Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
That's what this is really about. When you're Ops that also does Dev I'm prepared to bet that 95% of the time it's because whoever you work for is too cheap to employ proper devs. I reckon that I'm "DevOps" which is to say my title is "Systems Administrator", which sounds like Ops to me, but when it comes to what I actually _do_ here, that doesn't mean a damn thing.
I'm responsible for researching things, buying them, installing them, configuring them (which all seems like Ops) but then, when inevitably someone goes "Oh, can it also do this? AndbythewayweneeditbyFriday" hacking together some code to patch in whatever awful thing we've been asked for without spending any money because we haven't got any.
Honestly, the number of places I know within a mile of me (I might occasionally spend Friday lunchtimes in the nearest pub with other distressed IT staff) that don't have version control is seriously frightening.
I've asked why before, and the answer is always the same: We don't have time to implement it because we're too busy putting out the fires caused by not having it.
I don't really know how you get out of that one.
As far as I can tell it translates roughly like this:
Nothing ever gets finished because you can never stop "developing" it to deal with the fact that it's got to keep "Operating" all the time and can't be shut down for proper testing.
Development + Operation all at the same time by the same people, see?
That's certainly what it feels like around here anyway.
...I'm actually expected to do this by work in the hope we might find out who it belongs to and return it to them. I managed to get the responsibility passed to me from the Receptionists who usually manage lost property because I at least have a bunch of disposable linux VM's to try it on.
Well, yes, but to be fair that is largely how legal advice works.
Ultimately whether or not this is legal will have to be decided by a court, at which point if lawyer N can convince the court that it is, then they were right.
That might be a crazy hard sell, which is why none of the others wanted to try it, but the law isn't some immutable thing like mathematics. If you want to make something legal, you just need to convince a court* that it is.
*or possibly many courts, assuming what you're trying is contentious and is going to result in an appeal.
Yeah. Running 5 production servers, 2 test servers over about 500Tb of total storage on it and Ubuntu 14.04. It Just Works. The only issue is having to wait for the DKMS modules to compile whenever you do a kernel upgrade and given how rarely we actually do that I could so care less about any of this nonsense.
...for this level of stupidity. Guys, it took about 5 seconds from reading the headline to realizing that this was going to be a TERRIBLE idea. How on earth did anyone manage to get from thinking it up to actually telling people about it without clocking at least one of the absolute show stoppers here?
Brought in your own kit? Well, enjoy that because unless it's either a mouse, a keyboard, or a USB flash drive the PC is your office is going to ignore it.
There are A3 multifunction copier/scanner/fax/printer things on each floor by each stairwell. Those you may use. Other scanners, printers, 1980s fax machines you will not use. We won't support them. No exceptions.
...I'm not sure it really does anything I need. Maybe it does things you need - and if so, that's great - but from where I'm sat (which incidentally is in front of a Windows 7 desktop with half a dozen PuTTY sessions open to various Linux machines) what I'd really want from this is a way to use my extensive bash experience to control Windows machines as easily as I control Linux ones.
That doesn't seem to be what Microsoft are aiming for here. They talk about "developers" but really, when I have my developer hat on I would never rely on this to test Linux code because it's not actually representative of what that code would do on a real Linux machine.
...until auto manufacturers start taking network security seriously.
I'm glad someone's doing it, but really it's pretty poor that this is required in the first place. As soon as internet connected things started going into cars there should have been requirements that they were properly isolated from anything that managed the actual driving, and those requirements should have been laid down in law as important public safety concerns.
Are you suggesting that, as is so often the case in the UK, we are in fact protected by from our government by it's own incompetence?
No I'm suggesting that catastrophic failures of the PNC to properly handle sensitive data are not only unsurprising to me, but from my experience with the thing, were inevitable.
Let me tell you a little story about a library cataloguing program called genesis. Genesis was originally implemented to use serial terminals attached to a minicomputer, but at some point in the early 80s was updated to run as a DOS program on x86 pcs. When they did this, they made some design decisions that are beyond bizarre, including reserving a few blocks of memory as a keyboard and screen buffer.
Yes, the same buffer.
The practical upshot of this was that if you were a proficient typist you could overflow the keyboard part of the buffer into the screen part and corrupt the display. The "fix" implemented for this was a keyboard combination that flushed the entire buffer and reset the system to the last saved state - effectively deleting any work you had done since the last commit.
Commits were only possible on the last page of each form, and forms couldn't scroll, so you had to fill in a page, read it carefully, tab your way to the "next" button, fill in the next page and so on until you got to the last one where you could finally save the data you'd just entered. If you cocked up by typing too fast, well, now the form was corrupted and you had to start all over again and some of these forms ran to 20 pages or so.
That is the second worst computer system I've ever used.
The PNC is the worst.
I'm right with you on that one. I loathe Android. The problem is that iOS is actually worse, and god knows how they even managed that.
I've not found a mobile OS I liked since webos went under. WinPho started well, but it's just turned into a complete train wreck the last couple of years.
I'm still holding out some forlorn hope that some form of converged Ubuntu might actually appear and be usable in the near future.
I'm certainly not going to downvote you because you're at least half right. It's a thing that happens. Sometimes tho, it's not that IT is doing things badly, it's that they're not successfully explaining why they won't do things at all.
Sometimes the reason this happens is that whatever the PHB is trying to get done is stupid and dangerous, IT have said "Not in a million years and here's precisely why", the PHB hasn't understood the "here's precisely why" bit, and then spends ages trying to circumvent the process instead of rethinking the original plan.
Our industry has a bit of a history of promising a pet bear. Sure, it sounds cool, and everyone is going to be impressed if you have one, but sooner or later it's going to bite your face off. Most PHB's don't have the technical understanding to realize that, and most IT staff aren't good at explaining complex problems to people who don't have a technical background.
"Eve must also have a bunch of domains that can serve mangled iCloud.com URLs."
If she's got herself a malicious access point that bob here is attached to, and a server capable of masquerading as one of Apples, wouldn't she be better off just hijacking all DNS requests to iCloud.com or have I missed something?
To take a break from all the smut related ones, I still think the stupidest thing I've ever been asked to do at work was remove a pair of lesbian ducks* and their duckling from a lecture theatre.
The logic, apparently, was that they had gotten into the lectern and were disrupting the ability of a lecturer to use the computer, and it was ergo an IT issue.
It turns out that ducks defending a duckling won't run away from you so as to stop you touching them, but will go absolutely fucking mental once you pick them up and try and carry them away from their charge.
*Yeah, you read that right. If you want to read up on the breeding habits of the common mallard duck, feel free, it's pretty surreal reading.
That's as may be, but the law must still hold that man accountable, even if those who are supposed to enforce it are unable to do so. There's a world of difference between breaking a law because you are powerful enough to get away with it, and claiming that you're actually not bound by the law in the first place.
Jefferson wasn't living with Islamic terrorism and cell phones.
That's right. He was fighting an actual revolutionary war against a vastly superior military force. He had more to fear than we have ever had, and still believed that the rights of the individual were worth enshrining in the constitution.
Yes. That's exactly what they meant.
No man, no matter how virtuous, blessed by god, blood of kings - whatever - NO man is above the law. By the same token, no man is beneath it either. The devil himself is owed a fair trial, conducted with the same rigour and defence of his rights as anyone.
Either a right applies to all, or to no one. Otherwise it's not a right.
... the bill was a good and necessary way of updating the law ... but the bill's nickname of "Snoopers' Charter" was insulting to the people who work to make the country safer
Good! They should feel insulted. The whole bill is an insult. Not just to the people of this country but to the people who work in the security services.
Unless our hypothetical security services employee actually is a supporter of a fascist state and hopes to make such a state reality by bringing about the British stazi*, then obtaining powers like these is absolutely not why they signed up.
Proposing that state intrusion into the lives of citizens on this scale is required for the security services to do their job is an insult. The rest of us are just calling it what it is.
*And if they are, then I reckon we're all free to insult them as much as we like.
I think part of what happened was that people wised up to the fact that most of the "Green" IT policies were green in name only. They didn't make any serious difference to power consumption, they just annoyed everyone.
Once everyone had gotten utterly sick of them shutting off their screens every 2 minutes because you were busy reading something and hadn't moved the mouse, or parked the hard disk heads because you'd not requested any files in a while leading to this feeling that the machine was sleeping on the job every time you actually wanted something from it; all that shit got turned off and quietly dropped from the sales pitch because everyone was complaining about it.
In the meantime all the improvements in tech that actually drove down power consumption just happened quietly and without any fuss in the background as we went from each generation of tech to the next. New desktops / monitors drew less power than the ones they replaced, new servers hosted more VMs than could be put in the rackspace required for the old physical boxes at a lower price, and so the "Green IT" revolution ended with something of a whimper.
@Jeffrey Nonken
It is. It's a complete deal breaker. Not because Outlook is any good, it's not. It's horrible but we've got an administrative and secretarial staff here that simply do not know, and will not learn how to use anything else.
Despite the fact that we have people with mailboxes running to over 50gig which completely flummoxes Outlook and makes it fall over about twice a week, we've had people down tools and go home - and then be backed by their boss that this was appropriate! - when we were forced to shut the outlook translator off for an update for a few minutes and it went wrong and we didn't get it back for a day.
They could have carried on working through the web interface, but they just won't and until we can convince certain parts of the world - or at least their managers - that there's more to booking meetings than using Outlooks shared calendars we're stuck with it.
...I was working as the junior member of a 2 man IT department for a college. Students would rock up all the time with "My internet isn't working! Help!" which nearly always meant that we'd detected something horrible coming off the network port in their room and blocked them at the switch until they brought the offending machine in for decontamination.
This one girl brought in her pc with a DVD in the drive. Nothing terribly surprising about that, but this machine was in a real state and we had to resort to a live CD to get it booted, I didn't think about the DVD, I just put it on my desk until the computer was clean. When she came to get it back, I thought I ought to put the disc back in. She had her machine set to auto play DVDs. I saw the look on her face go from "Oh, thankyou, wouldn't want to leave that behind" to "Actually, what IS that?" to "Oh god NO!" just as it started playing a shaky camcorder quality porn film staring her, some other girl, and about 10 obviously incredibly drunk guys.
All you can really do at that point is close the lid and tell them to just take it away. No, really, I don't want to know. Don't say anything, just take your machine and go and we'll forget this ever happened.
15 years ago I was an undergraduate student.* One of our courses was a joint session with the Philosophy, Computer science and psychology departments about the development of artificial intelligence.
I remember it like this:
The computer science professors were all absorbed by the incredible technical developments being talked about. They were so excited by the technology itself. How cool is it to make new minds?
The psychology professors were excited too. They expected to be able to use those developments to learn more about what makes us the way we are. (After all, all the _really_ interesting psychology experiments are illegal to perform on real humans)
The philosophy professors, who spent more time out in the world interacting with actual people, mostly sat there and said "Yeah, but none of that is ever going to work, because all that stuff will have to be created by people, and people are fucking idiots."
15 years later and not a single one of the predictions about what AI would be able to do in 10 years time has come true. Not. One.
We still can't even make a counterstrike bot that doesn't play like you're fighting either a drunk labrador retriever, at one end or the god of war himself at the other, and the scope of that problem is really, REALLY small compared to making a useful general purpose AI.
*I'll leave it to the room to decide which subject I was studying at the time
Various sources have been promising incredible breakthroughs in battery technology for as long as I can remember, and they never seem to actually show up.
Sure, they sound very exciting, there are some impressive "in the lab" demonstrations, but when it comes to being able to go out and _buy_ the things it's back to tiny incremental steps that don't really change much.
Until I'm actually able to go out and buy a laptop that can work for 3 days straight, or a mobile phone that actually lasts for a week I'm just going to have to stay sceptical I'm afraid.
“The new legislation needs to be in force by 31 December 2016 in order to ensure that powers which are essential to counter the threat from criminals and terrorists do not lapse.”
So the only possible excuse for rushing at this point is that you expect this bill to get defeated, and have to re-write it again.
Where as, if you wrote it properly in the first place...
The trouble is HR don't even understand what skills they're testing for half the time.
I was once genuinely ordered, by an HR department, to make sure that the "technical test" for a new PA was presented as a printed document, which was to be laid before the keyboard of a laptop. Before each practical test, I was asked to go into the office in which it was being conducted, log in to the laptop with the candidate account, open the "office skills" test document in word, open the "mathematical skills" test document in excel, and open outlook ready for the "email skills" parts of the test. After the test I had to go in, save any documents they had left open, put them on a USB stick, and take it back to HR for scoring.
When I pointed out that anyone applying to be a PA should really be able to log into a computer process some some office tasks, and then save the results by themselves, I was told that those were "IT Skills" and that this wasn't a technical role.
...and they wondered why half their admin staff were incapable of doing their own jobs.
They're a nightmare.
I've been in my current role for 3 months. For TWO YEARS previously, the role went unfilled - on paper at least - and I was basically doing it unpaid, because HR wouldn't accept that I was qualified to do the job. I mean, never mind the fact that I was already doing the job; the fact that I'm self taught and have nothing more than a decade or so's experience with the exact systems the role supports - some of which I DESIGNED - wasn't good enough. I didn't have the paper qualifications, so they wouldn't submit my name for interview.
After over a year and 2 rounds of interviews where they failed to appoint anyone, I was finally allowed to apply for what was effectively my own job. (And immediately appointed to it.)
