Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
...how the employer has any legal power to prevent it's employees unionizing? It would seem to me that they don't really get any say in the matter, and at least on this side of the pond firing an employee for joining a union would get you a very quick unfair dismissal lawsuit that the employee would be certain to win.
The Privileged Attribute Certificate (PAC) is an extension to Kerberos tickets that contains useful information about a user’s privileges. This information is added to Kerberos tickets by a domain controller when a user authenticates within an Active Directory domain. When users use their Kerberos tickets to authenticate to other systems, the PAC can be read and used to determine their level of privileges without reaching out to the domain controller to query for that information (more on that to follow).
Now, admittedly I'm not exactly an expert in the inner workings of kerberos, but this bloody thing has caused me no end of trouble and looks like another example of MS screwing with something for their convenience without considering the consequences.
The last time there was a bug in the PAC, we got a samba update that "fixed" it by breaking all non MS kerberos instances, because it put in extra PAC checks and hard-required them to pass for authz to take place.... which of course they didn't. Because we're not running AD. And MIT Kerberos doesn't have the PAC attached to it to start with.
The problem with that is that there is so much informal, non-ticketed work that your jobbing sysadmin does on a day to day basis. From the "Help I've rearranged the columns on my spreadsheet and don't know what to do" type idiocy all the way to the "Huh, that machine drops off the network every 3rd Friday but only for precisely 3 minutes... what the hell is causing that?" kind of oddness that you happen to notice while glancing at the logs. There is an absolute shit ton of work that it's easier to just poke your nose in and fix now than raise a ticket, put it in a queue, and get back to it eventually, usually after you've forgotten why it was important in the first place.
As the study (for all it's faults) points out, when working remotely all that previously "I'll sort it out right now" work that was never tracked now leads to support tickets being raised, and therefore all the extra time spent actually handling the fact that there's a support ticket raised on top of the doing of the job in hand.
Just looking at a ticket queue that has 300% more tickets in it than you're used to - especially once that queue gets big enough to no longer fit on a single screen - has morale implications and can lead to choice paralysis when faced with a couple of hundred fairly trivial tasks all of which need doing, but none of which are actually terribly important right now.
The deliberate perpetuation of user ignorance is probably the single biggest failing of modern computing. We let people loose on things they have exactly zero understanding of and then act all surprized when they keep hurting themselves with it.
The humble desktop computer is probably about the most complex single object that most people will ever lay hands on in their lifetimes. Pretending that they're simple is a dangerous lie.
I know it's difficult to balance "What you need to know" against the towering vastness of "things that there are to know" but we have gone massively too far down the "Eh, don't think about it" branch.
...is that the document will look the way that the document is bloody supposed to look. Oftentimes that actually really matters. Now, that's not always the case to be sure, and there's nothing wrong with HTML+CSS as a model to support that in trivial cases. Let the content and the layout react to the device, but when it does matter that the document doesn't get re-flowed PDF is still the right answer.
And, no, it is NOT MS's responsibility to create a .DOCX format that allows others a guarantee of compatibility. They don't have to - it's their format, their software, to call the shots on.
In this you are entirely correct. Which is why .docx format should never be used in order to remain compliant with the document standards requirements laid out in the Equality Act 2010. The UK government goes as far as to explicitly recommend .odt or html in their accessibility guidelines.
So, no, it's not Microsoft's responsibility to comply. But it may well be yours if you work in the UK.
We've been operating without AD perfectly well at my current place for years, and my previous job, while we had it, it was a vestigial stump of a thing and all our actual desktop management was done through puppet and powershell.
Outlook, on the other hand, is impossible to fucking kill. You will prise Outlook from an office drone's cold, dead hands. Excel too. If we used O365 as our mail provider then maybe we could get away without desktop Outlook, but we don't.
We use google as our mail provider, Macs as our primary desktop, and still we have people demanding Outlook - and then when they discover that the Mac version of outlook isn't quite the same as the Windows one, they demand a Windows VM to run Windows Outlook in on their Mac.
...they get it too, because these people include the PA's of senior executives, and they'll just order us to do whatever the PA wants for the sake of a quiet life. It doesn't matter how insane it is, until we can run the MS office suite in it's entirety on Linux it's a dead end.
There are now an entire generation of PA's, Accountants, Legal assistants, HR bods - back office staff of every kind - who have used MS office for their entire careers and they will commit cold blooded murder before they're prepared to give it up now.
That goes double for the kinds of people - and you have met them, we've all met them - who will call the helpdesk if they accidentally re-order the icons on their desktop. They have no idea how to use their computer. They've memorized a handful of tasks inside Office that they do day in, day out, and they simply will not be trained to use something else - and since that most definitely includes many of the aforementioned senior executives, good luck getting management buy in on the idea that we should try and force them to.
"Competence" is something that's really only possible to validate after the fact. We'll find out if they were really a good hire during their probation period.
By that point however the "Talent Acquisition Team" have already done their bit, got their signing bonus, and moved on.
How well someone fits the company "Leadership and Diversity Principles" (Did they go to school with one of our directors? Are they from a minority group we don't have a lot of at the moment?) these are things that they can check off a list before we hire someone, so that's what they care about.
Not least it comes from the owners of taxi fleets, bus companies, delivery. Companies and long distance hauliers who would be much happier if they didnt have to pay for all those pesky employees who want things like sleep, and sick leave, and pensions.
Personally I'm a big fan of the idea for my own vehicle because it would allow me to drive to a nice pub in the afternoon, have a few beers with my lunch, and have the car drive me home again.
We are a long, long way from that tho, and the "it's not for hands free driving *wink wink*" approach the current systems have been marketed with is absolutely irresponsible.
...were still that clean, clear, and sensibly laid out. See how all the scroll bars don't run away and hide when you're not looking; leading to this awkward "waggle the mouse around near the window border waiting for them to come back". Revel in the glory of the menus being immediately visible at the top of the screen instead of hiding behind some random three dots... or three bars... or possibly a picture of a gear for some reason... where it now takes an extra click to find anything.
To be fair, they didn't suggest that the big V8 is necessarily either good or smart, but it is definitely very American.
Feels kinda like the death of the Steam Locomotive. Sure, they're dirty, noisy, inefficient, slow... but there's a soul that an electrified train will simply never have.
The time of the big V8 is ending, and it's right that it ends. The world has to move on. It's sad too tho.
...further.
Apple could cripple Jamf further.
It seems like hardly a month goes by that Apple doesn't release some new update that randomly breaks something we were relying upon in Jamf. Not that I expect that to get any better if Apple do decide to start offering their own management tool - which by the way it is utterly fucking insane that they don't already, and that we have to buy something like Jamf in the first place.
Apple device management in the enterprise space is a total shit-show. Given the incredible level of control Apple have over their devices it continues to drive me up the wall how reluctant they are to provide tools that can actually manage them properly.
...a thinnet BNC network terminator looks almost exactly like a BNC -> RCA adapter - especially if you have one of those little protective dust covers over the end of it. Back in the early 90s when I was in 6th form us poor comp-sci A level students (there were about 5 of us total, we had a rota) were often left in charge of the computing suite at lunch time so the actual staff could get some much needed rest, and the younger kids could use the computers to play games on.
If ever things got a bit much, or if we were particularly hung over (it was the 90s, no one would ID you as long as you didn't cause any trouble) we'd replace the network terminator for a nice quiet afternoon. "Sorry lads, network's down. Nothing we can do about it until the teachers get back and let us into the server room." Without access to the shared drive full of games most of the kids would just leave.
And tbh that's pretty much the end of it. No one cares to port their application to Linux because there's no mass market of Linux users out there waiting to buy it.
Conversely there's no mass market of Linux users out there waiting to buy things because applications aren't available to buy, so that blocks people from using Linux in the first place.
Truth be told most people doing most jobs could probably get by fine - because most people never step outside their browsers these days - but no IT department wants to have to run two parallel sets of infrastructure so as long as there's even a minority of people who need something that's not available on Linux, why bother supporting it at all? You're just making work for yourself.
All the old hands thought we would need another war, cold or hot, to get the requisite funding, unavailable in peacteime.
Well, there's a "Special Military Operation" going on right now that's making lots of people very nervous about the idea of relying on Russian oil and gas. Maybe that'll count.
...and always has been. When Netflix first rocked up all the stats show that file sharing services took a nosedive in popularity. Why? Because people don't mind paying for things, they mind feeling like they're getting cheated. As Netflix has started losing more and more of it's most popular content back to Disney+ and Paramount+ and HBO Max and all the others their subscriber numbers have declined and piracy is back on the rise.
I'm more than happy to pay for the content I watch, but I'm not - and it would seem the vast majority of people are not - prepared to pay for 8 different subscription video services to watch one or two shows from each. This is taking us straight back to the predatory cable TV model of the early 90s where you had to buy the family pack, and the sports pack, and the movies pack, and the education pack all separately and see yourself paying for ninety nine programmes in a hundred that you don't care about and don't want.
Music publishing has already shown how this ends up. Once people get used to the idea that they can buy the content that they want - and only the content that they want - they will stop being prepared to pay a subsidy to a bunch of things they don't care about, be that in the form of buying albums with 50% awful filler tracks on, or paying a monthly subscription for something they don't use.
It's sad to see the TV and movie industries repeating the same mistakes.
...Talent Acquisition does.
I've written half a dozen job adverts in the last year or so. I spend a week or two talking to the rest of the team, and some related teams we work closely with and come up with a careful description of what the job will entail, and from that try and derive a set of skills necessary to actually do the job. Off it then goes to the "Talent Acquisition" team for "de-biasing" before they post it to all the usual job boards.
I use these scare quotes most deliberately.
What inevitably happens next is that things like "Must have X years experience managing..." get removed for being potentially ageist - or weirdly, and weirdly often removed for using sexist language; for example I was told that the word "experience" has a masculine bias and should be avoided - and then phrases like "lively and enthusiastic!" get inserted without me asking for them because it counter-balances the language I've already used, and makes the advert as a whole more "age and gender neutral".
What ultiamtely gets posted is only vaguely reminiscent of the advert that the people who know what we need from the candidate actually agreed on.
I'm told that we use "industry standard tools" to perform this "de-biasing". Assuming that that's actually the case, if there is a systemic problem it seems like the real cause here is that these tools, and the people who insist on using them, are Absolutely Fucking Useless.
I'm not buying thousands of linux laptops, but I am buying hundreds of laptops total, which I expect will scale to thousands in the next couple of years. I'd very much rather buy the same model for both Linux and Windows users if I can, so it'd convince me to buy Dell (I mean, I already do, but if I didn't it might convince me to switch if I didn't) just so I can have the same support contract etc. for both sets of machines.
I hate laptops with a ten-key almost as much as I hate keyboards without one.
I'm so used to the idea that my keyboard is aligned centrally on the laptop screen I just can't type reliably on something with a tenkey because it shifts the whole keyboard over to the left.
I have the converse problem on mechanical keyboards without a tenkey where I end up subconsciously shifting my hands a bit every time I use a keyboard without one because I can sort of see the extents of the keyboard in my peripheral vision and it makes me screw up my hand positioning.
I would have assumed those effects cancel out?
Sure, we're looking at a field hundreds of millions of light years across, but we're also trying to focus on something billions of light years away - bits of it are billions of light years closer to us than other bits. There'd be some really complex parallax effects to cancel out if there were any movement at this end at all.
On the face of it it would make sense for some bits to be experiencing motion blur and other bits not.
"you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but listen!"
Honestly tho, my mind is really struggling to process this image. It's too big. Everything is too big. That's an almost imperceptible speck in the night sky and it contains more... everything... than it's even possible to imagine.
Humans were not built to handle this sort of scale. I feel awe and despair in equal measure. If this fails to move anyone, they just didn't grasp the reality of what they're looking at.
I think you misunderstand me - I agree with all of that, and I'm certainly more a fan of sysv than I am systemd.
But the principle of "no pets" is still a good one. Sysv init scripts aren't pets. Messing around in the init scripts by hand instead of doing the decent thing and logging all changes in git or similar and making everyone peer review the changes is the problem.
I mean, I agree with all of that - but to be fair the "Cattle not pets" approach is still a good one. It prevents the occasional smartass sysadmin who thinks they're above such tedious things as following standard processes - or even just writing things down - from buggering about with a box by hand so that no one else on the team knows what state it's in or why it's doing whatever weirdass thing it's doing the next time they go on leave and you have to look after it.
...that has always made me uncomfortable with the very idea of SaaS. Once they have your data and are deeply.embedded enough in your business that changing provider becomes extremely problematic what do you do if they decide to just jack up the price?
Oh, sorry, yeah, the £14,000 a year you were paying for that business critical application? It's £18,000 now, and if you want to use any "advanced features" like SAML for user authentication it'll be another £20 per user per month on top of that. Sorry, economic conditions, inflation, all that sort of thing. Oh, and good luck migrating all your existing data out to another provider because we don't provide that service at your pricing tier any more, only a bare legal minimum "dump the lot as a big flat file" that none of our competitors can easily read.
It is only once we have a dialogue of equals that we will be able to get the respect the EU deserves
...that's a really damning statement. One party is a legally recognized collective of national governments, the other is a loose association of large private companies.
The EU should not be treating these entities as equals. They should be treating them as "do as your damn well told or we fine you into oblivion."
However one feels about the EU in general it's absurd we have reached a place where it sees itself as the junior position in a negotiation with a private enterprise. That's just not how laws ought to work.
The solution is an office general secretary who's job is to actually administer this sort of thing.
"No, you can't have a meeting room on that day. There aren't any available. I'll call you if one comes free."
"There are only 4 people in your meeting, you can't have the conference room. You can have meeting room C since it only seats 5 anyway."
"I've moved your meeting from room A to room D because we've got a client presentation that needs to use the video conferencing facility, and you are only having an internal meeting."
This person knows who works here, knows what all the facilities available are, and knows who they can piss off by moving their meetings around and who they can't.
Sadly jobs like this have been long since removed in the never ending drive for increased profit efficiency.
This was a "librarian" which is to say, a tenured professor who had some free time who was given control of the library so it looked like they actually did something other than show up for the free dinners. Definitely not the sort who had earned the right to speak orangutan or been inducted into the secrets of L space.
Every time I discover a "Please print and sign" written on anything I start to twitch slightly. How? Print how? I've not owned a printer since the 90s. Also print why? You emailed it to me. I'm going to email it to you. Why are we still pretending that a signature means anything? If this is meant to be some sort of proof of identity how exactly do you think that works? It's not like you have anything to compare it to. God I hate signatures.
I ran into something this with the Library Self Issue terminal at a college I once worked at. I got an "Urgent!!!" support call from the college librarian saying that it was down and without it no one could use the library at all and we had to get it fixed immediately.
I went in to check on it and discovered that by "Down" they meant that it had been turned off. Turning it back on and logging into the admin account to check that it was in good health I discovered that it had been gracefully shut down three months earlier and never turned back on again.
I asked the on site library assistant and they said "Yeah, we always turn it off because it's old and it makes an annoying noise. The students only ever come in here to use the internet and that machine doesn't have internet so no one uses it."
...of enabling the little known text console by pressing - I think it was F12 - and then adjusting the overscan on the old CRT monitors so that the single line of black on white text that had just appeared at the bottom of the desktop under the icon bar was off the bottom of the screen.
Watching frustrated Computing teachers trying to work out why the machine wasn't responding to keyboard input at all because it was all silently going into that console was hilarious... well, it was if you were 12 anyway.
