It depends on your meaning by "salesmen", but in many cases in the modern enterprise ("account executives"), they're basically glorified customer support positions that get paid for retaining the customer and the ability to upsell. Same thing you get when you call the support line, except an account executive has a handful of customers to whom he is dedicated.
If you're talking about sales that functions primarily as new customer intake and has no long-lasting relationship with the clients, like door-to-door sales, I can see a better argument for that going obsolete.
Is there an easy way for me to decrypt what password Gawker had for me? I was unable to login with my account for over a year, but I'd like to see what password they have on file for me so I know whether I need to change it elsewhere.
I realize asking this also is asking for an instruction manual for malice with whatever is decrypted. I just don't know how to determine how exposed my email address leaves me.
If you have the database dump from Gawker, you can search for either your associated Email address, or the username they had on record. Extract that line from the file, put it in a new text file and run John The Ripper[1] on it: "./john mypassword.txt". On consumer hardware, it may take a while, but you'll eventually get it. My 2 year old 2.00GHz iMac took about 36 hours to crack my password.
If you'd like, email me and I can try to retrieve your password hash based on your email address. My email is in my profile.
I'm sure a lot of people asked the same question when competitors to Netscape hit the scene, and look at how much they've changed in that time.
I've only read a little about RockMelt, but it's not clear to me why they didn't develop this as an extension ... aside from perhaps being able to claim the search revenue.
Part of the reason that Cassandra may be the focus is that Kevin Rose places much of the stability problems on Cassandra's shoulders. Two or three minutes into the most recent diggnation he talks about Cassandra and describes Cassandra as "very beta-stage software" and says how days before the launch at least some of their focus was on fixing "Cassandra problems" rather than issues with Digg v4.
If true, it's a lame excuse: blame should be placed on the people that decided to use the beta software to power their very-important-to-their-paycheck website
