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Count to ten when a plane goes down

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Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#71

Post by Florin_Andrei »

fekberg wrote: post #28
mullingitover wrote: post #11

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…

> 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?

To err is human. To push the error to thousands of instances online at once - that's devops.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#72

Post by SolarNet »

gambler wrote: post #62
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…

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…

I think he was pointing out why it was built that way, not why it was that way. Today we know it is a false dichotomy, he was pointing out, back then, the world thought it wasn't.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#73

Post by jauer »

mullingitover wrote: post #11
feld wrote: post #2

Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.

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?

It could very well have been a minicomputer system where he was on the operator console and the other "computers" were terminals.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#74

Post by jasonwocky »

mikegreco wrote: post #9
pfisch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was probably fired because they realized they couldn't put a summer intern in control of such a critical system. I would make the same call.

If you go with this line of reasoning, whoever put him in that position should also be fired, and their boss should be fired for putting someone in charge who made such a poor decision in the first place.

The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss.

e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that.

In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#75

Post by thefreeman »

viraptor wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#76

Post by jessaustin »

viraptor wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#77

Post by thefreeman »

baddox wrote: post #36
marbletiles wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But typing "rm -rf /" is significantly harder to do accidentally than typing F7 instead of F6.

Not really, on my keyboard at least / is directly next to . and you could feasibly be clearing out a directory or something with rm -rf .

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#78

Post by discardorama »

feld wrote: post #2

Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.

It's easy to have this attitude now. But if you ask people who were in IT 30 years ago, they'll tell you that systems in those days had _many_ sharp edges. You were expected to know your way around, and the consequences of mistakes were pretty severe.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#79

Post by jzwinck »

australis wrote: post #68
svachalek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The / key was right next to Enter on a lot of old keyboards. It was quite easy to type 'rm -rf /tmp/garbage*' and have a simple fumble turn it into 'rm -rf /'. I mean, there's this guy I know, he did that once.

There's also the chance of it happening when writing a script Such as this classic: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...

Ten years prior to that, Apple had a similar bug in one of its installer scripts on OS X. I have a hard time finding much about it online now, because it happened at a time when OS X and the Internet were a lot less popular than today, but what I recall is that an unexpectedly customized installation directory (say with spaces or one level closer to "/" than the default) would cause the installer to delete a whole lot of things.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#80

Post by viraptor »

thefreeman wrote: post #75
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.

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.

> 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.

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