"a loud explosion and saw a ball of fire."
That would have been the ex-monkey.
2756 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009
I've surely posted this here before...
Early 2000s I asked a client, a small bank, whether they performed restore tests. Same answer: no, we get the daily "backup successful" message. At least, I managed to convince them that restore tests are a rather necessary task. And a couple of weeks later I get a phone call from that client after they found that all of their backup tapes were empty.
While setting up and testing the backup procedure, someone didn't want to wait for an hours-long backup to finish and directed the data stream to /dev/null. And then never changed it to write to the tape.
Certainly, the EUC wanted to demonstrate that leaving the EU is painful. In another example, when the Swiss decided they wanted to limit immigration and change the treaty on free movement, the EUC retributed with restrictions on Switzerland long before any change to a treaty was even discussed.
Anyhow, responsible for the disastrous Brexit outcome is first and foremost the bunch of condensed incompetence, aka Government of the United Kingdom at that time.
Never was, it is a representative republic
Democracy and republic are not mutually exclusive (it depends, however, how dogmatically you want to define them). "Representative republic" though is a pleonasm and the USA is probably best described as a representative democracy.
Does El Reg allow to call someone an idiot? Can we, please, establish an Idiots' Corner? Asking for a friend...
That's why it was inadvisable to write directly to hardware in DOS
My first reaction was: that is inadvisable for any software! Then I remembered what I grew up with - optimising assembler routines for performance or memory - long time before we could throw shitloads of processing power at any problem.
Asset registers are to be kept safe... Reminds me of an incident many, many moons ago. One day, a friend asked me whether I had use for used office equipment, originating from Big Corp, my employer at the time, sold online for very cheap. Sure!
Not long after I materialised said bargain, I had a meeting with Big Corp's security officer about some security audit. And during a tea break he tells me news, totally unrelated to the audit, about a now-ex employee, who privately sold lots of used office equipment, owned by Big Corp, and pocketed the revenue.
They do indeed have a QA environment which is virtually a copy of their production. Problem is end-to-end testing, which involves third parties such as the PRN provider, outcome verification, and payment services providers. Then it's for the developers and operators to literally put their money where their mouth is.
A test account acting like a person has little to no chance of surviving the purge.
Good for you - and your sysadmin. We have a case of an online gambling provider that operates in a jurisdiction where test accounts are not allowed in the production environment. The funny consequence is that the staff has to use their personal accounts and bet their own funds if they want to test a process end-to-end.
Hey, at least my mobile phone is typically less filthy than the average printed menu. And yes, I deeply dislike having to use my telephone to read the menu. In fact, on several occasions I pretended not to have a bloody phone and had the staff read the menu to me - I'm a very slow listener. They did deserve and get a good tip, it's not their fault after all.
Nearly I couldn't resist on commenting something along the line of they just wanted to get out to great the orange monkey which's soon going to be their president, again.
Anyhow, they may have never been used for any testing. But now that they've been roaming freely in an uncontrolled environment, it's unlikely that they ever will be. Purposeless death awaiting them. Not that it makes much difference to the monkeys.