If you click the link first, you get in line for the movie first. If you reorder your list, you just stepped out of line, no cuts.
Let's assume it works this way for a second and you are first in line for "Trees Lounge" or some other film. You have the three out plan, and you currently have all three movies out. Trees Lounge is your number one item on the queue and suddenly it comes back in from someone else. You are first on the "list", but you have three movies out already.
Netflix is not going to hold Trees Lounge until you return something else. It's going to ship right away. So they really can't make queues for each film.
Of course, if a movie you really want to see is at the top of your list, and it shows as available "now" all of a sudden, you could always up your plan to the next level for a month in the vain hope they might ship it to you. Or if you are evil, you could report one of your movies "Lost in the mail" so they would ship another. (I do not recommend fibbing -it's bad karma, but you could do it, I suppose!)
It's a paid service, you would think that they would want to cater to their most active customers to keep from losing them.
I disagree. Since customers can only differentiate themselves based on their plan level, the "best" customer from Netflix's point of view is probably the one with the eight rentals out at a time plan, who has nothing in the queue.
The worst customer is probably one with the eight out at a time plan with a queue of over 100 popular films.
I think the article is pretty good, however in my own playing around with my rental queue, I am convinced that queue length is somehow a factor.
When I joined Netflix, I got my shipments in two days from the Santa Ana facility, and I almost always got the top three on my list. Now it seems like they take three days at least. (Get shipping email on Monday, DVD arrives on Thursday.)
Now that I've been a member for six months or so, the top of my list has aggegated together about six movies that are all "Very Long Wait" and to be quite honest, I've never seen them anything other than that. I don't think I will ever get them.
FWIW, I do beleive the article is essentially correct and various service levels with Netflix decrease over time.
It also would not surprise me in the least if they analyze your viewing habits to determine if you are likely to stop using the Netflix service. It would probably be called the Geek Regression.
And just for kicks, the list of movies I will never see from Netflix: Solaris (Original 1970's version), Trees Lounge, Raging Bull, 24 Disc 1, Sopranos Disc 1. Has anyone gotten these?
Here in Clark County, Nevada, the very same Ms. Ferguson from the article was our elections supervisor at one time. She came in to the job, stayed just long enough to throw out all our old machines that had some kind of an audit trail and bought brand new totally electronic, un-auditable voting machines which violate state law from Sequoia Inc.
She only got the machines approved by the most ridiculous of explanations: A Printout of the memory card is just as good a audit trail as real ballots. Read about it here in our local paper.
What did Ms. Ferguson do after leaving Clark County? Why she went to Santa Clara County in CA, where she stayed just long enough to throw out any auditable voting machines and replaced them with fully electronic voting machines from Sequoia.
After that, where did Ms. Ferguson go? Why she accepted a position as a Vice President... of Sequoia systems!
Plus, I think the Slashdot crowd understands full well how when you have critical software apps that are closed source, you are essentially outsourcing control of your apps. So any county that has these fully electronic devices has outsourced election security to the low bidder. Egads.
In every last article on Google they always talk about when they might go public.
For the life of me, I can never figure out why this is a good idea for Google, or for users. A stock issue gives up ownership of the company for a capital infusion. If Google has enough cash to operate and invest (and it sure seems like they do from the article) what is the point?
Once they go public, Bill Gates can gobble up their stock and take them over, or any other big investor. Then, under profit pressure from non-geeks, they can dictate the new direction that Google may take.
Remember that all the accounting scandals that destroyed all those companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing and the rest? All of them were primarily concerned with destroying the company to keep the stock price up to satisfy both the outside investors and the stock options spread for the executives.
Google going public could be a disaster. They seem to have enough capital to run the company as they want right now. I'm missing the upside to this. Anyone care to speculate?
The first season is out on DVD box set in both the US and the UK. The Second season is coming out in May in the US. (Don't know about the UK release date.)
The entire series is already out on video from Columbia House.
The best thing (and the worst in a way) is that the teevee show was filmed in 16x9, planning for an eventual DVD release. The reason that this turned out to not be so good is that Warner Bros lost *all* of the original 16x9 space scenes, so they had to scrunch it and stretch all the space exteriors to fit 16x9 from 4X3. WTG Warner Bros!
(All the interior live-action is in native 16x9 though.)
If you click the x1000 links at the top of the page, new pages are displayed with the larger vessels such as Death Star II, Vorlon Planet Killer and V'Ger.
Neverwinter Nights is the mother of all timesinks.
This person obviously never played Everquest. Holy Moly! What happend to 1999? I think I lost 2000 too.
One minute I was planning a Y2K party, my friend handed me an EQ CD, and the next thing I knew there was a war with Iraq. It took me half a minute to figure out that I slipped forward instead of back in time!
In the Redhat article posted as the update, the author says...
I ran this entire article more than once through OpenOffice Writer (which is the Microsoft Word Equivalent) and it handled this really well. The spell checker was put to the test too, so if you spot some errors you know where to blame them;-)
That's the equivalent of "If it compiled, it must be good code."
The spell checker and grammar checker are never an excuse for releasing articles with errors!
Yes, I realize he put a smiley at the end, but I've seen this kind of attitude all too often. If there are errors, it is always the fault of the author and not the spell checker!
(I'm sure someone will point out some error I made in this comment, but I'm not shirking responsibility! All errors are the fault of the author and not Office, OpenOffice, Slashcode or anything else!)
If the browser identifies as Safari, boost prices on anything hip or cool by 20% due to Apple-user lust for fashion and style.
If the browser is Lynx, lower prices by 20%, they can't even afford a free-as-in-beer graphical browser!
If the browser is Internet Exploder, blue screen thier PC and charge them a subscription just to access our web site.
Yum, the future of price discrimination!
Actually, this reminds me of a demographics company called Claritas that sells demographics assignment services based on where you live. (Try it for yourself here.)
So now in the future can we expect people to get assigned based on their browsers and OS identification?
Users who run Mozilla on Linux tend to have:
Three or more pets, play video games on a hidden Windows partition they don't talk about and consume Doritos by the truckload.
Back in dem old'n'days when you had a safety deposit box, to enter the vault you had to countersign a signature card and show ID. Usually you had to go into the bank and get a hold of the right person who was the person with the keys and wait until they were available.
Once you were in the vault you could access the deposit boxes with your key. Typically the bank had a second key as well for the same box.
The bank I have now uses a hand scanner. I walk in during normal business hours, enter a secret code on a keypad and put my hand in the scanner. I have to know both the code and have the verified hand scan. Then the vault opens automatically and I go in and get into my box with just my key.
Personally, I find this vastly superior to the old system where I had to find "the deposit box guy" and wait. Now during normal business hours I can just go right in, thanks to the biometrics.
Also for the bank, they probably have one less thing to worry about during the day. I hate to sound cliche, but it's win-win!
What _would_ be nice is if WotC set up a "send us the proof of purchase for the book and we'll email you the data files" program. Because I don't expect they expect PCGen to be a huge revenue stream anyway, if enough people were to email them stating the case politely, they might well accept.
Let's assume they did this. Let's also assume that they don't want the hassle of opening all those envelopes and looking at proof of purchase labels. (All that does cost some kind of labor in-house, or paying a rebate-type service company to do it for you.) So they charge you a $2 handling fee.
Is that any different than the small fee they are going to charge for the data files?
Look at it this way, it's just a convenience fee.
IANAL but it seems obvious to me that you can certainly make up your own datafiles from the books and use them for your own personal use.
If you can't or don't want to be bothered, you can always pony up the couple of bucks (they claim from 1 to 5 USD in the article) and pay to download the file.
While I dislike MS in many ways, what they say here is true:
"If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore."
It's still no excuse for having such a wide open hole, but physical security is so often neglected. How many office workers leave their computers running all night so the nightime cleaning crew or anyone else can browse files or read emails?
We have a large training facility in our office that I run, and somtimes I can't even get users to log off the systems when they are done for the day, leaving all their personal network drives exposed to whoever. (So I go around and reboot all the systems daily. I sometimes consider leaving a.txt in their personal drives as a reminder, but I think I'd probably get in trouble with the company.)
This happened to me, I was the doofus that bought the used, junky, re-shrink-wrapped stuff.
I went to buy my very first Burner, a Creative 4x unit from Best Buy.
I went home, got out my tools, opened my PC case, opened the box in a geekish squeal of delight, only to find a Memorex 4X cdrom drive.
Needless to say, this was dissappointing. Someone had bought the box, taken it home, took out the Creative Burner and put in (a probably defective) old CDROM drive and them re-shrink wrapped it up and brought it back to Best Buy for a refund.
You do not even WANT to know how awful I was treated by the folks at Best Buy over this. I had to speak to the equivalent of the Best Buy Secret Service, give them all my info including my SSN and sign a document just to exchange it for a real one.
The worst part was that I really just wanted to get the burner. So the Best Buy Secret Agent Man tells me "We will open up a new one here in the store, just to make sure there aren't any problems with the unit." (He so thought I was trying to take them for a ride.)
I hate my job and so why should I care abo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
****BOSS NET FILTER ACTIVATED!****
I love my job and want to apologize to the world for stealing company electrons for my own personal use. I am the happiest corporate drone of all time and would like to remind all employees that reading/. at work is stealing and might be a violation of the DMCA!
I'm one of those software instructors who provides the training on the huge custom software package to the customer.
Typically when I arrive on site to show the customers the software we just spent a year creating for them, (**after the customer signs off on the requirements**) and I show them some super wham-o-dyne feature that is not included in the base package, I usuallyt get one of these responses...
1. (90% of the time) What a stupid feature. Why do we have that? Does anyone on earth use this feature?
Typical answer: No one else has it but you, your firm asked for it, and we spent about a jillion hours of developer time working it in and testing it even though the only person on Earth who thought it was a good idea was your project manager.
2. (10% of the time) What an excellent feature! I'll really use that. It will make my job easier. I'm glad we have this super wham-o-dyne feature.
I've seen it again and again. Most of the software ends up confusing users and being far too complicated because a few people insist on adding bizarre stuff to the base package.
I've seen the same thing in some open-source projects too, where the main developer can't resolve (or doesn't want to resolve) a dispute between two other coders, so they add in "options" so everyone can be happy. But it sometimes ands up making the final product a mess.
And as for spending enormous amounts of time in training on the new computer systems, I have to say that many times customers demand it.
If a customer lays down a lot of money for a custom software package, they simply expect an instructor to appear on site, in a tie, wielding donuts and coffee and lunches. We have CBTs that take about 2 hours and cost virtually nothing and cover the base package really well, but customers would rather have half thier staff sit around in a class room for two days instead. For non-technical personnel especially, they just demand that level of service if it's needed or not. So at least in my case, I can't take the blame for forcing the end users to sit through training!
Guilt no more!
Toolbars can be dangerous, but I have to say that the Google Toolbar is quite honestly the best thing ever. I use it constantly.
The primary reason I installed it is because Google passes muster with me as a respectable and decent company and the toolbar provides excellent funtionality that I really use.
When I'm on Linux at home, I just use the Konqueror google shortcut, but when I'm forced to use IE at work (for some apps that I must use that require it) it's not a bad toolbar.
There is NO substitute for being an informed user and knowing what the heck you are doing! But generally, generalizations should be avoided!
The reason that the eagles just don't drop the ring off is part of a theme from The Silmarillion.
As the story progresses from the beginning of the world to the time of the LOTR story, the Valar and their agents take less and less of a direct hand in things.
Gandalf was another servant of the Valar (a Maia, actually) and he was forbidden to match "power with power" in the fight against Sauron.
If this was true for Gandalf, it was certainly true that the Valar did not desire the Eagles to simply "fix" everything.
One of the essential elements of LOTR is the rejection of power. It would be a very Hollywood style theme to have some "rightful" ruler claim the ring, such as Aragorn or something. But that's why I like LOTR so much. Power is not sought, it's rejected.
When viewed from that perspective, you can see why the Lords of the West didn't want to fix things for Middle-Earth. They wanted the people of Middle-Earth to arrange their own destiny. Gandalf and the eagles were their to support the opposition to Sauron, not lead it.
A good way to help *push* them towards secure passwords is to crack your own systems passwords.
Nothing disturbs an end user more then when you email them their old password
I disagree.
I've seen users log into PC's all over the building and not even bother to log off. Some of these are high level managers and any old joe walking up that PC has access to all the manager's personnel records, associate evals, and their personal network drives. Users like this could honestly not care less if you have their password.
When I find them doing this, I generally leave a text file in the root of their personal network share with something like "Hey, I could have deleted everything in here! Please remember to log off the machines when you are done with them!" Even this doesn't help. Most of the users chuckle about it.
If the corporate culture does not care about security or halfway decent passwords, forcing people to change them will just anger the users and you will get Post-It-Note-On-Monitor level security.
I've even seen programmers hardcode default database passwords into some apps. When you have to deal with folks like this, passwords are the least of your problems.
It's because of the above issues that I hope that biometrics really work out in the future.
Personally I've had good luck with some of them. My bank uses biometrics hand prints to enter the safety-deposit box area and it's never failed on me.
As the state of Linux is today, you need an admin or at the very least power users to support a Linux solution.
As nifty as Gnome and KDE are, Linux will never achieve widespread use in homes and "personal" computers (as opposed to work computers) until users can install programs with minimal effort and set up things like simple files sharing with a windows box while only using the GUI. (Not an all inclusive list, but a start.)
On the other hand, if we teach kids how to use the command line and get them early, we may overcome the difficulty of Linux GUI's.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix is not going to hold Trees Lounge until you return something else. It's going to ship right away. So they really can't make queues for each film.
Of course, if a movie you really want to see is at the top of your list, and it shows as available "now" all of a sudden, you could always up your plan to the next level for a month in the vain hope they might ship it to you. Or if you are evil, you could report one of your movies "Lost in the mail" so they would ship another. (I do not recommend fibbing -it's bad karma, but you could do it, I suppose!)
The worst customer is probably one with the eight out at a time plan with a queue of over 100 popular films.
I think the article is pretty good, however in my own playing around with my rental queue, I am convinced that queue length is somehow a factor.
When I joined Netflix, I got my shipments in two days from the Santa Ana facility, and I almost always got the top three on my list. Now it seems like they take three days at least. (Get shipping email on Monday, DVD arrives on Thursday.)
Now that I've been a member for six months or so, the top of my list has aggegated together about six movies that are all "Very Long Wait" and to be quite honest, I've never seen them anything other than that. I don't think I will ever get them.
FWIW, I do beleive the article is essentially correct and various service levels with Netflix decrease over time.
It also would not surprise me in the least if they analyze your viewing habits to determine if you are likely to stop using the Netflix service. It would probably be called the Geek Regression.
And just for kicks, the list of movies I will never see from Netflix: Solaris (Original 1970's version), Trees Lounge, Raging Bull, 24 Disc 1, Sopranos Disc 1. Has anyone gotten these?
Here in Clark County, Nevada, the very same Ms. Ferguson from the article was our elections supervisor at one time. She came in to the job, stayed just long enough to throw out all our old machines that had some kind of an audit trail and bought brand new totally electronic, un-auditable voting machines which violate state law from Sequoia Inc.
She only got the machines approved by the most ridiculous of explanations: A Printout of the memory card is just as good a audit trail as real ballots. Read about it here in our local paper. What did Ms. Ferguson do after leaving Clark County? Why she went to Santa Clara County in CA, where she stayed just long enough to throw out any auditable voting machines and replaced them with fully electronic voting machines from Sequoia.
After that, where did Ms. Ferguson go? Why she accepted a position as a Vice President... of Sequoia systems!
Do I think there is some wild conspiracy here? Nope. It's just a case of a political hack on the take, who doesn't care about the laws of the state that she is supposed to enforce.
Plus, I think the Slashdot crowd understands full well how when you have critical software apps that are closed source, you are essentially outsourcing control of your apps. So any county that has these fully electronic devices has outsourced election security to the low bidder. Egads.
Even in jest, using newspeak is bad mojo. Offtopic I know, but it gives me a frowny face to think that anyone would willingly use it.
In every last article on Google they always talk about when they might go public.
For the life of me, I can never figure out why this is a good idea for Google, or for users. A stock issue gives up ownership of the company for a capital infusion. If Google has enough cash to operate and invest (and it sure seems like they do from the article) what is the point?
Once they go public, Bill Gates can gobble up their stock and take them over, or any other big investor. Then, under profit pressure from non-geeks, they can dictate the new direction that Google may take.
Remember that all the accounting scandals that destroyed all those companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing and the rest? All of them were primarily concerned with destroying the company to keep the stock price up to satisfy both the outside investors and the stock options spread for the executives.
Google going public could be a disaster. They seem to have enough capital to run the company as they want right now. I'm missing the upside to this. Anyone care to speculate?
The first season is out on DVD box set in both the US and the UK. The Second season is coming out in May in the US. (Don't know about the UK release date.)
The entire series is already out on video from Columbia House.
The best thing (and the worst in a way) is that the teevee show was filmed in 16x9, planning for an eventual DVD release. The reason that this turned out to not be so good is that Warner Bros lost *all* of the original 16x9 space scenes, so they had to scrunch it and stretch all the space exteriors to fit 16x9 from 4X3. WTG Warner Bros! (All the interior live-action is in native 16x9 though.)
If you click the x1000 links at the top of the page, new pages are displayed with the larger vessels such as Death Star II, Vorlon Planet Killer and V'Ger.
Well I got it from BitTorrent and all three CDs downloaded overnight very quickly.
I was upgrading a dual-boot WinXP-Home & RH8.0 machine.
The upgrade was flawless. GRUB kept my XP on the list and all my info was kept on the machine: cookies, files, old evolution emails, everything.
And I'm very much enjoying the AA fonts in Mozilla.
A breeze to upgrade from 8.0!
One minute I was planning a Y2K party, my friend handed me an EQ CD, and the next thing I knew there was a war with Iraq. It took me half a minute to figure out that I slipped forward instead of back in time!
That's the equivalent of "If it compiled, it must be good code."
The spell checker and grammar checker are never an excuse for releasing articles with errors!
Yes, I realize he put a smiley at the end, but I've seen this kind of attitude all too often. If there are errors, it is always the fault of the author and not the spell checker!
(I'm sure someone will point out some error I made in this comment, but I'm not shirking responsibility! All errors are the fault of the author and not Office, OpenOffice, Slashcode or anything else!)
If the browser identifies as Safari, boost prices on anything hip or cool by 20% due to Apple-user lust for fashion and style.
If the browser is Lynx, lower prices by 20%, they can't even afford a free-as-in-beer graphical browser!
If the browser is Internet Exploder, blue screen thier PC and charge them a subscription just to access our web site.
Yum, the future of price discrimination!
Actually, this reminds me of a demographics company called Claritas that sells demographics assignment services based on where you live. (Try it for yourself here.)
So now in the future can we expect people to get assigned based on their browsers and OS identification?
Users who run Mozilla on Linux tend to have:
Three or more pets, play video games on a hidden Windows partition they don't talk about and consume Doritos by the truckload.
Back in dem old'n'days when you had a safety deposit box, to enter the vault you had to countersign a signature card and show ID. Usually you had to go into the bank and get a hold of the right person who was the person with the keys and wait until they were available.
Once you were in the vault you could access the deposit boxes with your key. Typically the bank had a second key as well for the same box.
The bank I have now uses a hand scanner. I walk in during normal business hours, enter a secret code on a keypad and put my hand in the scanner. I have to know both the code and have the verified hand scan. Then the vault opens automatically and I go in and get into my box with just my key.
Personally, I find this vastly superior to the old system where I had to find "the deposit box guy" and wait. Now during normal business hours I can just go right in, thanks to the biometrics.
Also for the bank, they probably have one less thing to worry about during the day. I hate to sound cliche, but it's win-win!
Let's assume they did this. Let's also assume that they don't want the hassle of opening all those envelopes and looking at proof of purchase labels. (All that does cost some kind of labor in-house, or paying a rebate-type service company to do it for you.) So they charge you a $2 handling fee.
Is that any different than the small fee they are going to charge for the data files?
Look at it this way, it's just a convenience fee.
IANAL but it seems obvious to me that you can certainly make up your own datafiles from the books and use them for your own personal use.
If you can't or don't want to be bothered, you can always pony up the couple of bucks (they claim from 1 to 5 USD in the article) and pay to download the file.
It's still no excuse for having such a wide open hole, but physical security is so often neglected. How many office workers leave their computers running all night so the nightime cleaning crew or anyone else can browse files or read emails?
We have a large training facility in our office that I run, and somtimes I can't even get users to log off the systems when they are done for the day, leaving all their personal network drives exposed to whoever. (So I go around and reboot all the systems daily. I sometimes consider leaving a
Vir's Odyssey?
Is the point of the game to put people's heads on pikes and wave at them?
This happened to me, I was the doofus that bought the used, junky, re-shrink-wrapped stuff.
I went to buy my very first Burner, a Creative 4x unit from Best Buy.
I went home, got out my tools, opened my PC case, opened the box in a geekish squeal of delight, only to find a Memorex 4X cdrom drive.
Needless to say, this was dissappointing. Someone had bought the box, taken it home, took out the Creative Burner and put in (a probably defective) old CDROM drive and them re-shrink wrapped it up and brought it back to Best Buy for a refund.
You do not even WANT to know how awful I was treated by the folks at Best Buy over this. I had to speak to the equivalent of the Best Buy Secret Service, give them all my info including my SSN and sign a document just to exchange it for a real one.
The worst part was that I really just wanted to get the burner. So the Best Buy Secret Agent Man tells me "We will open up a new one here in the store, just to make sure there aren't any problems with the unit." (He so thought I was trying to take them for a ride.)
I hate my job and so why should I care abo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
/. at work is stealing and might be a violation of the DMCA!
****BOSS NET FILTER ACTIVATED!****
I love my job and want to apologize to the world for stealing company electrons for my own personal use. I am the happiest corporate drone of all time and would like to remind all employees that reading
I'm one of those software instructors who provides the training on the huge custom software package to the customer.
Typically when I arrive on site to show the customers the software we just spent a year creating for them, (**after the customer signs off on the requirements**) and I show them some super wham-o-dyne feature that is not included in the base package, I usuallyt get one of these responses...
1. (90% of the time) What a stupid feature. Why do we have that? Does anyone on earth use this feature?
Typical answer: No one else has it but you, your firm asked for it, and we spent about a jillion hours of developer time working it in and testing it even though the only person on Earth who thought it was a good idea was your project manager.
2. (10% of the time) What an excellent feature! I'll really use that. It will make my job easier. I'm glad we have this super wham-o-dyne feature.
I've seen it again and again. Most of the software ends up confusing users and being far too complicated because a few people insist on adding bizarre stuff to the base package.
I've seen the same thing in some open-source projects too, where the main developer can't resolve (or doesn't want to resolve) a dispute between two other coders, so they add in "options" so everyone can be happy. But it sometimes ands up making the final product a mess.
And as for spending enormous amounts of time in training on the new computer systems, I have to say that many times customers demand it.
If a customer lays down a lot of money for a custom software package, they simply expect an instructor to appear on site, in a tie, wielding donuts and coffee and lunches. We have CBTs that take about 2 hours and cost virtually nothing and cover the base package really well, but customers would rather have half thier staff sit around in a class room for two days instead. For non-technical personnel especially, they just demand that level of service if it's needed or not. So at least in my case, I can't take the blame for forcing the end users to sit through training! Guilt no more!
Toolbars can be dangerous, but I have to say that the Google Toolbar is quite honestly the best thing ever. I use it constantly.
The primary reason I installed it is because Google passes muster with me as a respectable and decent company and the toolbar provides excellent funtionality that I really use.
When I'm on Linux at home, I just use the Konqueror google shortcut, but when I'm forced to use IE at work (for some apps that I must use that require it) it's not a bad toolbar.
There is NO substitute for being an informed user and knowing what the heck you are doing! But generally, generalizations should be avoided!
The reason that the eagles just don't drop the ring off is part of a theme from The Silmarillion.
As the story progresses from the beginning of the world to the time of the LOTR story, the Valar and their agents take less and less of a direct hand in things.
Gandalf was another servant of the Valar (a Maia, actually) and he was forbidden to match "power with power" in the fight against Sauron.
If this was true for Gandalf, it was certainly true that the Valar did not desire the Eagles to simply "fix" everything.
One of the essential elements of LOTR is the rejection of power. It would be a very Hollywood style theme to have some "rightful" ruler claim the ring, such as Aragorn or something. But that's why I like LOTR so much. Power is not sought, it's rejected.
When viewed from that perspective, you can see why the Lords of the West didn't want to fix things for Middle-Earth. They wanted the people of Middle-Earth to arrange their own destiny. Gandalf and the eagles were their to support the opposition to Sauron, not lead it.
There is no way in hell I'm going to visit a website called "KYcall.com", I'm at work!
Worth a read. Talks about graphical passwords and a little on biometrics.
Link
A good way to help *push* them towards secure passwords is to crack your own systems passwords.
Nothing disturbs an end user more then when you email them their old password
I disagree.
I've seen users log into PC's all over the building and not even bother to log off. Some of these are high level managers and any old joe walking up that PC has access to all the manager's personnel records, associate evals, and their personal network drives. Users like this could honestly not care less if you have their password.
When I find them doing this, I generally leave a text file in the root of their personal network share with something like "Hey, I could have deleted everything in here! Please remember to log off the machines when you are done with them!" Even this doesn't help. Most of the users chuckle about it.
If the corporate culture does not care about security or halfway decent passwords, forcing people to change them will just anger the users and you will get Post-It-Note-On-Monitor level security.
I've even seen programmers hardcode default database passwords into some apps. When you have to deal with folks like this, passwords are the least of your problems.
It's because of the above issues that I hope that biometrics really work out in the future.
Personally I've had good luck with some of them. My bank uses biometrics hand prints to enter the safety-deposit box area and it's never failed on me.
I think you are exactly right.
As the state of Linux is today, you need an admin or at the very least power users to support a Linux solution.
As nifty as Gnome and KDE are, Linux will never achieve widespread use in homes and "personal" computers (as opposed to work computers) until users can install programs with minimal effort and set up things like simple files sharing with a windows box while only using the GUI. (Not an all inclusive list, but a start.)
On the other hand, if we teach kids how to use the command line and get them early, we may overcome the difficulty of Linux GUI's.