@GOG I'm a client of that bank . . . but I've never looked at their CSV extracts, since their OFX files don't have any problem! The OFX files of one of their competitors, on the other hand, say that my balance is always zero, which is never the case (negative, sometimes, but never exactly zero).
Posts made by Lawrence
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RE: Electronic bank statements: Paving the way to better AI
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RE: win 3.1 still used in a french airport
@bb36e If it's running COBOL, then the hardware is probably quite up-to-date!
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RE: In other news today...
@ijij There's at least one similar place in France, where people suffering from this kind of affliction find refuge. Closer to her than West Virginia :)
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RE: KRAKEN BITCOIN EXCHANGE whaaa?
@asdf I once held a check for 4.2 million euros. Unfortunately, it wasn't made out to me, and the guy in question was standing next to me, joking that maybe he'd take it and skip overseas instead of depositing it in the company bank account (and using a vanishingly small portion to pay my next salary).
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RE: Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones
@dkf I've said it before: we're darn lucky there is no dry land there where people might be tempted to live.
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RE: Never not listen to your RAM
@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
God I wish we could get our hands on that much shiny at WtfCorp.
Well when you have a thousand VMs to run (on VMware), you're very happy if you only need to add RAM and not CPUs. Those are "my" 256-GB machines. 768 is more big databases.
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RE: Never not listen to your RAM
@ben_lubar Well I don't know what @Weng is doing with 64 GB, but at work I have a class of machines all at 256 GB, several at 768, and for testing I have eight blades in a 4U chassis with 128 each which makes 1 TB of RAM in 4U. All for work, promise!
When I listen to it it usually tells me it's bored silly.
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RE: Could you pass a US citizenship test?
Also who the h*** is "Hilary" Clinton, I've only heard of a "Hillary" . . . hilarious.
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RE: Could you pass a US citizenship test?
@CoyneTheDup So I missed only four, but that's not getting me a Green Card, is it.
//Grumpy
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RE: Whats this called?
@loopback0 Ah yes, Layer 8. At $WORK we've replaced saying "It's PEBKAC" and "It's an ID-ten-T problem" by accusing Layer 8.
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RE: :fa_database: [Old Forum is still alive] Important Data
@flabdablet, post:31, topic:3163, full:false said:
1. Shut the computer down immediately.
Good for a computer that you just started up, but no-no for a disk that has been spinning continuously for some time (months, years . . .). Such disks are very likely not to start up again once they've spun down. A panic-prodded little tap on the side just as it is trying to start spinning can maybe save the day (or rather the hour necessary to do an ultimate save).
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RE: CSVs ought to be in ASCII
@CoyneTheDup, post:32, topic:54675, full:false said:
You should never have used Excel to create a graph for something important enough that the distinction between smoothed and not was critical.
In an ideal world . . . in the real world, Excel is used for things so important that every single addition should be manually double-checked by pair mathematicians, and every single formula should be triple-validated by subject experts back-checked by a committee, every single member having to attest to the correctness and provability by signing their name in blood. It's a miracle that there isn't a severe nuclear incident every ten years and that there isn't an economic crisis every five and that the economy actually works.
What's that you say about following other news than TDWTF?
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RE: The philosophical beauty of Unix and compressing files
Just FYI, each component file in a tar file is by default zero-padded out to 10kB boundaries. Imagine the effect on, say, a Linux kernel source tree, even compared to compressing each file and tar'ing them together.
You do not need to explain to me the reason why running a compressor on a tar file will result in size reduction, nor the historical reason for this design choice in tar, nor do you need to follow up by anything else than cogent well-reasoned variants of "oh that's cool I never knew that, thank you so very much, I'm clicking like on your post". It seems every time I say something here some kind soul feels it necessary to explain my own post back to me.
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RE: A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer TCP/IP Route Command after 5 security plugins
I do hope you were doing all this plugin installing inside a VM? Can you change banks?
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RE: WTF Paypal?
- it's still more convenient to just put it on automatic payments and be done with it; all of my utility bills get paid automatically
Right, but this is supposed to replace/improve the current automatic payments.
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RE: WTF Paypal?
OK OK, you get the bill in the inbox of your secure banking interface, and you click pay (or not). Happier?
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RE: WTF Paypal?
There is a new system being rolled out in Europe that does exactly this, but IIUC it's being rolled out in stages. First stage is things like utility bills, you get them in the mail, click pay.
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RE: WTF Paypal?
I've used Paypal too, but never with any money in it. I say to use Paypal, I get sent to Paypal, Paypal says I have no money, and I click the option to charge my card this once. At least that's how it worked a few years ago... I usually use my bank's "single use" CC numbers: connect to bank, ask for CC number valid X months for max $$$, valid for a single merchant only. Get CC number, plug it in to merchant site, $$$PROFIT$$$. Only problem is with things like airlines that want to see the credit card you used when boarding.
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RE: Linus RAID failure: suspense / horror thriller for IT professionals (video)
Stuff like this can lower the odds of catastrophic data loss, but it can't eliminate it. That trusted server could still fail catastrophically
@anonymous234 is describing a filer (or a SAN array). Eliminating catastrophic data loss is why I have three of them, in a 2 synchronous DC+ async DR setup, with snapshots for the last week or month (depending on the data) . . . but I still have backups.
Or else I could buy an Axxana Phoenix. Think a hunking big barrel with ethernet and FC ports and some 3 TB inside, and the rest is UPS and shock protection and fire protection and what have you and a 4G antenna so that you can get at your data even if your datacenter is in the process of burning down. I'm wondering if it would have survived long enough being on the 95th floor of WTC1, but a bit higher or lower should have been doable.
Oh, and I'm not allowed to put my pr0n collection on my work machines, but you suspected that
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RE: Fuck you, Dell. Because of your root CA with free matching private key that you put on everyone's systems.
Hmmm. The Acer price point is good, and the things look nice, but both the smartphone and the laptop I've bought have irritating problems that should have been caught by QA on the prototypes.
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RE: Learn to Database (article)
Using Big Data techniques you can absolutely get such performance improvement that it makes perfect sense to copy everything to the Big Data environment, run your query, and copy back the result, especially if, say, your daily query uses more than your daily data, so that you only copy over the day's new data and run the query on the full dataset. It basically depends on your data architecture, volume, and the nature of your query.
An extreme but real-world example from $WORK is a daily query that went from 18 hours to 6 minutes, for a one-time HW cost of 1/24th the yearly recurrent cost of the old system (think about asking a certain DB company known to be expensive for their very best, and a certain HW company also known to be expensive for their very best high-performance cluster to run it on; the very prescient DB company made so much money they recently bought the very shining HW company). That's a Performance/Cost improvement of 4320 times, not counting relief from stress and other problems caused when the old query had problems related to the fact that it usually took 18/24ths of available time, never less but sometimes more. The human development costs were more than recouped in the first year of operation.
Now, I'm not saying that the original SQL query wasn't written by a friend of the WTF-author in the above post, it could have been, but the high-level theoretical query scales perfectly (complicated query run on several million totally independent chunks) and the 180-fold performance increase we saw can be to a significant degree explained by the hundredfold multiplication of computing cores and corresponding I/O power, so it can't have been all that bad.
So, laws of physics by all means, but sometimes you can get better for less, and even much better for much less, so it would be a pity to discount the possibility. (And no, neither the sponsor/dev team nor the department got to keep even a fraction of the money we saved, but you already suspected that, right?) -
RE: Right on target, but fucking stupid
Their menu system was about 10 levels deep and nearly impossible to get it to send you to an actual human.
Once I got into a situation like that and remembered a story that some IVR systems can detect swearing. I tried, and lo and behold I did get a competent human, but of course I can't be certain that it was due to my vocabulary!
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RE: Right on target, but fucking stupid
$5 to make them a bit happier and maybe convince them to shave an hour or two off their invoice is chump change!
Not to mention that someone pushing 18 stressful hours will probably work better with a coffee. You were maximizing investment! Your only error was not taking it out of petty cash to begin with
Friend of mine was in a situation where a senior VP wanting to be certain that the whole team would be working 100% on a crisis decreed that "nobody enters that team's room except the pizza delivery guy" - and proceeded to physically stand guard outside to deflect unwanted distractions.
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RE: Right on target, but fucking stupid
@Polygeekery, post:19, topic:51904, full:false said:
Moments after our children were born, they placed a bracelet around their ankles.
Hmm yes. I remember that ceremony very well. Nothing high-tech, just plastic with a paper slip. I was curious and in want of reading material, so naturally I immediately looked at it. It was the wrong name.
True story.
That was 13 years ago but I well remember the nurse turning pasty white and stammering excuses . . .
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RE: Pointless keybinds
I may be a vi/vim fan, and I don't want to start any flame wars, but really, people who think that the Escape key is part of the command probably do not appreciate vi to the extent it merits. Hitting the Escape key signals the end of the previous typing command, and an experienced user will usually hit escape as a reflex as soon as a burst of typing is finished. I often quip that vi is a text editor . . . it's not for writing text, only for editing it!
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RE: Crazy ISP Stories
[4] You left yourself open for a CPFI attack
Yes! Or no:
[4] I have no evidence that this actually happened, but the only other explanation involves the phrase "hopelessly incompetent" so I'm just going to stick with this one.
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RE: The failure modes of rsync
One of my professors has ls aliased to l
I used that too since at my school it was a standard alias to ls -ltr.
Then one day in my early work years I got called in to save an old MS-DOS machine with a super-critical homegrown application written in a language I didn't know running out of its compilation directory, no backups whatsoever. First order of business was of course to make a backup. For some reason probably known only to the guy whose disappearance had prompted my being called in, "l" launched the equivalent of a complete make clean ; make all The make command succeeded after some ten sweaty minutes, the app continued to work, the client never noticed, I finished sitting on my left hand and typing with one finger to avoid slips of the mind, but since then I avoid too-short aliases.
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RE: Crazy ISP Stories
Back when dialup was new[7] a friend of mine got a second line so he could run a BBS. The tech must have run out of clips or glue or else he had too much telephone cable[4], because he wound[8] the cable lots of turns around a metal pipe on the way[9]. Friend called them several times (using his normal line) to tell them that the quality of his second line wasn't good enough for the modem, but was met with total incomprehension. Finally he thought to hook up a normal telephone to the second line, and called them with that. The voice quality was so bad that they sent out a tech on the spot.
[7] a really long time ago
[8] like, uh, "to wind", but [7]
[9] reserved for future use
[10] unrelated footnote[12]
[11] induction anyone?
[12] because recursion[10] is cool
[13] I think I've recovered now -
RE: I ressemble this ABC news title.. Err.. ahhh "Resent?"
We must agree to disagree as this old geezer hasn't time for prolonged "I said; you said".
Good, that means you'll leave me with the last word
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Ecology-HOWTO/ecology-howto-lifecyle-hardware.html#AEN571
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=366682
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RE: I ressemble this ABC news title.. Err.. ahhh "Resent?"
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Linux needs a 386 or better. It cannot run on 286.
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286 processors never got up to 133 MHz, so your random post on the Internet is just as wrong as could be expected. 386 processors got up to 40 MHz and 486 to 120 MHz (AMD versions IIRC). 133 MHz was a very popular Pentium.
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RE: I want wifi to share my connection with multiple access points! EXCEPT WHEN I DON'T!
I'm in France, I use the ISP named Free, and I have this feature, and I can guarantee that roaming users that happen to use my box are seen on the Internet as using a different IP entirely. Maybe Comcast are incompetents, maybe it's even probable that they are given their history, but the article author does not seem to examine the possibility that the feature might be correctly implemented.
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RE: The font size is 2, that is 2, not 1, not 3, but 2, y'heah!?
Thanks @kuro. For those who wonder, the =3D is QP escape encoding for =, so since I pasted from the raw e-mail that's OK. As for the totally empty text/plain part (which caused a MPART_ALT_DIFF=0.79 point spamassassin ding) I suppose it's either a bug . . . or a misguided attempt to reduce e-mail size . . .
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RE: The font size is 2, that is 2, not 1, not 3, but 2, y'heah!?
Well, when I look at the source of this web page and search for "font", I see a pretty clean style font-face declaration, and then three distinct copies of my post . . . No points for Discourse.
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The font size is 2, that is 2, not 1, not 3, but 2, y'heah!?
Got a mail from a friend. I was reading mail in a text console, and the mail was empty. So I looked at the HTML alternative part. There was the mail content, all right . . . This came from the WebMail of SFR, the second biggest ISP in France, the biggest non-ex-phone-monopoly in Europe, with something like 12000 million euros turnover.
<p dir=3D"ltr"><font size=3D"2">Salut</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font = size=3D"2">les</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">filles</font= ><font size=3D"2"> !!!</font><br><font size=3D"2">l'année</font><font = size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">scolaire</font><font size=3D"2"> </font= ><font size=3D"2">touche</font><font size=3D"2"> à </font><font size= =3D"2">sa</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">fin</font><font s= ize=3D"2">.......</font><br><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">Reste= </font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">quelques</font><font size= =3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">épreuves</font><font size=3D"2"> </fon= t><font size=3D"2">à</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">p= asser</font><font size=3D"2">...... ;-) </font><br><font size=3D"2">Que</fo= nt><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">diriez</font><font size=3D"2">= </font><font size=3D"2">vous</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"= 2">d'un petit</font><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">thé</fon= t><font size=3D"2"> </font><font size=3D"2">mercredi</font><font size=3D"2"= > </font><font size=3D"2">à</font><font size=3D"2"> la </font><font si= ze=3D"2">maison</font><font size=3D"2"> ??</font></p><p dir=3D"ltr"><font s= ize=3D"2">Bises</font><br><font size=3D"2">Bon</font><font size=3D"2"> </fo= nt><font size=3D"2">week-end</font><br><font size=3D"2">Béa</font><br>= </p> ------=_Part_578_1700849160.1434123865493--
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RE: Rant about your users here
So how big was the movie anyway? I've seen 650 MB by internal e-mail (it was sendmail). It went through without a hitch. As soon as I saw it I initiated a change to limit mail to 20 MB, of course, with reasons like "mail storage is getting too much" and "when people try to send these monsters outside they bounce and it gets even worse".
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RE: Automatically generated C source (RNN)
event_for_each_pid(pid, event, upid)
is missing a semi-colon, and the use of the "err" variable and the goto fail and goto fault_error sear my eyes, but otherwise... this explains all those outsourcing fails! Those offshore coders are actually RNNs!
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RE: "Working" from home.
@PleegWat, post:38, topic:47706, full:false said:
call them out on it if the periodic builds fail by their fault.
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There's a story out there about a dev team that set up a USB-connected Nerf turret to automatically swivel and pepper the (workspace of the) dev who broke the build. I'm sure people have done it on purpose just for the laughs.
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Waiting hours for a commit is not good, but if a commit causes the build to fail, reject that commit and retry the compile. Automatic bisection anyone?
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Holidays . . . one of the best parts of my job. I punch a clock so that I don't "overwork", I get six weeks off, which means 27 days since my full time of 35 hours a week is to be done in 4½ days (or 9 days per two weeks), so you could say I get 30 days plus (52-6)/2=23 days that I have to space out. If I work "too little" or less than 4 hours "too much" it's counted toward the next week, so that most adjustments are simply noting that I'm a bit "over" or "under" and leaving earlier or later than usual. If I do do overtime it gets paid at +25%, or +100%+time off if it happens to be on a Sunday. I actually sometimes wish I had more time to work. Oh, and the salary . . . is unfortunately not one of the best parts of my job. Nothing is perfect
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RE: Oh, you wanted to get off the train? Tough shit, GPS is out.
Also, if your train derails, you won't need to open the doors, since they probably won't work, right? The GPS could even send a signal to weld the doors closed, because they could be right over a ravine, right, and in case of a fatal error a computer is supposed to just lock up . . . right?
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RE: What, you never said it had to work
Better Dilbert (probably the one the Chinese used):
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-22 -
RE: Holidays? PFFFFT!
I'm on call in one-week units. I get a fixed amount for being on call (roughly 25% of my monthly, so I'm roughly paid double the week I'm on call), plus 4 hours off that I can take later, and that's if I'm not called (it happens that I'm not called at all). When I'm called I get paid overtime (x2 after 10 pm, x3 on Sundays), and equivalent time off.
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RE: Tabs vs Spaces
because the barebones text editors don't support configuring tab width. You must switch to 64-bit Windows 8
And what barebones text editor on Unix doesn't support configuring tab width?
The only thing I'd change in vim is to add adjustable tab width, to edit tab-separated column data easily. When you have one column with (say) an e-mail address and lots of 1-8 char columns it's annoying to have to adjust tab width to the longest e-mail address.
For the record, I'm of the opinion that in a sane IDE the programmer should not have to care about tabs vs. spaces other than knowing that a single press on the Tab key indicates that the programmer wants to indent one more level than the IDE guessed, and Backspace one less.
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RE: MySQL backslash escaping
Run for your life? Be more concise, just say: "Escape!"
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RE: "Why is our datacenter bill so insane?" "We confused DR with DNR."
I know about expensive disks, but even for 100% SSDs, DR'd and backed up, USD 100 per GB per year is kinda outside normal limits. . . Unless maybe you only have 5 TB and 50 VMs and you're bearing the whole brunt of a 24/24 team to look after them? Or something . . .
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RE: Every. Single. Class.
Well trolled. The code as written considers that the data pointed to is a part of the object, so if the object or member is const then the data pointed to in return is const. Otherwise you get a pointer that you can use to change the object that is supposed to be const. I could quote Item 21 of the Second Edition of Meyer's Effective C++ if you wish (Item 3 in 3rd edition). Returning a const pointer to non-const data is rarely if ever useful, because you usually don't care what your caller does to his data. Your custom smart pointer class . . . well, even though EvanED thinks it's wrong, if you have half a million pre-STL LOC working on the premise that "const SmartPt" is a pointer to something const, I can work with that. You hiring?
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RE: TeX emulating an 8-bit AVR CPU
Cue story of guy (beginning of 1990's) who had some calculations to do. Annoyed that his PostScript printer was actually more powerful than his POS desktop, he rewrote his code in PostScript to do the actual calculations on the printer and print the results directly.
In fact, I believe I've heard the story twice, once from a friend who had the printer in his office and who was very proud to explain how he'd done it, and once right here on TDWTF, seen from the side of the poor guy who needed to print a bog-standard document but couldn't because the printer was busy calculating for the bad-tempered postscript coder...
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RE: I have been doing this too long, I swear
Sanitizing is OK, no fishy function declarations anywhere.
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RE: On-Call at the Muse Concert
I'm on call one week in four or five, and I get nearly double pay that week. Monthly that means +20% on my take-home pay after taxes and social security and such. And the number of hours actually worked plus two hours per week is deductible off normal working hours, to be taken if you're too tired next morning or later when service permits. I just took a week off using that, and I have four other weeks waiting.
The only problem is that even at +20%, I'm grossly underpaid and very seriously contemplating better-paying jobs with worse work-life balance.
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RE: "Shell Shock", the bash complement to heartbleed (AS IF)
Good explanation.
I tested sudo scripts, of which I have lots, but they seem OK, sudo sanitizes the environment.
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RE: Important Data
Actually... in a system that can stand the failure of two disks but not of a third disk, there is an argument for shutting down everything when the second disk fails. That way, if you didn't notice the first one, you'll be sure to notice the second one, but you can still recover your data. Of course, you mustn't actually stop the disks, because the problem is probably old disks that have been spinning for years, and they will never start again...
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RE: Representative request.
True story:
Once upon a mail server, a long and complicated script began, as scripts are wont to do:
LOGFILE=/var/log/something
Fast forward in time. $LOGFILE got large, was deemed useless. $COW_ORKER replaced the line with
LOGFILE=/dev/null
without noticing that in some rare conditions (IIRC midnight on first day of month) the script would
rm -f $LOGFILE
Long before /dev use crossed a warning threshold, postfix stopped delivering mail. Nocturnal hilarity ensued. If we'd had a /dev/null2 we'd have used it immediately!