Slashdot Mirror
An Interview with 180 Solutions
Paperghost writes "Here's a great interview between Jimmy Daniels and an anonymous ex-employee of 180 Solutions, who portrays the company as being somewhere between turmoil and meltdown. There's so many notable quotables it's scary, but here's one that really sets the tone:
'Shutting down these rogue distributors turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected though. When you lose them, your daily installs go down drastically and the revenue goes to hell. The layoff in September could be laid directly at the feet of this effort.'"
By far the worst thing about slashdot editors--worse than the dupes, the typos, the mischaracterizations--is their apparent inability to write headlines and summaries that mean a damn thing to readers who don't already know every bit of obscure trivia about what's being discussed. I'm longstanding geek, I read slashdot more or less daily; I'm smack in the middle of the target audience. And yet, at least once a week I see a "summary" that's completely incomprehensible gibberish to me.
One has to wonder why, if the editors submit writeups that are meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know exactly what's being said, they bother writing anything at all.
"Who sets up Vmware as a permanent use type of solution like this?"
I do. I run a few public access computer centres, and this is the only way to keep them intact. The computers run Ubuntu by default, but if someone absolutely positively needs Windows (e.g. Teaching a class about Word), they run XP in a VM, which reverts to its initial state the moment it's powered off. Thank heavens for snapshots!
In public access situations, I really do have an 'infinite number of monkeys' at the keyboards, and this is the best way I've found to guarantee that things never break.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
> How can they have so many "rouge distributors" and not notice?
You'd think having so many "rouge distributors" would cause a lot of red faces.
Look at this Wikipedia revision, creating an article on a 180 Solutions product. Look at the history tab, and you will note this revision was done by the IP address 206.169.156.2. The IP address corresponds with 180 SOLUTIONS HOOKED-2 when looked up in the American Registry for Internet Numbers.
The article was changed to give it a more neutral tone many times, but in all cases the IP address tried to revert to the original version. The article in its current form is located here, but with a sign that says that everything in this article but not be accurate, nor true. The IP address range for 180 Solutions is 206.169.156.0 - 206.169.156.255. See this American Registry for Internet Numbers entry for 180 Solution's physical address. The city can be confirmed by Wikipedia itself.
This was done in June 2005, around the same time the U.S. Congress staffers began editing Wikipedia, coincidentally. Again, using Wikipedia as a source, this company has less than 250 employees. Because this IP address came from the company, what are the odds that the editor created that article about that "instant messaging service" for love of the company alone? It reads like an advertisement.
They used Wikipedia to market their filth, and spyware company or not, that's something I'll always hold in contempt. (mod up)