CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

But they could be right, they may have an issue in their engineering department recently.

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Speaking of,I wanted to mention a slightly related observation I've had recently scrolling through twitter (unfortunately) looking for information on this crisis. There are a lot of people who at least know enough technical jargon to probably work in IT or technology but they're using arguments like "it must be because of a DEI hire", for those who are unaware they're using "DEI" as a replacement for a hard-r N-word. In other words, I just learned that blatant racists are not a rarity in our corner of the world. If you're not one of them, I wanted to inform you of what they really mean. Fortunately I haven't seen this on HN so far :)

Of course, white people making mistakes is unheard of.

Yeah it's quite frustrating how easily people latch on to the daily meme if it reinforces their preexisting prejudices.

Republicans calling Kamala Harris the DEI candidate in 3, 2, 1...

That's what you get if you browse Twitter. Stay off mainstream Twitter for your own sanity.

> Fortunately I haven't seen this on HN so far :)

Here people just blame offshore workers for this bug or other such critical bugs, as if US workers don't make mistakes. Peoples' egos are just unbelievable. If it's not DEI developers, then it must be those filthy foreign programmers from developing nations responsible for poor quality software and I've even seen here mentioned that Windows worldwide dominance also be blamed on SW devs from developing nations for being too poor to own Macs. I despise this "holier than thou" mentality of some privileged tech workers.

I'm curious about what you mean though, if you have any sample threads.

There is a certain type of tech person (well, they probably exist elsewhere, but the tech variety is particularly noisy) who seems absolutely determined to use this one every time a company does something stupid; there seems to be an odd unwillingness to blame _process_, rather than some sort of imagined individual saboteur (who would, preferably, in the minds of these people, be someone other than a straight white man).

A particularly extreme example, to the point that it almost read as parody; when the door plug blew out of that 737, there was a certain amount of fixation by the weirdos on Twitter on how the pilot was a woman. Quite how this was supposed to have anything to do with it was unclear.

The whole thing is pretty weird, and feels quite new. Sometimes, a poorly-run company is just a poorly-run company.

Imagine actually being a minority, woman or any group like that and making a mistake. sucks.

It's new because, 10-20 years ago in America at least, it finally became extremely unfashionable to utter blatantly racist stuff in public, to the point where it cost you your friends and maybe your job, depending on who heard it. But then Trump happened, and casual racism became OK again among half the population, like the 50s have returned.

Linux has been a viable alternative for decades now for many tasks. This problem wasn't caused by a lack of money. If you want to blame someone for the dominance of Windows, blame corporations and managers, because they're the ones that have chosen it. SW devs from developing nations have only been doing what they perceived to be in their best economic interest.

For decades?! Maybe on the servers, but on PCs, hardly. Also, even if that may be the case now, it doesn't change the fact that at your job they'll most likely use Windows not Linux on the workstations. Linux is king on the servers, but PCs everywhere will mostly still be Windows, especially in corporate environments.

While it wasn't as easy as it is today, I've been running Linux on my home desktop since around 1999. It's never been that hard, and it did require more careful hardware selection (no, you can't just grab some random dirt-cheap piece-of-shit "winprinter" and expect it to work with Linux), but it's always been quite doable for anyone who claims to be skilled with computers. We're talking about IT workers here, not grandma.

>at your job they'll most likely use Windows not Linux on the workstations

This is exactly my point in my prior post.

Was it though? Your second paragraph is written in a way that it can easily be interpreted as "all critics of DEI hiring are racists". Is that a more sophisticated statement than "all minorities are incompetent"? Is being a racist the only reason someone might be opposed to quota-based hiring?

Wherever I've seen diversity initiatives, the point is to expand the hiring pool, not shrink it. In other words this is people who, for whatever reason, want to portray the situation as precisely the opposite of what it is.

Very easily could be one highly technical or just highly resourced individual with a bot farm..

Isn't that exactly the problem though: hiring is currently based on race/gender in favor of white/male hard enough that you get interior people from that hiring pool?

Personal anecdotes are not statistics or cases representative for the average user or business. What others do with their systems and their requirements and apps could be very different than yours. You think if Linux was that usable at everything in 1999 companies and individuals wouldn't have loves to use that instead of paying thousand of dollars to Microsoft?

Just because you could set it up and use it in 1999 doesn't mean it was the norm. Some people know how to change their own oil while most don't and don't care to since they prefer to pay someone else to do it as they have other hobbies than learning to tinker with their car. Similarly some people like you like to thinker and find out how to get Linux to work in 1999 while most prefer to just pay to use Windows NT/MacOS and get to work.

To clarify, I'm not to keen on DEI either, but we're not really talking about DEI here are we now?

Inertia is a strong force in corporations. I wouldn't count on reason there, inertia triumphs it.

Personal anecdotes is something that shows it can be done. In few corps I worked since 2004 I was also able to switch windows to linux (as many other developers there) and we didn't loose functionality. But I get it that for people that work mostly in excel it would be a blocker, as it doesn't have Linux version - so not all work could be done on Linux. But having options is good.

My current corp decided to give people a choice (after a decade of asking for it) and since 2 years we can choose between Windows, macOS and Linux.

(I'm still amazed that most developers chose macOS, as it is less power user friendly than Windows). Before I was the only one with Linux, now there are > 20% of us. And possibly more in the future when hardware will be upgaded.

Some people have built their own car from scratch in their garage that they use to drive to work, but it's unrealistic most people do that at scale, even though someone proved it's possible. The same way, why aren't you building your own car to daily drive and instead paying Ford/Toyota? Someone proved it's possible.

> In few corps I worked since 2004 I was also able to switch windows to linux

The vast majority of Windows/MacOS users are not SW-developers, nor to they have any deeper interest in tinkering with computers and learn Linux. They're content with what they're already familiar with.

You keep taking highly niche technical cases from your SW dev bubble and trying to extrapolate that experience as being mainstream when you're far from it. The photo studio or flower shop down the road in 2004 was no way gonna switch to Linux even if it was technically possible.

Imagine if any minority or woman was involved in any crowdstrike team that had anything to do with this outage and consider how the DEI debate is being raised in that context. If those people are hired, does it make them a DEI hire by default? of course not! that is silly, that's not even what DEI is. It is a slur in this context, nothing short of it.

I wouldn't be saying this if DEI was in any way relevant to the topic at hand, then we can discuss how DEI was to blame. Honestly, I don't even agree with the corporate approach of DEI, but bringing it up in this context would indeed be racism. Imagine making a mistake and someone say "this is what you get for allowing white privilege" is that fair? is that not racism? that's what's happening here. Everyone deserves fair treatment.

I bet you a lot of people think DEI is companies go "you're black, you're hired". Instead you're absolutely right, it's manipulating the pipeline so that 50% are the overall best and 50% are diverse. The "diverse" ones also have to do great in their interviews, no one is automatically hired.

We're not talking about regular people here. Try reading the prior messages for context before commenting. We're talking about people who claim to be IT professionals. If they were really as smart as they claimed, they could have done the same thing I did easily. They didn't, not because they loved Windows that much (maybe they did, maybe they didn't, it's irrelevant), but because it was seen as essential for their career.

Why is it so hard for you to understand that we're not talking about average users here?

Not even that; it’s changing the pipeline so that it has a lower weighting on upper-middle-class white men who went to one of about four universities (which does not actually equate with ‘overall best’). One surprisingly simple thing that companies can do is be realistic about their requirements in the job spec. There’s a fair bit of evidence that if you have an aspirational job spec, then some candidates will go “well, I meet some of that” and apply, and others will go “well, I only have five years of experience in [whatever], not six like it says in the job spec” and won’t apply. And group 2 tends to be less male, less white, and more working-class.

They did not choose Windows because a bunch of devs from India were too poor to buy Macs, which was the original assertion.