The parent post is an attempt at humor, not off-topic rambling. If you've ever anything be H. P. Lovecraft, you got the joke and probably were expecting to see some reference when you read the article. Cthulhu was a squiddy "god" that lived (so to speak) in the depths in Lovecraft's maltheist pantheon. HTH. HAND.
It's the whole 'lumpers v. splitters' thing. Rightly or wrongly, somebody who identifies a new species gets more respect ("He's a good scientist") than somebody who finds a big squid ("He's a good fisherman"). I know essentially nothing about squid phylogeny, but if these things are rare, it could be hard to tell if they are multiple species or just one or two species with lots of variation. I mean, if you didn't know better would you think that a Great Dane and a daschund were the same species? Of course, the article gives very little detail ("It's big!"), some of which is wrong ("It eats whales!"), so there could be some pretty good morphological evidence behind this conclusion, but CNN'll never tell.
I love the fact that it is THE one guy in the hot seats fault. Not Congress. Not the SEnate. Not the last eight YEARS of ignoring signs and worrying about guys selling sawed off shotguns in the mountains rather than corporate scandal and greed.
I agree with you - in part. These scandals have been brewing for years, so it's not all Bush's fault. BUT, he ran on the idea that there needed to be fewer laws and less oversight for big business. His appointee to head the SEC was widely percieved to be pro-business and that was considered a feature, not a bug, by the Prez. Bush was wrong. Big businesses are sometimes run by crooks. The head of a regulatory agency shouldn't come in saying he's not going to look for problems. Bush needs to say "I was wrong. I want Congress to triple the size of the SEC. I want Harvey Pitt to crack some skulls, and if he won't do it, I'll hire somebody who will. I want to use RICO laws to nail CEO's and CFO's who defraud stockholders. I want Congress to pass a law allowing for mandatory minimum sentencing and asset forfeiture on corporate executives who lie, or are even suspected of lying to stockholders - it's what we do for drug dealers and these people are no better. I want the release of 'pro forma' profits in annual reports to be probable cause for an investigation." Then people would start to take him seriously. This could be a golden political oppurtunity for Bush to show that he really is tough on crime, not just somebody who supports the death penalty. I doubt he'll seize the chance though.
THe only industry in the world that can mistreat its customers every step of the way are the Airlines.
That's impossible. The airlines were once heavily regulated, but were desparate to get out from under the yoke of the feds. When they got their wishes granted, all airlines instantly became the highly profitable companies with ecstatic customers that the feds kept them from being. Everybody knows that the free market is always perfect. Any other information is propaganda.
Bush came into office saying that the Feds needed to get off of the back of the corporations. His appointee to the SEC wanted to have a kinder, gentler reltionship with the corporations the SEC investigates. Then, a bunch of big corps publicly melted down, in part due to questionable/illegal actions. Therefore a bunch of people who said that Bush's ideas on deregulation were bad, and that his SEC boss was completely wrong, are saying "I told you so". Look at it this way, if Gore had won and said "We need to get the Feds off of everybody's back" and appointed a long time mob lawyer to FBI chief, saying "We need kinder, gentler RICO enforcement", how would the conservatives have reacted?
Corporate corruption is an organized crime, just like running a numbers game is. You've got a group of people conspiring together to break laws for their benefit. That's how they are similar to the mob. Nobody at Enron kneecapped anybody, but that doesn't mean that they weren't an organized gang of crooks. In the US there are a set of laws known as RICO - Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. They essentially (IIUnderstandC and IANAL) say that if you are the head of an organization that systemically breaks laws you are personally criminally responsible. They were originally created to combat organized crime by allowing the bosses to be arrested for what the underlings did, but they have been interpreted somewhat broadly - Operation Rescue was sued (albeit unsuccessfully) under the law. (Check out www.thirdamendment.com/rico for more details on how RICO is applied - rightly or wrongly.)
Now, according to graham.main.nc.us/~bhammel/INS/RICO.html racketeering activity includes things like bribery, embeezlement from pension funds, wire fraud, financial institution fraud, obstruction of justice and criminal investigations, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, as well as things like "unlawful substances" and "obscene materials". Furthermore, you are subject to RICO if you directly or indirectly recieve or invest any income from those activities, or use that income to control a company engaged in interstate or foriegn commerce. The WorldComs and Enrons of the world begin to edge into the RICO laws when they lie about profits (fraud) and shred documents (obstruction of justice) so that the C*Os can make big bucks. That's how corporate corruption is "the same classification as the mob".
an other alike question could be: would you eat meat of you had to kill and butcher the cow yourself..
Probably not, as slaughtering a cow is a lot of messy work, and my wife doesn't eat anything warm-blooded, so it would hardly be worth it. Otoh, she does eat eggs and I have a really good recipe for chicken tandoori;)
The question did specify any condtions such as starving children, etc. Therefore, the question is "Would you do it right now, sitting in your job interview in your good suit in your highly technologically advanced society?" Are your children currently starving? If they are, maybe you should spend less time on/.
Also, since you think it is moral/ethical/whatever to anonymously murder complete strangers, you must therefore accept that it is moral/ethical/whatever for complete strangers to anonymously murder you. I would be surprised if this were the case.
On the hitman side, I think Virgil in True Romance said it best - "Now the first time you kill somebody, that's the hardest... Now... shit... now I do it just to watch their fuckin' expression change." HAND.
I went to France as a high school junior (with the French Club) and several times I had people thank me for saving them in the world wars. I wish that I had thought to thank them for Lafayette, but it was very touching that they felt the need to do so.
Of course, I also ran into a lot of the stereotypical sneering frogs, but I expected that.
Hey, the networks wanted to do a dramatic reading of the Starr Report, but the FCC wouldn't let them.
Actually, the media was raised on Watergate and they are a bit left-leaning on average. However, the lesson that every reporter learned from Watergate was "If I help bring down a President, I'll be rich and famous." Which party the President belongs to is a minor consideration next to that. Scandals are news that leads to books and speaking tours. Reporters will bite on them, even if the righty reporters bite first on the Dems and vice-versa.
The reason Watergate is a bigger deal than Clinton's idiocy was that most people can see that lying about cheating on your wife is less of a threat to democracy than breaking into the headquarters of the opposing political party and lying about it.
If you think that Clinton is worse, could you please explain why?
Well, he's not actually a sysadmin, he just had that "Other duties as assigned" cluase in his job description kick in. It's a common situation in small offices that the person who is able to reboot their own pc when it locks becomes the sysadmin. (They tend to get stuck being the fax, copier and microwave repair guy, too.) I was a temp receptionist at a company and I became the 'sysadmin' because I could manipulate Excel and install Lotus 123 from floppies. If I had gotten the backup all the data job thrown in my lap then, I probably wouldn't have known how to swing it either. Sometimes you have to learn by asking seemingly simple questions.
Since he's using NT 4, I thought I'd say that you can do this in Windows via login scripts, but it's iffy in that Win9x sometimes just doesn't run the script for whatever reason.
Upon re-reading your question, I see that you have already had your Disaster That Everyone Should Learn From, so there should be no need to engineer one.
The first thing to do (which you may have already done) is create a folder called "Home" or "Users" or something similar. In that folder make subfolders for each user or position (job titles are good for positions with lots of turnover, like receptionists, while department heads tend to like seeing their names on things) and set the access in the Sharing and the Security tabs. You can be 'loose' in the Sharing tab, but you MUST be 'tight' in the Security tab. (Security affects all access whether local or over the network.) Figuring out which boss gets which access to which employees files will probably be the most annoying part. That's it from the server side. For starters, anyway.
On the client side, you'll have to go around and map the appropriate drives from each workstation. Use the same drive letter for everybody, it makes it easier to help them when they lose stuff. If users will have to be connected to multiple drives, you might want to make sure that 'Policies' is always P:, while 'Accounting' is always M:, or what have you. Set them to reconnect at logon. Move all the user documents to the networked folder. If you just copy them, the users will somehow manage to create problems by saving the networked version locally and vice-versa. You'll probably have to use the Find program to get all their documents, since the users probably don't know where they all are, and non-MS apps store them in different folders. If they have desktop shortcuts to local folders, you should delete them, and recreate ones that point to the new locations. Then, you'll have to go into each app and change the default save location from C:\My Documents, to H:\whatever.
You should also write a 'How To Work With Network Files' cheat sheet and distribute it to everyone. They probably won't read it, but you'll feel better.
You can use logon scripts to do the drive mapping, but it doesn't always work with Win9x quite right, so it might be easier to skip that. If the server is locked up when the users logon, they won't access their drives (obviously), and they'll get an error message. Unfortunately, the most common response to this message is to tell the pc to NOT reconnect to the share at the next logon, so the drives will be 'gone' as far the users are concerned. They will then panic. It's not a big deal, but it is something to be aware of.
Also, have a backup plan for tape-swapping when you're on vacation or out sick. You are the de facto administrator, so you should have a de facto assistant.
It will be a fair amount of work on the setup side, but it shouldn't be too much upkeep, barring lots of employee turnover. IF you have things organized well the first time that is. It's worth it to spend more time upfront.
As far as the actual backups go, test it by backing up a few random folders every week or two. You don't want to have the first time you back something up be the first time something goes wrong. Trust me on that, it sucks.
Don't just tell the people, have their boss put his name on a memo that you write explaining the situation. Make sure it says "If the data on your hard drive is lost it is gone," three times. Get this put in the employee handbook if at all possible.
Then pick your sacrificial lamb. Actually, if your users are of the right quality, one of them will probably volunteer themselves by getting a virus, freeing up space via deleting random files, etc. Otherwise, warn the lambs boss. The lamb will freak out, so their boss should be prepared to not freak out on you.
MAKE DAMN SURE YOUR BACKUPS WORK, OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.
Very important. Also make sure that you've got the 'Open File Option' or equivalent, and that it works properly. You don't want to find out that those outside accountants with remote access are leaving your accounting database open the hard way.
plus no more embarrassment from walking up to a 16 year old counter clerk with a big bottle of lubricant and a jumbo pack of raingear.:-)
While dating my wife, I once picked up a box of strawberries, a can of Redi-Whip and a box of condoms at the grocery store. The tennybopper checkout girl roboticly said "Have a good night" and the pimply-faced bagger said "I think he's gonna." I just smiled and ran out of the store.
I never felt like there were that many unanswered questions to begin with. I mean within the show's universe, The Conspiracy exists and the aliens are coming, but we've known that from the beginning. It's nice to know the date that they'll show up, but not essential. I think the people who are disappointed with the lack of answers, really wanted the government to stand up and say "You're right, let's prepare the fortification of the Earth". As cool as something like that could have been (and it would provide some nice fodder for the movies), it would have been against the themes of the show. I have always felt that The X-Files was about the nobility of struggling against impossible odds, not about the coolness of defeating them. It was a major paradigm shift for mainstream sf to have that attitude, compare The X-Files to Star Wars or Star Trek, and it was a breath of fresh air, or maybe dank, musty air, to feel that The Fight is as important as The Victory.
Of course the trolls will be put on the lander that was "accidently" programmed to use the metric system, rather than the English units, so they will, alas, crash on landing.
My father-in-law is a Lutheran pastor and he has used _The Matrix_ as a sermon illustration several times. Obviously, he stuck to the risk for others, going on a quest stuff, rather than the 'You are a battery that can warp reality' stuff.
Books generally only hit the weekly bestseller lists while they are relatively new, which sort of puts The Bible and Shakespeare in a disadvantaged position:). Also, there are multiple versions of Shakespeare's plays (singly, collected, complete, fully annotated, with photos of Leonardo and Clare, etc.) and The Bible (different translations, with the ancient Greek, lots of annotations, a million different devotionals, versions for kids, maps, and on and on), but they are all considered different books, which makes sense, since they are often by multiple publishers.
Besides, the real question is whether The Bible or Shakespeare is the most misquoted/out-of-context-quoted work in America.
Slashdot Mirror
Practical fusion power is only thirty years away. We just don't know when that thirty years starts...
The parent post is an attempt at humor, not off-topic rambling. If you've ever anything be H. P. Lovecraft, you got the joke and probably were expecting to see some reference when you read the article. Cthulhu was a squiddy "god" that lived (so to speak) in the depths in Lovecraft's maltheist pantheon. HTH. HAND.
It's the whole 'lumpers v. splitters' thing. Rightly or wrongly, somebody who identifies a new species gets more respect ("He's a good scientist") than somebody who finds a big squid ("He's a good fisherman"). I know essentially nothing about squid phylogeny, but if these things are rare, it could be hard to tell if they are multiple species or just one or two species with lots of variation. I mean, if you didn't know better would you think that a Great Dane and a daschund were the same species? Of course, the article gives very little detail ("It's big!"), some of which is wrong ("It eats whales!"), so there could be some pretty good morphological evidence behind this conclusion, but CNN'll never tell.
A pack of 200 squid is slightly unbelievable.
But extremely fucking cool.
I smell a Bad Horror Movie...
Twelve Tentacled Freaks! Cephalopodaphobia! Deep Blue Sea II: Revenge of the Calimari! And of course, Call of Cthulthu.
I love the fact that it is THE one guy in the hot seats fault. Not Congress. Not the SEnate. Not the last eight YEARS of ignoring signs and worrying about guys selling sawed off shotguns in the mountains rather than corporate scandal and greed.
I agree with you - in part. These scandals have been brewing for years, so it's not all Bush's fault. BUT, he ran on the idea that there needed to be fewer laws and less oversight for big business. His appointee to head the SEC was widely percieved to be pro-business and that was considered a feature, not a bug, by the Prez. Bush was wrong. Big businesses are sometimes run by crooks. The head of a regulatory agency shouldn't come in saying he's not going to look for problems. Bush needs to say "I was wrong. I want Congress to triple the size of the SEC. I want Harvey Pitt to crack some skulls, and if he won't do it, I'll hire somebody who will. I want to use RICO laws to nail CEO's and CFO's who defraud stockholders. I want Congress to pass a law allowing for mandatory minimum sentencing and asset forfeiture on corporate executives who lie, or are even suspected of lying to stockholders - it's what we do for drug dealers and these people are no better. I want the release of 'pro forma' profits in annual reports to be probable cause for an investigation." Then people would start to take him seriously. This could be a golden political oppurtunity for Bush to show that he really is tough on crime, not just somebody who supports the death penalty. I doubt he'll seize the chance though.
THe only industry in the world that can mistreat its customers every step of the way are the Airlines.
That's impossible. The airlines were once heavily regulated, but were desparate to get out from under the yoke of the feds. When they got their wishes granted, all airlines instantly became the highly profitable companies with ecstatic customers that the feds kept them from being. Everybody knows that the free market is always perfect. Any other information is propaganda.
Bush came into office saying that the Feds needed to get off of the back of the corporations. His appointee to the SEC wanted to have a kinder, gentler reltionship with the corporations the SEC investigates. Then, a bunch of big corps publicly melted down, in part due to questionable/illegal actions. Therefore a bunch of people who said that Bush's ideas on deregulation were bad, and that his SEC boss was completely wrong, are saying "I told you so". Look at it this way, if Gore had won and said "We need to get the Feds off of everybody's back" and appointed a long time mob lawyer to FBI chief, saying "We need kinder, gentler RICO enforcement", how would the conservatives have reacted?
Corporate corruption is an organized crime, just like running a numbers game is. You've got a group of people conspiring together to break laws for their benefit. That's how they are similar to the mob. Nobody at Enron kneecapped anybody, but that doesn't mean that they weren't an organized gang of crooks. In the US there are a set of laws known as RICO - Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. They essentially (IIUnderstandC and IANAL) say that if you are the head of an organization that systemically breaks laws you are personally criminally responsible. They were originally created to combat organized crime by allowing the bosses to be arrested for what the underlings did, but they have been interpreted somewhat broadly - Operation Rescue was sued (albeit unsuccessfully) under the law. (Check out www.thirdamendment.com/rico for more details on how RICO is applied - rightly or wrongly.)
Now, according to graham.main.nc.us/~bhammel/INS/RICO.html racketeering activity includes things like bribery, embeezlement from pension funds, wire fraud, financial institution fraud, obstruction of justice and criminal investigations, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, as well as things like "unlawful substances" and "obscene materials". Furthermore, you are subject to RICO if you directly or indirectly recieve or invest any income from those activities, or use that income to control a company engaged in interstate or foriegn commerce. The WorldComs and Enrons of the world begin to edge into the RICO laws when they lie about profits (fraud) and shred documents (obstruction of justice) so that the C*Os can make big bucks. That's how corporate corruption is "the same classification as the mob".
an other alike question could be: would you eat meat of you had to kill and butcher the cow yourself..
Probably not, as slaughtering a cow is a lot of messy work, and my wife doesn't eat anything warm-blooded, so it would hardly be worth it. Otoh, she does eat eggs and I have a really good recipe for chicken tandoori;)
The question did specify any condtions such as starving children, etc. Therefore, the question is "Would you do it right now, sitting in your job interview in your good suit in your highly technologically advanced society?" Are your children currently starving? If they are, maybe you should spend less time on /.
... Now... shit... now I do it just to watch their fuckin' expression change." HAND.
Also, since you think it is moral/ethical/whatever to anonymously murder complete strangers, you must therefore accept that it is moral/ethical/whatever for complete strangers to anonymously murder you. I would be surprised if this were the case.
On the hitman side, I think Virgil in True Romance said it best - "Now the first time you kill somebody, that's the hardest
Iirc, AI was based on a Brian Aldiss short story named 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', not A Dick story.
I went to France as a high school junior (with the French Club) and several times I had people thank me for saving them in the world wars. I wish that I had thought to thank them for Lafayette, but it was very touching that they felt the need to do so.
Of course, I also ran into a lot of the stereotypical sneering frogs, but I expected that.
Hey, the networks wanted to do a dramatic reading of the Starr Report, but the FCC wouldn't let them.
Actually, the media was raised on Watergate and they are a bit left-leaning on average. However, the lesson that every reporter learned from Watergate was "If I help bring down a President, I'll be rich and famous." Which party the President belongs to is a minor consideration next to that. Scandals are news that leads to books and speaking tours. Reporters will bite on them, even if the righty reporters bite first on the Dems and vice-versa.
The reason Watergate is a bigger deal than Clinton's idiocy was that most people can see that lying about cheating on your wife is less of a threat to democracy than breaking into the headquarters of the opposing political party and lying about it.
If you think that Clinton is worse, could you please explain why?
Well, he's not actually a sysadmin, he just had that "Other duties as assigned" cluase in his job description kick in. It's a common situation in small offices that the person who is able to reboot their own pc when it locks becomes the sysadmin. (They tend to get stuck being the fax, copier and microwave repair guy, too.) I was a temp receptionist at a company and I became the 'sysadmin' because I could manipulate Excel and install Lotus 123 from floppies. If I had gotten the backup all the data job thrown in my lap then, I probably wouldn't have known how to swing it either. Sometimes you have to learn by asking seemingly simple questions.
Since he's using NT 4, I thought I'd say that you can do this in Windows via login scripts, but it's iffy in that Win9x sometimes just doesn't run the script for whatever reason.
Upon re-reading your question, I see that you have already had your Disaster That Everyone Should Learn From, so there should be no need to engineer one.
The first thing to do (which you may have already done) is create a folder called "Home" or "Users" or something similar. In that folder make subfolders for each user or position (job titles are good for positions with lots of turnover, like receptionists, while department heads tend to like seeing their names on things) and set the access in the Sharing and the Security tabs. You can be 'loose' in the Sharing tab, but you MUST be 'tight' in the Security tab. (Security affects all access whether local or over the network.) Figuring out which boss gets which access to which employees files will probably be the most annoying part. That's it from the server side. For starters, anyway.
On the client side, you'll have to go around and map the appropriate drives from each workstation. Use the same drive letter for everybody, it makes it easier to help them when they lose stuff. If users will have to be connected to multiple drives, you might want to make sure that 'Policies' is always P:, while 'Accounting' is always M:, or what have you. Set them to reconnect at logon. Move all the user documents to the networked folder. If you just copy them, the users will somehow manage to create problems by saving the networked version locally and vice-versa. You'll probably have to use the Find program to get all their documents, since the users probably don't know where they all are, and non-MS apps store them in different folders. If they have desktop shortcuts to local folders, you should delete them, and recreate ones that point to the new locations. Then, you'll have to go into each app and change the default save location from C:\My Documents, to H:\whatever.
You should also write a 'How To Work With Network Files' cheat sheet and distribute it to everyone. They probably won't read it, but you'll feel better.
You can use logon scripts to do the drive mapping, but it doesn't always work with Win9x quite right, so it might be easier to skip that. If the server is locked up when the users logon, they won't access their drives (obviously), and they'll get an error message. Unfortunately, the most common response to this message is to tell the pc to NOT reconnect to the share at the next logon, so the drives will be 'gone' as far the users are concerned. They will then panic. It's not a big deal, but it is something to be aware of.
Also, have a backup plan for tape-swapping when you're on vacation or out sick. You are the de facto administrator, so you should have a de facto assistant.
It will be a fair amount of work on the setup side, but it shouldn't be too much upkeep, barring lots of employee turnover. IF you have things organized well the first time that is. It's worth it to spend more time upfront.
As far as the actual backups go, test it by backing up a few random folders every week or two. You don't want to have the first time you back something up be the first time something goes wrong. Trust me on that, it sucks.
Don't just tell the people, have their boss put his name on a memo that you write explaining the situation. Make sure it says "If the data on your hard drive is lost it is gone," three times. Get this put in the employee handbook if at all possible.
Then pick your sacrificial lamb. Actually, if your users are of the right quality, one of them will probably volunteer themselves by getting a virus, freeing up space via deleting random files, etc. Otherwise, warn the lambs boss. The lamb will freak out, so their boss should be prepared to not freak out on you.
MAKE DAMN SURE YOUR BACKUPS WORK, OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.
Very important. Also make sure that you've got the 'Open File Option' or equivalent, and that it works properly. You don't want to find out that those outside accountants with remote access are leaving your accounting database open the hard way.
INT: Courtroom, Day
Assistant DA: "The DNA evidence is indisputable!"
Defense Attorney Han Solo: "I object!"
Judge: "What grounds?"
Defense Attorney Chewbacca: "RAWWWWR" (Smashes table over Assistant DA)
Judge: "Let me suggest a new strategy...Let the wookie win."
In either case, the ideology would come first, and the analysis spun to preserve the phenomena.
Ain't politics grand?
plus no more embarrassment from walking up to a 16 year old counter clerk with a big bottle of lubricant and a jumbo pack of raingear. :-)
While dating my wife, I once picked up a box of strawberries, a can of Redi-Whip and a box of condoms at the grocery store. The tennybopper checkout girl roboticly said "Have a good night" and the pimply-faced bagger said "I think he's gonna." I just smiled and ran out of the store.
I never felt like there were that many unanswered questions to begin with. I mean within the show's universe, The Conspiracy exists and the aliens are coming, but we've known that from the beginning. It's nice to know the date that they'll show up, but not essential. I think the people who are disappointed with the lack of answers, really wanted the government to stand up and say "You're right, let's prepare the fortification of the Earth". As cool as something like that could have been (and it would provide some nice fodder for the movies), it would have been against the themes of the show. I have always felt that The X-Files was about the nobility of struggling against impossible odds, not about the coolness of defeating them. It was a major paradigm shift for mainstream sf to have that attitude, compare The X-Files to Star Wars or Star Trek, and it was a breath of fresh air, or maybe dank, musty air, to feel that The Fight is as important as The Victory.
Of course the trolls will be put on the lander that was "accidently" programmed to use the metric system, rather than the English units, so they will, alas, crash on landing.
My father-in-law is a Lutheran pastor and he has used _The Matrix_ as a sermon illustration several times. Obviously, he stuck to the risk for others, going on a quest stuff, rather than the 'You are a battery that can warp reality' stuff.
Books generally only hit the weekly bestseller lists while they are relatively new, which sort of puts The Bible and Shakespeare in a disadvantaged position:). Also, there are multiple versions of Shakespeare's plays (singly, collected, complete, fully annotated, with photos of Leonardo and Clare, etc.) and The Bible (different translations, with the ancient Greek, lots of annotations, a million different devotionals, versions for kids, maps, and on and on), but they are all considered different books, which makes sense, since they are often by multiple publishers.
Besides, the real question is whether The Bible or Shakespeare is the most misquoted/out-of-context-quoted work in America.