Every former windows phone user I have ever talked to has sworn up and down about how amazing of a platform it was. I honestly suspect Microsoft could have legitimately won a sizable slice of the mobile market if they simply chose a different name than “windows phone”

But then, this is the same company which held a mock funeral for the iPhone upon the launch of the Windows phone so…uh…yeah that actually happened…

I mean, the person who did it did technically manage it by running an emulator of a different similarly ancient architecture

Ars has a decent summary of the blog post if you don’t feel like reading the full blog post

No joke I read an article a while ago about a computer cafe in like Nepal I think it was? where users had to pedal a small DC generator to power the computers because power is so scarce up on the mountain

It’s more than just a TPM requirement. They have actual processor requirements cutting off all 7th gen and older Intel processors and all 2nd gen? Ryzen and older AMD processors so that they can modernize instruction sets. Many perfectly capable if a bit old machines that have years of life left in them that will be going to the recycler who will attempt to extract something of value from these machines.

I’m all for modernizing instruction sets and cutting off literal ewaste machines that nobody should still be using like the Core 2 Duo for example, but this is just going to produce mountains of ewaste, which is about the last thing we need with the looming climate apocalypse and dire need significantly reduce emissions rapidly

My oldest is about ready for her first computer, so I have an ewaste laptop earmarked for Christmas that I’ll have to tweak the configuration a bit more on before then.

She’s been getting better at better playing Minecraft and learning how to ask us how to spell the names of things so she can search for them in Minecraft, and getting pretty good with the mouse and keyboard too

I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight

Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die

For public facing only use key based authentication. Passwords have too much risk associated for public facing ssh

I was making after hours config changes on a pair of mostly-but-not-entirely redundant Cisco L3 switches which basically controlled the entire network at that location. While updating the running configs I mixed up which ssh session was which switch and accidentally gave both switches the same IP address, and before I noticed the error I copied the running config to the startup config.

Due to other limitations and the fact that these changes were to fix DNS issues (and therefore I couldn’t rely on DNS to save me) I ended up keeping sshing in by IP until I got the right switch and trying to make the change before my session died due to dropped packets from the mucked up network situation I had created. That easily added a couple of hours of cleanup to the maintainence I was doing

I’ve seen one around with the plate dev null

so all rules would have to be applied on the Pi itself

Sounds like you’ll want to setup IPTables

x86-64 is a CISC architecture

In many cases it’s actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon

ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example

The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.

Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They’re very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases

There’s even extreme edgecases where a compromised machine being part of a botnet actually improves security because the malware shores up security to help itself remain persistent and not find itself removed/blocked by other malware or attackers