Discussion
Old platemaking machine has an early pentium box on 😜 SP2, and monitor died. Ultra widescreen and stretched 1024x768 with pixels like fettucine.
Yet it keeps working.
Despite every IT dork coming in going "Oh this needs SP3" and fucking the entire device.
*I pull out cloned drive and sigh again*
IT people should not be allowed to touch production machines.
Controller PC + custom cards + $250,000 device are ONE UNIT.
Controller PCs are NOT FUNGIBLE.
@NanoRaptor
I feel like there needs to be a background image on the device showing text with "number of IT 'Professionals' that have attempted to upgrade this Tool to SP3 and broken it"
With a line of silhouettes for the times its has happened...
And then number of hours wasted too...
@thomasdorr Oh I *like* that so very very much.
@NanoRaptor Q: "Why are we using this crusty old thing with a floppy drive?" A: "Because it's a production line machine that allows us to pay your salary, and it would cost five million dollars to replace."
@NF6X yes yes yes!
Cheap mass market PCs are wonderful for straight down the line common usage. Browsing or office or photoshop or chat and video and so on.
Go outside that and the costs are frickin exponential.
@NanoRaptor seen that with harddisk production lines but honestly, what's the long term plan for this? i'm no stranger of reusing LTO tapes and tape libraries till the point you are replacing some parts with parts of previous broken down machines.
what's the strategy when a 250k part ends up killing a 100mil/day production line? (this was what happened in my case)
@pH_0x05 we have spare PCs and a spare controller card and spare cloned drives - and half a cannibalised spare main laser unit.
And an entire more modern system that’s 400kg instead of the 2 tonnes of the existing one ready to swap in the next time we do some major machine movement, probably mid next year.
@NanoRaptor
Is it networked and does it handle sensitive data?
If the answer to both is no, it does not matter. Appliances are appliances.
Wish people would understand this better, as well.
@MissAemilia Ha! It was almost certainly here and running when you were, too!.
Nothing sensitive. Networking is to a marginally newer Win2003 machine which is middling locked down and sits in a cupboard waiting for TIFFs in a hotfolder on a modern Mac
@NanoRaptor
Yeah then who gives a fuck. There's no risk here.
Fix that display situation though, that's shockin'.
@MissAemilia co worker who runs it goes “oh. I don’t notice that” so I figure he’s as much a part of the tool as the pc/card/laser unit and can be replaced when he wears out too ;)
@NanoRaptor the gas chromatograph at $JOB-4 had a Win95 PC literally inside the case of the unit and we were told under pain of death we were never ever to touch it ...
@NanoRaptor ... this was the same job that had me hunting up unopened copies of Win98 media (circa 2007) that they could ship with their inflatable pipe pig sensor array that water companies would drag through sewers, looking for cracks ...
@mherbert Gods yeah. this platemaker was a $250k machine when new. Instead of spending tens of thousands or more on making the weird ISA card run on a modern PC with modern Windows for no functional benefit we used the superpower of Buying Another One from a place whose main unit caught fire. Spare PCs, spare controller card, and a bunch of cloned drives for lunch money.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
