Posts by jake

Re: hopefully prosecutions elsewhere too

PDNFTTs

ATdhvaannkcse.

Re: Congratulations you poor bastard

Not fake news. An in-joke.

I'm 100% Finn genetically, but 100% Californian by birth, and somewhat regrettably my sense of humor is roughly 20% Yorkshire.

Re: Congratulations you poor bastard

One other thing Finland gave us: Linux.

Yes, I know, Torvalds is Swedish. Well, he's a Yank now, but who's quibbling?

Re: Good

Depends. It worked for Reagan ... but then Nancy retained her marbles, and was quite intelligent. She wasn't a Soviet Bloc art-school drop-out, either.

Re: Looking forward to a China world

If not just a troll, this is the kind of abject racism that Trump supporters feed on. You should be ashamed of yourself.

There is no wall. Trump never built one. Just another campaign lie, one of many. (Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!)

What the fuck is a "militia police force", and what does it have to do with the much hated Bureau of Land Management supporters?

Re: Move over Kardashians

Drown themselves live on YouTube?

Re: Four more years

I don't know what game Trump plays, but it isn't golf. Golfers don't cheat at their game.

Re: Yay! Party time!

Wrong way of thinking about it. Remember, the Presidential candidate chooses his own running-mate, the Party as a whole doesn't get a say in the matter. Trump chose Pence because Trump knew that he could do almost anything with impunity without getting kicked out, as long as he had somebody even more batshit crazy than him as a cushion. See the impeachment, for example. By late 2019, even the Republicans were sick and tired of Trump's antics. If the Vice President was even close to being sane, Trump would have been removed from power last February.

Re: I'm fairly sure Senator Lindsey Graham has received appropriate guidance regarding US laws

The Constitution (Article VI, clause 3) sez:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Re: Yay! Party time!

Actually that was about a long-needed clarification of the law on succession. We've needed it for over a hundred years, but every time someone brings it up, someone else always feels that it'll take power away from them and so they object. Doesn't alter the fact that it's needed, though.

Even if it had passed this time around, it would not have been used on Trump, for the simple reason that nobody, not even most Republicans, wants to see that fucking nut job Pence in the Oval Office. He makes Cheney look like an educated, tolerant pussycat.

And anybody who thinks it had anything at all to do with Biden probably also thinks that X-files was a documentary.

Re: ...letting someone else carry the can...

"Vandalism? That's what poor people do."

Nah. These days destroying a city center is merely exercising your freedom of speech.

All I can say is that I'm glad the local nutcases are still up in their Summer homes in Portland & Seattle and haven't moved back to Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco for the winter yet. Hopefully the good weather will hold ...

Re: Joe and the Onion

"I want to know why."

Formosa's Law would be my guess.

Re: Yay! Party time!

Oh, please. That's one of the most half-witted bits of conspiracy bullshit I've heard in decades.

Re: Congratulations you poor bastard

Joe drink like Yeltsin? I seriously don't think that's a good idea. He's only Irish, they can't drink like a Russian .... That would take a Finn.

Re: And now for this...

Last time I checked (about ten seconds ago), the Senate hadn't been decided yet. Yes, I know, chances are it'll have a Republican majority ... but with the mail-in ballots favoring the Democrats (because Trump told all the Republicans they were "bad", despite the fact that Trump uses mail-in ballots ... there's a word for that, isn't there?), there is still a small chance they will gain the seats needed. I'm not holding my breath.

Re: One down ...

"Maybe even time to sort out his taxes?"

I think New York State has volunteered to help him with that.

Re: FCC

He's celebrating, too. Once out, he can collect his Industry payoff seats on the boards of the various corporations he helped.

Honestly, there ought to be a law ...

Re: Yay! Party time!

IF someone had both the inclination, and the ability, to fix the elections[0] in any way here in the United States, do you REALLY think they would have forgotten to also fix the House and Senate? Because here in the US, without those two, the President is pretty much nothing more than a figurehead, as Trump found out (thankfully).

[0] Yes, I said "elections". Plural. We didn't have just one, we had one for each State, and for a few territories, and the odd hanger-on.

Re: I'm sure everyone must have seen this.

And I'm sure Ian Dury would have been right chuffed ... but I'm fairly certain most around these parts would prefer a pint or three. Or a nice bottle of single malt. (That's a hint to Manglement, if any are reading this august organ.)

Re: Rain? Luxury!

The reason was because the place was originally built without (indoor) plumbing, and there was no other logical place to put the pipes. Sometimes sneaking even half inch copper[0] around joists, through walls and the like is a pain in the ass (arse, if you prefer). Figuring out where to run a huge 4" cast iron soilstack makes the outside walls look mighty attractive.

This is not unique to the Old World, BTW. Here's a lovely example in downtown Sonoma.

[0] Pex makes this almost an order of magnitude easier. I'll never run copper again, unless forced to do so by the building code.

Re: Low IQ or low volition?

"What do you think is a reasonable interval between reboots?"

Mine typically only get rebooted when required following a patch, usually in the kernel (just about anything else can be restarted without a reboot) ... and then only during a routine maintenance window, unless it's security related.

Re: Anybody who identifies as a BOFH is a legend in their own mind.

I've been staying away from Windows for about 11 years now ... Slackware on the desktops, BSD on the servers. But thanks for the suggestion ... others would do well to heed your advice!

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

BOFHs, when you boil it down, are just operators. Operators are, in general, the most junior of IT staff, not even allowed to access corporate data. Anybody who identifies as a BOFH is a legend in their own mind.

Except the San Andreas isn't a subduction zone.

TRANSFORM FAULT - CORE DUMPED

Attempt to re-map already mapped territory through right-lateral strike-slip.

Re: I wonder..

My biggest one[0] was in the late '80s and involved running a script (as root, and from /, of course) that copied all my lovingly compiled ELF system binaries and attendant source and config files onto a production system that was pure COFF ... OOOPS!!! doesn't quite cover it :-)

I had been watching the production system for a couple days for something unrelated, and the server name, Pluto, was in my head. The test system that I was aiming for was Goofy ... Mea Culpa. Production systems are now named after something related to the business at hand, test systems are science related, and my personal stuff is allowed to be more whimsical.

And all such scripts are now hard-coded with the proper names.

I've made similar, smaller mistakes since, of course. I'm only human. A good sysadmin knows how to recover from luser error quickly ... especially his/her own!

[0] Other than dropping the odd hand-truck full of card decks ... and I once backed a forklift over the only known copy of a boot tape for a rather proprietary bit of kit ... fortunately it was still running, and I managed to generate a new tape before anyone important noticed.

A similar tale ... One that happened to a friend down at IBM Almaden ... Running late to get out the door (baseball game was due to start), he accidentally entered something along the lines of rm -rf / tmp (note inadvertent space). At approximately 5:04 PM local time on the 17th of October, 1989. About one millisecond later he realized what he had done. About one microsecond after that, the Magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake hit, with the epicenter approximately 14 miles to the South South West.

The SCSI drive, which, in his words, "was happily losing it's tiny little mind, and destroying mine alongside it" suffered a hard crash before the power went out. Seems that even high-end SCSI drives don't like imitating a pogo stick when the heads are moving around frenetically. DriveSavers in Marin managed to salvage most of the drive, thus saving a high-temp superconductor project over a year of data. Drivesavers didn't volunteer that the command had been run, so he didn't lose his job ... but his entire department got yelled at for not having a proper off-site backup strategy in place.

Re: Should ..

No. Just no.

Re: That's interesting

"Maybe it needs an "Are you sure you really want to fuck the network completely? (y/N)" prompt"

No. That way lies madness. Where do we draw the line on commands that require a yes or no to proceed? What about in scripts/aliases? Etc.

Re: That's interesting

"That doesn't sound like a useful thing to me."

Then don't use it to do that. SImples.

Note that you can do the exact same thing with perl. Or C. Or assembler.

Re: I wonder..

Whimsy in naming things like this has been common since at least the 1960s. It's one way that grad students attempt to remain sane in a rather stressful time of life. Some make it out of the lab, some don't, alas.

"Are there other sysadmin type commands that can total a network or computer"

Almost all of them, when used (im)properly. This is why important systems shouldn't allow users to run as root.

Re: As a field engineer (hardware only)

As a consultant, I can corroborate John's commentary.

I know a gal who is absolutely convinced that her stash of over 5500 Beanie Babies (and climbing) will be worth tens of millions of dollars when she is ready to retire.

Re: Colouring books

It might as well be the name of a frat ... it's certainly not English. Nor is it Latin.

I dunno about that ...

I know of two wrecked, gas powered Lotuses which have been rebuilt using scrapped first gen Teslas. Proper Lotus parts are hellaciously expensive, Tesla parts not so much.

Re: My mother

"Most can not understand that the English language is so called because it reached them from England."

It's not our fault we speak it the way it was spoken when we bailed out, while you lot have, over time, perverted the beauty of the language.

Re: My mother

"Don't forget that they are Murkans, and so know nothing about geography."

You Brits aren't exactly immune to this kind of thing ... A friend of mine's Wife was absolutely certain that London was south of where they lived, because "my Uncle lives in South Kensington, which is near London" ... Their abode? Croydon.

Another example: This Yank workedvolunteered[0] as a tour guide in York during his time in Yorkshire. You wouldn't believe how many British folks asked where "Old York" was ... usually while standing in The Shambles or in the castle or on the wall. Their logic was that they were in York, they knew of New York, so there must be an Old York, right?

[0] It was part & parcel of the archeological work I lucked into helping out with.

About three years ago my large animal Vet came in with a funny bit of advertising. This guy's in his second career, he became a Vet after 25 years as a DBA working for IBM. He knows I'm a computer guy, and thought I'd be amused. The ad was for a large animal veterinary practice management software package "NOW WITH AI!!!"

The Vet was laughing, and wondered how many times the company in question got Vets inquiring about their new Artificial Insemination package. Without a pause, I dialed the 800 number ... the answer was over 80% of calls! The guy on the other end wasn't amused when I suggested they fire their marketing genius and hire an AI expert ...