allegory

Well the bash vulnerability and then immediate disclose of another vulnerability makes that statement pretty moot.

We also have deeply layered non-hetereogenous kit so you have to punch hard to get through it all to something useful.

To be fair, it's pretty expensive breaking them into chunks and packaging them individually and they're turned pin ones by the looks. This isn't massive production run bags of them.

Sounds like you need to see the optician. I had the same trouble and they sorted it :)

Anecdote. I had a 2011 MBP with backlit keyboard. Never used it once. In fact, the machine ended up with windows on it because MacOS made me want to smash the thing (despite being a Unix guy) and the Boot Camp drivers didn't switch the backlight off reliably which annoyed the crap out of me.

If you're sitting in a place dark enough to need it, it's not good for you staring at the contrast between the screen and darkness so turn the light on.

Plus I don't look at the keyboard anyway.

This is one of the reasons why we fished out for 3x full racks at different DCs and bought our own kit. It's always our schedule.

Or just buy an older ThinkPad X201 / X220 / T410 with 1440x900 display and get a new 9-cell battery.

The things are really cheap, have a proper keyboard, are bomb proof, every part is replaceable for minimal cost, they are 100% supported by all operating systems, have excellent docking support and you can just sling them in your bag. Mine lives down the back of the sofa cushions when not in use.

I knackered the headphone port on mine from overuse. 5 mins on ebay, £7 spent, new board installed in 5 mins with a Philips screwdriver and the service manual.

For every day tasks, I use an i5 X201 with 8Gb of RAM and a Samsung 840 Pro and it's no different to the stacked HP Z620 I have in the office to use. If I need more power then I use that remotely.

Totally awesome machine and I paid virtually nothing for it.

PC tech is moving so slowly now it's a better investment to buy two older machines so you have a backup unit than one new one if you ask me.

Great point. One that pains me terribly.

Whilst not quite PDP11/VAX territory (I do love VAXstations though!), the killer for me was I bought a low end Sun Ultra 30 in 1999 just before they EOL'ed them and spent 3 years slowly upgrading it. Spent about 4000 GBP on it in total.

Still felt faster then than the i5 X201 ThinkPad on my lap today. Everything was smooth as butter, even though it was Solaris 2.6.

That's usually part of the ETL pipeline. If you look at SSIS and spring integration for example it has the ability to do this in the pipeline.

Spot on.

This is not hard work. I'm not sure exactly what was being done that made this take more than an hour.

On our kit, which is pretty hefty, I'd schedule a 30 minute window for a 150Gb ETL even with heavy transformations.

When we moved our stuff from Mongo to SQL Server it took an entire 6 minutes to drag 30Gb over including SQL full text. That was a 16 core Xeon with 64Gb of RAM and 15K SAS RAID 10 so not a big machine either.

Very true. My simplified one on the parent comment of that one makes no attempt to involve Unicode or character ranges for precisely that reason!

Very good points there. I worked for an aerospace and defence company for a bit as an electrical engineer. Our software was always read into RAM, checksummed, the RAM was write protected via a register and only then the code was executed. The bootloader was a mask ROM. That was all just to work around the possibility of bit flips in EPROMs.

This. I've had several smartphone devices over the years and not one has been bent in my pocket, even when I sit on it. I don't expect it to happen, even on a premium device.

Yes; I get told that every time I mention it :-)

I use a slightly more complex variation of that:

   ^.+@.+\..+$

Works wonders. I think when testing the addresses on a sign up form, we got only 0.5% that we couldn't relay too which was a pretty good hit rate.

Not the only one. Someone set up NHibernate on a project I was working on to run logging in DEBUG mode and throw it in a log file capped at 100k. Pages were taking 4-5 seconds to render. Wasn't obvious that the logs were being written as the file was capped at 100k.

Took ages to work that out.

Ugh.

Decent quality hard disks and DLTs will probably be fine. I've had DLTs survive 100oC for over an hour inside a fire safe in a fire and some old Seagate Cheetah 10K U160 SCSI disks in an external SCSI case with a dead fan running at 80oC for a month quite happily. The latter was actually running and operational which is remarkable.

Some optical media will fail. It doesn't even have to be kept at 75oC from experience.

Flash will almost certainly fail (leakage increases with temperature). I've had dead CF cards, USB sticks, SD cards, the lot and corruption after only a couple of years stored in ideal conditions. Then there's the old Sun PROM crapfest to consider as well...

These are all anecdotes, but there is data out there to support this as well.

Try powering off for 5 years and keeping at 75oC and see if the data is still there.

I still use a Quantum VS160 DLT to back up my SSD...

The thing plugs straight into my laptop via no brand cheapo SCSI/USB bridge much to the laughing from my colleagues (apart from the ops team who understand why I do it).

Being an ex EE, I understand exactly how "transient" the state of an SSD is.

Electrons; gotta catch 'em all.

That is just shit and there is no excuse for it. I'm sure Apple marketing will spin it like they did with the "you're holding it wrong" scandal.

Yes and RedHat is IBM circa 1997 and Canonical is HP circa 1997. The Sun of 1997 is Oracle (again).

Creeping up on their arses is Microsoft (again) with Azure and incredibly cheap commercial offerings.

I'll give you that to a degree. It does suck on FreeBSD with my X201. Nothing works but I'm being cheeky now and running it in VirtualBox on top of windows (which I need for other work).

OpenBSD however works wonderfully.

Yes. Indent per issue. One .otl file with all issues in it. No format enforced although I'm pretty consistent at writing issues. Once complete the issue is simply deleted. I've done this up to 4 people and it has worked wonderfully even though they had to learn vim :)

You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.

For me Linux is pretty dead already because I can't entirely trust the direct it's going in having survived the Unix wars of the 1990s. There are so many parallels to that at the moment, it's not funny. There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google). At the end of the day, much like back then, customers will suffer from terrible support, fragmentation and political battles.

I just want to get shit done and solve problems and anything that risks that gets outed now.

FreeBSD hits the sweet spot, probably followed by NetBSD.

Excellent points. Monocultures are terribly harmful, especially in the open-source side of things. While github is convenient, it's not the right answer for a lot of things and terribly inconvenient for others.

I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.

Just set in rc.conf:

   defaultrouter="NO"

It shouldn't hang.

How often do you reboot your kit? Boot time is such a stupid metric even on laptops and stuff where you just suspend/hibernate.

My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.

Proof:

http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png

Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...

RCTL is a stateful database. It's not there yet, but the right solution for managing this declaratively as with anything else on a Unix platform is Ansible/salt/cfengine or something like that, not building those tools into a superset service that manages everything.

I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10.

The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats.

And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared.

That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.

This. The FreeBSD rc system just works, is well documented and is small enough to understand by one person without too much effort.

Good brand yes, but shitty headphones.

I've got 5 quid on Kate having a ginger baby (bet against my friends, not a betting shop).

That's as far as it's ok to go if you ask me. The betting shops, gambling outfits and lottery prey on people's desire to be "better off". It's another form of servitude if you ask me. There are responsible gambling campaigns but daytime TV is all about betting and online bingo and stuff so it's about the same as saying not to smoke whilst giving away the first 10 cigarettes for free.

If you've got 25 minutes to spare, this takes a comedy twist on it but the underlying story shows how much it affects our culture here in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAXFHRdeLqw

(Black Books - A Little Flutter)