Well, it does depend a little on circumstances, and it's not without its consequences. You should generally avoid burning any bridges you don't have to, and it's not just the company's attitude to you that you need to worry about; other employees might remember you as that guy who up and left unexpectedly which made life difficult for everyone. Which can bite you in the arse a year or two down the line when they're a different company you're applying at and might have a say in hiring.
But if the company's treating you badly, or conditions are unnecessarily dangerous? You are justified in just leaving without notice, and such things are a secondary concern. And if things are bad enough, said hypothetical other employee may remember you as the guy who had the sense to just get out ASAP.
Phyllis Hartman says employees have a responsibility to try to communicate about what's wrong. "Start figuring out if there is anything you can do to fix it. The worst that can happen is that nobody listens or they tell you no."
No, that is not the worst that can happen by a longshot. The worse things will generally run afoul of workplace bullying laws, but that's small comfort.
Gotta agree there. My nightly routine involves plugging my phone, iPod, iPad and laptop in to charge overnight. If I don't do it nightly, I'll forget about it and one of the above will be out of juice when I'm out and about and need it. And since I'm charging them nightly anyway, I really don't give a damn whether it could theoretically go a week without charging or "only" three days or so.
I think that it's a chicken-and-egg issue. Tablets are considered media consumption devices, so nobody makes a tablet studly enough for real work, so the expectation is that tablets are media consumption devices, and consumers don't expect tablets to be studly enough for real work.
Tablets were actually like that before - basically laptops with a touchscreen that you could swivel around to use without the keyboard in the way. But they never gained much traction in that form. They cost more than the same laptop sans swivelling touchscreen, and few had that much use for it over and above a standard laptop.
Since the introduction of the current standard format of tablet, there have been a few here and there that try to be a tablet for "real work" from the other direction, by adding a detachable keyboard and things like that. But they've never really taken off either. The reality is that for 95% of people, the tablet is for media consumption and other light tasks, and the PC and/or laptop are for more serious work. One device with the strengths of both but the weaknesses of neither would be nice, but is A) way easier said than done, and B) only considered necessary by a small handful.
Personally I think this is a very good idea, and I know it's something I've considered on a few occasions.
The reason this is a problem is that when using home directory encryption you need a quick an easy way of making your data inaccessible, but as long as processes are running as your user the volume can't be unmounted, leaving your data open for everybody to read.
Killing all your processes and unmounting your encrypted home directory is a Good Thing(TM), and is semantically in-line with the meaning of 'Logging Out', aka - 'Im no longer using this computer'.
If you really want long-running processes it's pretty easy to create a separate services account, or use systemd containers, or docker etc.
Why so much fuss?
There must be other solutions to that particular problem that don't involve setting OS defaults that fuck everyone who has a use case different from "must at all costs keep encrypted home directory secure and inaccessible when not interactively using the computer". There are perfectly good reasons for having that as a priority, but it's not a priority for most.
Also, logging out does not mean "I am no longer using this computer", it means "I am no longer using this computer interactively". As many others have been pointing out, there are many reasons why a user would want processes to continue running while they're not logged in.
The story probably is a fabrication, but it's not implausible. If there's one thing I've learned about humanity in all my years, it's that there is no limit to the stupidity it's capable of.
It's where the principles of Murphy's Law and Schroedinger's Cat intersect - Murphy Schroedinger's Data, if you will.
Data stored in the cloud both exists and doesn't exist simultaneously; if you need the data it got accidentally deleted and there's no way to retrieve it, and if you delete the data because you don't want it seen, it turns out there's another copy and it will be all over the open internet shortly.
That's very good to have, but should not by any means be all you're relying on. Probably wouldn't have helped the guy in this story, given all the other boneheaded things about his setup.
I hear people say that, but I'm not so sure it's true. I've got an 11" MacBook Air, and in spite of the usual light abuse my laptops endure, it shows no signs of warping or deforming and none of the electronics have failed. I've actually had chunkier, more solid laptops fare worse.
Indeed. Anyone can talk big about how, unlike every other project in the same arena, they're doing everything the right way from the ground up and it'll be the best thing ever. Inevitably, somewhere down the line they'll either wind up doing things 'wrong' for the sake of practicality like the others, or continue being 'right' and thus impractical so almost no-one uses it for real world stuff.
But hey, even if it itself doesn't take off, it might introduce some feature or other that Linux or BSD or Hurd or whatever can implement. And a little more variety in the operating system arena couldn't hurt.
Yeah, there's a realistic and practical option. Rather than the current situation of hitting a button and waiting a minute or two for the lights when I need to quickly go somewhere just over the road, I can order an Uber, wait a while for it to show up, do a lap of the block in it because the traffic management system says that's the way we need to do it, and pay for the privilege. And repeat for the trip back.
And it is not impossible to map an image of someone over a CG model and have it move whatever way you want. It probably wouldn't convince a human that it's the real person, but it wouldn't need to.
Using faces for passwords is as ridiculous as using fingerprints for passwords. Biometrics should only be used for usernames, passwords should be something you know, not something that you are.
This is the most sense I've ever heard talked regarding biometrics.
I'm not too optimistic about systems like this. Sure, passwords can be stolen, but if you're careful they can be kept secret, and they can be changed if need be. But my face? If someone gets their hands on a suitable picture or video of me (really not hard to get a photo or video of the average person) and can use that, I'm shit outta luck. And on the other hand, I'm also concerned that an automated system could decide that I don't look like me; the state of my beard at the time or whatever throwing it off.
So in short, interesting idea, but probably not all that practical.
I'm confused. It almost sounds like you have tested the replacement, and found problems, but are waiting till the original dies to solve them? Perhaps the risk of downtime doesn't justify the near term effort.
Kind of. Decisions about this are above my pay grade, so I don't know all the details, but as far as I can tell the thinking is something like this: in testing, these problems have been detected and (I hope) solved, but if the new system is used in production other problems may arise, and we'd like to avoid that disruption, so for now we'll stick with what we know works properly.
Either way, I think the point was to have a plan for when the end occurs, which is fair enough.
Exactly. Just up and replacing something important for no better reason than "there's a new model out" is risky and foolish, hence "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But it's more foolish and risky to not plan around the possibility of it breaking, which is not the same thing as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but some people don't know the difference.
When the inevitable time comes when suddenly the old system *does* break, it's no longer under any support, nobody's left at the company who knows how it works, there's no budget for a modern replacement, and it has to be fixed in four hours or the company goes bankrupt.
That sounds to me more like general incompetence and mismanagement than a fatal flaw in the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
In my workplace, we rely very heavily on a particular piece of software running on a particular server. Said server is a Pentium II running Windows NT 4.0. Amazingly, this software running on this server has been absolutely rock solid.
Nonetheless, we're of course not relying on it to last forever, and replacing it has been looked at from time to time. Thing is, the same software running on the test new hardware has shown some problems that have proven absolute bastards to figure out, let alone solve. So for the time being, we are better off sticking with what's ancient and working properly, rather than switching over simply because this is new and that is old. When the old does finally fail, the new can be dropped in in short order, and we can sort out the problems that introduces, but in the meantime it's just not worth it.
...I'd like to say that our Department of Foreign Affairs is full of shit. Just about the entire government is on the subject of anything that matters, really.
There's a similar sort of thing in Australian elections, known as an informal vote. Voting is compulsory, but as it's a secret ballot, there's no enforcement of lodging a valid ballot. As such, if you want to do a "none of the above" vote, you show up at the polling station, get your ballot papers and get your name checked off, then put the blank ballot papers into the ballot box.
If you want to really reform the system, we should get rid of voting based on geography. Of all the issues I care about, almost none of them are specifically tied to the state I live in. Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc. Each voter can then pick whomever best represents their views and interests, regardless of where they live.
I agree that representation based on geography is very flawed, but I'm not sure that form of interest-based representation is much better. There's no easy answers to how to get this, but what's actually needed is a system that encourages politicians to legislate and act based on the balanced interests of all the people, rather than the current system of pandering to whoever's politically convenient at the time at the cost of people who actually need the help more.
Not going to happen. Microsoft won't do an Apple and break backwards compatibility with previous versions of Windows all for the sake of switching what is currently a well maintained and stable kernel for something else.
In Apple's case, they provided a compatibility layer to allow programs compiled for classic Mac OS to run on Mac OS X unmodified. They did phase the compatibility layer out, but after ample opportunity was given for developers to produce actual OS X versions of their software. In Windows' case, there is the massive amount of unmaintained legacy software that many businesses rely on to take into account, but the answer there is to keep maintaining the compatibility layer. As it is, Microsoft put some effort into maintaining compatibility with old software anyway.
Their only flirt with the idea (Windows RT) was a colossal flop. I don't see them repeating that, and I definitely don't see them doing so without providing an alternative in the process.
That's more because Windows RT is essentially Windows for ARM CPUs, and basically no Windows software is compiled for ARM CPUs. There are ways of dealing with that, such as what Apple did when they changed CPU architecture from PowerPC to Intel - a compatibility layer that's essentially PowerPC emulation. That's not such a realistic option for running x86 software on ARM - not if you want reasonable speeds, anyway.
Of course, nothing is free of design flaws. But Unix does have a generally pretty solid design, and personally I think it's generally better than that of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it does depend a little on circumstances, and it's not without its consequences. You should generally avoid burning any bridges you don't have to, and it's not just the company's attitude to you that you need to worry about; other employees might remember you as that guy who up and left unexpectedly which made life difficult for everyone. Which can bite you in the arse a year or two down the line when they're a different company you're applying at and might have a say in hiring.
But if the company's treating you badly, or conditions are unnecessarily dangerous? You are justified in just leaving without notice, and such things are a secondary concern. And if things are bad enough, said hypothetical other employee may remember you as the guy who had the sense to just get out ASAP.
Phyllis Hartman says employees have a responsibility to try to communicate about what's wrong. "Start figuring out if there is anything you can do to fix it. The worst that can happen is that nobody listens or they tell you no."
No, that is not the worst that can happen by a longshot. The worse things will generally run afoul of workplace bullying laws, but that's small comfort.
Gotta agree there. My nightly routine involves plugging my phone, iPod, iPad and laptop in to charge overnight. If I don't do it nightly, I'll forget about it and one of the above will be out of juice when I'm out and about and need it. And since I'm charging them nightly anyway, I really don't give a damn whether it could theoretically go a week without charging or "only" three days or so.
I think that it's a chicken-and-egg issue. Tablets are considered media consumption devices, so nobody makes a tablet studly enough for real work, so the expectation is that tablets are media consumption devices, and consumers don't expect tablets to be studly enough for real work.
Tablets were actually like that before - basically laptops with a touchscreen that you could swivel around to use without the keyboard in the way. But they never gained much traction in that form. They cost more than the same laptop sans swivelling touchscreen, and few had that much use for it over and above a standard laptop.
Since the introduction of the current standard format of tablet, there have been a few here and there that try to be a tablet for "real work" from the other direction, by adding a detachable keyboard and things like that. But they've never really taken off either. The reality is that for 95% of people, the tablet is for media consumption and other light tasks, and the PC and/or laptop are for more serious work. One device with the strengths of both but the weaknesses of neither would be nice, but is A) way easier said than done, and B) only considered necessary by a small handful.
Personally I think this is a very good idea, and I know it's something I've considered on a few occasions.
The reason this is a problem is that when using home directory encryption you need a quick an easy way of making your data inaccessible, but as long as processes are running as your user the volume can't be unmounted, leaving your data open for everybody to read.
Killing all your processes and unmounting your encrypted home directory is a Good Thing(TM), and is semantically in-line with the meaning of 'Logging Out', aka - 'Im no longer using this computer'.
If you really want long-running processes it's pretty easy to create a separate services account, or use systemd containers, or docker etc.
Why so much fuss?
There must be other solutions to that particular problem that don't involve setting OS defaults that fuck everyone who has a use case different from "must at all costs keep encrypted home directory secure and inaccessible when not interactively using the computer". There are perfectly good reasons for having that as a priority, but it's not a priority for most.
Also, logging out does not mean "I am no longer using this computer", it means "I am no longer using this computer interactively". As many others have been pointing out, there are many reasons why a user would want processes to continue running while they're not logged in.
The story probably is a fabrication, but it's not implausible. If there's one thing I've learned about humanity in all my years, it's that there is no limit to the stupidity it's capable of.
It's where the principles of Murphy's Law and Schroedinger's Cat intersect - Murphy Schroedinger's Data, if you will.
Data stored in the cloud both exists and doesn't exist simultaneously; if you need the data it got accidentally deleted and there's no way to retrieve it, and if you delete the data because you don't want it seen, it turns out there's another copy and it will be all over the open internet shortly.
Four words: filesystem with automatic snapshots.
That's very good to have, but should not by any means be all you're relying on. Probably wouldn't have helped the guy in this story, given all the other boneheaded things about his setup.
I hear people say that, but I'm not so sure it's true. I've got an 11" MacBook Air, and in spite of the usual light abuse my laptops endure, it shows no signs of warping or deforming and none of the electronics have failed. I've actually had chunkier, more solid laptops fare worse.
Indeed. Anyone can talk big about how, unlike every other project in the same arena, they're doing everything the right way from the ground up and it'll be the best thing ever. Inevitably, somewhere down the line they'll either wind up doing things 'wrong' for the sake of practicality like the others, or continue being 'right' and thus impractical so almost no-one uses it for real world stuff.
But hey, even if it itself doesn't take off, it might introduce some feature or other that Linux or BSD or Hurd or whatever can implement. And a little more variety in the operating system arena couldn't hurt.
Oh, I know there are plenty that do. I'm saying that they don't *need* to.
TVs do not need WiFi chipsets.
Yeah, there's a realistic and practical option. Rather than the current situation of hitting a button and waiting a minute or two for the lights when I need to quickly go somewhere just over the road, I can order an Uber, wait a while for it to show up, do a lap of the block in it because the traffic management system says that's the way we need to do it, and pay for the privilege. And repeat for the trip back.
And it is not impossible to map an image of someone over a CG model and have it move whatever way you want. It probably wouldn't convince a human that it's the real person, but it wouldn't need to.
Using faces for passwords is as ridiculous as using fingerprints for passwords. Biometrics should only be used for usernames, passwords should be something you know, not something that you are.
This is the most sense I've ever heard talked regarding biometrics.
Yep. Calls to emergency services are always able to be made, regardless if the phone is locked, or even has a SIM card in it at all.
I expect that people will make such a thing. Might not even need to be as sophisticated as a 3D model.
I'm not too optimistic about systems like this. Sure, passwords can be stolen, but if you're careful they can be kept secret, and they can be changed if need be. But my face? If someone gets their hands on a suitable picture or video of me (really not hard to get a photo or video of the average person) and can use that, I'm shit outta luck. And on the other hand, I'm also concerned that an automated system could decide that I don't look like me; the state of my beard at the time or whatever throwing it off.
So in short, interesting idea, but probably not all that practical.
I'm confused. It almost sounds like you have tested the replacement, and found problems, but are waiting till the original dies to solve them? Perhaps the risk of downtime doesn't justify the near term effort.
Kind of. Decisions about this are above my pay grade, so I don't know all the details, but as far as I can tell the thinking is something like this: in testing, these problems have been detected and (I hope) solved, but if the new system is used in production other problems may arise, and we'd like to avoid that disruption, so for now we'll stick with what we know works properly.
Either way, I think the point was to have a plan for when the end occurs, which is fair enough.
Exactly. Just up and replacing something important for no better reason than "there's a new model out" is risky and foolish, hence "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But it's more foolish and risky to not plan around the possibility of it breaking, which is not the same thing as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but some people don't know the difference.
When the inevitable time comes when suddenly the old system *does* break, it's no longer under any support, nobody's left at the company who knows how it works, there's no budget for a modern replacement, and it has to be fixed in four hours or the company goes bankrupt.
That sounds to me more like general incompetence and mismanagement than a fatal flaw in the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
In my workplace, we rely very heavily on a particular piece of software running on a particular server. Said server is a Pentium II running Windows NT 4.0. Amazingly, this software running on this server has been absolutely rock solid.
Nonetheless, we're of course not relying on it to last forever, and replacing it has been looked at from time to time. Thing is, the same software running on the test new hardware has shown some problems that have proven absolute bastards to figure out, let alone solve. So for the time being, we are better off sticking with what's ancient and working properly, rather than switching over simply because this is new and that is old. When the old does finally fail, the new can be dropped in in short order, and we can sort out the problems that introduces, but in the meantime it's just not worth it.
Not particularly. I think our current government are a pack of incompetent, morally bankrupt morons for a variety of non-Assange reasons.
...I'd like to say that our Department of Foreign Affairs is full of shit. Just about the entire government is on the subject of anything that matters, really.
There's a similar sort of thing in Australian elections, known as an informal vote. Voting is compulsory, but as it's a secret ballot, there's no enforcement of lodging a valid ballot. As such, if you want to do a "none of the above" vote, you show up at the polling station, get your ballot papers and get your name checked off, then put the blank ballot papers into the ballot box.
If you want to really reform the system, we should get rid of voting based on geography. Of all the issues I care about, almost none of them are specifically tied to the state I live in. Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc. Each voter can then pick whomever best represents their views and interests, regardless of where they live.
I agree that representation based on geography is very flawed, but I'm not sure that form of interest-based representation is much better. There's no easy answers to how to get this, but what's actually needed is a system that encourages politicians to legislate and act based on the balanced interests of all the people, rather than the current system of pandering to whoever's politically convenient at the time at the cost of people who actually need the help more.
Not going to happen. Microsoft won't do an Apple and break backwards compatibility with previous versions of Windows all for the sake of switching what is currently a well maintained and stable kernel for something else.
In Apple's case, they provided a compatibility layer to allow programs compiled for classic Mac OS to run on Mac OS X unmodified. They did phase the compatibility layer out, but after ample opportunity was given for developers to produce actual OS X versions of their software. In Windows' case, there is the massive amount of unmaintained legacy software that many businesses rely on to take into account, but the answer there is to keep maintaining the compatibility layer. As it is, Microsoft put some effort into maintaining compatibility with old software anyway.
Their only flirt with the idea (Windows RT) was a colossal flop. I don't see them repeating that, and I definitely don't see them doing so without providing an alternative in the process.
That's more because Windows RT is essentially Windows for ARM CPUs, and basically no Windows software is compiled for ARM CPUs. There are ways of dealing with that, such as what Apple did when they changed CPU architecture from PowerPC to Intel - a compatibility layer that's essentially PowerPC emulation. That's not such a realistic option for running x86 software on ARM - not if you want reasonable speeds, anyway.
Of course, nothing is free of design flaws. But Unix does have a generally pretty solid design, and personally I think it's generally better than that of Windows.