Captainant

You must not be a MS sales engineer then

Tfw 40k grimdark was closer to reality than we think lol. Buncha folks today look at IT staff as if they're tech priests with exclusive access to unknowable information. No, dumbass. Just use your fuckin brain and think for a second and Google some shit and then see what works. It's not magic, but sooooo many people exhibit this strange pride in being technically unprofficient

Re: when is a company crossing the line? Probably when they're shifting their business strategy to ensure more outages happen so they can continuously increase rates https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/centerpoint-bill-hurricane-beryl/285-9ae6118f-51f6-40b4-bd75-a9d8894cff11 "If I spend $1 on prevention, tree maintenance, cutting the trees down, I make two or three cents," Hirs said. "But if I spent $100 on disaster recovery, I'm going to make a significantly much greater profit. Therefore, we (utilities) kind of wait for disaster to strike."

KHOU put out some good reporting on this actually https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/centerpoint-bill-hurricane-beryl/285-9ae6118f-51f6-40b4-bd75-a9d8894cff11 "If I spend $1 on prevention, tree maintenance, cutting the trees down, I make two or three cents," Hirs said. "But if I spent $100 on disaster recovery, I'm going to make a significantly much greater profit. Therefore, we (utilities) kind of wait for disaster to strike." Turns out where they make pennies on the dollar for investing in prevention, they can make fat multiples in profit by jacking up rates after a storm to """pay for repairs""". They've been compounding rate increases since 2021 now

It's extremely unfortunate that the man who started the "trans assassination attempt" conspiracy theory is literally named "Hookem" https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/07/conservatives-accused-a-random-trans-woman-of-shooting-at-donald-trump-shes-speaking-out/ Fuck you, simulation

https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/centerpoint-bill-hurricane-beryl/285-9ae6118f-51f6-40b4-bd75-a9d8894cff11 "As a matter of public policy, we don’t want them going broke. Who’s going to take it over?" Hirs said. "And so we allow them a rate of return." Hirs said it’s a profit negotiated with state regulators and historically that rate of return has hovered around 10% on capital investments, such as new wires and poles and other equipment needed for the transmission and distribution of electricity. But Hirs said what is not as profitable for electric utilities are the costs of routine maintenance. "If I spend $1 on prevention, tree maintenance, cutting the trees down, I make two or three cents," Hirs said. "But if I spent $100 on disaster recovery, I'm going to make a significantly much greater profit. Therefore, we (utilities) kind of wait for disaster to strike." After disaster strikes, utilities go through a regulatory process with the Public Utility Commission of Texas to try to recoup storm recovery costs (including a rate of return) by passing them along to customers’ monthly bills. In past disasters, such as Hurricane Ike, the monthly increases could go on for years. "So the customer may end up paying $1, $2, $3 (per month), it depends on how much CenterPoint decides this cleanup cost will be," said Sandra Haverlah, President of the Texas Consumer Association. While CenterPoint has yet to officially tally up the cost for the derecho in May and Hurricane Beryl, the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings estimates it could likely climb north of $1 billion. "So every single time a storm comes now, CenterPoint turns around and says, 'OK, customers, here's another $2 on the bill,'" Haverlah said. "And we're starting to question when does that become too much?" Haverlah said it’s even more important to question given that CenterPoint, a for-profit, investor-owned utility, is under scrutiny for mishandling the response to Hurricane Beryl.

I guess they took "smoke out the child abusers" a little too literally

Crowdstrike is (was, now lmao) a leading endpoint protection software that was used by the majority of F500 businesses. Part of that software's operating model is that they can push out new virus definition and application updates whenever they deem necessary which bypasses most IT organizations controls for patch maintenance windows. Because hey - it's a security update! Don't want to delay those right? Well, it turns out allowing a 3rd party to push kernel level updates to your systems whenever they want isn't the best operating model! Crowdstrike pushed a bad package that's loaded at boot which causes a memory error known as a pagefault in the kernel space of the OS. This induces a kernel panic and complete crash. Because the bad file is loaded at boot every time, it locks up the OS into what's known as a "boot loop". The fix for this is literally just to simply remove the offending file from the system32 directory, but doing so requires booting into safe mode (which doesn't load ANY non-critical dll's on boot) so you can actually load the OS and remove the file. Once it's deleted, you're done and fixed. The problem is that most corporate machines have encryption software baked into the hardware called Bitlocker that requires retrieving a key from central IT to be able to boot into safe mode and delete the offending file. And it pretty much has to be done manually with hands on a keyboard, because you can't connect to it over the network because the host OS is kill edit: I should note that cloud users and extra savvy IT shops do have a quicker fix for this in simply detaching the virtual volume from a borked windows host, attaching it to a Linux host, and removing the file through simple filesystem operations. Since linux can just mount the volume directly, you can delete the file that way and move the now repaired volume back onto the windows virtual machine or instance.

I'll be goddamned, /r/WSB actually called it perfectly. This was posted about 8 hours before CS took half the internet offline https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/s/U3LbD1IRFT

Lol I just realized my daughter has the same hair style

Yeah it's a pretty easy fix if you're technically proficient, but it's a manual process that requires hands-on-keyboard. And LOTS of folks aren't all that confident with even basic typing

Did yall catch the after credit scene?

man if "MBA" were a person lol...

It's so weird to me that people obsess over their 401k - it's something you should be looking at quarterly, not tracking day by day

FTC calling out M$ for doing pretty much the exact opposite of what it said it would do when it was acquiring Activision https://www.ign.com/articles/ftc-blasts-xbox-game-pass-price-increase-and-new-tiers-as-product-degradation A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filing in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is taking aim at the recent Xbox Game Pass price increase, saying that it vindicates "the congressional design of preliminarily halting mergers to full evaluate their likely competitive effects." The filing argues that the price increase, which was announced July 9, is "inconsistent" with the case it made during last year's Xbox FTC trial. In breaking down the new revised service, the FTC filing describes the new Standard tier as a "degraded product" that withholds day-one releases while still representing an increase over the original Console Game Pass tier. "Product degradation — removing the most valuable games from Microsoft's new service — combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged," the filing reads. It also notes that the price increase coincides with Call of Duty being added to the most expensive tier. As outlined last week, the newly-revised Xbox Game Pass will raise the price of the Ultimate tier from $16.99 to $19.99 per month along with a host of other changes. The price increase was described as inevitable by analysts speaking with IGN, with some predicting that Game Pass will eventually see the introduction of ads. The changes are said to be part of a push by Xbox to recoup some of its $69 billion investment in Activision Blizzard.

Oh and the Mercedes F1 team is sponsored by crowdstrike lol

Oh we got hit by that! We have to call our central IT, verify our identity, read the serial number sticker off our machine, and then boot into safe mode, enter the bitlocker pin, and then go into command line and delete the bad DLL. Reboot and you're good! Super fast and easy and scalable lol

Yeah my virtual desktop is hosed lol. Thankfully I have local admin on my work laptop and didn't auto pull the update so I'm not completely hosed. Our outlook servers, VPN, and a few other core shared services are completely børked though. Gonna be an interesting Friday lol

Don't get me wrong, I think the devops model is better than the tradition dev/QA model, but it is rarely done "right" and not just as a buzzword thing. If QA is a defined part of your acceptance criteria then you're good, but PM's and business partners have a way of ignoring those things I've found.

You like trump for the pedophilia and rape, right?

QA is typically seen as a cost center and is often a first group targeted for downsizing by idiot empty suits, or getting outsourced to a consulting firm that's more interested in returning GREEN status than actually doing QA. Ive seen it firsthand in my customers time and time again

You're telling me the push to prod ISN'T "user acceptance testing"?? Ah fuck I gotta send some emails...

There are for Linux, because it's a OS that's actually built for enterprise usage lol. Windows is basically a full reinstall to unfuck it, and from what I've been reading in /r/crowdstrike most admins are just completely locked out from remote windows systems due to the boot loop.

It's usually deployed as part of a managed device, I know it's on my work laptop and virtual desktop as part of the whole minimum required security posture. I get the option to postpone windows and user software updates, but endpoint protection gets pushed through Username appropriate lulz

Literally a bad DLL file that causes a page fault BSOD on boot