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For some reason, technical professionals associated with large organizations seem to actively enjoy pretending that basic upkeep is beyond the means of their or

For some reason, technical professionals associated with large organizations seem to actively enjoy pretending that basic upkeep is beyond the means of their organization (or has a poor value proposition). I suspect that it comes from a perverse enjoyment of being "pragmatic" in the face of "idealism" but really they're just saying "My org refuses to pay the costs associated with correctly operating the technologies it uses". If you're going to take that attitude, you need to expect that your bluff is going to be called from time to time and you'll have to do some large, unscheduled projects when it happens... that's what being pragmatic actually means: recognizing the positive and negative effects of your options and owning the whole package.

duxup 10y ago
I recall a lot of horror stories from mobile telco providers when the US government proposed to users to take their phone number from one carrier to the next. It was just one terrible prediction after another that involved so many risks and complications.... until they had to do it and then it just worked.
- hackcasual 10y ago
  I worked in telecoms at the time. It was a huge pain in the ass, but in the end it was fixable. The company I worked for actually made a nice chunk providing the HLR (home location register) updates needed to get it to work.
skuhn 10y ago
It's especially irksome to me in this case because Symantec (and maybe some of their actual customers) are acting like this is unheard of. Services did just recently have to update their certs to move away from SHA1 intermediate CA cert, didn't they? The current Symantec SHA1 intermediate CA cert is valid between Feb 2010 and Feb 2020, so it seems like there was probably a cert change ~7 years ago too. The horror!
borplk 10y ago
Spot on. A variation of this happens about browsers as well. How hard is it to run some version of Chrome or Firefox that is within the last 5 major releases? I don't care how big your organisation is, it's not that hard. Yet they want to off-load the costs to the rest of the world to keep sites compatible with their IE8.

duxup 10y ago

I recall a lot of horror stories from mobile telco providers when the US government proposed to users to take their phone number from one carrier to the next. It was just one terrible prediction after another that involved so many risks and complications.... until they had to do it and then it just worked.

hackcasual 10y ago
I worked in telecoms at the time. It was a huge pain in the ass, but in the end it was fixable. The company I worked for actually made a nice chunk providing the HLR (home location register) updates needed to get it to work.

skuhn 10y ago

It's especially irksome to me in this case because Symantec (and maybe some of their actual customers) are acting like this is unheard of. Services did just recently have to update their certs to move away from SHA1 intermediate CA cert, didn't they? The current Symantec SHA1 intermediate CA cert is valid between Feb 2010 and Feb 2020, so it seems like there was probably a cert change ~7 years ago too. The horror!

borplk 10y ago

Spot on. A variation of this happens about browsers as well. How hard is it to run some version of Chrome or Firefox that is within the last 5 major releases? I don't care how big your organisation is, it's not that hard. Yet they want to off-load the costs to the rest of the world to keep sites compatible with their IE8.