vocatus_gate

What station did you visit? I spent 7 mo at Palmer and it was incredible!

Saw a lot of those down there

http://imgur.com/AOzmqZM

I just returned from 7 months in Antarctica at Palmer Station during the winter (a "winter-over" contract). It was impressive seeing the divers stay in the water as long as they did. Typically couldn't stay in past 30 minutes, even in heated dry suits.

I just came back from 7 months on one of the U.S. research stations, doing network engineering and glacier search and rescue. It was pretty interesting to see how fast the glacier face the station was near was retreating each year.

edit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_ha...

Oh trust me, we Americans are getting tired of it too.

Outsiders are often able to see much more clearly what's really going on with a dying organization.

It's because for some reason these days people have this bizarre obsession to shoehorn gender into everything, regardless the relevance.

This site is my favorite page to put full-screen on coworkers' computers when they forget to lock their screens.

You can actually right-click on the files in the "file explorer" and download them to your desktop IRL.

Did you mean "solution looking for a problem"? I didn't understand what you said.

I always thought it was "Fake User Interface."

What's the benefit of this? My uneducated guess would be faster automated testing?

Or, as it was already called, "being condescending." I don't get why EVERYTHING is shoehorned into being some gender-related thing these days.

Forgive the ignorance; what is headless?

The thing I love about bitcoin is that a $500 swing in a single day (or hour) is completely normal and par for the course. Sort of amusing in how ridiculous it is.

The whole "ponzi scheme" accusation is trotted out every time Bitcoin is brought up, and it's always by people completely unfamiliar with how Bitcoin actually functions. It's as much a "ponzie scheme" as much as any other limited-supply asset.

I wintered over in Antarctica at Palmer Station last year (2016). We saw icebergs flip frequently, never got any photos of this quality though.

Antarctica is an incredible place, truly nothing else like it.

What am I doing wasting time with Bitcoin, when WOP had a 14,087% (!!) gain???

Either Tron, a small one-off hacky script I made to automate the annoying process of cleaning up an infected Windows computer and which unexpectedly spiraled into a major open-source project:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript

or...this bad boy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/24e5xq/my_proudes...

Hideous but it worked.

Ah, now our friends in Japan can be scammed and disappointed by nonexistent fly-by-night vaporware Kickstarters just like we in America have been for some time now.

4 years NSA, 14 years Army Signal Corps (routers/switches/radios) with multiple overseas tours, now working in an enterprise financial data center with CCNA/CISSP and a TS/SCI with full scope poly would put me a little ways out of the "completely incompetent IT staff" category.

None taken, but you obviously didn't even read the post.

These project machines are shipped (or physically hand-carried) by grad students from random universities all over the world. They come from who-knows-what IT department running who-knows-what software packages, often cobbled together JUST enough to get it working because they're so budget and time constrained that's all the resources they had to throw at it. So the lab is full of bespoke machines running a variety of very obscure software, much of it on tailored Windows boxes.

So no, "me and my colleagues" didn't "destroy a multi-million dollar project by trying to save a few dollars."

I'd imagine with the resources at Microsoft's disposal their legal team has every possibility covered.

They weren't "my" experiments - I was the station network engineer with double-duty as helpdesk/IT person.

Imagine this: you're a broke grad student and you're given $xx grant money to conduct a certain experiment in N months. What are you going to spend your VERY limited time+money on? Finding a good Linux hardware developer to roll some custom solution that no one can understand or support? Or just throw together some hacky Python or .net MVP that will run on Windows which practically anyone in the world can troubleshoot with basic knowledge?

Linux is great and all (runs on all my systems except one), but it is NOT the best option when there are heavy time constraints and the system is going somewhere very remote where there will be one, MAYBE two people with basic IT knowledge to troubleshoot.

> I have some doubts about this story.... I highly doubt any of these experiments were running the home editions of Windows

I guess you've never worked with budget-constrained grant projects before.

> I do remember you talking about going to Antarctica in the Tron subreddit

7 months on ice.

> I hope that there isn't some undocumented part of the script that is disabling automatic updates.

Tron doesn't perform ANY undocumented actions. Unlike most the people defending Microsoft's actions in this thread, I am pro-user and seek to minimize negative impact to users in any project I'm involved in.

> Also, I am pretty sure that running home versions of Windows in contexts like this is against the Windows TOS.

If you're telling me there are people in the world using Windows in violation of its TOS I'm shocked, SHOCKED to say the least.

Good idea thanks. We'll check it out. But of course again, that's not something the user should have to do (and not something we want to have to do on every single system that connects). Wifi != "unlimited bandwidth."

Unlike all these Stockholm-syndrome affected users here, I will tell you.

Start --> 'services.msc' --> find "Windows Updates" service --> right-click --> properties --> switch it to Disabled and reboot.

Turn it on once a month or whenever YOU want to update. Done.

No. In THEORY you're more vulnerable to exploits in the wild by disabling Windows Update. In REALITY you're statistically FAR more likely to be harassed and have your software/apps/OS break due to Microsoft's "very similar to malware-style" forced updates.

I disabled Win10 updates over 1.5 years ago with zero issue. Security people love to claim the sky is falling, but it's all about risk/reward. Risk of issue due to actual exploit is pretty low for most people, so even though the potential IMPACT is very high, because the probability is so low compared to the constant irritation of Microsoft arbitrarily forcing whatever they want down your throat once a month, they just deal with it and shut off updates.

edit: downvote if you want, I'm not wrong.

I'm Army Reserve and we frequently have this problem in field exercises. Fire up some Win10 laptops on our very limited Verizon MiFi access point, they promptly download gig's of updates without consent and immediately push the bandwidth past the limit and the AP gets throttled to oblivion.

Yeah yeah you can turn of Windows updates or whatever, but you shouldn't have to do that just to force Microsoft to respect your wishes to update when you want to. And no, I'm not talking about some stupid restricted 8-hour window with no other option outside completely shutting down the service. TBH I'm still surprised they haven't tried to block users from doing that too at this point.

I worked in Antarctica last year, a "winter-over" contract as combination Network Engineer/Glacier Search and Rescue (GSAR) team member, at one of the very small U.S. research stations.

In the atmospheric/climatology lab there are a number of computers running very specific versions of Windows (down to specific patches) tailored to really obscure science research software packages, some industry standard, most custom-rolled and tailored to that project. Which means they're very fragile and need to be left alone.

Of course Microsoft blasts Win10 installer files down our very expensive, very slow satellite link, and proceeds to force Win7/8 systems to Win10 which broke a few multi-million dollar experiments in a place that takes MONTHS to get to in the winter. So effectively killed the research.

And yeah, you can argue "well you should've disabled Windows updates etc etc" but in REALITY, not perfect-theory world, you should be able to trust your OS manufacturer not to force-install a major OS revision without your consent. And in the old days of Microsoft, you could. Now they just say "f--- you, we're installing it regardless what you want."

That company can die in a fire for all I care.