What was that company that worked for Sierra that was shut down a year or so ago? Dynamix. It was even on Slashdot. They made Tribes, The Incredible Machine, Stellar 7, and a bunch others. I am pretty sure that they were in Portland, or NEAR Portland. Maybe I am on crack. If you are really interested... Google is your friend.
You bring up a really good issue -- that review sites are often whores of the industries themselves. If they do one bad article, they can count on never being able to get free stuff from that vendor to review again. The result is that game company review sites, and other similar review sites of any kind, need to be whores of the companies which products they review.
MaxCha and Fighting Legends did get a lot of really good reviews, and got some really bad reviews. Some of them were so bad that they were funny. Some were so good that it was sick. In the case of at least two reviews, I can definitely attest that an exchange occurred that increased the goodness of the review. Corruption and lack of ethics definitely exists in game review sites, but not all of them.
From what I can tell, the computer gaming industry is completely rife with stuff like this. "Hot seller" shelves are 100% bought, as are most other shelves in game stores and other stores (Wal-Mart is an apparent exception). Be noted that this is only my impressions from speaking with the people in marketing and impressions that I got. Take it with some salt.
Between May of 2001 and January of 2002, I worked for a company called Maximum Charisma Studios (MaxCha) out of Denver metro Colorado. They were a start up, made a game called Fighting Legends Online, released it, it sucked, and they went chapter 7.
MaxCha had 32 employees at it's height. About half of those people were the real producers of the company and the other half were the wanna-be-game-company-employee types who were barely doing anything, and mostly were assistants for the rest. We had a lot of interns who worked for free doing slave labor -- stuff like helping the marketing department, helping customer support, doing testing (playing the game for free and logging bugs).
MaxCha made major efforts to push it's game, giving away free shirts, stickers, mailing CDs to people all over, and even gave the game away for free with a rebate program, but nobody would buy it because it sucked. Those who did buy it took it back to the stores because it sucked. You can't get sales if your PC game sucks, no matter how hard you push it -- console publishing may be a little easier to build some hype with.
The lessons learned for me were invaluable, and I think it will be for the others who paid attention too.
In total, I heard that the company blew only just over 3 million across a period of about two to two and a half years, which is amazingly little for what was accomplished. I am proud to say that I was personally responsible for about one third of that because I provided all recommendations for production infrastructure for the online game -- collocation, servers, routers, switches, random equipment, $30K of RAM from memman.com (Thanks Jay), software, and services costs. Almost everything done (ALL sound development, ALL art, the box, programming, marketing, even distribution) was done in-house.
The story of MaxCha was that of a bunch of kids who grew up, wanted more out of their jobs than just being paid, got together, said, "Hey, let's start a game company!" And they all had their own idea of how it was going to go. The game ended up not having a design board because the founders all wanted their little idea to be the basis of the game. The result was that the game had no basis, no story, and play sucked. The code rocked, the back end infrastructure was excellent, our ability to scale up and support a massive customer base in short order was good, but the game was not fun.
No fun, no sales. Whoops.
I moved away from the Denver Metro area after the company went under. Denver/Boulder Colorado has a decent game company market, as does San Francisco California, Seattle Washington, Portland Oregon, and a few other random places. I even found that EA Sports has a sub company that makes sports games here in Orlando Florida.
It is really hard to get into the gaming business unless you have some contacts, start your own business, or luck out. In my case, I lucked out because I was not really into working for a game company. I was just looking for a way to get out of my old employer because they were about to tank.
The atmosphere at MaxCha was very loose on the downstairs, and business like on the upstairs. We had a two story building that was very small, but it was perfect because the CEO, marketing department, HR, and other 'stiff' managers worked upstairs as a nice pretty front. Downstairs was the art department, testing, the programmers, and others. There were times that people slept there over night, there was beer drinking on site, pot smoking outside at the park, and parties at houses every few weeks. The fridge downstairs had beer in it, someone had a pet dog running around, there were game consoles laying about, and people came and went as they pleased so long as they worked 40 hours a week and got the projects done. I personally would come in somewhere between 9:00am and 1:00pm, and work my eight to ten hours.
In a small company like this, individuals made all of the difference. Not firing do-nothings early was a mistake, and making up the work later was very difficult. Worse, the employee was socially entrenched and nobody wanted to be the bad person and do the duty to the company that was necessary. There were a few who fell into this category, but I was surprised that most of the people in MaxCha actually recognized that because they were a small business they themselves needed to take initiative on various things in the company and get the job done.
The failure of MaxCha as a game company was that the game released was no fun, and sales were nothing. The nail in the coffin was the fact that the game was an online interactive game that required expensive infrastructure. If it had been a stand alone title, they might have been able to put out a second game and get it right the second time.
Box art, packaging, manual, and physical product was great. The box looked good, felt good, and looked like it could be a good game. Code was really good. Graphics were a little heavy for what they were but that was because of the frame of the game -- players did not get to see all of the patches that added all of the stuff that was left out to make the release date.
The release date made two years prior was met, even if little things got cut off. That is apparently an incredible feat in the gaming industry.
IT infrastructure was good, which usually gets neglected in gaming companies. Everyone is a computer user and nobody wants to admit that they need one person to really support the internal and production network. They think they can throw up a Win2K server on the T1 and host all those gamers off of it. We got it right though.
Design at MaxCha was a mistake -- no real design staff. Furthermore, design is like a book. A team does not write a story, one person does. Giving away that authority was a problem that the founders did not want to do, and so they all tossed in their little features, but it turned out crappy. They did not trust one person enough to write the story, give the concept to the artists and content producers, and come up with the game design that ultimately made the game fun. The fun got left out.
Because design was bad, the artists did their best to come up with original good stuff, and they did. Programmers programmed well, did UI interaction testing, got the AI right, and documented code well. Marketing sold the game as being good for everybody and got the name out. But in the end, everyone did it their own way and nobody was responsible for bringing it all together.
Giving that ability and responsibility to the right single person can make a great game company, but it is hard to do that. This is why many game companies are self started.... and thats what I have to say.
I purchased one of the original Shuttle Spacewalker systems a little over a year ago.
The system does it's job, but I have a big issue with it -- noise. The thing has a CPU fan that runs hard and fast. Since the CPU fan must be low profile, you really do not have a choice in replacing it with something else. There is a fan in the back of the chassis that pushes air out, adding a little noise. And finally, the power supply is very noisy, and designed very badly. It pulls hot air into it from inside the case, and pushes hot air back inside the case -- there is no transient air.
Had I know about the noise issues with the Shuttle Spacewalker before I bought it, I would not have.
I do not know if any of the modern versions have fixed these problems, but I would be wary of it.
You are absolutely correct about bandwidth being very expensive.
In Denver Colorado I was very happy to pay $150 per month for a DMT PPP over ATM ADSL line at a 640Kbps downstream and 640Kbps upstream rate, along with a/29 IP allocation with reverse DNS configuration, and no port filtering.
Oversubscription is a necessary evil in order to profit for ISPs. Not everyone will be using 100% of their allocated bandwidth at any time. If they desire to do so, then they purchase a "dedicated" block of bandwidth. When you see the word dedicated, that means the dedication that there is the upstream bandwidth to feed your needs no matter the activities of other users on the network.
Here in Orlando, I have CRAZY internet connection. The ISP is a little dinky ISP/telco called Orlando Telephone Company. The apartment complex uses a Cisco Long Reach Ethernet (AKA VDSL pre standard) solution where I am getting 1.5Mbps both upstream and downstream almost all of the time. I am paying $55 a month. How can they possibly offer this kind of deal? They oversubscribe the systems. So far, I have not had any problems. I use Gnucleus over night to look for odd-ball files that I am looking for and schedule it to turn back off during normal day time hours. The only problem is that this is a bridged connection with DHCP allocations only. The only reason that the network access here is so good is because the network operators are idiots. I am sure that they will swing in the other direction sooner than later.
Some day oversubscription may be a problem. As long as I can profit, and the ISP can profit at the same time, then great. The unfortunate part is that most ISPs are planned so poorly that they have no idea what the breaking point of profit and user experience is and what the window size is. ISPs are really dumb.
Post this on Mojolin.com! Also, put out flyers at tech colleges within driving distance. Don't get lazy with your hiring. You can find someone bright who fits the bill if you try. Most companies give it minimal effort and end up with an employee who barely pulls their own weight -- forget about profits.
Be descriptive. Go ahead and talk about quirks. Eliminate people in person, not on your advertisement. Also, be courteous to those who you do not hire. Tell them that they don't have the job in the same medium that they have used to contact you, and be frank and respectful with them.
Actually, entry level does not seem to be doing all that bad. The reason for this is because of the cheap labor of course. The companies are hanging onto the good people and then will hire some manual labor (you) to assist them. So, things are not all bad. Just be willing to relocate out of your local area.
Good luck, don't give up. It will take you at least three months to find something, maybe six or more.
Wise words Sir. Thank you for the advice. I agree in regards of mutual respect of the employer and employee relationship necessary for successful business, but not all do. I would indeed take a lesser paying job if it was something that I would enjoy, was in a specific industry, or would provide me with something non monetary, but the hiring parties are just not offering any of that to people.
I feel that this is a huge failure of companies when they attempt to gain talent. There is always someone out there willing to work for less money and a little more of something less tangible, such as working in a specific industry (computer gaming), working in a diverse environment (lots of different equipment), or if they can make a carer specialization change.
It comes down to relationships with companies and employees. Some are good, some are bad, but you can't forget that it is all business and that at the end of the day you want to be fed.
Well, in your market, and for your type of work, if there are those numbers of people available and moving, then great for you!
However, metro areas are varied in how well they are doing. For example, Denver is saturated with telecom and ISP related people right now, and it is really hard for these people to find work in the same area. These are highly skilled people who are just in a bad market segment.
For myself, I am currently in the Orlando Florida marketplace looking for Unix (Gnu/Linux, BSD, Solaris) or Microsoft Systems Administration, or IP Network Engineering (Cisco, Juniper, Nortel) work. The local market is really bad. Companies here want very specific people and will not take anything else. Examples that I have come across lately are Japanese speaking, need to have extensive security industry experience for an entry level position, and three years experience with.Net Server RC1 (no joke!, a publisher called Harcourt).
If I was willing to go over to the Tampa or Miami metro areas then I would be in really good shape right now though. I get mail and calls from recruiters and companies in those areas asking if I am willing to do the commute or move, but I am not.
In my local area, I interviewed for a Network Administrator position recently for a manufacturing company that has multiple sites in the Southeast U.S.. They use Cisco, have a frame relay network going on, Microsoft desktops and servers, a little Gnu/Linux and want more. This company made a single post for the position on flipdog.com and careerbuilder.com. First day they have 150 resumes, second day, 350. They said no way and handed the task over to a recruiter. The only reason that I am in a higher position right now is that I have a manufacturing background, meet all of the requirements, and know their inventory system. Luck, not qualifications will get me this job, if I get it.
Dang, this is exactly what happened to me last March when my former employer CEO called me up and asked that I do a little work for him in regards to the project that I had worked on formerly.
I was working for Maximum Charisma Studios in Denver Colorado. They released a product in 2001 that was poop and the company went chapter 7, fired all employees on the last week of January of 2001. Everyone was fired with dignity and the company went down with minimal looting and not a lot of hostility.
The company was trying to sell it's online multiplayer game product design and code to another company and so the product was still online and in collocation. Well, there was a bug that had been plaguing us that had not been fixed before everyone was fired.
Hey, this is going to turn into a Microsoft bashing story too! Cool.
The problem was that the software clients that ran on a bunch of Windows 2000 Servers would have problems forwarding or processing UDP packets after about 30 days. This was consistent on all of the servers. 30 days and the UDP would stop, the ports would get held hostage, and absolutely nothing would fix the problem beyond the typical Windows fix of rebooting.
30 days rolled around and the systems stopped working. They tried to reboot them, but there was a special procedure to getting it all to work, plus a very key system had died with a failed RAID controller, which made things worse. So, they called me and ask me to do the work.
There is a quote that I remember right here from Slashdot. It had to do with work/employee related stuff.
"Never consult for free."
I heard about the problem that they had, negotiated what exactly needed to be done, and said that I would do the work for $1,000.00 flat, and could have everything online within 48 hours. We did it respectfully and nobody lost their composure over the phone while I worked this deal out.
It went pretty good, I got my $1K cheque and it got cashed. I did the work and everything was online again. If they sold the product off or not, I don't recall.
The point is that I made my former employer understand that it did not pay my bills to work for free, and that if it was in our mutual interest to do business then we could, for a price which we agreed upon. Everyone was happy when we were done.
Now, if the former employer had been hostile from the start, I question if I would have taken the project on at all. And if I had, I would have made a written contract be signed prior to any work being done. And in the case of financial instability and the possibility of bankruptcy on their part and me not being able to collect on the work done, I would have required a deal that put the funds into special holding by a third party or something similar.
The problem is that the unhappy employer is probably going to do something bad to you. More is broken than they tell you and they are going to blame the broken on you and ask that you fix it for free or they will sue. They are going to try to make you feel guilty into helping them, they are going to do whatever it takes to get some work done by you for free.
Don't deal with bitter former employers or employees unless you absolutely have to, you are going to profit from it, and you make sure that it is going to turn out exactly how you think it will.
California Ants Love Matika Battery Chargers
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This happened to me several times when I worked in California doing comercial and residental construction related stuff. Ants would come in over night and get into my Makita cordless power pack battery charger when I left it in charging. Other people at my construction site reported very similar things with their battery chargers. I never experienced the ants trying to nest in the chargers because I never found eggs, but they definitely liked being in there. It seems that the ants like the high frequency voltage, which gives them a buzz. I suspect that the ants like to get high, go figure.
I discovered a sort of rule to it some time later. In general, if you can hear it buzzing while it is charging, bugs might take a liking to it.
For those who don't know, Makita makes power tools, especially professional grade cordless power tools. Their signature is that they use a turquoise/blue plastic or paint housings.
Right now, I am jobless myself. My company went chapter 7 when their software product did not sell.
I hear this a whole lot -- that the people who still have jobs have a lot of new work and that it is hard to keep up. They are being asked to work more hours on that salary pay, do more things than they ever did before. There is a big potential plus here in the recognition of doing that work -- you can add it to your resume and you gain experience from it.
The second thing that I am hearing from a lot of people is that as soon as things get better, or they get a break into another job that pays better, they are gone, zero notice, no regrets. They are being milked by the management, they know it, and they are going to split as soon as things get better.
Employee retention is going to be a big problem in the not so distant future in the technical fields. There is going to be a lot of people moving once the job market gets warmer. Unfortunately, I do not see that happening until sometime around 4th quarter 2003 or mid year 2004.
I have to go an interview in ten minutes, so I have to go. The Orlando Florida job market is TERRIBLE for technical people. This may be my only break. Bye bye!
I worked for a company called Maximum Charisma Studios last year before they went chapter 7. We had a Cisco 3548XL 1U height switch on a bracketed wood shelf too small for the switch, and all of the patch cables dangling below it because there was no way to secure them.
I asked the boss several times to buy me a $200 aluminum relay rack so that I could mount it down and take care of all of our cables, eliminate the possibility of the thing falling off.
About a month later I was working in the server room trying to move some rack servers around and the damn switch fell off of the shelf, flipped over, and hit me on the head.
The damage to my head was minimal, but it hurt. It could have been serious had the metal corner hit me on the head instead of the flat part.
The damage to the switch was pretty bad. The IEC 320 power port was bent and damaged and ten of the RJ45 ports had their retaining clips ripped out, meaning that plugs would no longer clip in. The network was down for about 30 minutes while I replaced it with another switch that we just happened to have at the time.
Finally after the incident did the boss allow me to buy the relay rack. On the same day that I was about to install the thing we had the "You are all fired!" meeting with the CEO.
The only good part about it all is that I got to keep the Cisco switch. It still has 38 good ports, and I was able to repair the bent chassis and solder in a new IEC 320 plug. A surface mount micro fuse also blew up that controlled the blower in the switch, so I just shorted it with a wire. It works, and a I have a Cisco switch now.
And that is my story.
I am curious about data center safety requirements. I think that it is three feet width between all relay racks and data cabinets, but I would be interested in official documents if anyone knows. Thanks in advance.
The current American telecom infrastructure is a two meter width trunk tree with ten leaves to support it. The telecommunication companies have buried large amounts of fiber optic cable for metropolitan, Interstate, and international links all over the lands and less than ten percent is in use because there is no need by the people who own the fiber.
I think we can agree that all telecommunication carriers are monopolies. Instead of having one monopoly like there was with AT&T, there are now a dozen or more monopolies who own their own cable within their own areas. Whoever owns the line is the only one who can provide service.
It is impossible to have any sort of service competition to individual customers when any one entity owns the communication circuit to and from your home. Wireless is a hope, but the limited spectral frequency range as allocated by the FCC makes even the air a monopolized medium.
I have been on both sides of the wire and I am a very frustrated individual. I have worked for the ILEC, the CLEC, the ISP, and I am a telecom customer. The inability to get the service that I want is maddening. The inability to deliver service that my customers want is disappointing and putting my company out of business.
How do we fix this problem? I do not care how much it costs. I do not care how long it will take. It needs to get done and we need to get working on this now.
When I say telecom I mean voice, data, television, everything -- it does not matter any more.
National Public Radio (NPR) / Public Radio International (PRI) stations often will feature odd music every once in awhile and sometimes I like it, some times I don't. But always it is something that I have not really heard before, I or that I have heard because of my strange music likes. I like ambient stuff, especially Tetsu Inoue, Namlook's labels and similar.
So, here is what I know. Not everyone here knows their cables or connectors nor do they need to. Here are some simple things to help you out with.
RJ stands for Regents Jack. RJ11 is your typical 2-6 pair telephone jack. RJ45 is your typical 4-5 pair Ethernet pin jack, also gets used for DS1s.
BNC is a Barrel Node Connector. BNC gets used on test equipment, older coax cable NICs for thin or thicknet. Also DS3 twinax cable interfaces. That screw in on the back of your TV set? F-type.
Tons of pretty pictures; http://www.cmsa.wmin.ac.uk/~alan/compon ents/conn/
Molex appears to have a nice connector tutorial for you to check out. I need to look this over myself; http://www.molex.com/training/bce/gstoc.h tml
Get yourself a Molex catalog. Every type of cable connector you can imagine. Go to their products page and browse around. http://www.molex.com
Do not forget Amp, even though their web presence sucks (or last time I looked) http://www.ampnetconnect.com/
Random cable interfaces, with some pictures; http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/Netwo rk_cabling. htm
Cable Types for 3Com Products http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/m isc/cables/cabling.htm
Unix Serial Port Resources: Sun Serial Port & Cables Pinouts http://www.stokely.com/unix.serial.port.r esources/ A-B-Ycablepinout.html
IEC has standards, like that power plug on the back of your computer -- an IEC 320 plug. http://www.iec.org/
Your typical U.S. three prong power plug is an NEMA-5-15P (P for plug), and the receptical is a NEMA-5-15R. Here are some charts with pretty pictures; http://www.leviton.com/sections/techsup p/nema.htm http://www.quail.com/locator/nema.htm
SCSI connectors, pinouts, and protocols, and some IDE/ATA stuff too; http://t10.org/
Do not forget about the Fiber Channel and HIPPI; http://www.t11.org
PCI card interfaces; http://www.pcisig.com/
EIA/TIA; http://www.tiaonline.org/
Whoa, I just found this... standards for wiretapping?; http://www.tiaonline.org/standards/ carnivore/
Cisco, always a great place to look and learn. Common LAN interfaces from what I see; http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/prod uct/la n/cat6000/6000hw/inst_aug/0bcabcon.htm
More Cisco, including V.35 and X.21 pictures; http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc /product/ac cess/acs_mod/cis3600/hw_inst/cabling/marcabl.htm Arg, I had to repost this because Slashdot says, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 26.9)." That sucked and needs to change.
If you have more references, please let the world know. I know stuff, you know stuff. Put your stuff here.
I own a PIX 506 box and have worked on the 515 and 525 as well.
Both the PIX 506 and 515 use an Intel socket 7 200Mhz MMX processor without a cooling fan, they just have a heat sink. The system board is just an Intel, nothing special there. PIX expansion slots are PCI slots. The Ethernet interfaces use Intel eepro i82557 (or was it i82559?) chips, just like your Intel NIC in your desktop. Everything is really standard, except for the software that runs on the box.
For people who know Cisco hardware, they seem to recognize that the PIX series of firewalls are far faster than say a 3600 series router, or any of the older Cisco hardware. The PIX firewalls were acquired by Cisco when they bought Network Translation. Reference; http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/146/p ressroom/199 5/oct95/242.html
So when you are buying that $4000 3640 with 128MB of RAM to handle the 100K or so of Internet BGP routes, you are buying something with the processing power of an Pentium computer or less.
One of the major considerations for Cisco is that their equipment has to be really stable and heat tolerant. People love to treat Cisco hardware like old telco hardware and keep it out in a barn and stuff, in the damp air, with a bunch of dust, whatever. We should all know how Intel processors are in regards to heat. But even an old 200Mhz Intel MMX processor can run without a cooling fan.
Cisco router hardware, in general, is really slow and sucks for processor speed. Juniper has mopped Cisco all over the floor in the core Internet market in the last few years because of port density, processing speed, and packet forwarding latency. In comparison, you look at a Juniper M40 versus a Cisco 12012, and the 12012 looks like a huge POS, and I don't mean packet over Sonet.
One of the things about the Juniper routers is that they use Intel processors and SDRAM -- not much special there. The hardware is all completely custom, but they choose to ditch the Motorola and IBM processors for Intel. Packet forwarding processors are totally different than the core processors that we are talking about here, so I will leave them out for the most part. Still, Cisco uses a lot of off the shelf stuff in their routers and companies like Juniper have manufactured their own or applied existing stuff better to get the wire speed forwarding rates on all interfaces, with a backplane speed that is greater than the sum of all possible interfaces on a router.
Cisco does not really see themselves as a hardware manufacture, but instead as a software company. However, if they do not shape up and start making some really good hardware, they are going to get kicked out by Juniper as they start to climb down the ladder and come out with smaller more affordable boxes and spread out from their core and big-box offerings (think M-5).
Lately Cisco has released a few good new hardware. The 10000 series aggregation boxes can mux Sonet down to fractional DS1s, which is pretty hot, but these boxes are really hard to use these days because of the serious downturn in the market and the fact that a lot of DS1 customers have gone away. Old 7513s that ISPs have in stock with fractional PA-2T3s work fine.
In switches, Cisco has come out with the 3500XL and 3550XL switches, which are really great.
But most people out there have 2600s and 3600s. There are a lot of 2500s still in use too. Some things are starting to hurt Cisco though. It can take a minute or two for all of those BGP routes to get filtered out when interfaces flap. Cisco does not even offer any kind of SSH2 capability with ANY of their routers (to my knowledge), they only support SSH1 on special IOS versions and platforms. I really wonder if these routers, with their slow processors, can handle new stuff.
I wonder how this will effect an IP6 roll out. I remember working on some 3600s and IP6 some time back. They had issues, but I understand that Cisco has worked a lot of those out.
Oh well.
The moral of the story is that Cisco hardware is kind of slow and it shows. On the other hand, it usually gets the job done.
I need to go back to finding myself a job. Posting on Slashdot ain't paying the rent.
Anyone out there have a Juniper Olive image? I would not mind having one of those in my lab.
Go to http://netseller.com/ Look for the Software section on the blue left hand frame. $20 plus cheap USPS shipping.
Netseller has a lousy site, but they are a pretty good company. They sell a lot of junk and they deal on eBay a lot, or used to. They get a spotlight back during the UPS strike some years ago when they were on Good Morning America (I think it was).
I recently moved to the Orlando Florida metro area. I have previously lived and had broadband access in San Diego California, Phoenix Arizona, and Denver Colorado.
In San Diego California, around 1998-1999, I had access to a Time Warner cable Internet ring. No other competing broadband services existed at the time other than perhaps ISDN, though that was not viable due to costs. Rates were usually between 128Kbps and 1200Kbps bidirectional with 20 - 80ms latency to the first hop. The rate and latency varied wildly at times but you could usually get through. I could get only one static IP address assigned to me if I begged for it if I remember correctly. I think I paid around $100 monthly for this service.
In Phoenix Arizona between 1999 - 2001 I had varied choices at different apartments for Cox @Home cable Internet service, ISDN to Primenet (for who I worked, otherwise would not have been viable), and at one point Sprint offered a wireless service that was being market tested and later was canceled and folded. DSL was never available to any of my apartment complexes because I was either out of range (Scottsdale) or the End Office was not equipped with a DSLAM yet. Some other areas had DSL access through Northpoint, Covad, Jato, and Qwest. Jato was the first to go, then Northpoint. Covad pulled some DSLAMs and Qwest installed more. Getting static IP addresses from anyone other than Northpoint, Covad, or Qwest was not possible. Qwest gets bonus points for allowing DSL customers to get a/29 allocation (with reverse DNS resolution through a web application!) over a routed (not bridged) PPPoATM ADSL DMT (older lines are CAP possible) circuit, and they use all Cisco equipment.
In Denver Colorado between 2001 - 2002 I had an apartment which I could get DSL through Covad or Qwest only. AT&T Broadband was available only seven months after I first moved in to a brand new apartment complex. The complex was all wired with Cat5, which made me happy. I was 17400 feet from the Qwest CO. I chose Qwest DSL service. I got an ADSL line, DMT signaling, PPPoATM, routed, Cisco CPE and Cisco DSLAM, 40ms to first hop consistently, 640Kbps bidirectional. The CPE cost me almost $300, but a free PCI Intel card was given to me. The service was $150 or so every month for 640Kbps bidirectional and a/29 allocation, which means six IP addresses routed. I had access to 24 hour tech support, real tech support staff who had console access to DSLAMs and knew their stuff. This all cost extra, but it was what I needed because I run my own servers (eMail, 2xDNS, web, ftp, ssh, etc.)
Here in Orlando Florida where I have just moved, I found that getting BellSouth DSL in an apartment complex is completely impossible. Every apartment complex which I looked in, and I did look over the entire west side metro area, either was out of range or used Digital Line Compression (DLC), which breaks DSL. Time Warner cable Intenet services are available in almost all of the complexes, but user complaints are high and no allocations under any conditions. No wireless out here. I am screwed for any kind of IP allocation unless I own a house right next to the EO. BellSouth will do IP allocations, but they are bridged with PPPoE (BAD and completely defeating the purpose) using Alcatel DSLAMs in most cases, but it will really cost me to get any kind of upload speed like I had in Denver.
But rejoice! I have found an Oasis. An apartment complex where some little limp-dick piddly place called Orlando Telephone Company (website made by "ImageProz") who offers a strange VDSL solution using Cisco Long Reach Ethernet switches in the complex. They do not advertize anything about their service and the techs have no clue about what they are doing with their equipment. Check this out, the connection allows for 1500Kbps bidirectional, which I almost always get. They give me access to Time Warner DNS servers because they do not have their own. They use DHCP to lease out real world IP addresses, but they have misconfigured their server so that ANY MAC that requests an IP off of my line gets an IP address -- as many as I want! All for $55 per month with a $100 deposit for the Cisco 575 LRE CPE. Oh, another minor issue -- no neighbor can communicate with any other neighbor because the ISP uses "port protected" but not VLANs on their switches. Thus, no customer port can communicate with any other customer port. A rather broken network I would say, but they do not know how to trunk the VLANs to a router port. Oh well.
So, Orlando really sucks for broadband. Nobody knows what they are doing here, or access is just not available. Getting static IP allocations seems to be a growing problem, preventing users from being real members of the Internet.
The issue at hand has absolutely nothing to do with fair rights usage.
It is not your fair usage right to violate copyright holders by downloading all of the warez and mp3s that you so desire. If you want that, stick with cable TV. This is the Internet, an information sharing network -- if the information is not your's to publish, then don't.
The issue at hand is the question of if the communication network which provides access by Americans to a Chinese based system which violates United States law.
For people who violate copyright law by publishing duplicate copies of commercial software and copyrighted music and movies, I have no sympathy. Shut this server down.
The Chinese website in question is clearly violating United States law. It may also be violating Chinese law, but to this I am not knowing.
This action seems very similar to the legal pursuits of the French government against eBay and Yahoo for posting content which is illegal in their country, but not in the U.S. Specifically, they were after WWII memorabilia, and anything deemed to be offensive by the French government.
Are ISPs which provide transit access to illegal material themselves responsible for the illegal material itself, even though it is under a different administrative domain outside of their control, and outside of the control of the U.S. government?
I do not think so. This is like holding the phone companies responsible for someone who did something illegal using their network. The ISPs in question do not condone or approve of the server in question which is violating U.S. law.
I hope you do not condone it either. There are enough mp3 downloading fools on this network already. I use the Internet to publish a daily journal, to share pictures that I take with my digital camera, and to communicate ORIGINAL WORKS by myself to others, and to obtain their own original works.
Slashdot Mirror
What was that company that worked for Sierra that was shut down a year or so ago? Dynamix. It was even on Slashdot. They made Tribes, The Incredible Machine, Stellar 7, and a bunch others. I am pretty sure that they were in Portland, or NEAR Portland. Maybe I am on crack. If you are really interested... Google is your friend.
You bring up a really good issue -- that review sites are often whores of the industries themselves. If they do one bad article, they can count on never being able to get free stuff from that vendor to review again. The result is that game company review sites, and other similar review sites of any kind, need to be whores of the companies which products they review.
MaxCha and Fighting Legends did get a lot of really good reviews, and got some really bad reviews. Some of them were so bad that they were funny. Some were so good that it was sick. In the case of at least two reviews, I can definitely attest that an exchange occurred that increased the goodness of the review. Corruption and lack of ethics definitely exists in game review sites, but not all of them.
From what I can tell, the computer gaming industry is completely rife with stuff like this. "Hot seller" shelves are 100% bought, as are most other shelves in game stores and other stores (Wal-Mart is an apparent exception). Be noted that this is only my impressions from speaking with the people in marketing and impressions that I got. Take it with some salt.
Hi, will do.
Between May of 2001 and January of 2002, I worked for a company called Maximum Charisma Studios (MaxCha) out of Denver metro Colorado. They were a start up, made a game called Fighting Legends Online, released it, it sucked, and they went chapter 7.
... and thats what I have to say.
MaxCha had 32 employees at it's height. About half of those people were the real producers of the company and the other half were the wanna-be-game-company-employee types who were barely doing anything, and mostly were assistants for the rest. We had a lot of interns who worked for free doing slave labor -- stuff like helping the marketing department, helping customer support, doing testing (playing the game for free and logging bugs).
MaxCha made major efforts to push it's game, giving away free shirts, stickers, mailing CDs to people all over, and even gave the game away for free with a rebate program, but nobody would buy it because it sucked. Those who did buy it took it back to the stores because it sucked. You can't get sales if your PC game sucks, no matter how hard you push it -- console publishing may be a little easier to build some hype with.
The lessons learned for me were invaluable, and I think it will be for the others who paid attention too.
In total, I heard that the company blew only just over 3 million across a period of about two to two and a half years, which is amazingly little for what was accomplished. I am proud to say that I was personally responsible for about one third of that because I provided all recommendations for production infrastructure for the online game -- collocation, servers, routers, switches, random equipment, $30K of RAM from memman.com (Thanks Jay), software, and services costs. Almost everything done (ALL sound development, ALL art, the box, programming, marketing, even distribution) was done in-house.
The story of MaxCha was that of a bunch of kids who grew up, wanted more out of their jobs than just being paid, got together, said, "Hey, let's start a game company!" And they all had their own idea of how it was going to go. The game ended up not having a design board because the founders all wanted their little idea to be the basis of the game. The result was that the game had no basis, no story, and play sucked. The code rocked, the back end infrastructure was excellent, our ability to scale up and support a massive customer base in short order was good, but the game was not fun.
No fun, no sales. Whoops.
I moved away from the Denver Metro area after the company went under. Denver/Boulder Colorado has a decent game company market, as does San Francisco California, Seattle Washington, Portland Oregon, and a few other random places. I even found that EA Sports has a sub company that makes sports games here in Orlando Florida.
It is really hard to get into the gaming business unless you have some contacts, start your own business, or luck out. In my case, I lucked out because I was not really into working for a game company. I was just looking for a way to get out of my old employer because they were about to tank.
The atmosphere at MaxCha was very loose on the downstairs, and business like on the upstairs. We had a two story building that was very small, but it was perfect because the CEO, marketing department, HR, and other 'stiff' managers worked upstairs as a nice pretty front. Downstairs was the art department, testing, the programmers, and others. There were times that people slept there over night, there was beer drinking on site, pot smoking outside at the park, and parties at houses every few weeks. The fridge downstairs had beer in it, someone had a pet dog running around, there were game consoles laying about, and people came and went as they pleased so long as they worked 40 hours a week and got the projects done. I personally would come in somewhere between 9:00am and 1:00pm, and work my eight to ten hours.
In a small company like this, individuals made all of the difference. Not firing do-nothings early was a mistake, and making up the work later was very difficult. Worse, the employee was socially entrenched and nobody wanted to be the bad person and do the duty to the company that was necessary. There were a few who fell into this category, but I was surprised that most of the people in MaxCha actually recognized that because they were a small business they themselves needed to take initiative on various things in the company and get the job done.
The failure of MaxCha as a game company was that the game released was no fun, and sales were nothing. The nail in the coffin was the fact that the game was an online interactive game that required expensive infrastructure. If it had been a stand alone title, they might have been able to put out a second game and get it right the second time.
Box art, packaging, manual, and physical product was great. The box looked good, felt good, and looked like it could be a good game. Code was really good. Graphics were a little heavy for what they were but that was because of the frame of the game -- players did not get to see all of the patches that added all of the stuff that was left out to make the release date.
The release date made two years prior was met, even if little things got cut off. That is apparently an incredible feat in the gaming industry.
IT infrastructure was good, which usually gets neglected in gaming companies. Everyone is a computer user and nobody wants to admit that they need one person to really support the internal and production network. They think they can throw up a Win2K server on the T1 and host all those gamers off of it. We got it right though.
Design at MaxCha was a mistake -- no real design staff. Furthermore, design is like a book. A team does not write a story, one person does. Giving away that authority was a problem that the founders did not want to do, and so they all tossed in their little features, but it turned out crappy. They did not trust one person enough to write the story, give the concept to the artists and content producers, and come up with the game design that ultimately made the game fun. The fun got left out.
Because design was bad, the artists did their best to come up with original good stuff, and they did. Programmers programmed well, did UI interaction testing, got the AI right, and documented code well. Marketing sold the game as being good for everybody and got the name out. But in the end, everyone did it their own way and nobody was responsible for bringing it all together.
Giving that ability and responsibility to the right single person can make a great game company, but it is hard to do that. This is why many game companies are self started.
I purchased one of the original Shuttle Spacewalker systems a little over a year ago.
The system does it's job, but I have a big issue with it -- noise. The thing has a CPU fan that runs hard and fast. Since the CPU fan must be low profile, you really do not have a choice in replacing it with something else. There is a fan in the back of the chassis that pushes air out, adding a little noise. And finally, the power supply is very noisy, and designed very badly. It pulls hot air into it from inside the case, and pushes hot air back inside the case -- there is no transient air.
Had I know about the noise issues with the Shuttle Spacewalker before I bought it, I would not have.
I do not know if any of the modern versions have fixed these problems, but I would be wary of it.
You are absolutely correct about bandwidth being very expensive.
In Denver Colorado I was very happy to pay $150 per month for a DMT PPP over ATM ADSL line at a 640Kbps downstream and 640Kbps upstream rate, along with a
Oversubscription is a necessary evil in order to profit for ISPs. Not everyone will be using 100% of their allocated bandwidth at any time. If they desire to do so, then they purchase a "dedicated" block of bandwidth. When you see the word dedicated, that means the dedication that there is the upstream bandwidth to feed your needs no matter the activities of other users on the network.
Here in Orlando, I have CRAZY internet connection. The ISP is a little dinky ISP/telco called Orlando Telephone Company. The apartment complex uses a Cisco Long Reach Ethernet (AKA VDSL pre standard) solution where I am getting 1.5Mbps both upstream and downstream almost all of the time. I am paying $55 a month. How can they possibly offer this kind of deal? They oversubscribe the systems. So far, I have not had any problems. I use Gnucleus over night to look for odd-ball files that I am looking for and schedule it to turn back off during normal day time hours. The only problem is that this is a bridged connection with DHCP allocations only. The only reason that the network access here is so good is because the network operators are idiots. I am sure that they will swing in the other direction sooner than later.
Some day oversubscription may be a problem. As long as I can profit, and the ISP can profit at the same time, then great. The unfortunate part is that most ISPs are planned so poorly that they have no idea what the breaking point of profit and user experience is and what the window size is. ISPs are really dumb.
Post this on Mojolin.com! Also, put out flyers at tech colleges within driving distance. Don't get lazy with your hiring. You can find someone bright who fits the bill if you try. Most companies give it minimal effort and end up with an employee who barely pulls their own weight -- forget about profits.
Be descriptive. Go ahead and talk about quirks. Eliminate people in person, not on your advertisement. Also, be courteous to those who you do not hire. Tell them that they don't have the job in the same medium that they have used to contact you, and be frank and respectful with them.
Hi
Actually, entry level does not seem to be doing all that bad. The reason for this is because of the cheap labor of course. The companies are hanging onto the good people and then will hire some manual labor (you) to assist them. So, things are not all bad. Just be willing to relocate out of your local area.
Good luck, don't give up. It will take you at least three months to find something, maybe six or more.
Hi
Wise words Sir. Thank you for the advice. I agree in regards of mutual respect of the employer and employee relationship necessary for successful business, but not all do. I would indeed take a lesser paying job if it was something that I would enjoy, was in a specific industry, or would provide me with something non monetary, but the hiring parties are just not offering any of that to people.
I feel that this is a huge failure of companies when they attempt to gain talent. There is always someone out there willing to work for less money and a little more of something less tangible, such as working in a specific industry (computer gaming), working in a diverse environment (lots of different equipment), or if they can make a carer specialization change.
It comes down to relationships with companies and employees. Some are good, some are bad, but you can't forget that it is all business and that at the end of the day you want to be fed.
Hi
Well, in your market, and for your type of work, if there are those numbers of people available and moving, then great for you!
However, metro areas are varied in how well they are doing. For example, Denver is saturated with telecom and ISP related people right now, and it is really hard for these people to find work in the same area. These are highly skilled people who are just in a bad market segment.
For myself, I am currently in the Orlando Florida marketplace looking for Unix (Gnu/Linux, BSD, Solaris) or Microsoft Systems Administration, or IP Network Engineering (Cisco, Juniper, Nortel) work. The local market is really bad. Companies here want very specific people and will not take anything else. Examples that I have come across lately are Japanese speaking, need to have extensive security industry experience for an entry level position, and three years experience with
If I was willing to go over to the Tampa or Miami metro areas then I would be in really good shape right now though. I get mail and calls from recruiters and companies in those areas asking if I am willing to do the commute or move, but I am not.
In my local area, I interviewed for a Network Administrator position recently for a manufacturing company that has multiple sites in the Southeast U.S.. They use Cisco, have a frame relay network going on, Microsoft desktops and servers, a little Gnu/Linux and want more. This company made a single post for the position on flipdog.com and careerbuilder.com. First day they have 150 resumes, second day, 350. They said no way and handed the task over to a recruiter. The only reason that I am in a higher position right now is that I have a manufacturing background, meet all of the requirements, and know their inventory system. Luck, not qualifications will get me this job, if I get it.
# Jesse
Dang, this is exactly what happened to me last March when my former employer CEO called me up and asked that I do a little work for him in regards to the project that I had worked on formerly.
I was working for Maximum Charisma Studios in Denver Colorado. They released a product in 2001 that was poop and the company went chapter 7, fired all employees on the last week of January of 2001. Everyone was fired with dignity and the company went down with minimal looting and not a lot of hostility.
The company was trying to sell it's online multiplayer game product design and code to another company and so the product was still online and in collocation. Well, there was a bug that had been plaguing us that had not been fixed before everyone was fired.
Hey, this is going to turn into a Microsoft bashing story too! Cool.
The problem was that the software clients that ran on a bunch of Windows 2000 Servers would have problems forwarding or processing UDP packets after about 30 days. This was consistent on all of the servers. 30 days and the UDP would stop, the ports would get held hostage, and absolutely nothing would fix the problem beyond the typical Windows fix of rebooting.
30 days rolled around and the systems stopped working. They tried to reboot them, but there was a special procedure to getting it all to work, plus a very key system had died with a failed RAID controller, which made things worse. So, they called me and ask me to do the work.
There is a quote that I remember right here from Slashdot. It had to do with work/employee related stuff.
"Never consult for free."
I heard about the problem that they had, negotiated what exactly needed to be done, and said that I would do the work for $1,000.00 flat, and could have everything online within 48 hours. We did it respectfully and nobody lost their composure over the phone while I worked this deal out.
It went pretty good, I got my $1K cheque and it got cashed. I did the work and everything was online again. If they sold the product off or not, I don't recall.
The point is that I made my former employer understand that it did not pay my bills to work for free, and that if it was in our mutual interest to do business then we could, for a price which we agreed upon. Everyone was happy when we were done.
Now, if the former employer had been hostile from the start, I question if I would have taken the project on at all. And if I had, I would have made a written contract be signed prior to any work being done. And in the case of financial instability and the possibility of bankruptcy on their part and me not being able to collect on the work done, I would have required a deal that put the funds into special holding by a third party or something similar.
The problem is that the unhappy employer is probably going to do something bad to you. More is broken than they tell you and they are going to blame the broken on you and ask that you fix it for free or they will sue. They are going to try to make you feel guilty into helping them, they are going to do whatever it takes to get some work done by you for free.
Don't deal with bitter former employers or employees unless you absolutely have to, you are going to profit from it, and you make sure that it is going to turn out exactly how you think it will.
This happened to me several times when I worked in California doing comercial and residental construction related stuff. Ants would come in over night and get into my Makita cordless power pack battery charger when I left it in charging. Other people at my construction site reported very similar things with their battery chargers. I never experienced the ants trying to nest in the chargers because I never found eggs, but they definitely liked being in there. It seems that the ants like the high frequency voltage, which gives them a buzz. I suspect that the ants like to get high, go figure.
I discovered a sort of rule to it some time later. In general, if you can hear it buzzing while it is charging, bugs might take a liking to it.
For those who don't know, Makita makes power tools, especially professional grade cordless power tools. Their signature is that they use a turquoise/blue plastic or paint housings.
http://www.makita.com/
Right now, I am jobless myself. My company went chapter 7 when their software product did not sell.
I hear this a whole lot -- that the people who still have jobs have a lot of new work and that it is hard to keep up. They are being asked to work more hours on that salary pay, do more things than they ever did before. There is a big potential plus here in the recognition of doing that work -- you can add it to your resume and you gain experience from it.
The second thing that I am hearing from a lot of people is that as soon as things get better, or they get a break into another job that pays better, they are gone, zero notice, no regrets. They are being milked by the management, they know it, and they are going to split as soon as things get better.
Employee retention is going to be a big problem in the not so distant future in the technical fields. There is going to be a lot of people moving once the job market gets warmer. Unfortunately, I do not see that happening until sometime around 4th quarter 2003 or mid year 2004.
I have to go an interview in ten minutes, so I have to go. The Orlando Florida job market is TERRIBLE for technical people. This may be my only break. Bye bye!
Can we please get a correction for this article?
I worked for a company called Maximum Charisma Studios last year before they went chapter 7. We had a Cisco 3548XL 1U height switch on a bracketed wood shelf too small for the switch, and all of the patch cables dangling below it because there was no way to secure them.
I asked the boss several times to buy me a $200 aluminum relay rack so that I could mount it down and take care of all of our cables, eliminate the possibility of the thing falling off.
About a month later I was working in the server room trying to move some rack servers around and the damn switch fell off of the shelf, flipped over, and hit me on the head.
The damage to my head was minimal, but it hurt. It could have been serious had the metal corner hit me on the head instead of the flat part.
The damage to the switch was pretty bad. The IEC 320 power port was bent and damaged and ten of the RJ45 ports had their retaining clips ripped out, meaning that plugs would no longer clip in. The network was down for about 30 minutes while I replaced it with another switch that we just happened to have at the time.
Finally after the incident did the boss allow me to buy the relay rack. On the same day that I was about to install the thing we had the "You are all fired!" meeting with the CEO.
The only good part about it all is that I got to keep the Cisco switch. It still has 38 good ports, and I was able to repair the bent chassis and solder in a new IEC 320 plug. A surface mount micro fuse also blew up that controlled the blower in the switch, so I just shorted it with a wire. It works, and a I have a Cisco switch now.
And that is my story.
I am curious about data center safety requirements. I think that it is three feet width between all relay racks and data cabinets, but I would be interested in official documents if anyone knows. Thanks in advance.
See slashdot in light mode;
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?light=1
It helps lower Slashdot's bandwidth but still loads the top banner.
Dear Vint Cert
The current American telecom infrastructure is a two meter width trunk tree with ten leaves to support it. The telecommunication companies have buried large amounts of fiber optic cable for metropolitan, Interstate, and international links all over the lands and less than ten percent is in use because there is no need by the people who own the fiber.
I think we can agree that all telecommunication carriers are monopolies. Instead of having one monopoly like there was with AT&T, there are now a dozen or more monopolies who own their own cable within their own areas. Whoever owns the line is the only one who can provide service.
It is impossible to have any sort of service competition to individual customers when any one entity owns the communication circuit to and from your home. Wireless is a hope, but the limited spectral frequency range as allocated by the FCC makes even the air a monopolized medium.
I have been on both sides of the wire and I am a very frustrated individual. I have worked for the ILEC, the CLEC, the ISP, and I am a telecom customer. The inability to get the service that I want is maddening. The inability to deliver service that my customers want is disappointing and putting my company out of business.
How do we fix this problem? I do not care how much it costs. I do not care how long it will take. It needs to get done and we need to get working on this now.
When I say telecom I mean voice, data, television, everything -- it does not matter any more.
Thank you
National Public Radio (NPR) / Public Radio International (PRI) stations often will feature odd music every once in awhile and sometimes I like it, some times I don't. But always it is something that I have not really heard before, I or that I have heard because of my strange music likes. I like ambient stuff, especially Tetsu Inoue, Namlook's labels and similar.
The idea was that people learn something. I did and so did others.
This was a really good Slashdot article. I found cool stuff here, learned new things, and corrected some mistakes.
Thanks!
So, here is what I know. Not everyone here knows their cables or connectors nor do they need to. Here are some simple things to help you out with.
RJ stands for Regents Jack. RJ11 is your typical 2-6 pair telephone jack. RJ45 is your typical 4-5 pair Ethernet pin jack, also gets used for DS1s.
BNC is a Barrel Node Connector. BNC gets used on test equipment, older coax cable NICs for thin or thicknet. Also DS3 twinax cable interfaces. That screw in on the back of your TV set? F-type.
Tons of pretty pictures;
http://www.cmsa.wmin.ac.uk/~alan/compo
Molex appears to have a nice connector tutorial for you to check out. I need to look this over myself;
http://www.molex.com/training/bce/gstoc.
Get yourself a Molex catalog. Every type of cable connector you can imagine. Go to their products page and browse around.
http://www.molex.com
Do not forget Amp, even though their web presence sucks (or last time I looked)
http://www.ampnetconnect.com/
Random cable interfaces, with some pictures;
http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/Netw
Cable Types for 3Com Products
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/
Unix Serial Port Resources: Sun Serial Port & Cables Pinouts
http://www.stokely.com/unix.serial.port.
IEC has standards, like that power plug on the back of your computer -- an IEC 320 plug.
http://www.iec.org/
Your typical U.S. three prong power plug is an NEMA-5-15P (P for plug), and the receptical is a NEMA-5-15R. Here are some charts with pretty pictures;
http://www.leviton.com/sections/techsu
http://www.quail.com/locator/nema.htm
SCSI connectors, pinouts, and protocols, and some IDE/ATA stuff too;
http://t10.org/
Do not forget about the Fiber Channel and HIPPI;
http://www.t11.org
PCI card interfaces;
http://www.pcisig.com/
EIA/TIA;
http://www.tiaonline.org/
Whoa, I just found this... standards for wiretapping?;
http://www.tiaonline.org/standards
Cisco, always a great place to look and learn. Common LAN interfaces from what I see;
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pro
More Cisco, including V.35 and X.21 pictures;
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/do
Arg, I had to repost this because Slashdot says, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 26.9)." That sucked and needs to change.
If you have more references, please let the world know. I know stuff, you know stuff. Put your stuff here.
I own a PIX 506 box and have worked on the 515 and 525 as well.
Both the PIX 506 and 515 use an Intel socket 7 200Mhz MMX processor without a cooling fan, they just have a heat sink. The system board is just an Intel, nothing special there. PIX expansion slots are PCI slots. The Ethernet interfaces use Intel eepro i82557 (or was it i82559?) chips, just like your Intel NIC in your desktop. Everything is really standard, except for the software that runs on the box.
For people who know Cisco hardware, they seem to recognize that the PIX series of firewalls are far faster than say a 3600 series router, or any of the older Cisco hardware. The PIX firewalls were acquired by Cisco when they bought Network Translation. Reference;
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/146/
So when you are buying that $4000 3640 with 128MB of RAM to handle the 100K or so of Internet BGP routes, you are buying something with the processing power of an Pentium computer or less.
Here are some facts on the Cisco 3600 series;
3620 64MB RAM maximum, 80Mhz RISC processor
3640 128MB RAM maximum, 100Mhz RISC processor
3660 256MB RAM maximum, 225Mhz RISC processor
One of the major considerations for Cisco is that their equipment has to be really stable and heat tolerant. People love to treat Cisco hardware like old telco hardware and keep it out in a barn and stuff, in the damp air, with a bunch of dust, whatever. We should all know how Intel processors are in regards to heat. But even an old 200Mhz Intel MMX processor can run without a cooling fan.
Cisco router hardware, in general, is really slow and sucks for processor speed. Juniper has mopped Cisco all over the floor in the core Internet market in the last few years because of port density, processing speed, and packet forwarding latency. In comparison, you look at a Juniper M40 versus a Cisco 12012, and the 12012 looks like a huge POS, and I don't mean packet over Sonet.
One of the things about the Juniper routers is that they use Intel processors and SDRAM -- not much special there. The hardware is all completely custom, but they choose to ditch the Motorola and IBM processors for Intel. Packet forwarding processors are totally different than the core processors that we are talking about here, so I will leave them out for the most part. Still, Cisco uses a lot of off the shelf stuff in their routers and companies like Juniper have manufactured their own or applied existing stuff better to get the wire speed forwarding rates on all interfaces, with a backplane speed that is greater than the sum of all possible interfaces on a router.
Cisco does not really see themselves as a hardware manufacture, but instead as a software company. However, if they do not shape up and start making some really good hardware, they are going to get kicked out by Juniper as they start to climb down the ladder and come out with smaller more affordable boxes and spread out from their core and big-box offerings (think M-5).
Lately Cisco has released a few good new hardware. The 10000 series aggregation boxes can mux Sonet down to fractional DS1s, which is pretty hot, but these boxes are really hard to use these days because of the serious downturn in the market and the fact that a lot of DS1 customers have gone away. Old 7513s that ISPs have in stock with fractional PA-2T3s work fine.
In switches, Cisco has come out with the 3500XL and 3550XL switches, which are really great.
But most people out there have 2600s and 3600s. There are a lot of 2500s still in use too. Some things are starting to hurt Cisco though. It can take a minute or two for all of those BGP routes to get filtered out when interfaces flap. Cisco does not even offer any kind of SSH2 capability with ANY of their routers (to my knowledge), they only support SSH1 on special IOS versions and platforms. I really wonder if these routers, with their slow processors, can handle new stuff.
I wonder how this will effect an IP6 roll out. I remember working on some 3600s and IP6 some time back. They had issues, but I understand that Cisco has worked a lot of those out.
Oh well.
The moral of the story is that Cisco hardware is kind of slow and it shows. On the other hand, it usually gets the job done.
I need to go back to finding myself a job. Posting on Slashdot ain't paying the rent.
Anyone out there have a Juniper Olive image? I would not mind having one of those in my lab.
Go to http://netseller.com/
Look for the Software section on the blue left hand frame. $20 plus cheap USPS shipping.
Netseller has a lousy site, but they are a pretty good company. They sell a lot of junk and they deal on eBay a lot, or used to. They get a spotlight back during the UPS strike some years ago when they were on Good Morning America (I think it was).
I recently moved to the Orlando Florida metro area. I have previously lived and had broadband access in San Diego California, Phoenix Arizona, and Denver Colorado.
In San Diego California, around 1998-1999, I had access to a Time Warner cable Internet ring. No other competing broadband services existed at the time other than perhaps ISDN, though that was not viable due to costs. Rates were usually between 128Kbps and 1200Kbps bidirectional with 20 - 80ms latency to the first hop. The rate and latency varied wildly at times but you could usually get through. I could get only one static IP address assigned to me if I begged for it if I remember correctly. I think I paid around $100 monthly for this service.
In Phoenix Arizona between 1999 - 2001 I had varied choices at different apartments for Cox @Home cable Internet service, ISDN to Primenet (for who I worked, otherwise would not have been viable), and at one point Sprint offered a wireless service that was being market tested and later was canceled and folded. DSL was never available to any of my apartment complexes because I was either out of range (Scottsdale) or the End Office was not equipped with a DSLAM yet. Some other areas had DSL access through Northpoint, Covad, Jato, and Qwest. Jato was the first to go, then Northpoint. Covad pulled some DSLAMs and Qwest installed more. Getting static IP addresses from anyone other than Northpoint, Covad, or Qwest was not possible. Qwest gets bonus points for allowing DSL customers to get a
In Denver Colorado between 2001 - 2002 I had an apartment which I could get DSL through Covad or Qwest only. AT&T Broadband was available only seven months after I first moved in to a brand new apartment complex. The complex was all wired with Cat5, which made me happy. I was 17400 feet from the Qwest CO. I chose Qwest DSL service. I got an ADSL line, DMT signaling, PPPoATM, routed, Cisco CPE and Cisco DSLAM, 40ms to first hop consistently, 640Kbps bidirectional. The CPE cost me almost $300, but a free PCI Intel card was given to me. The service was $150 or so every month for 640Kbps bidirectional and a
Here in Orlando Florida where I have just moved, I found that getting BellSouth DSL in an apartment complex is completely impossible. Every apartment complex which I looked in, and I did look over the entire west side metro area, either was out of range or used Digital Line Compression (DLC), which breaks DSL. Time Warner cable Intenet services are available in almost all of the complexes, but user complaints are high and no allocations under any conditions. No wireless out here. I am screwed for any kind of IP allocation unless I own a house right next to the EO. BellSouth will do IP allocations, but they are bridged with PPPoE (BAD and completely defeating the purpose) using Alcatel DSLAMs in most cases, but it will really cost me to get any kind of upload speed like I had in Denver.
But rejoice! I have found an Oasis. An apartment complex where some little limp-dick piddly place called Orlando Telephone Company (website made by "ImageProz") who offers a strange VDSL solution using Cisco Long Reach Ethernet switches in the complex. They do not advertize anything about their service and the techs have no clue about what they are doing with their equipment. Check this out, the connection allows for 1500Kbps bidirectional, which I almost always get. They give me access to Time Warner DNS servers because they do not have their own. They use DHCP to lease out real world IP addresses, but they have misconfigured their server so that ANY MAC that requests an IP off of my line gets an IP address -- as many as I want! All for $55 per month with a $100 deposit for the Cisco 575 LRE CPE. Oh, another minor issue -- no neighbor can communicate with any other neighbor because the ISP uses "port protected" but not VLANs on their switches. Thus, no customer port can communicate with any other customer port. A rather broken network I would say, but they do not know how to trunk the VLANs to a router port. Oh well.
So, Orlando really sucks for broadband. Nobody knows what they are doing here, or access is just not available. Getting static IP allocations seems to be a growing problem, preventing users from being real members of the Internet.
I am on a win32 system right now
I agree. I liked the old Mozilla icons.
Dear Sir
The issue at hand has absolutely nothing to do with fair rights usage.
It is not your fair usage right to violate copyright holders by downloading all of the warez and mp3s that you so desire. If you want that, stick with cable TV. This is the Internet, an information sharing network -- if the information is not your's to publish, then don't.
The issue at hand is the question of if the communication network which provides access by Americans to a Chinese based system which violates United States law.
For people who violate copyright law by publishing duplicate copies of commercial software and copyrighted music and movies, I have no sympathy. Shut this server down.
The Chinese website in question is clearly violating United States law. It may also be violating Chinese law, but to this I am not knowing.
This action seems very similar to the legal pursuits of the French government against eBay and Yahoo for posting content which is illegal in their country, but not in the U.S. Specifically, they were after WWII memorabilia, and anything deemed to be offensive by the French government.
Are ISPs which provide transit access to illegal material themselves responsible for the illegal material itself, even though it is under a different administrative domain outside of their control, and outside of the control of the U.S. government?
I do not think so. This is like holding the phone companies responsible for someone who did something illegal using their network. The ISPs in question do not condone or approve of the server in question which is violating U.S. law.
I hope you do not condone it either. There are enough mp3 downloading fools on this network already. I use the Internet to publish a daily journal, to share pictures that I take with my digital camera, and to communicate ORIGINAL WORKS by myself to others, and to obtain their own original works.
Fair rights ain't got nothing to do with it.