Posts by Rosuav 50 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2007
This is why you should *always* have a transaction open. Oops, something went wrong... hit Ctrl-C, type 'rollback' if the SIGINT doesn't automatically roll you back, start again. If the worst comes to the worst, you just kill your client session and the server will automatically roll its transaction back. Of course, this does assume you're using a sane database engine; I use PostgreSQL, others also work, just avoid MySQL.
The BOFH clearly knows this, hence the explicit 'commit' to seal the assets' (and DBA's) doom.
I'm in favour of minimum password lengths rather than mandatory {digit, letter, symbol} rules, and strongly recommend that people use XKCD 936 compliant passwords. To people not in the know, it sounds like an internet standard on par with RFC 2822 or IEEE 754. To people who DO know what XKCD is, it's definitely an internet standard.
"... essentially a Cinderella technology--they've no idea how the technology works but they take it for granted until the midnight of its failure."
Your post has little to do with a BOFH article, but I do like this line, and I think I may be using it.
The article says that bignum systems are "... limited only by the computer system's available memory". Assuming that means virtual memory, that's true of most bignum systems. This guy went beyond that - it would take roughly 1TB of memory to hold the resulting number, and he had "only" 6GB. (And that's without taking into account that calculations at this precision require more than one number of this size.)
Don't tell me he had all that hard disk space as virtual memory, because I will find it hard to believe. To get that sort of performance, he'd almost _have_ to do it himself, rather than relying on the OS to page out the right parts of the number.
Impressive feat. Now let's see it put to some other use, because I'm sure he had one in mind before he started!
> Sorry, I haven't put anybody off their lunch, have I?
Nah. Anyone who is eating lunch while reading BOFH already knows what they're up for.
But I have to confess. "Two in one day" - I'd be satisfied with two in one fortnight - new episodes, that is. This is the correct standard, though!
codemonkey said: "This approach to sucking it and seeing is perfectly acceptable in terms of research. I've done it all my life...find the breaking point, know where the boundaries lie, and know when and how and if you can cross them. Makes 100% sense."
But you have an idea in your head of what the breaking point will look like. (Like, maybe, something actually literally breaking.) You still know beforehand how you'll recognize success/failure.
Nick said: That was laugh out loud funny - as in it made me actually laugh out loud, not just the "mildly amusing" which people usually mean by "laugh out loud funny".
Nick, your comment was "cackle out loud funny". As in, I read your comment, and I really did cackle. I don't know what anyone who has used that in any other context, and there's only a thousand Google results for "cackle out loud" (quoted), but whatever they mean, I probably didn't mean it.
... wait, since when was the BOFH anyone's friend? Ah yes, I remember. There was an episode in which that occurred... 2003, the BOFH-father. Yes. Alright, carry on!
Glad to see a new episode. And hey... it STARTS with user paranoia instead of having to CREATE it half-way through!
I have a roaming connection that consists of a USB GPRS modem (which sticks by velcro to the back of my laptop's lid). There is no way to install a hardware firewall. Four minutes? The first time I used this connection with a (throw-away) fresh, unpatched XP, it took somewhere between 20 seconds and 20 minutes to be compromised - I didn't time it properly. The second time, it took two minutes. Each time, that system got so infected that I didn't dare do ANYTHING serious with it, but just repartitioned and reformatted the disk as soon as I got home.
A hardware firewall / NAT router is probably 99% of the solution. If you have an unpatched Windows system, though - or even a patched one, though it's less critical there - a personal software firewall is a good way to protect against rogue code from web sites etc, and also helps contain problems if you do get them. It does help.
Yes, all operating systems get updates. If you don't like that idea, I'm sure someone can find you a copy of MS-DOS version 1; or maybe you'd rather go for QDOS? But Windows has a lot of problems that allow external attackers to take control of your system, whereas other operating systems have much less critical faults. I'd like to see anyone try to argue that Linux security holes are as much of a problem as Windows holes.
This is undoubtedly Unicode. Bytes per letter: 2. Double your size. (STILL doesn't make up enough space though.)
@ @ALL THE TROLLERS:
1) Some of us HAVE developed operating systems. Some of us may not have developed OSes, but we've developed applications that talk to the OS. And just a few of us might happen to know what we're talking about. Windows has a lot of ancient code and ancient backward-compat modes that mean that it really is a pest to work on.
2) 1GB free? That's actually plenty.... as long as you don't have a bloated OS. When I install a new eComStation system, I'll usually partition the disk with 1GB _total_ for the OS, including its default page file (which I move subsequently, but it fits happily into that gig). Usually, there's a whole lot of free space on that volume. I'm looking at a system here where the boot partition is on a dedicated 4GB drive; and there's 3.5GB free.
3) It's not a waste of energy to keep complaining about Windows. Apart from being highly satisfying, word sometimes gets back to the people who decide what OS you'll buy. Windows? Didn't my dev team give me fifty good reasons for not using it? Okay, let's get something else.
56MB is appalling for adding words to the dictionary.
It's definitely true. I can detect, from some distance away and across many noises, the sound of hard drive activity ceasing (which means the three-hour procedure has finished, yay) even if it's on the quietest drive in the building. Or the sound of a fan changing its note. If my brother's with me, he'll usually detect the same thing at the same time, and we'll both KNOW that the other has sensed it... leading to conversations as bewildering to outsiders as the BOFH/PFY one here. And the more crucial the situation, the less likely that anyone will get any information out of either of us.
And the boss.... fails the test. BAHAHAHAHAHA!
Laughed loudly enough to wake my brother.
RE: "It almost seems that the BOFH just sat back" - The BOFH and the PFY work as a team. They have a real partnership. A partnership of mutual respect and cooperation, working together toward a common goal. They always work WITH each other, never against each other - you'd never find the PFY stealing the money that the BOFH had hidden under the false bottom of the fire extinguisher, and you'd certainly never find the BOFH stuck in a darkened basement with a laptop as his only source of light AND his only hammer. Nor will you ever EVER find them electrocuting each other with cattle prods. Oh no. This is a genuine partnership.
Yeah, the PFY has had love interests at times. He usually loses them to the BOFH's interaction or his own geekiness, and then has periods of time when he's sensible enough not to replace them. I've never yet seen two consecutive BOFHs with one girlfriend across them, at least, not that I remember.
OS/2 lovers already know that eCS is alive and well; SimonT refuses to believe it. Situation normal, comments are as could be expected. :)
Sam - what I was referring to was the language, a link to the description of which has kindly been posted by David Ross Smith. (By the way, my title means "read from the keyboard".) Ook! is a Turing-complete language with only three syntax elements: Ook! Ook? and Ook. If you're not interested in esoteric languages, don't go within a mile of Ook! without a complete hazmat suit, lest your brain summarily explode.
Oh wait, that was Ook. Still, it's only half a token. How can I parse Ook. without a following token? You have to say Ook twice for each command you want to execute....
Okay, I'm not a Pratchett geek, I'm a programming languages geek. Feel free to return to your regularly scheduled... err um programming.
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