Are you having a giggle? Who's running the UK? Teresa May. The same Teresa May who has been for years looking to censor the living shit out of the Internet, track every user in the UK, and ban porn "because of the children":
Who said anything about targeting? The effective corporate tax rate during the 50s and 60s, arguably one of the most prosperous times in US history, was moving back and forth between 37% and 43%. Today it's 21%. Time to raise it across the board to 30%+. It's a moral requirement.
OP was making fun of idiots who cannot tell the difference between a socialist idea and a communist one. As a side effect he/she has also lured out those who have no sense of humor, like yourself.
Seems more plausible you commented throwing doubt on my anecdote in a delusional attempt to seem cool. What I described did happen, and I posted the story with my actual nearly 2 decade old account, Mr. Anonymous *Coward*.
> In any case, the correct way to run production databases is with a dev copy
So not only do you try to paint me as a liar, you didn't even bother to read my story. When did I say anything about this being a database server? Because you know, it wasn't one. It was a web server, old Red Hat box circa 2001 running Apache.
As mentioned, the problem was the entire filesystem from the root had been mistakenly chmodded. Just in case you didn't know, if you go to the root:
cd /
and then do something like this:
chmod 755 * -R
That's an oops. A big one. But it has nothing to do with databases, unless you happen to have a database running on the afflicted machine. Which we didn't, so no replays, no checkpoints for us. Next time read the comment before tossing in your own two cents (anonymously...) Kay?
> There is no reasonable way to recover from a recursive chmod from / as root.
No there isn't, that's why it was so much work for the junior.
> The irony is you mentioned QA. Just how did you verify every single file on the system had the same permissions as before the chmod was executed?
Well, for openers we had several systems built at exactly the same time and these were relatively newly built so I told him to use another as a guide. Secondly, I'm not stupid, though I see in my previous comment that I didn't really make it clear that after he was done, we ended up decomming and wiping the box anyway. Because you're right, you can't trust a box that's had that level of brain surgery accidentally inflicted upon it even if everything seems to work OK afterward. The junior was a little put out at first, but understood the point of the lesson and laughed about it later.
> Now if they keep on messing up and deleting the data after going via the process over again. Then I will get tough on them. Making a mistake is fine, making the same mistake over and over again isn't
This is the correct way to do things. One of the things I do with a junior who makes a mistake is have them fix it with a bit of guidance, but with them doing the actual work. I find that approach helps people become more careful - they're less likely to carelessly screw something up if they've already gone through all the work it takes to fix it. One particular example springs to mind of a linux server in a QA environment - pre VM days - and a junior mistakenly chmodded everything recursively from / . We could have rebuilt the server and restored backups, but I thought it would be a better lesson to have them fix all the permissions by hand. It took said junior most of the day, but after that they became obsessive about triple and quadruple checking anything they were doing with elevated privileges and they never made that mistake ever again, or any other comparable mistake.
> Banning things that people really believe is wrong. That's why I get annoyed when something I believe is modded as troll.
Context can be king. YOU might believe it, but that doesn't exclude someone else from using that viewpoint or belief to troll. For example, you might believe wholeheartedly the Earth is flat (and a disturbing number of people apparently do believe this exact thing). But *I* don't believe that. That wouldn't preclude me from posting a flat-Earth oriented snark/troll comment and it being correctly voted down, because the context and intent of my post would have been to troll.
> You can't just tolerate or ignore stuff you don't like so you want to BAN it ?
Where did I say that? I just said make them use actual accounts. Raise the bar to posting a bit more than clicking a checkbox, to help slow down the torrent of shit.
It's not even a pocket calcuator. 3 people in the household generating power for 8 hours per day - which like I say requires FULL EFFORT, like Tour de France/Ironman marathon effort - to get to 200w of out them - will generate only 4.8 kWh. So after burning out all of your dwellers and ensuring they have no life, you're still not even halfway to that 11kWh.
You're being a pedant. The only thing that matters is if the house uses 11kWh in that day, then 11Kw needs to be generated. So you either need 1 person on a stationary bike for 55 to 110 hours depending on their fitness - going full out. Which is of course impossible - or you need a number of people divided into that total to make it happen. Like I said, can't be done on human effort. Unless you want to hire 20-30 people to bike for 3-4 hours every day to generate enough electricity to run your house. Which is insane.
I think it's time Slashdot started thinking about banning ACs. Seems lately all the shit comments that roll in on each story are posted by those who can't even stand to hide behind a screen name.
> just a single homeowner does all the mechanical aerobics exercises each day to not need a power company bill
A fit human being at peak output can generate anywhere from 100-200 watts of recoverable power depending on the person. Go look at your power bill and see how many KwH you use a day. You're insane if you think an average dwelling - even a crazy efficient one - could be powered by humans alone.
Just because I'm not buying today, doesn't mean I may not be inclined to do so in future. And if you don't offer something that caters to my preferences then when I am in a "buying" state of mind I'll look elsewhere or just not buy at all if nothing suitable is available. I imagine there have been at least some nice usability updates in the last 11 years and maybe in a few more I'd be looking to see what's new, but if my main option is a rental service I'm not that motivated to explore upgrading.
> That's a cop out though. Google assumed their own risk by getting into the market
> This is a platform. They are computers with telephony functions.
You have that backwards. They are a telephone run by a computer. It's not a cop out, it's a very real risk they have to mitigate. As I pointed out, Android is the only environment that even goes this far to be "user friendly" toward unvetted apps. If you're looking for an open platform, go look somewhere else because you'll never find it on a phone. You're correct, we're seeing this from different perspectives and won't be meeting in the middle.
> You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
> Again though, my point is why? The only reason that is not in the cards is simply because they artificially made it that way.
Because a phone is not a computer. It's a phone. And it's subject to some incredibly strict regulations that computers are not subject to surrounding many things, including the availability of the device to call and stay in contact with emergency services, for example. Google, Apple, and others have to abide by these rules, and part of that is mitigating risk of malware rendering the phones unable to contact those services. Can you imagine the shit show that would entail if half the Android phones in the US couldn't call 911 due to a malware infection? Or worse, half the android phones called 911 ALL AT ONCE due to a malware infection?
That is one reason they have to do their damndest to maintain a level of security over their devices and that means playing gatekeeper as much as possible. And at the end of the day it's their ass on the line. If the phone gets hacked people are going to blame Google, not Epic.
> Actually, PalmOS and Symbian apps were open - there was no app store or anything. You downloaded the files and installed them on your phone.
I remember well, and the thing about it was you had to use your PC to download them and then go to the trouble of purposely uploading them to your device. Which, as I mentioned I think is a great idea and is exactly how sideload.apk files should have to work because that would dramatically reduce the chances of someone tricking the average user into running something unintended.
>> We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
> Apple is just as guilty if not more. The argument that "It isn't as bad as they other guy" is still weak. Using a more extreme example would be, "I'm not so bad, I only beat that guy into a state or paralysis/coma, while that guy beat another to death!" Neither one is right, just less wrong...
I think that's a bit of hyperbole. The default position on apps from phones always was "work with what the manufacturer makes available for purchase on the store or hack your phone. Period". Apple stepped in and let people develop (for a fee) free apps in addition to paid ones, but the single point of distribution was and is the App Store. Android was the very first OS that even gave you the option to sideload.apk files without having to screw with a PC like PalmOS on the Treo. You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
> I'll give you that Epic did take a big risk in using that to accomplish this, but why exactly should Google have such a monopoly on the distribution of software to the phones?
Because they make the software that runs the phones? If you don't like it, go get a different phone, or write your own software for the phone. Or if you don't want to do that, go get a Tizen or Plasma Mobile compatible phone, overwrite the stock Android with that and have at it. I mean sure, Tizen's riddled with security holes and Plasma only works on a couple of Android devices but baby steps.
> Why can't they provide a more secure way for independent market places or developers to distribute apps? Simple, profit. They stand to make nothing and even lose their monopoly if they did that.
You're right. They stand to make nothing. And they risk introducing instability. So why on God's Green Earth would they? Do you do extra work for free that might cause you more problems in your day job? I don't. Why would they?
> My generation did it in the 80/90/00s and we had no problem.
I'm part of "that generation" as well, and I can recall massive problems that started back then which we still live with today. Except back in the olden days the vector was a floppy disk. These days it's wireless and OTA. Back then you fed a stupid prompt a cookie, these days your gran's phone gets locked out while it mines crypto or has its file system encrypted and held for ransom.
Walled garden ecosystems exist for a reason and that reason is the average user has proven time and again to be anywhere from mostly to completely incompetent at handling security threats.
The problem with your arguments are you're applying expectations of open-ness for PC OSs to the mobile phone market. You complain that:
> On top of that, they have taken great pains to prevent other stores from taking much hold or allowing for simplified individual distribution to the Android platform in any way. Imagine the uproar if Microsoft did this with Windows.
We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
> First, Android is supposed to be open source/marketed as being the open platform,
And it is. To MANUFACTURERS. It's a packaged OS that anyone who wants to build a device around can do so. Your disconnect is you are conflating how Android is considered an open platform to how Linux is on the X86 space.
> Epic did take a risk for this business decision and definitely fucked up with the execution, but Google is doing some real shady shit now and straight up trying to punish them.
And I disagree. Google put a mechanism in for experienced users to be able to load an untrusted.apk file with the expectation that only people who understood the ramifications of doing so - i.e. so called "power users" - would use it. And now Epic's told everyone and their grandma to allow untrusted.apks to be installed on their phones. Epic is the party saying "Google wanted a cut of our cash flow so we're just gonna tell everyone to toss out a basic security feature of Android so we can make some more money!"
> So you honestly think that getting software from only on place is the best possible future?
So you honestly think an army of millions of 12 year olds can properly vet and secure their Android device? Like it or not, Android, IOS and similar mobile OSs operate on a walled-garden approach to the average user. Half of the reason we have massive malware problems on Windows is due to anyone and anything installing any application any time without proper vetting. Your Grandma gets a scary popup? She does what it says and bang! she's now mining crypto for some Russian. At least Android out of the box has a fairly decent defense against the the most basic vector of infection, and now Epic is telling people to disable that deliberately.
> Android NEEDS to get programs from places other than google.
Why? Serious question. You knew what you were buying into when you got a smartphone, and that was a curated ecosystem. Even this curated ecosystem is way more open than what came before smartphones, remember the days of running an "app" on an old Nokia or Motorola? How about PalmOS or Symbian apps?
So to your question - for a PHONE? Yes, it's best that the average person on the street gets their software from a centralized location where there is at least some quality control and attempts to head off malware. At the end of the day, the main reason you have a PHONE is to call people and communicate with them, and it already does all of that out of the box.
To be perfectly honest, I would like to see it restricted even more. In my ideal world if you want to install an.APK on your Android phone, you would have to physically load it from a PC over a USB cable. That would eliminate much of the risk IMO. That way everyone who wants to use non-Play store software can still do so, but a clueless end user can't easily be tricked into sideloading something malicious.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of things don't work out as their creators intend. Seems most of Western Europe never got the memo...
Are you having a giggle? Who's running the UK? Teresa May. The same Teresa May who has been for years looking to censor the living shit out of the Internet, track every user in the UK, and ban porn "because of the children":
2017:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/theresa-may-election-latest-internet-regulation-downing-street-speech-manifesto-a7783186.html
2016:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/theresa-may-prime-minister-privacy-mass-surveillance-snoopers-charter-attack-warning-a7133431.html
2014:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/government-public-case-surveillance-state-theresa-may
I'd take the EU's crappy link bill over living in a digital East Germany any day.
Who said anything about targeting? The effective corporate tax rate during the 50s and 60s, arguably one of the most prosperous times in US history, was moving back and forth between 37% and 43%. Today it's 21%. Time to raise it across the board to 30%+. It's a moral requirement.
OP was making fun of idiots who cannot tell the difference between a socialist idea and a communist one. As a side effect he/she has also lured out those who have no sense of humor, like yourself.
Seems more plausible you commented throwing doubt on my anecdote in a delusional attempt to seem cool. What I described did happen, and I posted the story with my actual nearly 2 decade old account, Mr. Anonymous *Coward*.
> In any case, the correct way to run production databases is with a dev copy
So not only do you try to paint me as a liar, you didn't even bother to read my story. When did I say anything about this being a database server? Because you know, it wasn't one. It was a web server, old Red Hat box circa 2001 running Apache.
As mentioned, the problem was the entire filesystem from the root had been mistakenly chmodded. Just in case you didn't know, if you go to the root:
cd /
and then do something like this:
chmod 755 * -R
That's an oops. A big one. But it has nothing to do with databases, unless you happen to have a database running on the afflicted machine. Which we didn't, so no replays, no checkpoints for us. Next time read the comment before tossing in your own two cents (anonymously...) Kay?
> There is no reasonable way to recover from a recursive chmod from / as root.
No there isn't, that's why it was so much work for the junior.
> The irony is you mentioned QA. Just how did you verify every single file on the system had the same permissions as before the chmod was executed?
Well, for openers we had several systems built at exactly the same time and these were relatively newly built so I told him to use another as a guide. Secondly, I'm not stupid, though I see in my previous comment that I didn't really make it clear that after he was done, we ended up decomming and wiping the box anyway. Because you're right, you can't trust a box that's had that level of brain surgery accidentally inflicted upon it even if everything seems to work OK afterward. The junior was a little put out at first, but understood the point of the lesson and laughed about it later.
> Now if they keep on messing up and deleting the data after going via the process over again. Then I will get tough on them. Making a mistake is fine, making the same mistake over and over again isn't
This is the correct way to do things. One of the things I do with a junior who makes a mistake is have them fix it with a bit of guidance, but with them doing the actual work. I find that approach helps people become more careful - they're less likely to carelessly screw something up if they've already gone through all the work it takes to fix it. One particular example springs to mind of a linux server in a QA environment - pre VM days - and a junior mistakenly chmodded everything recursively from / . We could have rebuilt the server and restored backups, but I thought it would be a better lesson to have them fix all the permissions by hand. It took said junior most of the day, but after that they became obsessive about triple and quadruple checking anything they were doing with elevated privileges and they never made that mistake ever again, or any other comparable mistake.
Oh there was probably some firing involved. Small arms is my guess. Or the guy ran off and fell on a pile of bullets...
It might be self promotive, but the content was still more interesting than 90% of the posts on this site.
> Banning things that people really believe is wrong. That's why I get annoyed when something I believe is modded as troll.
Context can be king. YOU might believe it, but that doesn't exclude someone else from using that viewpoint or belief to troll. For example, you might believe wholeheartedly the Earth is flat (and a disturbing number of people apparently do believe this exact thing). But *I* don't believe that. That wouldn't preclude me from posting a flat-Earth oriented snark/troll comment and it being correctly voted down, because the context and intent of my post would have been to troll.
> You can't just tolerate or ignore stuff you don't like so you want to BAN it ?
Where did I say that? I just said make them use actual accounts. Raise the bar to posting a bit more than clicking a checkbox, to help slow down the torrent of shit.
It's not even a pocket calcuator. 3 people in the household generating power for 8 hours per day - which like I say requires FULL EFFORT, like Tour de France/Ironman marathon effort - to get to 200w of out them - will generate only 4.8 kWh. So after burning out all of your dwellers and ensuring they have no life, you're still not even halfway to that 11kWh.
You're being a pedant. The only thing that matters is if the house uses 11kWh in that day, then 11Kw needs to be generated. So you either need 1 person on a stationary bike for 55 to 110 hours depending on their fitness - going full out. Which is of course impossible - or you need a number of people divided into that total to make it happen. Like I said, can't be done on human effort. Unless you want to hire 20-30 people to bike for 3-4 hours every day to generate enough electricity to run your house. Which is insane.
I think it's time Slashdot started thinking about banning ACs. Seems lately all the shit comments that roll in on each story are posted by those who can't even stand to hide behind a screen name.
> just a single homeowner does all the mechanical aerobics exercises each day to not need a power company bill
A fit human being at peak output can generate anywhere from 100-200 watts of recoverable power depending on the person. Go look at your power bill and see how many KwH you use a day. You're insane if you think an average dwelling - even a crazy efficient one - could be powered by humans alone.
Just because I'm not buying today, doesn't mean I may not be inclined to do so in future. And if you don't offer something that caters to my preferences then when I am in a "buying" state of mind I'll look elsewhere or just not buy at all if nothing suitable is available. I imagine there have been at least some nice usability updates in the last 11 years and maybe in a few more I'd be looking to see what's new, but if my main option is a rental service I'm not that motivated to explore upgrading.
My good old copy of Office 2007 does everything I need. I like buying things once, not renting them as a service.
It's doable, you just have to be insane like this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnYp4srEooI
So time to step up your game!
> That's a cop out though. Google assumed their own risk by getting into the market
> This is a platform. They are computers with telephony functions.
You have that backwards. They are a telephone run by a computer. It's not a cop out, it's a very real risk they have to mitigate. As I pointed out, Android is the only environment that even goes this far to be "user friendly" toward unvetted apps. If you're looking for an open platform, go look somewhere else because you'll never find it on a phone. You're correct, we're seeing this from different perspectives and won't be meeting in the middle.
> You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
> Again though, my point is why? The only reason that is not in the cards is simply because they artificially made it that way.
Because a phone is not a computer. It's a phone. And it's subject to some incredibly strict regulations that computers are not subject to surrounding many things, including the availability of the device to call and stay in contact with emergency services, for example. Google, Apple, and others have to abide by these rules, and part of that is mitigating risk of malware rendering the phones unable to contact those services. Can you imagine the shit show that would entail if half the Android phones in the US couldn't call 911 due to a malware infection? Or worse, half the android phones called 911 ALL AT ONCE due to a malware infection?
That is one reason they have to do their damndest to maintain a level of security over their devices and that means playing gatekeeper as much as possible. And at the end of the day it's their ass on the line. If the phone gets hacked people are going to blame Google, not Epic.
> Actually, PalmOS and Symbian apps were open - there was no app store or anything. You downloaded the files and installed them on your phone.
I remember well, and the thing about it was you had to use your PC to download them and then go to the trouble of purposely uploading them to your device. Which, as I mentioned I think is a great idea and is exactly how sideload .apk files should have to work because that would dramatically reduce the chances of someone tricking the average user into running something unintended.
>> We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
> Apple is just as guilty if not more. The argument that "It isn't as bad as they other guy" is still weak. Using a more extreme example would be, "I'm not so bad, I only beat that guy into a state or paralysis/coma, while that guy beat another to death!" Neither one is right, just less wrong...
I think that's a bit of hyperbole. The default position on apps from phones always was "work with what the manufacturer makes available for purchase on the store or hack your phone. Period". Apple stepped in and let people develop (for a fee) free apps in addition to paid ones, but the single point of distribution was and is the App Store. Android was the very first OS that even gave you the option to sideload .apk files without having to screw with a PC like PalmOS on the Treo. You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
> I'll give you that Epic did take a big risk in using that to accomplish this, but why exactly should Google have such a monopoly on the distribution of software to the phones?
Because they make the software that runs the phones? If you don't like it, go get a different phone, or write your own software for the phone. Or if you don't want to do that, go get a Tizen or Plasma Mobile compatible phone, overwrite the stock Android with that and have at it. I mean sure, Tizen's riddled with security holes and Plasma only works on a couple of Android devices but baby steps.
> Why can't they provide a more secure way for independent market places or developers to distribute apps? Simple, profit. They stand to make nothing and even lose their monopoly if they did that.
You're right. They stand to make nothing. And they risk introducing instability. So why on God's Green Earth would they? Do you do extra work for free that might cause you more problems in your day job? I don't. Why would they?
> My generation did it in the 80/90/00s and we had no problem.
I'm part of "that generation" as well, and I can recall massive problems that started back then which we still live with today. Except back in the olden days the vector was a floppy disk. These days it's wireless and OTA. Back then you fed a stupid prompt a cookie, these days your gran's phone gets locked out while it mines crypto or has its file system encrypted and held for ransom.
Walled garden ecosystems exist for a reason and that reason is the average user has proven time and again to be anywhere from mostly to completely incompetent at handling security threats.
The problem with your arguments are you're applying expectations of open-ness for PC OSs to the mobile phone market. You complain that:
> On top of that, they have taken great pains to prevent other stores from taking much hold or allowing for simplified individual distribution to the Android platform in any way. Imagine the uproar if Microsoft did this with Windows.
We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
> First, Android is supposed to be open source/marketed as being the open platform,
And it is. To MANUFACTURERS. It's a packaged OS that anyone who wants to build a device around can do so. Your disconnect is you are conflating how Android is considered an open platform to how Linux is on the X86 space.
> Epic did take a risk for this business decision and definitely fucked up with the execution, but Google is doing some real shady shit now and straight up trying to punish them.
And I disagree. Google put a mechanism in for experienced users to be able to load an untrusted .apk file with the expectation that only people who understood the ramifications of doing so - i.e. so called "power users" - would use it. And now Epic's told everyone and their grandma to allow untrusted .apks to be installed on their phones. Epic is the party saying "Google wanted a cut of our cash flow so we're just gonna tell everyone to toss out a basic security feature of Android so we can make some more money!"
> So you honestly think that getting software from only on place is the best possible future?
So you honestly think an army of millions of 12 year olds can properly vet and secure their Android device? Like it or not, Android, IOS and similar mobile OSs operate on a walled-garden approach to the average user. Half of the reason we have massive malware problems on Windows is due to anyone and anything installing any application any time without proper vetting. Your Grandma gets a scary popup? She does what it says and bang! she's now mining crypto for some Russian. At least Android out of the box has a fairly decent defense against the the most basic vector of infection, and now Epic is telling people to disable that deliberately.
> Android NEEDS to get programs from places other than google.
Why? Serious question. You knew what you were buying into when you got a smartphone, and that was a curated ecosystem. Even this curated ecosystem is way more open than what came before smartphones, remember the days of running an "app" on an old Nokia or Motorola? How about PalmOS or Symbian apps?
So to your question - for a PHONE? Yes, it's best that the average person on the street gets their software from a centralized location where there is at least some quality control and attempts to head off malware. At the end of the day, the main reason you have a PHONE is to call people and communicate with them, and it already does all of that out of the box.
To be perfectly honest, I would like to see it restricted even more. In my ideal world if you want to install an .APK on your Android phone, you would have to physically load it from a PC over a USB cable. That would eliminate much of the risk IMO. That way everyone who wants to use non-Play store software can still do so, but a clueless end user can't easily be tricked into sideloading something malicious.