True - that has to be the funniest line in the article. Of course, the only reason he hasn't seen anything like it is because nobody in the entire patent system is actually capable of reading - even their numeracy skills are barely sufficient to count the non-sequential $20 notes in that brown paper bag...
Shhhh! When this clown realises he's just reinvented the lemon/potato battery, your idea will bring on a lemon/potato famine, and then what will I eat with my fish?
Yes - I've recently retired from playing ET and a few other FPS games (AA, SOF2, SOF, etc.) in a fairly competitive clan (national comp. level) for over five years. The average age of the members would've generally been 28 +/- 5 years or so, our youngest was 15 and our oldest was over 40. The clan environment can be quite "incestuous" in the longer term - people shift from one to another, real-world siblings join different clans so they can fight, etc. - and from what I've seen from other clans the age brackets are generally reasonably similar too.
A hypothesis: I suspect (at least for competitive clans) that the recruiting policy is to pick beople that have (a) skills and (b) some reasonable degree of maturity, IE yes they can thrash the pants of anyone else in a public server, but they don't overly gloat, comment-spam, teamkill, spawncamp, etc. Generally people will improve both (a) and (b) the longer they play a game, but additionally people's behaviour also tends to mellow with age... hence the older demographic.
I'm not sure... looking at Google Earth all I can say is that his travelling salesman solution leaves a lot to be desired. He's bouncing around all over the place. Its even worse when you consider that the problem doesn't change much from year to year, and his global positioning hardware has 364 days of idle CPU time per year too.
Then again, he HAS just left Kabul and was heading to Baghdad via Tehran, so maybe he's dodging surface-to-air missiles or something...
Jim Hacker: "CGMS?" Humphrey Appleby: "Civil service code. It stands for Consignment of Geriatric Manufacturers of Shoes." Bernard Wooley: "Load of old cobblers, Minister."
True, but not as much, and you get a whole slew of other combustion products too. With the right hydrogen engine, no carbon-based crud comes out because no carbon goes in...
Why not apply the same principle here to the hydrogen engines then? They will produce heat just as conventional gas engines do, that same heat can be used further down the line to drive a steam engine. And as an added bonus, you get a supply of water for free, as a combustion product from the Hydrogen engine!
I was thinking they were talking about "truths about system administrators", not "truths about system administration".
Anyway, for the benefit of those who haven't seen this (very old and long, but somewhat entertaining) email that was doing the rounds a while ago... disclaimer: someone else wrote it, and I don't know who.
KNOW YOUR UNIX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR - A FIELD GUIDE
There are four major species of Unix sysad:
1) The TECHNICAL THUG. Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
2) The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST. Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
3) The MANIAC. Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
4) The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morpohodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR:
-- SITUATION: Low disk space. --
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor disk usage, maintain a database of historic disk usage, predict future disk usage via least squares regression analysis, identify users who are more than a standard deviation over the mean, and send mail to the offending parties. Places script in cron. Disk usage does not change, since disk-hogs, by nature, either ignore script-generated mail, or file it away in triplicate.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work. Locks accounts that go over quota.
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor processes, maintain a database of CPU usage, identify processes more than a standard deviation over the norm, and renice offending processes. Places script in cron. Ends up renicing the production database into oblivion, bringing operations to a grinding halt, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts CPU usage policy in motd. Uses CPU quotas. Locks accounts that go over quota. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks.
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes perl script that creates home directory, copies in incomprehensible default environment, and places entries in/etc/passwd,/etc/shadow, and/etc/group. (By hand, NOT with passmgmt.) Slaps on setuid bit; tells a nearby secretary to handle new accounts. Usually, said secretary is still dithering over the difference between 'enter' and 'return'; and so, no new accounts are ever created.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts new account policy in motd. Since people without accounts cannot read the motd, nobody ever fulfills the bureaucratic requirements; and so, no new accounts are ever created.
MANIAC: "If you're too stupid to break in and create your own account, I don't want you on the system. We've got too many goddamn sh*t-for-brains a**holes on this box anyway."
I'd go one step further and actively urge the FireFox developers NOT to fix problems with Flash in FF. The last thing we need is more horribly bloated, all-eye-candy-and-no-content, security-hole-and-adware-ridden, non-standard-compliant Flash websites and more Flash ads/popups all over the internet.
Flash is the infected hemorrhoid on the arse of the internet. I've yet to see a website where the need for Flash is justified because nothing else would do what was required.
Looks like the deadline has been extended from December 5 until late February.
Article text, in case it moves:
-----------
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sharman Networks, the operator of file-sharing network Kazaa, on Friday said an Austrailian court has extended until late February a stay of an injunction barring it from distributing copyrighted recordings.
Sharman said the extended stay is conditional on the company's modifying its software to filter out copyrighted music from the peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
Peer-to-peer networks let users share files rather than relying on a centralized server. In recent years, such networks have been a hotbed of pirated entertainment and software.
Obvious marketing miss... if "Firemonger" is essentially a starter-pack for Firefox, why not call it "Firestarter"? You even get the added bonus of soundtrack by The Prodigy for your viral marketing videos...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been driving under my wife's supervision for two years
Yeah, they tend to do that don't they?
True - that has to be the funniest line in the article. Of course, the only reason he hasn't seen anything like it is because nobody in the entire patent system is actually capable of reading - even their numeracy skills are barely sufficient to count the non-sequential $20 notes in that brown paper bag...
Shhhh! When this clown realises he's just reinvented the lemon/potato battery, your idea will bring on a lemon/potato famine, and then what will I eat with my fish?
Obligatory Simpsons quote: "Mmmm... Soylent Green!" - Homer
This has been done before, and people get "paid" for it too: Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Yes - I've recently retired from playing ET and a few other FPS games (AA, SOF2, SOF, etc.) in a fairly competitive clan (national comp. level) for over five years. The average age of the members would've generally been 28 +/- 5 years or so, our youngest was 15 and our oldest was over 40. The clan environment can be quite "incestuous" in the longer term - people shift from one to another, real-world siblings join different clans so they can fight, etc. - and from what I've seen from other clans the age brackets are generally reasonably similar too.
A hypothesis: I suspect (at least for competitive clans) that the recruiting policy is to pick beople that have (a) skills and (b) some reasonable degree of maturity, IE yes they can thrash the pants of anyone else in a public server, but they don't overly gloat, comment-spam, teamkill, spawncamp, etc. Generally people will improve both (a) and (b) the longer they play a game, but additionally people's behaviour also tends to mellow with age... hence the older demographic.
This just in..."ID Scientists Figure Out How Pigs Fly"
You forgot to link to a relevant article, but I found one on that very topic that even the ID whackjobs could understand...
Indeed - it adds another dimension to the phrase "left-handed website"...
It's like an offline website.
I'm not sure... looking at Google Earth all I can say is that his travelling salesman solution leaves a lot to be desired. He's bouncing around all over the place. Its even worse when you consider that the problem doesn't change much from year to year, and his global positioning hardware has 364 days of idle CPU time per year too.
Then again, he HAS just left Kabul and was heading to Baghdad via Tehran, so maybe he's dodging surface-to-air missiles or something...
I also recommend GEB - an eternal golden braid ...as do I. As an added bonus it also touches on Zen philosophy in a couple of places too.
You submitted the article, but didn't read it? ...or bother to check for dupes - seriously this news is like 5 weeks old.
Missing option...
*CowboyNeal howling in the far-off distance*
how are they going to prove it's a prime?
Personally I'd start here. As of 2002 this problem can be solved in polynomial time.
To bastardise a classic "Yes Minister" quote:
Jim Hacker: "CGMS?"
Humphrey Appleby: "Civil service code. It stands for Consignment of Geriatric Manufacturers of Shoes."
Bernard Wooley: "Load of old cobblers, Minister."
True, but not as much, and you get a whole slew of other combustion products too. With the right hydrogen engine, no carbon-based crud comes out because no carbon goes in...
Why not apply the same principle here to the hydrogen engines then? They will produce heat just as conventional gas engines do, that same heat can be used further down the line to drive a steam engine. And as an added bonus, you get a supply of water for free, as a combustion product from the Hydrogen engine!
Apologies for posting full text - finally found a link:
t ml
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.h
I was thinking they were talking about "truths about system administrators", not "truths about system administration".
/home
/home
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group. (By hand, NOT with passmgmt.) Slaps on setuid bit; tells a nearby secretary to handle new accounts. Usually, said secretary is still dithering over the difference between 'enter' and 'return'; and so, no new accounts are ever created.
/home; mkdir "Bob's home directory" /etc/passwd
Anyway, for the benefit of those who haven't seen this (very old and long, but somewhat entertaining) email that was doing the rounds a while ago... disclaimer: someone else wrote it, and I don't know who.
KNOW YOUR UNIX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR - A FIELD GUIDE
There are four major species of Unix sysad:
1) The TECHNICAL THUG. Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
2) The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST. Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
3) The MANIAC. Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
4) The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morpohodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR:
-- SITUATION: Low disk space. --
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor disk usage, maintain a database of historic disk usage, predict future disk usage via least squares regression analysis, identify users who are more than a standard deviation over the mean, and send mail to the offending parties. Places script in cron. Disk usage does not change, since disk-hogs, by nature, either ignore script-generated mail, or file it away in triplicate.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work. Locks accounts that go over quota.
MANIAC:
# cd
# rm -rf `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`;
IDIOT:
# cd
# cat `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{ printf "%s/*\n", $2}'` | compress
-- SITUATION: Excessive CPU usage. --
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor processes, maintain a database of CPU usage, identify processes more than a standard deviation over the norm, and renice offending processes. Places script in cron. Ends up renicing the production database into oblivion, bringing operations to a grinding halt, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts CPU usage policy in motd. Uses CPU quotas. Locks accounts that go over quota. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks.
MANIAC:
# kill -9 `ps -augxww | sort -rn +8 -9 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`
IDIOT:
# compress -f `ps -augxww | sort -rn +8 -9 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`
-- SITUATION: New account creation. --
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes perl script that creates home directory, copies in incomprehensible default environment, and places entries in
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts new account policy in motd. Since people without accounts cannot read the motd, nobody ever fulfills the bureaucratic requirements; and so, no new accounts are ever created.
MANIAC: "If you're too stupid to break in and create your own account, I don't want you on the system. We've got too many goddamn sh*t-for-brains a**holes on this box anyway."
IDIOT:
# cd
# echo "Bob Simon:gandalf:0:0::/dev/tty:compress -f" >
-- SITUATION: Root disk fails. --
TECHNICAL THUG: Rep
I think you just answered your own question - datamining for The Daily WTF...
At least this fella can stick a sign out the front... "Gone Fission"....
I'll show myself out.
I'd go one step further and actively urge the FireFox developers NOT to fix problems with Flash in FF. The last thing we need is more horribly bloated, all-eye-candy-and-no-content, security-hole-and-adware-ridden, non-standard-compliant Flash websites and more Flash ads/popups all over the internet.
Flash is the infected hemorrhoid on the arse of the internet. I've yet to see a website where the need for Flash is justified because nothing else would do what was required.
I'd also be worried about running "finger" on localhost...
Looks like the deadline has been extended from December 5 until late February.
Article text, in case it moves:
-----------
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sharman Networks, the operator of file-sharing network Kazaa, on Friday said an Austrailian court has extended until late February a stay of an injunction barring it from distributing copyrighted recordings.
Sharman said the extended stay is conditional on the company's modifying its software to filter out copyrighted music from the peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
Peer-to-peer networks let users share files rather than relying on a centralized server. In recent years, such networks have been a hotbed of pirated entertainment and software.
Obvious marketing miss... if "Firemonger" is essentially a starter-pack for Firefox, why not call it "Firestarter"? You even get the added bonus of soundtrack by The Prodigy for your viral marketing videos...