On Jan 25, 2010, at 4:47 PM, frantisek holop wrote:
> hmm, on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 12:32:10PM -0800, Ben Calvert said that
>> the unnamed individual (with such great faith in his mail system that he
uses
>> gmail to correspond with us) is actually performing the valuable function
of
>> helping me compose interview questions to weed out undesirable job
applicants,
>> so let's try to keep this thread going as long as possible.
>
> how is his kind of "certainty" bad from a professional view?
because of the rest of your message, which is about the imperfection inherent
in "real life"
people who are looking for clear cut certainty in life are unable to deal with
the huge grey areas that come up when administering a real world system.
I encounter this attitude in management who want to be able to say "we have a
firewall with features x y and z, so the network is secure", or much worse and
more typical "using ${CommercialSoftwarePackage} is safe as long as you have
applied all the patches".
These attitudes, like the guy from Xen land a couple of weeks ago who thought
he would compliment the developers on misc@ by saying that OpenBSD is a
"Perfectly Secure Operating System", are (imho) caused by the delusion that
it's possible to be certain about these kinds of things.
Good Developers and Administrators (again, imho) say things like "we have
audited the code and eliminated all instances of ${BadIdea}. No one has
reported a remote root hole in x days" or "we've done these things, and are
monitoring the logs to see what kind of attack is tried next".
The specific mistake I believe mr nix was making is assuming that because he
read something in a man page (and earlier, something else in a FAQ) that
1. it's possible for the statement to be true
2. actually true.
3. and therefore, his mail server will never lose mail when it crashes.
the guy from Xen land, so said something like "it's highly unlikely that there
are any bugs in the hypervisor" was making the same mistake. he was assuming
that it's possible to have perfect software running on perfect hardware, and
therefore didn't listen to people telling him that neither condition was
actually being met.
>
> it all works on a "good enough" level (for various values of "good"),
> otherwise we wouldn't be using it at all. nothing is perfect in life,
> it is always barely "good enough", why would IT be different?
>
> not many people go on elaborate ontogenetical discussions what
> the manual _really_ meant by "atomic operation" or "sql transaction".
> why don't we go down right to the subatomic level and just say
> we don't even exist? that you are reading a message that
> perchance does not exist?
>
> if humankind was expected to make things perfect, it would be still
> working on the wheel.. we build systems that are acceptably reliable
> inside certain boundaries, made on certain budgets.
>
> that these budgets are evershrinking and quality is becoming
> a verb in past perfect without future tense, that is another
> sad story. we are cheap. we get what we pay for.
>
> -f
> --
> i'm so close to hell i can almost see vegas!
>
Ben
