Good question! I can’t remember.

I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

For the not all media played successfully, I found it was primarily down to transcode settings trying to hardware transcode file types my server can’t hardware transcode. It’s something worth playing with

Now yes, but it was briefly the basis for Firefox OS, which was almost early enough to the market to become a major player, but unfortunately too late and people were already attached to some apps they used regularly

Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.

This is why it’s becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they’re trying to access

Literally just yesterday my wife learned of Minetest’s existence and said it was a terrible name

Steam requires it to be installed in an x86 environment, whether natively, or through emulation (and most x86 emulation has significant overhead and imperfections)

But java applications should run natively if you supply an appropriate build of java. I have an arm VPS that I’ve hosted several Minecraft servers on without any problems (other than those I created myself) and I also learned by accident that Microsoft’s builds of OpenJDK actually work for (at least some) Minecraft versions that they aren’t supposed to, so I have to wonder if that’s a happy accident or intentional work by Microsoft

For what I’ve read and heard mentioned by engineers when I worked for a phone manufacturer, Android already heavily uses virtualization. If I remember correctly it does that for the A/B partitions for updating, as well as for the multiple user support. But I’m very open to anyone with closer experience to the Android kernel than I have chiming in with better specifics

I hadn’t seen any of his talks or content in a while so I was pretty sad to see how he stood on the recent Godot bans (shockingly opening GitHub issues containing slurs directed at the developers gets you banned from interacting with their project! Who’da thunk it?) and then seeing his comment section full of varying levels of dogwhistle to the rhetoric

Edit to add: in hindsight his slide into conspiracy definitely explains why I’ve gotten weird vibes off of his previously very good content

I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect

Excel is the backbone of so many businesses though!

The amount of times you hear “OMG why did Microsoft change XYZ” across IT departments everywhere…

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight

Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die