it was a JOKE. I don't think getting slammed in the head with a hammer is funny either, but I still laugh when I watch The Three Stooges.
If these guys are guilty, I do hope they get sent away for long enough to serve the purpose: To punish them for the harm that they caused, and to discourage others from similar acts.
If they are not, then I hope the courts determine that quickly and allow them to resume their lives as quickly as possible.
I did make the trade, just about a year ago (to Vonage). Despite my self-imposed rule that I do not complicate basic household tasks enough to get a beating from my wife, the VoIP thing has worked out better than I though.
I'll take exception to the "ISP to your cul-de-sac" idea, though: Even with a well-placed Linksys access point, I can barely get a signal on the far side of my house, never mind at the neighbor's.
(though enough of my neighbors do have 802.11 that I've taken on the volunteer role of Approver Of What Channel To Use)
The people who buy Sun hardware (or at least those who used to, and now generally buy racks 'o' generic Intel/AMD boxen) are pretty good at math.
Sun is in real need of a "good idea", since it's rapidly being phased out in the last few markets that it plays in. If this makes good fiscal sense in something like corporate data warehousing, I hope they do well. I dunno, they might be able to pull off some marketing coup like making the price of an SAP install more predictable, but... I'm not rushing to buy any Sun stock.:-/
Having worked in IT management, though, I know it's much easier to make one-shot capital purchases than it is to sign up for long-term contracts; aside from the fiscal liability, every manager likes the idea that if they make one bad purchase, they won't be locked into it past the next bonus review period.
Used to be Sun came out with something new, and everybody else had to play catch-up. This sounds like a business plan someone had back in 1999... and wisely shredded.
Saw this one coming...
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Way Back When, I had a boatload of 3Com gear, including enough of their ethernet hubs to fill a room, another room full of their diskless workstations, and so on.
Strike #1 was pissing off the enterprise customer. After a very ungraceful exit from the server/NOS marketplace, they concentrated on their infrastructure business. Unfortunately, both their hubs and workstations suffered from design defects which made them into a huge liability.
Strike #2 was pissing off the VAR/Integrator market. While their network bridges and routers actually had better features and a lower entry point than Cisco's gear, they did nothing with it, and totally ignored the requirement to have a full line of products, from low-end to almost-carrier-grade. Combine that with several abortive attempts to bypass your channel "partners", and...
Strike #3: Take the only thing you have, which is brand recognition, and instead of using the high-end name that everyone associates with "hey, that's good enough that I'm willing to pay a premium", and instead use the low-end name which competes with the lowest price around.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 90's, I listened to Eric Benhamou give his vision for the future of 3Com. I went back to my hotel, plugged in my laptop, and sold my 3Com stock.
A few years ago, I was working for a Cisco VAR, and there were three types of customers we wanted:
1. Big commercial user with huge consulting budget.
2. Dot-com companies with a wheelbarrow full of IPO cash.
And the best of all...
3. A school district.
To pretend that these school districts were a bunch of simpletons being pickpocketed by the city slickers is just a bunch of crap. They had it down to a science, and would do things like make sure that competing vendors ran into each other in the lobby.
The RFP was never designed so the lowest bidder would get it; instead it was designed to give the board the ability to award the contract to the "correct" bidder.
You did not bring out the usual logo T-shirts and keychains for these customers; that would be an improper gift. However, there were numerous and expensive alternatives. A contract worth several million could earn a nice donation to an elected asshat's campaign fund, or a $100k/yr internship for their unemployable offspring, etc etc etc.
After closing any deal, there were always plenty of (semi-tongue-in-cheek) offerings to the Almighty Al Gore, the patron saint of stock options.
Linksys has been really good at innovating for a while now, and they have always been good at getting the price down.
My big concern is quality. Looking back, almost half the access points we've gotten from them have been DOA or died shortly afterward. Two out of three GigE switches had bad fans in them, one of the replacements did as well. One BEFSR41 power brick melted.
On NICs, I can't fault them; they're 100% reliable and install with zero issues. I'd reccommend them as easily as Intel or 3Com. But their external hardware has been really spotty. Compared against the rock-solid reliability I expect from even low-end Cisco gear (1600-series routers or even ATA's) I think they're taking a big gamble putting the Cisco label on it.
That said, I want one of those usb-to-ethernet storage gizmos.
I had the pleasure of calling the local phone company almost a year ago now, and putting in a disconnect order. Have had nothing but Vonage since then.
My biggest concern was whether our home alarm system would be compatible (it was, just had to prepend a "1" to the dialed number) and whether the Tivo would work with it (it did, though we've since upgraded to two networked Tivo's which no longer use landlines...)
I also needed it to be simple and as transparent as possible - being a techie, I have a bad habit of making things more complicated than necessary ("watch a DVD? Simple! select the component input with the black remote, switch the optical output to PCM, 96kHZ..") and I did not want to inflict that on my family for something as essential as phone service.
Not sure how well others have done, but the only issue I can remember was sometime last year voicemail was out of service for the better part of a day. wouldn't have noticed if they hadn't told me.
I've got one business associate who has an office in NY, and another in Mexico City. Although Vonage doesn't officially support using the box outside the US (latency concern, I guess), he happily plugs it into his DSL line wherever he happens to be and it works fine.
AT&T seems to offer an almost identical service - if you can save a few dollars getting a package from them (cell, etc) it might be worth considering as an alternative.
Both AT&T and Vonage offer a neat feature where you can make incoming calls ring not only on your home phone, but your cellphone, office phone, etc etc etc., and you can answer any one of them.
... The line from the press release:
The Trilobite 2.0 is programmable. Just as a VCR can be set to start up at a specific time on a certain day.. would be the giveaway. Instead, it just tells me that the return rate on these things will be high.
A casual reader might think that AT&T turned up 400+ new cells, but a closer reading seems to indicate that it signed up 400+ new sites in your local coverage area where they will slap you with a nifty roaming charge.
I think it's a smart, reasonable choice, and it's a good example of how the legal system can be efficient and fair when used properly.
The folks who were downloading music knew it was illegal and unethical, and decided that since there were so many people doing it, there was no way anyone would catch them.
Guess again.
The civil court system has processed in place to deal efficiently with large numbers of offenders, while still allowing innocent people to have due process, as well as strong measures to protect against malicious prosecution.
Be grateful. While we all like a free lunch, we don't like it when it's our lunch that's getting handed out. Like it or not, the "song swappers" are dime-a-dozen crooks; the same people who shoplift or lie about what they ordered in a restaurant. We can't force them to have ethics, but we can show them that there are still a carrot and a stick.
conf t int pos 2/0 *giggle* shut *cackle* no shut *snort* shut *ROFL* no shut "Sir, I can't see anything wrong with the network. It must (shut) be a problem (no shut) with your equipment.
The windows indexing service always leaves me feeling like I somehow missed a critical page in the documentation which would make it work just the way I expect it to.
I can tell it's got a lot of power, and being a part of the OS, it's seamless.. but I just can't seem to make it useful to me.
Google would have a winner on it's hands if it would let me organize (and ensure I have a backup of) all the documents on the five computers in my house. I've got probably 6gb of family pictures, but no good way to organize them by where they were taken, who is in them, etc. I was in a full-blown panic when I accidentally wiped the only copy of that directory, and had to restore it from a DVD backup, copies given to relatives, sent mail, and so on. That's worth money to me, but it really needs to be transparent.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
eh? speak up, there was a bump....
It would be pretty amusing to see a bunch of out-of-shape gamers pedaling like crazy to produce the 435 watts their Antec power supply eats.. plus the 140 watts the monitor eats... plus the speakers plus the A/C plus plus plus...
Damn. If pedaling faster meant more bandwidth... I'd have legs like Lance Armstrong.
I'm not sure whether the fellow who wrote the article is a sociopath, or an idiot. Granted, it's sometimes hard to clearly differentiate one from the other.
I suppose I should get all excited and make an analogy to leaving the keys in the car, etc.. but other posters no doubt have done so more eloquently than I can. Instead, I'll just wait patiently 'till this genius becomes a test case.
Re:Inflation.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Energy is an extremely competitive, high-risk market. The margins are razor-thin, and prices change minute to minute... and unlike milk, there are no guarantees that you'll make a profit on the oil you produce, or even that you'll be allowed to keep your plant if SUV drivers think the free lunch is going off the menu.
Refineries are incredibly complex, expensive, and unpopular items. The environmentalists want you shut down, period, and spend a lot of money trying to get you to do so. Instead, they just make it more expensive for you to stay in business. Meanwhile, you've got competitors trying to cut your legs out from under you, and, as high as prices might go - you've still got contract customers (airlines, power generators) who have capped prices. Transporting oil, everybody wants triple-hulled tankers that look like cruise ships, but they want to pay the prices they got when 30-year-old, leaking hulks run by the cheapest labor on the planet were the standard.
You want cheap oil, you got it. The Saudis sell us the stuff for less than it costs to pump it out of our own wells. American oilfield workers don't complain about their jobs being "outsourced" - they simply found other careers when their jobs disappeared 20 years ago. Move one coding job to Bombay and you get a senate inquiry. Move 120,000 oil jobs to Riyadh, Jeddah, and Bahrain... and you can buy a bigger SUV! woohoo!
But now you've got a problem. All those Chinese peasants who make those cheap computers and appliances we love so much? Well, they are all buying houses. And televisions. And cars. And they want electricity for them... Guess where they're buying it from??
Instead of being the only bidder on that tanker 'o' crude, you're now one of perhaps four or five. All of a sudden the local crack dealer has five customers instead of just you.
Oil companies making big profits? Nope. Building power plants is a dead business; anyone making a profit runs the risk of getting their plant "liberated" by a governor who needs votes. Opening up a new refinery, well.. you've got a three to five year lead time from the shovel hitting the dirt 'till your first truckload of super unleaded goes out thr gate. Except nobody wants a refinery near their house. Or anywhere else, for that matter - a permit might take six months or six years before you even know if you can build. And refineries ain't cheap. You need to convince enough investors that you can get the permits, build the plant, get the ships to offload oil... and of course, that the price will still be high enough to turn a profit over the 25-year lifespan of your refinery.
Some of us have no choice. My business is required to make several addresses accessible to the public, (ironically, one of them is an "abuse@" address..) and they get trolled by spammers.
With less than 10 employees, we get well over 700 spams per day on average. Last week I missed an email from a customer because my "delete" key was just a little faster than my eye. The two hours a week I spend deleting spams could be spent with my kids, helping a customer, or trying to find new business.
Spammers cost me a lot of money - not wild-guess-could-be money, but *real* money. Worse, they waste my time, resources, and good will. The internet has many wonderful uses, but like any other public area, you get thieves, vandals, predators, and plain old lunatics.
I could try to get all excited about it... but the reality is that it will increase efficiency in retail, distribution, and half a dozen other fields.
With the competitive nature of a market-driven economy, companies will be working like crazy to figure out how to use RFID to cut costs, make customers happier, and hack the legs off the competitors.
Any pervasive technology finds an equilibrium: If you try to take something from your customers without giving them some benefit, you can be certain that the store across the streer will offer a deal just a little more attractive.
If you said to consumers, "let me stick an RF transponder in your car that identifies you and can be used to track your driving habits. And pay me a buck a month for the privilege", you wouldn't get many takers. Add into that "... and you can drive through toll booths without ever slowing down or looking for change again", you get customers lined up, waving credit cards at you left and right.
One of the expected benefits of having a son who is going to be ten years old is, I can go into any toy store and buy anything I want, without embarassment.
(And yes, I do have my own 1,200-piece bucket of legos, which is off-limits to the kids)
... and it looks like that's about how things have ended up, at least in this case. Users who don't run windows update (or up3date, or apt-get, etc.) get a gentle reminder from the ISP, in the form of NO CARRIER:-)
Slashdot Mirror
it was a JOKE. I don't think getting slammed in the head with a hammer is funny either, but I still laugh when I watch The Three Stooges.
If these guys are guilty, I do hope they get sent away for long enough to serve the purpose: To punish them for the harm that they caused, and to discourage others from similar acts.
If they are not, then I hope the courts determine that quickly and allow them to resume their lives as quickly as possible.
Yeesh.....
Loading "Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison Level" ......
"Your car is being towed..."
Did I really say that? Groan....
I did make the trade, just about a year ago (to Vonage). Despite my self-imposed rule that I do not complicate basic household tasks enough to get a beating from my wife, the VoIP thing has worked out better than I though.
I'll take exception to the "ISP to your cul-de-sac" idea, though: Even with a well-placed Linksys access point, I can barely get a signal on the far side of my house, never mind at the neighbor's.
(though enough of my neighbors do have 802.11 that I've taken on the volunteer role of Approver Of What Channel To Use)
The people who buy Sun hardware (or at least those who used to, and now generally buy racks 'o' generic Intel/AMD boxen) are pretty good at math.
:-/
Sun is in real need of a "good idea", since it's rapidly being phased out in the last few markets that it plays in. If this makes good fiscal sense in something like corporate data warehousing, I hope they do well. I dunno, they might be able to pull off some marketing coup like making the price of an SAP install more predictable, but... I'm not rushing to buy any Sun stock.
Having worked in IT management, though, I know it's much easier to make one-shot capital purchases than it is to sign up for long-term contracts; aside from the fiscal liability, every manager likes the idea that if they make one bad purchase, they won't be locked into it past the next bonus review period.
Used to be Sun came out with something new, and everybody else had to play catch-up. This sounds like a business plan someone had back in 1999... and wisely shredded.
Way Back When, I had a boatload of 3Com gear, including enough of their ethernet hubs to fill a room, another room full of their diskless workstations, and so on.
Strike #1 was pissing off the enterprise customer. After a very ungraceful exit from the server/NOS marketplace, they concentrated on their infrastructure business. Unfortunately, both their hubs and workstations suffered from design defects which made them into a huge liability.
Strike #2 was pissing off the VAR/Integrator market. While their network bridges and routers actually had better features and a lower entry point than Cisco's gear, they did nothing with it, and totally ignored the requirement to have a full line of products, from low-end to almost-carrier-grade. Combine that with several abortive attempts to bypass your channel "partners", and...
Strike #3: Take the only thing you have, which is brand recognition, and instead of using the high-end name that everyone associates with "hey, that's good enough that I'm willing to pay a premium", and instead use the low-end name which competes with the lowest price around.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 90's, I listened to Eric Benhamou give his vision for the future of 3Com. I went back to my hotel, plugged in my laptop, and sold my 3Com stock.
A few years ago, I was working for a Cisco VAR, and there were three types of customers we wanted:
1. Big commercial user with huge consulting budget.
2. Dot-com companies with a wheelbarrow full of IPO cash.
And the best of all...
3. A school district.
To pretend that these school districts were a bunch of simpletons being pickpocketed by the city slickers is just a bunch of crap. They had it down to a science, and would do things like make sure that competing vendors ran into each other in the lobby.
The RFP was never designed so the lowest bidder would get it; instead it was designed to give the board the ability to award the contract to the "correct" bidder.
You did not bring out the usual logo T-shirts and keychains for these customers; that would be an improper gift. However, there were numerous and expensive alternatives. A contract worth several million could earn a nice donation to an elected asshat's campaign fund, or a $100k/yr internship for their unemployable offspring, etc etc etc.
After closing any deal, there were always plenty of (semi-tongue-in-cheek) offerings to the Almighty Al Gore, the patron saint of stock options.
Linksys has been really good at innovating for a while now, and they have always been good at getting the price down.
My big concern is quality. Looking back, almost half the access points we've gotten from them have been DOA or died shortly afterward. Two out of three GigE switches had bad fans in them, one of the replacements did as well. One BEFSR41 power brick melted.
On NICs, I can't fault them; they're 100% reliable and install with zero issues. I'd reccommend them as easily as Intel or 3Com. But their external hardware has been really spotty. Compared against the rock-solid reliability I expect from even low-end Cisco gear (1600-series routers or even ATA's) I think they're taking a big gamble putting the Cisco label on it.
That said, I want one of those usb-to-ethernet storage gizmos.
I had the pleasure of calling the local phone company almost a year ago now, and putting in a disconnect order. Have had nothing but Vonage since then.
My biggest concern was whether our home alarm system would be compatible (it was, just had to prepend a "1" to the dialed number) and whether the Tivo would work with it (it did, though we've since upgraded to two networked Tivo's which no longer use landlines...)
I also needed it to be simple and as transparent as possible - being a techie, I have a bad habit of making things more complicated than necessary ("watch a DVD? Simple! select the component input with the black remote, switch the optical output to PCM, 96kHZ..") and I did not want to inflict that on my family for something as essential as phone service.
Not sure how well others have done, but the only issue I can remember was sometime last year voicemail was out of service for the better part of a day. wouldn't have noticed if they hadn't told me.
I've got one business associate who has an office in NY, and another in Mexico City. Although Vonage doesn't officially support using the box outside the US (latency concern, I guess), he happily plugs it into his DSL line wherever he happens to be and it works fine.
AT&T seems to offer an almost identical service - if you can save a few dollars getting a package from them (cell, etc) it might be worth considering as an alternative.
Both AT&T and Vonage offer a neat feature where you can make incoming calls ring not only on your home phone, but your cellphone, office phone, etc etc etc., and you can answer any one of them.
... The line from the press release: The Trilobite 2.0 is programmable. Just as a VCR can be set to start up at a specific time on a certain day .. would be the giveaway. Instead, it just tells me that the return rate on these things will be high.
A casual reader might think that AT&T turned up 400+ new cells, but a closer reading seems to indicate that it signed up 400+ new sites in your local coverage area where they will slap you with a nifty roaming charge.
ohnosecond: The time it takes you to realize you meant to type "...soft out" at the end of the line.
I think it's a smart, reasonable choice, and it's a good example of how the legal system can be efficient and fair when used properly.
The folks who were downloading music knew it was illegal and unethical, and decided that since there were so many people doing it, there was no way anyone would catch them.
Guess again.
The civil court system has processed in place to deal efficiently with large numbers of offenders, while still allowing innocent people to have due process, as well as strong measures to protect against malicious prosecution.
Be grateful. While we all like a free lunch, we don't like it when it's our lunch that's getting handed out. Like it or not, the "song swappers" are dime-a-dozen crooks; the same people who shoplift or lie about what they ordered in a restaurant. We can't force them to have ethics, but we can show them that there are still a carrot and a stick.
conf t
int pos 2/0
*giggle*
shut
*cackle*
no shut
*snort*
shut
*ROFL*
no shut
"Sir, I can't see anything wrong with the network. It must (shut) be a problem (no shut) with your equipment.
The windows indexing service always leaves me feeling like I somehow missed a critical page in the documentation which would make it work just the way I expect it to.
I can tell it's got a lot of power, and being a part of the OS, it's seamless.. but I just can't seem to make it useful to me.
Google would have a winner on it's hands if it would let me organize (and ensure I have a backup of) all the documents on the five computers in my house. I've got probably 6gb of family pictures, but no good way to organize them by where they were taken, who is in them, etc. I was in a full-blown panic when I accidentally wiped the only copy of that directory, and had to restore it from a DVD backup, copies given to relatives, sent mail, and so on. That's worth money to me, but it really needs to be transparent.
eh? speak up, there was a bump....
It would be pretty amusing to see a bunch of out-of-shape gamers pedaling like crazy to produce the 435 watts their Antec power supply eats.. plus the 140 watts the monitor eats... plus the speakers plus the A/C plus plus plus...
Damn. If pedaling faster meant more bandwidth... I'd have legs like Lance Armstrong.
I'm not sure whether the fellow who wrote the article is a sociopath, or an idiot. Granted, it's sometimes hard to clearly differentiate one from the other.
I suppose I should get all excited and make an analogy to leaving the keys in the car, etc.. but other posters no doubt have done so more eloquently than I can. Instead, I'll just wait patiently 'till this genius becomes a test case.
Energy is an extremely competitive, high-risk market. The margins are razor-thin, and prices change minute to minute... and unlike milk, there are no guarantees that you'll make a profit on the oil you produce, or even that you'll be allowed to keep your plant if SUV drivers think the free lunch is going off the menu.
Refineries are incredibly complex, expensive, and unpopular items. The environmentalists want you shut down, period, and spend a lot of money trying to get you to do so. Instead, they just make it more expensive for you to stay in business. Meanwhile, you've got competitors trying to cut your legs out from under you, and, as high as prices might go - you've still got contract customers (airlines, power generators) who have capped prices. Transporting oil, everybody wants triple-hulled tankers that look like cruise ships, but they want to pay the prices they got when 30-year-old, leaking hulks run by the cheapest labor on the planet were the standard.
You want cheap oil, you got it. The Saudis sell us the stuff for less than it costs to pump it out of our own wells. American oilfield workers don't complain about their jobs being "outsourced" - they simply found other careers when their jobs disappeared 20 years ago. Move one coding job to Bombay and you get a senate inquiry. Move 120,000 oil jobs to Riyadh, Jeddah, and Bahrain... and you can buy a bigger SUV! woohoo!
But now you've got a problem. All those Chinese peasants who make those cheap computers and appliances we love so much? Well, they are all buying houses. And televisions. And cars. And they want electricity for them... Guess where they're buying it from??
Instead of being the only bidder on that tanker 'o' crude, you're now one of perhaps four or five. All of a sudden the local crack dealer has five customers instead of just you.
Oil companies making big profits? Nope. Building power plants is a dead business; anyone making a profit runs the risk of getting their plant "liberated" by a governor who needs votes. Opening up a new refinery, well.. you've got a three to five year lead time from the shovel hitting the dirt 'till your first truckload of super unleaded goes out thr gate. Except nobody wants a refinery near their house. Or anywhere else, for that matter - a permit might take six months or six years before you even know if you can build. And refineries ain't cheap. You need to convince enough investors that you can get the permits, build the plant, get the ships to offload oil... and of course, that the price will still be high enough to turn a profit over the 25-year lifespan of your refinery.
Some of us have no choice. My business is required to make several addresses accessible to the public, (ironically, one of them is an "abuse@" address..) and they get trolled by spammers.
With less than 10 employees, we get well over 700 spams per day on average. Last week I missed an email from a customer because my "delete" key was just a little faster than my eye. The two hours a week I spend deleting spams could be spent with my kids, helping a customer, or trying to find new business.
Spammers cost me a lot of money - not wild-guess-could-be money, but *real* money. Worse, they waste my time, resources, and good will. The internet has many wonderful uses, but like any other public area, you get thieves, vandals, predators, and plain old lunatics.
I could try to get all excited about it... but the reality is that it will increase efficiency in retail, distribution, and half a dozen other fields.
With the competitive nature of a market-driven economy, companies will be working like crazy to figure out how to use RFID to cut costs, make customers happier, and hack the legs off the competitors.
Any pervasive technology finds an equilibrium: If you try to take something from your customers without giving them some benefit, you can be certain that the store across the streer will offer a deal just a little more attractive.
If you said to consumers, "let me stick an RF transponder in your car that identifies you and can be used to track your driving habits. And pay me a buck a month for the privilege", you wouldn't get many takers. Add into that "... and you can drive through toll booths without ever slowing down or looking for change again", you get customers lined up, waving credit cards at you left and right.
Call me really odd, but I'd be prepared to lend him an old full-height seagate hard drive, and provide a baseball bat to assist with installation.
(cranky because I accidentally deleted several important messages today that were mixed up in the 100+ spams in my inbox.)
One of the expected benefits of having a son who is going to be ten years old is, I can go into any toy store and buy anything I want, without embarassment.
(And yes, I do have my own 1,200-piece bucket of legos, which is off-limits to the kids)
... and it looks like that's about how things have ended up, at least in this case. Users who don't run windows update (or up3date, or apt-get, etc.) get a gentle reminder from the ISP, in the form of NO CARRIER :-)