I don't know that the telcos donated the equipment. I work for an outsourcing company that has a NO contract, and we donated stuff. Our corporate guys are particularly proud of the fact that our NOC kept running during the whole disaster, and we got payroll out on schedule.
I don't know who donated the wireless mesh network - but I doubt it was the telcos.
Heck, the place I work for is being sold a new VOIP system by the monster phone company, and they are going to hook the various sites up via T-1 lines... even though we have dark fiber in the ground. T-1 lines mean monthly revenue for them, you see.
More likely, some radio company like ClearWire or Enterasys or Aruba donated the gear. It would be nice if this part of TFA had more detail.
As an email administrator, I would be happy to implement any of the anti-spam technologies: BondedSender, DomainKeys, SPF (I've already published my SPF data, and I'll happily turn on receive-side SPF checking when my whole system supports it.)
My system drops twelve to fourteen thousand spam messages per day. (For comparison, we accept about three to four thousand legitimate messages per day). I am certain that if it cost the sender even a penny per message, my volume of spam would drop 90%.
In this article, I pretty much hear Bennett Haselton whining that he doesn't get to send messages to people with certain email addresses - unless he posts a $2,000 bond. I can sympathize that $2,000 is a lot of money, and frankly that does seem too high. Would Mr. Haselton complain if the bond were $50?
Remember - you only lose your bond if people report you as a spammer. If someone reports you as a spammer, it is probably in your financial best interest to put them on your own personal 'do-not-email' list. Mr. Haselton probably doesn't want his message going to people who find it annoying.
Which cuts down on my spam rate - hey... we both win.
I don't see any hospital giving some random person that walked in the door an email account. Now, I could see them letting anyone use a web page, from which Yahoo, Google, AOL or Hotmail mail could be sent.
But then, the recipient is is going to see a sender's address they recognize.
I just don't see "important messages" being sent from bogus email addresses.
That's a fair question. The place I worked for had to migrate the VIPs to Exchange from GroupWise, because the #1 VIP wanted Outlook. We bought 40 of the Quest licenses - so the MS marketing team is probably counting them.
But two months later, 95% of those VIPs hate Outlook and are begging to come back to GroupWise. You won't see MS announcing those kinds of losses....;-)
Isn't there an additional cost per-seat for the MS Windows CAL?
We did a comparison about a year and a half ago, and the MS licenses (for comparable Novell services) were cheaper - but not by much. It was something like a nine year return on investment (which your finance person would tell you is not worth it).
Of course, what you really want is what the directory gets you: if all you need is login name + password, then it doesn't make sense to pay a lot per seat. If you need more, then it may be worth the money. For example, adding ZENworks gives you the ability to remote-control the desktop, and even re-image the desktop, all from eDirectory. Spending money on Ghost?, Hassling with getting your users to provide you with their IP address (which on a locked down machine means more work on your end) for remote control? It all costs money.
Rather like Metcalf's law, the value of a directory increases with the extended services it enables.
We have no limits on total storage space per mailbox (about 1,800 users), and space on the servers was growing a little too rapidly. We got management to buy off on attachment limits ("email is not a file transfer protocol").
Today, if a user tries to attach a file greater than 20 MB, the user gets a refusal message. This did cause a few help desk calls - it took a little bit of working with a few users to train them to use FTP.
But, this one little change greatly changed the growth curve in our email storage requirements.
I don't know that mine was the Osborne 1; mine came in the grey/blue case instead of the original tan case.
But yes, the Osborne was my first. I even got in on the dBase offer. Hoo boy! Doing sorts on floppys! Yeehaw!;-)
Interestingly, around 1983, I carried it on a business trip, and stuffed it under the airliner seat just like it was designed for. The guy next to me (like 40 years old, compared to my 20 at the time) was pretty curious, and asked me what it was. When I told him it was a personal (portable) computer, he looked at me like I was an alien. Then he asked what I would use it for - and I explained I would write up my report on the trip at night in my hotel room, and it would be done before I got back from my trip. Word processing. This seemed to surprise him.
Then he told me he was a salesman for IBM. He sold mainframes.
I think he got a glimpse of the future, and it looked young.;-)
He was a pretty nice guy. But I think I unsettled him.
It sounds like the system is working though. From the sounds of it, if you showed ReturnPath an opt-out message, followed by a spam message, they would use it as pressure on the bonded senders.
Which is how it should be. If the bonded senders are willing to put their money where their mouth is, they should lose that money if they violate the rules.
This is easy for me to say, but you should consider sending the Comcast DVR back, and living with standard definition.
Capitalism at work: if the product sucks, send it back. Don't reward them with money per month for a bad product.
Of course, if the difference between SD and HD is great enough, then you may be willing to put up with paying them more money for poorer software.
But if Comcast is refusing to let you hide the stupid channels, it doesn't bode well for the future. I'd let them know that the money they spent on their restrictive design is money in the toilet, 'cause it isn't going to earn them cash out of your wallet.
Some companies are terrific at sending their people to training. I used to work for one of those (IT outsourcer here). When we met with the end-users, they loved us, because we knew what the heck we were doing, and it showed in our work. Alas, due to a tragedy at the highest level, the company founders decided to dismantle the company and sell out.
My new employer is significantly more stingy with the training dollars.
Due to other factors we nearly lost the contract (could lose it still). But - the company has had to shell out a ton of money in an attempt to save the contract, and somewhere the light bulb went on: it isn't worth all this money, if the staff can't out-perform the competition.
So this year, they have paid for time and tuition for about eight people, where for the previous three years we got zilch. Heck - I got my CCNA, and two of us got their CCNP's.:-)
With all this training, and the professionalism that comes from knowing you are a subject-matter expert, morale is tremendously improved. And that is reflected in customer satisfaction.
If your employer won't train you, look for a place that doesn't run the joint like the Keystone Kops.
I implemented MediaWiki as a part of an internal documentation project. As a collection of documentation, it is terrific. Any user anywhere has access, and can update the document. There is nothing quite like being in a wiring closet and adding notes and photographs to the page describing what should and should not be in that wiring closet.
In my project, the biggest impediment to wide-scale adoption was the inconvenience of logging in all the time. Due to the sensitive nature of the information in the wiki, we had to secure it against anonymous browsing*. This means yet-another-login-name-and-password - which is of course the death of ease-of-use.
What I wouldn't have given for a decent single-sign-on solution for MediaWiki + eDirectory (that doesn't incur additional dollar cost to our client).
Anyway, the collaborative editing function of the wiki was handy enough, that management asked for another wiki, just for management people, for the task of contract review. The biggest hurdle here is the import-export of the wikitext <--> MS Word.
*Documentation is only as good as it accurately reflects reality - so our documentation includes our warts. Our contract is up for bid, and anonymous browsing would expose those warts to the very company that is bidding against us. No, we didn't feel like handing ammunition to our enemy. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have learned and implemented a different system, that has a granular permissions system.
And interestingly enough, that language isn't very different from Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - although SVG is 'defined' for 2D, with the 3D extensions still in 'experimental' form (last I checked).
I can see your point, although I worry about nationalizing. Sometimes the power and telcom hang off poles together. Do we nationalize both? Today, the state and county have road crews. Do they both now employ power and telcom crews? Probably not - the govt would just contract out the work.
Once nationalized, I can easily see where the telcom and power line contracts are valuable enough that they would attract all sorts of corruption.
It isn't an easy situation to fix. You are 100% correct about vendors pointing fingers at each other. From what I've heard, the Baby Bells had a reputation for their technicians going out of their way to screw with 3rd-party equipment. I read somewhere that it got so bad that the 3rd party gear has to be inside a chain link fence cage (inside the building) and the keys to the padlocks have to logged for each use.
I'd like to see right-of-way access granted to any company that wants to run fiber to the home. I remember when the cable TV company got rights to lay coax in my town. One of my friends worked on a crew. They didn't get paid a lot, and there were something like six crews of four guys working all throughout the town. But they cabled the whole town of about 70,000 people in about six months. He ended up following that cabling crew across the country and ended up in Kentucky last I heard.
Technically, kinda sorta no. You and I paid our phone bills, and as a regulated monopoly, the government told Ma Bell that she could charge "whatever it costs, plus a modest profit."
It wasn't taxes, collected by the IRS or your local government Tax Collector. It was a non-negotiable fee without recourse of choosing a competitive provider. Not that there is a whole lot of difference....
So it is the difference between roads and rail. Roads are actually paid for (and built) by your local government - rail by some private (for profit) company.
Should the SBC assets be nationalized? As a Libertarian, I don't think so. I would rather see the monopoly busted by allowing any company right-of-way permissions (providing that the end-user actually gets something for the right-of-way).
I'm going to suppose that depends on the client. I have a network of 32 NetWare servers, and not a one has IPX on it anymore (all 100% TCP/IP). I have servers running both NetWare 5.1 and OES NetWare (which is NetWare 6.5 SP 4).
Two of my co-workers are running Linux and mounting volumes on the servers. One is using the official Novell client. He was using the user community Novel Client (as opposed to the Novell Client). He reports that the official Novell Client is much much faster at mounting and accessing drives.
Sorry I'm not more help than that. The only Linux I use is SuSE, and that at home occasionally - no NetWare access here.
Re:I am lucky in this regard
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That was pretty smart of your county people - I'm sure they keep a few fibers for their own private network, and get paid by the providers using the rest of the fiber.
My county has contracted with the cable TV provider to run fiber between cities and and campuses. Going fiber-optic has been far far better than any other technology we've used (telco, microwave, 802.11 point-to-point wireless).
We don't have fiber run for anyone but ourselves though. To build a community fiber plant would require cash far beyond what we have available.
Re:My experience hasn't been that good.
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I'm glad for you that they fixed it, and quickly. I had a different line fail, where they told us they had to replace a bunch of line. I think they ended up replacing the wire from end to end. The site was down for five days though.
But you are right about them doing it right the second time. That circuit hasn't had a problem in the two years since.
Re:My experience hasn't been that good.
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That makes a lot of sense - well, from a diagnosis standpoint. Of course, it reinforces the reputation of "We don't care, we don't have to."
Re:Picking a nit about "LATA" definition and trunk
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And you are correct - I did play fast and loose with the LATA / area code description. I remember that one line, because we did have a problem with it, and the two carriers involved pointed fingers at each other. As it happens, that one site is in the area code south of us. But you are correct - an inter-LATA link does not necessitate an area code change.
My experience hasn't been that good.
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But then, I work for an agency that has about 100 different leased lines (ATM, T-1, Frame-Relay, ISDN, ADSL and even the occasional dial-up). All are local - only one goes inter-LATA (across area codes). Yes, Joe Taxpayer foots the bill.
"We don't care, we don't have to." is a pretty good descriptor of SBC.
We have one customer who loses connectivity every couple of weeks. We call SBC, they do something, tell us to power cycle the equipment, and the problem is solved. When we ask what they did, they say they didn't do anything.... (Except of course when the customer calls us, they have already power cycled the equipment - no connectivity.) We've taken all new equipment to them (known good gear, twice) - no dice. Only after SBC does their magic, does it work - and SBC continues to claim the problem is our gear.
And this problem has been going on for months. And that is just one circuit, this year.
"We don't care, we don't have to."
How about fraudulent billing? Since SBC knows we are a large organization, they know that they can get away with stuff. IT would tell Telcom to have a leased line discontinued. Telcom would phone in the order and SBC would say they would disconnect the circuit. But SBC never stopped billing us for the circuit. Because the billing people weren't in the loop, they kept paying for dead circuits. SBC knows they have plausible deniability - so they keep charging.
Did I mention eight years of "wire maintenance" when we have our own Telcom department that runs and repairs the wires?
"We don't care, we don't have to."
I've had to drive 45 miles to a site to bring out a new router because SBC claimed "we've replaced the entire line, it must be your equipment." And when I get there, the new router doesn't make any difference. Then, the on site technician says 'well, we never did replace the line between the pole and the building. Maybe we should do that' - which magically fixes the problem.
If you had as much interaction with SBC as my co-workers and I have, you'd hate them too.
I do see your concern. My point was that Mr. Ralsky is running a high-risk business, and should have seen the confiscation of equipment coming. Hence, the disaster recovery plan.
Mr. Ralsky got a reporter's ear, and used it to yell out 'help, help, I'm being repressed!'
I don't believe him. I'm sure he has a DR plan in place and has already activated it.
Sure, in an ideal world, his gear wouldn't be confiscated. If the warrants were issued against SBC, probably some sort of deal would be worked out where a set of backup tapes were handed over instead (I believe this was the case with one of the Presidential investigations).
But in Mr. Ralsky's case, his operation is clearly on the edge of legitimacy, and so he should know he needs full disaster recovery plans and test schedules.
I'm going to disagree that it is unconstitutional. The equipment is 'evidence', and warrants were issued for its confiscation. When his trial is over, he will get his equipment back (although the hard drives might be wiped clean, should he be found guilty).
And although Mr. Ralsky says he is effectively out of business, I trust him and this statement as much as I trust his honorable treatment of email address removal requests - which is no trust at all*. He certainly has backup tapes off site. He also has the means to start right back up - or he should have, considering the money involved. If he doesn't, then he is an idiot, and gets what he deserves. SBC wouldn't go out of business if their bookkeeping computers were seized - same principle here.
I know I expect SourceForge to have backup tapes held off site. If SourceForge and OSDN don't have disaster recovery plans already written and tested - shame on them.
Every business that depends on IT should have a DR plan. Even if law enforcement mistakenly seizes your computers - that doesn't excuse your business from failing. Once you get 'large enough' it is irresponsible to not have a DR plan.
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I don't know who donated the wireless mesh network - but I doubt it was the telcos.
Heck, the place I work for is being sold a new VOIP system by the monster phone company, and they are going to hook the various sites up via T-1 lines ... even though we have dark fiber in the ground. T-1 lines mean monthly revenue for them, you see.
More likely, some radio company like ClearWire or Enterasys or Aruba donated the gear. It would be nice if this part of TFA had more detail.
Try the Developer color scheme. You'll crave bubblegum ice cream after a while, but it will keep you alert.
My system drops twelve to fourteen thousand spam messages per day. (For comparison, we accept about three to four thousand legitimate messages per day). I am certain that if it cost the sender even a penny per message, my volume of spam would drop 90%.
In this article, I pretty much hear Bennett Haselton whining that he doesn't get to send messages to people with certain email addresses - unless he posts a $2,000 bond. I can sympathize that $2,000 is a lot of money, and frankly that does seem too high. Would Mr. Haselton complain if the bond were $50?
Remember - you only lose your bond if people report you as a spammer. If someone reports you as a spammer, it is probably in your financial best interest to put them on your own personal 'do-not-email' list. Mr. Haselton probably doesn't want his message going to people who find it annoying.
Which cuts down on my spam rate - hey... we both win.
I don't see any hospital giving some random person that walked in the door an email account. Now, I could see them letting anyone use a web page, from which Yahoo, Google, AOL or Hotmail mail could be sent.
But then, the recipient is is going to see a sender's address they recognize.
I just don't see "important messages" being sent from bogus email addresses.
But two months later, 95% of those VIPs hate Outlook and are begging to come back to GroupWise. You won't see MS announcing those kinds of losses.... ;-)
We did a comparison about a year and a half ago, and the MS licenses (for comparable Novell services) were cheaper - but not by much. It was something like a nine year return on investment (which your finance person would tell you is not worth it).
Of course, what you really want is what the directory gets you: if all you need is login name + password, then it doesn't make sense to pay a lot per seat. If you need more, then it may be worth the money. For example, adding ZENworks gives you the ability to remote-control the desktop, and even re-image the desktop, all from eDirectory. Spending money on Ghost?, Hassling with getting your users to provide you with their IP address (which on a locked down machine means more work on your end) for remote control? It all costs money.
Rather like Metcalf's law, the value of a directory increases with the extended services it enables.
FWIW, eDirectory 8.8 on Windows does now requires NTFS. ... you can install eDirectory only on an NTFS partition. I don't know when that change was made.
Today, if a user tries to attach a file greater than 20 MB, the user gets a refusal message. This did cause a few help desk calls - it took a little bit of working with a few users to train them to use FTP.
But, this one little change greatly changed the growth curve in our email storage requirements.
But yes, the Osborne was my first. I even got in on the dBase offer. Hoo boy! Doing sorts on floppys! Yeehaw! ;-)
Interestingly, around 1983, I carried it on a business trip, and stuffed it under the airliner seat just like it was designed for. The guy next to me (like 40 years old, compared to my 20 at the time) was pretty curious, and asked me what it was. When I told him it was a personal (portable) computer, he looked at me like I was an alien. Then he asked what I would use it for - and I explained I would write up my report on the trip at night in my hotel room, and it would be done before I got back from my trip. Word processing. This seemed to surprise him.
Then he told me he was a salesman for IBM. He sold mainframes.
I think he got a glimpse of the future, and it looked young. ;-)
He was a pretty nice guy. But I think I unsettled him.
Which is how it should be. If the bonded senders are willing to put their money where their mouth is, they should lose that money if they violate the rules.
They'd probably take you off the list, if each of their emails to you cost them money....
Personally, I'd like to see the Bonded Sender program work, as the fundamental idea is good.
Capitalism at work: if the product sucks, send it back. Don't reward them with money per month for a bad product.
Of course, if the difference between SD and HD is great enough, then you may be willing to put up with paying them more money for poorer software.
But if Comcast is refusing to let you hide the stupid channels, it doesn't bode well for the future. I'd let them know that the money they spent on their restrictive design is money in the toilet, 'cause it isn't going to earn them cash out of your wallet.
Some companies are terrific at sending their people to training. I used to work for one of those (IT outsourcer here). When we met with the end-users, they loved us, because we knew what the heck we were doing, and it showed in our work. Alas, due to a tragedy at the highest level, the company founders decided to dismantle the company and sell out.
My new employer is significantly more stingy with the training dollars.
Due to other factors we nearly lost the contract (could lose it still). But - the company has had to shell out a ton of money in an attempt to save the contract, and somewhere the light bulb went on: it isn't worth all this money, if the staff can't out-perform the competition.
So this year, they have paid for time and tuition for about eight people, where for the previous three years we got zilch. Heck - I got my CCNA, and two of us got their CCNP's. :-)
With all this training, and the professionalism that comes from knowing you are a subject-matter expert, morale is tremendously improved. And that is reflected in customer satisfaction.
If your employer won't train you, look for a place that doesn't run the joint like the Keystone Kops.
In my project, the biggest impediment to wide-scale adoption was the inconvenience of logging in all the time. Due to the sensitive nature of the information in the wiki, we had to secure it against anonymous browsing*. This means yet-another-login-name-and-password - which is of course the death of ease-of-use.
What I wouldn't have given for a decent single-sign-on solution for MediaWiki + eDirectory (that doesn't incur additional dollar cost to our client).
Anyway, the collaborative editing function of the wiki was handy enough, that management asked for another wiki, just for management people, for the task of contract review. The biggest hurdle here is the import-export of the wikitext <--> MS Word.
*Documentation is only as good as it accurately reflects reality - so our documentation includes our warts. Our contract is up for bid, and anonymous browsing would expose those warts to the very company that is bidding against us. No, we didn't feel like handing ammunition to our enemy. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have learned and implemented a different system, that has a granular permissions system.
Once nationalized, I can easily see where the telcom and power line contracts are valuable enough that they would attract all sorts of corruption.
It isn't an easy situation to fix. You are 100% correct about vendors pointing fingers at each other. From what I've heard, the Baby Bells had a reputation for their technicians going out of their way to screw with 3rd-party equipment. I read somewhere that it got so bad that the 3rd party gear has to be inside a chain link fence cage (inside the building) and the keys to the padlocks have to logged for each use.
I'd like to see right-of-way access granted to any company that wants to run fiber to the home. I remember when the cable TV company got rights to lay coax in my town. One of my friends worked on a crew. They didn't get paid a lot, and there were something like six crews of four guys working all throughout the town. But they cabled the whole town of about 70,000 people in about six months. He ended up following that cabling crew across the country and ended up in Kentucky last I heard.
It wasn't taxes, collected by the IRS or your local government Tax Collector. It was a non-negotiable fee without recourse of choosing a competitive provider. Not that there is a whole lot of difference....
So it is the difference between roads and rail. Roads are actually paid for (and built) by your local government - rail by some private (for profit) company.
Should the SBC assets be nationalized? As a Libertarian, I don't think so. I would rather see the monopoly busted by allowing any company right-of-way permissions (providing that the end-user actually gets something for the right-of-way).
Two of my co-workers are running Linux and mounting volumes on the servers. One is using the official Novell client. He was using the user community Novel Client (as opposed to the Novell Client). He reports that the official Novell Client is much much faster at mounting and accessing drives.
Sorry I'm not more help than that. The only Linux I use is SuSE, and that at home occasionally - no NetWare access here.
My county has contracted with the cable TV provider to run fiber between cities and and campuses. Going fiber-optic has been far far better than any other technology we've used (telco, microwave, 802.11 point-to-point wireless).
We don't have fiber run for anyone but ourselves though. To build a community fiber plant would require cash far beyond what we have available.
But you are right about them doing it right the second time. That circuit hasn't had a problem in the two years since.
And you are correct - I did play fast and loose with the LATA / area code description. I remember that one line, because we did have a problem with it, and the two carriers involved pointed fingers at each other. As it happens, that one site is in the area code south of us. But you are correct - an inter-LATA link does not necessitate an area code change.
"We don't care, we don't have to." is a pretty good descriptor of SBC.
We have one customer who loses connectivity every couple of weeks. We call SBC, they do something, tell us to power cycle the equipment, and the problem is solved. When we ask what they did, they say they didn't do anything.... (Except of course when the customer calls us, they have already power cycled the equipment - no connectivity.) We've taken all new equipment to them (known good gear, twice) - no dice. Only after SBC does their magic, does it work - and SBC continues to claim the problem is our gear.
And this problem has been going on for months. And that is just one circuit, this year.
"We don't care, we don't have to."
How about fraudulent billing? Since SBC knows we are a large organization, they know that they can get away with stuff. IT would tell Telcom to have a leased line discontinued. Telcom would phone in the order and SBC would say they would disconnect the circuit. But SBC never stopped billing us for the circuit. Because the billing people weren't in the loop, they kept paying for dead circuits. SBC knows they have plausible deniability - so they keep charging.
Did I mention eight years of "wire maintenance" when we have our own Telcom department that runs and repairs the wires?
"We don't care, we don't have to."
I've had to drive 45 miles to a site to bring out a new router because SBC claimed "we've replaced the entire line, it must be your equipment." And when I get there, the new router doesn't make any difference. Then, the on site technician says 'well, we never did replace the line between the pole and the building. Maybe we should do that' - which magically fixes the problem.
If you had as much interaction with SBC as my co-workers and I have, you'd hate them too.
Mr. Ralsky got a reporter's ear, and used it to yell out 'help, help, I'm being repressed!'
I don't believe him. I'm sure he has a DR plan in place and has already activated it.
Sure, in an ideal world, his gear wouldn't be confiscated. If the warrants were issued against SBC, probably some sort of deal would be worked out where a set of backup tapes were handed over instead (I believe this was the case with one of the Presidential investigations).
But in Mr. Ralsky's case, his operation is clearly on the edge of legitimacy, and so he should know he needs full disaster recovery plans and test schedules.
And although Mr. Ralsky says he is effectively out of business, I trust him and this statement as much as I trust his honorable treatment of email address removal requests - which is no trust at all*. He certainly has backup tapes off site. He also has the means to start right back up - or he should have, considering the money involved. If he doesn't, then he is an idiot, and gets what he deserves. SBC wouldn't go out of business if their bookkeeping computers were seized - same principle here.
I know I expect SourceForge to have backup tapes held off site. If SourceForge and OSDN don't have disaster recovery plans already written and tested - shame on them.
Every business that depends on IT should have a DR plan. Even if law enforcement mistakenly seizes your computers - that doesn't excuse your business from failing. Once you get 'large enough' it is irresponsible to not have a DR plan.
*According to the Spamhaus Project, Mr. Ralsky hosts his email servers in China to evade U.S. law. And as an email administrator, I don't see any evidence that email removal requests result in less spam - quite the opposite, really.