Zoot suit
Plus one for the exclamation. And the sentiment of course.
909 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
OK. The serious side is clear and there are clearly issues which a functioning social services could help prevent from becoming a police issue
But ... Flatulence, Whatsapp (which is part of the massive wind farm that is Meta) and the contortionist angle make this the perfect Friday read.
I almost wet myself reading it after all while SHWMBO let rip with a very loud one but didn't record it on her phone.
We will have 1000 AI BOFH in the systems team and another 1000 PFY on the helldesk.
I know I am a grumpy old git who has been in this business too long but AI (or the bits of it that get all the news) is determined to eat itself. I know that teams where I work are hoping to develop LLMs that are super good at spotting pre-cancerous cell development and I can imagine that scanning pictures of the cosmos to find planets will also be well served by these toys but not the crap that MS, Google et al seem to be interested in.
With the talking to dead people bit I think of Rimmer so another poor use case.
In a job I wrote a script to automate patching of the RH boxes (all VMs). The bit I thought was clever was that I included a powershell script with powercli to take automatic snapshots with a date stamped name. Then another job would look for those snapshots four days later and delete them. My colleagues then started using those scripts when they were working on boxes outside the patch process so as not to have to remember to delete the snapshots before the VMware guy got all snotty about them.
Initially I was a bit annoyed but then started doing the same thing myself.
Though I am less of a Gandalf than a non-scottish Rab C Nesbitt.
The first one was on a Sun box. As a greenhorn I had followed some instructions to put /usr and /opt as well as /var in different disk slices. The time came to construct the data partitions on the attached array and I entered newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s3 rather than /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s3 and I watche /usr disappear. Thankfully it wasnt in production so the three days of rebuilding was just a good learning experience for me.
The second was a good few years later and the Local Authority I worked for had adopted this new fangled Linux for some 'non-critical' stuff. This particular toy (even on vmware by then) did all the interface file transfers between systems so was clearly non-critical </sarc>. Anyway, for some reason I needed to put some files into a directory in /etc. It arrived as a tarball and without thinking I let tar xvf destroy the whole of /etc. It was remarkable how long it took to fall in a heap but I still had days of desperately trying to get it to a state where I could get the restore software to talk to the backup server before finding out the backups had not been working (it really was a self inflicted perfect storm). As I remember there was little come back as manglement didn't really know what I did and nothing too critical like the benefits BACS file still went properly.
Ooh the memories! My first proper sysadmin gig was at a now defunct uni and they used to redesign the registration form every year. Bear in mind it was multi-part carbon and had to be printed on a huge dot-matrix jobby. Persuading it to print the form properly took up most of August!
I do miss Sun but not that.
I wonder if money could be found to send a probe specifically to investigate space beyond the heliosphere. New Horizons reached Pluto much more quickly so I should think they could load up a ship with cool toys to check stuff out and even get there in 20 or so years.
I also wonder if these things will outlast this 59 year old.
Others here have pointed out that the best thing to do is to delete your account. As far as I can tell, never having used it, is that the only users left are polical journos and politicos. If everyone did this then the problems assiciated with his latest brain fart - blocking in this case - would go away.
I don't know if MS always asking are you sure is better than the UNIX/LIinux assumption that you know what you are doing.
My colleague and I gave a list of user accounts on a Solaris system that hadn't been used in an arbitrary time - I think 90 days - to a deparment admin and she duly deleted all the old accounts. The trouble was that we had failed to a grep -v on low uid accounts and she removed the sys account. It took my colleague 5 days to get the system back up and running!
The update seems to suggest that they aren't going to give Larry any more of my taxes but I really hope they don't. They should talk to colleagues in Birmingham about that.
Anothing thing I wonder. Could there be a group of medium sized advanced economies with a roughy similar geographical location who could cooperate on procuring/designing a system that would deal with their, likely, similar issues of collecting their dues from a recalcitrant citizinry?
Icon because the Fartarse!
Many years ago before I ascended to the heady heights of systems administrator I had a job driving taxis in Taunton where Debenhams had their data processing facility. A daily job was for one of us to go round to their place with a van at four AM and pick upreams of fandfold paper for transport to the head office on Oxford St. Goodness knows what happened to it but I struggled to imagine the eighties equivalient of the C-suite wading through it all.
Back in the late eighties I drove a taxi in Taunton. There were a couple of 'cider' pubs near the market where the farmers would drink the profits. One was notorious as it would refuse to serve its cider to what they termed foreigners. The other gained some notoreity when another driver came on the radio to tell us that the wall spearating the lounge from the bar wasn't there any more because someone had been thrown through it.
Happy days even if said anecdote has nothing to do with the original story!
Obvious icon and I will be having my last Red Strip of this visit to the In Laws in a few hours while waiting at NMIA.