as i said, they are creating files and manipulating the registry, there is always potential for damage. For example, they could make a simply typo, or the virus itself could contain "black ice" that detects if someone is trying to delete it and causes more damage.
and they are forcing the fix on people, in that the people running their fix are not opting into it in any way.
read the other posts in this thread about "code green" which faced similar issues. I think the liability risk is very real.
And if it's personal liability you're concerned with, why complain? They're only jeopardizing themselves, not you.
if we're only allowed to make comments on slashdot about things which personally affect us, it's going to be a pretty barren place.:)
I think the real issue is legal liability. Quality Assurance is hard enough for big companies with established testing departments. There is no way that they people involved in writing the Fizzer uninstaller could test even a small percentage of existing configurations out in-the-wild.
So, there is a real risk that the fizzer uninstaller might actually damage computers or delete data. When you're messing with files and registries on someone's hard drive, anything can happen. One small typo in the script, or one weird configuration that you didn't predict, and someone's hard drive could be toast and they will be looking for you.
While the writers of fizzer might be hard to find, the writers of the fizzer uninstaller are likely named security professionals that are easy to locate. So they are taking a huge risk of a lawsuit if anything goes wrong with the uninstaller.
I wouldn't do what they have done. The personal liability is far too great.
Another thing that Linux folks should remember, but most of them couldn't spell Linux at the time
Insulting your audience on the first line is rarely a good way to get your point across.:)
Your history is a bit revisionist. Corsair never saw the light of day in any usable form. Corsair was heavily dependent on OpenDoc, making it a dubious "revolutionary" technology. And Frankenberg killed Corsair, thus helping launch Caldera with some of the cut team members, so it's a bit too much "spin" for me to claim that Novell was somehow responsible for Caldera's success by firing people.
You say in one bullet that Caldera was the first serious commercial linux, and in the next bullet talk about Red Hat preceding them. By the time I played with Caldera 1.0, Red Hat was pretty well established. Red Hat shipped their first version in '94, Caldera formed in '94 and didn't ship until some time after.
eDirectory for Linux has been around for a while, I'll give you that, and Novell has a long (and sad) history with *nix. I'm not sure that the history of Novell and *nix is something to be proud of, however. That would be like talking about how qualified Novell is to contribute to the future of word-processors.:)
I think you hit the nail on the head. Novell is giving NetWare a future using Linux, not giving Linux a future using NetWare.
Along the way, they will probably contribute some useful code and leverage towards Linux adoption in the mainstream. So yes, it sounds like a win/win for both sides assuming Novell commits actual resources to the issue and it isn't just a press release. As I said in a different post, this will be the 2nd time Novell has announced the porting of all of NetWare's services to *nix, so we'll see.
I worked for Novell until about a year ago, and I have to agree with a previous poster who said that this strategy was all about customer retention. Show customers a direction towards Linux, a little bit of open source, and toss in some buzzwords and customers might keep their license agreement. It's a good strategy financially and not unlike what Microsoft has done in that arena.
Netware's list price is over $100 a seat. Even if MySQL, Apache, and anything else ported over worked perfectly, no one is going to buy a linux-based Netware as a linux replacement. eDirectory runs about $2 a seat list and has been running on Linux for a long time. The announcement of a free UDDI server is nice, but I don't see long term how Novell will get a piece of anything in the Web Services space with that. It's more of a developer tool, and Novell isn't a developer tools company, they make money selling to big corporations. Yes, they recently acquired an app-server company, but that's an ever worse competitive mess than the LAN arena.
I think Novell's main problem is too many products. There are still just as many products at Novell as there were two years ago, but there are probably half the engineering staff to maintain them. Products like iChain and DirXML are incomprehensible to most people, and too narrow in scope and low in sales when most of their competition are rolling their products up into big do-all authentication suites. Also, there haven't been installation or adminstration console standards at Novell for years and years, so getting two different products from different groups running is quite a challenge.
While I'm a little bitter over some of the specifics of my departure, I think overall Novell has good people and still has a large user base. It's hard to turn a big boat like Novell towards new technology when the old stuff is still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Hopefully this won't end up like the two previous major efforts towards *nix, the first being the purchase of AT&T Unix and the "SuperNOS" strategy and the second being a major alliance with Red Hat that never really went anywhere.
Well that was a refreshingly content-free article, allow me to summarize:
Sun: Windows is better at whatever Liberty/Passport does Novell: Maybe in the home market, but we do whatever Liberty/Passport does much better in the Enterprise! Netegrity: Maybe Microsoft does whatever Liberty/Passport does better on Windows, but the true value is doing that cross-platform and cross-domain!
I still don't see how any of this is more than a niche market. Yes, there is a need in large enterprises for single sign-on, but that's largely a Fortune 100 issue, so no huge market there. For smaller companies, it's far cheaper to staff a helpdesk than it is to do an enterprise single-sign-on implementation. Yes, home-users have to manage a lot of userids and passwords too, but integrated browser password functions cover the 90% of people who don't move from their base computer. So for the home as well it's a niche function.
The only value I see is the value of Microsoft or AOL with extending their MSN or AOL login to new functions and thereby making it more "sticky", giving users an effective barrier to leaving their service. To me, that's really all this posturing is about.
Also, I fail to see why my cell-phone and my SSH session need to share a password.
I'm not sure where the "can't get source" comment in the title came from. I clicked through to the announcement, read both stories, and even translated the german text, and nothing in there said they terminated the agreement due to inability to get the source.
...it's one of those things you can guage how truly american a person is...
Score points for:
1. They only speak english. 2. They assume watching the Japanese equivalent of Powerpuff Girls when they are pushing 40 is "cool" and "alternative". 3. Two words: Morbidly Obese (score triple points if they say they are on a low-carb diet) 4. They assume that a person who admits to watching anime is geeky when statistically it is much more likely that they are japanese.
I doubt this guy was rich enough to start his own Blue LED research lab, which I am sure cost millions and millions of dollars.
If he wants to own his own patents, I'm sure there is no law in japan stopping him from quitting and starting his own lab with his own money.
This is just crazy to me. The guy is a RESEARCHER working for a COMPANY and people think that he should have a right to the PATENTS on things that he researched and invented ON THE JOB?
This is as bad as the MP3 whiners. Want free music? Make some, and give it away. Problem solved.
I did read the article, and I don't see how you can read it and not think that Moby is blaming downloaders and burners for his poor sales.
He says:
"This is owing to the fact that bands/artists with technically savvy fans will have a lot of fans who will end up downloading music or burning CDs where as less tech-savvy fans will end up buying their CDs."
This is his explanation for why his sales are down, which I think is BS. Play was truly a fresh approach to music. Reviewers slobbered over it and there was a huge buzz about it. 18 has mixed reviews and is largely just a sequel to play. To me, this explains why his sales are down without having to resort to blaming people sharing the songs. Occam's razor.
I bought 18, and I really like it. *BUT*, it's not the revolutionary, fresh album that Play was. It's more like Play 2. Moby talks about this in his Wired Magazine interview:
There's no getting around it: 18 sounds, almost track for track, like Play. It even has the sampled gospel vocals - though in place of the earlier disc's rusticated "Ooh, Lawdys," 18 features more urbane, sexy-sounding shout-outs to the Almighty. Moby insists the echoes are essentially coincidence. "I want to make a good record," he says. "And if it means it has songs similar to things on Play, fine." It is a good record - and if Play hadn't existed, it would be a great record.
And that's what he delivered. A good album that is highly derivative of Play. It isn't a bad album at all, and I'm sure it will sell well. I like it a lot. But Play was revolutionary. But Moby is, by his own admission, an egotistical prick. It's easier to blame downloaders and copiers than it is to admit that he will probably never, ever, have a record as popular as Play ever again.
The pessimist position here is that Wal-Mart knows full well that 99% of consumers will immediately get their smart uncle Bob to come over, reformat the hard drive, and install a version of Windows. So, the installation of Mandrake is just a ploy to make their PC's cheaper than their competition and get sales.
I'm not saying that Mandrake isn't good, or that Linux isn't fun to run. I'm just saying that the average consumer is going to be upset when they find that they can't run Microsoft Word or Quicken.
Novell, where I worked until recently, has a product called iFolder that works well for this. Basically, it provides a client that can copy from the client to the server in a lazy fashion whenever the client is attached to the internet (not just the office net)... it uses RSA encryption and has passphrase, key recovery, conflict resolution, all kindza good stuff. The client policies are all server controlled.
The server runs on Linux (Red Hat only, officially), Windows, and NetWare. Client is Windows only. Specs here:
http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/sysreqs.h tm l
Unfortunately, the price is idiotic. $50 a seat. You get a stripped down version free with NetWare 6, but it doesn't have the features you need to make it work well. Novell has had bad pricing for years, probably because the same product managers who made the dumb pricing decisions before are still there.
But, if the price drops you might want to check it out, it's a great solution for roaming users with laptops.
I've also used Second Copy from Centered http://www.centered.com/ . It's pretty good stuff. Allows you to set a backup policy for copying stuff up to a server. My biggest complaint, which may be fixed now, is that there didn't seem to be an easy way to do an automated roll out of the client. But, you just set the copy policy, set it to copy to a mapped drive, and let it go. More configuration setting than you could imagine, although it does require you to have a drive mapping and not a simple IP connection like iFolder.
I just got a new Athlon 1800+ CPU with an ABIT KG7-RAID motherboard. It had a thermisistor for the CPU with good default settings, and it has a CPU FAN RPM detector. In the BIOS you can turn on a feature to shut the system down if the CPU fan fails, and you can also set alarms for CPU temp.
So, given that, I'd rather have the better performing and cheaper Athlon system. The risk seems minimal and by the time time you pay slightly more for the Intel CPU, the Intel mobo, and the Intel Rambus RAM, you're paying a lot more. My personal opinion.
Computer Recycling Center accepts for Donation drop-off, ALL computer equipment of ANY age and ANY condition, working or non-working. We charge a small REUSE FEE for older items.
Our Mission is to promote the highest and best re-use of computer equipment, and recycle the unusable items to keep them out of our landfills.
I agree with the other person that posted about "escalation". These sites need revenue, and they will get as annoying as they need to. They have to keep their companies alive. In the words of Dilbert, they will sell our organs for money if they thought they could get away with it.
It depends on the test. Mensa requires that you score 98th percentile or better on a standardized intelligence test. There are many different tests that they accept. Ten years ago when I took the tests, I know that included the Cattel Test and the California Test of Mental Maturity. I took both, and interestingly enough got the exact same percentile even though the tests are quite different. Many tests have different scales, so the number doesn't really count. 180 is quite high on some scales, such as this one where 131 will put you at the 98th percentile.
So, IQ is really just a number for braggarts to toss around, it's the percentile that counts, if that counts at all. I used to be in Mensa, but I never quite understood what they were all about. It was a little bit social club, a little bit of pimping for the idea of intelligence tests, and a lot of people with big egos. In some ways it was OK, but I'd rather hang out with intelligent people who aren't getting together just because they're intelligent, so I'll take a user group or some other fun gathering over a Mensa meeting any day.
But I suppose I'll get flamed now for trying to act cool by saying "I could be in Mensa, but I'm not". I just hope it's a good flame and not a boring goatse.cx link. 8-)
Where I work, we have the whole building in San Jose set up for wireless. The way we approach security is that the wireless network is on the public internet outside the internal firewall (not on the DMZ, the wireless are completely outside).
So, in order to get to internal data while on wireless you must start up a VPN client or go through our portal. This isn't a perfect solution, people still get free bandwidth if they want, but at least they can't get to internal data.
Also, we have most of the wireless access points in public conference rooms, and a couple of them have been stolen!
Interesting, I assumed digital cable was prevalent now since it's all I can get where I'm at (San Jose) and where I was (Columbus, Ohio)...
But you're right, it hasn't penetrated yet, here's an article on the subject.
To clarify your "solution" point though, AFAIK with digital cable all channels are scrambled, so you couldn't record two channels at once under any circumstances.
But a TIVO. I'm surprised anyone would say that ultimate TV is better than Tivo. The only angle microsoft has on Tivo is the fact that it can record two shows at the same time, theoretically. (In actuality, 99% of users wouldn't be able to use this feature, since they have only one cable decoder box. Since most cable is moving to digital cable where all channels are scrambled, you can only tune to one channel at a time through the ultimate TV box.) (By the way, isn't their ad campaign the WORST?)
I have a sixty hour phillips Tivo and I'm very happy with it. I just got the 2.0 software downloaded and they have made many improvements. Tivo even hosts a open forum where they host a "hacking Tivo" board. And it runs Linux. You should be ashamed, hacker, for even considering an evil MSFT device.
To be fair though, there are some problems with Tivo's, too. Some people with old Tivo's are having stuttering problems with the new 2.0 software.
I just went to the site, fed in my cc#, and looked around. Some initial thoughts.
Yahoo! appears to assign an "i can view porn" cookie. Seems a little troubling from a privacy standpoint. It may be just a separate cookie for their video story, but I definitely have a new Yahoo! cookie with the text "video" and a bunch of other data in it.
It does appear to be secure, in that I have to be signed in to Yahoo! and have produced a CC# before I can view the story. If I sign out, I can't get to the story without signing back in. So, as long as you sign out properly, your kids won't be browsing the store.
It's pretty explicit. There are large front and back pics of many dvd's, and they aren't censored.
The selection is pretty slim. If you go to "leather & latex" for example, there are only a few selections. The webmonkeys doing the categorization appear to have had a lot of fun. For example, the movie "recipe for sex" is under the category "Adult&Erotica/Hardcore/Plot-based/Really cooking". 8-)
There appears to be no additional guarantee of privacy in the adult section. This is horrible to Yahoo!'s potential business, in my opinion. I assume that Yahoo! sells my purchase patterns, click patterns, etc... to all takers, and I would NEVER buy porn from Yahoo!, Amazon, or any on-line store that didn't guarantee privacy. I rather go to Fry's and pay cash, thank you.
I wonder if there is a market for a totally private e-commerce site.... www.privateshopping.com or something. Allow you to buy "questionable" items of all sorts with a guarantee that they will store none of your personal info. Could be an interesting business model.
But for Yahoo!, I can't imagine what they were thinking. I understand from a recent business week article that their new focus is on the corporate enterprise. I can't imagine that the CIO will be impressed by the feature of "access to Yahoo! Porn" when Yahoo! is making a sales pitch. The loss in corporate customers and advertising would have to outweigh the revenue from porn, unless yahoo is going exclusively porn. 8-)
Nope, the 2,000+ days-up is true. You're confused by the date at the top, which is the release date of the current version of the kernel. So, this server was running a 8/9/1991 version of Netware 3.11.
This server was at a major midwestern bank that a friend of mine was the Novell sales engineer for. He said on our internal newsgroup that they were so proud of this server not going down that when they needed to move the server from one building to another, they moved it while powered on connected to the UPS.
Granted, a screenshot like this would be extremely easy to fabricate, but I have high confidence that this shot is real.
Slashdot Mirror
as i said, they are creating files and manipulating the registry, there is always potential for damage. For example, they could make a simply typo, or the virus itself could contain "black ice" that detects if someone is trying to delete it and causes more damage.
and they are forcing the fix on people, in that the people running their fix are not opting into it in any way.
read the other posts in this thread about "code green" which faced similar issues. I think the liability risk is very real.
And if it's personal liability you're concerned with, why complain? They're only jeopardizing themselves, not you.
if we're only allowed to make comments on slashdot about things which personally affect us, it's going to be a pretty barren place.
I think the real issue is legal liability. Quality Assurance is hard enough for big companies with established testing departments. There is no way that they people involved in writing the Fizzer uninstaller could test even a small percentage of existing configurations out in-the-wild.
So, there is a real risk that the fizzer uninstaller might actually damage computers or delete data. When you're messing with files and registries on someone's hard drive, anything can happen. One small typo in the script, or one weird configuration that you didn't predict, and someone's hard drive could be toast and they will be looking for you.
While the writers of fizzer might be hard to find, the writers of the fizzer uninstaller are likely named security professionals that are easy to locate. So they are taking a huge risk of a lawsuit if anything goes wrong with the uninstaller.
I wouldn't do what they have done. The personal liability is far too great.
Another thing that Linux folks should remember, but most of them couldn't spell Linux at the time
:)
:)
Insulting your audience on the first line is rarely a good way to get your point across.
Your history is a bit revisionist. Corsair never saw the light of day in any usable form. Corsair was heavily dependent on OpenDoc, making it a dubious "revolutionary" technology. And Frankenberg killed Corsair, thus helping launch Caldera with some of the cut team members, so it's a bit too much "spin" for me to claim that Novell was somehow responsible for Caldera's success by firing people.
You say in one bullet that Caldera was the first serious commercial linux, and in the next bullet talk about Red Hat preceding them. By the time I played with Caldera 1.0, Red Hat was pretty well established. Red Hat shipped their first version in '94, Caldera formed in '94 and didn't ship until some time after.
eDirectory for Linux has been around for a while, I'll give you that, and Novell has a long (and sad) history with *nix. I'm not sure that the history of Novell and *nix is something to be proud of, however. That would be like talking about how qualified Novell is to contribute to the future of word-processors.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Novell is giving NetWare a future using Linux, not giving Linux a future using NetWare.
Along the way, they will probably contribute some useful code and leverage towards Linux adoption in the mainstream. So yes, it sounds like a win/win for both sides assuming Novell commits actual resources to the issue and it isn't just a press release. As I said in a different post, this will be the 2nd time Novell has announced the porting of all of NetWare's services to *nix, so we'll see.
I worked for Novell until about a year ago, and I have to agree with a previous poster who said that this strategy was all about customer retention. Show customers a direction towards Linux, a little bit of open source, and toss in some buzzwords and customers might keep their license agreement. It's a good strategy financially and not unlike what Microsoft has done in that arena.
Netware's list price is over $100 a seat. Even if MySQL, Apache, and anything else ported over worked perfectly, no one is going to buy a linux-based Netware as a linux replacement. eDirectory runs about $2 a seat list and has been running on Linux for a long time. The announcement of a free UDDI server is nice, but I don't see long term how Novell will get a piece of anything in the Web Services space with that. It's more of a developer tool, and Novell isn't a developer tools company, they make money selling to big corporations. Yes, they recently acquired an app-server company, but that's an ever worse competitive mess than the LAN arena.
I think Novell's main problem is too many products. There are still just as many products at Novell as there were two years ago, but there are probably half the engineering staff to maintain them. Products like iChain and DirXML are incomprehensible to most people, and too narrow in scope and low in sales when most of their competition are rolling their products up into big do-all authentication suites. Also, there haven't been installation or adminstration console standards at Novell for years and years, so getting two different products from different groups running is quite a challenge.
While I'm a little bitter over some of the specifics of my departure, I think overall Novell has good people and still has a large user base. It's hard to turn a big boat like Novell towards new technology when the old stuff is still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Hopefully this won't end up like the two previous major efforts towards *nix, the first being the purchase of AT&T Unix and the "SuperNOS" strategy and the second being a major alliance with Red Hat that never really went anywhere.
Good luck, guys!
Well that was a refreshingly content-free article, allow me to summarize:
Sun: Windows is better at whatever Liberty/Passport does
Novell: Maybe in the home market, but we do whatever Liberty/Passport does much better in the Enterprise!
Netegrity: Maybe Microsoft does whatever Liberty/Passport does better on Windows, but the true value is doing that cross-platform and cross-domain!
I still don't see how any of this is more than a niche market. Yes, there is a need in large enterprises for single sign-on, but that's largely a Fortune 100 issue, so no huge market there. For smaller companies, it's far cheaper to staff a helpdesk than it is to do an enterprise single-sign-on implementation. Yes, home-users have to manage a lot of userids and passwords too, but integrated browser password functions cover the 90% of people who don't move from their base computer. So for the home as well it's a niche function.
The only value I see is the value of Microsoft or AOL with extending their MSN or AOL login to new functions and thereby making it more "sticky", giving users an effective barrier to leaving their service. To me, that's really all this posturing is about.
Also, I fail to see why my cell-phone and my SSH session need to share a password.
P.S. Justin Taylor is a big geek. 8-)
thanks!
I'm not sure where the "can't get source" comment in the title came from. I clicked through to the announcement, read both stories, and even translated the german text, and nothing in there said they terminated the agreement due to inability to get the source.
...it's one of those things you can guage how truly american a person is...
Score points for:
1. They only speak english.
2. They assume watching the Japanese equivalent of Powerpuff Girls when they are pushing 40 is "cool" and "alternative".
3. Two words: Morbidly Obese (score triple points if they say they are on a low-carb diet)
4. They assume that a person who admits to watching anime is geeky when statistically it is much more likely that they are japanese.
8-) 8-) 8-)
I doubt this guy was rich enough to start his own Blue LED research lab, which I am sure cost millions and millions of dollars.
If he wants to own his own patents, I'm sure there is no law in japan stopping him from quitting and starting his own lab with his own money.
This is just crazy to me. The guy is a RESEARCHER working for a COMPANY and people think that he should have a right to the PATENTS on things that he researched and invented ON THE JOB?
This is as bad as the MP3 whiners. Want free music? Make some, and give it away. Problem solved.
He says:
This is his explanation for why his sales are down, which I think is BS. Play was truly a fresh approach to music. Reviewers slobbered over it and there was a huge buzz about it. 18 has mixed reviews and is largely just a sequel to play. To me, this explains why his sales are down without having to resort to blaming people sharing the songs. Occam's razor.
And that's what he delivered. A good album that is highly derivative of Play. It isn't a bad album at all, and I'm sure it will sell well. I like it a lot. But Play was revolutionary. But Moby is, by his own admission, an egotistical prick. It's easier to blame downloaders and copiers than it is to admit that he will probably never, ever, have a record as popular as Play ever again.
The pessimist position here is that Wal-Mart knows full well that 99% of consumers will immediately get their smart uncle Bob to come over, reformat the hard drive, and install a version of Windows. So, the installation of Mandrake is just a ploy to make their PC's cheaper than their competition and get sales.
I'm not saying that Mandrake isn't good, or that Linux isn't fun to run. I'm just saying that the average consumer is going to be upset when they find that they can't run Microsoft Word or Quicken.
- Twid
Novell, where I worked until recently, has a product called iFolder that works well for this. Basically, it provides a client that can copy from the client to the server in a lazy fashion whenever the client is attached to the internet (not just the office net)... it uses RSA encryption and has passphrase, key recovery, conflict resolution, all kindza good stuff. The client policies are all server controlled.
h tm l
The server runs on Linux (Red Hat only, officially), Windows, and NetWare. Client is Windows only. Specs here:
http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/sysreqs.
Unfortunately, the price is idiotic. $50 a seat. You get a stripped down version free with NetWare 6, but it doesn't have the features you need to make it work well. Novell has had bad pricing for years, probably because the same product managers who made the dumb pricing decisions before are still there.
But, if the price drops you might want to check it out, it's a great solution for roaming users with laptops.
I've also used Second Copy from Centered http://www.centered.com/ . It's pretty good stuff. Allows you to set a backup policy for copying stuff up to a server. My biggest complaint, which may be fixed now, is that there didn't seem to be an easy way to do an automated roll out of the client. But, you just set the copy policy, set it to copy to a mapped drive, and let it go. More configuration setting than you could imagine, although it does require you to have a drive mapping and not a simple IP connection like iFolder.
I just got a new Athlon 1800+ CPU with an ABIT KG7-RAID motherboard. It had a thermisistor for the CPU with good default settings, and it has a CPU FAN RPM detector. In the BIOS you can turn on a feature to shut the system down if the CPU fan fails, and you can also set alarms for CPU temp.
So, given that, I'd rather have the better performing and cheaper Athlon system. The risk seems minimal and by the time time you pay slightly more for the Intel CPU, the Intel mobo, and the Intel Rambus RAM, you're paying a lot more. My personal opinion.
- Twid
Typing "computer recycling" in google led me on the FIRST LINK to:
The national directory of computer recycling programs
Scrolling down, I found the second link:
The computer recycling center
You can take it from there....
When I was on this story earlier today:
m ent-crime-poundstone-dc I got a really annoying DHTML ad for Jurassic Park that scrolled with the page. It appears to be random, so you may not get it.
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010702/17/entertain
I agree with the other person that posted about "escalation". These sites need revenue, and they will get as annoying as they need to. They have to keep their companies alive. In the words of Dilbert, they will sell our organs for money if they thought they could get away with it.
- Twid
ENCOUNTER 2001 IS PEOPLE!
- Todd
P.S. The lameness filter thinks that my message has too much all-caps. So, please disregard this lowercase text. 8-)
It depends on the test. Mensa requires that you score 98th percentile or better on a standardized intelligence test. There are many different tests that they accept. Ten years ago when I took the tests, I know that included the Cattel Test and the California Test of Mental Maturity. I took both, and interestingly enough got the exact same percentile even though the tests are quite different. Many tests have different scales, so the number doesn't really count. 180 is quite high on some scales, such as this one where 131 will put you at the 98th percentile.
So, IQ is really just a number for braggarts to toss around, it's the percentile that counts, if that counts at all. I used to be in Mensa, but I never quite understood what they were all about. It was a little bit social club, a little bit of pimping for the idea of intelligence tests, and a lot of people with big egos. In some ways it was OK, but I'd rather hang out with intelligent people who aren't getting together just because they're intelligent, so I'll take a user group or some other fun gathering over a Mensa meeting any day.
But I suppose I'll get flamed now for trying to act cool by saying "I could be in Mensa, but I'm not". I just hope it's a good flame and not a boring goatse.cx link. 8-)
If you could pay for this pay phone call with your WAP phone! Just like the soda machines that are already in europe.
Think about the convenience, no more fishing for change!
- Todd
P.S. 8-)
Where I work, we have the whole building in San Jose set up for wireless. The way we approach security is that the wireless network is on the public internet outside the internal firewall (not on the DMZ, the wireless are completely outside).
So, in order to get to internal data while on wireless you must start up a VPN client or go through our portal. This isn't a perfect solution, people still get free bandwidth if they want, but at least they can't get to internal data.
Also, we have most of the wireless access points in public conference rooms, and a couple of them have been stolen!
- Twid
Interesting, I assumed digital cable was prevalent now since it's all I can get where I'm at (San Jose) and where I was (Columbus, Ohio)...
But you're right, it hasn't penetrated yet, here's an article on the subject.
To clarify your "solution" point though, AFAIK with digital cable all channels are scrambled, so you couldn't record two channels at once under any circumstances.
- Twid
> Whaddyagonnado?
But a TIVO. I'm surprised anyone would say that ultimate TV is better than Tivo. The only angle microsoft has on Tivo is the fact that it can record two shows at the same time, theoretically. (In actuality, 99% of users wouldn't be able to use this feature, since they have only one cable decoder box. Since most cable is moving to digital cable where all channels are scrambled, you can only tune to one channel at a time through the ultimate TV box.) (By the way, isn't their ad campaign the WORST?)
I have a sixty hour phillips Tivo and I'm very happy with it. I just got the 2.0 software downloaded and they have made many improvements. Tivo even hosts a open forum where they host a "hacking Tivo" board. And it runs Linux. You should be ashamed, hacker, for even considering an evil MSFT device.
To be fair though, there are some problems with Tivo's, too. Some people with old Tivo's are having stuttering problems with the new 2.0 software.
- Twid
I just went to the site, fed in my cc#, and looked around. Some initial thoughts.
Yahoo! appears to assign an "i can view porn" cookie. Seems a little troubling from a privacy standpoint. It may be just a separate cookie for their video story, but I definitely have a new Yahoo! cookie with the text "video" and a bunch of other data in it.
It does appear to be secure, in that I have to be signed in to Yahoo! and have produced a CC# before I can view the story. If I sign out, I can't get to the story without signing back in. So, as long as you sign out properly, your kids won't be browsing the store.
It's pretty explicit. There are large front and back pics of many dvd's, and they aren't censored.
The selection is pretty slim. If you go to "leather & latex" for example, there are only a few selections. The webmonkeys doing the categorization appear to have had a lot of fun. For example, the movie "recipe for sex" is under the category "Adult&Erotica/Hardcore/Plot-based/Really cooking". 8-)
There appears to be no additional guarantee of privacy in the adult section. This is horrible to Yahoo!'s potential business, in my opinion. I assume that Yahoo! sells my purchase patterns, click patterns, etc... to all takers, and I would NEVER buy porn from Yahoo!, Amazon, or any on-line store that didn't guarantee privacy. I rather go to Fry's and pay cash, thank you.
I wonder if there is a market for a totally private e-commerce site.... www.privateshopping.com or something. Allow you to buy "questionable" items of all sorts with a guarantee that they will store none of your personal info. Could be an interesting business model.
But for Yahoo!, I can't imagine what they were thinking. I understand from a recent business week article that their new focus is on the corporate enterprise. I can't imagine that the CIO will be impressed by the feature of "access to Yahoo! Porn" when Yahoo! is making a sales pitch. The loss in corporate customers and advertising would have to outweigh the revenue from porn, unless yahoo is going exclusively porn. 8-)
- Twid
Nope, the 2,000+ days-up is true. You're confused by the date at the top, which is the release date of the current version of the kernel. So, this server was running a 8/9/1991 version of Netware 3.11.
This server was at a major midwestern bank that a friend of mine was the Novell sales engineer for. He said on our internal newsgroup that they were so proud of this server not going down that when they needed to move the server from one building to another, they moved it while powered on connected to the UPS.
Granted, a screenshot like this would be extremely easy to fabricate, but I have high confidence that this shot is real.