Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
Hello all,
Was doing some upgrades on a UBR7246 (to a VXR), and I got to thinking
about short sighted design considerations. I was curious if any of you
had some pet peeves from a design perspective to rant about. I'll start
with a couple.
1) The slide lock on transceiver cables.
2) Intel's+IBM's "640K" wall.
3) IDE addressing standards. (We've been through the 528 MB,
2.1 GB, 4.2 GB, 8.4 GB caps.... what's next?)
2 & 3 are basically failures to look ahead far enough. We have
lots of those. Some would say IPV4 is one, but I'll give them
a little more credit than most....
Are you asking? 
It would by my count be the 137.4GB limit of LBA28 which was already corrected with LBA48 if your motherboard supports it. Maybe you haven't had to use an IDE drive that large yet. 
There may have been another limitation in there on IDE that I'm missing in some form... As a sidenote, MS (in trying to phase out FAT32 in favor of NTFS) started limiting the creation of FAT32 drives allowing a maximum of only 32GB in Windows 2000, but that doesn't really bother me.
Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
vinny@tellurian.com
(973)300-9211 x 125
(973)940-6125 (Direct)
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Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com (888)TELLURIAN
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those that don't.
> Was doing some upgrades on a UBR7246 (to a VXR), and I got to thinking
> about short sighted design considerations. I was curious if any of you
> had some pet peeves from a design perspective to rant about. I'll start
> with a couple.
Here are a few of mine:
The little clippy widgets (looks kind of like @) on some oldschool racks, that hold the nut in place for the hex-head bolt. Why these were considered desirable is beyond me.
The slimline DS3 patch panels. God help you should you need to do something with the two innermost wires on the back end of that- there's barely room for pliers, much less fingers.
Procurve switch management interface. Archaic, arcane, insane, unusable.
Cisco V-notched power cables - Design "feature" geared around getting suckers to buy a power cable for 45USD.
~Ben
I'm actually quite happy with the HP ProCurve switch interface, the web
interface is the first thing to be disabled though.
Your all missing my most favorite bad design decision.
And I know that in other areas this has been mentioned and made fun of
enough but ...
Who thought it was a good idea to put braille on the drive up atms?
And having a contact in banking I do know that banks pay extra for this
feature its not just a case that they are all made this way.
No! those are great!! you get to yell at the poor sap that uses your Cisco
power cable on their monitor! And when they do, and you can't get it
back, or lose it, just grab their sun's power cable and cut a notch in the
right end with your poocket knife
-Chris
Once upon a time, Ben Browning <benb@theriver.com> said:
The little clippy widgets (looks kind of like @) on some oldschool racks,
that hold the nut in place for the hex-head bolt. Why these were considered
desirable is beyond me.
We've got a bunch of racks like that (and my PDP8 rack at home has them
as well). The nice thing about them is if you get a screw cross
threaded and chew up the threads, you can pop the clip off and put a new
one on. With rack rails that are pre-threaded, you've just lost the use
of a hole (or you can try to re-tap the hole, maybe ending up having to
use a non-standard screw for just that hole).
My dad's legally blind. That braille makes it possible for him to get cash
(either from the back seat or step out and walk up) if somebody's
giving him a ride, without him having to give his card and PIN to
somebody else.
In a message written on Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 03:53:44PM -0700, Ben Browning wrote:
Cisco V-notched power cables - Design "feature" geared around getting
suckers to buy a power cable for 45USD.
Uh, you might want to be careful with these connections. You'll
note the IEC-320 C13/C14 connectors (eg, what you find on PC's) are
15 Amps, but only 65 degC rated. The IEC-320 C15/C16 (with the
notch) are also 15 Amps, but are rated to a pin temperature of 120
degC. I doubt Cisco did it to be a PITA, electrical codes probably
required it for some reason.
Just to clerify, since I've gotten a ton of these.
I'm totally blind have been for 28 years.
Braille on walk up machines, makes good sense. As does it on lifts and
microwave oven buttons etc. It does not make good sense on airplane lights
and it makes less sense on drive up atms.
Especialy when you think it through long enough and if someone needs to
use braille chances are they are visually impaired enough to not be able
to read the screens at all. Thus when the atm doesn't speak back to you
as many still don't your not sure what prompt your at.
Many do speak in larger cities, with braille makes them very useful.
But in a car again, generally the voice will be low enough, for obvious
security ; and other reasons you won't hear it over the car and surround
noise anyway. So that someone looking over your shoulder will still be
there unless you've memorized the prompts on your local atm, a possibility
granted.
Its just a problem that hasn't been well thought out and baddly
engineered!
Works for my dad - though he did have to call the bank once, turned out
they had added a "Select English or Spanish" screen at the start....