Let's assume that somebody is sitting outside of my apartment with all of this wireless hijacking configured, and we'll further assume that I've got all of the exact configurations required for my machine to be vulnerable. One would presume that this person is after the data in my machine, or wants to cause problems for me. Why else would they be trying to break in and gain root access? (btw, don't I need to have enabled the root account for this person to get root access, since root is not enabled on OS X by default?)
I might be going out on a limb here, but I would venture to say that there's a much bigger threat because the dude could just kick my door down and take my entire computer away with him. Then he can have all my data, and all of my applications, and my hardware too. Meanwhile, some other loser nerd is still mucking around trying to get this "hack" to work, but the guy who jacked me is walking away with my machine.
I understand this security issue is a threat and all, but I just don't see why anyone should be overly concerned. People seem to come up with scary stories like this about all kinds of things, hyping the facts up to make it seem like everyone who owns a Mac today is going to have a nerd take over their machine and steal all of their stuff. It reminds me of the pains people will go to in order to "secure" their machines, but then do something completely insecure like walk away from their desk for 10 minutes without password-protecting their machine.
and don't forget that after you've donated that stuff, get a receipt saying you donated "printer, monitor, etc.". I used to think it was a waste of time, but at the end of the year you can claim that you donated $500 in computer hardware, and that can be a tax deduction. You'll still donate the same stuff, but at the end of the year you'll give less money to the government (whether that's good or bad is debatable... I happen to enjoy not giving away so much of money to the IRS, ymmv).
Obviously, it would be shitty to pay more for something we already know and love (or you might have email for free, in which case paying anything would stink). But here's what I like about it. They could set it up in some kind of tiered system, kinda like cell phone usage plans, where it's pretty cheap if you stay within your expected usage, but totally unreasonably expensive if you go over. So maybe you pay one penny per email sent during the month, with a cap of 500 emails sent (I'm just throwing that number out there, because it seems like a huge number for an individual). If you go over 500 emails, you pay $1 per email. You could then regulate email traffic and collect taxes at the ISP level, since they're the ones who own and control the smtp servers.
Yes, there would be implementation issues and privacy concerns, problems, etc., but if this were in place I can't help but think it would make a positive difference. And before I get slammed by everyone, I realize there are all kinds of problems with legislating spam behavior in this country. The most obvious of which is the spammer's ability to simply relocate their operation outside the U.S. border where U.S. laws will have a much more difficult time taking effect.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to invent the solution in this post, so don't take it like I'm defending the silver bullet to the problem of spamming, or go on a crusade to prove why I'm wrong. I just think this is an interesting idea. There are problems with every other spam prevention idea, evidenced by the continued (and growing) presence of spam for the majority of people (ie, not just computer geeks; spam reduction has to work for people like our grandparents and non-nerdy friends, and it will have to be transparent for it to work).
I think the email tax seems like one of the least shitty solutions out there. Anyone else have other, not-so-shitty solutions to spam?
The final match result is a 2.0 - 2.0 draw, proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived.
So let me get this straight, there's one guy out there who wasn't totally creamed by this computer, and even though that very same computer would totally annihilate any other opponent on the chess board, that means "the day of the machines has not arrived"? What? So when Gary Kasparov is dead, and that same computer is able to destroy every other human opponent, I guess everyone will say, "the machines have now arrived!"
Obviously, there's another level that computerized chess systems have yet to attain; that is, totally obliterating all human opponents, all the time, which would include Gary Kasparov. But I don't think it's fair to make a comment like "the machines have not arrived", because they have arrived, and they're doing very damn well against almost every human on the planet.
Using the iPod for Mac on a PC, or using the iPod for Windows on a Mac, is not supported by Apple
This point needs to be emphasid a lot, because it is the key issue here. As far as I know, Apple has had this policy for all iPods since day one. So who's to blame, Apple for saying "use a Mac iPod on a Mac, and use a PC iPod on a PC", or the user who didn't listen and did what he wanted? Yes, it stinks that some people used to do this without problems, and now they're not so lucky. But the bottom line is that nobody should ever have used a Mac iPod on a PC in the first place.
more reviews
on
The Scar
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here's the amazon link which provides a bunch of formal reviews as well as the usual customer reviews.
Look at the rest of society, outside of the context of computing.
If I have a knife and I leave it on a table, and a neighborhood kid comes over and stabs himself in the head, I'll probably get sued (and lose) even though I didn't do the stabbing.
If I leave the keys to my car and somebody steals it, drives all over town and runs over a group of teenagers, I'll probably get sued as being somewhat responsible because I provided the car (indirectly).
If I'm a parent with a house full of handguns, and my child finds one and blows his sister's head off, I'll probably end up in jail even though I didn't pull the trigger.
I can't think of too many examples where our society wouldn't sue the hell out of anyone, even if you're just a by-stander, when something goes wrong. Whether or not that's "right" or "the way things should be", it certainly is. So why should it be any different if my computer is used to do something malicious or damaging? I say stick with the established precedent and blame the computer owner, even if he had nothing to do with the crime. It might not be fair, but at least it would be consistent. We don't live in a society of fairness anyway, we live in a society of blame and accusation.
If Huminity can beat the performance (or lack of it) for services like Friendster, I'd give it my vote. I think I have 14 people in my "friends" list on Friendster, and a Personal Network of nearly 400,000, and it is almost entirely impossible to do just about anything within the service. Sometimes, I can't even login without a browser timeout. Huminity might be able to do really well if they can get decent performance, or even just perceived performance through the use of caching tricks, saved data, etc.
We're still stuck with old school pixels here in the U.S., but according to the article, the Zaurus will have a 640x480 pixil display. Isn't that similar to a pixel, but, like, cooler and stuff?
Microsoft: "We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better."
millions of people: "Ah, but there are millions of us here, and we all use open source solutions because they're better, cheaper, faster, more secure, and easier to maintain."
Microsoft: "What's that? You say that open source is better?"
millions of people: "Yes"
Microsoft: "Right! Then we're not going to talk to you. Now, as we were saying, we haven't talked to a single user..."
or maybe it was the other way around, and the pro-open source people didn't want to talk to Microsoft, because you know, why bother. And then Microsoft says "we haven't talked to a single user..."
I can clear this up. See, it was supposed to say "there are almost 60,000 copies of viruses in existence on people's machines".
I think they also got the number wrong, it's missing several 0's. It should be something like "six hundred mega-zillion", or some other gigantic number that I would write out if I knew how many 0's to add.
And he probably told his family that after he's done with the Star Wars trilogy theater version, he's gonna tackle the Lord of the Rings trilogy one-hour theater play, and then he'll do The Matrix trilogy one-hour version (this is where his slow-mo special effects stunt work will shine).
And then they probably kicked him and his computers straight out of the basement, "By God, we told you that you wouldn't live at home forever, no matter how much of a nerd you think you are! We found you an apartment and we'll pay the rent, just get out and take your caffeinated beverages with you!"
This seems like a good (and almost obvious) solution. Forget blocking a Hotmail account, block the entire computer from getting net access in the first place. I like it.
... you need XML in as many places as possible, all code written for.NET, and um, C#. And you definitely need Windows for security, because nothing else is secure, that's for sure! You also need to stay away from iTunes, which is like totally insecure. QuickTime is also not secure. Windows Media Player is like totally secure, dude. You also need to be sure you have a Passport account and use MSN on a daily basis, because those will increase your overall security. You must also take care to book all travel through Expedia, or you might sacrifice the security of your personal information!
In summary, keep giving us money, because all your security are belong to us.
I think it's interesting that he wasn't a Mac fan at all before this project. He says he chose it because it had better performance than everything else out there ("Ironically, they lost the gigahertz game," he said of Intel. "(The G5) is extremely faster than the Itanium II, hands down."), and was cheaper too (Dell and other manufacturers quoted prices between $10 and $12 million, vs. the $5.2 million or G5s).
What more do you need? Faster systems, cheaper total cost, and slick looking cases.
David Goldsmith, director of research for @stake, a security company that found four of the vulnerabilities, confirmed that Apple said it wasn't going to patch the flaws in earlier versions of the software.
I recently read about these "security problems" in 10.2.x found by @stake, and I find it amusing that the details were virtually left out of this current article.
The current set of vulnerabilities include a flaw in the operating system that causes applications to be installed that have insecure file permissions. Other vulnerabilities could allow a local or remote user to crash the system.
IMHO, this is being blown way out of proportion. I've never heard of @stake before, and it sounds like they're trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, possibly to make a name for themselves.
I read an article a few days ago (sorry, no link) about this security thing on 10.2.x. From that article, it said that one of the security issues is that some files have default filesystem privs open to "group" or "other", such that if you were to install something malicious it might have access to modify certain other pieces of your filesystem that should otherwise be read-only. This is pretty idiotic, I think, because if you're about to install something malicious, that's your fricking problem right there. Should this filesystem thing be fixed? Sure. Is this a serious "security issue"? I don't think so.
Two of the other vulnerabilities had to do with somebody sitting at your console typing in specific, malicious commands that would result in a kernel panic. Problem? Sure, this should probably be fixed. But I don't see how this is a "security issue". If somebody is sitting behind my machine with a terminal window open, I've got a lot more to be worried about (stealing files, deleting data, mucking up configurations) than whether he's about to type in some command to send my machine into kernel panic mode.
I don't see how any of this is worthy of the kind of media hype that we're seeing.
a) this move will greatly reduce software piracy, and b) we all know that Microsoft loses zillions of dollars per year software piracy
Does it follow that Microsoft will be supportive of Vietname moving to Open Source solutions?
Funny situation, because it puts Microsoft between a rock and a hard place - continue losing money in the conventional way (piracy), or lose money in a new way when the few paying customers stop buying MS products altogether. Sweet!
In addition to DNR officers using the fancy new high-technology portable odor detecting device called the "olfactometer", we've just learned that there is a cheaper, more convenient solution that's competing for market share in the fast-paced market of odor detecting devices. It's called a "nose".
I can't tell what the OS is, but sniffing the http response header (after sending a request for http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn) produced the following server info:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:23:43 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI' X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322 Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 24182
even worse than "kill your boss", what about a hacker sending you these terrible messages:
"Microsoft is good" "Bill is your friend and he loves you (really)" "Linux is no longer cool" "You need Office 2003 NOW" "All your glasses are belong to us"
I don't know a single technical person who is a) reasonably good at what he does, while b) being certified as such. Said another way, all of the people I know who have a clue about any specific technology are almost certainly not the people who hold any formal certifications in that area. By and large, I don't see much evidence that the technical community in general thinks too highly of certifications. Sure, some certifications can be difficult to achieve, and can be crafted in such a way as to filter out everyone but the experts. But creating such a test would be difficult to do, and it would take a lot of time to evolve (especially something so diverse and varied as 'Linux'). And even once you get there, you still have the problem that the technical folks don't value the certification anyway.
From what I hear in the questions posed in the original post, it sounds like there is a group of non-technical people who are searching for a way to bless some small subset of the technical crowd. I think it would be far wiser to hire some technical people to do this job for you. If you're still committed to building a certification process, get your technical people to do it for you. Posting on/. is a good step towards getting useful feedback, but I think the right step would be to source a few tech heads (full-time, contract, whatever) and task them with the problem.
This is exactly what Microsoft has proven itself to be good at - taking someone else's idea and trying to muscle their way onto the winner's podium. Whatever Microsoft releases as competition to the iTunes Music Store, it won't be product innovation at all. Instead, it will be a direct chicken-shit reaction to a great piece of work that has proven itself to be extremely popular.
I know there are lots of smart people working for the big Redmond giant, but it's kinda stunning how they seem to be the last ones to arrive again and again and again. I guess they should stop teaching classes on how to introduce buffer overruns into their code, and focus on coming up with some good ideas (ya ya, I know they've got a huge research division that's doing all kinds of cool stuff...)
forget about being dead, was it ever alive?
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not trying to troll here, but I've never taken Bluetooth seriously and I don't see that too many other consumers have either. The only people who seem to be excited about it are marketing and executive folks (and they seem to also be the few who are willing to spend the cash on Bluetooth-enabled gadgets). Sure, wireless connectivity is a neat idea in theory, but in practice it seems like the best characterization of Bluetooth is that it's simply unreliable. I could make similar comments about WAP devices/web phones as well.
I heard that there will be no toilet breaks, because it's all part of a contest. See, without toilet breaks, that will make it easier to distinguish who is really a hardcore LOTR fan and who is a poser. There will be judges monitoring the audience via hidden camera, and whoever earns the most points as a hardcore LOTR fan (dressing up in costume helps your score) will be awarded a full-size cardboard cutout of, umm, Gandalf. I am completely serious. Really.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume that somebody is sitting outside of my apartment with all of this wireless hijacking configured, and we'll further assume that I've got all of the exact configurations required for my machine to be vulnerable. One would presume that this person is after the data in my machine, or wants to cause problems for me. Why else would they be trying to break in and gain root access? (btw, don't I need to have enabled the root account for this person to get root access, since root is not enabled on OS X by default?)
I might be going out on a limb here, but I would venture to say that there's a much bigger threat because the dude could just kick my door down and take my entire computer away with him. Then he can have all my data, and all of my applications, and my hardware too. Meanwhile, some other loser nerd is still mucking around trying to get this "hack" to work, but the guy who jacked me is walking away with my machine.
I understand this security issue is a threat and all, but I just don't see why anyone should be overly concerned. People seem to come up with scary stories like this about all kinds of things, hyping the facts up to make it seem like everyone who owns a Mac today is going to have a nerd take over their machine and steal all of their stuff. It reminds me of the pains people will go to in order to "secure" their machines, but then do something completely insecure like walk away from their desk for 10 minutes without password-protecting their machine.
and don't forget that after you've donated that stuff, get a receipt saying you donated "printer, monitor, etc.". I used to think it was a waste of time, but at the end of the year you can claim that you donated $500 in computer hardware, and that can be a tax deduction. You'll still donate the same stuff, but at the end of the year you'll give less money to the government (whether that's good or bad is debatable... I happen to enjoy not giving away so much of money to the IRS, ymmv).
Obviously, it would be shitty to pay more for something we already know and love (or you might have email for free, in which case paying anything would stink). But here's what I like about it. They could set it up in some kind of tiered system, kinda like cell phone usage plans, where it's pretty cheap if you stay within your expected usage, but totally unreasonably expensive if you go over. So maybe you pay one penny per email sent during the month, with a cap of 500 emails sent (I'm just throwing that number out there, because it seems like a huge number for an individual). If you go over 500 emails, you pay $1 per email. You could then regulate email traffic and collect taxes at the ISP level, since they're the ones who own and control the smtp servers.
Yes, there would be implementation issues and privacy concerns, problems, etc., but if this were in place I can't help but think it would make a positive difference. And before I get slammed by everyone, I realize there are all kinds of problems with legislating spam behavior in this country. The most obvious of which is the spammer's ability to simply relocate their operation outside the U.S. border where U.S. laws will have a much more difficult time taking effect.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to invent the solution in this post, so don't take it like I'm defending the silver bullet to the problem of spamming, or go on a crusade to prove why I'm wrong. I just think this is an interesting idea. There are problems with every other spam prevention idea, evidenced by the continued (and growing) presence of spam for the majority of people (ie, not just computer geeks; spam reduction has to work for people like our grandparents and non-nerdy friends, and it will have to be transparent for it to work).
I think the email tax seems like one of the least shitty solutions out there. Anyone else have other, not-so-shitty solutions to spam?
The final match result is a 2.0 - 2.0 draw, proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived.
So let me get this straight, there's one guy out there who wasn't totally creamed by this computer, and even though that very same computer would totally annihilate any other opponent on the chess board, that means "the day of the machines has not arrived"? What? So when Gary Kasparov is dead, and that same computer is able to destroy every other human opponent, I guess everyone will say, "the machines have now arrived!"
Obviously, there's another level that computerized chess systems have yet to attain; that is, totally obliterating all human opponents, all the time, which would include Gary Kasparov. But I don't think it's fair to make a comment like "the machines have not arrived", because they have arrived, and they're doing very damn well against almost every human on the planet.
lemmee guess, www.tabletpctalk.com is hosted by IIS? regardless, the site is hugely sucking thanks to El Slashdot Effect.
Using the iPod for Mac on a PC, or using the iPod for Windows on a Mac, is not supported by Apple
This point needs to be emphasid a lot, because it is the key issue here. As far as I know, Apple has had this policy for all iPods since day one. So who's to blame, Apple for saying "use a Mac iPod on a Mac, and use a PC iPod on a PC", or the user who didn't listen and did what he wanted? Yes, it stinks that some people used to do this without problems, and now they're not so lucky. But the bottom line is that nobody should ever have used a Mac iPod on a PC in the first place.
Here's the amazon link which provides a bunch of formal reviews as well as the usual customer reviews.
Look at the rest of society, outside of the context of computing.
If I have a knife and I leave it on a table, and a neighborhood kid comes over and stabs himself in the head, I'll probably get sued (and lose) even though I didn't do the stabbing.
If I leave the keys to my car and somebody steals it, drives all over town and runs over a group of teenagers, I'll probably get sued as being somewhat responsible because I provided the car (indirectly).
If I'm a parent with a house full of handguns, and my child finds one and blows his sister's head off, I'll probably end up in jail even though I didn't pull the trigger.
I can't think of too many examples where our society wouldn't sue the hell out of anyone, even if you're just a by-stander, when something goes wrong. Whether or not that's "right" or "the way things should be", it certainly is. So why should it be any different if my computer is used to do something malicious or damaging? I say stick with the established precedent and blame the computer owner, even if he had nothing to do with the crime. It might not be fair, but at least it would be consistent. We don't live in a society of fairness anyway, we live in a society of blame and accusation.
If Huminity can beat the performance (or lack of it) for services like Friendster, I'd give it my vote. I think I have 14 people in my "friends" list on Friendster, and a Personal Network of nearly 400,000, and it is almost entirely impossible to do just about anything within the service. Sometimes, I can't even login without a browser timeout. Huminity might be able to do really well if they can get decent performance, or even just perceived performance through the use of caching tricks, saved data, etc.
We're still stuck with old school pixels here in the U.S., but according to the article, the Zaurus will have a 640x480 pixil display. Isn't that similar to a pixel, but, like, cooler and stuff?
Microsoft: "We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better."
millions of people: "Ah, but there are millions of us here, and we all use open source solutions because they're better, cheaper, faster, more secure, and easier to maintain."
Microsoft: "What's that? You say that open source is better?"
millions of people: "Yes"
Microsoft: "Right! Then we're not going to talk to you. Now, as we were saying, we haven't talked to a single user..."
or maybe it was the other way around, and the pro-open source people didn't want to talk to Microsoft, because you know, why bother. And then Microsoft says "we haven't talked to a single user..."
I can clear this up. See, it was supposed to say "there are almost 60,000 copies of viruses in existence on people's machines ".
I think they also got the number wrong, it's missing several 0's. It should be something like "six hundred mega-zillion", or some other gigantic number that I would write out if I knew how many 0's to add.
And he probably told his family that after he's done with the Star Wars trilogy theater version, he's gonna tackle the Lord of the Rings trilogy one-hour theater play, and then he'll do The Matrix trilogy one-hour version (this is where his slow-mo special effects stunt work will shine).
And then they probably kicked him and his computers straight out of the basement, "By God, we told you that you wouldn't live at home forever, no matter how much of a nerd you think you are! We found you an apartment and we'll pay the rent, just get out and take your caffeinated beverages with you!"
This seems like a good (and almost obvious) solution. Forget blocking a Hotmail account, block the entire computer from getting net access in the first place. I like it.
... you need XML in as many places as possible, all code written for .NET, and um, C#. And you definitely need Windows for security, because nothing else is secure, that's for sure! You also need to stay away from iTunes, which is like totally insecure. QuickTime is also not secure. Windows Media Player is like totally secure, dude. You also need to be sure you have a Passport account and use MSN on a daily basis, because those will increase your overall security. You must also take care to book all travel through Expedia, or you might sacrifice the security of your personal information!
In summary, keep giving us money, because all your security are belong to us.
I think it's interesting that he wasn't a Mac fan at all before this project. He says he chose it because it had better performance than everything else out there ("Ironically, they lost the gigahertz game," he said of Intel. "(The G5) is extremely faster than the Itanium II, hands down."), and was cheaper too (Dell and other manufacturers quoted prices between $10 and $12 million, vs. the $5.2 million or G5s).
What more do you need? Faster systems, cheaper total cost, and slick looking cases.
David Goldsmith, director of research for @stake, a security company that found four of the vulnerabilities, confirmed that Apple said it wasn't going to patch the flaws in earlier versions of the software.
I recently read about these "security problems" in 10.2.x found by @stake, and I find it amusing that the details were virtually left out of this current article.
The current set of vulnerabilities include a flaw in the operating system that causes applications to be installed that have insecure file permissions. Other vulnerabilities could allow a local or remote user to crash the system.
IMHO, this is being blown way out of proportion. I've never heard of @stake before, and it sounds like they're trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, possibly to make a name for themselves.
I read an article a few days ago (sorry, no link) about this security thing on 10.2.x. From that article, it said that one of the security issues is that some files have default filesystem privs open to "group" or "other", such that if you were to install something malicious it might have access to modify certain other pieces of your filesystem that should otherwise be read-only. This is pretty idiotic, I think, because if you're about to install something malicious, that's your fricking problem right there. Should this filesystem thing be fixed? Sure. Is this a serious "security issue"? I don't think so.
Two of the other vulnerabilities had to do with somebody sitting at your console typing in specific, malicious commands that would result in a kernel panic. Problem? Sure, this should probably be fixed. But I don't see how this is a "security issue". If somebody is sitting behind my machine with a terminal window open, I've got a lot more to be worried about (stealing files, deleting data, mucking up configurations) than whether he's about to type in some command to send my machine into kernel panic mode.
I don't see how any of this is worthy of the kind of media hype that we're seeing.
Given the following:
a) this move will greatly reduce software piracy, and
b) we all know that Microsoft loses zillions of dollars per year software piracy
Does it follow that Microsoft will be supportive of Vietname moving to Open Source solutions?
Funny situation, because it puts Microsoft between a rock and a hard place - continue losing money in the conventional way (piracy), or lose money in a new way when the few paying customers stop buying MS products altogether. Sweet!
In addition to DNR officers using the fancy new high-technology portable odor detecting device called the "olfactometer", we've just learned that there is a cheaper, more convenient solution that's competing for market share in the fast-paced market of odor detecting devices. It's called a "nose".
I can't tell what the OS is, but sniffing the http response header (after sending a request for http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn) produced the following server info:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:23:43 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI'
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 24182
btw, if anyone's interested, http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn does a silent redirect to http://207.46.196.115/longhorn, so that's the server info you need to check against, not msdn.microsoft.com.
even worse than "kill your boss", what about a hacker sending you these terrible messages:
"Microsoft is good"
"Bill is your friend and he loves you (really)"
"Linux is no longer cool"
"You need Office 2003 NOW"
"All your glasses are belong to us"
I don't know a single technical person who is a) reasonably good at what he does, while b) being certified as such. Said another way, all of the people I know who have a clue about any specific technology are almost certainly not the people who hold any formal certifications in that area. By and large, I don't see much evidence that the technical community in general thinks too highly of certifications. Sure, some certifications can be difficult to achieve, and can be crafted in such a way as to filter out everyone but the experts. But creating such a test would be difficult to do, and it would take a lot of time to evolve (especially something so diverse and varied as 'Linux'). And even once you get there, you still have the problem that the technical folks don't value the certification anyway.
/. is a good step towards getting useful feedback, but I think the right step would be to source a few tech heads (full-time, contract, whatever) and task them with the problem.
From what I hear in the questions posed in the original post, it sounds like there is a group of non-technical people who are searching for a way to bless some small subset of the technical crowd. I think it would be far wiser to hire some technical people to do this job for you. If you're still committed to building a certification process, get your technical people to do it for you. Posting on
This is exactly what Microsoft has proven itself to be good at - taking someone else's idea and trying to muscle their way onto the winner's podium. Whatever Microsoft releases as competition to the iTunes Music Store, it won't be product innovation at all. Instead, it will be a direct chicken-shit reaction to a great piece of work that has proven itself to be extremely popular.
I know there are lots of smart people working for the big Redmond giant, but it's kinda stunning how they seem to be the last ones to arrive again and again and again. I guess they should stop teaching classes on how to introduce buffer overruns into their code, and focus on coming up with some good ideas (ya ya, I know they've got a huge research division that's doing all kinds of cool stuff...)
I'm not trying to troll here, but I've never taken Bluetooth seriously and I don't see that too many other consumers have either. The only people who seem to be excited about it are marketing and executive folks (and they seem to also be the few who are willing to spend the cash on Bluetooth-enabled gadgets). Sure, wireless connectivity is a neat idea in theory, but in practice it seems like the best characterization of Bluetooth is that it's simply unreliable. I could make similar comments about WAP devices/web phones as well.
I heard that there will be no toilet breaks, because it's all part of a contest. See, without toilet breaks, that will make it easier to distinguish who is really a hardcore LOTR fan and who is a poser. There will be judges monitoring the audience via hidden camera, and whoever earns the most points as a hardcore LOTR fan (dressing up in costume helps your score) will be awarded a full-size cardboard cutout of, umm, Gandalf. I am completely serious. Really.