>>peak oil is real and we're all doomed to a pre-industrial existence in the long run...
>>peak oil is a load of crap, used to scare up the price of petrol, there is nothing to worry about...
>>and wired had some great articles about a new bacterial super-super-glue and a link to clothes made out of wood-chips...
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70695-0.html?tw=wn_index_13 http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70692-0.html?tw=rss.index
>>and then there's this article about wiki (http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70670-0.html?tw=wn_index_16), with quotes like this:
But why should I contribute to an article? I'm no expert. That's fine. The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.
>>excerpts below from the dilbert blog - great stuff
I have yet to meet this employee, but everyone talks about her and not in the most positive light. She's supposed to be over six feet tall and three hundred pounds but for me, it's like she's invisible or an imaginary beast like a yeti. The other day, she got to me. She re-arranged the office furniture so I couldn't do any work until I re-arranged it back. The next day, it is re-arranged again with a nasty threatening note. If she wants to threaten me, she can tell me in person. So I re-arranged the furniture back and nailed it down. Next, the desktop on my computer has been re arranged and my files are re-titled with insults (i.e.,Dork's Excel). It's like waging a war with the Easter Bunny. You think you finally lost your mind. No way have I ever seen her. No phone or e-mail. But she is on the payroll.
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I work as a machinist. When our laptop died last week it took with it two years worth of programs for the CNC lathes. Sadly, the IT guy had not made any back-up files in that time. The worker running one of the CNC lathes retyped the program from a printed copy and fed it into the machine without carefully checking its accuracy. The machine unfortunately responded by doing exactly as it was programmed to do, running its turret into the spinning chuck. The impact tore the master jaws from the chuck, hurling one of the jaws through two layers of .063 thick steel guard, through a half inch diameter steel safety cage, finally embedding itself in the glass of the door. The second jaw went through the two .063 thick steel sheets and almost made its way through the steel of the door itself. The third jaw hit the steel door sideway making a HUGE dent.
I spent the next three days moving the tool turret back square to the world, installing a new chuck, aligning the headstock and building a new set of safety guards and reconstructing the sheetmetal. All because some putz wasn't capable of line-reading a program before hitting the green buton.
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Ok, you're not going to believe this but I swear its true...
We bought several million dollars of computer equipment for a new client project and needed a new data center house such toys. The facility was a shared facility and the client insisted that the equipment (with their data) be physically separated from the other companies in the data center. I was amazed at the level of creativity on how to separate the equipment.
I kid you not - the first suggestion was to actually take the boxes the equipment was shipped in and build a 'fort' around the equipment. Obviously there was a lack of understanding on WHY the equipment should be separated.
The second suggestion was to take some of the extra 5' cube walls and put them around the equipment.
When pointed out that an intruder could simply pick up a cube wall and move it, it was then decided to go to Home Depot and buy galvanized chain link fence to guard the precious information.
Now you would think this would be a good start, but then someone brought up that it was a raised floor and a crafty person could sneek under the panels - so they attached 3" posts to the concrete foundation that ran up through the floor.
Such innovation then sparked another person to suggest that someone could simply climb over the fence. Of course the practical soulution was to put a top on the cage. So it was done.
Now there were three unplanned consequences to this: 1) No one considered that the lights might burn out, so now you either bring your own flashlight or bolt cutters to get to the lights; 2) Its a faraday cage, so cell phones no longer work in the cage, so if you need to talk to anyone while working on the machines you need a second person outside the cage you can yell to; 3) Someone happened to overlook the 40" wide steel DOOR! that was on one wall of the room formed by the cage. Upon checking, it was found this door opened to the back alley, did not have a lock on it, and had been open for months.
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I am a Unix System Admin. The Computer Security Department becomes convinced that it is vital to audit users attempts to use the Linux "kill" command. It does not matter that they can't "kill" anything anyway; you can sit there and get the Permission Denied message; but it must be logged. It turns out in Linux, there are different kill commands, the plain old "kill" command cannot be audited. So, they make us modify the /bin/kill command, so that is logged. Never mind that no one in their right mind would type 5 extra characters to use the /bin/kill command.
So now we are auditing something that no one uses. And when we go through the audit test ourselves, we forget to type /bin/kill, instead use just kill, and of course it isn't logged.
My attempts to point out the complete stupidity of this pretend audit fall on deaf ears.
You probably can't use this, but I feel much better now.
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>>that last one was obviously for Ian...
>>more later
