BY PAUL ROLICH

I recently spoke with a CIO friend of mine. He was gnashing histeeth and pulling his hair, so I knew things werent going well. Iasked him what his problem was, and he explained he needed to layoff or restructure a large chunk of his staff and was agonizingover the decisions he had to make. It seems he wasnt making hisnumbers, and some of his staff was to be right-sized. I suggestedthat perhaps he could save his staff by admitting his departmentsimply was mismanaged and that he should be transitioned. He didntseem to think that was a viable option, so I suggested that perhapsthe goals actually were unreachable and that his boss may beinterested in pursuing other interests. Maybe it was a case of himjust being unable to interface well with his employer. This was allstarting to sound like a strategic misrepresentation to me, sobefore the whole thing turned into a pile of recycled data, Isuggested my friend brush up on his technical skills just in casehe ever needed to do anything other than PowerPoint. Thus, thelatest edition of our little quiz.|

1. What are the top-rated insurance Web sites(as reported by www.infofaq.com)?

If youre interested, check them out:
www.libertymutual.com
www.thehartford.com
www.aig.com
http://statefarm.com
www.allstate.com

2. What was the first microprocessor to beshipped in a 1 gigahertz version?

The Athlon from AMD. It was the successor to the AMD K6.

3. And what then is a gigahertz?

A frequency of one billion cycles per second.

4. OK, Smartywhat is a teraflop?

A measure of supercomputer speed equivalent to 10 to the powerof 12 floating point operations per second. (That is a trillion forus North Americans.)

5. Speaking of teraflops, what is the mostpowerful (fastest) supercomputer these days?

The Earth Simulator (ES), which is a proj- ect of Japaneseagencies NASDA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC to develop a 40 TFLOPS systemfor climate modeling.

6. Why would you delete a file namedjdbgmgr.exe from the desktop computers in your organization?|

Because you are an idiot. This file is named in a very popularvirus hoax referred to as the JDBGMGR hoax. The hoax instructs youto delete this file immediately. Some versions of this hoax takeadvantage ofan actual threat, the W32.bugbear@mm worm. Thejdbgmgr.exe file mentioned in the hoax has a bear icon. The actualW32.bugbear@mm worm file does not have a bear icon. Maybe youshould consider downsizing yourself.

7. Explain the difference between NetBUI andNetBIOS.

NetBEUI is an acronym for NetBIOS Extended User Interface, thetransport protocol of Microsoft Networking. NetBEUI isnt a routablenetwork, so its popularity is declining in comparison with TCP/IP.NetBIOS is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System, theoriginal network API for MS-DOS and the foundation for NetBEUI. Oneis a transport protocol (NetBUI), and one is an API (NetBIOS).

8. Describe three interesting things aboutGNU?

It is a recursive acronym (GNUs not Unix)which raises anotherquestion: Is PHP a recursive acronym or merelyself-referential?
Its free! The project is provided by the Free Software Foundation(FSF).
The G in GNU is pronounced, unlike the animal with the same name.Gnus do not have soft palettes and thus cannot pronounce the hardG.

9. What do the computer mouse, windows, icons,and LANs have in common?

They were all invented at PARCthe Xerox Palo Alto ResearchCenter.

10. So, why did Xerox fail to capitalize on allthese inventions (there were lots of others)?

Maybe senior management should have decided to spend more timewith their families.