Posts by rnturn

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Vendors...

Two examples of vendor boneheadedness:

A hospital management system upgrade that was performed by the vendor. I was required to be present in case they ran into a snag. The only interaction I had with them was when they asked which disk was the OS (VMS) on? I answered but wondered "Huh?". After they left I checked the system out and found that their upgrade had blown away all the account password parameters we'd set up for HIPAA compliance. Password lifetimes changed to 9999 days and crap like that. Nothing in the release notes mentioned any changes like that were to be made. While it was a simple fix via some DCL magic, I had a lengthy phone call about the user account changes with the vendor. Seems those changes were requested by another customer. We got 'em by accident I guess.

When we audited a back office application (again, VMS) for a bank trading system, we found that the users had been granted BYPASS (i.e., God) privilege and it was enabled by default. When we tried to remove that, users were unable to log out of the application. Another "feature": the application opened dozens of files during operation. There were logical names created for each file... all pointing to the same disk. You can imagine how that affected performance. (I/O queues were through the roof.) My boss let me change that by determining which files were the "hottest" and tweaking the logical names and distributing them across multiple disks on our test environment. The application ran like a bat outta hell. Faster than the production system despite the test system running on lesser hardware. Proposing the change to the vendor generated a response of "We won't support you if you do that". We came to the conclusion that they'd developed their application on a workstation with a single disk and because they, apparently, didn't understand VMS very well, set themselves with BYPASS privilege to avoid having to deal with the unpleasantness of proper file permissions. We had to get an official statement from the vendor that the BYPASS priv was mandatory in order to satisfy the bank's auditors.

Tiny tweak for Pi OS, big makeover for the Imager

"We have read that if you invest in a gold and silver-plated premium HDMI cable ..."

Oh no... are the folks from Pear back in business with their ultra high-priced cabling?

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: Work visas, really? Where are they?

If that battery plant never opens, there's about 8500 votes she won't be getting.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

I think I've seen these people at work. I worked for a company for ten years and during that time they had at least two "directors" who had nobody reporting to them. They got invited to meetings -- and sometimes even showed up -- but I never saw or heard of any these types contribute to the work that the rest of the IT department was engaged in. When the company started shedding their older employees (I was among those even though there was no one else on the staff that had my background) they were *still* there as a directors -- directing no one.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: 50 Miles to work and back each day?!?

I did that for a while. I don't know what it's like in the Seattle area but 50 miles in the Chicago area means SW suburb to damn near the WI border -- 60-90 minutes each way. On a interstate where you're driving 70mph at times with barely a car length between you and the jerks in front of you who keep hitting the brakes. An accident in front of you meant you were stuck in barely moving bumper-to-bumper traffic until you could get to an exit to the surface streets. (Luckily I've lived in the area long enough to know most of the reasonable alternate routes.) I was late 2-3 days/week because of traffic/accidents. Left that job for a WFH position and never looked back. When recruiters called I'd hop on Google Maps figuring out the commute and when I'd have to leave home to make it to the office. Life's too short to spend 2-3 hours in a car commuting.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

I still have bad memories of using Atlassian's documentation wiki. Maybe it's better now but when I had to use it you found yourself following links that had you chasing your tail -- some topics had multiple, slightly different and confusing entries.

I've read multiple studies/articles that point out that projects where the documentation is written *first* tend to work better than those with post-development documentation.

I had that happen when doing my first VMS install. The fellow who had the manuals had them in a locked cabinet and was, of course, out of town for the weekend. Luckily, I was able to track down multiple articles in DEC Professional that walked you through a VMS install to pull it off.

Re: Manuals...

And then to the paperback White Wall.

I recall having a phone conversation with a DEC sales rep who wanted to know if we'd still purchase the hardcopy manuals since the CD-ROM versions were available. Since the CD-ROM version required multiple discs and we weren't rolling in cash to be able to have multiple CD-ROM readers on the system to keep the multiple discs online -- which meant skimming through multiple manuals entailed mounting/remounting different discs to track down a solution -- my response was that we'd still want one copy of the hardcopy manuals to avoid that hassle. The cost of the hardcopy version wasn't excessive as I recall. Anyway... this seemed to mystify said DEC rep who'd obviously never had to pore through multiple manuals opened to the appropriate pages to fix a problem.

The drawback to the White Wall was that updates required replacing the whole manual unlike the ring binder version.

GenAI comes for jobs once considered 'safe' from automation

Re: The big downside is...

Saw this story this morning:

https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-manager-hiring-white-collar-recession-layoffs-jobs-efficiency-2024-12

When those middle managers are booted out of the company, who's the AI going to call? Someone in the C suites? That ought to be entertaining.

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Re: Wayland is now the display system of choice on the Raspberry Pi

Running "sudo raspi-config" is "damn hard"? Who knew.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Next Week

I once worked for a project manager whose idea of documentation was a two-page (max) description of the software being used. IMHO, that was barely enough to list all the software components/languages being used and, maybe, a terse description of what it was used for. But two pages was his limit.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: It does suck

I've found the current Gnome desktop annoying. Seems to want to be different just because. I endured it at my last client because the "official" download site on their LAN didn't include any desktop other than Gnome for our Linux VMs.

I really like the KDE Activities feature (earlier versions of it were "meh" at best). Having customized menus for different activities has turned out to be very useful. As is the ability to, once again, assign different background to each activity after losing that with KDE's virtual desktops.

To each his own, I guess.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Re: Stonehenge?

Heh. 11/70 running RSX-11M-PLUS and F77.

US government sets a 30-day deadline for wiping TikTok from feds' phones

Q: Why are govt. work devices...

...configured to allow employees to download apps in the first place?

Especially apps like TikTok. What work benefit does it have?

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Re: Invention

> If patenting it stops anyone except Ford from doing it, I'm all for that.

It won't and Fords will probably be hacked and stolen using this "drive somewhere easier to tow" feature in no time.

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

Re: Used to like it but tech has moved on

> 2. Can't do a proper formatted signature without mucking around with creating it in a new mail, saving it as HTML and making sure it stays where you put it, along with all its HTML elements. This is 2023, not 1993!

Holy moley! What elaborate HTML needs to go into a .sig that can't be done in a couple of minutes in vi?

> A good UI would confine inbox use to unread message Opening a message would remove it from the inbox.

Hmm... All of my email stays in the Inbox until I've decided what to do with it. Just because I've read it doesn't mean I've finished dealing with it. Hiding emails from me just because I've touched it doesn't qualify as a good interface to me.

Agreed. My DE's panel gives me a nice little tab to get back to the Compose window after I've switched to other windows to select text to paste into the new email. Different strokes, I guess.

Amazon convinces FCC it can avoid space junk chaos

The FCC? What restrictions does the FCC have on the creation of space junk? Why isn't Amazon having to convince NASA -- or, perhaps, the DoD -- that their brazillion satellites aren't going to cause problems?

We blew too much money hiring like crazy so we gave you the boot – Amazon

Re: Happy New Year! You're fired!

"... and become a Trappist Monk where I can do no further damage."

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: "If it's old, it's obsolete; and if it's obsolete, it needs to die."

I've got a KIM-1 around here. Just needs a power supply. :D

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

I'm glad the article mentioned LG. They made a damned fine cellphone but decided that after 1-2 security updates, users weren't going to get any more. When I finally replaced my last LG, it had been over three years since the last updates. I suppose the security-aware cellphone user would simply dump the phone for a newer mode. And LG's response seems to have been "Too much trouble to provide updates. We're leaving the market." I'll be thinking twice before buying another smart-anything from LG.

IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

Re: Redundancy relocation

> If not, then that's one thing it has going for it. ... But just the one.

Heh. I still recall some older UNIX books having chapters or appendices devoted to the way certain aspects of the OS worked under AIX. Haven't touched the OS since the last employer that was running an RS/6000 and don't miss either at all.

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

While working for an aerospace firm back in the '80s, we were using so much DEC equipment that I wasn't surprised to find that there was actually an office where actual DEC employees worked.

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

> it may well be cheaper and more 'planet friendly' to drive twenty minutes to work and let your employer provide the heating and lighting

But for those of us whose commute can amount to well over an hour each way on most days, I'll eat a little extra heating and lighting (well not so much of that as my home office has Southern exposure) costs rather than spending upwards of two hours of each day behind the wheel in bumper-to-bumper traffic trying keep away from the dunderheads who find it necessary to drive 10-15MPH over the posted limit weaving in and out of traffic.

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

I and others in the family were each getting those calls a couple of times a week for a time. Until it failed to work following an Android upgrade, probably 90% of the numbers I was blocking with a spam blocking app were related to these car warranty come-ons.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: Sad state in academia

I had an Ultra 60 that I wound up getting rid of. Interesting to keep up-to-date on Solaris as we were transitioning to Sol10 at work but, to prepare for an upcoming move, it went out the door. It was a real power hog, too. I swear I could tell by looking at the spinning disk in the power meter on the back of the house that the Ultra 60 was powered up.

Re: Dissenting opinion: Nostalgia is a drug, kids...

> I had a roommate in college that kept a PDP-11/34 running, complete with a couple of RL-02 drives. He spent more time chasing up broken point-to-point wiring in the backplane than he did being logged in.

I worked with PDPs for a number of years and never once has backplane wiring problems. (Even made a change to the backplane wiring to support a static RAM card for an 11/70---no problems.) I have to wonder what the heck he might have been doing to create those.

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

Re: Not unusual

"Sorry about /your/ career, honey, but Elon wants me to move to Texas."

Re: Not unusual

> Anyway, I'm not familiar with the area where they are located but I understand the rents are prohibitive and I don't know how much of a misery commutes might be.

I used to have to spend time out at Moffett Field back in the '80s. Even back then the commute from our hotel in San Jose (anything closer would blow our daily stipend) could be 45 minutes or more in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I can't imagine those commutes have gotten any better though there always BART that some can take advantage of. I felt really bad for the FTEs who were commuting from Stockton (or farther) where they'd found affordable housing.

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: What do we expect?

Hmm... which quartile is most likely to hold the most institutional knowledge about a company and its processes? It'd be safe bet that the possessors of that knowledge skews heavily toward the group that the company wants to get rid of the most.

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

I'd go, but...

> who's going to go up and change that failed drive?

... I'm afraid, not being a former astronaut elected to the Senate, that I'd be deemed too old for the mission.

Open source community split over offer of 'corporate' welfare for critical dev tools

Is this really needed?

How will this new organization prevent something like the Solarwinds fiasco? Refresh my memory... Wasn't that the result of a corporate network security screw-up allowing black hat access to commercial source code?

Oracle's Larry Ellison shares fears of bankrupting Western civilization with healthcare

Re: records database for the United States

Yep. "federal database" will become "government takeover of healthcare" before you can blink.

Oops, web trackers may have leaked 3 million patients' info

Re: So nobody checked

In some manger's office the reaction was "Ooh! Shiny! Put that into production right away!" without asking any questions about whether the site was HIPPA-compliant.

I had software vendors issue upgrades/updates/patches back in the '90s that blew our HIPPA policies out of the water which, then, had to be re-implemented. It appears the idjits STILL haven't learned.

Nearly one in two industry pros scaled back open source use over security fears

Re: Real security professionals

It's not just OS security that's the problem. Years ago, I wound up discovering that the consultant that installed and did the initial setup of an enterprise batch processing system set it up so that all jobs ran as the application superuser. Apparently this "expert" had failed to read the fine manual about how to control access to batch jobs. The way it had been set up made it possible for anyone who logged in -- say, to restart a failed reporting job in the middle of the night -- to accidentally kick off a job that should only have been run by the DBAs. The fix was fairly simple and could have been implemented during the next scheduled downtime but was put on the back burner---indefinitely. One of those things that makes you go home and update one's resume.

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Re: Easy as solution

> DuckDuckGo is rubbish. It uses Google underneath so it’s results are basically crap

I thought DDG was using Bing for its searches.

Re: Konquerror

Despite having access to a slew of web browsers on Linux, I can remember one web site that only worked with Konqueror for the longest time (I think it worked with IE well enough). But it's been years since that was the case; AFAIK, the site is now inaccessible to Linux users. I don't even bother trying nowadays.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

> This doesn't happen on Linux forums.

Oh yes it does except on Linux fora it goes something like:

"You're using <some-non-Arch> Linux... you should install Arch Linux."

Re: The software conflict

> ... it's not a bug, it's an undocumented requirement...

We got one of those years ago after a hospital management software package "upgrade" that changed the password lifetime for every user account to 9999 days. After going through the two-inch thick pile of paper that was the release notes, I found that this change was never mentioned. A call to the vendor went something like "Why would you do that?" to which they responded "Oh... You've instituted an N-day lifetime to comply with HIPAA?" It turns out that they made that password lifetime change at the request of a *single* customer. That it was potentially rolled out to ALL customers lowered my already low opinion of the vendor. And I was left wondering if any other customers had noticed that their user accounts had been mucked with as part of an application upgrade.

So... as another user posted about "kids releasing any old crap" nowadays... hey, it's been going on for years and years.

Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam

Re: How to feel about this

> Send me a flyer through the post office, if it looks interesting I'll read it but email spam is already loathed, and you don't want a pissed off person whose vote you want to get reading your message.

Physical flyers cost money to print and send, even at the reduced rates they might receive. I'm positive that's why they pushed to be able to abuse Gmail.

> On the other hand, I am really looking forward to the backlash against gmail when the prime bullshit hits the fan.

Republican politicians will likely not care about the backlash and would surely complain mightily if their ability to get in voters faces/email accounts is disrupted in any way.

Re: You get what you pay for

> I’d never give my email address to a political party of any description. I use my own domain name for email. I give companies a unique address and if I get an unsolicited email to that address I know who it’s come from .

Gotta try giving politicians phony usernames as part of my email address. Postfix will simply drop their spam on the floor. I've tried going the unsubscribe route but it not 100% effective. (I could register a complaint somewhere about that but that takes time I'd rather use for something else.)

Re: Forward it on the FCC

> If you want to forward on the spam, it's the FEC you want. The FCC would just be confused.

Well, the FCC covers communications (including the Internet) so forwarding it to them might have an affect. If nothing else it might cause them to contact the FEC and asking "What the hell were you thinking?"

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

Re: Speech recognition...

> Early 80s, John and Stan did a demonstration of speech recognition at work...

A fellow undergraduate EE student used a low-cost speech recognition board to make a voice controlled waveform generator. It wasn't terribly sophisticated device but it was able to switch between sine, triangle, and square waves, adjust amplitude and frequency, etc. by voice command. While it was light years behind what Siri is able to do today he did this using an Altair in '77/'78.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: Sometimes, it's the little things.

If a VM like VirtualBox were not an option I would just soon install Cygwin/X than use the ridiculousness that is Putty.

Back-to-office mandates won't work, says Salesforce's Benioff

> A return to work mandate would be impossible without relocating most of the team.

Like that'll ever happen. Recall IBM's move that closed a lot of regional offices and mandated people move to certain cities in order to keep their jobs. Did any of them get moved on the IBM's dime?

And with the two-earner family being the norm nowadays, it's the height of arrogance for a company to tell an employee that their spouse has kill the career path they were on and go job hunting in a new city.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Digital transmission?

I still have LPs -- well over 1000 -- that I still play, including original release Beatles LPs that still sound great. Like I mentioned: proper record handling (learned from my Dad when I was a kid). I have even more CDs. Some of the them are re-releases of LPs that I have and some of them sound awful compared to the original LP. It's got nothing to do with analog vs. digital. It's the remixing that ruined the CD. Most peoples' complaints about LPs are about things that are due to their own lack of care. Those folks are better off with 128Kbps MP3s.

Re: That vinyl sound

Do you lose information? Yes. Is it information you can hear? Probably not. Our ears are low pass filters and most anything above 20KHz can't be heard... when we're young. As we age, most of us are lucky to be able to hear the frequencies in the upper teens. Doesn't matter if the source is analog or digital-to-analog.

Now the difference between MP3 and FLAC? Even my older ears can tell the difference in an A-B test. Unless that test takes place in a car hurtling down the highway with the windows down.

Re: That vinyl sound

> Why do all of the audiophiles agree that the vinyl sound is better? Perhaps it does but it's just a digital signal that has had some strange processing steps (not magic) added to it during the process of converting it back to sound.

Early CDs suffered from some recording techniques (miking, etc.) that made them sound pretty harsh (too /much/ high frequency content from what I've heard). Sound engineers learned their way around that problem. I was a fairly early adopter of CDs but never considered them to sound bad. The dynamic range was a joy and something that was rather rare from an LP w/o surface noise becoming distracting. Then record companies decided to compress the hell out of everything to make it sound louder. Maybe THAT's what the LP aficionados appreciate about their LPs: no compression.