Seconded. After putting in my SPF records, the amount of backscatter dropped a huge amount. Presumably the rest of the world got a little better too, as they could tell who the forgers are.
Re:Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 1
There was one contemplation point in the book that was outside the norm of what you would learn in school: "what is quality?" (define quality).
Prior to reading the book, you probably could not have answered that question. After reading the book, you can. It ties into the opening line of the book: "And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good -- Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Outside of that, it made for an interesting drama.
So I was installing SuSE on our new z/OS mainframe (to a virtual machine guest to be specific), and the list of packages being installed was scrolling by: gstreamer.s390
And I'm thinking to myself "who, on God's Green Earth, had the job of porting audio to an EBCDIC based mainframe?" Talk about bizarro world....
But then I thought sure, it may not be used much; but when it does, it could launch 3,840 streams at 130 decibel. It's a Beowulf cluster of Rick Astley in a single box! And THAT is all worth it.
Sure - I'll grant you that Prop 13 also made tax increases harder. But the point remains that the problem isn't that government doesn't have money - it's that the legislature grows the budget beyond it's income in spite of knowing how much money will be coming in.
You mistakenly think Prop 13 is bad. All Prop 13 did is limit property tax to 2%. And if inflation makes property values go up, so goes the taxes. The new tax rate was steady, predictable, foreseeable, and absolutely reasonable.
It was the legislature that that decided to live beyond it's means. It was Governor Davis that gave the prison guards a 22% raise.
A good example of the corruptness of the legislature and taxes was the California Lottery. "It's money for Schools! Who doesn't want money for schools?"
Reality was that the first year, the Lottery brought in an extra $400 Million. The second year, the General Fund portion of the school budget was reduced $400 Million. "Oh looky here: we have an extra $400 Million for pork!"
You can't pin that kind of thievery on the voters.
We had a local vote that passed that raised sales tax a little to build a new jail facility. But nowhere in the sales pitch did the campaigners say that the tax had to be permanent. In fact, quite the opposite: the pitch was that the sales tax increase was for only two years.
Of course, two years later, the same people came back and said "We need another tax increase to pay for the staff in the new facility, and this time the tax increase needs to be permanent."
So do you think we rewarded them for lying to us during the first sales pitch?
Is this the fault of 'the stupid voter' or the fault of 'the politicians in charge'?
Frankly, I think Schwarzenegger should save the taxpayers some money and disband the CARB. They did the heavy lifting and got a lot of good pollution control work done. But now they are bored and passing rules for trivial results at massive expense. They are now more a liability than an asset and need to be written off the budget entirely.
I'd argue that the intelligent regulation would be to mandate some sort of cooling based on internal temperature differential. Once passenger compartment gets to be some percentage hotter than the outside air, the cooling mechanism kicks in to bring the internal temp to parity with the external temp.
1) Instead of mandating which technology to use, you are mandating results. The free market (and the engineers that work in them) will eventually figure out the best solution. (I think a little exhaust fan that runs off the battery would do it, although you can already get the Toyota Prius with a $3,000 option to add solar cells to the roof to run the fan and charge the battery).
2) Has to potential to stop heat death from infants / animals left in sealed passenger compartments.
3) The idea that glass will keep the car cool is only good for a very small percentage of trips. That it is enough to matter is a stupid idea.
Seriously: how much heat had to build up that you are wasting a significant amount of gasoline to cool the car down?
That is a rhetorical question, as I live in California's Central Valley. It gets so hot here, that jokes are: "You know you're from Fresno when people with black cars or upholstery are assumed to be from out-of-town." "You know you're from Fresno when you think someone driving wearing oven mitts is clever." "You know you're from Fresno when you discover, in July, it only takes two fingers to drive your car." "You know you're from Fresno when the best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance." "You know you're from Fresno when you can say 115 degrees without fainting." (There are many more, though they probably pertain as well to Phoenix as to Fresno).
Anyway - yes, I've driven the car when it is OMG hot, and the airco had to work far longer to cool down the car. On a normal hot day, the car takes 5 - 10 minutes to cool down. On the OMG hot days, it takes 15 - 30 minutes to cool down.
A) The OMG hot days only happen 20 days a year (about 5%).
B) The OMG hot car happens when you leave your car out in the sun ALL DAY. While at work, or you aren't smart enough to put the car in the garage, whatever - the car has to sit in the hot sun for HOURS to get so hot that the airco has the heat overload problem.
This glass isn't some magic that reverses the laws of thermodynamics. If you leave the car out in the sun for HOURS, it is still going to get OMFG hot. It may take longer with the new glass, but it will still happen.
So the real case for this 'solution' only solves the problem where the car was first cool AND THEN goes out into the OMG heat (5% of the days) AND THEN only stays in the heat a short enough time that the delaying factor of the new glass matters.
Way to swat a fly with a sledgehammer CARB. You are a bunch of dolts on a power trip.
That ad doesn't really do it for me either. It flashed by on the TV this evening, and I ignore it, what with the fluffy music. Then at the end, it changes gears and goes all dark and gritty and violent and visually disruptive. I look up and see "Droid Does" "November" and think "Oh great. Some horror movie about robots with the same nickname as the Android phone. Probably funded by Microsoft. That will suck."
I think I would rather see "Hi, I'm a Droid. And I'm an AT&T." But instead of actors, go with talking cartoon smart phones. Have people in the background handling the devices, which lets you show off sliding keyboards and stuff. Pitch it a little different, as 'the secret trash-talking between devices' (they communicate, you know).
Not that I'm likely to be swayed or dissuaded by ads. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get one of these phones - unless initial hands on reviews indicate there is something horribly wrong with them.
As an email administrator, I would see mail get caught in the anti-spam filter. Wells Fargo was the first bank I saw that removed URLs from their emails, and said just simply 'please visit www.wellsfargo.com'. Washington Mutual was embedding URLs right up until the very end. Bank of America embedded links, but it was through their acquisition of Countrywide, so I don't know if it is all their fault.
Seriously, when I change banks (which I will be, pretty soon) this will be a pass / fail hurdle. Embed a URL in an email to me, and I'm no longer a customer of your bank. If you can't take security seriously, I can't leave my money in your hands.
It would really suck if the lunar substrate turned out to be far more rigid (what with the cold of space) than we thought, and this impact set up a resonant frequency that shook all the surface lunar dust OFF, and the Earth's gravity drew it all in, causing the Ultimate Lunar Winter. It's The End Of The World As We Know It.
Holy crap! I think I just invented the next Michael Bay movie!
I do hereby claim 25% of the movie revenue. If only to make it too unprofitable (to stop the madness).
My home town newspaper long ago switched to hiring high school students in place of long term professionals. They may be paid journalists, but they are so wet behind the ears that the newspaper is a joke. The publisher is vain, too: she loves the SPCA and refuses to publish stories when someone embezzles $50,000 from the local SPCA. They've had embezzlement at least three times that I know of. And the corruption. Dear God how they enable corruption!
So actually, yeah, I expect that many blogs are more trustworthy.
I always add the salutation - because if I don't, people on the CC: list will reply, thinking I addressed it to them. Some people are rushed. It is a courtesy.
I would argue that allowing a little bit of dishonor 'because it's my personal life' is a bad idea in government. There is a person in our District Attorney's office (former DA) who has been sued for sexual harassment. Specifically, "If you want the promotion, I'll need a blowjob" sexual harassment. Of course, the defendant says it was merely philandery gone bad.
You would give him the right to delete evidence? (Because it's none of the public's business)?
I don't see the problem with just demanding honor, particularly wrt retention of evidence. If you don't want to be called a dirty old man, don't BE a dirty old man. The evidence takes care of itself that way.
Yes. Someone else pointed out that after the mailbox is restored, the contents have to be vetted by the lawyers, prior to be handed over to the newspaper. So there are more expenses than just the retrieval. $30,000 for five mailboxes does sound a bit high. Not ludicrously high, but high.
Depends on if they have daily backups that are retained that long. So if there really are 180 tapes that have to be loaded (more like 170, as the most recent tapes are probably still in the library), and each restore takes about one hour of work to do, and the employees involved get paid about $30 per hour, then yes that works out to about $5,000. Where I work, it takes longer than an hour to retrieve a set of tapes because the tapes are sent-off site (you are paying for travel time and mileage), and one has to unload current tapes, do the restore, unload the archive tapes, and reload the current tapes. Then take the archive tapes back to off-site storage. We don't do daily tapes though.
I placed a comment with the FCC regarding Comcast's practice. Details here. My complaint was later used as evidence in a law suit against Comcast.
The gist of it is that after they sabotaged my connection, I called tech support, and tech support tried to shift the blame back to me.
I would have been fine with them if 1) they had done actual traffic shaping, and throttled my connection to a consistent 500 Kbps out of the 6,000 Kbps they sold me, and 2) didn't lie to my face about the whole thing.
Networking Failure Analysis 101 is asking "What changed?"
What changed is that Comcast decided to take a crap on me the customer. That is their choice - but to lie to me and tell me it is my fault is heinous. And I hope the FCC tells them it is also criminal.
I would prefer to switch to something that costs spammers money to send. My job is email administrator, and it is a rare day that my system gets less than 1/2 million spam connections. That is six connections per second, sustained, over every 24 hour period. We've had days where it was two million spams per day.
So it may not look like a big problem to you - but that is because people like me spend time and money to minimize the effects of the problem for you.
I'd rather spend the money on something useful.
Fundamentally, the reason the spammer makes money is that the fool that advertises with him/her pays $500, and the spammer pays pennies for electricity and bandwidth for the job. As long as it is lucrative, spammers will exist.
So I like the idea of moving to a for-pay email system. I prefer the bonded sender idea, but that hasn't taken off.
I don't think this system will take off either. I don't see an advantage to configuring my mail servers to accept the Centmail stuff automatically. Bonded Sender, I would reconfigure for. But this looks to be an invitation for junk mail from well heeled advertisers.
For what it is worth, when you do get to the twenty user level, you can sometimes get RIM (or your vendor) to thrown in a free BES license. And with Verizon at least, for an order of twenty BBs or larger, they throw in the BES CAL for free. Now, you still will still want to pay for (some sort of) support contract with RIM. And THAT is a yearly renewable charge. So my point is that at the larger quantities, it's not too expensive, and 'larger' may not be as big as you think.
We have a support contract with RIM, and their tech support has been the best I've ever used. I'm a GroupWise customer, so their support group doesn't have to be that large. But *every* time I have had to call, the support has been *excellent*.
Another option is Novell GroupWise. It runs on Linux now, and Novell throws in the GroupWise Mobile Server. GMS is really just the Nokia Intellisync Suite with some features removed. But - IT IS FREE (with active GroupWise maintenance). The Intellisync server handles (almost) every device known to mankind - except BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre and Android. For the last three, Novell is working on an ActiveSync server, but I have no idea when it will ship. (And if IBM buys them, it may never). Anyway, if you have spare time you might give their eval a try.
Or just ask your comms vendor to work a deal for you with RIM.;-)
"The Fan" - posts from two IP addresses during a single 24 period. "The Addict" - posts from two IP addresses during a single 24 period, eight days in a row. "The Connoisseur" - has KDawson on the do-not-show-articles-selected-by list. "The Content-Maker" - total quantity of comments put the poster in the top ten percentile of all posters (excluding anon. coward). "The Heart of Gold" - total up all the +5 posts per person, apply to the top 5 percentile. "The Defender of Good" - this one is trickier. Find the top five percentile posters with the most Foes. Find the set of people whom have been foe'd by the foes. Scan that set for +5 insightful, and total. Top five percentile gets "The Defender of Good" achievement. "Help! I'm Being Oppressed!" achievement - any user that gets down-modded by an Editor. Ever.
No disagreement here. In the early days, VARs earned their keep, because the combination of hardware and software needed some care. But as time went on, and Novell did get NetWare to the point of being both exceptionally stable AND simple. And yet, if you grew to a very large network, it still did very well.
NetWare's day's are numbered though. Although Linux isn't as simple as NetWare, it brings a breadth of possibility that makes everything else pale.
For what it's worth, when Ron Hovsepian was at IBM, he and his crew over there marveled at at the NetWare reseller channel. It was awesome - customers got resellers that knew their stuff, and resellers got lots of money. But when he got to Novell, he was disappointed to find out that the reseller channel had been decimated. I don't know why, although I know that the bean counters were (are?) in charge at Novell, and they were ruining the company.
Upshot is that Ron Hovsepian told his people to rebuild the reseller channel into it's former glory. So it kind of makes sense that Ron said "do X" and when it didn't happen, he's looking at the people he told to do it.
It's probably not a bad idea, to train resellers of SuSE to be particularly competent, and make the product look good. It's an uphill battle though, because Microsoft has dumbed down the requirements for "good enough". If a small business has to choose between awesome / expensive (a.k.a. complicated) or good enough / cheap (a.k.a. simple), cheap will win.
Sure, I wouldn't use the word "great"; but... I see the foresight MS used in bringing out SharePoint.
Better than email is a whole, real, Document Management System. And although implementing a DMS is smart, traditionally they didn't do "web". So Microsoft brings a DMS into its stable of product offerings, and makes it a WebDAV server, and integrates its access control features into Active Directory. That was smart.
Did I just use the word "stable" in a sentence describing a Microsoft product? Gad - they've gotten to me.
Anyway - the idea behind SharePoint was a good one, and I don't know of a better option out there. (Novell wants us to buy Teaming+Conferencing, but like iFolder I expect it's a good idea that will fade away).
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Seconded. After putting in my SPF records, the amount of backscatter dropped a huge amount. Presumably the rest of the world got a little better too, as they could tell who the forgers are.
There was one contemplation point in the book that was outside the norm of what you would learn in school: "what is quality?" (define quality).
Prior to reading the book, you probably could not have answered that question. After reading the book, you can. It ties into the opening line of the book: "And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good -- Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Outside of that, it made for an interesting drama.
So I was installing SuSE on our new z/OS mainframe (to a virtual machine guest to be specific), and the list of packages being installed was scrolling by: gstreamer.s390
And I'm thinking to myself "who, on God's Green Earth, had the job of porting audio to an EBCDIC based mainframe?" Talk about bizarro world....
But then I thought sure, it may not be used much; but when it does, it could launch 3,840 streams at 130 decibel. It's a Beowulf cluster of Rick Astley in a single box! And THAT is all worth it.
The connections are SSL secured. It has clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac. You are going to need to set up your own server though.
Double points if the source code CD also works as a death frisbee.
Sure - I'll grant you that Prop 13 also made tax increases harder. But the point remains that the problem isn't that government doesn't have money - it's that the legislature grows the budget beyond it's income in spite of knowing how much money will be coming in.
You mistakenly think Prop 13 is bad. All Prop 13 did is limit property tax to 2%. And if inflation makes property values go up, so goes the taxes. The new tax rate was steady, predictable, foreseeable, and absolutely reasonable.
It was the legislature that that decided to live beyond it's means. It was Governor Davis that gave the prison guards a 22% raise.
A good example of the corruptness of the legislature and taxes was the California Lottery. "It's money for Schools! Who doesn't want money for schools?"
Reality was that the first year, the Lottery brought in an extra $400 Million. The second year, the General Fund portion of the school budget was reduced $400 Million. "Oh looky here: we have an extra $400 Million for pork!"
You can't pin that kind of thievery on the voters.
We had a local vote that passed that raised sales tax a little to build a new jail facility. But nowhere in the sales pitch did the campaigners say that the tax had to be permanent. In fact, quite the opposite: the pitch was that the sales tax increase was for only two years.
Of course, two years later, the same people came back and said "We need another tax increase to pay for the staff in the new facility, and this time the tax increase needs to be permanent."
So do you think we rewarded them for lying to us during the first sales pitch?
Is this the fault of 'the stupid voter' or the fault of 'the politicians in charge'?
Frankly, I think Schwarzenegger should save the taxpayers some money and disband the CARB. They did the heavy lifting and got a lot of good pollution control work done. But now they are bored and passing rules for trivial results at massive expense. They are now more a liability than an asset and need to be written off the budget entirely.
I'd argue that the intelligent regulation would be to mandate some sort of cooling based on internal temperature differential. Once passenger compartment gets to be some percentage hotter than the outside air, the cooling mechanism kicks in to bring the internal temp to parity with the external temp.
1) Instead of mandating which technology to use, you are mandating results. The free market (and the engineers that work in them) will eventually figure out the best solution. (I think a little exhaust fan that runs off the battery would do it, although you can already get the Toyota Prius with a $3,000 option to add solar cells to the roof to run the fan and charge the battery).
2) Has to potential to stop heat death from infants / animals left in sealed passenger compartments.
3) The idea that glass will keep the car cool is only good for a very small percentage of trips. That it is enough to matter is a stupid idea.
Seriously: how much heat had to build up that you are wasting a significant amount of gasoline to cool the car down?
That is a rhetorical question, as I live in California's Central Valley. It gets so hot here, that jokes are: "You know you're from Fresno when people with black cars or upholstery are assumed to be from out-of-town." "You know you're from Fresno when you think someone driving wearing oven mitts is clever." "You know you're from Fresno when you discover, in July, it only takes two fingers to drive your car." "You know you're from Fresno when the best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance." "You know you're from Fresno when you can say 115 degrees without fainting." (There are many more, though they probably pertain as well to Phoenix as to Fresno).
Anyway - yes, I've driven the car when it is OMG hot, and the airco had to work far longer to cool down the car. On a normal hot day, the car takes 5 - 10 minutes to cool down. On the OMG hot days, it takes 15 - 30 minutes to cool down.
A) The OMG hot days only happen 20 days a year (about 5%).
B) The OMG hot car happens when you leave your car out in the sun ALL DAY. While at work, or you aren't smart enough to put the car in the garage, whatever - the car has to sit in the hot sun for HOURS to get so hot that the airco has the heat overload problem.
This glass isn't some magic that reverses the laws of thermodynamics. If you leave the car out in the sun for HOURS, it is still going to get OMFG hot. It may take longer with the new glass, but it will still happen.
So the real case for this 'solution' only solves the problem where the car was first cool AND THEN goes out into the OMG heat (5% of the days) AND THEN only stays in the heat a short enough time that the delaying factor of the new glass matters.
Way to swat a fly with a sledgehammer CARB. You are a bunch of dolts on a power trip.
That ad doesn't really do it for me either. It flashed by on the TV this evening, and I ignore it, what with the fluffy music. Then at the end, it changes gears and goes all dark and gritty and violent and visually disruptive. I look up and see "Droid Does" "November" and think "Oh great. Some horror movie about robots with the same nickname as the Android phone. Probably funded by Microsoft. That will suck."
I think I would rather see "Hi, I'm a Droid. And I'm an AT&T." But instead of actors, go with talking cartoon smart phones. Have people in the background handling the devices, which lets you show off sliding keyboards and stuff. Pitch it a little different, as 'the secret trash-talking between devices' (they communicate, you know).
Not that I'm likely to be swayed or dissuaded by ads. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get one of these phones - unless initial hands on reviews indicate there is something horribly wrong with them.
As an email administrator, I would see mail get caught in the anti-spam filter. Wells Fargo was the first bank I saw that removed URLs from their emails, and said just simply 'please visit www.wellsfargo.com'. Washington Mutual was embedding URLs right up until the very end. Bank of America embedded links, but it was through their acquisition of Countrywide, so I don't know if it is all their fault.
Seriously, when I change banks (which I will be, pretty soon) this will be a pass / fail hurdle. Embed a URL in an email to me, and I'm no longer a customer of your bank. If you can't take security seriously, I can't leave my money in your hands.
It would really suck if the lunar substrate turned out to be far more rigid (what with the cold of space) than we thought, and this impact set up a resonant frequency that shook all the surface lunar dust OFF, and the Earth's gravity drew it all in, causing the Ultimate Lunar Winter. It's The End Of The World As We Know It.
Holy crap! I think I just invented the next Michael Bay movie!
I do hereby claim 25% of the movie revenue. If only to make it too unprofitable (to stop the madness).
My home town newspaper long ago switched to hiring high school students in place of long term professionals. They may be paid journalists, but they are so wet behind the ears that the newspaper is a joke. The publisher is vain, too: she loves the SPCA and refuses to publish stories when someone embezzles $50,000 from the local SPCA. They've had embezzlement at least three times that I know of. And the corruption. Dear God how they enable corruption!
So actually, yeah, I expect that many blogs are more trustworthy.
I always add the salutation - because if I don't, people on the CC: list will reply, thinking I addressed it to them. Some people are rushed. It is a courtesy.
I would argue that allowing a little bit of dishonor 'because it's my personal life' is a bad idea in government. There is a person in our District Attorney's office (former DA) who has been sued for sexual harassment. Specifically, "If you want the promotion, I'll need a blowjob" sexual harassment. Of course, the defendant says it was merely philandery gone bad.
You would give him the right to delete evidence? (Because it's none of the public's business)?
I don't see the problem with just demanding honor, particularly wrt retention of evidence. If you don't want to be called a dirty old man, don't BE a dirty old man. The evidence takes care of itself that way.
Yes. Someone else pointed out that after the mailbox is restored, the contents have to be vetted by the lawyers, prior to be handed over to the newspaper. So there are more expenses than just the retrieval. $30,000 for five mailboxes does sound a bit high. Not ludicrously high, but high.
Depends on if they have daily backups that are retained that long. So if there really are 180 tapes that have to be loaded (more like 170, as the most recent tapes are probably still in the library), and each restore takes about one hour of work to do, and the employees involved get paid about $30 per hour, then yes that works out to about $5,000. Where I work, it takes longer than an hour to retrieve a set of tapes because the tapes are sent-off site (you are paying for travel time and mileage), and one has to unload current tapes, do the restore, unload the archive tapes, and reload the current tapes. Then take the archive tapes back to off-site storage. We don't do daily tapes though.
Well... the other choice is AT&T, who's motto is "We had the original monopoly on evil. For the best at evil, your only choice is AT&T!" ;-)
I placed a comment with the FCC regarding Comcast's practice. Details here. My complaint was later used as evidence in a law suit against Comcast.
The gist of it is that after they sabotaged my connection, I called tech support, and tech support tried to shift the blame back to me.
I would have been fine with them if 1) they had done actual traffic shaping, and throttled my connection to a consistent 500 Kbps out of the 6,000 Kbps they sold me, and 2) didn't lie to my face about the whole thing.
Networking Failure Analysis 101 is asking "What changed?"
What changed is that Comcast decided to take a crap on me the customer. That is their choice - but to lie to me and tell me it is my fault is heinous. And I hope the FCC tells them it is also criminal.
I would prefer to switch to something that costs spammers money to send. My job is email administrator, and it is a rare day that my system gets less than 1/2 million spam connections. That is six connections per second, sustained, over every 24 hour period. We've had days where it was two million spams per day.
So it may not look like a big problem to you - but that is because people like me spend time and money to minimize the effects of the problem for you.
I'd rather spend the money on something useful.
Fundamentally, the reason the spammer makes money is that the fool that advertises with him/her pays $500, and the spammer pays pennies for electricity and bandwidth for the job. As long as it is lucrative, spammers will exist.
So I like the idea of moving to a for-pay email system. I prefer the bonded sender idea, but that hasn't taken off.
I don't think this system will take off either. I don't see an advantage to configuring my mail servers to accept the Centmail stuff automatically. Bonded Sender, I would reconfigure for. But this looks to be an invitation for junk mail from well heeled advertisers.
For what it is worth, when you do get to the twenty user level, you can sometimes get RIM (or your vendor) to thrown in a free BES license. And with Verizon at least, for an order of twenty BBs or larger, they throw in the BES CAL for free. Now, you still will still want to pay for (some sort of) support contract with RIM. And THAT is a yearly renewable charge. So my point is that at the larger quantities, it's not too expensive, and 'larger' may not be as big as you think.
We have a support contract with RIM, and their tech support has been the best I've ever used. I'm a GroupWise customer, so their support group doesn't have to be that large. But *every* time I have had to call, the support has been *excellent*.
Another option is Novell GroupWise. It runs on Linux now, and Novell throws in the GroupWise Mobile Server. GMS is really just the Nokia Intellisync Suite with some features removed. But - IT IS FREE (with active GroupWise maintenance). The Intellisync server handles (almost) every device known to mankind - except BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre and Android. For the last three, Novell is working on an ActiveSync server, but I have no idea when it will ship. (And if IBM buys them, it may never). Anyway, if you have spare time you might give their eval a try.
Or just ask your comms vendor to work a deal for you with RIM. ;-)
I thought it was "The Flu Formerly Known As Swine".
How about adding these achievements?
"The Fan" - posts from two IP addresses during a single 24 period.
"The Addict" - posts from two IP addresses during a single 24 period, eight days in a row.
"The Connoisseur" - has KDawson on the do-not-show-articles-selected-by list.
"The Content-Maker" - total quantity of comments put the poster in the top ten percentile of all posters (excluding anon. coward).
"The Heart of Gold" - total up all the +5 posts per person, apply to the top 5 percentile.
"The Defender of Good" - this one is trickier. Find the top five percentile posters with the most Foes. Find the set of people whom have been foe'd by the foes. Scan that set for +5 insightful, and total. Top five percentile gets "The Defender of Good" achievement.
"Help! I'm Being Oppressed!" achievement - any user that gets down-modded by an Editor. Ever.
No disagreement here. In the early days, VARs earned their keep, because the combination of hardware and software needed some care. But as time went on, and Novell did get NetWare to the point of being both exceptionally stable AND simple. And yet, if you grew to a very large network, it still did very well.
NetWare's day's are numbered though. Although Linux isn't as simple as NetWare, it brings a breadth of possibility that makes everything else pale.
For what it's worth, when Ron Hovsepian was at IBM, he and his crew over there marveled at at the NetWare reseller channel. It was awesome - customers got resellers that knew their stuff, and resellers got lots of money. But when he got to Novell, he was disappointed to find out that the reseller channel had been decimated. I don't know why, although I know that the bean counters were (are?) in charge at Novell, and they were ruining the company.
Upshot is that Ron Hovsepian told his people to rebuild the reseller channel into it's former glory. So it kind of makes sense that Ron said "do X" and when it didn't happen, he's looking at the people he told to do it.
It's probably not a bad idea, to train resellers of SuSE to be particularly competent, and make the product look good. It's an uphill battle though, because Microsoft has dumbed down the requirements for "good enough". If a small business has to choose between awesome / expensive (a.k.a. complicated) or good enough / cheap (a.k.a. simple), cheap will win.
Sure, I wouldn't use the word "great"; but... I see the foresight MS used in bringing out SharePoint.
Better than email is a whole, real, Document Management System. And although implementing a DMS is smart, traditionally they didn't do "web". So Microsoft brings a DMS into its stable of product offerings, and makes it a WebDAV server, and integrates its access control features into Active Directory. That was smart.
Did I just use the word "stable" in a sentence describing a Microsoft product? Gad - they've gotten to me.
Anyway - the idea behind SharePoint was a good one, and I don't know of a better option out there. (Novell wants us to buy Teaming+Conferencing, but like iFolder I expect it's a good idea that will fade away).