Consider the position in the company you're taking, and what powers you'd probably have..
What if your Becon score was 0? (impossible, I believe). You have a whole stack of credit cards that were run up to $50,000, and then charged off. You declared bankrupcy twice in the last 5 years. You defaulted on the loan for your home, and there are still more creditors that are after you. Your existing bills account for 10x what you'll make this year.
If I was the CEO, there's no way I'd want you having direct control over any finances, or anything else in the company. You're a high risk for getting money any which way you can.. The odds are very good that you'll be skimming money, and possibly wipe out the company. Now not only have you ruined yourself, you've ruined the employment for 40 people, and probably their credit in the near future too..
That's a worst case scenerio. If you have a becon score of say 700, with a couple cards that are near their limits, and nothing significant in your bad history, there wouldn't be much of a reason not to trust you..
By saying "no", do you have something to hide? Go to equifax.com, spend a few dollars to get your own history and score, and then go back to the boss and say "It's none of your business what's *IN* my credit history. I'll disclose to you that my score is 700 which indicates I'm a safe credit risk." Show them the print-out of that page.
I've worked for companies that do credit and background checks. Be straight forward with them.. I gave them a brief overview of the good and bad things in there, and when they get the report back, they see I was open with them, and you'll have a much better working relationship with them..
You're not taking a Customer Support position, you're taking a Director position. It's very reasonable for them to want to check everything out first..
But now the question is, how important is the job to you? How badly to they want you? If they want you, and you have other opprotunities, you can threaten to take another offer, and they may wave the credit check. If you're a high credit risk and rob them, they seriously screwed up by not doing it.. If you're not a high risk, you have nothing to worry about..
Or, just go find a different employer who doesn't fully investigate the staff, and hope no one else destroys the company...
Honestly, this is not an effort against Opera. If I choose to break my own site, so be it..
In my industry, just about every site does video of some sort. There's always some group that feels they were intentionally blocked because of whatever reason. I've seen sites that stream exclusively Windows Media, and some that use propriatory plugins like "Emblaze".. Some were using the Netscape "Push" method (send a multipart header, and then send a new mime delimiter between frames). Netscape "Push" doesn't (or didn't) work with MSIE.. Windows Media doesn't work with Linux. (with a few exceptions).. Something doesn't work with something else.
If I choose to make my site not work with MSIE or Netscape, and only let Opera viewers see it, well, it's my site.. If Slashdot decides tommorrow that they like a feature of Mozilla 9.999, and it doesn't work with any other browser, including MSIE, how many of you are going to be bitching for MSIE compatability?
I'll get a bunch of comments back "Microsoft Sucks", but I'd *LOVE* it if they'd put the REMOTE_USER_AGENT string beside your name in the comments.
For those curious, mine is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
I'm not defending Microsoft. It's shitty that they did it, but honestly it's their site. Try doing a Windows Update from Netscape, that doesn't work either.
Want more fun? Try installing a nice fresh copy of an older Microsoft OS (say WinNT 4.0), and get yourself up to day.. Years ago, they broke the Microsoft pages, so you couldn't get the updates. But I can't say that I've ever seen a/. story on that.
Where I work, we try our best to make our pages render correctly on our machines.. That means, keep everyone in the office happy, and hopefully it will make the majority of our customers happy. We have enough varity by choice to keep things interesting. here's the short list of the browsers we use:
Win98/Win2k/WinXP: MSIE 5.0 -> MSIE 6.1 Netscape 4.7 -> Netscape 7.01 Mozilla 1.1 -> Mozilla 1.3a Opera (unsure of version)
Mac: OS/9, OS/X MSIE (unsure of version) Netscape (unsure. various versions) Mozilla (unsure. various versions)
Linux: (Slackware) Mozilla 1.1 -> 1.3a Netscape (various) Konqueror 3.0.1
But sure as hell, we'll have some sort of rendering problem on some browser, and someone will scream that there's a conspiracy against them specifically..
Our sites don't require any special browser. They all work. We don't know of any compatability issues right now, but I'm sure someone will find that Konqueror v1.0 won't work with a particular page, if they try hard enough. Our site has average users browsing. Some advanced users, lots of regular users..
In the last 24 hours we had 17,017 different REMOTE_USER_AGENT strings sent to one of the servers, in 1,949,023 requests from 116,273 unique IP's.. If I take the list and:
Here's the top 10 results: 474500 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 317359 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98 140794 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98 91425 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0 66331 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98 31072 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0 29963 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 8.0 26778 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0 25426 "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible 20841 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98
And in comparison, we'll look at some other top 10's.. Here's the top 11 Linux clients (11, because the first Opera was #11)
grep -i linux work.txt 1563 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 387 "Mozilla (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i586 161 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux 145 "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.13 i686 96 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U 72 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U 67 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586 64 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686 56 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-34 i686 46 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U 39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
And the top 10 Opera clients.
127 "Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U 118 "Opera/6.05 (Windows XP; U 104 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 2000; U 74 "Opera/7.01 (Windows NT 5.0; U 72 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 98; U 60 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 98; U 56 "Opera/7.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U 49 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 2000; U 41 "Opera/7.0 (Windows 98; U 39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
Ok, lets give better Opera numbers. It seems Opera has a few different formats for its browser string. Thanks guys. That helps me a lot..
The top 10 browser string with "Opera" anywhere in it are:
--- 752 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [en]" 627 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows XP) Opera 7.0 [en]" 617 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" 378 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Opera 7.0 [en]" 277 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.01 [en]" 271 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]" 246 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05 [en]" 222 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [de]" 194 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.0 [en]" 156 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 6.05 [en]"
Or more specifically, lets find every Opera browser regardless of OS type.. That's just about as big as we can inflate your numbers.
Now honestly, who should I be designing pages for? the 2,500 hits from Opera 7.0, or the 474,500 from "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 ?
**WE** do respect peoples ability to choose what browser they want, and *WE* won't limit it, but I'd bet with these numbers in front of them, most bosses would have the pages designed for the majority..
If the decision were presented to me, wether to include a really great feature that works in Netscape and MSIE but not Opera, or not, and I did exactly what I just did, and saw that 8,092 of 1,949,023 hits came from Opera, that's.0004% of our hits, I'd have to say "Do the change, ignore Opera".
If Microsoft had half a clue (which I'm sure someone there does), and they checked to see what browsers were viewing, and *THEY* saw that.0004% of the browsers hitting them were Opera, they wouldn't waste the time to do make special pages specifically to break Opera.. It's simply a bug.. It's not worth the effort.. If someone did anything, I'd bet they were trying to make a better page for the Opera people, and failed.. Probably a newbie was given the job. Who cares if you mess up the page that no one sees..
Red Dwarf was pretty cool. It wasn't made to be thought of as serious SciFi..:)
Well, unless you think of a man, his man-cat, and the hologram of your long since dead boss living thousands of years in the future on a mining ship as a serious plot.:)
NASA has and always will be a big political game. Politicans want to look good to the public, so they throw money into something the public will (hopefully) like.. Why did we (America) go to the moon? Because Russia put something in orbit, and we wanted to prove to the world that we're the cool elite superpower that no one else can beat...
If it was all about the advancement of mankind, NASA shouldn't be contracting out the jobs to select companies who can never disclose their work.
Space travel should be handled by corporations looking to make money off it.. They'll make their money, they just need a little "encouragement".
Take automobiles for example. If the gov't had said "These are for government use only, and will only be built by our select contractors, who will work under top-secret clearance, and can never share or disclose any information about the project", there would be only a few select types of cars on the road, and they'd each cost 10 billion dollars. And, no individuals would have cars in their garage.:)
If the government turned around tommorrow and said, "We'll give a 100 billion dollar grant to each company who successfully prototypes a reusable space vehicle for regular commercially viable use, and has it ready for production", I'd bet we'd have 5 to 10 working reusable space vehicles within 10 years. Not only that, but you'd see airlines picking up a few of them for use too..
But, space is the government's monopoly. Normal humans don't go to space. Anything about say 40,000 feet is unreachable, and no one is traveling there. The government has a nice safe place to keep their communications and spy satellites. They can put almost anything they want up there, and know it will remain relatively undisturbed.. Well, except for micrometors, and other assorted space junk.. (insert the obligatory alien/UFO reference here)
I'd *LOVE* to see a few of the aircraft manufacturers making working spacecraft, using the information that the government has researched on aerospace science over the last 60+ years. But they'll never let it all out, so aircraft manufacturers are starting with what they've learned about aeronautical science.
{sigh}
We need to adjust our government a bit..
When I'm president............:)
Vote for me, JWSmythe, on the Slashdot party, on election day! WhooHoo:)
Actually, I read somewhere that one of the studio's is going to do a hitchhikers movie.. Expect it in the next couple years.. It's suppose to be a good movie, as opposed to the BBC television show. (no offense to the BBC, but it sucked)
That's probably why they stopped making them.. From what I heard, the big platters were a bad thing.. They were so wide and thin, they could bump into each other pretty easily.. A little harmonic vibration, or physical bumping was hard on them.. But, they looked good.:)
Well, here's what I've learned from personal experience. I've bought no less than say 300 drives over the last few years, for servers and workstations.
We'll start with what lives longest.. Machines that we have in our colo's, kept under 75 degrees F, and they are very rarely moved. Some of the machines don't have physical interaction for over a year at a time. These live virtually forever.. We've had less than 1% failure rate over 5 years. We've retired more, simply because they're no longer big enough for our purposes, rather than because they've failed.
We recently shipped 20 of those old drives from New York to Los Angeles, via FedEx. They were all working at the time they were shut off, and packed in a shipping crate. I've only tested 4 so far. 2 were completely dead.. One wouldn't spin up. The other spun, but "knock"ed, and was completely worthless. The other two worked fine. So, the physical abuse of just being shipped was enough to kill them.
Now, consider the drives that haven't been in nice colo conditions. Some have been in offices where the staff seems to think 80 degrees is cold. At 80 degrees F, we have something like a 25% failure rate over 1 year. 25% of the machines will have a drive failure in a year. I can only name off two machines in that environment that haven't had a drive failure in 5 years, one of them being an extraordernarly cooled case (6 case fans, plus 2 small fans on each drive).
In one environment, the staff insisted on keeping the temp at 90 F.. This was mostly because they knew the machines would fail at about 90 F, and they didn't have to work if their workstations crashed. Funny, that business went bankrupt.. Besides over a 30% drive failure rate, they also managed to cook the rest of the parts rather randomly. Motherboards would simply stop working, power supplies would get toasted, and CPU's with good CPU fans would just drop dead.
In a computer store I worked in, when Quantum had first released their "BigFoot" drive series (5.25" wide, and maybe.5" thick), they were shipped to us as OEM parts in large boxes. There was formed sponge foam around them to keep them seperated. The shipping department would receive them, and pull them out two at a time. If we heard them "clack" into each other (it's a distinctive sound), we could pretty much guarantee the drives were both dead. Poor Quantum, they got so many RMA's from that store on those. I think we only had a 50% survival rate. They were nice drives though, in the fact that you could stack 4 of them in two 5.25" bays.
There are always the rare exceptions that are always quoted as fact. One guy would tell everyone about how he has a machine with a SCSI drive running for 10 years, with no fans at all.. Ok, but it's not very good statistical sampling. A sample group of one doesn't show much.. Over hundreds, we get a better picture.
So, yes, keep your drives cool.. If you don't, it will have a shorter life span.
Don't shake your drives.. Hard impacts (less than 2" drop is enough) can destroy it, either damaging the controller board, or bumping the heads into the platters. The space is rather small (see the discussions a few months ago about removing the tops of hard drives. Smaller than a piece of dust). Constant vibration can have the same effect as a good impact. Harmonics can be evil.. Just ask any aircraft engineer.
Don't forget about the "LAW".. M-72 Light Anti-tank Weapon. It's from the Vietnam era. Compact, single shot rocket launcher.. It's 28 inches long collapsed, and only weighs 5 pounds..
Pretty easy to work. Hmmm, it's been a while since I've seen one.. I think it went:
Take it out of your pack,
Pull the pin (to uncap the end)
extend it (like a collapsable telescope or chinese yoyo)
raise the rear sight
aim
squeeze
Dead Enemy
ya, and I know someone will add "??? -- Profit" No easy profit here. Once you blow up the enemy, it's kinda hard to go through the remains of his pockets, assuming you can find them.:)
BTW, LAWs are for anti-tank and bunker use.. They'll go through 1 foot of armour. It'd make a pretty serious mess against a person too..:)
If you don't have a good collection of sins, you'll definately have to work on that.. What am I going to do with a pure sole? Well, besides corrupt it.:)
That's a very interesting one. I'm really tempted to decode it for myself, and see if I see errors..
The end of the story you cited says that the final character wasn't [BEL], but [ACK], where they're expecting a response on the empty part of the track.
Anyone with a decent sized pay site only needs to check their web server logs.. The script kiddies that try to crack passwords are great for supplying me with an endless supply of anonymous web proxies.:)
Don't feel bad. I submitted it yesterday too.. It just took them some time to post it..
Usually when I submit a story, someone else had gotten one in earlier too, but theirs are always pathetically written, but get posted first.. I have a whole box of rejected stories like that.
They'd just need to translate common character/letter combo's, put a little logic into combining single letter words together ( f r a u d = 'fraud') and then soundex the words..
But if they *SHOULD* is another question.. The guy wrote his opinion, which is perfectly legal in most states (I'm not sure about Cali).. In *MY* opinion, it's up to him to make everyone happy..
In the real world, I've seen people protesting businesses with written signs saying "This business ripped me off".. The police look, make sure he's peaceful while he's there, and leave him alone.
Of course, the guy has the right to sue for anything he wants..
Unless of course, the feds get into it, then they'll consider him a cyber-terrorist, and he'll go to jail indefinately.
I've had people threaten to sue me over so many things it isn't even funny.. Most of them want to sue because of whatever painfully pathetic reason.. Feel free.. Try to associate my alias of the day to a real person.. The courts will be full of attempted hearings regarding JWSmythe, John Smith, John Doe, G Public, Joe User, etc, etc..:)
We still have ropes? I thought we were using electronic measuring devices, such as This.. Sure as hell, you can't own a rope any more, that's a terrorist device!:)
I would have been more entertained to read that it had (c) 2002, Sony Music Corporation.. Then they'd have the RIAA trying to shut down the site.:)
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. EELRIJUE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. COnduit CLOSING [bell sound]".
Most of these sites scream hoax or conspiracy. One message said straight-up that there's no way anyone could decode it (yada, yada. They just didn't try hard enough. I do the impossible twice before lunch daily.{grin})
Has anyone tried to figure out what the CD says?:)
Well, seriously think about it. What are the possibilities.
1) It was an alien.
They'd be trying to convey a message.. So it should be easy to decrypt.
2) It was a hoax.
Someone wants bragging rights. They're not going to go through all the work of trashing that field (great work though), and not make the obviously intricate CD mean *something*.
Looking at http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2002/Crabwood/c rabwood2002sac.jpg, it's fairly clear to see that the marks are evenly spaced. There's an obvious smallest unit, which the others are multiples of.. So, take the smallest displayed unit as 1, and the absense of a unit as 0, the whole thing could be broken out to binary...
But, do aliens know ASCII to Binary translation?:)
BTW, have another look at the pic. It's not rings, it's a spiral like a record.. The beginning and end are solid, and taper up and down from nothing. The bumps are too infrequent to even attempt to simulate an audio record.. That'd just make pops..
Oh, I would *LOVE* to come out and play.:) If someone blasts me off the track and I'm over 150mph, we'll probably end up talking in the pits.. Very friendly, of course..
"You're the guy who blew past me on that straight? All right! How much horsepower you have? What'd you do to it? Can you take me for a ride in it?":)
I've never had any problem with the brakes fading in my TransAm's.. I suppose it could happen pretty easily in the older ones with drum brakes in the rear.. When I went out in my 2000, I was running it very hard.. The most that happened to the brakes was that I could smell the pads warming up.. But the braking action never failed.. And that was after several 30 minute runs, going from well over 100 to about 30 for the turns and back up..
I was driving a friends newer Mustang GT (late 90's), and had the brakes go in that.. It was due to water on the road.. I guess they're much more sensitive.
No offense, but that happens all the time over here.. A few months ago, there were three fires started in the span of a few days (all accidental or natural), that put LA under a nice cloud of smoke.. One of the fires was within 5 miles of where I was staying.. Another was South of LA. I had the pleasure of driving out to a home there.. It was kinda surreal when your entire field of view in front of you is fire, and then realize it's still miles away..
When I was a kid, I grew up in nowhere, Florida. Pretty much, grab a Florida map, and figure out how much space is at least 100 miles from any city with a population over 1000.. There's lots of it. There'd be fires all the time, caused by lightning strikes, or stupid people not putting out camp fires.. LA's fires make the news, because they're close to major news offices.. The fires in Florida would sometimes be huge, and maybe make a 5 second blurb on the nearest cities news channel.
4 dead, 400 homes isn't international news. Well, it would be, but it ranks right up with little Timmy with his hand stuck in the toilet (again).
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the position in the company you're taking, and what powers you'd probably have..
What if your Becon score was 0? (impossible, I believe). You have a whole stack of credit cards that were run up to $50,000, and then charged off. You declared bankrupcy twice in the last 5 years. You defaulted on the loan for your home, and there are still more creditors that are after you. Your existing bills account for 10x what you'll make this year.
If I was the CEO, there's no way I'd want you having direct control over any finances, or anything else in the company. You're a high risk for getting money any which way you can.. The odds are very good that you'll be skimming money, and possibly wipe out the company. Now not only have you ruined yourself, you've ruined the employment for 40 people, and probably their credit in the near future too..
That's a worst case scenerio. If you have a becon score of say 700, with a couple cards that are near their limits, and nothing significant in your bad history, there wouldn't be much of a reason not to trust you..
By saying "no", do you have something to hide? Go to equifax.com, spend a few dollars to get your own history and score, and then go back to the boss and say "It's none of your business what's *IN* my credit history. I'll disclose to you that my score is 700 which indicates I'm a safe credit risk." Show them the print-out of that page.
I've worked for companies that do credit and background checks. Be straight forward with them.. I gave them a brief overview of the good and bad things in there, and when they get the report back, they see I was open with them, and you'll have a much better working relationship with them..
You're not taking a Customer Support position, you're taking a Director position. It's very reasonable for them to want to check everything out first..
But now the question is, how important is the job to you? How badly to they want you? If they want you, and you have other opprotunities, you can threaten to take another offer, and they may wave the credit check. If you're a high credit risk and rob them, they seriously screwed up by not doing it.. If you're not a high risk, you have nothing to worry about..
Or, just go find a different employer who doesn't fully investigate the staff, and hope no one else destroys the company...
Honestly, this is not an effort against Opera. If I choose to break my own site, so be it..
/. story on that.
.0004% of our hits, I'd have to say "Do the change, ignore Opera".
.0004% of the browsers hitting them were Opera, they wouldn't waste the time to do make special pages specifically to break Opera.. It's simply a bug.. It's not worth the effort.. If someone did anything, I'd bet they were trying to make a better page for the Opera people, and failed.. Probably a newbie was given the job. Who cares if you mess up the page that no one sees..
In my industry, just about every site does video of some sort. There's always some group that feels they were intentionally blocked because of whatever reason. I've seen sites that stream exclusively Windows Media, and some that use propriatory plugins like "Emblaze".. Some were using the Netscape "Push" method (send a multipart header, and then send a new mime delimiter between frames). Netscape "Push" doesn't (or didn't) work with MSIE.. Windows Media doesn't work with Linux. (with a few exceptions).. Something doesn't work with something else.
If I choose to make my site not work with MSIE or Netscape, and only let Opera viewers see it, well, it's my site.. If Slashdot decides tommorrow that they like a feature of Mozilla 9.999, and it doesn't work with any other browser, including MSIE, how many of you are going to be bitching for MSIE compatability?
I'll get a bunch of comments back "Microsoft Sucks", but I'd *LOVE* it if they'd put the REMOTE_USER_AGENT string beside your name in the comments.
For those curious, mine is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
I'm not defending Microsoft. It's shitty that they did it, but honestly it's their site. Try doing a Windows Update from Netscape, that doesn't work either.
Want more fun? Try installing a nice fresh copy of an older Microsoft OS (say WinNT 4.0), and get yourself up to day.. Years ago, they broke the Microsoft pages, so you couldn't get the updates. But I can't say that I've ever seen a
Where I work, we try our best to make our pages render correctly on our machines.. That means, keep everyone in the office happy, and hopefully it will make the majority of our customers happy. We have enough varity by choice to keep things interesting. here's the short list of the browsers we use:
Win98/Win2k/WinXP:
MSIE 5.0 -> MSIE 6.1
Netscape 4.7 -> Netscape 7.01
Mozilla 1.1 -> Mozilla 1.3a
Opera (unsure of version)
Mac: OS/9, OS/X
MSIE (unsure of version)
Netscape (unsure. various versions)
Mozilla (unsure. various versions)
Linux: (Slackware)
Mozilla 1.1 -> 1.3a
Netscape (various)
Konqueror 3.0.1
But sure as hell, we'll have some sort of rendering problem on some browser, and someone will scream that there's a conspiracy against them specifically..
Our sites don't require any special browser. They all work. We don't know of any compatability issues right now, but I'm sure someone will find that Konqueror v1.0 won't work with a particular page, if they try hard enough. Our site has average users browsing. Some advanced users, lots of regular users..
In the last 24 hours we had 17,017 different REMOTE_USER_AGENT strings sent to one of the servers, in 1,949,023 requests from 116,273 unique IP's.. If I take the list and:
cat list.txt | cut -f 1-3 -d ";" | sort | uniq -c > work.txt
less work.txt
Here's the top 10 results:
474500 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1
317359 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98
140794 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98
91425 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0
66331 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98
31072 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0
29963 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 8.0
26778 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0
25426 "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible
20841 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98
And in comparison, we'll look at some other top 10's.. Here's the top 11 Linux clients (11, because the first Opera was #11)
grep -i linux work.txt
1563 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686
387 "Mozilla (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i586
161 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux
145 "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.13 i686
96 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U
72 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U
67 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586
64 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686
56 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-34 i686
46 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
And the top 10 Opera clients.
127 "Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U
118 "Opera/6.05 (Windows XP; U
104 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 2000; U
74 "Opera/7.01 (Windows NT 5.0; U
72 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 98; U
60 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 98; U
56 "Opera/7.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U
49 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 2000; U
41 "Opera/7.0 (Windows 98; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
Ok, lets give better Opera numbers. It seems Opera has a few different formats for its browser string. Thanks guys. That helps me a lot..
The top 10 browser string with "Opera" anywhere in it are:
cat list.txt | grep -i opera | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
752 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [en]"
627 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows XP) Opera 7.0 [en]"
617 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]"
378 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Opera 7.0 [en]"
277 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.01 [en]"
271 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"
246 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05 [en]"
222 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [de]"
194 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.0 [en]"
156 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 6.05 [en]"
Or more specifically, lets find every Opera browser regardless of OS type.. That's just about as big as we can inflate your numbers.
cat list.txt | grep -i opera > work.txt
cat work.txt | grep ^\"Opera > a.list
cat work.txt | grep -v ^\"Opera > b.list
cat a.list | cut -f 2 -d \" | cut -f 1 -d " " > opera.id
cat b.list | cut -f 2 -d ")" | cut -f 1 -d \[ >> opera.id
And then a little cleanup in 'vi' to fix the leading space, and the space versus slash in the two types...
cat opera.id | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
2565 Opera/6.05
2488 Opera/7.0
678 Opera/7.01
549 Opera/6.01
537 Opera/6.0
438 Opera/6.04
336 Opera/6.03
105 Opera/6.11
63 Opera/5.12
47 Opera/6.02
47 Opera/5.0
43 Opera/6.0/\xa4/
32 Opera/5.02
30 Opera/4.0/Beta/4
28 Opera/5.11
27 Opera/5.01
21 Opera/6.01/~/
14 Opera/5.12/\xa1\xe8/
13 Opera/3.60
12 Opera/5.12/OCV2/
9 "
7 Opera/6.1
2 Opera
1 Opera/6.01/OCV2/
Now honestly, who should I be designing pages for? the 2,500 hits from Opera 7.0, or the 474,500 from "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 ?
**WE** do respect peoples ability to choose what browser they want, and *WE* won't limit it, but I'd bet with these numbers in front of them, most bosses would have the pages designed for the majority..
If the decision were presented to me, wether to include a really great feature that works in Netscape and MSIE but not Opera, or not, and I did exactly what I just did, and saw that 8,092 of 1,949,023 hits came from Opera, that's
If Microsoft had half a clue (which I'm sure someone there does), and they checked to see what browsers were viewing, and *THEY* saw that
Red Dwarf was pretty cool. It wasn't made to be thought of as serious SciFi.. :)
:)
Well, unless you think of a man, his man-cat, and the hologram of your long since dead boss living thousands of years in the future on a mining ship as a serious plot.
NASA has and always will be a big political game. Politicans want to look good to the public, so they throw money into something the public will (hopefully) like.. Why did we (America) go to the moon? Because Russia put something in orbit, and we wanted to prove to the world that we're the cool elite superpower that no one else can beat...
:)
.. Well, except for micrometors, and other assorted space junk.. (insert the obligatory alien/UFO reference here)
:)
:)
If it was all about the advancement of mankind, NASA shouldn't be contracting out the jobs to select companies who can never disclose their work.
Space travel should be handled by corporations looking to make money off it.. They'll make their money, they just need a little "encouragement".
Take automobiles for example. If the gov't had said "These are for government use only, and will only be built by our select contractors, who will work under top-secret clearance, and can never share or disclose any information about the project", there would be only a few select types of cars on the road, and they'd each cost 10 billion dollars. And, no individuals would have cars in their garage.
If the government turned around tommorrow and said, "We'll give a 100 billion dollar grant to each company who successfully prototypes a reusable space vehicle for regular commercially viable use, and has it ready for production", I'd bet we'd have 5 to 10 working reusable space vehicles within 10 years. Not only that, but you'd see airlines picking up a few of them for use too..
But, space is the government's monopoly. Normal humans don't go to space. Anything about say 40,000 feet is unreachable, and no one is traveling there. The government has a nice safe place to keep their communications and spy satellites. They can put almost anything they want up there, and know it will remain relatively undisturbed
I'd *LOVE* to see a few of the aircraft manufacturers making working spacecraft, using the information that the government has researched on aerospace science over the last 60+ years. But they'll never let it all out, so aircraft manufacturers are starting with what they've learned about aeronautical science.
{sigh}
We need to adjust our government a bit..
When I'm president............
Vote for me, JWSmythe, on the Slashdot party, on election day! WhooHoo
Actually, I read somewhere that one of the studio's is going to do a hitchhikers movie.. Expect it in the next couple years.. It's suppose to be a good movie, as opposed to the BBC television show. (no offense to the BBC, but it sucked)
Maybe he'll name his something more creative/unique..
That's probably why they stopped making them.. From what I heard, the big platters were a bad thing.. They were so wide and thin, they could bump into each other pretty easily.. A little harmonic vibration, or physical bumping was hard on them.. But, they looked good.
Well, here's what I've learned from personal experience. I've bought no less than say 300 drives over the last few years, for servers and workstations.
.5" thick), they were shipped to us as OEM parts in large boxes. There was formed sponge foam around them to keep them seperated. The shipping department would receive them, and pull them out two at a time. If we heard them "clack" into each other (it's a distinctive sound), we could pretty much guarantee the drives were both dead. Poor Quantum, they got so many RMA's from that store on those. I think we only had a 50% survival rate. They were nice drives though, in the fact that you could stack 4 of them in two 5.25" bays.
We'll start with what lives longest.. Machines that we have in our colo's, kept under 75 degrees F, and they are very rarely moved. Some of the machines don't have physical interaction for over a year at a time. These live virtually forever.. We've had less than 1% failure rate over 5 years. We've retired more, simply because they're no longer big enough for our purposes, rather than because they've failed.
We recently shipped 20 of those old drives from New York to Los Angeles, via FedEx. They were all working at the time they were shut off, and packed in a shipping crate. I've only tested 4 so far. 2 were completely dead.. One wouldn't spin up. The other spun, but "knock"ed, and was completely worthless. The other two worked fine. So, the physical abuse of just being shipped was enough to kill them.
Now, consider the drives that haven't been in nice colo conditions. Some have been in offices where the staff seems to think 80 degrees is cold. At 80 degrees F, we have something like a 25% failure rate over 1 year. 25% of the machines will have a drive failure in a year. I can only name off two machines in that environment that haven't had a drive failure in 5 years, one of them being an extraordernarly cooled case (6 case fans, plus 2 small fans on each drive).
In one environment, the staff insisted on keeping the temp at 90 F.. This was mostly because they knew the machines would fail at about 90 F, and they didn't have to work if their workstations crashed. Funny, that business went bankrupt.. Besides over a 30% drive failure rate, they also managed to cook the rest of the parts rather randomly. Motherboards would simply stop working, power supplies would get toasted, and CPU's with good CPU fans would just drop dead.
In a computer store I worked in, when Quantum had first released their "BigFoot" drive series (5.25" wide, and maybe
There are always the rare exceptions that are always quoted as fact. One guy would tell everyone about how he has a machine with a SCSI drive running for 10 years, with no fans at all.. Ok, but it's not very good statistical sampling. A sample group of one doesn't show much.. Over hundreds, we get a better picture.
So, yes, keep your drives cool.. If you don't, it will have a shorter life span.
Don't shake your drives.. Hard impacts (less than 2" drop is enough) can destroy it, either damaging the controller board, or bumping the heads into the platters. The space is rather small (see the discussions a few months ago about removing the tops of hard drives. Smaller than a piece of dust). Constant vibration can have the same effect as a good impact. Harmonics can be evil.. Just ask any aircraft engineer.
Pretty easy to work. Hmmm, it's been a while since I've seen one.. I think it went:
ya, and I know someone will add "??? -- Profit" No easy profit here. Once you blow up the enemy, it's kinda hard to go through the remains of his pockets, assuming you can find them.
BTW, LAWs are for anti-tank and bunker use.. They'll go through 1 foot of armour. It'd make a pretty serious mess against a person too..
Baby, once we conqueror the world, you can have Apple.
Hmmmm.. Poached soul in herb sauce.. Good evil thought..
Are you sure you want to sell your soul? You sound like you'd make a great partner in our world domination.
Well, at least with you intact..
I'll have to think about the terms..
If you don't have a good collection of sins, you'll definately have to work on that.. What am I going to do with a pure sole? Well, besides corrupt it.
And exactly does the title to your soul provide? When can I collect? :)
Adding another soul to my collection doesn't do much for me, after you've died from old age. Along with it would be the weights from your life..
That's a very interesting one. I'm really tempted to decode it for myself, and see if I see errors..
The end of the story you cited says that the final character wasn't [BEL], but [ACK], where they're expecting a response on the empty part of the track.
Here's a summary of the proposed domains.
If you want to know who submitted it, read through the comments again.
Enjoy!
Al-Queda.mil
runofthe.mil
General.mil (cereal)
Cara.mil (caramel)
Rumor.mil (which would be slashdot.org.. hehe)
rastafarian.mil
peace.mil
Piece.mil ("as I find well toned and armed women hot")
starfleet.mil
diploma.mil
peace.in.our.t
gin.mil
pointlessdeath.mil
2600.mil
Na
runofthe.mil
slashdot.mil
ally
IN-SOVIET-RUSSIA-we-practice-better-i
in.soviet.russ
slashdot.mil
kevinmitni
2600.mil
fuckedcompany.mil
bushisanidiot
ashcroftisan ass.mil
sgc.mil
weoverthrewiran.mil
weoverthre
weassinatevietnamese.mil
wekillci
wesupportcoupinchile.mi
wesupp
wetrainedosama.mil
w
wegavesaddammoney.mil
wegave
weoverthrewpanama.mil
webombaspi
"noches.mil" (Thousand nigths)
"dos.mil" (Two thousand)
blackop.mil
pepper.mil
paper.mil
da
deathstar.mil (for dvader@deathstar.mil)
milf.mil
Wind.mil
honeyp
Anyone with a decent sized pay site only needs to check their web server logs.. The script kiddies that try to crack passwords are great for supplying me with an endless supply of anonymous web proxies.
Soul for sale: Good Working Order, One Lady Owner. Prefer Lucifer to Micro$oft, but will accept Best Offer.
:)
How much for the soul?
Don't feel bad. I submitted it yesterday too.. It just took them some time to post it..
Usually when I submit a story, someone else had gotten one in earlier too, but theirs are always pathetically written, but get posted first.. I have a whole box of rejected stories like that.
Just keep trying.
Going to? You should have done that *BEFORE* reading slashdot.
:)
I did.
Well, with my girlfriend, not yours.
They'd just need to translate common character/letter combo's, put a little logic into combining single letter words together ( f r a u d = 'fraud') and then soundex the words..
:)
But if they *SHOULD* is another question.. The guy wrote his opinion, which is perfectly legal in most states (I'm not sure about Cali).. In *MY* opinion, it's up to him to make everyone happy..
In the real world, I've seen people protesting businesses with written signs saying "This business ripped me off".. The police look, make sure he's peaceful while he's there, and leave him alone.
Of course, the guy has the right to sue for anything he wants..
Unless of course, the feds get into it, then they'll consider him a cyber-terrorist, and he'll go to jail indefinately.
I've had people threaten to sue me over so many things it isn't even funny.. Most of them want to sue because of whatever painfully pathetic reason.. Feel free.. Try to associate my alias of the day to a real person.. The courts will be full of attempted hearings regarding JWSmythe, John Smith, John Doe, G Public, Joe User, etc, etc..
We still have ropes? I thought we were using electronic measuring devices, such as This.. Sure as hell, you can't own a rope any more, that's a terrorist device! :)
I would have been more entertained to read that it had (c) 2002, Sony Music Corporation.. Then they'd have the RIAA trying to shut down the site.
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES.
Much PAIN but still time.
EELRIJUE.
There is GOOD out there.
We OPpose DECEPTION.
COnduit CLOSING [bell sound]".
This answer was found at:
http://www.dcccs.org/the_alien_at_crabwood_farm_ho use.htm
http://home.clara.net/lucypringle/articles/crabwoo d.html
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=381&cat egory=Environment
(this one requires a registration. I haven't read it yet)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 &oe=UTF-8&scoring=d&q=EELRIJUE&btnG=Google+Sea rch
DejaNews shows 57 threads
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&scoring=d&q=EELRIJUE&sa=N&tab=g w
Google finds 66 sites.
Most of these sites scream hoax or conspiracy. One message said straight-up that there's no way anyone could decode it (yada, yada. They just didn't try hard enough. I do the impossible twice before lunch daily.{grin})
Has anyone tried to figure out what the CD says? :)
c rabwood2002sac.jpg, it's fairly clear to see that the marks are evenly spaced. There's an obvious smallest unit, which the others are multiples of.. So, take the smallest displayed unit as 1, and the absense of a unit as 0, the whole thing could be broken out to binary...
:)
Well, seriously think about it. What are the possibilities.
1) It was an alien.
They'd be trying to convey a message.. So it should be easy to decrypt.
2) It was a hoax.
Someone wants bragging rights. They're not going to go through all the work of trashing that field (great work though), and not make the obviously intricate CD mean *something*.
Looking at http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2002/Crabwood/
But, do aliens know ASCII to Binary translation?
BTW, have another look at the pic. It's not rings, it's a spiral like a record.. The beginning and end are solid, and taper up and down from nothing. The bumps are too infrequent to even attempt to simulate an audio record.. That'd just make pops..
Oh, I would *LOVE* to come out and play. :) If someone blasts me off the track and I'm over 150mph, we'll probably end up talking in the pits.. Very friendly, of course..
:)
"You're the guy who blew past me on that straight? All right! How much horsepower you have? What'd you do to it? Can you take me for a ride in it?"
I've never had any problem with the brakes fading in my TransAm's.. I suppose it could happen pretty easily in the older ones with drum brakes in the rear.. When I went out in my 2000, I was running it very hard.. The most that happened to the brakes was that I could smell the pads warming up.. But the braking action never failed.. And that was after several 30 minute runs, going from well over 100 to about 30 for the turns and back up..
I was driving a friends newer Mustang GT (late 90's), and had the brakes go in that.. It was due to water on the road.. I guess they're much more sensitive.
No offense, but that happens all the time over here.. A few months ago, there were three fires started in the span of a few days (all accidental or natural), that put LA under a nice cloud of smoke.. One of the fires was within 5 miles of where I was staying.. Another was South of LA. I had the pleasure of driving out to a home there.. It was kinda surreal when your entire field of view in front of you is fire, and then realize it's still miles away..
When I was a kid, I grew up in nowhere, Florida. Pretty much, grab a Florida map, and figure out how much space is at least 100 miles from any city with a population over 1000.. There's lots of it. There'd be fires all the time, caused by lightning strikes, or stupid people not putting out camp fires.. LA's fires make the news, because they're close to major news offices.. The fires in Florida would sometimes be huge, and maybe make a 5 second blurb on the nearest cities news channel.
4 dead, 400 homes isn't international news. Well, it would be, but it ranks right up with little Timmy with his hand stuck in the toilet (again).