Posts by Alistair 3137 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
I've configured environment TMP directory pointers on SO MANY MF@#$%@#$% third party "enterprise" apps in my career I have considered just filing security bugs on the vendors anonymously. Wether or NOT the data is confidential or not, it is a habit any *nix admin should engage. <And in many cases one needs to actually create a tmp folder for the app, in its own disk space>
The commitments being made by the tech billionaires to the Trump Regime are, in toto, unattainable. Between the AI 3 card monte game, Larry (et fils), Zilcherberg, there have been about $2.2T US committed to various bullshit enterprises. Furthermore, in the various Celebrity Presidential Parades about the planet, there are bout $4.4T to $6.8T US commitments to purchase *energy* (variously, crude, refined petroleum, LNG etc) over the next 5 years.
Taken individually any of these commitments is possible, but collectively they result in the US having 0 barrels of oil, 0 CM of natural gas and almost 0 electrical capacity for the people living, working and quite likely dying in the US.
The US economy is in free fall, and is likely already in a recession, to wit, the Fed actually DID lower the prime (admittedly only a quarter point) while there is very clearly more being spent (several TIMES more) by the entirety of the US than is coming in from the collective incomes of business, government, individuals and the financial groups.
Thus this "We will build it and they will come" bullshit is precisely bullshit.
Footnote: I was hired at RH in October 2018. Less than a month later the purchase offer was dropped.
The chant from both teams on the purchase was that RH would continue as it was and IBM would have no influence.
It took less than 8 months before the pivot. Jim Whitehurst was appointed President of IBM. And less than 5 months later resigned. I have no need to ask Jim. It was abundantly clear by that point that IBM culture, empolyee policy, management technique was being leveraged on the Redhat structure. I KNOW why he left, leaving behind some very healthy bonuses and such. Very Very Very sad set of circumstances for anyone working at Redhat.
Thus this article was in no way shape or form *news*. It was expected.
*cough*
Yes, the government should be invested in the corporations .......... said not one single republican ever.
Considering rather a large number of long term investment organisations have ben leaning down their Intel investments of late it seems a very trumpian decision.
@chivo243
I'm not having many good months lately either, I've seen *entire* IT depts dropped, replaced with newbies and "*AI*" support tools. Mostly in what would typically be referred to as "Small/Medium" enterprise operations. (600 -> 2k employees, perhaps 70 or so as IT) where it was "Move it all to the clod, and we don't need IT no more" actions. For at least one of those, I know the Senior Director responsible, and that person has a resignation letter sitting undated on their desk.
Sadly telling the id10T execusuite that AI does not yet exist and that LLMs *WILL* go off the rails if not carefully ringfenced and maintained gets you a pink slip instantly. Until the LLM does indeed go off the rails and costs the id10T execusuite their collective bonuses at the worst possible moment.
*no, its NOT a typo, I call it clod, not cloud
It is somewhat ironic just how much of what he wrote, sang, and recorded back in the late 50's and 60's is yet once more, completely relevant to the events of the day.
Honestly one of the most direct attacks on the "American Empire" back then, and considering the Id10T in charge at the moment, absolutely appropriate music and diatribes
Of course the maga crowd will be horribly offended and call him a libtard or something, but trust me, he gets to own them.
Not so long ago in our perspective, but back in ancient history to some, there was a third party vendor agency for a certain yacht laden database and application platform vendor that was assisting in the build out of our implementation of an application platform. Sadly the architect advisor they had demonstrated at their first presentation the level at which this vendor was operating, by insisting that each table in the underlying DB had to have a dedicated spindle in the storage array. When asked if they knew how many tables were in the planned DB they replied "I believe perhaps 50 or 60".
The DB involved had just over 52,000 tablespaces, and was projected to add approximately 1200 a year. (Hey, I was platform NOT DBA). The consult went downhill from there. And it was a LOOONNNG way down. Anyone know about HPUX filesystem i-node issues these days?
In any case, no, in EVERY case LVM is your friend
I was hoping the drone would explode.
Personally I was kinda expecting the drone carrying the note to take the hit when he snatched the note and trim a good inch or so off the TV News Reporter Hair Glue glom on the top of his head. If that thing is a head and not a brick
I never did SAT because we had issue with the way system config and details were stored *at redhats end*.
Cloned the repos we had access to and kept our own copies. Used several different FOSS utilities to keep the systems updated and since we never stored app/user data on the same volumes as the OS we did (reinstall) on version jumps. Release updates and security patch runs were in general painless. I learned entirely too much about anaconda.
I am utterly heartboken. Nasa, throughout my life has been able to provide an awesome perspective on the universe, and how humanity can, at least once in a blue moon, get shit together, and work with *something* approaching global cooperation. Duffy is utterly useless to start with and appears to be nothing more than a an echo mouth for dumb donnie's daily drivel dumps. I hope the middle managers at NASA are prepared to keep him gagged, blindfolded, handcuffed and hidden in the filing cabinet in the locked bathroom in the unlit basement behind the leopard warning sign until they get things done without his useless input.
I'm going to be honest, as far as MY experience goes, other than USA and certain parts of Mexico, the Officers of the Law that are armed *typically* have to file paperwork with the authorities when they so much as *draw* a firearm, and paperwork is anathema to the vast majority of cops. I know at least 5 here in Canuckistan, covering 3 different forces.
Can best be demonstrated by HHS, where science is being banned and social media wasteland resources are fed to AI to generate "Scientific" papers (tm). Sadly NASA may want to move its head office to Winterpeg, where it might find a few more folks willing to listen to real facts, instead of horseshit.
I'll point out that SSH is secure. And my X sessions always tunnel. In all honesty, over 25 plus years of using various unices in an enterprise environment, I've *NEVER* had an unprotected X session configured. Localhost ONLY. Tunnelled back to the desktop in SSH. I built *all* our systems that sported X that way. And in coherent discussions with real systems admins all over the world it is generally the default configuration for most Unixes.
Unless you're talking air gap requirements, configured correctly Xorg server can be made secure, I've not tried similar with wayland as I've never used it.
astronomers have found an enormous filament of hot gas that bridges four galaxy clusters. ...
As well as containing approximately ten times the mass of the Milky Way and stretching for 23 million light-years (equivalent to traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times), the filament clocks at over ten million degrees.
Hmmm. Superhighway perhaps?
I mean, have ANY of you been on the 401 eastbound around Avenue Rd at 4:00pm on a weekday?
Long, searing hot, any time of year, and radiating *some* sort of violent energy in every direction.
Having managed a fleet of around 4500 linux systems (VMs, Standalone HW, Clusters, gateways, dev/test/qa/prod, infrastructure storage etc) Umm, guess what mah frien? There be most excellent OPEN SOURCE solutions for fleet management that make that disaster from redmond look like utter crap.
@ Doctor
back when GSM was introduced, and with it the IMEI, we were briefed that the network operators could at least block
Having been around a certain mobile telecom operator, yes, indeed. There was an agreed protocol to distribute *known and verified* stolen device IMEIs as a list amongst (at the time I was tasked with redeploying the infra) at *least* 11 different north american operators. (I say at least, however I suspected from the size of some of these reports that a couple of the operator sources were collating lists from elsewhere). These data exchanges were weekly between US/CAN operators and daily between CAN/CAN operators.
The single largest issue with GENERATING the data was obtaining correctly defined reports that the devices were actually stolen. In our case we needed the actual report to come from an end user and include either a corporate entity label, or a police report #. (i.e. the device was owned by a corporate and the corp was reporting it stolen through appropriate contacts, or owned by an individual and included a police report #) You can see the issue there. The reporting requirements were to prevent someone locking out someone else's phone with a malicious report.
Sometime after 2008 or 2009, the police report requirement was dropped at our end, but there were some events that came close to being large legal issues with stolen phone reports. I'm not aware of the *current* processes, but having seen the data reporting requirements about 5 years ago, I'm guessing that getting an IMEI blocked is going to be somewhat harder these days.
FSD cars can be trusted...there are numerous videos of it being demonstrated on Youtube on real roads, in real traffic etc etc. The only thing that makes FSD dangerous is the humans on the road doing dumb unpredictable shit, like opening their door into traffic, not following the rules, randomly changing lanes, jack knifing trucks etc.
FSD is not now and will likely not for quite some time be "trusted", not because it cannot handle day to day normal events, but rather because it cannot handle humans on the road doing dumb unpredictable shit. That, sir, is the POINT, humans do dumb unpredictable shit.
I've been using trackballs since..... urrr, well I think I've had mice at offices where I *wasn't* a full timer. I still have my ?? 27 year old (possibly 32?) logitec trackball running, the fingertip, not thumb version, the scrollwheel has had its rubber outer liner replaced many times, oddly with a standard faucet filter washer. I've taken one or another trackball with me to work, I just cannot deal with waving all over the desk.
@AMAFM
Many of us listened even *before* the launch, however the launches appear to have fascinated about 29% of the US voting population back in 2016, and it has carried through to the now rather destructive landing craters, including the disaster of global markets lately. Hopefully the fascination breaks before the critters get out of the cylinders.
@VOT - you really need to give up. Most of the folks on this forum are quite well experienced in the REAL world, not your fantasies.
Canada still provides 48 to 60 percent of the base crude oil that the US consumes. Aaaaaaaaand Trump has slapped that crude with a 10% tariff.
Trump is NOT a shark. He's far more like a mudskipper.
Trump has a substantial track record of bankruptcy, lost fraud lawsuits against his businesses, and several cases of having his very own words used against him in courts of law. He's the bully on the schoolyard, facing not one, but in the end 11 countries (Europe, South America, Canada) lead by folks who have amongst them, 7 Phd's and at least 14 Masters degrees. I'm not even counting China, where Xi has a rather long list of core governmental agencies lead by exceptionally smart folks.
@AC
Carney will be even worse than Trudeau. Your economy has tanked and Carney will likely finish it off.
Basically considering the last 9 years, including COVID and the idiot in the WH down south for the *second* time, Canada has done just fine overall. Compared to the rest of the G20 we're in pretty damn good shape. Lower inflation overall, lower debt increases vs GDP drop, lower individual non-capital debt than the rest of the G20. You need to stop listening to the bullshit Pollievre and the rest of the corporatists have been spouting in the social media assault on democracy.
Bluntly, Pollievre has been a lifelong politician, and has NOTHING in the way of accomplishments, nor for that matter does Trump, who has a staggeringly long list of failures. Much like our compatriots in Mexico, we Canadians are deciding that someone with a goddamn BRAIN will do us so much better than someone who can only spout useless cliches about things being broken.
Germany has had the great good fortune to have had a Really Smart Leader for a number of years, unfortunately, Angela has stepped out of leadership. I seriously hope that the UK can find someone as well educated as Macron and Merkel and Carney.
"I just do wish people still put important statically linked binaries in /sbin..."
and
That s was/is for single-user mode. /sbin contained and should still only contain the barest sysadmin essentials that might be needed to prepare a Unix box
Are in no way incompatible. The binaries to bootstrap the system were stored in /sbin and were statically linked on MANY unicies. In fact, in HPUX AIX and (at least the last version that I ran) Oracle's rip off RHEL /sbin is both basic bootstrap code, and statically linked.
Furthermore, /sbin's statically linked code has in my professional System Admin career saved at *least* 25 LIVE running systems from needing to be *rebooted* and thus *restored* from backup.
Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).
At one point about 10 years ago I ended up with a commute that, if taken during *typical* hours, would have been 90 to 150 minutes each way, and my employer agreed that I could work 06:00 - 14:00. This cut my commute to less than 50 minutes in the am and less than 90 in the pm. I tended to get most of my days work *done* between 06:00 and 08:30 each and every day. Thereafter I was harassed by the Stupid Question For You brigade. Luckily, after about 18 months in that state I ended up with a back problem for about 2 months and was thereafter allowed to WFH. Unless, of course, the third party DC staff did something insanely stupid, such as sealing up the *new* Switch Room *BEFORE* the HVAC folks had set up the AC ventilation correctly, resulting in a rather toasty afternoon in the third floor of 3600 (IFYKYK) and taking out the entirety of not one, but THREE datacenters.....
For a tariff on Aluminium to work it would have to make smelting in the US cheaper than buying in from Canada. And, of course there is a lead time on building smelting plants etc
Eclectic: The etc would be, hmmm, lessee, dams on the Mississippi river or perhaps 7 or 8 nuclear plants? Smelting plants they may well already have, and likely could revitalize several in Ohio that are already mothballed. The powersource lead times are 10 to 20 years.
Your copy of economics 101 is about 95 years out of date.
You could do yourself *one* favour on the front of understanding how tariffs can affect production and economic process, Look up something called the Smoot-Hawley tarrif act, and how and when it was applied, and precisely what occurred over the ensuing 18 years. Makes for interesting reading. As a result perceptions of tariffs changed over the ensuing years.
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