31–40 of 284 posts
I disagree that it was appropriate that you were fired, but interesting story all about.
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.
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
It is definitely a problem with Unix also.
Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
It is possible there was a warning for both functions and the operator just acknowledged the warning assuming it was for the single reset without reading it. This is a common problem with warning too often in interfaces.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except he didn't know there was a breaking news situation. He said pushing the wrong button wouldn't normally be a big deal.
He said he came in to find the system running, and the only time that happened was when Washington was waiting for info. And even if you don't buy that, if pushing the button's not a big deal it doesn't need all the safeguards everyone's yelling for. (Had such safeguards been in place he might equally well have seen them, thought "oh, nobody's in, this will do what I want anyway" and approved it).
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.
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
"I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before it does what I told it to do! Piece of junk."
The result was that software in that era tended to come with a lot more sharp edges. The age of the Recycle Bin that would save you from yourself didn't arrive until administering systems became something the general public was expected to do.
Incidentally, "features" like this are why I don't trust systems that have some centralised control - IMHO giving any one individual (or organisation, in many cases these days) such power over others is not a good thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stole the words right out of my keyboard. Who puts the 'reset every workstation in the building' button right next to the 'reset just one workstation' button with no confirmation prompt?
He might have been that times IT Administrator? We've come a long way over these past 30 years, but think about it for a second, if you're an IT Administrator today handling all the office machines, you probably have the power to click 1 button to turn them all off? (Depending on the setup of course..) There's obviously more access rights involved today. Doesn't answer "who" put the button in there, I'm just thinking…
Even if I have the authority to press the big red button, I'd like it to be behind glass and far from the light switch.