The fucked-up part is employers will still hire Gen Z (or whatever the fuck they're called) over highly skilled Gen X because employers think that Gen Z are harder workers and not over-entitled and self-important cunts -- which they are.

Also, they can't code for shit, have never heard of Linux, and their entire lives revolve around spending endless amounts of time on Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else is presenting Short Attention Span Theater that day. Skills and experience? Yeah, OK, Boomer.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Motorola used Linux company-wide for firmware development in 1992? That's not impossible, but seems pretty unlikely. Of course, "Linux" might just be laymen for "a Unix."

I don't disbelieve the story, since his primary thing was social engineering, but I don't know if I buy the "I was going to hack the firmware on my phone to fool the feds" angle. He would need their tool chain to build it and then a way to get the modified firmware on the phone. Back then a commercially available handset was probably not field programmable. I don't know that he's been connected to any particular technical hacking achievements.

I think his stories need to be taken with a grain of salt. Plenty of truth, but also exaggeration and self-promotion.

In 2018, 100% of supercomputers run Linux.
actually you'll have to go back more than 10 years to see even slight share of other OSs :
https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/
(choose Category "Operating System Family" and Submit)

Right on, it's running Linux!

Sometimes I'm very glad that I live in a country that generally doesn't give a f@$% about US Copyright and Intellectual Property.

Since that is the case, and because I also happen to derive some schadenfreude-esque pleasure from the "Streisand effect", I have decided to download and seed for the foreseeable future the 6GB worth of files for the last version of Stage 9 before the shutdown, including Windows, Linux, and VR variants.

Anyone interested in following suit can use this magnet link, although there is potential for ISP strikes/warnings if you live in the US or other places where they have a less laissez-faire approach to these things than in Thailand (where I live).

Fair use needs protection. When that fails, at least one can assist with unfettered use, even if the powers that be claim that use is illegitimate.

I am in the lounge and I'm having issues submitting text. I put words in the box and hit enter on pc or in lounge hit send and get nothing. How did you do it? I had the same problem on my Mac. I am weaning off of Apple(Just purchased a Dell) and I am trying to understand Windows 10. Later I plan to be using Linux.

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

To be fair, prior to the Windows 10 upgrade spam "updates" in Windows 7, one could generally trust Windows updates to be in the best interest of the user to install.

Then those came around, and suddenly Micro$oft got caught doing blatantly shady things and passing them off as "critical updates". "Get Windows 10" nagware, telemetry, "genuine advantage", etc. that snuck in by being as vague as possible in KB entries, sending the updates multiple times, and/or unnecessarily combining elements that users might have legitimate reasons to NOT want along with updates that actually were actually important.

I was running Windows 7 and made an informed decision to avoid Windows 10 (because I didn't want telemetry, don't approve of the "cloud" / seeing the OS as a licensed rental paradigm vs owning it, trend towards walled garden, etc.). Then one day I got the "GWX" Windows 10 update nagware through an update. I discovered how to disable / remove that, and started to scrutinize the updates more closely, but a while later it snuck back in and made me aware of M$'s attempts to hide it and get it on to ALL Windows machines.

For a while I continued to run Windows 7, while attempting to be vigilant about picking and choosing updates to keep those things I found undesirable out. After Windows 10 came out, in some ways that got even harder because they started trying to backport the telemetry etc. into 7. Eventually, I gave up and turned off updates altogether.

By that point, I had gone from checking in with Linux as a hobby once in a while to using it as my daily driver for all mission-critical stuff, along with any computer usage that generates personally identifying data (web browsing / banking / etc.). I keep Windows around purely for games that don't run well or at all in Linux. So, I don't care much about any vulnerability to ransomware or whatever as a result of not updating. All data that needs to be protected is on an ext4 Linux partition on a different physical drive and/or machine that Windows has no access to, so worst case scenario I lose saved games and have to reformat and reinstall Windows for games.


I wouldn't want to be doing important, work-related stuff like rendering on an un-updated Windows machine like the guy in the video, but on the other hand a big chunk of that is Micro$oft's fault for abusing the whole update process to put in stuff that benefits THEM rather than USERS.

Linux is free.

Linux. I'm on Linux Mint, but lots of good options out there.