Posts by ttlanhil

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: I did.

By standard Roman numerals rules, yes.

Historically, no, IIII has been common.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Hilarious!

For some approaches, yes, it's hard (in large part because of the placebo effects).

If you just want to test the effectiveness of 1 dose of placebo per day vs 3 doses per day? That's trivial (you can't blind such an experiment, of course, but you can still get interesting results)

Re: Hilarious!

Red ones should act faster, Shirley?

But medical studies into placebos have also found that larger doses of placebo have a larger effect - taking more of them, or more often, or larger pills - it all adds to placebo effect

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: With 20 digits

That's if you treat each digit as binary.

You can count higher if you extend it a bit - each finger can be fully closed, partly open (i.e. the finger joint connecting to the hand is opened, but all joints in the finger closed), or fully open.

That said - I don't know many people who can individually control all of their toes, so you probably can't rely on even binary there (or possibly treating it as 2 digits per foot - big toe, other toes, I suspect many people can do that much)

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

As a proud KDE user...

Compared to other full DEs (gnome, windows, whatever), no, it's not.

Compared to the DEs designed to be much more lightweight and less featureful? Sure, for users who want that, it's resource hungry by comparison

Compared to KDE of 30 years ago? The amount of RAM KDE is using today would be very expensive last millennium :)

But also... Tweaking it to be less resource hungry can mean turning off some of the 3D effects and the like - if you don't have a half-decent graphics card from the last decade, then that could well be draining on your system

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Shirley it would have made more sense to be System32_86 so you can also offend the WinNT/Alpha folks (or more recently, Windows on ARM)

Owning your own system is irrelevant for 99% of users. Sure.

Being allowed and able to do the things you want/need to do, without being blocked by MS (or Apple, or Google, or...) policy, adverts, LLM interjections, etc...

That's for everyone

A slight reframe, and it shows your conclusion is misguided

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

People, corporations, and other organisations have been challenging laws of countries for rather a while, now...

Re: since when?

It's not part of the election process, but it's part of the political landscape (anywhere people discuss politics is)

For good or bad (1), social media & forums and the like are one of the places people can discuss, debate (2), and become more informed (3)

The alternatives are only local discussions (your friends & family, mostly), or the corporate mass media

Both of which have other problems

Footnote 1: let's be honest, it's really both - the ratio depends on which platform, and in the case of reddit, which subs you read

Footnote 2: sometimes the debate is even respectful

Footnote 3: occasionally upgraded to "well-informed"

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: "I can understand why he wanted to maintain uptime on the mail server,"

grEy if you're speaking English

grAy if you're speaking American

Apart from when it's a name, they're (in-practice) interchangeable, but if you want to spell the colour correctly, that's the hint as to which is which

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: call the dB person

not necessarily - maybe their script does updates that fail in a way that doesn't abort further processing

Trying to update a transactions (the financial kind) table and throwing an error per row could easily do that

Or worse yet, a retry loop with no limit or delay...

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

The first timestamp is in PDT, so the 3:01 is as well (unless marked otherwise, which it isn't)

Although it seems like much of the world operates (or not, recently) on US-EAST-1 time, so...

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Hows that!

Have you tried sharpening your canteen?

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

Re: Bah!

Depends.

Sometimes people would rather interrupt other people than read themselves, even when they're ostensibly the expert (but don't like reading)

someone who has a habit of asking you to read the manual for them (and should know better) can be told to do their own job

Other times, techy people aren't great at the people skills, but somehow end up getting pestered by users

And sometimes, people are just rude and/or elitist

Re: The books

It is - if colleagues think you're weird for reading the documentation, it means you have a low standard of colleagues (unless they thought it weird you'd do it as homework rather than during office hours, that's a different matter)

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Huh ?

If you're talking DNS for external use (public sites, VPN users, etc) then I'll agree with what you've said

If it's DNS for just the local network, and you're not a huge site, then not necessarily

Use-case matters a lot

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Some greybeards...

I can think of a few ways a game could cause it to be slow.

When not running, it could be because it's taking up a lot of disk space or there were system config changes (uninstalling fixing the problem means it wasn't config)

When running, CPU/RAM/etc as well

Any greybeard who didn't check disk space, free ram, and cpu usage - when trying to figure out why a system is slow - should have retired long ago

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

The last day of the working week is virtual or logical Friday, even if it's not calendar Friday.

All Friday rules still apply!

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

> I know a guy who works as a tester, and is quite proud that he can break things, and find flaws where others cannot. Isn't that, erm, part of your job?

Sure, that's the job, but nothing wrong with taking pride in being good at it!

As a programmer, a tester who can find all those edge cases (and communicate them clearly) is very useful

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

You can also just log out of your GUI and back in, and you should get almost all of the same benefits (e.g. if menu rebuild only happens on login) - as the app launcher belongs to the DE, not the OS

It's only if there's kernel/modules/init changes (or services that are enabled but not started) that a full reboot is required (barring live kernel updates which exclude even kernel - the rest theoretically can be updated in place)

Depending on $things and $stuff, logging out & in to the DE might not be significantly faster than a full reboot though

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Re: Absolutely brilliant

If I remember correctly... It was actually the CEO, although that's from stories pre-y2k

Directors don't get replaced as often as managers, but also IIRC it has happened a few times since then

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: You can even sign in...

It might not have even needed much lobbying - the insurance industry likes being able to quantify risks, and Google/MS authentication is a reasonably well known and predictable risk level for them.

And there's a lot of work that goes into securing auth on those platforms - certainly there are problems, but even specialists like Okta have had breaches, so I can understand that viewpoint

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Re: One of my favotire tools

> Not sure why you got a load of downvotes for this

I wasn't one of them, but I'd assume for listing windows tools; this is el reg, after all...

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: "They also didn't understand time zones very well."

Some don't even know how their own time zone works

I've had some US clients request a meeting at a certain time US EST, when they're in daylight saving time - thinking it's the same thing...

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

And for many it's a source of sunlight

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: A number of things wrong with this account

As other have said above - it's a Python of the Monty kind (if you read through carefully you'll find that it's actually explained)

If OPERATOR was the account name, then yes it narrows it down a lot; if it's just the job title of the computer operator then not so much

And of course a script can be corrupted when sending to another person, particularly when it's a joke script that gets corrupted by the jokester sending it to someone else.

Hard to say exactly how it happened (maybe, just maybe, it was done with a text editor), but it certainly can

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

I'd suggest also the "engineers" who did multiple replacements without identifying a problem...

Second NHS IT system confirmed to be affected by CrowdStrike issues

Re: Which Windows PCs are effected and should you turn on your PC!

If you aren't using CloudStrike Falcon, then you're not at risk of this bug hitting your system.

But we're never really safe :)

A data file with an invalid format can cause a driver to crash badly enough to take out the entire OS?

And this file (and those drivers) got pushed out around the world by a big player in the *security* space?

Fascinating...

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Re: Weird..

Yeah, I know, just another mistake that ended up affecting huge numbers of people.

Hence the trollface icon

Re: Weird..

What makes you think no-one planned this cascading failure?

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: So, to the unfamiliar…

Yes, security on those old systems was poor. But the idea of multi-user and having some sort of isolation (and access control) was being worked on.

There's always been a conflict between security and usability (if it's done well, you can get a fair bit of both, but that takes skill and effort)

MS doesn't exactly have a track record of focusing on security - but if they did, random other corporations couldn't, say, install kernel code - and that'd upset a lot of people too (anti-cheat rootkits, for example)

Re: Related?

A driver is for things like hardware.

e.g. if your sound drivers fail, you can just lose audio rather than killing the system.

drivers are not for security (well, there are hardware security tokens, but that failure will fail correctly)

And external companies injecting code into the kernel for security? yeah, we have an example today of why that's not ideal

Re: Chief Threat Hunter?

Who's this "Hunter" chap, and how'd he get such a cool title?

Re: So, to the unfamiliar…

That's only part of it.

Going back through the years, they've always prioritised making things easier for people over good security.

Which did work, as it helped with the spread of computers and with making them more money

But we're continually seeing the downsides

Windows started as single-user & standalone. You didn't really need that much in the way of security (until sneakernet virii, but that's a bit later).

As opposed to "real" OSes that started out with some sense of being multiuser (primitive and broken though it was have a century ago)

It's changed a lot over the years, but you can still see some of the legacy of those early days

Re: Related?

It'd be possible to have a kernel that can catch a subset of crashes in kernel space (and maybe eject a driver or something), but more to the point:

kernel crash means a bug in kernel space.

Either MS's code has bugs itself, or has a security hole that allows other software to crash the kernel (yes, in reality it's both).

Unless you're using a non-MS kernel, MS has something to do with this.

And yes, the same could happen with other kernels, sure, but it usually happens with Windows

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Re: "300-odd sales agents realized the scripts they were reading to prospective customers"

A lot of them probably didn't care - but it's also possible that they've had an Edict from On High that any deviation from the script means a write up and loss of pay...

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

> 1) stop the auto run on CD drives (&usb) - probly done 15 years too late just before they went obsolete

CD/DVD would be obsolete. USB thumbdrives are now approximately uncommon, but not obsolete and will be a security concern for a while yet...

Not that rare - if you barely used it for anything and it wasn't left running for long, even older versions of windows would work reliably

e.g., for all of the executives who had to have the most expensive computer because it was expensive, and it only got turned on when they summoned a new pleb to install upgrades in order to keep it expensive...

I dare say that could have been much more common than WinNT/Alpha...

Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe

Re: but include a button for opening the page in the associated app instead.

Are you asking about the advantages for the website, or the user?

Depending on the app, there definitely are some, for both

E-commerce websites definitely don't need an app, but things like maps (set up to have a widget, directions on lock screen, etc) or media players (allowed to play in background, etc) have a use-case.

If most of the data and files are static (or rarely changing, or you want them offline) then an app is an advantage (both to you, since it loads faster & offline, and to the site since it drops data costs)

for a good app performance should be a lot better too

Plus for the website, there's some ego trip, but also having the icon on your phone's home screen is bonus advertising every time the user notices it

For most apps I actually want, there's no adverts anyway (some do it, but unless you install an alternative browser on your phone you'll still get them in the website as well)

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

Re: I'm so happy that I got lucky 30 years ago ...

> It could have been yours, too.

Indeed, it was (first Linux distro, I had played a bit with gnuwin and cygwin(*))

30 years... Nostalgia sure aint what it use to be

I didn't start at the start, but it wasn't much later - now I'm wondering which version I started with..?

Initially thought it might be 3.0, but I think I remember compiling to a.out files as well, so could have been 2.3...

Ahh, the days of running off of 2 floppies (because the hard drive had windows installed) - one to boot (with kernel) and one for userspace (including X86, I think - or maybe that was later and a 3rd floppy?)

I learnt a lot from that, but eventually got tired of having to figure out changes to config files (particularly X.conf) most updates (config files weren't managed - if you unpacked the one in the .tar.gz over the one in /etc you had to reconfigure it - and I hadn't yet figured out diffing and merging local changes with upstream)

Footnote: I thought I had played with cygwin for a while before slackware, but wikipedia tells me cygwin came out in 95, so maybe it was just gnuwin before and cygwin in parallel...)

Re: Great liberators ??

It is relevant for a lot of their customers though - American companies will prefer to buy from other American companies(*)

Is it relevant in regards to if companies will pay for a sysadmin team that can manage it themselves rather than rely on support contracts?

harder to say...

Footnote: A few $JOBs ago, we had ecommerce clients from around the world.

Nearly all in the US were running IIS, most everywhere else were Apache (nginx was only starting to come in)

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Surely the ones working on the server should be left alone, and the electricity supplied to all the shoulder-surfers and manglement interrupting to ask why it's not fixed yet?

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Did someone miss hear "thou sand" and think they were being called a beach?

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Google suggests the 7 day week came about from Sumerians counting quarters of the lunar cycle (so it's a quarter lunar-month rather than a set number of days, but comes out the same)

All the caveats about a quick googling and veracity of history of course :)

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

I'd say in the Unix command line philosophy, each app can be the master of one skill - not a mere jack (there are apps that do things badly, and there are apps that do a lot, but for most common tasks there's one tool that does that thing well).

And you control how they interact pretty easily, as opposed to having to set up linking requests/etc with modern apps

That makes a big difference!

I'm a KDE user rather than Gnome - there's a bit of it in the KDE world.

It's there in app composition (e.g. anything that needs text editing - from notes up to an IDE - can embed the text editor part and it uses same keyboard shortcuts, spellchequer, etc, in all apps)

It's there in places like I/O (text editors can open a file on a remote server over SSH if you want, since it's a set of io access plugins)

And of course in calling other apps. If the app doesn't have its own webview, then clicking a link can launch the system web browser. Or similar for downloads. But that much is common on most (all?) DEs

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: Proton Mail

It may have been less than "mere hours".

Quite possible the address was already getting intermittent spam before you signed up, then once the email address went live and the mailserver stopped saying "recipient not found" - joy of joys for a spambot, a fresh inbox detected!

Of course it's also possible there's other ways spammers can find out - like if they offer a bit of free hosting space, and people can check the directory of ftp://homepages.$isp.net/

Or something more mundane like the ISP added the email address to the email service their marketing people use for promotional material - and they selected one of the cheaper providers...

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: But it's in the contract

Well, if they're willing to pay enough to move a continental plate or two...

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

Re: No real surprise

Credit where it's due: when you leave your desk for a meeting often little work gets done!

Meta physical: Facebook parent to open its first real-world store

the US giant's Portal smart home devices

Can they make cake?