Yeah, it was bullshit.

For one thing, they’re barely more than a press-release regurgitation service. Check out the first grafs of this story and see if you can spot the problem. Note: You should be able to play even if you have no idea what they’re talking about:

A broadband provider’s claim of superfast speeds may only be as good as its weakest link, which could be its domain name server software.

A report issued Thursday by Nominum, a company that sells domain name system (DNS) server software, indicated that some broadband service providers need to bulk up their DNS servers to ensure that broadband users actually get all the benefits of their high-speed connections.

Kinda gibberishy, I’m sure, for folks who don’t know anything about this. Let’s break it down:

A broadband provider’s claim of superfast speeds may only be as good as its weakest link, which could be its domain name server software.

“Whoever sells you high-speed internet — your cable company, your phone company, whatever — probably says you have speed of X. However, if they’re fucktards and don’t know what they’re doing with DNS, you won’t get the speed they’re promising.” It is totally ok if you have no idea what DNS is. It’s important (it sure SOUNDS important, right?). Actually, it really is important. But keep reading.

A report issued Thursday by Nominum, a company that sells domain name system (DNS) server software, indicated that some broadband service providers need to bulk up their DNS servers to ensure that broadband users actually get all the benefits of their high-speed connections.

“Some people who sell DNS software say that many Internet company DNS servers suck!” **And, presumably, they ought to upgrade to Nominum. Er, no.

Like we said, it’s a recopied press release. It’s like CNet is Fox and Nominum is the GOP. Paying any attention to this story is like asking a barber if you need a haircut.

Now: we here at Heathen actually use OUR OWN DNS servers. Most of you don’t have that option, and that’s fine. We do it for other reasons that 99% of our readers have no interest in (we host lots of other domains — see? We already lost you.). However, the real kicker here is this:

There is no market for closed-source, proprietary DNS software, at least among people who know what they’re doing. Everyone WE know who does DNS does it with BIND, which is free and open source. It’s the standard. Paying for DNS is like paying for a web server — i.e., a sucker’s game. Nominum probably knows this, which is why they’re feeding bullshit PR to a halfass “tech” news service like CNet.

Or, at least, InformationWeek’s nominations. We think they’re mostly right.

In summary:

12. The Morris Worm

Or, how to singlehandedly bring down the Internet accidentally. Everyone hated it, but it sure was clever.

11. Google search rank

Hard to argue this hasn’t changed the (Western) world.

10. Apollo guidance system

They went to the moon on less computing power than we have in our iPod, for cying out loud.

9. Excel

Made good on Visicalc’s promise, and made spreadsheets friendly and powerful for the masses. Perhaps Microsoft’s best work ever.

8. Mac OS (pre-OS X)

Cribbed as it was from Xerox, it still changed the way computers worked. Apple’s ad line from that era said it all: “The computer for the rest of us.”

7. SAAbre system

Or, how American managed to steal market share by letting everyone use their system. Very clever.

6. Mosaic browser

Mosaic was the first graphical browser; it moved the web from a land of nerds to something everyone could use.

5. Java (Feh.)

We’re not so sure about this one. (We kid; Java’s VM approach and “write once, run everywhere” philosophy took a while to really come through, but its benefits are inassailable.)

4. IBM System 360 OS

The grandaddy of Big Iron systems — and the first real general-purpose operating system.

3. The gene sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research

Dude, they’re unraveling DNA. Nuff said.

2. IBM’s System R

System R was the precursor to relational databases, which is to say the smarts that underlie virtually every database system now in use anywhere — from Oracle to MySQL to PostGres.

1. Unix in general and BSD 4.3 specifically

Without Unix, we’d have no Internet. Without BSD, we’d probably have no free and Free software movement, no OS X, etc.

The single Greatest Piece of Software Ever, with the broadest impact on the world, was BSD 4.3. Other Unixes were bigger commercial successes. But as the cumulative accomplishment of the BSD systems, 4.3 represented an unmatched peak of innovation. BSD 4.3 represents the single biggest theoretical undergirder of the Internet. Moreover, the passion that surrounds Linux and open source code is a direct offshoot of the ideas that created BSD: a love for the power of computing and a belief that it should be a freely available extension of man’s intellectual powers–a force that changes his place in the universe.

If you haven’t heard of some of these, you’re not geeky enough to have an opinion. ;)

We’re completely gobsmacked that, before today, we’d never seen The Bug Count Also Rises. Fantastic.

Hat tip to HTGSUTB and UltiLopp, both of whom will doubtless be horrified at their noms de Heathen.

It’s amazing how much better you feel when you finally get around to putting your fucking apache config files into a goddamn source control repository so cocksucking Apple can’t accidentally fuck them up with their qualitard admin tools.

BoingBoing points us to the Pitch Drop Experiment, which began in 1927.

The first Professor of Physics at the University of Queensland, Professor Thomas Parnell, began an experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties. The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar once used for waterproofing boats. At room temperature pitch feels solid – even brittle – and can easily be shattered with a blow from a hammer (see the video clip below). It’s quite amazing then, to see that pitch at room temperature is actually fluid!

In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. Three years were allowed for the pitch to settle, and in 1930 the sealed stem was cut. From that date on the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel – so slowly that now, 72 years later, the eighth drop is only just about to fall.

The next drop should come by winter.

Uptight boss? Still need to read Heathen to get through the day? WorkFriendly has just the thing!

Sometimes, when we’re having productivity issues, we pine for the days when computers weren’t hooked to anything but the power jack and the printer, and could barely run one program at a time, let alone the couple dozen we keep open. There was something nice and pure about a full screen devoted to a single task.

Well, thank God for Merlin Mann yet again, as by combining three small interface hack programs, he’s found a way to emulate full-screen mode on a Mac. The little add-ins (1) hide the menubar unless you hit it with your mouse (MenuShade); (2) automatically hide programs unused for X amount of time (SpiritedAway); and (3) provide a BackDrop to obscure anything else floating around. It sounds basic and silly, but we’ve just tried it on a lark and we’re pretty darn happy with it. Enjoy.

Ok. We’ve pretty much given up on the whole anti-Evite thing despite their spammy rep. They have too much mindshare, and people like using them way too much. However, it still bugs the shit out of us that an Evite email doesn’t actually include the basic logistical information for the event in question: when and where. “We’ve invited you to something, but you have to click to find out what it is!” is just kinda dodgy, at least from where we sit. Insist we click through to RSVP, but at least give us the damn basics in the email.

Bubba’s Ear points out this set of motivational posters based on RPG/MMORPG concepts. Some are pretty damn funny, but only if you’re very, very geeky.

Update: Yes, as Bubba’s Ear notes, the direct links are broken — or, rather, they don’t work because of the (wholly reasonable) way their webmaster has the server configured. Please use this handy guide to see which ones to which we were referring to. At.

• “Some”: The one about Cthulu on a plane.
• “are”: The one with a riff on the Aliens line about “taking off and nuking the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.”
• “damn”: The one with the plush Cthulu and the caption “O r’lyeh?”
• “funny”: The one with the joke about the Barrens in WoW.
• “geeky”: The one making fun of Shadowrun’s dependence on huge numbers of six-siders.

We started this toon on launch day, November 23, 2004.

Happy Sysadmin Day. Keeping various and sundry servers online is only one of our duties, but we still qualify.

Of course, we’re amateurs compared to this guy.

Speaking of which, Hey, Mike, didja see this?

For a while, we’ve noticed that occasionally, iChat will stop making noise when people message us. This is bad, since we don’t notice, and sometimes the person in question is the boss. The only action we’ve seen thus far that fixes it, though, is a reboot, which is way overkill for something like this. Searching Apple’s message boards didn’t yield anything for a long time, but today we finally hit pay dirt here, which points us to this blog post from a similarly geeky Mac guy named Dan.

We’ll reproduce his instructions here for posterity:

[UPDATE] Ok, so I found another temporary fix just short of rebooting. If I kill the coreaudiod process and start up iChat again, I get my sound effects a.k.a. alerts back. To do that, I opened up Terminal, ran:

$ ps -aux | grep coreaudio

To get the process ID as can be seen here:

root 32 0.3 0.2 29808 1816 ?? Ss Tue02PM 1:10.80 /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

The process ID is 32. So then I quit iChat, and ran this to kill the coreaudiod process:

$ sudo kill 32

Then start iChat and you should hear the familiar alert sounds again. Yay!

Good *nixheads out there may wonder if doing a kill -HUP might not work; we don’t know, but we’re planning on trying it next time around.

The Daily Show explains it for you quite well.

BoingBoing points us to the 95 Theses of Geek Activism.

Maybe you ought to build a watch. From scratch.

The reason the Telcos are so opposed to things like net neutrality is because they’re not technology companies. They are essentially opposed to innovation, which is obvious when you look at their research budgets.

Business Week is running a fascinating essay that highlights all the reasons why the telcos hate innovation. They’re not technology companies, which is highlighted by how little they spend on research. They’re in the business of extracting as much money as they can from their network right now — which is a short-sighted and eventually self-destructive plan. They view real innovation as a threat, not an opportunity, because tech innovation is usually about driving down the cost of infrastructure. That doesn’t help them squeeze more money out of it. As the writer of the essay points out, this is evident in the telcos continued fight against things like muni-WiFi, even as they quietly get involved in muni-WiFi projects themselves.

The article also highlights how this lack of technological innovation from within the telcos means that even in areas where they have every opportunity to innovate, such as IPTV, all they’re doing is catching up to what the cable providers already deliver. They’re missing the opportunity to do much more. In fact, this is a great way to view the net neutrality issue. If the telcos were really about promoting innovation (and the author makes fun of AT&T for claiming it needs to merge with BellSouth to be able to innovate), then network neutrality wouldn’t be an issue at all. The company would focus on making its platform (the network) as accessible and as fast as possible — to encourage more innovation and development from third parties. Instead, the telcos focus, not on encouraging innovation, but on setting up roadblocks. The roadblocks give them the power to squeeze more money out of the network — but at the expense of actual innovation that would make their networks that much more valuable.

Dude, check this out.

Space Invaders done with people as pixels in a theater. Excellent.

So, for this client install we’ve been working on, we procured a pile of network gear to extend their existing setup in order to accommodate our equipment. This is standard operating procedure.

What wasn’t standard was the minimal nature of this client’s infrastructure, and the distance to the desired work site from the office implied cable runs in excess of the limits of ethernet (for the record, about 100m). We thought about fiber — which was, until recently, the only real option — but the costs were high, and throwing that kind of tech at a small firm with no IT employees sounds like a pretty bad idea. But there’s wifi, right?

Right, so we went that route. Knowing they needed a new router anyway, we included some network refitting in the deal, and bought a fancy pre-N Linksys we figured would reach to where we needed to be plus an access point (essentially a wireless ethernet jack) and an 8-port switch. We planned to drop in the router in as a direct replacement for theirs and hang all our gear off either the network in the office or the “extension” network in the work area, connected via the aforementioned access point. Easy!

Well, no. In the interim, they opted to acquire some replacement gear of their own, none of which from identifiable manufacturers. (Seriously: in a world of commodity Linksys/Netgear/DLink gear available in every electronics and office supply shop, whoever they hired to do IT went off-brand.) And they had some ports forwarded to internal resources, none of which was documented, and their IT consultant guy was incommunicado on vacation, both of which mean we couldn’t possibly just do the “drop in our router” plan. Further complicating the picture was the presence of more brick than we initially realized, which shortened the already meager range of the off-brand wireless gear.

Fine. We tried to rejigger our gear into the new world order, but with no success. Finally, we hit upon getting a range extender, and the of using our fancy router (Linksys WRT54GX4) as just an access point (disable its DHCP, etc.). We dropped by Fry’s en route to dinner, and planned on regaining lost time in the morning.

The next day, the “use the Linksys as a wireless only device” plan went off more or less without a hitch. Using the extender — a WRE54G, also from Linksys — however, was a major problem. We could get a much better signal in the far location than before, but we still needed a bit of a boost; the only resource that could connect was my Powerbook. However, no matter what the configuration, the network went south as soon as we powered on the extender. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

I called Linksys. After being on hold for half an hour and getting bounced around a bit, I finally got an answer: The extender isn’t compatible with the router.

Um, what?

Right. Two pieces of Linksys kit from the same model year, the same shelf, the same store, will not interoperate despite notionally supporting the same protocols. Now, we acknolwedge that the router is a bit of a hot rot; we assume that they’ve made the call to sacrifice compatibility — even with their own gear — in favor of range and bandwidth. Fine. But it would be a really good idea to note this on the box of the router, which they didn’t bother to do.

So, Linksys? Kiss my ass. You’re jackasses. We do give some recognition to your tech support drone, though. He actually had the stones to start a sentence about “returning the router and getting instead a Linksys blah blah blah….”, whereupon we asked “If we have to go back to the shop and return this, do you really think we’re going to buy MORE Linksys gear after this experience?”

Some attention-grubbing nutbirds in Europe are whining about RFID virii, saying things like:

“Everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong,” wrote the trio in their research paper.

How many times can you be wrong in ONE sentence?

1. In fact, simple scans CANNOT modify back-end systems. There’s no way. So-called “SmartLabels” are just data storage devices that respond to radio fields. When a reader hits the tag, the tag echoes back its data. The DoD- and Wal-Mart-mandated tags hold only 96 bits, so we’re not talking about much data, either. By the time a tag read reaches any back-end code, it’s just data.

2. That said, like any input, RFID input must be validated and examined to prevent overflow attacks, injections, etc. Scanning an RFID tag and naively assuming it’s a safe data source could create trouble — but that’s true of any input. In this regard, RFID is no different than a form on a web page. In many poorly-designed systems, it’s possible to do damage by putting in malicious code in web forms — that’s almost certainly how the old Heathen site got hacked, for example, via a flaw in WordPress. No developer worth a damn will ever assume his inputs are safe, at least in systems like web tools and (yes) RFID. Whole libraries of code exist to isolate data and ensure information gleaned from inputs doesn’t contain exploits. It’s a known problem, and one that all competent people know how to avoid.

That’s why this is a total non-issue. It’s especially stupid that people are saying “virus” here; a virus is actual malicious computer code that knows how to replicate and infect. Here, they’re talking about a system vulnerability and carefully tailored data injection attacks. It’s a security problem (if you’ve hired idiots for your RFID development), but not one that has much at all to do with viruses. You may as well speak of “bar code viruses,” since that makes just as much sense.

In a nutshell, what these fools are whining about — and, apparently, spending a lot of time and money demonstrating — is that under carefully created circumstances, it’s possible for information from a system input (in this case, RFID) to carry a damaging payload if the system assumes the data is known-safe. Way to go! We eagerly anticipate their next study, which probably covers such earthshaking assertions as “you should not give your online banking information to the nice people in Nigera.”

(This isn’t to say there aren’t areas of legitimate concern in the RFID world; just that this story isn’t one of them.)

Excellent summary, geared for the lay reader. If you’ve ever wondered if it’s true that essentially unbreakable cryptography exists that even the Feds can’t hack, here’s your answer: you bet your ass. That’s why they’ve been trying to restrict its use. Thank god they’ve failed so far.

BoingBoing reports that some folks have produced a brand new Atari cartridge based on an old Commodore64 game. Awesome.

In the dark ages when Heathen were in high school, graphing calculators were well over $100. Of course, we had one anyway. Its meager memory proved invaluable on more than on occasion, and not just for Trig identities.

Now they’re free on teh Intarwub and made of AJAX. Neat.

Geek writer Mark Pilgrim has apparently been inspired by Ze Frank to give videoblogging a try, which somewhat mixed results. Fortunately, he also included the text in the blog post, which makes it easy for us to point out and quote one of the best zingers of the day:

In the “news I don’t care about” department, a company I’ll never work for has announced that it will not be shipping a new filesystem I’d never trust in an operating system I’ll never use. The so-called “WinFS” filesystem was supposed to feature rich metadata and schemas to help you organize your ever-growing porn collection.

Joe Gregorio, seen here preaching the Gospel of Atom, predicted the non-shipping-ness of WinFS in 2003, saying “WinFS is the file system formerly called Cairo and has repeatedly not shipped since 1995. If it ever did ship it would be a complete failure because it does not solve a problem that anyone actually has.”

Ouch.

We agree.

BoingBoing points us to this collection of scale models showing the relative sizes of our planets, the sun, and a few nearby stars.

Ladies and gentleheathen, we present the geekiest backpack EVAR.

Mmmmm, coelacanths on film.

faulkner:~ chet$ du -ksh .
139G    .

Heh. Probably time for some pruning.

We were geeky growing up, and still are. Really geeky. Our favorite toys growing up were a telescope (“Holy crap! Look at the moon!”), a toy microscope (“Holy crap! Look at that bug!”), a 500-in-1 electronics project kit (“Holy crap! Why’s that resister smoking?”), and the ubiquitous chemistry set (at least before we got a computer, anyway).

Sure, giving an alcohol burner to a 12-year-old may seem like a bad idea, but the value of the open-ended exploration a real chemistry set provides is hard to underestimate. But it’s got fire in it, and the tablespoons of various and sundry scary-sounding substances in there makes people in a post-9/11 world freak all out (not to mention the safety hysteria), so now it’s pretty much impossible to buy a real chemistry set — and never mind that the crap under your sink is way scarier in the right hands.

It’s not just the administration that’s anti-science; it’s the whole damn country that’s intellectually incurious.

Logan and Magneto explain how the movies differ from the comics. If you ever read X-men, this is for you.

Powerbooks and Macbooks come with a motion sensor to detect sudden and rapid changes in the computer’s position — which is to say, they know when they’re falling, and can act to protect the hard drive accordingly.

Some people have found the tool can also be used to change virtual desktops by smacking the side of the computer, which is pretty awesome.

We just remapped some keys in emacs for the first time, but dammit having quick access to backwards-kill-word is just too damn useful.

We blame Mike.

This is hard geeky, but great: Tour de Babel, a review of programming languages. If you know at least two, this is probably funny to you.

In a discussion of Sturgeon’s Law and good programming, we got this from O.M.I.C.:

Given reasonable margins of error, every living thing is an insect, and there does not exist a single line of good code.

Based on what we’ve seen to date in our development career, we are in no position to argue.

But Java’s still a cargo cult.

Laura found one.

Mark Pilgrim is blogging again; the linked entry poses a question we here at Heathen would very much like the answer to.

How DO you back up 100GB of data a year for the rest of your life? All the documents and pictures and videos and whatnot pile up quickly, and while hard disc space is cheap, it’s not particularly solid or suited for long-term storage. Tapes rot. Paying someone else is, at this point, a nonstarter (Mark looked). DVDs are tiny (4GB each) and also not immortal.

We’ve stated before that, for real security, you must measure your backup security in time zones and spindles. It’s actually more than that: you really need to keep them “live” on a real computer and not on some disconnected hard drive someplace, too. Why? Formats change. Keeping your data live means you keep it on reasonably recent technology (ask my client where he’s gonna go to get the pre-DOS 5.25″ disks from his GRiD read, for example). Right now, though, there just doesn’t appear to be an easy way to solve this problem. You’d think it would be a business plan in here someplace, but apparently not. Or not yet, anyway.

Slashdot is reporting that, come September, Lucasfilm will release two-disc versions of each of the first three Star Wars films (which is to say, episodes IV, V, and VI, known colloquially as “the ones that don’t suck all kinds of ass, as even the one with the goddamn ewoks looks like Citizen Kane compared to any of the other three”) including both the remastered versions as well as the original theatrical release versions. Clickthrough to the actual story fills in that the “classic” versions will have only 2-channel soundtracks, and we assume won’t get the fancy remastering treatment, but at least they’ll exist.

Of course, this could be a huge hoax. There’s no press release at LucasArts or LucasFilm or Fox that backs this up, which makes us nervous. However, the source quoted in the story (Jim Ward) is in fact an exec with Lucas’ empire as stated, so either the hoaxers did homework or it’s legit. It’s also apparently being viewed as an add-on event to the launch of a new video game on September 12, which creates a bit more believability.

If true, MUST HAVE.

John Gruber explains why the recent Dan Goodin “story” about the “rise of OS X malware” is, well, bullshit. It was an AP piece, so it ran all over the damn place despite being a poorly researched piece of shit, as Gruber illustrates. Bullets, in case you’re in a hurry:

• Yes, if you’re an idiot, and download supposedly unreleased OS updates from dodgy websites and try to install them, the odds are you’ll get infected. Dumbass.
• No, we’re not invulnerable in Macland. But no reasonable person every said we were.
• Yes, it’s still true that the Mac is essentially virus-free, and has been since its introduction.
• Yes, this is partly because of its market share, but also because of the way the system is designed since the shift to OS X.
• No, Apple’s move to the Intel platform does not mean it’s going to be subject to an increased level of malware activity — virii are still system dependent; you’ll note that Linux is virus-free, too, but has always run on the same hardware as Windows.
• Finally, journalists sure are lazy:

  If Goodin wanted to be reasonable or accurate, he could have written a story titled “Some Guy Double-Clicked a Trojan Horse Virus for Mac OS X but It Didn’t Actually Spread to Anyone Else”, but what kind of story would that be? OK, it’d be a true story, but it wouldn’t be a good story. No one would have linked to such a story except to make fun of it: What would be the point of making a big stink out of one guy who got hit by a Mac OS X Trojan horse — which was so poorly written that it couldn’t even successfully spread to another computer — when there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Windows users suffering from malware every single day? What good journalism calls for is taking that one guy, and writing an article that presents his episode as though it were part of a trend of increasing Mac virus attacks. No one is going to make fun of Dan Goodin — or the Associated Press, or the dozens of reputable news outlets that ran the story — for that.

Incoming Sun CEO Schwartz has a nice long ass-kissing blog entry up claiming that Scott McNealy is directly responsible for the creation of the millions of jobs associated with the Internet.

Um, no.

McNealy is a big-iron salesman who managed to ride the boom up, and should be given all the credit and blame for Java that Gosling can spare, but the Internet is built not on his pronouncements and hardware but on 30 years of work that happened before the mid-90s. The network Schwartz gives credit to McNealy for was already there. His famous line about “the network is the computer” was a description of fact, not a call to arms. It was already true when he said it, and the world of online business was already off and running.

McNealy’s true claim to fame these last 6 or 7 years is less attractive: He led a company with enviable market position and products to almost complete commercial irrelevance. It’s not easy to see how he could have avoided this — after all, Sun is synonymous with expensive and high-performance hardware no longer required in light of the advances in the “white box” world — but with the kind of war chest he ended the 20th century with, it seems like a fair bet he could have at least tried something else. Instead, he made Sun a target for spot-on jokes like this (image from ArsTechnica):

It is apparently possible to complete the Legend of Zelda in 36 minutes.

Here is the complete 1984 Newsweek ad insert for the newly-launched Macintosh. Looking at them side by side, it’s hard to understand why they didn’t take over completely — in 1984, PCs had no mice, no GUI, and next to no graphics. They were big and clunky and typically used green- or amber-on-black displays.

We didn’t realize, though, that there was ever a time that Macs had no-kidding RS-232 ports. That’s kinda funny. Funnier is how young the software kings look in the brochure.

Via MeFi.

Are there two cities in the world farther apart than Barcelona, Spain, and Wellington, New Zealand? This calculator says they’re 12,338 miles apart, and if the circumference of the earth is 24,901 (at the equator), this suggests a theoretical max of 12,450.5 miles, or only 112.5 more than these two.

Update: Here’s a better calculator that reports slightly different figures (Wellington to Madrid is now 12,327, and also-ran Quito to Singapore is 12,248), but seems a bit more serious.

Woz.

(Extrapolating a bit, it’s sort of amusing how the two most influential personal computer firms were both founded by two people: an egomaniac that’s still in charge, and a decent guy and brilliant technologist who left years ago.)

KittenAuth.

…but it turns out that Dlink are assholes, too.

We came late to the whole Mac party — our first was a 1999-era G3 Powerbook — but we certainly remember when they looked like this. Yep: a System 7 MacSE implemented in Flash. Enjoy.

Late tonight, it will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Of course Wired noticed.

Specifically, one of their security officials said businesses should invest in quick and easy procedures for wipe-and-reinstall, since many forms of malware infections are now considered non-recoverable. Nice.

Via MeFi, we’re pointed to DamnInteresting.com‘s account of the Lake Peigneur Swirling Vortex of Doom. Precis: a drilling “oops” punctures an underground salt dome and creates an enormous whirlpool. End result? An 11-foot-deep freshwater lake became a 1,300 foot deep saltwater lake. No shit.