Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
Think about the resource constraints of systems back then.
Count to ten when a plane goes down
121–130 of 284 posts
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
...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.
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 typically preserves the session though, so all non-ajax sites will come back as they are, including partially filled forms.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#123Earlier 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…
Another alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that ev…
Whenever I implement a bulk delete feature I tell the user how many records they're about to delete and ask them to type it back in.
If it's possible they're trying to delete data from the wrong place (say, an administrative account that manages many customers) another safeguard is to have them select the name of the context (customer name, etc.) out of a list of four or five nonsense alternatives.
The user experience tends to involve a lot of double takes and rereading, which is precisely what I want.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#124Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
I don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition. Or just the old rm -rf / Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.
`parted` always makes me nervous. It's probably not so bad but the changes are instant.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again.
Personal experience tells me this is not always true.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is. Which is why everyone in Unix who types "rm -rf " then types their next character _very carefully_ and reads the line before committing. I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.
The proper answer is to type "rm -rf" otherwise you're risking a stray strike on enter.
The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#127Earlier 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.
Personally I agree. Mistakes happen, everyone has accidentally hit the wrong key at one point or another in their life. I was pretty surprised how seemingly fine he was with being fired. At the same time, I guess the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response, and it has been about 30 years since it happened.
IMHO, firing someone who owns up to a keystroke mistake like that is wrong. Good managers fix the problem, weak managers fix blame.
Root cause analysis + countermeasure might have boiled down to "operator error due to shitty interface" + "we will tape a guard over F7 key, since it will never ever get fixed in software"
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#128Earlier 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.
I've done it enough times that I was finally motivated to figure out to set browser.showQuitWarning=true in about:config.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
are you that angry co-admininstrator ? just curious
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're invoking an annoying and ridiculously overused false dichotomy that is as false today as it was 30 years ago. An interface that has fail-safes does not have to be annoying and clunky. In fact, interfaces that are annoying and clunky are a great contributor to human mistakes, because they require a lot of rote action, which encourages people not to pay attention and work on auto pilot. If something has changed…
You know, I think that was the point of the comment. I might just be reading it wrong, but it seemed to me that he was decrying such interfaces, using obviously hyperbolic language like "pointless time-wasters" (in the context of something other people believed) and "the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds". It sounded to me like he was even slightly making fun of that worldview.
You are correct, making fun of it was my intention. I suppose next time I will have to hang a "WARNING: SARCASM" sign on my comment, to make sure everybody gets it :-D