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Programmers Hold Funerals for Old Code
MacBrave writes "The AP has an interesting story about how the programming staff at an Ohio company are holding funerals for retired or 'killed' programs. I dunno, this sounds a little TOO geeky for my tastes......."
The graveyard has been part of LexisNexis for a very long time.. I've been employed there for 9 1/2 years now. Its really kind of cool to see.
There was a casket on the stage at WWDC a few years ago, with Mac OS 9 in it..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
First thing that came to my head was I wonder how they put to rest MS Bob, and I googled for it and thought this was kinda funny and relevant.
...
"During his short, unhappy life, Bob was ridiculed, ignored and finally abandoned.
Sure, he was only a computer program, but still: Let us now pause a moment to pay our respects to Microsoft Bob.
RIP: Bob, 1995-96"
source: Bob is dead; long live Bob
This is so embarassing to the rest of us that work there. I've been writing software at LN for almost a decade and have NEVER heard of this. Where did the AP dig this crap up? One little group out of several thousand programmer employees decides to be incredibly stupid, and the rest of us have to wear "Complete Retard" stamped on our foreheads. I only hope this can be lived down before I have to look for another job. Christ, I'm going to find these people's cubes and bury THEM. "Blocker Hill", indeed. Shoot me now.
And to those jackass apologists here (jsav40, Dancin _Santa, ewe2) who say "it's not TOO geeky or bizarre", fuck you. You don't work there.
Doesn't your version cause a single beep and a continuous printout?
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Actually, it depends on whether you have devfs and on mv's implementation. If you have devfs, then mv becomes copy and unlink, because rename doesn't work between filesystems. So, if you use devfs and mv is implemented to truncate, but not delete, destinations before overwriting them, then it would work. Though it would be quicker to just delete or shred the file.
I was recently in FOSS Oklahoma. I found their cemetery. Apparently they bury, not creamate. :-)
. htm
If anyone is willing to mirror, my pictures (including the aforementioned FOSS CEMETERY) can be found under
http://www.connelm.homelinux.com/foss/foss
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
I actually did this once. Our school's CS cluster was maintained partly by students, one of whom was me. I was, of course, very inexperienced in actual Unix administration, though I had read Slashdot, Usenet, etc., quite a bit. There was a directory in someone's home directory that no one could delete, even as root (probably due to some bizarre NFS issue, never figured it out). I had heard the phrase "send flames to /dev/null" and others in that vein. Plus I knew... er, "knew"... that /dev/null would always delete what you sent to it. Putting 1 and 1 together to make 3, I typed sudo mv undeletable_dir /dev/null.
/dev/null to the actual device in /devices/pseudo/ (this is a Solaris system). Crisis averted.
In the terminal room, there was suddenly a cacophany of beeping. The phone started ringing. This was bad. And no one knew how to fix it.
Someone suggested rebooting the machine. Of course, the machine promptly refused to boot. Much panic was in abundance, the phrase "complete restore from backup" was ominously spoken. Finally, someone with a Clue (TM) showed up and pointed out that we only needed to remake the symlink from
Moral? Several. man(4) null. Don't do things as root if you aren't sure what will happen. When you fsck shit up, try to find someone who actually knows what they're doing, and get them to fix it. And, above all, don't believe what you read on the Internet.