10 ms·
Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
by feld 12y ago
Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt?
Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
- smacktoward 12y agoIn fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before it does what I told it to do! Piece of junk." The result was that software in that era tended to come with a lot more sharp edges. The age of the Recycle Bin that would save you from yourself didn't arrive until administering systems became something the general public was expected to do.
- austinz 12y agoThis is very true, which begs the question - why was a 23-year-old summer intern placed in charge of the embassy computer system, or even given access to its central console? He may have have self-taught facility with computers, but I find it hard to believe he'd have much experience at that age with the sort of large, mission-critical institutional computer system described in the article. I wonder if he had a supervisor sysadmin that he was working under, but given how he described his boss, that seems unlikely as well.
- analog31 12y agoYou might be surprised. What I observed during that time was that a lot of, if not most, senior people were clueless about what computers were actually doing. The potential "reach" of that intern might just not have occurred to people. And we still have national security / diplomacy disasters resulting from relatively low level people having access to vital computer systems beyond anybody's imagination.
- efnx 12y agoEven allowing for the era, providing the opportunity for a possibly disastrous effect to take place due to someone dropping the keyboard or knocking it with their elbow is inexcusable. Accidents happen - they should be minimized and steps should be taken towards quick recovery but they should be expected.
- viraptor 12y ago> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.
- thefreeman 12y agoPersonally I agree. Mistakes happen, everyone has accidentally hit the wrong key at one point or another in their life. I was pretty surprised how seemingly fine he was with being fired. At the same time, I guess the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response, and it has been about 30 years since it happened.
- viraptor 12y ago> the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response That's a dangerous way of thinking. 9/11 was big enough that it required a response. Not sure if we'll ever reverse the airport security stupidity that was such a response.
- smsm42 12y agoThis is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment may be entirely appropriate - one of your responsibilities is not to make such mistakes, you failed at it, you're fired.
- vehementi 12y agoI never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.
- gambler 12y agoYou're invoking an annoying and ridiculously overused false dichotomy that is as false today as it was 30 years ago. An interface that has fail-safes does not have to be annoying and clunky. In fact, interfaces that are annoying and clunky are a great contributor to human mistakes, because they require a lot of rote action, which encourages people not to pay attention and work on auto pilot. If something has changed over these years, it's the overall understanding of design principles and their popularization. (Thanks, Don Norman and other people in the field!) Training has nothing to do with it. Even if you can train a person to work with a badly designed system without making mistakes (often), designing the system well in the first place is almost always significantly easier and cheaper. For example, accidental key presses can be easily prevented by requiring the user to type a command of reasonable length. Typing "reboot-all-workstations" is not that difficult, but it would definitely prevent the incident described in the article.
- SolarNet 12y agoI think he was pointing out why it was built that way, not why it was that way. Today we know it is a false dichotomy, he was pointing out, back then, the world thought it wasn't.
- zaidf 12y agoYou're not taking into account the fact than what is considered bad and clunky interface today may have been the best in class 30 years ago.
- nightpool 12y agoYou know, I think that was the point of the comment. I might just be reading it wrong, but it seemed to me that he was decrying such interfaces, using obviously hyperbolic language like "pointless time-wasters" (in the context of something other people believed) and "the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds". It sounded to me like he was even slightly making fun of that worldview.
- smacktoward 12y agoYou are correct, making fun of it was my intention. I suppose next time I will have to hang a "WARNING: SARCASM" sign on my comment, to make sure everybody gets it :-D
- steven2012 12y agoNo, this isn't true at all. The power switch on the IBM PCs were way at the back so that people couldn't unintentionally reset the computer. The same thinking went into Ctrl-Alt-Del, which was a combination that people wouldn't accidentally hit. So having a system where F7 would reboot the entire system was pretty dumb, even in the early 80s.
- gry 12y agoI can't find information why the design(s) were as they were. The design of Ctrl-Alt-Del was intentionally unintentional. Gates noted Ctrl-Alt-Del should have been one button, not three [1]. David Bradley, the inventor of the trifecta, did make it deliberately difficult to reboot, however, it was also originally an Easter Egg which made it to production [2]. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-ctrl-alt-del-was-a-mistake http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#History
- MBCook 12y agoCtrl-Alt-Del was an excellent choice for it's intended purpose. It can be easily typed at they keyboard (no need to fiddle with the back of the computer) but it's very unlikely to be something you hit accidentally. I'm not sure a single key would have been a good idea. "The reboot key" just sounds like a mistake waiting to happen. I've seen enough stories on the 'net of laptops with power buttons in terrible places on the keyboard to get a glimpse. The mistake was using it for the Windows NT screen lock/unlock. Changing the "reboot your computer" sequence into the "start using my computer" sequence is a rather non-sensicle (ignoring implementation) choice.
- CoolGuySteve 12y agoAnother alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that everyone eventually memorizes. But even today, Windows 7 only makes you click that one button in UAC, and most people probably do it without even thinking about it.
- btilly 12y agoI have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory. Anyone using the app would hate me.
- derefr 12y agoWhen you delete a github repo, you have to retype the fully-qualified name of the repo you want to delete. I think that's exactly the right level of annoyance: it makes sure that if you're mistaken about where you are, you realize it, and that if you're making a typo, you'll have to make it the same way twice.
- jjoonathan 12y agoNot as much as we hate the person who made the decision to prevent phones/computers from turning on immediately when the battery is empty, even if they're plugged in :P If I ever meet that person IRL... I might even go so far as to make a tasteless joke about committing physical violence in retaliation for the hassle they've caused me.
- gridspy 12y agoThere are good reasons for this - When the battery has just started charging, the voltage will not be high enough for the phone to actually work, because the draw from the battery exceeds the plug pack input - Sometimes when transmitting, the phone uses more power for a fraction of a second than the power pack can deliver. This surge of energy could come from the battery, but the battery is empty so it won't work correctly - Having some amount of battery means the phone can soft-off correctly when the plug is removed suddenly. The alternative is an un-expected hard off which is usually bad. The user might experience data loss. There are a bunch of grey areas around low voltage, such as flash writes failing marginally or radio not working correctly or partial saves. Much easier for the engineers and perhaps more reliable for the users to make them wait just a little.
- tzs 12y agoAhhh....the days of sharp tools, no failsafes, and young programmers or admins. I recall that time I wrote a batch manager for the VAX 11/780 at Caltech High Energy Physics. It consisted of a program to monitor the batch queue and start jobs as scheduled ("BATch MANager", or "BATMAN"), and a program for users to submit jobs ("Run Overnight Batch INput", or "ROBIN"). The configuration file for BATMAN was stored in /etc/batman. During development, I occasionally had to "rm /etc/batman". Of course, out of habit, as soon as I typed "/etc/" my fingers would automatically type "passwd", and once I did not catch this in time. Oops. It happened to be a Sunday morning at around 7AM, and I had to call the other admin, who handled backups, to come in and restore that file. He was annoyed. The second time I did this, he was pretty pissed. The third time, I fortunately had been working at the terminal we had in the machine room, and managed to shut down power to the machine before the write buffers were flushed, and the file was OK after fsck. I didn't have to deal with an angry co-admininstrator that time. Just angry physicists. The other admin (Norman Wilson, in case anyone knows him or he reads HN) then made a link named /etc/safe_from_tzs to /etc/passwd to stop my nonsense once and for all. That worked until the first time I wanted to overwrite /etc/batman instead of rm it. That led to a cron job that maintained a copy of /etc/passwd in a separate file, and periodically checked to see if it were missing or misformatted, and restored it if so.
- dkural 12y agoOne would think after the first two times you'd find a better way to do this, realizing your infrequent but habitual mistake. Why didn't you change any of your practices after the first two screw ups?
- ern 12y agoIt wasn't until Windows 95 (or was it 3.1?) that usability and standardization were taken very seriously in the PC world. I recall vaguely using an 80's-era DOS-based word processor at my father's office, and pressing "F1" for help, and wiping out my work.
- Gravityloss 12y agoIf you visit countryside museums with old agricultural or workshop equipment, you can verify they are basically all maiming devices. Things used even in the 1950s. In one machine you push a piece of wood downwards and there's a blade that hacks slices off the bottom. Real tough men pushed right till the end so there was no waste. They often had some missing fingertips. Some really small changes made those accidents avoidable, like using some other pieces to hold the worked piece.
- mullingitover 12y agoStole the words right out of my keyboard. Who puts the 'reset every workstation in the building' button right next to the 'reset just one workstation' button with no confirmation prompt?
- fekberg 12y agoHe might have been that times IT Administrator? We've come a long way over these past 30 years, but think about it for a second, if you're an IT Administrator today handling all the office machines, you probably have the power to click 1 button to turn them all off? (Depending on the setup of course..) There's obviously more access rights involved today. Doesn't answer "who" put the button in there, I'm just thinking out-loud! :)
- matchu 12y agoThe issue wasn't whether he allowed to press it; it was just way too easy to press accidentally. Even if I have the authority to press the big red button, I'd like it to be behind glass and far from the light switch.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago> if you're an IT Administrator today handling all the office machines, you probably have the power to click 1 button to turn them all off? To err is human. To push the error to thousands of instances online at once - that's devops.
- krrrh 12y agocrontab -e crontab -r
- samstave 12y agocrontab -ri
- jauer 12y agoIt could very well have been a minicomputer system where he was on the operator console and the other "computers" were terminals.
- kysol 12y agoMy thoughts exactly. With that sort of "global" function, you would expect some sort of countdown timer prompt on each terminal that could be cancelled.
- oh_sigh 12y agoThere was probably something like a warning prompt that came up, but he may have been used to disregarding the message because it was always what he intended to do.
- hueving 12y agoIt is possible there was a warning for both functions and the operator just acknowledged the warning assuming it was for the single reset without reading it. This is a common problem with warning too often in interfaces.
- baddox 12y agoIt's still pretty obviously a horrible idea to have the two keys right next to each other with confirmations that are even remotely similar.
- swilliams 12y agoHoly moly. That's almost like the one Far Side cartoon with a "Wings Stay On" "Wings Fall Off" switch. http://imgur.com/AosYvGn http://imgur.com/AosYvGn
- michaelneale 12y agoThat was one my my reactions too (yeah it was a different age). My other reaction was about the total loss due to a restart - in what could have easily happened by faults in many other systems - presumably there was no way to save data as work went no, no journaling or anything. Indeed this was a different age.
- dade_ 12y agoTwo servers side by side. Broken KVM that only switched the monitor. The screen was Windows NT, but the keyboard in front of the monitor was connected to another server running OS/2. Ctrl-Alt-Del The Windows screen did nothing, but the sudden hard drive activity on the OS/2 server told me what I needed to know. Not thirty seconds later, I had visitors. I was around 21 at the time, so yeah... Experience.
- raverbashing 12y agoI don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition. Or just the old rm -rf / Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.
- jqm 12y agoIt's still the same on some Linux distros at least. I wiped a Slackware install last year carelessly attempting to fdisk an external drive. I caught it a few moments in, but it took a bit of doing to get the data back and I had to re-install.
- taylorbuley 12y agoNo thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!
- grecy 12y agoI was leaving my old job and handing in my MacBook Pro. After getting permission from the network guys (who were going to format it anyway) I ran rm -rf / as root. It was surprisingly boring, taking a very long time to delete all my files (I should have deleted them first). Eventually it got around to deleting fonts, which caused things to render a little strange, but after 60 minutes nothing much had changed and it was still chugging, so we shut it down and went to the bar for my last "Friday night drinks".
- yoblin 12y agoI did the same thing but had remotely SSH mounted some of our production servers. Won't make that mistake again.
- gordjw 12y agoI managed to run (sudo) mv /* /tmp one day. I was trying to move everything out of a folder to tmp (mv ./* /tmp), which was fine. Then I cd to /, and, wanting to rerun the command I'd run right before the mv, pressed up twice and enter quickly... Well, it failed once it finished moving /bin/mv to tmp. Of course cp, and a lot of other helpful commands come before mv alphabetically. It wasn't too bad, just needed a boot from a live disc to move everything back, but I still get nervous whenever / and * are in the same command.
- xophe 12y agoYou must have missed the main point of this essay, so I'll reiterate here. "take a deep breath, count to ten"
- SonicSoul 12y agoagreed 100% (if there truly wasn't a prompt). OP took the fall because the head administrator was too ashamed to admit that their system was so poorly designed to allow for this to happen.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- discardorama 12y agoIt's easy to have this attitude now. But if you ask people who were in IT 30 years ago, they'll tell you that systems in those days had _many_ sharp edges. You were expected to know your way around, and the consequences of mistakes were pretty severe.
- WalterBright 12y agoI was in IT 30 years ago, and this was never the attitude. What's different today: 1. we know a heluva lot more about human factors design 2. we have a heluva lot more excess computer power that can be devoted to human factors
- RachelF 12y agoI'd add: 3. many more people are using computers.
- mseebach 12y agoYou know what's totally plausible? That hitting F6 and F7 prompted for confirmation, but using the same prompt - and he just hit "Y", "Return" as he'd done 1000 times before (just like everybody does with the UAC dialog in Windows 7 today), and that bit didn't make it into the story because it's totally irrelevant to the point he's making. Heck, it probably wasn't even F6 or F7. If he's a normal human, he likely can't remember.
- JustSomeNobody 12y agoThink about the resource constraints of systems back then.
- openjck 12y agoSome people are saying that a warning would have helped. Remember that warning functions are easy to ignore. Never use a warning when you mean undo. http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning
- hliyan 12y agoThat won't help here. You cannot "undo" a workstation reset, or any other action that results in a state propagation.
- openjck 12y agoSure you can. Pressing the button would start a timer. While the timer is running, the user would have the opportunity to review their selection (maybe even with a simulation of what effect the selection has) and could undo the request if necessary. Only after the timer expires would the action actually be taken. This is how the "undo send" feature of Gmail works. http://mashable.com/2010/08/22/how-to-undo-send-in-gmail/ http://mashable.com/2010/08/22/how-to-undo-send-in-gmail/
- _pmf_ 12y agoI don't know whether armchair usability trivia helps here. Not every system deals with ephemeral web drivel; some systems interact with the real world and have impact.
- openjck 12y agoAre you saying that usability does not need to be considered in the design of critical systems? Human factors grew out of the need to build safe and error-resistant weaponry in World War II. Poor attention to human factors and user interface design was a factor in the Three Mile Island disaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors#In_aviation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors#In_aviation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Human_factors:_Confusion_over_valve_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Huma... With respect, to call this armchair usability and to imply that some users are just stupid is to completely misunderstand what usability is.