Once when doing tech support at a local hospital, one of the nurses called us stating that she had "some sort of weather report" up in a window on screen, but she couldn't click it away because the most would go under the screen. Obviously piquing my interest, I told her not to touch the computer until I arrived.
Since the hospital was quite big, it took me about 10 minutes to reach her workstation, where she exclaimed that "the window closed on its own a minute ago. I swear it was on there for half an hour".
That, coupled with the layout of the desk, the description of the window led me to a hypothesis. I pressed the button on the monitor (which she had unknowingly pressed with the corner of her keyboard) which called up the system menu of the display. It showed 100% sun (brightness). The mouse would go under it.
Then, I hiked back another 10 minutes to await the next phone call.
I also did tech support in a hospital. I'm not sure IT is a value add in that environment, at least not as much as IT thinks it is. Nurses are busy doing things like saving lives and caring for people experiencing the worst day of their life. On top of that nurses have to deal with poorly implemented and maintained workstations. Then when they ask for help the very people who created the problem in the first place come and belittle them.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Just noting my own perception that IT people tend to be very smug and see the world from an IT-centric perspective. Nurses aren't dumb and they certainly aren't lazy. They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.
As I recall everything in the hospital that was actually critical to providing care had some specialist that maintained the system. The computer running the MRI machine wasn't bound to Active Directory and might not even be on the network. Issues with it were routed to GE, not the guy that fixes printers.
Ha - I know where you're coming from, but, like every opinionated SOB on this site, can't help but throw in my own opinion*:
1) The parent comment seems completely neutral and non-judgmental. Seems quite just "I had this experience", essentially a set of facts (compared to frequent enough comments that possibly really ought to generate a response / "note of approbation").
2) Stereotypes are the epitome of judgmental thinking, language, attitudes, etc. That may sound judgmental itself, and I apologize for that - that's due, in part, to connotation "issues" with words we use (although, I can't, obviously, claim that even removing those removes all of that issue - I am literally labeling and characterizing strictly in denotation). To be fair, people, in general, can be very smug.
In my experience, there has been an "enrichment" of that in "IT", but, for example, try talking to some of the especially high-ranking surgeons, say ... or, certain professors. In particular, I've personally come across a somewhat bimodal distribution, I think. Some people who reach "very high levels of expertise" are very humble ("right-sized" - not subservient or etc.) and super nice (surprisingly willing to help and talk to even "the layman" / "novice"). Then, there are the outright "arrogant bastards".
So, to add some kind of summation - calling out "IT people" specifically, and especially the parent comment ... well, what's the point? Again - not meant to be rhetorical or aggressive ... but, I think many would agree that people in general should cut that $h1t out.
This opinion brought to you by my "Big Giant Head... remember, when you're thinking of giant heads, think [my] Big Giant Head..."**
* Which, we all know is likely to be comparable to ... something else everyone's got. Though, I'm telling myself, of course, that I've got something useful to say. "Caveat lector". :)
** With apologies to the writers and other people involved in making "3rd Rock from the Sun"
Every group of people who's remotely decently specialized... will get very smug assholes. I've met IT people who just want to help you get your shit done, and those who look down at you for being a "stupid user". Also I've met Doctors whom think they are god, and Doctor's who want to be a partner in your health journey and are totally non-judgemental (at least outwardly).
I'm sure you'd find the same in any similar field. Engineers. Pilots. Mechanics. Nurses.
And yes, everyone looks at the world from their personally centric view of the world. It's the only way we, as humans, know how. After all, how would you get to your oh-so-important job if not for the road engineer, or the mechanic who built your car, or the city designer who designed the routes that you use every day.
Some are more aware of main character syndrome [1] than others... and some are just less assholes than others.
The original comment didn't read very smug to me, but more generally you have a point. Most people (maybe all of us?) have much better things to do than learn quirks of Windows. It really is the software/computer manufacturer or maintainers fault when things work in an unexpected way. I mean, why do we even have general purpose computers and operating systems on machines designed to do one single job (like medical equipment)? why does the system menu even exist in a setup where it's never needed? The only reason is that the computer and software industry is really a duct taping industry where stuff just gets slapped together in a way that's easiest for whoever is doing the duct taping - not in a way that's easiest for the user or the best for the actual application.
In no other engineering discipline would this shit fly; imagine building a bridge and just constructing it from rocks, old cars and whatever scrap they happened to have lying around the construction site and then fixing it on the go as some of that crap quite predictably falls apart. This is basically what all of computer/software industry is doing.
> Nurses aren't dumb and they certainly aren't lazy. They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.
I don't want to reduce this discussion to name calling. Absolute majority of my tickets were along the lines of "user entered shit data and now they are getting shit data out, help". A minority of users would put in effort to thoroughly document actual state of affairs. Huge portion of users just did the bare minimum to tick a mental box "I did a thing". If they could find a way to discharge patient from their unit with lowest number of clicks/keypresses they would do that, even if it meant marking the patient as deceased (not much of a hyperbole, by the way).
> Nurses are busy doing things like saving lives and caring for people experiencing the worst day of their life.
That's the problem with medical personnel. They see the immediate act of "saving lives", e.g. putting a patient in a scanner ASAP, as their only job. All the documentation stuff is usually seen as a hindrance, sometimes as a way to cover someone's ass. Under very rare circumstances it is seen as an integral part of patient care. How do I know that? Every implementation of rule checks would be met with backlash rather than appreciation for an extra pair of robotic eyes.
> They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.
I understand a nurse shouldn't need to be a computer expert, but where to draw the line? I'm not a car guy, but I am expected to maintain a working vehicle and obey the rules of the road. I'm not a nurse, but am expected to comply with their instructions and understand to some degree what they're doing while under their care.
I see this in a lot of software. Any software person wants to solve a problem, but their solution becomes a part of their own ego such that in their mind it is the cornerstone of the entire business, whether that's true or not. However, the person they're solving it for just wants to get something done - they don't want software in their way. The best software should is as invisible to the end user as possible.
I had to do a tech support call once where 'the screen keeps glitching out I think I have a virus' (The Net was still in theaters). I showed up, removed the boombox with two large speakers from on top of the CRT and like magic the problem was solved!
I have the misfortune of my rescued VGA CRT displaying incorrect colors in the corners, unless I either leave magnets on the screen, or flip the magnets while degaussing and remove them before using the display.
Back in 1989 I worked as a one-man-IT-department for a bunch of ex-academic economists doing econometric modelling on a Digital VAX 11/750. This mini-computer was running VMS - a multi-user operating system. All users had admin rights and each one thought that they could make their models run faster by bumping up the process priority as far as it could go - which of course interfered with the realtime processes needed to manage the effective running of the computer. Unsurprisingly, this had the opposite effect to what they intended. When I discovered this was what was happening, I revoked their privileges and after a system restart, sanity was restored. I was thanked for finally making the system work faster.
There was a system that a bunch of students administered (I was one of the students at the time). We would occasionally prank each other. On this DEC station where memory was scarce, one guy ran emacs.
Another guy wrote a program that forked 1000 copies of itself, nice itself to 19, did a sleep(0) and then exit. As soon as it got any cpu time, it would exit, but it never would as long as emacs was running. Meanwhile, the load (as displayed by xload) became a solid black box.
So the emacs guy would run 'ps -ef | grep procname | xargs kill' as root.
This meant that it had to get some cpu time to handle the kill, which took longer than a sleep(0) and was largely ineffective.
The second time this prank was done, the process was named 'ema'... which promptly also killed all instances of emacs too.
The third time this prank was done, the process was named 'et'. This happened to have also matched /etc/initd and the machine rebooted rather suddenly.
We used to play pranks on each other such as logging into the NeWS server on a colleagues machine and manually setting a small rotation in the transformation matrix for a terminal window that someone was typing in....
NeWS had an interactive PostScript shell and almost no security so this kind of mucking about was trivial...
Somehow I've never considered what will happen on Unix if pid 1 exits!
Even though I'm pretty sure I've run with init=/bin/sh and then typed "exit" at some point in my single-user session, I have absolutely no recollection of the results. I should try it on a few OSes and see!
In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was kind of slow to start, especially when there were 20+ users logged in. Helpfully, our TA taught us how to ctrl-z to suspend the interpreter, then edit our program in vi, and then "fg" to get back into the interpreter.
Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)
I had a classmate who did her assignments in Ada. The compiler & linker would bring the school's Data General MV/8000 to it's knees, as it swapped out other processes to make room for it. Every 30-40 minutes we would have a coffee break forced on us.
When I was first learning Linux around 2006 I somehow got the idea that Ctrl-Z was the way to exit programs. For maybe 3 years, I would just Ctrl-z my way out of programs.
Luckily I worked almost entirely over ssh so I presume the suspended threads died with my ssh session exiting each day.
I had a similar story with a friend in college in the 2000's. He would always hit Ctrl-z'd to "close" emacs when logged into the server which would've been fine if he wasn't using screen or tmux as well. At some point, he was using a ridiculous amount of RAM on the server and the admins suspended his login to force him to come in.
Oh, my first internet access was through one of those in 1991 at college! Found a cool exploit that let me anonymously broadcast messages to anyone. Sure freaked out a lot of people. Was fun cause you'd get to see the effects of your action in real time because it was a bunch of people in the same room on shared terminals.
Around '84 doing seismic data. We just got a terminal in the office that would allow you to monitor the jobs running on the IBM mainframes downstairs. Completely new tech to all of us. It had a command line message capability. Because it was quite easy to send to all instead of just your recipient, one marriage ended rather suddenly. Seeing the effects of your actions with new tech in real time indeed.
Nice, reminds me of my high school computer lab. I wrote a trojan horse in VB6 and distributed it among the lab PCs somehow, then from mine I would open and close peoples CD trays, turn their monitor off, send them to... questionable websites where they would swear it wasn't them! Haha, good times.
That reminds me of a story from a guy I worked with.
I'm not sure where he worked but it involved a queue of people. He said someone asked him if they could be given priority for their problem to be looked at before others in the queue. In other words jump to the head of the queue.
He said "Sure!" to the surprise of the person asking "But you do realize I will do that for anyone else who asks the same thing?"
So they person chose to remain in their place in line.
I remember going along to a VAX/VMS System Administration workshop. Another bloke and I did a prank where we substituted text of the text editor that would produce blinking "Working" if it got busy. We substituted "or" with "an". The workshop coordinator caught us because we forgot to do something I can't remember and a login was tied to the change in the executable.
Economy is all about incentives and behaviors. Did they learn any lessons from how they acted during the episode? And hopefully published a whole bunch of papers from it?
> All users had admin rights and each one thought that they could make their models run faster by bumping up the process priority as far as it could go - which of course interfered with the realtime processes needed to manage the effective running of the computer
It amazes me what the bios and OS or OS api's let you do, even on modern devices.
> It amazes me what the bios and OS or OS api's let you do, even on modern devices.
Same, but not necessarily in a negative way. I like pushing my hardware and software to the limits, becoming unable to push those limits would be pretty disappointing.
Digging into the manuals I figured out how to launch the compiler as a background process so I could still have a working system while waiting for it. Brought the whole classroom to a halt.
More digging revealed that the background priority was set well above user priority. AFIAK no malice involved, just someone who didn't know how to set the system up and left that landmine for me to find.
Had exactly the same with a bunch of developers who could change the queue priority on a mainframe for their own work. They couldn't work out for themselves that if everybody set their work to the highest priority it had no benefit to any of them. Trying to educate them failed, so we revoked access.
Mine were in the early 2000s. Back then, the computers at the lab at my uni were not very powerful, so people would do work at a Linux console, saving themselves the hassle of running a bulky X session.
Some time around 2001 I read the console_ioctl(4) manpage and found it replete with prank possibilities. I wrote little programs that would flip the console font so that all the characters were upside down; or swap capital letters with small letters, again by way of manipulating the font; or flash patterns on the keyboard LEDs; or fade to black and back by manipulating the palette.
I then added a server component so that I could leave it running at an innocuously-looking terminal, wait for a victim, fire up these effects remotely from another box in the same room, and watch what happens. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the coding part was more fun than the watching-people-slip part, so I gave up on the latter.
Another prank I used to do was simulate a successful root login on these terminals by just typing in what would be printed, including the motd, at the getty login prompt, simulating newlines with tabs/spaces (and never ever pressing RET), ending in `[root@mailhost root]# `. Then, again, step back and watch what happens. Some people would curiously type in `whoami` and be puzzled why they got a password prompt; some would step back in terror without touching anything, switch terminals and email the sysadmin.
I wish I'd had Linux systems. I was doing the same type of thing with Windows networks since you could effectively run any program as any user with task scheduling so long as they were logged into the system. Pair that with active directory and you have user info. So knowing who was where, open iexplorer at certain site, innocuous word doc, etc. The most malicious case was an automated logout batch script.
People eventually caught on to the approach and tried to replicate the remote execution but executing as themselves instead of that user so when the IT admins came around there was a very obvious trail to who had been running it. I stopped playing around but eventually IT then SWE became my profession. I sometimes wonder how it'd have gone if I'd been reprimanded though.
IBM 370 mainframe, 80+ programmers, running VM/370 which creates virtual machines, one for each programmer.
I'm one of two systems programmers with "superuser" privs.
In the virtual machine you normally ran CMS but you could run anything. Some machines ran MVS.
To direct a command to the virtual machine itself you would prefix the command with a special character which by default was #
but any chosen character could be the magic prefix. So #cp ... would be a command to the virtual machine.
Bored one day I wondered if a virtual machine could run VM itself, on the "second level". I booted it up, changed the prefix
character to ! (so, !cp). I could create new virtual machines inside this new VM.
So, could a second level virtual machine run VM? I booted it up on the "third level", changed the prefix to @ (so, @cp)...
I got 8 levels deep. So, yes, VM could run VM, could run VM, could run VM... etc.
Game over. Time to start shutting down these embedded levels.
Out of habit I typed "#cp shutdown" ... and it did. The REAL VM on the REAL machine shut down. Panic run to the machine room to push the start button on the console.
Of course the system keeps a log ... and the other systems programmer showed up at my door ... and said "don't do that again".
I don't understand. I thought # was the prefix for the level 1 VM, not for the level 0 OS (the host). If you used # to send commands to level 0, what was the prefix for level 1?
System admin privilege #cp shutdown works on the real machine (unless the prefix is changed).
I set the first virtual level system prefix to be !cp, second level to @cp, third level to $cp (look at the top of your number keys to see the sequence).
I SHOULD have walked backward $cp shutdown ... @cp shutdown ... !cp shutdown but habit caused me to type #cp shutdown. Sigh.
Sounds like us used to linux working on solaris. Process got stuck and we were too lazy to look up the PID. So we just called “killall procname”. Machine immediately went dead.
When the sysadmin came over we learned that killall does something different on solaris and we should never use it again.
When I was at college back in the 80's we had access as students to the college's VAX 11/750 (an 8750 Systime clone) to work on our coding projects. The student terminals were on one half of a large divided room, the other half being used by the college IT folks. Often, if there wasn't a spare terminal on the IT admin half of the room, one or two of the IT folks would use two of the nearest terminals just over the divider.
One day, bored out of my mind waiting for my COBOL project to compile, I wondered if I could capture the sys admin's username and password. I wrote a script using the CLI to perfectly simulate the login prompt complete with beeps, messages and all. All it did was clear the screen, sit there waiting for user to enter their username and password, when they did the script would mail me said username and password, display a username/password error then logout to the real login process.
After trying the script out on a couple of unsuspecting classmates and having a bit of anonymous tomfoolery I decided it was time to try this out for real with the sysadmins. I logged into both terminals the IT folks normally used and left the script running. A few hours later I returned and to my surprise and mild anxiety I found out that I'd captured the SYSTEM login password :o. For about a month or so I'd full control of that machine, and would re-run the script occasionally whenever the SYSTEM password changed. I told no-one and on my last day at college logged in and deleted the script, just in case (this was around the time the law in the UK was getting a bit heavy with regards to unauthorised computer access).
Combined with access to the huge set of manuals for that machine I spent a heap of time exploring and learning about VMS and no-one had a clue.
an approach that goes back the the rainbow books, at least. There was some scheme to use the "break" key on the teletype for this (maybe in Multics, or OS/360 perhaps?) but I have no idea if it was ever implemented.
For those who don't remember, "break" was not an ASCII character but a literal long unmaskable pause in transmission, and couldn't be generated in software or by reading the paper tape punch, nor could it be read on the host side into an input buffer as it wasn't a character.
This seems like a rite of passage... I did the same thing with the VAX at my school, but decided to come clean and gave the sysadmin all the passwords I gathered after one day (including several with SYSTEM privileges). They gave me my first job :-). I also made sure to grant the necessary permissions to one or two obscure accounts, so that I could regain SYSTEM when it was revoked on my "official" accounts. Fun times, and innocent too -- I never used the privileges to cause havoc.
This is great. Reminds me of the BASIC program I wrote on my Ti-83 to simulate the memory reset process for algebra tests because our teacher walked around and would run it himself.
Its funny how writing a user login replacement seems kind of ubiquitous for all future hackers. Mine was in Visual Basic (5 iirc) for a Windows (Novell?) network. This was back in school. You could trivially change win.ini to set it up to run _before_ the real login screen. Mine would save the username and password to either a shared network drive or a local file, then display a "password error" and exit to the real login prompt.
What got me in the end was that a "friend" used the same trick and started copying peoples files from their network account to his own. My suspicion is that when he eventually maxed his quota, the system must've warned the network admin... a cursory look would later reveal he copied some teacher's thesis files, and that was a big no no.
Eventually this incident would land me my first computer related job as a junior tech support/network admin.
In high school in 1988, a friend and I discovered a vulnerability in the netware deployment of 30 IBM PS/2 Model 30-286s in our brand new computer lab that allowed us to insert programs into the autoexec netboot sequence. Prior to that, we'd been hacking on the (brand new at the time) VGA registers and figured out how to switch from 80x25 text mode to 320x200 256-color graphics mode with no flicker or glitches, as both modes have a refresh rate of 70Hz. So he created a TSR that preloaded a digitized picture of a clown face (a popular upload on BBSes at the time) into A000:0000, and after about 4 minutes, it would display the clown face for a few frames and then immediately switch back to whatever the user was working on. We gave ourselves away because we couldn't stop laughing in the corner of the room watching all the students get very confused/horrified looks. One bonus was the comic timing of a student calling the instructor over, having him stare at the screen for 3+ minutes, turn away, then have the clown face flash when he wasn't looking.
My friend's name was Brian, one of the smartest people I've had the privilege of knowing. Ten years later, we created mobygames.com.
My gag was a bird chirp that would play every so often--typically minutes between chirps. There were several random numbers that went into making the chirp so it would be different every time and every noise it made would be shifting frequency, never a moment of a fixed tone (back when speakers usually just went BEEP.) Leave it running on a machine that wasn't being used...
In the early '90s, I was a fresh Computer Science undergraduate student at a state university. Our computer lab was packed with the Sun SPARCstation IPCs, each running SunOS. We had this rudimentary email system that everyone in the department used to communicate. The tech-savvy folks, of course, had started exploring Usenet, but for the majority of us, the e-mail was our digital universe.
One day, my group of friends and I decided to have some fun. We concocted an idea inspired by the famous 'fortune' command that prints out random adages. We wrote a simple shell script that would take a random line from a text file full of humorous and nonsensical messages we'd written, then mail it to a random user in the computer science department. The script was set up as a cron job, scheduled to send one of these messages every hour.
Initially, it was just a harmless prank. People found the messages funny and would often share them in the lab. The source of these messages became the talk of the department, but nobody knew where they were coming from. We took great pleasure in watching our peers and professors speculating about the mysterious sender.
However, things started to get out of hand when the Dean received an especially absurd message that read, "Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!" He found the joke incomprehensible and thought it was some sort of cryptic message or even a potential threat.
The campus IT team was called in to investigate, and a week-long frenzy ensued as they tried to trace the source of the emails. My friends and I watched in trepidation, wondering if we'd be found out and expelled for our seemingly harmless prank.
Finally, after several sleepless nights, we decided to turn ourselves in. We went to the Dean and confessed. After an anxious silence, he started laughing. Apparently, he had been let in on the joke by one of the Computer Science professors and was waiting to see how long it would take for us to come forward. He was good-natured about the prank and found our initiative creative, although he warned us about the unintended consequences of such pranks.
Looking back, it was a fun, memorable prank that gave us a valuable lesson about the ethics of technology use. It's a story I often recount when I'm teaching my own Computer Science students about the importance of ethical conduct in the digital world.
I once had to troubleshoot the math department director’s PC misbehaving. It turned out that he let prime95 have every spare cycle on a core 2 duo for a decade and the machine would only boot if it had cooled to room temperature.
Looks like the project averaged about one new Mersenne Prime per year for 1996-2009, and then only 4 hits for 2010-2018 with none since 2018.
Obviously the tflops::hit difficulty ratio is ramping up as the numbers get larger, but I can't help wondering if the cryptocurrency craze dampened their work rate.
They're reporting 78,012 tflops of work done today, but my five minutes of investigation wasn't enough to find a historical chart of tflops/day and five minutes is about the limit of my curiosity on this matter for now.
Readit News
Since the hospital was quite big, it took me about 10 minutes to reach her workstation, where she exclaimed that "the window closed on its own a minute ago. I swear it was on there for half an hour".
That, coupled with the layout of the desk, the description of the window led me to a hypothesis. I pressed the button on the monitor (which she had unknowingly pressed with the corner of her keyboard) which called up the system menu of the display. It showed 100% sun (brightness). The mouse would go under it.
Then, I hiked back another 10 minutes to await the next phone call.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Just noting my own perception that IT people tend to be very smug and see the world from an IT-centric perspective. Nurses aren't dumb and they certainly aren't lazy. They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.
As I recall everything in the hospital that was actually critical to providing care had some specialist that maintained the system. The computer running the MRI machine wasn't bound to Active Directory and might not even be on the network. Issues with it were routed to GE, not the guy that fixes printers.
1) The parent comment seems completely neutral and non-judgmental. Seems quite just "I had this experience", essentially a set of facts (compared to frequent enough comments that possibly really ought to generate a response / "note of approbation").
2) Stereotypes are the epitome of judgmental thinking, language, attitudes, etc. That may sound judgmental itself, and I apologize for that - that's due, in part, to connotation "issues" with words we use (although, I can't, obviously, claim that even removing those removes all of that issue - I am literally labeling and characterizing strictly in denotation). To be fair, people, in general, can be very smug.
In my experience, there has been an "enrichment" of that in "IT", but, for example, try talking to some of the especially high-ranking surgeons, say ... or, certain professors. In particular, I've personally come across a somewhat bimodal distribution, I think. Some people who reach "very high levels of expertise" are very humble ("right-sized" - not subservient or etc.) and super nice (surprisingly willing to help and talk to even "the layman" / "novice"). Then, there are the outright "arrogant bastards".
So, to add some kind of summation - calling out "IT people" specifically, and especially the parent comment ... well, what's the point? Again - not meant to be rhetorical or aggressive ... but, I think many would agree that people in general should cut that $h1t out.
This opinion brought to you by my "Big Giant Head... remember, when you're thinking of giant heads, think [my] Big Giant Head..."**
* Which, we all know is likely to be comparable to ... something else everyone's got. Though, I'm telling myself, of course, that I've got something useful to say. "Caveat lector". :)
** With apologies to the writers and other people involved in making "3rd Rock from the Sun"
I'm sure you'd find the same in any similar field. Engineers. Pilots. Mechanics. Nurses.
And yes, everyone looks at the world from their personally centric view of the world. It's the only way we, as humans, know how. After all, how would you get to your oh-so-important job if not for the road engineer, or the mechanic who built your car, or the city designer who designed the routes that you use every day.
Some are more aware of main character syndrome [1] than others... and some are just less assholes than others.
[1] https://www.cxomedia.id/human-stories/20220722170529-74-1756...
In no other engineering discipline would this shit fly; imagine building a bridge and just constructing it from rocks, old cars and whatever scrap they happened to have lying around the construction site and then fixing it on the go as some of that crap quite predictably falls apart. This is basically what all of computer/software industry is doing.
> Nurses aren't dumb and they certainly aren't lazy. They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.
I don't want to reduce this discussion to name calling. Absolute majority of my tickets were along the lines of "user entered shit data and now they are getting shit data out, help". A minority of users would put in effort to thoroughly document actual state of affairs. Huge portion of users just did the bare minimum to tick a mental box "I did a thing". If they could find a way to discharge patient from their unit with lowest number of clicks/keypresses they would do that, even if it meant marking the patient as deceased (not much of a hyperbole, by the way).
> Nurses are busy doing things like saving lives and caring for people experiencing the worst day of their life.
That's the problem with medical personnel. They see the immediate act of "saving lives", e.g. putting a patient in a scanner ASAP, as their only job. All the documentation stuff is usually seen as a hindrance, sometimes as a way to cover someone's ass. Under very rare circumstances it is seen as an integral part of patient care. How do I know that? Every implementation of rule checks would be met with backlash rather than appreciation for an extra pair of robotic eyes.
I understand a nurse shouldn't need to be a computer expert, but where to draw the line? I'm not a car guy, but I am expected to maintain a working vehicle and obey the rules of the road. I'm not a nurse, but am expected to comply with their instructions and understand to some degree what they're doing while under their care.
In fact the nurse gave a quite accurate description of events i might add.
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Another guy wrote a program that forked 1000 copies of itself, nice itself to 19, did a sleep(0) and then exit. As soon as it got any cpu time, it would exit, but it never would as long as emacs was running. Meanwhile, the load (as displayed by xload) became a solid black box.
So the emacs guy would run 'ps -ef | grep procname | xargs kill' as root.
This meant that it had to get some cpu time to handle the kill, which took longer than a sleep(0) and was largely ineffective.
The second time this prank was done, the process was named 'ema'... which promptly also killed all instances of emacs too.
The third time this prank was done, the process was named 'et'. This happened to have also matched /etc/initd and the machine rebooted rather suddenly.
NeWS had an interactive PostScript shell and almost no security so this kind of mucking about was trivial...
Even though I'm pretty sure I've run with init=/bin/sh and then typed "exit" at some point in my single-user session, I have absolutely no recollection of the results. I should try it on a few OSes and see!
Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)
Luckily I worked almost entirely over ssh so I presume the suspended threads died with my ssh session exiting each day.
I'm not sure where he worked but it involved a queue of people. He said someone asked him if they could be given priority for their problem to be looked at before others in the queue. In other words jump to the head of the queue.
He said "Sure!" to the surprise of the person asking "But you do realize I will do that for anyone else who asks the same thing?"
So they person chose to remain in their place in line.
Happy System Administrator's Day!
It amazes me what the bios and OS or OS api's let you do, even on modern devices.
Same, but not necessarily in a negative way. I like pushing my hardware and software to the limits, becoming unable to push those limits would be pretty disappointing.
Digging into the manuals I figured out how to launch the compiler as a background process so I could still have a working system while waiting for it. Brought the whole classroom to a halt.
More digging revealed that the background priority was set well above user priority. AFIAK no malice involved, just someone who didn't know how to set the system up and left that landmine for me to find.
Mine were in the early 2000s. Back then, the computers at the lab at my uni were not very powerful, so people would do work at a Linux console, saving themselves the hassle of running a bulky X session.
Some time around 2001 I read the console_ioctl(4) manpage and found it replete with prank possibilities. I wrote little programs that would flip the console font so that all the characters were upside down; or swap capital letters with small letters, again by way of manipulating the font; or flash patterns on the keyboard LEDs; or fade to black and back by manipulating the palette.
I then added a server component so that I could leave it running at an innocuously-looking terminal, wait for a victim, fire up these effects remotely from another box in the same room, and watch what happens. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the coding part was more fun than the watching-people-slip part, so I gave up on the latter.
Another prank I used to do was simulate a successful root login on these terminals by just typing in what would be printed, including the motd, at the getty login prompt, simulating newlines with tabs/spaces (and never ever pressing RET), ending in `[root@mailhost root]# `. Then, again, step back and watch what happens. Some people would curiously type in `whoami` and be puzzled why they got a password prompt; some would step back in terror without touching anything, switch terminals and email the sysadmin.
People eventually caught on to the approach and tried to replicate the remote execution but executing as themselves instead of that user so when the IT admins came around there was a very obvious trail to who had been running it. I stopped playing around but eventually IT then SWE became my profession. I sometimes wonder how it'd have gone if I'd been reprimanded though.
In the virtual machine you normally ran CMS but you could run anything. Some machines ran MVS.
To direct a command to the virtual machine itself you would prefix the command with a special character which by default was # but any chosen character could be the magic prefix. So #cp ... would be a command to the virtual machine.
Bored one day I wondered if a virtual machine could run VM itself, on the "second level". I booted it up, changed the prefix character to ! (so, !cp). I could create new virtual machines inside this new VM.
So, could a second level virtual machine run VM? I booted it up on the "third level", changed the prefix to @ (so, @cp)...
I got 8 levels deep. So, yes, VM could run VM, could run VM, could run VM... etc.
Game over. Time to start shutting down these embedded levels.
Out of habit I typed "#cp shutdown" ... and it did. The REAL VM on the REAL machine shut down. Panic run to the machine room to push the start button on the console.
Of course the system keeps a log ... and the other systems programmer showed up at my door ... and said "don't do that again".
Fun times.
I set the first virtual level system prefix to be !cp, second level to @cp, third level to $cp (look at the top of your number keys to see the sequence).
I SHOULD have walked backward $cp shutdown ... @cp shutdown ... !cp shutdown but habit caused me to type #cp shutdown. Sigh.
When I was at college back in the 80's we had access as students to the college's VAX 11/750 (an 8750 Systime clone) to work on our coding projects. The student terminals were on one half of a large divided room, the other half being used by the college IT folks. Often, if there wasn't a spare terminal on the IT admin half of the room, one or two of the IT folks would use two of the nearest terminals just over the divider.
One day, bored out of my mind waiting for my COBOL project to compile, I wondered if I could capture the sys admin's username and password. I wrote a script using the CLI to perfectly simulate the login prompt complete with beeps, messages and all. All it did was clear the screen, sit there waiting for user to enter their username and password, when they did the script would mail me said username and password, display a username/password error then logout to the real login process.
After trying the script out on a couple of unsuspecting classmates and having a bit of anonymous tomfoolery I decided it was time to try this out for real with the sysadmins. I logged into both terminals the IT folks normally used and left the script running. A few hours later I returned and to my surprise and mild anxiety I found out that I'd captured the SYSTEM login password :o. For about a month or so I'd full control of that machine, and would re-run the script occasionally whenever the SYSTEM password changed. I told no-one and on my last day at college logged in and deleted the script, just in case (this was around the time the law in the UK was getting a bit heavy with regards to unauthorised computer access).
Combined with access to the huge set of manuals for that machine I spent a heap of time exploring and learning about VMS and no-one had a clue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete
For those who don't remember, "break" was not an ASCII character but a literal long unmaskable pause in transmission, and couldn't be generated in software or by reading the paper tape punch, nor could it be read on the host side into an input buffer as it wasn't a character.
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Big surprise now I program for a living.
Oddly, me too :)
What got me in the end was that a "friend" used the same trick and started copying peoples files from their network account to his own. My suspicion is that when he eventually maxed his quota, the system must've warned the network admin... a cursory look would later reveal he copied some teacher's thesis files, and that was a big no no.
Eventually this incident would land me my first computer related job as a junior tech support/network admin.
My friend's name was Brian, one of the smartest people I've had the privilege of knowing. Ten years later, we created mobygames.com.
One day, my group of friends and I decided to have some fun. We concocted an idea inspired by the famous 'fortune' command that prints out random adages. We wrote a simple shell script that would take a random line from a text file full of humorous and nonsensical messages we'd written, then mail it to a random user in the computer science department. The script was set up as a cron job, scheduled to send one of these messages every hour.
Initially, it was just a harmless prank. People found the messages funny and would often share them in the lab. The source of these messages became the talk of the department, but nobody knew where they were coming from. We took great pleasure in watching our peers and professors speculating about the mysterious sender.
However, things started to get out of hand when the Dean received an especially absurd message that read, "Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!" He found the joke incomprehensible and thought it was some sort of cryptic message or even a potential threat.
The campus IT team was called in to investigate, and a week-long frenzy ensued as they tried to trace the source of the emails. My friends and I watched in trepidation, wondering if we'd be found out and expelled for our seemingly harmless prank.
Finally, after several sleepless nights, we decided to turn ourselves in. We went to the Dean and confessed. After an anxious silence, he started laughing. Apparently, he had been let in on the joke by one of the Computer Science professors and was waiting to see how long it would take for us to come forward. He was good-natured about the prank and found our initiative creative, although he warned us about the unintended consequences of such pranks.
Looking back, it was a fun, memorable prank that gave us a valuable lesson about the ethics of technology use. It's a story I often recount when I'm teaching my own Computer Science students about the importance of ethical conduct in the digital world.
Obviously the tflops::hit difficulty ratio is ramping up as the numbers get larger, but I can't help wondering if the cryptocurrency craze dampened their work rate.
They're reporting 78,012 tflops of work done today, but my five minutes of investigation wasn't enough to find a historical chart of tflops/day and five minutes is about the limit of my curiosity on this matter for now.