So let me get this straight, you'd rather spend billions a year to send people to Mars, for no useful purpose, because it "might mean something some day" versus feeding millions of people a year?
A space program like Apollo employs a bunch of people and encourages technical education and investment, which employs even more people (as teachers and businesspeople). It's the same as the government throwing money at banks or car manufacturers, except the country would be getting something new out of it and not encouraging irresponsible corporations.
Just tell all those starving Ethiopian kids about how that money went to send a man to Mars because *that* *might* mean something.
Please, this argument has been debunked for decades if not centuries or millennia. For people living in first-world countries, there is *always* someone worse-off than you that you could theoretically help by giving up some of what you have. Even if we spent *no* money on space exploration, or national defence, or education. The way to improve the condition of the world is not by sacrificing the things that allow us to better ourselves. It's by bettering ourselves and then using the position we achieve to help the less-fortunate.
The only person I recall leaving was Claudia Christian who played Cmdr Ivanova.
While this is true, the GP is correct in one respect - when JMS thought the series was going to be canceled after the end of season 4, he did squeeze what was supposed to be season 5 into season 4, leaving a big gap to fill when he did end up getting a season 5. As much as I am a big fan of B5, it is basically Lord of the Rings in Space, and season 5 was basically supposed to be the chapter where the Hobbits^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHumans return to Hobbiton^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HEarth and oust Saruman^H^H^H^H^H^H^HClarke using the newfound courage that they discovered while saving Middle Earth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe rest of the galaxy before Frodo^H^H^H^H^HSheridan leaves Middle Earth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe galaxy with the Elves^H^H^H^H^HFirst Ones at the Grey Havens^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCorianus 3.
This stuff was done *on TV*, with MODELS and motion-control cameras.
Well, in all fairness to historical accuracy, there was really only one set of shots filmed using models for the original BSG. They were created for the pilot/feature-length first episode. The entire rest of the season just reused those exact same shots over and over. I'm sure if the production team had tried to come up with original shots for each episode, they would have looked a lot more low-budget.
Mebbe so, but you still have to come up with a way to recharge those batteries. Mebbe hydrogen isn't the best solution, however, it can power a generator to recharge said batteries.
There's no reason to introduce hydrogen into the process you describe, unless you have a pre-existing source of hydrogen gas (IE skimming it off of Jupiter). Otherwise you're just wasting efficiency by not charging the batteries directly using whatever power you used to run the hydrogen generator.
It was the Windows/IE bundling which caused Netscape to crash and burn.
The bundling didn't exactly help, but it was mostly Netscape's own fault. Netscape 4 was bloated and used too much of a Swiss army knife model, trying to be not just a browser, but also a WYSIWYG HTML editor, mail client, etc. It ended up not doing anything well.
OTOH, IE3 was very fast and lightweight. It was *just* a browser. And it was free, without jumping through hoops about pretending you were a student or whatever loophole it was that Netscape had back in those days to get out of paying for their browser.
Of course, MS went and screwed things up with IE4 and their integrated-with-the-OS, look!-my-desktop-wallpaper-is-a-webpage! model, but that was a little later.
f you've ever heard of the concept that whenever there's some chance, the universe 'splits' and both events occur, that's what's going on. When the quantum computer makes a qubit 1 and 0 at the same time, it basically uses a truly random event to determine which value the bit will be. The universe 'splits' and down one path there is a 1, and down the other there is a 0. Except the quantum computer 'splits' the universe in such a way that the two universes can interact with each other. It is even possible to have the quantum computer compute something on every input at once and then search through all the different universes to find an answer; this is known as Gover's algorithm.
As big a fan as I am of the Many Worlds theory, and as much as I think it's the one that makes the most sense in terms of explaining quantum phenomena, my understanding is that it's far from accepted as fact, with the Copenhagen interpretation being in the lead.
So to keep things on an even keel, is there a similarly straightforward explanation that can be given which doesn't depend on Many Worlds?
Now we are talking about password security. You can also throw on a five length minimum. Now even if your password was "password" they would still find it extremely difficult to compromise the system since it would be slow and would break after the first five.
The reason length is important is because there are ways to crack most types of password that don't involve going through the same interface that an interactive user would.
For example, on Windows you can get ahold of the password hashes either off of a domain controller or with network sniffing software. Then you can make any number of cracking attempts offline. Or you can just use a rainbow table system like Ophcrack and do a reverse lookup in a matter of minutes on the hash of virtually any password less than 15 characters long.
I would have thought smoking would bring on mental problems in the first place rather than be a palliative.
Nicotine improves brain function even in non-schizophrenics, because it binds to acetylcholine receptors. Of course, the most common delivery methods have one or two negative side effects.
Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office.
My theory is that it's another step in the bizarre UI design model that MS seems to have come up with, where the Windows UI is the same across every type of device (desktops, servers, tablets, handheld PCs, cellphones, etc.).
It began with them putting the Start menu on handhelds and cellphones, which IMO was a stupid idea. Something like the Start menu is useful on desktops because you have a mouse to navigate with *and* you are very likely to end up with a ton of software installed that requires a navigation hierarchy instead of a flat list. On a mobile device it slows the user down and adds unnecessary complexity.
The ribbon is the next step. IMO the ribbon UI would make a lot of sense for a device with a touchscreen, because it's much more friendly to fingers than a traditional menu. But on a desktop? It's a huge waste of screen real-estate, and it shows because so many of the functions I use in Office don't fit into the ribbon and I have to get to them in some new and stupid way now.
They're working on something similar with their current/next wave of server applications. The management consoles for them all use a model that would work very well for a simple touchscreen app but is infuriating as a server GUI because it doesn't take advantage of e.g. having a mouse.
Basically it seems like they're going for a lowest-common-denominator approach that's not going to make anyone happy. UIs that are tailored to take advantage of a platform's strengths are much better, and exceptions (like crazy people who want to manage their servers from a tablet on a regular basis) can be dealt with as such instead of making everyone else pay the price.
If extraterrestrial life were watching our TV, surely Fox and the WB would have been attacked by now... or at least a very harshly worded intergalactic message would have been delivered to the Fox executives about their nonsensical canceling of shows like Firefly and Futurama while promoting unadulterated drivel.
For a species with technology millions of years more advanced than our own, creating a copy of e.g. Joss Whedon (an "Alpha-Level" in Alastair Reynolds' terminology) and then placing it unawares in a Matrix-style simulation where (in this case) Firefly had never been canceled should be trivial. Meanwhile, in the real world, the original Joss' anguish provides additional entertainment for the malevolent alien viewers.
Not only that but they patch it urgently for the 175th time.
MS haven't patched this vulnerability 175 times. They've issued 175 patches that have made use of the ActiveX killbit mechanism to disable various old controls, as opposed to patching the vulnerability in those controls.
Apple did all the engineering, R&D, and human interface work for iTunes. (Ok, other than what they bought in the beginning). Now Pre is trying to piggy back on this.
Interoperability with competitors' hardware is generally protected, at least in the US. See Coleco and other companies producing Atari 2600-compatible hardware, various companies producing unlicensed software for the NES, Sega Genesis, PS2, etc that had to use similar trickery to what Palm is doing.
In a laptop? A device that very likely gets bounced around in a bag for most of its life?
I've even seen (rarely, but it has happened) servers where reseating a component made them bootable again. Whether it was technically "loose" or not, it's something that can be tried quickly for things like RAM and expansion cards.
I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document
SharePoint 2007 works fine with FireFox, assuming you configure FireFox to pass your Windows credentials on and maybe a few other minor configuration changes. I imagine it will work with other modern browsers (in which category I do not include e.g. lynx).
and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package
You can store any type of file you like in SharePoint, as long as the administrators don't have it on the blocked extension list.
Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes.
Most of the corporate users I work with love Excel and PowerPoint files in addition to their Word documents. How would you replicate that in MediaWiki?
Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.
That's how your organization is choosing to use SharePoint. It supports that model because it's supposed to be a replacement for (among other things) file shares and Exchange public folders. It also supports different usage models, including limited wiki-style pages.
If you think your organization has progressed into the documentless future of tomorrow, maybe you should try convincing other people there to work in that way using the tools they already have, and if it provides significant benefit you can steer them towards a product geared specifically toward that model.
Maybe. But having met people who really did have schizophrenia, I'm a little dubious of this theory (which I've heard before). To use a computer analogy, my perception of their experience was not just that their brains started producing/storing inaccurate data, but that the program code was also not working as intended. One of the most striking examples was their speech patterns, where in certain cases they would say things that had the timbre and cadence of normal English speech, but if you actually paid attention it didn't make any sense - it was just nonsensical syllables strung together in a pattern that superficially sounded like English. If random corruption of "data" and "program code" in the brain is the root of creativity, then it seems to me that creativity is a very inefficient, brute-force method, which is only practical in people without schizophrenia because our brains have the processing power to discard (at some subconscious layer) the huge number of results that aren't worth pursuing. That's sort of along the lines of random mutation and natural selection, but the timescales are vastly different, so I at least hope that there is something more efficient at work in our brains.
You're dumb if you don't participate in a recall, though, because you/are/ compensated or given a safer/better-working/improved product in return.
I would say it depends on the recall. If it's for e.g. a Battlestar Galactica toy that shoots rubber darts but which can fire nails equally well, you're probably better off keeping the toy (out of reach of small children) as a collector's item.
Most people define a lie as a statement the speaker knows to be false.
I'm curious how well this technique stands up to method acting - IE temporarily remolding your thoughts to be those of the character you're playing. If you know a statement is false, but then get in the mindset of someone who believes the statement is true for long enough to be tested, will that look any different to this machine? I suppose the answer would reveal at least a little bit about how our brains work.
The 555 can be used in a lot of interesting, simple projects. I like the idea of audio, because it's something that (IMO) a lot of young students will find interesting compared to some of the other typical beginning electronics projects.
One very easy 555 project is an Atari Punk Console. I built one of those a couple of years ago and took it to a party and it provided hours of entertainment.
Another option might be a simple resonant low-pass filter, since any of the students who've listened to electronic music will immediately recognize the effect and want to play with it.
Strong passwords may not save you from keylogging, but that doesn't make them altogether useless. Rainbow tables, for example, will expose weak passwords but not strong ones on Windows machines.
Mod parent up. I came here to say this. TFA may apply to passwords used on non-Windows systems, but it does not apply at all to Windows because there are a number of ways to get ahold of the password hashes and thereby bypass the n-attempt limit.
On the flip side, it's actually not too hard to have the computer deny users from using passwords that contain words from the dictionary. So you don't need to say "there must be a digit and an uppercase letter and a non-character symbol..." You can just say "no words" and have the computer check the password for strings that match dictionary words.
That would be a terrible idea.
My current password contains dictionary words, but no one will ever brute force it. Why? Because it's almost 40 characters long. On the other hand, it's easy for me to remember, because it's a sentence.
As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking. [snip] Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples: - The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images. - Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries. - A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc. - The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can. - From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki. - If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.
I also imagine it's useful (to people with a lot of money) doing extreme versions of the "person standing on a building/mountain/hill in front of a giant full moon" shot.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight, you'd rather spend billions a year to send people to Mars, for no useful purpose, because it "might mean something some day" versus feeding millions of people a year?
A space program like Apollo employs a bunch of people and encourages technical education and investment, which employs even more people (as teachers and businesspeople). It's the same as the government throwing money at banks or car manufacturers, except the country would be getting something new out of it and not encouraging irresponsible corporations.
Just tell all those starving Ethiopian kids about how that money went to send a man to Mars because *that* *might* mean something.
Please, this argument has been debunked for decades if not centuries or millennia. For people living in first-world countries, there is *always* someone worse-off than you that you could theoretically help by giving up some of what you have. Even if we spent *no* money on space exploration, or national defence, or education. The way to improve the condition of the world is not by sacrificing the things that allow us to better ourselves. It's by bettering ourselves and then using the position we achieve to help the less-fortunate.
The only person I recall leaving was Claudia Christian who played Cmdr Ivanova.
While this is true, the GP is correct in one respect - when JMS thought the series was going to be canceled after the end of season 4, he did squeeze what was supposed to be season 5 into season 4, leaving a big gap to fill when he did end up getting a season 5.
As much as I am a big fan of B5, it is basically Lord of the Rings in Space, and season 5 was basically supposed to be the chapter where the Hobbits^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHumans return to Hobbiton^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HEarth and oust Saruman^H^H^H^H^H^H^HClarke using the newfound courage that they discovered while saving Middle Earth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe rest of the galaxy before Frodo^H^H^H^H^HSheridan leaves Middle Earth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe galaxy with the Elves^H^H^H^H^HFirst Ones at the Grey Havens^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCorianus 3.
This stuff was done *on TV*, with MODELS and motion-control cameras.
Well, in all fairness to historical accuracy, there was really only one set of shots filmed using models for the original BSG. They were created for the pilot/feature-length first episode. The entire rest of the season just reused those exact same shots over and over. I'm sure if the production team had tried to come up with original shots for each episode, they would have looked a lot more low-budget.
Mebbe so, but you still have to come up with a way to recharge those batteries. Mebbe hydrogen isn't the best solution, however, it can power a generator to recharge said batteries.
There's no reason to introduce hydrogen into the process you describe, unless you have a pre-existing source of hydrogen gas (IE skimming it off of Jupiter). Otherwise you're just wasting efficiency by not charging the batteries directly using whatever power you used to run the hydrogen generator.
It was the Windows/IE bundling which caused Netscape to crash and burn.
The bundling didn't exactly help, but it was mostly Netscape's own fault. Netscape 4 was bloated and used too much of a Swiss army knife model, trying to be not just a browser, but also a WYSIWYG HTML editor, mail client, etc. It ended up not doing anything well.
OTOH, IE3 was very fast and lightweight. It was *just* a browser. And it was free, without jumping through hoops about pretending you were a student or whatever loophole it was that Netscape had back in those days to get out of paying for their browser.
Of course, MS went and screwed things up with IE4 and their integrated-with-the-OS, look!-my-desktop-wallpaper-is-a-webpage! model, but that was a little later.
f you've ever heard of the concept that whenever there's some chance, the universe 'splits' and both events occur, that's what's going on. When the quantum computer makes a qubit 1 and 0 at the same time, it basically uses a truly random event to determine which value the bit will be. The universe 'splits' and down one path there is a 1, and down the other there is a 0. Except the quantum computer 'splits' the universe in such a way that the two universes can interact with each other. It is even possible to have the quantum computer compute something on every input at once and then search through all the different universes to find an answer; this is known as Gover's algorithm.
As big a fan as I am of the Many Worlds theory, and as much as I think it's the one that makes the most sense in terms of explaining quantum phenomena, my understanding is that it's far from accepted as fact, with the Copenhagen interpretation being in the lead.
So to keep things on an even keel, is there a similarly straightforward explanation that can be given which doesn't depend on Many Worlds?
Now we are talking about password security. You can also throw on a five length minimum. Now even if your password was "password" they would still find it extremely difficult to compromise the system since it would be slow and would break after the first five.
The reason length is important is because there are ways to crack most types of password that don't involve going through the same interface that an interactive user would.
For example, on Windows you can get ahold of the password hashes either off of a domain controller or with network sniffing software. Then you can make any number of cracking attempts offline. Or you can just use a rainbow table system like Ophcrack and do a reverse lookup in a matter of minutes on the hash of virtually any password less than 15 characters long.
I would have thought smoking would bring on mental problems in the first place rather than be a palliative.
Nicotine improves brain function even in non-schizophrenics, because it binds to acetylcholine receptors. Of course, the most common delivery methods have one or two negative side effects.
Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office.
My theory is that it's another step in the bizarre UI design model that MS seems to have come up with, where the Windows UI is the same across every type of device (desktops, servers, tablets, handheld PCs, cellphones, etc.).
It began with them putting the Start menu on handhelds and cellphones, which IMO was a stupid idea. Something like the Start menu is useful on desktops because you have a mouse to navigate with *and* you are very likely to end up with a ton of software installed that requires a navigation hierarchy instead of a flat list. On a mobile device it slows the user down and adds unnecessary complexity.
The ribbon is the next step. IMO the ribbon UI would make a lot of sense for a device with a touchscreen, because it's much more friendly to fingers than a traditional menu. But on a desktop? It's a huge waste of screen real-estate, and it shows because so many of the functions I use in Office don't fit into the ribbon and I have to get to them in some new and stupid way now.
They're working on something similar with their current/next wave of server applications. The management consoles for them all use a model that would work very well for a simple touchscreen app but is infuriating as a server GUI because it doesn't take advantage of e.g. having a mouse.
Basically it seems like they're going for a lowest-common-denominator approach that's not going to make anyone happy. UIs that are tailored to take advantage of a platform's strengths are much better, and exceptions (like crazy people who want to manage their servers from a tablet on a regular basis) can be dealt with as such instead of making everyone else pay the price.
If extraterrestrial life were watching our TV, surely Fox and the WB would have been attacked by now ... or at least a very harshly worded intergalactic message would have been delivered to the Fox executives about their nonsensical canceling of shows like Firefly and Futurama while promoting unadulterated drivel.
For a species with technology millions of years more advanced than our own, creating a copy of e.g. Joss Whedon (an "Alpha-Level" in Alastair Reynolds' terminology) and then placing it unawares in a Matrix-style simulation where (in this case) Firefly had never been canceled should be trivial. Meanwhile, in the real world, the original Joss' anguish provides additional entertainment for the malevolent alien viewers.
Credit card companies tend to charge a prohibitive percentage for small transactions.
Seattle seems to have worked out a deal with them. All of the parking meters here accept credit cards.
Not only that but they patch it urgently for the 175th time.
MS haven't patched this vulnerability 175 times. They've issued 175 patches that have made use of the ActiveX killbit mechanism to disable various old controls, as opposed to patching the vulnerability in those controls.
They were called "Blasters", although "Light Sabre" can sound an awful lot like Laser if you say it fast enough and they did come in green.
In one of the prequels (TPM, I think?) Anakin refers to a light sabre as "a laser sword". I believe the old scripts called them as such too.
Apple did all the engineering, R&D, and human interface work for iTunes. (Ok, other than what they bought in the beginning). Now Pre is trying to piggy back on this.
Interoperability with competitors' hardware is generally protected, at least in the US. See Coleco and other companies producing Atari 2600-compatible hardware, various companies producing unlicensed software for the NES, Sega Genesis, PS2, etc that had to use similar trickery to what Palm is doing.
A memory module does not become loose.
In a laptop? A device that very likely gets bounced around in a bag for most of its life?
I've even seen (rarely, but it has happened) servers where reseating a component made them bootable again. Whether it was technically "loose" or not, it's something that can be tried quickly for things like RAM and expansion cards.
Despite what you think, the Warcraft series has a HUGE backstory and set of lore to work from.
I'm not sure J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock were actually writing with Blizzard in mind.
I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document
SharePoint 2007 works fine with FireFox, assuming you configure FireFox to pass your Windows credentials on and maybe a few other minor configuration changes. I imagine it will work with other modern browsers (in which category I do not include e.g. lynx).
and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package
You can store any type of file you like in SharePoint, as long as the administrators don't have it on the blocked extension list.
Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes.
Most of the corporate users I work with love Excel and PowerPoint files in addition to their Word documents. How would you replicate that in MediaWiki?
Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.
That's how your organization is choosing to use SharePoint. It supports that model because it's supposed to be a replacement for (among other things) file shares and Exchange public folders. It also supports different usage models, including limited wiki-style pages.
If you think your organization has progressed into the documentless future of tomorrow, maybe you should try convincing other people there to work in that way using the tools they already have, and if it provides significant benefit you can steer them towards a product geared specifically toward that model.
Maybe. But having met people who really did have schizophrenia, I'm a little dubious of this theory (which I've heard before). To use a computer analogy, my perception of their experience was not just that their brains started producing/storing inaccurate data, but that the program code was also not working as intended. One of the most striking examples was their speech patterns, where in certain cases they would say things that had the timbre and cadence of normal English speech, but if you actually paid attention it didn't make any sense - it was just nonsensical syllables strung together in a pattern that superficially sounded like English.
If random corruption of "data" and "program code" in the brain is the root of creativity, then it seems to me that creativity is a very inefficient, brute-force method, which is only practical in people without schizophrenia because our brains have the processing power to discard (at some subconscious layer) the huge number of results that aren't worth pursuing. That's sort of along the lines of random mutation and natural selection, but the timescales are vastly different, so I at least hope that there is something more efficient at work in our brains.
You're dumb if you don't participate in a recall, though, because you /are/ compensated or given a safer/better-working/improved product in return.
I would say it depends on the recall. If it's for e.g. a Battlestar Galactica toy that shoots rubber darts but which can fire nails equally well, you're probably better off keeping the toy (out of reach of small children) as a collector's item.
Most people define a lie as a statement the speaker knows to be false.
I'm curious how well this technique stands up to method acting - IE temporarily remolding your thoughts to be those of the character you're playing. If you know a statement is false, but then get in the mindset of someone who believes the statement is true for long enough to be tested, will that look any different to this machine? I suppose the answer would reveal at least a little bit about how our brains work.
The 555 can be used in a lot of interesting, simple projects. I like the idea of audio, because it's something that (IMO) a lot of young students will find interesting compared to some of the other typical beginning electronics projects.
One very easy 555 project is an Atari Punk Console. I built one of those a couple of years ago and took it to a party and it provided hours of entertainment.
Another option might be a simple resonant low-pass filter, since any of the students who've listened to electronic music will immediately recognize the effect and want to play with it.
Strong passwords may not save you from keylogging, but that doesn't make them altogether useless. Rainbow tables, for example, will expose weak passwords but not strong ones on Windows machines.
Mod parent up. I came here to say this. TFA may apply to passwords used on non-Windows systems, but it does not apply at all to Windows because there are a number of ways to get ahold of the password hashes and thereby bypass the n-attempt limit.
On the flip side, it's actually not too hard to have the computer deny users from using passwords that contain words from the dictionary. So you don't need to say "there must be a digit and an uppercase letter and a non-character symbol..." You can just say "no words" and have the computer check the password for strings that match dictionary words.
That would be a terrible idea.
My current password contains dictionary words, but no one will ever brute force it. Why? Because it's almost 40 characters long. On the other hand, it's easy for me to remember, because it's a sentence.
As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking.
[snip]
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.
Don't forget about photojournalists in warzones.
I also imagine it's useful (to people with a lot of money) doing extreme versions of the "person standing on a building/mountain/hill in front of a giant full moon" shot.