
Re: Talk about flash·backs…
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyеlashes
Silver white wintеrs that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things...
Re: Talk about flash·backs…
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Pouty mouthed girls who can beat their eyelashes
Girls who can walk with a wiggle and swing
Are high on the list of my favourite things
I'm becoming one of those crusty old farts I knew when I was starting out in computing. The ones who thought that Ethernet would never take off and that 9,600 baud was high speed...
I'm becoming one of those, too. And I know why. Partially, because I'm getting old. And partially because of stuff like this: [1]The Truth About AI .
[1] https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/11/the-truth-about-ai/
Oh, thank you SO much for that link!
Sometimes powers users need to be introduced to real power in the form of V x I.
Ahh yes, the well-known BOFHette: IV Watts
Nice foreshadowing
In this case, the shadow being cast against the server room wall by flickering blue arclight. Can I smell grilled pork?
Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.
The trick is being selective about your crusty old fartism.
Virtualisation[1], emulation, flash storage, graphical remote access that works without hassle, Unicode[2], broadband, FPGAs, VR, and cheap powerful embedded SOCs - all fantastic
Mobiles. Gosh, lots of things going on there. Such a mess too, but an improvement over what we had before. Probably.
'AI'/LLMs - probably useful, come back when the world changing hype has died down and it's truly optional in products, yeah?
Containers and fifteen thousand unaudited random dependency components written in Javascript or Python pulled down randomly from the Internet each time. Ummm, I can see it's useful for rapid prototyping, but *so many* potential integration, backup, and security issues.
Mandatory cloud based subscription services on over complicated architecture when self hosting is eminently possible : go away
[1] yeah, yeah, I know for Proper Old Farts who were running IBM VM back in the 70s or Big Iron after that it's not new, and I used V86 mode under OS/2 in the 90s for DOS boxes etc, but really it was the 00s before VT-x made it all usable.
[2] If only more products supported it. It's embarrassing when modern products don't support a well designed *thirty year old* standard
Re: Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.
I sometimes feel my career has just been going in circles...
I started on VAX, Unix and AS/400 systems with centralised computing
Everything moved to PCs
Thin clients, Citrix and Parallels came along with the heavy lifting done by servers
Better comms speeds pushed processing back to the PC
The cloud and SAAS arrived so back to centralisation
Now AI is slowly moving to more running locally.
Strangely I still think ERP and the like were easier and faster to use on character terminals if you knew what you were doing, the flow on many web UIs is dreadful - does that make me a crusty old fart? If so I'll accept the accolade!
I'm glad I've only got a few more years to go before it all becomes SEP (Somebody Else's Problem, with thanks to Douglas Adams).
Re: Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.
There's definitely cycles.
As to character terminals vs a GUI or web. I don't think character terminals are inherently easier and faster, assuming the GUI is a decent one it's perfectly fast enough to handle everything the character terminal did and more. The problem as you indicate is that non character based systems are often poorly designed to be driven entirely by a keyboard, and any use of a mouse whatsoever fundamentally requires moving your hand (although I note there's a Kickstarter going at the moment which uses a Bluetooth ring on your finger called Prolo to perform mouse actions or similar).
Even a web browser can be very fast to use as long as the site isn't overburdened with complexity, but far too often it is.
I note that Windows' CUA heritage is falling apart too. Windows still supports shift insert, ctrl insert, and shift delete from CUA in addition to the horrid Wordstar oriented X, C, or V, but the Windows designers have forgotten when introducing paste without formatting as Ctrl Shift V, that they should *also* have logically included Ctrl Shift Insert, but it does nothing in Word for instance.
Re: Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.
" ERP and the like were easier and faster to use on character terminals if you knew what you were doing"
Definitely.
Ugghhhh pointless meetings....
My worse was a 5 day (yes DAY) "Technical" meeting, of which about 30 minutes was actually technical, which pretty much consisted of , yeah easy. The rest was just dozens of managers talking utter bollocks. Got so bad, that some of us techies (vendor's ones were just as bored) decided Eve Online was a great way to pass the time. Bullshit bingo ran out on day 1, so we had to find something didn't we?
All very nice but I do prefer the calming influence that can be achieved through the careful application of a deep understanding of Feng Shui.
For instance, consider a calm, carefully sculpted sand beach, sloping gently down to tranquil waters of a beautiful lake, dropped into the landscape like a gently shimmering mirror.
All that is, of course, there simply to frame and act as backdrop to the vendor agents legs , carefully positioned according to the rules of Feng Shui, just protruding from the water, with the rest of him head down in the ooze at the bottom.
So restful, so calming.
I can't help but wonder how long this New Boss is going to last before he goes to that big meeting from which there is no return.
Maybe he'll Zoom from a window
The end was shocking!