Sending 3 weeks manually verifying a couple of hundred excel sheets against other excel sheets netted the same payment from the customer as the automation I created that cut that down to 2-3 days.
Blergh.... Public issue trackers tend to bring a lot of corporate politics into the process of trying to efficiently use the tracker for what it is meant for. Sigh.
I spent most of my time at my previous job automating tasks for other people so that they could stop doing the repeated and error prone work.
Then I got laid off because the bean-counters at central corporate did not believe I had enough "billable hours". The corporation actively encourages you to work slowly and inefficiently because they make more money that way...
And they wonder why the offshore sector in Norway crashed a year ago with the oil price no longer inflating profits.... sigh
I spent 8 hours on a flight with MY carry-on between my legs because there was literally NO other place I was allowed to put it on the plane.... I wanted to stab people. The people in the row in front of me had brought 2 baby seats for their kids to sit in, and had L-shaped roller thingies for bringing them with em, and those took up the overhead compartment for 6 people worth... and THAt is where my shit was supposed to sit..... so not only did I have screaming toddlers for 8 hours, I had a bag between my legs making any movement bleh.... fuck people.
Well, if encryption is illegal they can just bust em for that and drop em in a hole until they give up their keys. If they do NOT give up their keys, they stay in the hole.
Messages used to be split if longer than 160 characters.. Not sure if that is how it is handled in the back-end any more. That is how my ancient phone handled it anyway...
Oh.. and the environment is not very hostile. Everything is fully battery backed, fully environmentally shielded and there are virtually no vibrations reaching the room.
Hell, after 20 years in operation the room hardly has dust anywhere. The controllers look brand new when inspected.
I love working with the system as is, but trying to shoe-horn the new system requirements into the existing hardware is tricky at best. We're running all our data over a 2mbit token ring network.
Oh it is good gear, but the list of 'bugs' and 'erratas' on the gear is growing longer and longer for every month it stays in service. Spare parts are almost impossible to come by, and even the toolchain needed to update the programs are old enough to require special dedicated workstations.
It is not a matter of 'working' it is a matter of 'will work in the future'. Right now all the gear has reached "end of life" and spare parts are very close to being "ebay if you're lucky" in terms of procurement. Trying to get the customer to upgrade BEFORE we're already screwed and have to 'rush' an upgrade is the game we're in now.
Doing a 3 year project in 6 months (while in some cases doable..) leads to badly rushed design and future redesigns. We've seen this over and over in the past 10 years.
An example is that the new hardware has built in EX barriers on each channel, the termination boards are much better and a variety of other improvements. This translates into -4- massive cabinets being reduced to one. Real-estate offshore is hugely expensive and this would save staggering amounts of money compared to expanding equipment rooms... but they want the stuff they're used to, not the stuff that is current.
The hilarity of the whole thing is that the 'current' stuff is now installed all over the rig where old hardware is not available so now we have both systems running in parallel with a ton of 'interfacing' and single points of failure introduced as a result.
In the business I work "profibus" is considered a "new" technology. The standard was published in 1989.
We still run a token ring coax network for most critical systems on a significant part of the oil rigs in the North sea and on onshore installations supporting them.
Some of the controllers are 20 years old and just milling along happily. We did a replacement of NVRAM recently and that is all the service the modules need. I fully expect this crud to still be in use in 20 years. Conservative bastards >.
"55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio"
Do the rest care about radio or have the people who listen already moved on?
My parents listen to radio here in Norway, but they use their TV for it these days since all the channels are available through the "Radio" option on their fiber cable/internet/everything system.
Running a server out of memory can cause game world corruption if it happens at a bad time. Quite annoying and could cause rollbacks to backups and such... bleh
He's monetizing the videos on youtube and earning advertising money himself. His case is weak as hell as a result...
From article: "Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar."
The guy has flagged his videos as monetized and earn advertising money from views.
If the videos were NOT monetized he would have a much better case...
From article: "Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar."
Having low views and not making much from it is hardly a defense.
As much as I hate to say it, he is monetizing his drone flights and is sort of screwed...
Virtually all oil and gas rigs in the North Sea are connected (through firewalls of course) to the corporate office network.
Most of them are now moving to "Integrated Operations" which is a buzzword they came up with for "remote control room and maintenance" where the network is extended to vendor locations so that we do not have to send people out to the rig to look at stuff. We just call the rig and ask them to open the 'gate' so to speak and we get full raw network access to the secure network from a dedicated switch at our offices. This is of course all tunneled across the internet... *sigh*
It is going to go horribly wrong at some point, I just hope I am on-shore when it happens.....
A safety valve -should- go into a safe position when power is lost. Virtually all such valves will be hydraulic anyway (at least in the oil/gas business where I work anyway) and can be operated manually with stored pressure. The issue in the case of the steel plant is knowing what a 'safe' state is for the valves. That requires a proper consequence analysis with a resulting "cause and effect" matrix for executing safe shutdown. It is tedious as fuck, and expensive as all hell, but mostly worth it. Alas people tend to overestimate the rarity of such events and go or the "save us a bit of money now" solution:(
With sufficiently 'annoying' security practices, people stop following them.
We were issued password-protect usd sticks for secure use at work, and a month later we got ones without passwords. Why? People found the encrypted and protected sticks "too cumbersome" and just went out and bought a cheap 16 gig stick for themselves....
I bet the procedures will not be properly followed until one of the oil rigs get taken down. It pains me to know the issues and have zero ways to affect it....
Except things that we regularly bring to oil rigs and plug into the 'secure' side of the network:.xlsx and.docx files containing installation instructions and checklists.pdf files with 'red markups' of changed logic.exe files fetched from manufacturer websites with firmware upgrades A ton of files in proprietary file formats we have no actual way to check the contents of other than trusting the software which created the files.
We essentially have to trust that McAfee and MS endpoint protection will keep stuff out... (office net scans with endpoint, secure side with mcafee)
It is far far faaaar from perfect, and the staff there make it less so by putting usb sticks on their KVM boxes so every time they hop from office->secure and back they re-mount the drives automatically... it is cringeworthy for sure, but nobody sees the issue, or they plain dont care.
We have a document control system at work, it has grown to such a degree that adding a document is a 3 day process involving a document controller and various other tasks. If the document does not fit a corporate template it may get rejected.
At that point people tend to go "fuck it" and just send around work copies until it is finalized and THEN go through the hassle.
It is unfortunate, but I've seen it happen in two different companies so far... both multinational, both ignoring their own procedures for sensitive data.
That is what League of Legends does. The fact that servers send the client more information than it strictly needs is just silly. Though generating 3d sound from players client-side would require positional data.. so it is a bit tricky
VAC catches the people bad at it. Without it we would have a huge number of free hacks floating around. The ones being used now cost money, which limits the user-base somewhat at least.
Valve has done a huge job in getting rid of those sorts of hacks. But this is and has always been a big arms race.
VAC did defeat most of this crud for quite a while, but there will always be people willing to create new hacks as long as there is money or 'lulz' involved.
Best we can really do is be vigilant and weed out those who ruin the game for the rest. Be it with hacks or just general asshatesque behavior.
Wall-hacking and tracking stuff mostly. Since your client knows the location of all the players for the purpose of generating 3d sound etc you can extract that info. These hacks were distributed through steam workshop due to a flaw in that system, and were thought to be hidden from VAC.. until the bans hit;)
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed price contracts.
Sending 3 weeks manually verifying a couple of hundred excel sheets against other excel sheets netted the same payment from the customer as the automation I created that cut that down to 2-3 days.
"But the customer is always right!"
"We cannot tell the customer we will not fix!"
Blergh....
Public issue trackers tend to bring a lot of corporate politics into the process of trying to efficiently use the tracker for what it is meant for. Sigh.
I spent most of my time at my previous job automating tasks for other people so that they could stop doing the repeated and error prone work.
Then I got laid off because the bean-counters at central corporate did not believe I had enough "billable hours". The corporation actively encourages you to work slowly and inefficiently because they make more money that way...
And they wonder why the offshore sector in Norway crashed a year ago with the oil price no longer inflating profits.... sigh
I spent 8 hours on a flight with MY carry-on between my legs because there was literally NO other place I was allowed to put it on the plane.... I wanted to stab people.
The people in the row in front of me had brought 2 baby seats for their kids to sit in, and had L-shaped roller thingies for bringing them with em, and those took up the overhead compartment for 6 people worth... and THAt is where my shit was supposed to sit..... so not only did I have screaming toddlers for 8 hours, I had a bag between my legs making any movement bleh.... fuck people.
Well, if encryption is illegal they can just bust em for that and drop em in a hole until they give up their keys.
If they do NOT give up their keys, they stay in the hole.
Messages used to be split if longer than 160 characters.. Not sure if that is how it is handled in the back-end any more. That is how my ancient phone handled it anyway...
Oh.. and the environment is not very hostile. Everything is fully battery backed, fully environmentally shielded and there are virtually no vibrations reaching the room.
Hell, after 20 years in operation the room hardly has dust anywhere. The controllers look brand new when inspected.
I love working with the system as is, but trying to shoe-horn the new system requirements into the existing hardware is tricky at best. We're running all our data over a 2mbit token ring network.
Oh it is good gear, but the list of 'bugs' and 'erratas' on the gear is growing longer and longer for every month it stays in service. Spare parts are almost impossible to come by, and even the toolchain needed to update the programs are old enough to require special dedicated workstations.
It is not a matter of 'working' it is a matter of 'will work in the future'. Right now all the gear has reached "end of life" and spare parts are very close to being "ebay if you're lucky" in terms of procurement. Trying to get the customer to upgrade BEFORE we're already screwed and have to 'rush' an upgrade is the game we're in now.
Doing a 3 year project in 6 months (while in some cases doable..) leads to badly rushed design and future redesigns. We've seen this over and over in the past 10 years.
An example is that the new hardware has built in EX barriers on each channel, the termination boards are much better and a variety of other improvements. This translates into -4- massive cabinets being reduced to one. Real-estate offshore is hugely expensive and this would save staggering amounts of money compared to expanding equipment rooms... but they want the stuff they're used to, not the stuff that is current.
The hilarity of the whole thing is that the 'current' stuff is now installed all over the rig where old hardware is not available so now we have both systems running in parallel with a ton of 'interfacing' and single points of failure introduced as a result.
It can drive an engineer mad.
In the business I work "profibus" is considered a "new" technology. The standard was published in 1989.
We still run a token ring coax network for most critical systems on a significant part of the oil rigs in the North sea and on onshore installations supporting them.
Some of the controllers are 20 years old and just milling along happily. We did a replacement of NVRAM recently and that is all the service the modules need.
I fully expect this crud to still be in use in 20 years. Conservative bastards >.
"55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio"
Do the rest care about radio or have the people who listen already moved on?
My parents listen to radio here in Norway, but they use their TV for it these days since all the channels are available through the "Radio" option on their fiber cable/internet/everything system.
Log a case, ask them to contact you for the specifics due to the sensitive nature.
Not -that- hard to do...
Running a server out of memory can cause game world corruption if it happens at a bad time.
Quite annoying and could cause rollbacks to backups and such... bleh
He's monetizing the videos on youtube and earning advertising money himself. His case is weak as hell as a result...
From article: "Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar."
The guy has flagged his videos as monetized and earn advertising money from views.
If the videos were NOT monetized he would have a much better case...
From article:
"Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar."
Having low views and not making much from it is hardly a defense.
As much as I hate to say it, he is monetizing his drone flights and is sort of screwed...
Virtually all oil and gas rigs in the North Sea are connected (through firewalls of course) to the corporate office network.
Most of them are now moving to "Integrated Operations" which is a buzzword they came up with for "remote control room and maintenance" where the network is extended to vendor locations so that we do not have to send people out to the rig to look at stuff. We just call the rig and ask them to open the 'gate' so to speak and we get full raw network access to the secure network from a dedicated switch at our offices.
This is of course all tunneled across the internet... *sigh*
It is going to go horribly wrong at some point, I just hope I am on-shore when it happens.....
A safety valve -should- go into a safe position when power is lost. Virtually all such valves will be hydraulic anyway (at least in the oil/gas business where I work anyway) and can be operated manually with stored pressure. :(
The issue in the case of the steel plant is knowing what a 'safe' state is for the valves. That requires a proper consequence analysis with a resulting "cause and effect" matrix for executing safe shutdown. It is tedious as fuck, and expensive as all hell, but mostly worth it. Alas people tend to overestimate the rarity of such events and go or the "save us a bit of money now" solution
With sufficiently 'annoying' security practices, people stop following them.
We were issued password-protect usd sticks for secure use at work, and a month later we got ones without passwords. Why?
People found the encrypted and protected sticks "too cumbersome" and just went out and bought a cheap 16 gig stick for themselves....
I bet the procedures will not be properly followed until one of the oil rigs get taken down. It pains me to know the issues and have zero ways to affect it....
Except things that we regularly bring to oil rigs and plug into the 'secure' side of the network: .xlsx and .docx files containing installation instructions and checklists .pdf files with 'red markups' of changed logic .exe files fetched from manufacturer websites with firmware upgrades
A ton of files in proprietary file formats we have no actual way to check the contents of other than trusting the software which created the files.
We essentially have to trust that McAfee and MS endpoint protection will keep stuff out... (office net scans with endpoint, secure side with mcafee)
It is far far faaaar from perfect, and the staff there make it less so by putting usb sticks on their KVM boxes so every time they hop from office->secure and back they re-mount the drives automatically... it is cringeworthy for sure, but nobody sees the issue, or they plain dont care.
We have a document control system at work, it has grown to such a degree that adding a document is a 3 day process involving a document controller and various other tasks. If the document does not fit a corporate template it may get rejected.
At that point people tend to go "fuck it" and just send around work copies until it is finalized and THEN go through the hassle.
It is unfortunate, but I've seen it happen in two different companies so far... both multinational, both ignoring their own procedures for sensitive data.
Criminal case, not civil cases from what I can gather.
And the next step is kernel module for anti-cheat.. *sigh*
That is what League of Legends does. The fact that servers send the client more information than it strictly needs is just silly.
Though generating 3d sound from players client-side would require positional data.. so it is a bit tricky
VAC catches the people bad at it. Without it we would have a huge number of free hacks floating around. The ones being used now cost money, which limits the user-base somewhat at least.
Valve has done a huge job in getting rid of those sorts of hacks. But this is and has always been a big arms race.
VAC did defeat most of this crud for quite a while, but there will always be people willing to create new hacks as long as there is money or 'lulz' involved.
Best we can really do is be vigilant and weed out those who ruin the game for the rest. Be it with hacks or just general asshatesque behavior.
Wall-hacking and tracking stuff mostly. Since your client knows the location of all the players for the purpose of generating 3d sound etc you can extract that info. These hacks were distributed through steam workshop due to a flaw in that system, and were thought to be hidden from VAC.. until the bans hit ;)