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Count to ten when a plane goes down

johncbeck.tumblr.com

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Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#111

Post by sp332 »

jessaustin wrote: post #76
viraptor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.

...the whole window with ctrl+q. OMG I've never done that but now that I know about it I'm very afraid. If I do it tomorrow I'm blaming you.

If you do this in Firefox, you can go to History -> Restore previous session. This will bring up all the tabs you had open last time it quit.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#112

Post by gridspy »

jjoonathan wrote: post #107
btilly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory. Anyone using the app would hate me.

Not as much as we hate the person who made the decision to prevent phones/computers from turning on immediately when the battery is empty, even if they're plugged in :P If I ever meet that person IRL... I might even go so far as to make a tasteless joke about committing physical violence in retaliation for the hassle they've caused me.

There are good reasons for this

- When the battery has just started charging, the voltage will not be high enough for the phone to actually work, because the draw from the battery exceeds the plug pack input

- Sometimes when transmitting, the phone uses more power for a fraction of a second than the power pack can deliver. This surge of energy could come from the battery, but the battery is empty so it won't work correctly

- Having some amount of battery means the phone can soft-off correctly when the plug is removed suddenly. The alternative is an un-expected hard off which is usually bad. The user might experience data loss.

There are a bunch of grey areas around low voltage, such as flash writes failing marginally or radio not working correctly or partial saves. Much easier for the engineers and perhaps more reliable for the users to make them wait just a little.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#113

Post by ck2 »

How about when Russia returned the data recorders after years of refusing to South Korea - made a press spectacle of it - and then South Korea discovered the recorders were empty and missing the data tapes when the press was gone.

Or the US navy crew who received medals after shooting down the Iranian airline.

Once there is loss of life, it is 100% politics afterwards with little to no practicality, just look at all the mass shootings where there were zero changes afterwards. We simply do not value life, it is politics first.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#114

Post by gry »

steven2012 wrote: post #83
smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

No, this isn't true at all. The power switch on the IBM PCs were way at the back so that people couldn't unintentionally reset the computer. The same thinking went into Ctrl-Alt-Del, which was a combination that people wouldn't accidentally hit. So having a system where F7 would reboot the entire system was pretty dumb, even in the early 80s.

I can't find information why the design(s) were as they were. The design of Ctrl-Alt-Del was intentionally unintentional.

Gates noted Ctrl-Alt-Del should have been one button, not three [1]. David Bradley, the inventor of the trifecta, did make it deliberately difficult to reboot, however, it was also originally an Easter Egg which made it to production [2].

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#History

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#115

Post by mathattack »

mikegreco wrote: post #4

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

Lots of fields are like that. You generally get paid better because of the risk. (I hope he was!)

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#116

Post by dkural »

tzs wrote: post #101
smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

Ahhh....the days of sharp tools, no failsafes, and young programmers or admins. I recall that time I wrote a batch manager for the VAX 11/780 at Caltech High Energy Physics. It consisted of a program to monitor the batch queue and start jobs as scheduled ("BATch MANager", or "BATMAN"), and a program for users to submit jobs ("Run Overnight Batch INput", or "ROBIN"). The configuration file for BATMAN was stored in /et…

One would think after the first two times you'd find a better way to do this, realizing your infrequent but habitual mistake. Why didn't you change any of your practices after the first two screw ups?

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#117

Post by yoblin »

grecy wrote: post #108
taylorbuley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!

I was leaving my old job and handing in my MacBook Pro. After getting permission from the network guys (who were going to format it anyway) I ran rm -rf / as root. It was surprisingly boring, taking a very long time to delete all my files (I should have deleted them first). Eventually it got around to deleting fonts, which caused things to render a little strange, but after 60 minutes nothing much had changed and it…

I did the same thing but had remotely SSH mounted some of our production servers.

Won't make that mistake again.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#118

Post by jfb »

jonreem wrote: post #54
graylights wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it. The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"

On any modern system it's actually "sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" and then entering your password while staring at the command. "rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root

Much, much, much the worse is "rm -rf ~ /blue". I don't give a crap about 99% of the stuff outside of $HOME, but of course, the stuff in $HOME is the stuff that's trivial to destroy.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#119

Post by djur »

pooper wrote: post #90
viraptor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This helps: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/customizable-... Also, I made a mistake, it doesn't close the window. It closes all windows at once. Be afraid!

ctrl + q very appropriately quits the application. If this came as a ticket to me, I'd close it as working as expected.

Traditionally applications have asked the user if they're sure they want to quit. That's a no-no these days, but it's still a reasonable choice in situations where the cost of quitting might be high (there's unsaved content, or the app takes a long time to start, or it's impossible to persist the current state of the application).

For some time, the Chrome team refused to implement a 'Sure you want to quit?' popup due to a general anti-popups consensus. They also refused to implement a checkbox to enable that behavior due to a general anti-configuration consensus. They've since relented on the latter.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#120

Post by vehementi »

smsm42 wrote: post #91
viraptor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response That's a dangerous way of thinking. 9/11 was big enough that it required a response. Not sure if we'll ever reverse the airport security stupidity that was such a response.

This is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment…

I never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.
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