My condolences. And as much as I hate Posit/Workbench, some of that is on your IT department. If I’m reading your comment correctly, you’re having issues because it needs admin privileges to update some things, namely packages. That’s honestly a very simple fix, they just need to grant your user NTFS write permissions to the Rstudio/Workbench install directory locally (and maybe some registry keys, but that’s not definite). That’s it. It’s a 10-second permanent fix and no more UAC prompts for you.

What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?

Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit’s documentation isn’t great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that’s even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There’s a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees’ blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it’s entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn’t some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it’s an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.

Their support is absolute shit too, it’s truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won’t get anyone who actually knows WTF they’re talking about until you’re escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it’s the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it’s their product at fault. It obviously couldn’t possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we’ve previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.

Don’t even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It’s even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially “nothing,” and the other is “firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful.” That’s not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that’s the problem.

So yeah, if you’re not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they’re absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don’t have any real competition.

Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.

They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”

I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.

Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.

It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.

Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.

I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.

It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.

I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

This made me very angry.

The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.

While on the topic, this isn’t how passwords work in systems.

Passwords are stored as one way hashes. So it’s cryptoed only in one direction, it’s lossy, and can’t be recovered back to the original password.

When you log on, your cleartext PW is hashed in ephemeral memory/storage and then the cleartext password is thrown away.

That hash is compared to the hash in the DB. If the hash matches, then you have access. If it doesn’t, then your PW is incorrect.

Oh my sweet Summer Child. This is definitely how it’s supposed to work, but there are plenty of services that just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Have you ever been on a site that has a stupid-low character limit for a password? There’s literally no reason to do that, all the hashes are going to end up the same size in the DB anyway regardless of the original string length. Even bcrypt’s max secret character limit is 70-something characters.

Ever change a password and have it not work on the next login because they’re silently truncating it after a certain character limit? Ever get an email with an actual password in it?

The only reason you would do things like this is if you’re storing/processing passwords in plaintext and not hashing it client-side first.

I can think of 3 offenders of this off the top of my head. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.

hunter2

Wow, what a coincidence, my password is ******* too!

Were told our assignments in high school would get an automatic zero if we didn’t turn them in in cursive, even…

Lots of those in C# now, especially with Unity coming along like it did.

On Error Resume Next never before have more terrible words been spoken.

Every time I’m reading a PowerShell script at work and see -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue I want to scream into a pillow and forcefully revert their commit.

I’ve actually done it a few times, but I want to do it every time.

Eh, it depends. Other low-level things (systemd, glibc, etc) need a reboot too.

It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.

Does liber office make .docx files and export to pdf?

It does. It’s fine as a replacement for Word, but no one has an answer for Excel. LibreOffice Calc is fine for a basic spreadsheet, but Excel is in a completely different universe than Calc with anything beyond that.

To be fair though, Excel is in a completely different universe than literally any other competing product.

The fact that Firefox isn’t listed as a browser alternative but Brave is throws any credibility that this article might have straight into the garbage.

Suggesting Brave anything throws its credibility into the shitter, much less multiple times in multiple categories.

I’m considering switching everything to Debian eventually, but there’s a couple dedicated repos that make using Fedora on my laptop much easier for now.

I’d recommend against that. Debian is fantastic for a server, but I think it leaves a lot to be desired as a workstation OS as compared to Fedora.

You can get it there/make it that way, but Fedora is just better from a user experience/convenience perspective out of the box.

and pushed the staff turnover rate in my department to 95%. They ended up having to outsource the function to an overseas firm.

Sounds like their reason behind implementing the RTO plan was successful then.

BTW, any authenticator app works when it tells you to use one. They all use a standard, so it doesn’t matter which one you use.

Eh, it’s a little more nuanced than that, there’re more standards for MFA code generation than just TOTP.

And even within the TOTP standard, there are options to adjust the code generation (timing, hash algorithm, # of characters in the generated code, etc.) that not all clients are going to support or will be user-configureable. Blizzard’s Battle.net MFA is a good example of that.

If the code is just your basic 6-digit HMAC/SHA1 30-second code, yeah, odds are almost 100% that your client of choice will support it, but anything other than that I wouldn’t automatically assume that it’s going to work.

Bet it’ll be their own special flavor of Python that doesn’t play nice with literally any other packages or interpreters.

It’s literally just Python and it says that it supports standard packages/modules. And Guido Van Rossum works at Microsoft now, there’s no way he would let them bastardize it, he would’ve quit before that happened.

I don’t understand why people will find any reason to shit on anything while not even (seemingly) reading the article. If you did, I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t seem like you did.

But yeah, fuck it, let’s rip it all out and just keep the VBA integration until the heat death of the universe.

A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.

Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.

Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.