Unfortunately, I have a LOT of remote servers to administer. We have 4 data centers here in Irving, TX; 1 in Blue Hill, NY; 1 in Freehold, NJ; 1 in Ft.Wayne, IN; and 1 in Sacramento, CA. We've got that drill down. It's so good that I've gotten lazy and use the system to administer the servers that are in my building so that I don't have to get up from desk!
I would suggest that since this is co-lo'd server that you look at something like the RIBLOE from Compaq. There are several companies that make them and you can even use the virtual floppy to do things like flash the BIOS remotely. It also allows to you watch the POST and do all the things that you could do if you were standing in front it except change hardware. We use the Compaq/HP version, the IBM one, Rose Electroics makes one, you can get them for almost any hardware you can name.
Their distribution model sucks. I've read the posts and it seems that almost everyone is grabbing downloads of things that just aren't available. Did you know that when Napster was operating that CD sales actually ROSE 20%? How is that harming those vultures?
When are they going to clue in? We, the consumer, want everything all time. You, the vendor, will give it to us or we'll get it on our own. If you had a clue, you'd change how record stores operate. They would ALL be burning CD's on demand. New albums might only be available as a pre-recorded album. Otherwise, your entire library would be available to the record store all the time. The technological issues are minimal.
What are they afraid of? They don't want the public to realize that we could deal with the artists directly. The internet forms the perfect distribution channel. No one really needs them. If we paid the artist directly, we'd get our songs for a $1.00 each and the artists would get exponentially more money than they get from the RIAA now. So the artists don't really need them.
God knows that we the customer don't really need them. They tell us what we can and cannot purchase. I don't want the things you tell me that I should. I WANT WHAT I WANT! If you don't want to supply it, someone else will.
We only have a certain number of choices to produce engergy.
Hydroelectic - the PETA freaks won't let you do that because some damn thing or other won't be able to swim up stream.
Fossil Fuel - expensive and pollutes. The acid rain will kill all of us anway
Wind - not reliable and not available most places. This is also EXTREMELY noisy - can we say "noise pollution"?.
Solar - Hmmm - wonder how well that's going to work in the nice rainy , foggy UK?
Nukes - makes anyone sane nervous. Karen Silkwood ring any bells?
Geothermal - anyone want to see the NEXT ice age?
Garbage - Incenrators burn your garbage. Renewable and fairly clean. Also does away with landfills
The fact of the matter is that we don't have an unlimited source of energy but we have an unlimited source of people. Instead of looking for new ways to get energy, turn the problem around. Look for new ways of limiting the people to a sustainable level.
My solution - put birth control in the water. If you don't pass the IQ test, you don't get the antidote.
The ultimate function of the Internet is rather Darwin-istic. The "fittest" wiget survives, grows, changes, reproduces (in the form of copy-cats) and eventually evolves into something else. It doesn't matter if the wiget is an e-zine or some software or a web site or something else. If you can't survive, it's because you are doing something that renders you "unfit". Find out what that is and fix it. If you do, you won't need to beg for help. You'll be able to pay your rent.
Look, in spite of the problems that the Shuttle program has had, it's still safer than your freeway drive to work. The ultimate bottom line is that I'd be on the next one, if they called.
This is just what we need! Now, instead of being threatened with de-peering for exceeding their traffic quotas, which is usually due to SPAM, we'll get more spam since the smaller ISP's will now get paid to generate all that traffic.
I was part of a team who built a real time, database back end kluge of an on line ordering system with a web site as the front in back in 1996. These patents are from 2000 - 4 YEARS later. They can't patent what they didn't create. They can try, but it won't hold. We GPL'd this stuff back in 1996. These jackasses are in violation of the GPL.
Anyone want proof? Feel free to write. I still have a disk image of the site somewhere.....
Too bad that basic services like SSH and WINE/Terminal Services don't run under Palm.
I use my handheld to provide freedom of movement when I am on call. In order for me to administer my mixed environment of 500+ Windows boxes, 200+ Unix boxes, assorted network gear and other attendant devices, I need to be able to access both. Too bad that the ONLY handheld that currently meets my requirements without hours and hours of hacking runs a MS OS.
My current employer deals in offering a lot of services to its customers over the internet. We started off as a "Microsoft only" shop, even though we have at least 100 Sun servers here that run the back end databases and such. Our management finally got smart and noticed that the downtime reports almost never listed any of the Sun servers. They comissioned a study to see if we could improve our service by changing operating systems. They were considering replacing our Windows gear with Sun stuff.
We pointed out that we could keep our current gear and just migrate the OS, so for us, this is an ideal situation. We've begun migrating to Linux one application at a time. Our uptimes have improved dramatically, which has reduced the amount of hardware we have been allocating to each application which in turn has allowed us to speed up the migration. The most difficult part has been getting the development teams to use the "other slash".
Because our admins were mostly all cross platform to begin with, the migration hasn't been terribly painful. I realize that we are unusual in that aspect. We've begun training those that are single platform only by pairing a Unix-only with a Windows-only in a sort of buddy-system. The biggest part of the learning curve has been figuring out which distro to use. We have found that as long as we stay with RedHat 7.2, we really don't have any issues with the OS and hardware. I would like to point out that not every distro will support every vendors proprietary server hardware. We tried using newer distros and ran into problems with the kernel not supporting things. We tried using other vendors distros (Mandrake, Suse, etc.) and ran into problems as well.
My advice would be to go slowly. Port one thing at a time. Get your admins up to speed on that one thing. Once they get up to speed on that one thing, they'll be able to work the kinks out. Once they get the kinks worked out, then you can move on to the next application. I can't stress enough that you need to proceed SLOWLY.
I think that this article might be useful to you. It describes a commercially available NIC that does much of the network processing on the NIC.
I think that the price is a bit out of your range for now. My understanding is that they are running about $1000 each. Wait, and the price will drop, tho.
I wouldn't be doing too much celebrating just yet. IBM, HP/Compaq/DEC Alpha, Sun, and several others hold lots of RISC chip technology patents. HP just recently sold their patents for the Alpha chips to Intel to produce the rather crappy Itanium chips. To say that they aren't violating any of Intel's patents is entirely premature.
I agree with many of the things that the other posters here are telling you to do. I have a few suggestions though. Put the money in to areas where it will do you some good. Buy the cheaper servers. The real bottleneck on most servers is the PCI bus and the hard drive IO, anyway. Multiple smaller servers eliminiates this issue since the same load is spread across more PCI buses and read-write heads. It's nice to have the budget for an E10K, but we have two at work and I'm not terribly impressed, and especically not for the price tag, nevermind the footprint, weight, power usge, or massive BTU's.
My first concerns your network. You are far more likely to saturate your network than to run out of server capacity. Sites with page views in thousands per second generally run multiple high end connections, like DS-3's. You are going to need gear that can handle this kind of load, not to mention the redundancy and multipathing. Some serious gig gear is probably definitely in order.
I'd also suggest that you do some tweaking to your firewalls. Security is, or at least, should be a major concern for sites that take those kind of hits. Just ask Wingspan Bank. You can build a great site, but if people get their information stolen, they won't be back.
My next suggestion would be to put a dedicated load balancing hardware device out in front of them. Either use Squid or use an actual hardware device that is supposed to do this kind of thing, ala Cisco's CSS products.
I'd also suggest sinking some of that cabbage into a real database. Understand that I'm not knocking PostgreSQL or any of the other open source databases. Oracle has roughly 85% of the high end database market FOR A REASON. Once you shuck out for the Oracle instance, shuck out for someone one to tune it as well. Tuning is VERY important to databases.
Anyway that's my 2 cents worth. This advice is worth exactly what you have paid for it.
I am about to. We're getting ready to roll out and its either going to be at the end of this week or the beginning of next week. Feel free to drop me a line and I'll let you know how it's going. The testing we've done looks promising. We'll be running mod_perl as a DSO instead of compiled in, so we won't quite be able to compare apples to apples.
You know, all you folks can find 50,000 things to say about Microsoft's OS, but when it comes to the hard core, backend, technical issues, ALL of you dry up. You aren't informed! Well, now is the time for you to get over it. Microsoft is going to quietly sneak in the back door and take over the internet, if we don't get off our collective behinds and put a stop to it. ICANN was supposed to represent the users and it's been hijacked by corporate interests, Microsoft among them, who intend to use DNS as a means to "own" the interent.
Perhaps you aren't familiar with DNS, which I find hard to swallow on in a community this technical. DNS says that your site exists and this is how people find you. It also controls email via the MX records in DNS. If you like to surf and read email, then you have a stake in this. When you start tinkering with the very basic addressing of the internet, you start exercising a LOT of control over what is allowed and what isn't allowed. Who wants that in the hands of a bunch of corporate sell-outs?
This is going to shape the internet for generations to come. We are laying the ground work for all kinds of things. IPv6 is coming, which will replace the current internet addressing scheme. What about voice over IP? How's that going to work? Will it work for cell phones? New routing protocols are coming that will be purely optical. Do you really want the implementation of ALL of this in hands of the corporations who stand to profit out of finding extra ways to make you pay to use all this?
Let's take a trip down memory lane about previous ICANN policies. Rememeber with Internic (now Register.com) was the only name registrar and they screwed up EVERYTHING!! There were so bad, in fact, that Congress stepped in and made ICANN allow other registrars. If you have a domain name that's registered, look at your inbox and how much spam you get related to your domain name(s). That's another fine ICANN policy in action. Don't fool yourself, these people are not there to look out for the public good.
Well, unless you want a lot more of the same for the next few decades, I'd suggest that you all write your representatives (here the the good old usa - http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/) and start squealing now. You need to get your family to write. Get your friends and co-workers to write - even if you have to write the letter and get them to sign it.
You know, you have to fight the fight while it can still be won. We are still within our window of opportunity, people.
I would suggest that you proceed slowly. Linux doesn't have the mature GUI that Windows offers and it takes some getting used to. Most non-technical people are inherently disturbed by change - they fear change. My current employer is considering this. We have organized groups by job function. The admin assistants will be going first since word processing, email, etc. are fairly robust for Linux. I suggest that you look at Ximian.com and their Evolution product, namely for the email client. I also suggest AbiWord as a good "Word" replacement. The whole office suite is relatively simple to replace.
Our developers and IT staff, which make a large part of our company, are having difficulty since we use many of those "specalized applications" that you were referring to. We have had some luck with WINE. You might also want to check out Lindows. VMWare is another option, but that still requires a Windows license - however - it wil allow you to run what just became your legacy apps until you can migrate off them as well.
Big Brother has been out and about for a very long time now. Only an utter fool doesn't realize this. What did you think Carnivore was about? Maybe you thought it was about looking at "bad people's" email? What if you are considered to be one of the "bad people"?
Corporate Entities are wanting to own you. Our court system has already decided that whoever collects information about you owns the information. They own information about your drivers license, your address, your criminal history, and a thousand other things you wouldn't necessarily want your boss looking at. For the whopping fee of $25.00 per year, I can look up all kinds of things about you at www.publicdata.com.
My current campaing is against Motorola. They have ordered their resellers to provide them with all the information they have on people who purchase specific Motorola products. Motorola then sells the data to Dun & Bradstreet. You get issued a DUNS number and then other companies start to accumulate information about you. Information to which you have no access and no recourse to correct. I suggest that you boycott any Motorola product or any item made with a Motorola chip. Vote with your dollars. Corporations understand the bottom line
Since do-gooders in what was then the Belgian Congo decided to make their own polio vaccine from the local chimp and monkey popluation, which just happened to be infested with SIV (the ape equivalent of AIDS), they injected literally thousands of humans with SIV until the virus finally mutated and became HIV aka AIDS. I say that they should pay for the treatment of everyone on the planet with AIDS. They started it. Let them mop up the consequences.
Am I the only one who has noticed that CD sales ROSE by 22% after Napster came on line and that have already dropped by 4% (and are continuing to drop) without Napster?
Part of the RIAA's case is that they have been harmed. How? Where?
My personal experience with support from several major manufacturers has lead me to boycott their prodcuts. I will never purchase anything from them again unless they develop a cure for the plague and I happen to be a victim.
Considering that I am in infrastructure and I have a lot of final say in what is purchased, I have millions to spend during the course of my career. You can bet that those folks won't see a dime of it. I will ALWAYS choose their competitor's products because, if nothing else, because I won't have to deal with them.
Every other line of business has to support and service its customer base lest they leave. Why people accept this sort of treatment from techonology companies is beyone me. I choose to vote with my dollars, and with my employers dollars. I recommend that the rest of us do the same. This way we can drive the loosers out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I have a LOT of remote servers to administer. We have 4 data centers here in Irving, TX; 1 in Blue Hill, NY; 1 in Freehold, NJ; 1 in Ft.Wayne, IN; and 1 in Sacramento, CA. We've got that drill down. It's so good that I've gotten lazy and use the system to administer the servers that are in my building so that I don't have to get up from desk!
I would suggest that since this is co-lo'd server that you look at something like the RIBLOE from Compaq. There are several companies that make them and you can even use the virtual floppy to do things like flash the BIOS remotely. It also allows to you watch the POST and do all the things that you could do if you were standing in front it except change hardware. We use the Compaq/HP version, the IBM one, Rose Electroics makes one, you can get them for almost any hardware you can name.
I'm still waiting for the proof of concept so that I can test this on every mail server in sight. Hmmmm.......wonder if the FBI will by later.
Queen B
Their distribution model sucks. I've read the posts and it seems that almost everyone is grabbing downloads of things that just aren't available. Did you know that when Napster was operating that CD sales actually ROSE 20%? How is that harming those vultures?
When are they going to clue in? We, the consumer, want everything all time. You, the vendor, will give it to us or we'll get it on our own. If you had a clue, you'd change how record stores operate. They would ALL be burning CD's on demand. New albums might only be available as a pre-recorded album. Otherwise, your entire library would be available to the record store all the time. The technological issues are minimal.
What are they afraid of? They don't want the public to realize that we could deal with the artists directly. The internet forms the perfect distribution channel. No one really needs them. If we paid the artist directly, we'd get our songs for a $1.00 each and the artists would get exponentially more money than they get from the RIAA now. So the artists don't really need them.
God knows that we the customer don't really need them. They tell us what we can and cannot purchase. I don't want the things you tell me that I should. I WANT WHAT I WANT! If you don't want to supply it, someone else will.
QueenB
We only have a certain number of choices to produce engergy.
The fact of the matter is that we don't have an unlimited source of energy but we have an unlimited source of people. Instead of looking for new ways to get energy, turn the problem around. Look for new ways of limiting the people to a sustainable level.
My solution - put birth control in the water. If you don't pass the IQ test, you don't get the antidote.
QueenBThe ultimate function of the Internet is rather Darwin-istic. The "fittest" wiget survives, grows, changes, reproduces (in the form of copy-cats) and eventually evolves into something else. It doesn't matter if the wiget is an e-zine or some software or a web site or something else. If you can't survive, it's because you are doing something that renders you "unfit". Find out what that is and fix it. If you do, you won't need to beg for help. You'll be able to pay your rent.
Look, in spite of the problems that the Shuttle program has had, it's still safer than your freeway drive to work. The ultimate bottom line is that I'd be on the next one, if they called.
RIAA = Rip-off Industry Association Assholes
This is just what we need! Now, instead of being threatened with de-peering for exceeding their traffic quotas, which is usually due to SPAM, we'll get more spam since the smaller ISP's will now get paid to generate all that traffic.
ACK!!!!
What the hell are you people thinking?????
I was part of a team who built a real time, database back end kluge of an on line ordering system with a web site as the front in back in 1996. These patents are from 2000 - 4 YEARS later. They can't patent what they didn't create. They can try, but it won't hold. We GPL'd this stuff back in 1996. These jackasses are in violation of the GPL.
Anyone want proof? Feel free to write. I still have a disk image of the site somewhere.....
Too bad that basic services like SSH and WINE/Terminal Services don't run under Palm.
I use my handheld to provide freedom of movement when I am on call. In order for me to administer my mixed environment of 500+ Windows boxes, 200+ Unix boxes, assorted network gear and other attendant devices, I need to be able to access both. Too bad that the ONLY handheld that currently meets my requirements without hours and hours of hacking runs a MS OS.
My current employer deals in offering a lot of services to its customers over the internet. We started off as a "Microsoft only" shop, even though we have at least 100 Sun servers here that run the back end databases and such. Our management finally got smart and noticed that the downtime reports almost never listed any of the Sun servers. They comissioned a study to see if we could improve our service by changing operating systems. They were considering replacing our Windows gear with Sun stuff.
We pointed out that we could keep our current gear and just migrate the OS, so for us, this is an ideal situation. We've begun migrating to Linux one application at a time. Our uptimes have improved dramatically, which has reduced the amount of hardware we have been allocating to each application which in turn has allowed us to speed up the migration. The most difficult part has been getting the development teams to use the "other slash".
Because our admins were mostly all cross platform to begin with, the migration hasn't been terribly painful. I realize that we are unusual in that aspect. We've begun training those that are single platform only by pairing a Unix-only with a Windows-only in a sort of buddy-system. The biggest part of the learning curve has been figuring out which distro to use. We have found that as long as we stay with RedHat 7.2, we really don't have any issues with the OS and hardware. I would like to point out that not every distro will support every vendors proprietary server hardware. We tried using newer distros and ran into problems with the kernel not supporting things. We tried using other vendors distros (Mandrake, Suse, etc.) and ran into problems as well.
My advice would be to go slowly. Port one thing at a time. Get your admins up to speed on that one thing. Once they get up to speed on that one thing, they'll be able to work the kinks out. Once they get the kinks worked out, then you can move on to the next application. I can't stress enough that you need to proceed SLOWLY.
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1318/1318ibg12.htm l
I think that this article might be useful to you. It describes a commercially available NIC that does much of the network processing on the NIC.
I think that the price is a bit out of your range for now. My understanding is that they are running about $1000 each. Wait, and the price will drop, tho.
Ultimate security is achevied only with the air gap firewall.
I wouldn't be doing too much celebrating just yet. IBM, HP/Compaq/DEC Alpha, Sun, and several others hold lots of RISC chip technology patents. HP just recently sold their patents for the Alpha chips to Intel to produce the rather crappy Itanium chips. To say that they aren't violating any of Intel's patents is entirely premature.
Hmm...let me think about this for a moment...
You and your RIAA thugs can pucker up and kiss my pink little bootie.
I agree with many of the things that the other posters here are telling you to do. I have a few suggestions though. Put the money in to areas where it will do you some good. Buy the cheaper servers. The real bottleneck on most servers is the PCI bus and the hard drive IO, anyway. Multiple smaller servers eliminiates this issue since the same load is spread across more PCI buses and read-write heads. It's nice to have the budget for an E10K, but we have two at work and I'm not terribly impressed, and especically not for the price tag, nevermind the footprint, weight, power usge, or massive BTU's.
My first concerns your network. You are far more likely to saturate your network than to run out of server capacity. Sites with page views in thousands per second generally run multiple high end connections, like DS-3's. You are going to need gear that can handle this kind of load, not to mention the redundancy and multipathing. Some serious gig gear is probably definitely in order.
I'd also suggest that you do some tweaking to your firewalls. Security is, or at least, should be a major concern for sites that take those kind of hits. Just ask Wingspan Bank. You can build a great site, but if people get their information stolen, they won't be back.
My next suggestion would be to put a dedicated load balancing hardware device out in front of them. Either use Squid or use an actual hardware device that is supposed to do this kind of thing, ala Cisco's CSS products.
I'd also suggest sinking some of that cabbage into a real database. Understand that I'm not knocking PostgreSQL or any of the other open source databases. Oracle has roughly 85% of the high end database market FOR A REASON. Once you shuck out for the Oracle instance, shuck out for someone one to tune it as well. Tuning is VERY important to databases.
Anyway that's my 2 cents worth. This advice is worth exactly what you have paid for it.
I am about to. We're getting ready to roll out and its either going to be at the end of this week or the beginning of next week. Feel free to drop me a line and I'll let you know how it's going. The testing we've done looks promising. We'll be running mod_perl as a DSO instead of compiled in, so we won't quite be able to compare apples to apples.
You know, all you folks can find 50,000 things to say about Microsoft's OS, but when it comes to the hard core, backend, technical issues, ALL of you dry up. You aren't informed! Well, now is the time for you to get over it. Microsoft is going to quietly sneak in the back door and take over the internet, if we don't get off our collective behinds and put a stop to it. ICANN was supposed to represent the users and it's been hijacked by corporate interests, Microsoft among them, who intend to use DNS as a means to "own" the interent.
Perhaps you aren't familiar with DNS, which I find hard to swallow on in a community this technical. DNS says that your site exists and this is how people find you. It also controls email via the MX records in DNS. If you like to surf and read email, then you have a stake in this. When you start tinkering with the very basic addressing of the internet, you start exercising a LOT of control over what is allowed and what isn't allowed. Who wants that in the hands of a bunch of corporate sell-outs?
This is going to shape the internet for generations to come. We are laying the ground work for all kinds of things. IPv6 is coming, which will replace the current internet addressing scheme. What about voice over IP? How's that going to work? Will it work for cell phones? New routing protocols are coming that will be purely optical. Do you really want the implementation of ALL of this in hands of the corporations who stand to profit out of finding extra ways to make you pay to use all this?
Let's take a trip down memory lane about previous ICANN policies. Rememeber with Internic (now Register.com) was the only name registrar and they screwed up EVERYTHING!! There were so bad, in fact, that Congress stepped in and made ICANN allow other registrars. If you have a domain name that's registered, look at your inbox and how much spam you get related to your domain name(s). That's another fine ICANN policy in action. Don't fool yourself, these people are not there to look out for the public good.
Well, unless you want a lot more of the same for the next few decades, I'd suggest that you all write your representatives (here the the good old usa - http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/) and start squealing now. You need to get your family to write. Get your friends and co-workers to write - even if you have to write the letter and get them to sign it.
You know, you have to fight the fight while it can still be won. We are still within our window of opportunity, people.
I would suggest that you proceed slowly. Linux doesn't have the mature GUI that Windows offers and it takes some getting used to. Most non-technical people are inherently disturbed by change - they fear change. My current employer is considering this. We have organized groups by job function. The admin assistants will be going first since word processing, email, etc. are fairly robust for Linux. I suggest that you look at Ximian.com and their Evolution product, namely for the email client. I also suggest AbiWord as a good "Word" replacement. The whole office suite is relatively simple to replace.
Our developers and IT staff, which make a large part of our company, are having difficulty since we use many of those "specalized applications" that you were referring to. We have had some luck with WINE. You might also want to check out Lindows. VMWare is another option, but that still requires a Windows license - however - it wil allow you to run what just became your legacy apps until you can migrate off them as well.
Boys and Girls, can we say Class Action?
I knew you could!!!
Which firm is going pony up and take this one?
Ford has nice deep pockets and I think that it shouldn't be too hard to show that they lack "due diligence" in protecting their cusotmers information
Big Brother has been out and about for a very long time now. Only an utter fool doesn't realize this. What did you think Carnivore was about? Maybe you thought it was about looking at "bad people's" email? What if you are considered to be one of the "bad people"?
Corporate Entities are wanting to own you. Our court system has already decided that whoever collects information about you owns the information. They own information about your drivers license, your address, your criminal history, and a thousand other things you wouldn't necessarily want your boss looking at. For the whopping fee of $25.00 per year, I can look up all kinds of things about you at www.publicdata.com.
My current campaing is against Motorola. They have ordered their resellers to provide them with all the information they have on people who purchase specific Motorola products. Motorola then sells the data to Dun & Bradstreet. You get issued a DUNS number and then other companies start to accumulate information about you. Information to which you have no access and no recourse to correct. I suggest that you boycott any Motorola product or any item made with a Motorola chip. Vote with your dollars. Corporations understand the bottom line
Since do-gooders in what was then the Belgian Congo decided to make their own polio vaccine from the local chimp and monkey popluation, which just happened to be infested with SIV (the ape equivalent of AIDS), they injected literally thousands of humans with SIV until the virus finally mutated and became HIV aka AIDS. I say that they should pay for the treatment of everyone on the planet with AIDS. They started it. Let them mop up the consequences.
Am I the only one who has noticed that CD sales ROSE by 22% after Napster came on line and that have already dropped by 4% (and are continuing to drop) without Napster?
Part of the RIAA's case is that they have been harmed. How? Where?
My personal experience with support from several major manufacturers has lead me to boycott their prodcuts. I will never purchase anything from them again unless they develop a cure for the plague and I happen to be a victim.
Considering that I am in infrastructure and I have a lot of final say in what is purchased, I have millions to spend during the course of my career. You can bet that those folks won't see a dime of it. I will ALWAYS choose their competitor's products because, if nothing else, because I won't have to deal with them.
Every other line of business has to support and service its customer base lest they leave. Why people accept this sort of treatment from techonology companies is beyone me. I choose to vote with my dollars, and with my employers dollars. I recommend that the rest of us do the same. This way we can drive the loosers out of business.