they created a huge amountof havoc over plans to decommision an oil platform
Ah. A wonderful story of the triumph of show business environmentalism over rational thought. A search for Brent Spar on google will give the details.
Brent Spar was an oil storage platform in the North Sea used, in the early days of the development of the North Sea fields, for storage of oil before loading into tankers and shipping. It had been phased out by pipelines and was due to be decommisioned. After 3 years of consultation with interested parties (including environmental groups) it was decided to dump it in a deep ocean trench. The reasons were: occupational risk in dismantling it on land; technical difficulty; expense; and risk of contamination.
Enter Greenpeace. They climbed aboard and, according to thier scientific tests, the rig was riddled with heavy metals, oils (5,500 tonnes was the figure mentioned), PCBs, radioactive materials, and would be an act of extreme irresponsibility to dump it at sea.
The stage was set, and the drama unfolded. Greenpeace occupied the rig. Shell tried to get them off, petrol stations in Europe were firebombed and shot at, boycotts were started. In all, there was a huge media frenzy: David and Golith; a huge faceless bureacracy (and oil company at that) versus people who are trying to save the earth.
Shell decided to abort the sinking, and the rig was towed to a deep water fjord in Norway to await an alternative. Round 1 to Greenpeace.
Round 2 was conducted by a Norwegian Consultancy, who actually did a very detailed inventory of the rig. They published figures that agreed with the Shell figures, and were completely at odds with the Greenpeace figues (the actual ammount of oil, for example, was 50 tonnes). The only conclusions were that Greenpeace were either lying, or hopelessly incompetent. This was not so much a defeat for Greenpeace as a catastrophy. Their role was as a scientifically based environmental pressure group. Their main asset was a good relationship with the media, which they harmed greatly during the Brent Spar campaign.
Now, Greenpeace is certainly seen as a more fringe, hardcore organisation, and I think that it all traced directly from that campaign. They may have won a victory with Brent Spar, but it has turned out to be a Pyrric victory.
If so, then this is far preferable than an 'Ask Slashdot - how do I measure my programmer's productivity?'
I disagree - "Ask Slashdot" does not have a illusion (or possibly delusion) of authority. To have any sort of meaningful measure of productivity you must have something to measure - "ability to solve customer problems quickly" is not a measurable and cannot be used as a metric.
The whole article was just woolly waffle. It is also a pointless definition as it is only applicable after the fact - "What software is about is solving the probelms for the people who will use the software." How do you know until it ships? What a manager wants is a metric that he can use to measure productivity during development - after the fact is useless.
Oh - and the "should not lose site [sic]" in the last paragraph cheered me up too.
they were trying to show you the improvements over NT
This was an NT4 Enterprise Exam question.
You don't remember correctly - NT4 had a maximum recommended SAM size of 40 MB, and each account, global group, local group, and group membership counted towards it. However, the SAM could grow to at least three times this (which was a 42000 user domain, with loads of groups etc).
I refer the gentlemen above to knowledgebase article Q122920.
I quote:
"The maximum number of other computers that are permitted to simultaneously connect over the network to Windows NT Workstation 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, and Windows 2000 Professional is ten. This limit includes all transports and resource sharing protocols combined. This limit is the number of simultaneous sessions from other computers the system is permitted to host. This limit does not apply to the use of administrative tools that attach to the system from a remote computer."
So: Right, Right, Right, Nyer, Nyer, Nyer - why wasn't my comment moderated up further!!!
"Three men, traveling with their wives, came to a river. There they found one boat, but it could only carry two people at a time. Since all the husbands are extremely jealous, no woman can be left with a man unless her husband is present. How do they cross the river? (You can assume that each man has just one wife, and that each woman has one husband)."
They swim.
Re:Actually, you bring up an interesting point...
on
IT Certifications Summary
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, of course, I picked both. I'm running Apache on Windows 2000 Pro right now, and IIS also comes as an optional add-on.
Windows 2000 pro is limited to 10 incoming TCP/IP connections, so is hardly suitable for a public web server. This is a limitation (albeit artificial) of the operating system, and not of any web server that it may be running.
on the tests you have to keep in mind how things should work
No - you have to keep in mind how MS thinks you should work them. A lot of questions are "What is the best way of...." when best depends a lot on some specific details of the infrastructure.
The classic (and annoying) question like this is "When somebody leaves a company what should you do with their account? Which of the following is the best answer.". The answer (according to MS) was disable them, and delete the account after 2 weeks. Huh?? This is simply barking - it may be the best for some cases, but if you are working for the security services I cannot see them thinking that this was the best policy.
The questions have got slightly more sane recently, but so much of the MCP exams is trying to learn the MS mindset so you can work out their view of best.
Hmm - not too bad an application. Users will write them down if they are too complex; that is the difference between strong and effective.
The policy I came up with at my last company was minimum of 6 characters, not like your name, must start and end with a letter, and must contain a non-letter. This got the success rate of lophtcrack with multilingual dictionaries down from 80%+ to about 4% on hybrid scan. This was enforced by Password policy enforcer (a company I have no connection with except as a satisfied customer), which has slightly better functionality than epasswd.
Not really. Ever hear of a liger [sierrasafarizoo.com]?
Yes - they are sterile. I could have given a more complete definition of species but the point is that (which seems to have passed you by completely) is that any definition can be answered with "Not really".
Let's try
1) Species are organisms that can interbreed with each other.
Not really - what about Ligers.
2) Species are organisms that interbreed with each other and produce viable offspring.
No really - what about the gulls mentioned above - they can interbreed but don't.
3) Species are organisms that can be made to interbreed with each other.
Not really - by painting the gulls, sure, you can persuade them to interbreed. But there are similar examples with e.g. salamanders where we can't persuare them to interbreed, even though it looks like they should be able to.
You can attack the definition from the bottom (genes) instead of phenotypes:
4) Two animals are the same species if (in the wild) there is a significant gene flow between their two gene-pools.
The trouble with this is that an animals gene-pool is defined in terms of its species. And, once that is sorted out, we can then talk anout significant. So chalk up another not really.
I'll ignore the bit where you make a horse's arse of yourself about human speciation - others have dealt with it.
I know it isn't politically correct to say such things, but that's one of the main reasons I love science. It has no room nor desire for political correctness.
But this is a gem. Science is objective to a degree, but it is also a social structure. In the social structure policital correctness is a rife as anywhere else. Take, for example, physics. A hard science - as objective as it comes. Right? Now explain why Carlo Rubbia won a Nobel prize.
To save you the time, Carlo Rubbia was the administrator of the CERN project that discovered the W and Z particles - his scientific contribution was smaller that the majority of other scientists involved. Now, this was a worthy project and probably deserved the prize. There were, however, about 400 people in the teams and, traditionally, the prize goes to =3 people. So they gave it to the administrator - it was, politically, the correct thing to do.
Nice idea, but it is not going to happen. For example, take deep sea hydrothermal vents. The life around these was completely unexpected (different species, but similar to other species else where). There is a high probability that other such unexpected islands of life remain to be discovered.
Secondly, take places like Lake Vostok. Possibly there is life in here, and if there is there is possibly life elsewhere entombed under a million years of ice.
Added to this is there is a certain vagueness as to what a species actually is. I can't remember the details, but there is a species of bird (a gull I think) that is present round to world. As you go from east to west the individuals change slightly, but can still interbreed (which is, more or less, the definition of what a species is). Whoever, once you go round the world you get back to where you started, the individuals either side of the start line can no longer interbreed with those on the other side of the line. (I'd draw an ascii diagram but I can't really be bothered fighting the lameness filter). Are all these individuals one species or not? (A good analogy is a line of individuals - each one is within an inch in height of both neighbours (== can interbreed). When you form the line into a circle the two former end members are two feet apart in height (== can't interbreed)).
Then you have just the sheer practical difficulty of getting to places where there might be life - Challenger Deep? The seabed under Challenger deep? Oil bearing shale 3 miles down? We know (from our sole visit to Challenger Deep) that there is some sort of life down there, but have no clue as to what species.
A worthwhile undertaking, but doomed from the start - we can't, currently, get definite about giant squid, nevermind microscopic sea creatures.
the only mp3's I have on my harddrive that arent legal are ones that I wouldnt have bought anyway
But, BUT, BUT... the only reason you can say you would not have bought them is that you downloaded them, and realised that they were crap. If you hadn't downloaded them, you may have bought them because you would not have realised that they were crap.
And that is the point of all this. They don't really care about people people downloading music - they are more worried about people finding out the music is crap before they get a chance to buy it.
OK - that was tongue in cheek, but think about it for a minute: how many chances to hear a whole CD do you have before either you, or one of your friends, buys the thing? Radio? Nope - the record companies have this sewn up. A record store? You'd have to get lucky. Any others? So, if you want to hear a CD you have to buy it.
Or at least, that used to be the case. At the moment it isn't, and by God these guys are desparately trying to get the worms back in the can (or, more aptly, get the pig back in the poke).
We'll have to see what happens - my hope is that they will kill their goose, and music will become more diverse. My guess is that music will be two types - the bulk will be draconian corporate type (uncopyable, which is lucky as it'll be unlistenable), and the rest "underground", which will be more interesting but harder to find.
Remember one thing about music - and I can't recall who originally said it - "People don't know what they like, they like what they know".
last time I checked iridium was an EXTREMELY hard substance,
Yes, it is extremely hard. It is also extremely brittle, which makes it a bad choice as it takes so much force to make a mark in a tablet of it, it'll probably break.
Actually, in a very specific circumstance. There is a town in the UK called "Westward Ho!" (yes - it is spelt with the "!"). Now, put that at the end of an exclamation. Gives all sorts of opportunities for "incorrect" punctuation: "!!", "!?", "!.", and "!," etc.
ALong with something to show how many pages you've used.
Huh????
I think it (the subscription idea) is a dumb idea, but that is just my opinion. If, however, you are going to do it, at least do it properly. You absolutely must show the user how many pages he has left. Preferably as a counter on each (chargable) page, but definitely on the user's page.
But paying for every 1000 pages? What this leads to is every time I'm going to have a look at something in Slashdot, I have to weigh whether or not I *really* want to, because every time has a cost.
Ah - it gets worse. You load slashdot (1 page hit), open a story (2), read the comments, decide to respond to a comment (3), preview your response (4), decide not to post and go back to the story (5,6), read a long comment (7), go back (8), but accidently hit back twice so your at the home page (9), so back to the story (10), read the extra comments on the next page (11), respond to one of these with preview (12, 13, 14), then go back to the story (15), and decide to look at the level zero posts (16), then you go back to the home page (17).
Then you check you messages (18) and see there is a new reply you click it (19) and then click the link (20) then hit reply, preview and post (21, 22, 23) then back home.
You decide to metamoderate (24, 25) and end up back at the home page (26).
Wow - that's a lot of pages. Admittedly there are more efficient ways of doing things, but these are my browsing habits.
The galling thing is that it will cost you money (if you chose to subscribe) to metamoderate and to post. Even submitting a story will cost you money.
Best wishes in your future careers guys, this site is dying.
Now people look back on the Nazis and say "At least they made the trains run on time".
It was Mussolini who reputedly got the trains to run on time. The Nazis were about getting rockets to run on time: Werner Von Braun - whose career spanned the Nazi Party, the US Military, and NASA - was the prime exponent of this.
Likewise, City University of Newcastle upon Tyne was seriously proposed as a name of a new university in Newcastle.
Another was the company "Experts Exchange", who registered expertsexchange.com as their domain, much to the disappointment of any prospective transexuals who visited.
About 140 degrees is an acceptable temperature to drink it at (any hotter and it isn't actually drinkable). It is in a syrofoam cup with a lid, so it takes few minutes (at least) to cool down noticibly.
As it happens McDonalds have decreased the temperature of the coffee, so you probably haven't even noticed that you have been deprived of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
BT's ADSL service gives you 256kbps upstream, which is twice that offered by Telewest and NTL, and at only £5/month more
From tomorrow (coincidentally enough) 256kbps upstream will be available. I think it's 50 GBP per month though.
they created a huge amountof havoc over plans to decommision an oil platform
Ah. A wonderful story of the triumph of show business environmentalism over rational thought. A search for Brent Spar on google will give the details.
Brent Spar was an oil storage platform in the North Sea used, in the early days of the development of the North Sea fields, for storage of oil before loading into tankers and shipping. It had been phased out by pipelines and was due to be decommisioned. After 3 years of consultation with interested parties (including environmental groups) it was decided to dump it in a deep ocean trench. The reasons were: occupational risk in dismantling it on land; technical difficulty; expense; and risk of contamination.
Enter Greenpeace. They climbed aboard and, according to thier scientific tests, the rig was riddled with heavy metals, oils (5,500 tonnes was the figure mentioned), PCBs, radioactive materials, and would be an act of extreme irresponsibility to dump it at sea.
The stage was set, and the drama unfolded. Greenpeace occupied the rig. Shell tried to get them off, petrol stations in Europe were firebombed and shot at, boycotts were started. In all, there was a huge media frenzy: David and Golith; a huge faceless bureacracy (and oil company at that) versus people who are trying to save the earth.
Shell decided to abort the sinking, and the rig was towed to a deep water fjord in Norway to await an alternative. Round 1 to Greenpeace.
Round 2 was conducted by a Norwegian Consultancy, who actually did a very detailed inventory of the rig. They published figures that agreed with the Shell figures, and were completely at odds with the Greenpeace figues (the actual ammount of oil, for example, was 50 tonnes). The only conclusions were that Greenpeace were either lying, or hopelessly incompetent. This was not so much a defeat for Greenpeace as a catastrophy. Their role was as a scientifically based environmental pressure group. Their main asset was a good relationship with the media, which they harmed greatly during the Brent Spar campaign.
Now, Greenpeace is certainly seen as a more fringe, hardcore organisation, and I think that it all traced directly from that campaign. They may have won a victory with Brent Spar, but it has turned out to be a Pyrric victory.
If so, then this is far preferable than an 'Ask Slashdot - how do I measure my programmer's productivity?'
I disagree - "Ask Slashdot" does not have a illusion (or possibly delusion) of authority. To have any sort of meaningful measure of productivity you must have something to measure - "ability to solve customer problems quickly" is not a measurable and cannot be used as a metric.
The whole article was just woolly waffle. It is also a pointless definition as it is only applicable after the fact - "What software is about is solving the probelms for the people who will use the software." How do you know until it ships? What a manager wants is a metric that he can use to measure productivity during development - after the fact is useless.
Oh - and the "should not lose site [sic]" in the last paragraph cheered me up too.
they were trying to show you the improvements over NT
This was an NT4 Enterprise Exam question.
You don't remember correctly - NT4 had a maximum recommended SAM size of 40 MB, and each account, global group, local group, and group membership counted towards it. However, the SAM could grow to at least three times this (which was a 42000 user domain, with loads of groups etc).
I refer the gentlemen above to knowledgebase article Q122920.
I quote:
"The maximum number of other computers that are permitted to simultaneously connect over the network to Windows NT Workstation 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, and Windows 2000 Professional is ten. This limit includes all transports and resource sharing protocols combined. This limit is the number of simultaneous sessions from other computers the system is permitted to host. This limit does not apply to the use of administrative tools that attach to the system from a remote computer."
So: Right, Right, Right, Nyer, Nyer, Nyer - why wasn't my comment moderated up further!!!
"Three men, traveling with their wives, came to a river. There they found one boat, but it could only carry two people at a time. Since all the husbands are extremely jealous, no woman can be left with a man unless her husband is present. How do they cross the river? (You can assume that each man has just one wife, and that each woman has one husband)."
They swim.
Well, of course, I picked both. I'm running Apache on Windows 2000 Pro right now, and IIS also comes as an optional add-on.
Windows 2000 pro is limited to 10 incoming TCP/IP connections, so is hardly suitable for a public web server. This is a limitation (albeit artificial) of the operating system, and not of any web server that it may be running.
on the tests you have to keep in mind how things should work
No - you have to keep in mind how MS thinks you should work them. A lot of questions are "What is the best way of...." when best depends a lot on some specific details of the infrastructure.
The classic (and annoying) question like this is "When somebody leaves a company what should you do with their account? Which of the following is the best answer.". The answer (according to MS) was disable them, and delete the account after 2 weeks. Huh?? This is simply barking - it may be the best for some cases, but if you are working for the security services I cannot see them thinking that this was the best policy.
The questions have got slightly more sane recently, but so much of the MCP exams is trying to learn the MS mindset so you can work out their view of best.
Enforce password conventions the way NASA does
Hmm - not too bad an application. Users will write them down if they are too complex; that is the difference between strong and effective.
The policy I came up with at my last company was minimum of 6 characters, not like your name, must start and end with a letter, and must contain a non-letter. This got the success rate of lophtcrack with multilingual dictionaries down from 80%+ to about 4% on hybrid scan. This was enforced by Password policy enforcer (a company I have no connection with except as a satisfied customer), which has slightly better functionality than epasswd.
Another good choice is colors, red, blue, green, etc...
One place where I worked had (city code)(location code)(machine designation)(colour) - lots of offices in the same city.
Anyway, a typical server name would be NYCVENSGREEN. The key was that they all had an S before the colour, which lead to such names as
STEAK
SLIME
STEAL
Ah - the hours we spent trying to think these up.
Ol' Margaret is not the kind of woman to mess with ;)
The only problem with that is that she was no longer Prime Minister - she resigned 22 November 1990. John Major was Prime Minister then.
I admire the cut of your jib, sir.
Not really. Ever hear of a liger [sierrasafarizoo.com]?
Yes - they are sterile. I could have given a more complete definition of species but the point is that (which seems to have passed you by completely) is that any definition can be answered with "Not really".
Let's try
1) Species are organisms that can interbreed with each other.
Not really - what about Ligers.
2) Species are organisms that interbreed with each other and produce viable offspring.
No really - what about the gulls mentioned above - they can interbreed but don't.
3) Species are organisms that can be made to interbreed with each other.
Not really - by painting the gulls, sure, you can persuade them to interbreed. But there are similar examples with e.g. salamanders where we can't persuare them to interbreed, even though it looks like they should be able to.
You can attack the definition from the bottom (genes) instead of phenotypes:
4) Two animals are the same species if (in the wild) there is a significant gene flow between their two gene-pools.
The trouble with this is that an animals gene-pool is defined in terms of its species. And, once that is sorted out, we can then talk anout significant. So chalk up another not really.
I'll ignore the bit where you make a horse's arse of yourself about human speciation - others have dealt with it.
I know it isn't politically correct to say such things, but that's one of the main reasons I love science. It has no room nor desire for political correctness.
But this is a gem. Science is objective to a degree, but it is also a social structure. In the social structure policital correctness is a rife as anywhere else. Take, for example, physics. A hard science - as objective as it comes. Right? Now explain why Carlo Rubbia won a Nobel prize.
To save you the time, Carlo Rubbia was the administrator of the CERN project that discovered the W and Z particles - his scientific contribution was smaller that the majority of other scientists involved. Now, this was a worthy project and probably deserved the prize. There were, however, about 400 people in the teams and, traditionally, the prize goes to =3 people. So they gave it to the administrator - it was, politically, the correct thing to do.
You're thinking of various large gulls in the genus Larus - Herring, Western, Glaucous-winged etc.
Thanks - it was starting to annoy me because I couldn't find it. If would have meant a trip to the loft (and I really don't want to do that).
Nice idea, but it is not going to happen. For example, take deep sea hydrothermal vents. The life around these was completely unexpected (different species, but similar to other species else where). There is a high probability that other such unexpected islands of life remain to be discovered.
Secondly, take places like Lake Vostok. Possibly there is life in here, and if there is there is possibly life elsewhere entombed under a million years of ice.
Added to this is there is a certain vagueness as to what a species actually is. I can't remember the details, but there is a species of bird (a gull I think) that is present round to world. As you go from east to west the individuals change slightly, but can still interbreed (which is, more or less, the definition of what a species is). Whoever, once you go round the world you get back to where you started, the individuals either side of the start line can no longer interbreed with those on the other side of the line. (I'd draw an ascii diagram but I can't really be bothered fighting the lameness filter). Are all these individuals one species or not? (A good analogy is a line of individuals - each one is within an inch in height of both neighbours (== can interbreed). When you form the line into a circle the two former end members are two feet apart in height (== can't interbreed)).
Then you have just the sheer practical difficulty of getting to places where there might be life - Challenger Deep? The seabed under Challenger deep? Oil bearing shale 3 miles down? We know (from our sole visit to Challenger Deep) that there is some sort of life down there, but have no clue as to what species.
A worthwhile undertaking, but doomed from the start - we can't, currently, get definite about giant squid, nevermind microscopic sea creatures.
the only mp3's I have on my harddrive that arent legal are ones that I wouldnt have bought anyway
But, BUT, BUT... the only reason you can say you would not have bought them is that you downloaded them, and realised that they were crap. If you hadn't downloaded them, you may have bought them because you would not have realised that they were crap.
And that is the point of all this. They don't really care about people people downloading music - they are more worried about people finding out the music is crap before they get a chance to buy it.
OK - that was tongue in cheek, but think about it for a minute: how many chances to hear a whole CD do you have before either you, or one of your friends, buys the thing? Radio? Nope - the record companies have this sewn up. A record store? You'd have to get lucky. Any others? So, if you want to hear a CD you have to buy it.
Or at least, that used to be the case. At the moment it isn't, and by God these guys are desparately trying to get the worms back in the can (or, more aptly, get the pig back in the poke).
We'll have to see what happens - my hope is that they will kill their goose, and music will become more diverse. My guess is that music will be two types - the bulk will be draconian corporate type (uncopyable, which is lucky as it'll be unlistenable), and the rest "underground", which will be more interesting but harder to find.
Remember one thing about music - and I can't recall who originally said it - "People don't know what they like, they like what they know".
last time I checked iridium was an EXTREMELY hard substance,
Yes, it is extremely hard. It is also extremely brittle, which makes it a bad choice as it takes so much force to make a mark in a tablet of it, it'll probably break.
Yet using two exclamation marks is acceptable?
In certain circumstances, yes.
Actually, in a very specific circumstance. There is a town in the UK called "Westward Ho!" (yes - it is spelt with the "!"). Now, put that at the end of an exclamation. Gives all sorts of opportunities for "incorrect" punctuation: "!!", "!?", "!.", and "!," etc.
ALong with something to show how many pages you've used.
Huh????
I think it (the subscription idea) is a dumb idea, but that is just my opinion. If, however, you are going to do it, at least do it properly. You absolutely must show the user how many pages he has left. Preferably as a counter on each (chargable) page, but definitely on the user's page.
But paying for every 1000 pages? What this leads to is every time I'm going to have a look at something in Slashdot, I have to weigh whether or not I *really* want to, because every time has a cost.
Ah - it gets worse. You load slashdot (1 page hit), open a story (2), read the comments, decide to respond to a comment (3), preview your response (4), decide not to post and go back to the story (5,6), read a long comment (7), go back (8), but accidently hit back twice so your at the home page (9), so back to the story (10), read the extra comments on the next page (11), respond to one of these with preview (12, 13, 14), then go back to the story (15), and decide to look at the level zero posts (16), then you go back to the home page (17).
Then you check you messages (18) and see there is a new reply you click it (19) and then click the link (20) then hit reply, preview and post (21, 22, 23) then back home.
You decide to metamoderate (24, 25) and end up back at the home page (26).
Wow - that's a lot of pages. Admittedly there are more efficient ways of doing things, but these are my browsing habits.
The galling thing is that it will cost you money (if you chose to subscribe) to metamoderate and to post. Even submitting a story will cost you money.
Best wishes in your future careers guys, this site is dying.
Now people look back on the Nazis and say "At least they made the trains run on time".
It was Mussolini who reputedly got the trains to run on time. The Nazis were about getting rockets to run on time: Werner Von Braun - whose career spanned the Nazi Party, the US Military, and NASA - was the prime exponent of this.
NT4 would boot headless. the problem was that if you subsequently plugged in a mouse or a keyboard the OS would not recognise it.
Likewise, City University of Newcastle upon Tyne was seriously proposed as a name of a new university in Newcastle.
Another was the company "Experts Exchange", who registered expertsexchange.com as their domain, much to the disappointment of any prospective transexuals who visited.
I never buy anything there - I prefer food.
About 140 degrees is an acceptable temperature to drink it at (any hotter and it isn't actually drinkable). It is in a syrofoam cup with a lid, so it takes few minutes (at least) to cool down noticibly.
As it happens McDonalds have decreased the temperature of the coffee, so you probably haven't even noticed that you have been deprived of choice.