Misc. Ramblings

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, asked VeriSign to "voluntarily suspend the service and participate in the various review processes now underway." The "service" in question is the redirection of requests to domains that do not exist to VeriSign's own servers.

Said servers give you other possible spellings for the domain you were looking for as well as links by categories. There is also a "Search the Web" box.

The polite response from VeriSign was to say they will continue to do what they want but are willing to take a meeting to discuss things. The English translation of VeriSign's corporate speak is "Bugger off."

Note the privacy policy of the page states:

We use third-party companies to serve paid and unpaid search results and other content to our Site Finder. In the course of serving these results, these companies may place or recognize a cookie on your browser, and may use information (not including your name, address, e-mail address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other web sites in order to serve content to our site, improve the services offered on our site, or measure advertising effectiveness of paid search results. For more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having your information used by these companies, please visit http://www.content.overture.com/d/Usm/about/company/privacypolicy.jhtml.

See the ICAAN site here for the request and VeriSign's response.

The Power of 1,000 Monkeys. Over at Virginia Tech, they're creating a 1,100 PowerMac G5 cluster "super computer." I'm not sure using Apple computers is the most cost efficient way of doing it but I guess they think so. Take a look at the site here.

Speaking of Monkeys. Our IT folks switched over to Netware 6.x while I was on vacation (without letting me know, of course). Unfortunately, this broke the MS Client Service for Netware that we had been using since the MS client was faster and more stable than the Netware offering (Yes, I know, hard to believe but I think this reflects how bad the Netware client is more than how good the MS one is).

I searched the MS website to see if there was anything on this. But, in doing a search on "Netware 6" or "Netware 6.x" it did not bring up any Knowledge Base articles at all. Strange. Surely there must be something, unless our IT people are doing something to lock out all clients except the Novell one so that they can "manage" our PCs.

If so, with due respect to our fine IT folks, we do not want, nor do we need them to manage our PCs. We do very well without their "support". We had anti-virus software and firewalls running on our PCs years before IT got around to even thinking about such things. We were running MS Office years before IT got around to recommending it over WordPerfect. We began running Windows 2000/XP years before our IT had a copy to try out. We advocated for joining the 20th century, before the 21st was over, by installing Ethernet instead of the over-priced, proprietary, and difficult to get IBM Token-Ring NICs.

In other words, we don't need no steekin' IT office miles away to tell us how to best do our work when they are so behind the times that they think IBM/Lotus Notes is a cost effective way to get e-mail.

To our IT, change is something you get when you buy something with cash. Otherwise, change is something to be avoided. And if you can't avoid it, contract a vendor to institute the change because they (IT) don't have the expertise to implement nor manage it.

If you ask me, doing business this way will lead to the logical conclusion of contracting out all of IT since they can't do anything useful now. Except maybe "manage" PCs.

Aloha!