"Researching either the source code or the documentation on the BitTorrent Web site would have shown that the real choking algorithms work nothing like this."
This is Bram's comment. Is he hallucinating that the Web page documentation says this? If not, then he's correct to say it, regardless of what other sections of his documentation might say. Inconsistent documentation is not good, but obviously very common in either commercial or OSS software.
If Microsoft wants to do simulations based on BT concepts, they should obviously use the latest (stable) software build as their model and not some Web site FAQ. You'd think MS would know that.
Bram made a simple comment on the quality of the resesarch paper. He made it based on his experience with his ACTUAL EXISTING FUNCTIONING SUCCESSFUL (based on amount of Net traffic running it) PRODUCT.
Therefore he - unlike most/. trolls - is in a unique position to comment on that paper.
He said their simulations and suggested approach were obsolete, which makes the research paper useless in his opinion. While the conclusion that it is worthless may not be true in MS's opinion, the fact that he said it is not only worthy of reporting based on his experience, it may also be useful to MS to point them in the right direction before they screw up another product.
Therefore there is nothing wrong with Bram stating what he stated.
"But, I am sure if you went back and looked at their ideas prior to coding, they also would have a great number of things, at that time, that wouldn't hold water today."
That happens to be the entire point of Bram's comment - that MS's approach will not hold water, and worse, that it seems to be based on BT technology as it was at least three releases ago.
1) It doesn't exist yet, early or not, which is a point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
2) As stated, it's not going to work as far as he can tell, which is the second point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
In other words, vaporware does not depend on how old the vaporware is. Microsoft can announce vaporware five minutes from now based on an idea still in in someone's head, with no papers or anything, and it's still vaporware until you get to at least an alpha test product.
You need AC and heating more than you need a PC - unless of course you make the money by which you pay for your AC and heating by using the PC - which most people don't. The same applies to car repair.
"Our goal is to be in and out asap but we will be there as long as it takes. Can the hourly people say that?"
Yes, I can. I just spent sixteen hours on a client and got paid $175. While that makes me dumber than you, I doubt you'd do that for a client no matter what you claim. And if you did, Best Buy would fire your ass.
And your base rates are still ridiculous. I don't care what it costs to run a company. If that's true, then the consumer needs a local neighborhood repair guy more than he needs a company because the company has priced themselves out of the home user market.
I have clients that tell me up front what they can afford to pay for my services. My clientele hire me because they can just barely afford me - at $25/hour. They CANNOT afford you or any other national franchise operation.
And while Best Buy's Geek Squad may charge a flat rate, most of the national franchises charge HOURLY just like the local people. Ten hours at $200/hour is a LOT more than my $25/hour for ten hours.
I'll grant you that many independent tech support guys vary in quality - I think I'm not that great, myself - but from the stories I hear about Geek Squad, I'd say you guys vary considerably more in quality.
Finally - if you're so good, why the hell are you being paid by the hour by some company rather than working for yourself and charging what you're really worth? My guess is - you aren't really worth what the company is charging your customers, let alone what you'd charge as an independent.
"If you have people skills and like technology, why not switch to pre-sales engineering?"
Translation: If you know how to bullshit people, work for an expensive rip-off "consultantcy".
At City College of San Francisco, they spend nearly $200K a year for a consultant company to manage their MIS package - AFTER paying $150K to the company they bought it from for "support". And the consultant company gets to "recommend" further support - from themselves - every year.
Nice work if you can get it.
Or, you could become a Republican or Democratic politician and steal the country blind.
I may be a former bank robber, but I have too much integrity for this sort of thing, sorry.
Fixing PCs is low-paying (unless you're Geek Squad, apparently) and I'd rather do higher-level systems work, but at least it's (comparatively) honest labor - if you're honest enough to tell the client "all this stuff is badly designed and sucks".
And then do the same next month because nobody explained to you how the spyware got there in the first place, or installed the software to prevent it from coming back.
These are nice tools for the PC tech support guy, but for the average clueless home user, they're useless.
"I still felt bad - clearly I'm not cut out for this kind of work."
Yup - me, too, even though I am frequently feeling guilty for not being efficient or experienced enough to have done the job in half the time.
This last trojan cleaning client I had, however, had two people work on her problem before me. One was supposedly a "graduate from an engineering school" who spent more hours than me on the problem and wanted to charge her the Earth. The other was a geek friend who apparently did know enough to run Ad-Aware and Spybot - but still didn't install an AV or firewall or run HijackThis and left a ton of stuff on the machine. So it was left to me to finish the job.
I spent nearly sixteen hours and got $175 for the job. Had I been better prepared for the weird trojans with the right tools on my bootable CDs, I could have done the job in four hours, so it's my fault I didn't make as much as I should have. (Actually I would have made less, since I would only have gotten $100 for a four-hour job, so I suppose I should count the extra $75 as "profit!!")
But still, I feel good that I solved the problem where others couldn't, because I cared to solve the problem where others didn't.
But it IS a consumer device. And the economics don't change because it's a PC.
Paying $300 to fix a washer is not reasonable for most working stiffs and it's not reasonable for a PC either. Especially having to pay that sum repeatedly over the course of a year.
Plumbers and car dealers may get away with it, but most people need plumbing and a car much more than they need a PC and that controls the perception of value.
Charging $100 an hour or more for an ordinary (read: not wealthy) home user to fix a home PC is highway robbery.
For a home user, it's usually not that bad. Once you've run enough malware detectors, and manually removed whatever they didn't find that you can still see is running, a home machine is usually clean enough that it doesn't need to be reinstalled (if the OS hasn't been too damaged by the removal process - which does happen.)
Hackers don't waste a lot of time compromising home systems except in a remote access way to create spam zombies. Business systems are another matter, and I would agree that rebuilding the server is the best option.
On my last trojan cleanup, I did run RootkitRevealer from Sys-Internals just to be sure there was no rootkit installed because of the number of spyware trojans installed. Nothing was found. It's impossible to be 100 percent sure without a complete clean reinstall, but the odds favor it's clean. For a business, I would do otherwise.
"Your tech needs $750/week to support his wife and family. In order to pay him $750/wk your business has to receive $2250 in revenues from his weekly business."
And if I work for myself, and I'm not married, and have no kids (or even a car), I need a lot less than $2250 a week to survive - which is why I can put him out of business.
That's why I charge $25/hour for home users, and $35/hour for small businesses. That's marginal, and I'd like to charge more - but right now on Craigslist there are a hundred out-of-work dot.com.bomb guys charging the same or slightly more - they're my competitors, not the Geek Squad.
Yup - most techs are trying to graduate from home users to small business users. I know I am.
The cash flow is better if you can get the business to go for a fixed amount of hours per month on a service contract.
I charge $25/hour for home users, and $35/hour for small businesses on a per-incident basis. But a small business can have me for ten hours a month for the home user rate. That's incredibly cheap for a small business to have someone keep the damn computers running rather than having to fix them later.
I wouldn't call paying $2-300 to fix a $2,000 machine a small price to pay - especially when it's spyware problems that will crop up again in a month. That's like paying $2,000 a month to fix a $15,000 car.
Paying ten to twenty-five percent of my machine every couple of months is ridiculous.
That's why I buy my printer cartridges for my Epson Stylus C60 from PrintPal.com - $6 for black, $7 for color, instead of $30-35 for the Epson cartridges.
But I know the client hasn't done it, so I don't just format and reinstall. I try to clean first until it's apparent that it's impossible to repair the damage.
I'm just not cut out for this kind of work - I actually care about the client's system like it was my own. Bad for business, obviously.
Actually I think most people care most about their pictures uploaded from their digital camera.
And there are still services like Photobucket.com that let you store your pictures there.
But for some reason people are nervous (possibly rightly so, since even credit cards aren't safe with major credit companies these days) about storing more personal data on an online service.
What's needed is a 200GB ruggedized storage device with NO moving parts and NO chance of being fried by a power surge (and no chance of being lost like a thumb drive) that people can attach to their computer and use for data storage only and be fairly safe from losing critical data no matter what happens to the computer itself. Then computer repair would be a cinch - wipe and reinstall the OS on the main system drive.
Only problem would be how to keep malware from overwriting the data on the storage device - obviously it can't be read-only - maybe it could be read-only-after-write?
You, however, are assuming that all the clients are well-off professionals.
A lot of clients aren't. They're working stiffs. My last client told me if I went over $200, I'd have to come back on her next paycheck. So I kept it under $200 so the job wouldn't be half done and have to be redone when I returned. Cost me some hourly rate loss, but clients appreciate that sort of thing. Pays off in referrals (I hope!)
Of course, I'd rather be working for doctors and small businesses, where I can charge more. But I don't have enough of those clients yet where I can just raise my rates and cut off the small fry.
I do, too. And I feel better about myself because I know I'm not ripping off people who are hopelessly confused about computers and who only use them because they feel they need email and to write a letter now and then.
Charging $100 an hour or more for ordinary working stiffs (as opposed to businesses) is highway robbery. It is NOT brain surgery - or even car repair (most people NEED a car MUCH more than they need a computer) so comparisons with those sorts of knowledge workers is incorrect.
I can't see charging over $50-75/hour for computer repair to home users. Businesses, yeah, go up to $100 or even more for specialized network work, because the value of the systems involved is much greater (in fact, I think some consultants are underpaid when they are installing systems that put millions in revenue into the company) - but not to home users.
How many appliance repair outfits charge $200-300/hour to fix a freakin' washing machine? Granted, they're easier to fix and require less knowledge, but that's just the nature of the machine. The economics don't change for the home user just because it's a computer - especially with new machines going for $300-500 less monitor.
Yeah, but who's perfect? Who knows EVERYTHING about the OS (AND the hardware AND the applications) they're working on?
You get to mucking with a computer trying to fix something. Then something that seems "weird" happens - only you forgot about that stupid part of Windows, so you waste half an hour trying to "fix" something that isn't broken until you realize you made a mistake and can get back to the main problem.
I DON'T charge for that time - even though, while I obviously screwed up by misinterpreting something normal as something abnormal, it was really the stupid design of the OS that caused me to make the mistake in the first place.
Case in point - folders labeled as "Read-Only" in Windows XP when only a couple files somewhere in the folder tree are really read-only - or because XP is using the read-only checkbox to actually indicate a System file. Everything was marked Read-Only! I thought I had screwed up and made the whole drive read-only somehow! (Because a program I was actually running in limited user mode instead of admin mode failed and didn't tell me the correct error message that it needed admin mode.) When I finally realized that wasn't the case, I had wasted half an hour of the client's - and more importantly, my - time.
It's easy to say no competent person would make such a mistake - but there are plenty of other issues in any system that will cause you to spend time trying to remember what's what or fixing a nonexistent problem while trying to deal with a complicated real issue.
Doctors make mistakes in diagnosis all the time (although, to be charitable to them, it's a lot easier to do that with a complicated organism like a human than it is with a computer.) And I doubt they reduce their bills because of it. I do.
Heh, back when I was doing customer support for BofA on their cash management product, I once spent seven and a half hours on the phone - the entire day - walking a client through rerunning a month's worth of processing because they didn't make a backup and their software got hosed.
Got a written letter of commendation from the client out of that one (and of course fired later when I cussed out a supervisor for being fucking incompetent.)
The important thing: tell the client NEVER to buy some POS that doesn't have a CD drive again!
Why any company would sell something like that is a mystery to me. And the user has to be a real moron to buy one (of course, some users get their little laptops from friends or relatives - after said "friend" decided it was a POS.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Researching either the source code or the documentation on the BitTorrent Web site would have shown that the real choking algorithms work nothing like this."
This is Bram's comment. Is he hallucinating that the Web page documentation says this? If not, then he's correct to say it, regardless of what other sections of his documentation might say. Inconsistent documentation is not good, but obviously very common in either commercial or OSS software.
If Microsoft wants to do simulations based on BT concepts, they should obviously use the latest (stable) software build as their model and not some Web site FAQ. You'd think MS would know that.
You don't get it, do you?
Bram made a simple comment on the quality of the resesarch paper. He made it based on his experience with his ACTUAL EXISTING FUNCTIONING SUCCESSFUL (based on amount of Net traffic running it) PRODUCT.
Therefore he - unlike most
He said their simulations and suggested approach were obsolete, which makes the research paper useless in his opinion. While the conclusion that it is worthless may not be true in MS's opinion, the fact that he said it is not only worthy of reporting based on his experience, it may also be useful to MS to point them in the right direction before they screw up another product.
Therefore there is nothing wrong with Bram stating what he stated.
"But, I am sure if you went back and looked at their ideas prior to coding, they also would have a great number of things, at that time, that wouldn't hold water today."
That happens to be the entire point of Bram's comment - that MS's approach will not hold water, and worse, that it seems to be based on BT technology as it was at least three releases ago.
He's calling it vaporware for two reasons:
1) It doesn't exist yet, early or not, which is a point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
2) As stated, it's not going to work as far as he can tell, which is the second point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
In other words, vaporware does not depend on how old the vaporware is. Microsoft can announce vaporware five minutes from now based on an idea still in in someone's head, with no papers or anything, and it's still vaporware until you get to at least an alpha test product.
The question is: Will it be pulled from Longhorn?
(Yes, this is a joke, morons.)
You need AC and heating more than you need a PC - unless of course you make the money by which you pay for your AC and heating by using the PC - which most people don't. The same applies to car repair.
Nice troll. Almost had me going there for a minute.
"Our goal is to be in and out asap but we will be there as long as it takes. Can the hourly people say that?"
Yes, I can. I just spent sixteen hours on a client and got paid $175. While that makes me dumber than you, I doubt you'd do that for a client no matter what you claim. And if you did, Best Buy would fire your ass.
And your base rates are still ridiculous. I don't care what it costs to run a company. If that's true, then the consumer needs a local neighborhood repair guy more than he needs a company because the company has priced themselves out of the home user market.
I have clients that tell me up front what they can afford to pay for my services. My clientele hire me because they can just barely afford me - at $25/hour. They CANNOT afford you or any other national franchise operation.
And while Best Buy's Geek Squad may charge a flat rate, most of the national franchises charge HOURLY just like the local people. Ten hours at $200/hour is a LOT more than my $25/hour for ten hours.
I'll grant you that many independent tech support guys vary in quality - I think I'm not that great, myself - but from the stories I hear about Geek Squad, I'd say you guys vary considerably more in quality.
Finally - if you're so good, why the hell are you being paid by the hour by some company rather than working for yourself and charging what you're really worth? My guess is - you aren't really worth what the company is charging your customers, let alone what you'd charge as an independent.
"If you have people skills and like technology, why not switch to pre-sales engineering?"
Translation: If you know how to bullshit people, work for an expensive rip-off "consultantcy".
At City College of San Francisco, they spend nearly $200K a year for a consultant company to manage their MIS package - AFTER paying $150K to the company they bought it from for "support". And the consultant company gets to "recommend" further support - from themselves - every year.
Nice work if you can get it.
Or, you could become a Republican or Democratic politician and steal the country blind.
I may be a former bank robber, but I have too much integrity for this sort of thing, sorry.
Fixing PCs is low-paying (unless you're Geek Squad, apparently) and I'd rather do higher-level systems work, but at least it's (comparatively) honest labor - if you're honest enough to tell the client "all this stuff is badly designed and sucks".
And then do the same next month because nobody explained to you how the spyware got there in the first place, or installed the software to prevent it from coming back.
These are nice tools for the PC tech support guy, but for the average clueless home user, they're useless.
"I still felt bad - clearly I'm not cut out for this kind of work."
Yup - me, too, even though I am frequently feeling guilty for not being efficient or experienced enough to have done the job in half the time.
This last trojan cleaning client I had, however, had two people work on her problem before me. One was supposedly a "graduate from an engineering school" who spent more hours than me on the problem and wanted to charge her the Earth. The other was a geek friend who apparently did know enough to run Ad-Aware and Spybot - but still didn't install an AV or firewall or run HijackThis and left a ton of stuff on the machine. So it was left to me to finish the job.
I spent nearly sixteen hours and got $175 for the job. Had I been better prepared for the weird trojans with the right tools on my bootable CDs, I could have done the job in four hours, so it's my fault I didn't make as much as I should have. (Actually I would have made less, since I would only have gotten $100 for a four-hour job, so I suppose I should count the extra $75 as "profit!!")
But still, I feel good that I solved the problem where others couldn't, because I cared to solve the problem where others didn't.
And I'll add that selling a PC that needs that kind of repair (read: Windows) is highway robbery as well.
No, a PC is not an appliance.
But it IS a consumer device. And the economics don't change because it's a PC.
Paying $300 to fix a washer is not reasonable for most working stiffs and it's not reasonable for a PC either. Especially having to pay that sum repeatedly over the course of a year.
Plumbers and car dealers may get away with it, but most people need plumbing and a car much more than they need a PC and that controls the perception of value.
Charging $100 an hour or more for an ordinary (read: not wealthy) home user to fix a home PC is highway robbery.
For a business server, you might be right.
For a home user, it's usually not that bad. Once you've run enough malware detectors, and manually removed whatever they didn't find that you can still see is running, a home machine is usually clean enough that it doesn't need to be reinstalled (if the OS hasn't been too damaged by the removal process - which does happen.)
Hackers don't waste a lot of time compromising home systems except in a remote access way to create spam zombies. Business systems are another matter, and I would agree that rebuilding the server is the best option.
On my last trojan cleanup, I did run RootkitRevealer from Sys-Internals just to be sure there was no rootkit installed because of the number of spyware trojans installed. Nothing was found. It's impossible to be 100 percent sure without a complete clean reinstall, but the odds favor it's clean. For a business, I would do otherwise.
"Your tech needs $750/week to support his wife and family. In order to pay him $750/wk your business has to receive $2250 in revenues from his weekly business."
And if I work for myself, and I'm not married, and have no kids (or even a car), I need a lot less than $2250 a week to survive - which is why I can put him out of business.
That's why I charge $25/hour for home users, and $35/hour for small businesses. That's marginal, and I'd like to charge more - but right now on Craigslist there are a hundred out-of-work dot.com.bomb guys charging the same or slightly more - they're my competitors, not the Geek Squad.
Yup - most techs are trying to graduate from home users to small business users. I know I am.
The cash flow is better if you can get the business to go for a fixed amount of hours per month on a service contract.
I charge $25/hour for home users, and $35/hour for small businesses on a per-incident basis. But a small business can have me for ten hours a month for the home user rate. That's incredibly cheap for a small business to have someone keep the damn computers running rather than having to fix them later.
I wouldn't call paying $2-300 to fix a $2,000 machine a small price to pay - especially when it's spyware problems that will crop up again in a month. That's like paying $2,000 a month to fix a $15,000 car.
Paying ten to twenty-five percent of my machine every couple of months is ridiculous.
That's why I buy my printer cartridges for my Epson Stylus C60 from PrintPal.com - $6 for black, $7 for color, instead of $30-35 for the Epson cartridges.
Either them or Geek Squad is like $20,000 or more to get in the franchise, IIRC from some article I read.
You have to buy (or lease, I suppose) the stupid VW Bug and all that marketing crap.
Doesn't seem worth it to me unless you can concentrate on doing tech support in wealthy neighborhoods where the residents don't mind the rates.
And when that got back to her parents, you did thirty years in a prison cell next to Bubba the homosexual rapist for soliciting a minor.
Jesus, man, be more careful what you say! These days, asshole prosecutors take that shit seriously.
I have that clause in my service contract, too.
But I know the client hasn't done it, so I don't just format and reinstall. I try to clean first until it's apparent that it's impossible to repair the damage.
I'm just not cut out for this kind of work - I actually care about the client's system like it was my own. Bad for business, obviously.
Actually I think most people care most about their pictures uploaded from their digital camera.
And there are still services like Photobucket.com that let you store your pictures there.
But for some reason people are nervous (possibly rightly so, since even credit cards aren't safe with major credit companies these days) about storing more personal data on an online service.
What's needed is a 200GB ruggedized storage device with NO moving parts and NO chance of being fried by a power surge (and no chance of being lost like a thumb drive) that people can attach to their computer and use for data storage only and be fairly safe from losing critical data no matter what happens to the computer itself. Then computer repair would be a cinch - wipe and reinstall the OS on the main system drive.
Only problem would be how to keep malware from overwriting the data on the storage device - obviously it can't be read-only - maybe it could be read-only-after-write?
You, however, are assuming that all the clients are well-off professionals.
A lot of clients aren't. They're working stiffs. My last client told me if I went over $200, I'd have to come back on her next paycheck. So I kept it under $200 so the job wouldn't be half done and have to be redone when I returned. Cost me some hourly rate loss, but clients appreciate that sort of thing. Pays off in referrals (I hope!)
Of course, I'd rather be working for doctors and small businesses, where I can charge more. But I don't have enough of those clients yet where I can just raise my rates and cut off the small fry.
I do, too. And I feel better about myself because I know I'm not ripping off people who are hopelessly confused about computers and who only use them because they feel they need email and to write a letter now and then.
Charging $100 an hour or more for ordinary working stiffs (as opposed to businesses) is highway robbery. It is NOT brain surgery - or even car repair (most people NEED a car MUCH more than they need a computer) so comparisons with those sorts of knowledge workers is incorrect.
I can't see charging over $50-75/hour for computer repair to home users. Businesses, yeah, go up to $100 or even more for specialized network work, because the value of the systems involved is much greater (in fact, I think some consultants are underpaid when they are installing systems that put millions in revenue into the company) - but not to home users.
How many appliance repair outfits charge $200-300/hour to fix a freakin' washing machine? Granted, they're easier to fix and require less knowledge, but that's just the nature of the machine. The economics don't change for the home user just because it's a computer - especially with new machines going for $300-500 less monitor.
Yeah, but who's perfect? Who knows EVERYTHING about the OS (AND the hardware AND the applications) they're working on?
You get to mucking with a computer trying to fix something. Then something that seems "weird" happens - only you forgot about that stupid part of Windows, so you waste half an hour trying to "fix" something that isn't broken until you realize you made a mistake and can get back to the main problem.
I DON'T charge for that time - even though, while I obviously screwed up by misinterpreting something normal as something abnormal, it was really the stupid design of the OS that caused me to make the mistake in the first place.
Case in point - folders labeled as "Read-Only" in Windows XP when only a couple files somewhere in the folder tree are really read-only - or because XP is using the read-only checkbox to actually indicate a System file. Everything was marked Read-Only! I thought I had screwed up and made the whole drive read-only somehow! (Because a program I was actually running in limited user mode instead of admin mode failed and didn't tell me the correct error message that it needed admin mode.) When I finally realized that wasn't the case, I had wasted half an hour of the client's - and more importantly, my - time.
It's easy to say no competent person would make such a mistake - but there are plenty of other issues in any system that will cause you to spend time trying to remember what's what or fixing a nonexistent problem while trying to deal with a complicated real issue.
Doctors make mistakes in diagnosis all the time (although, to be charitable to them, it's a lot easier to do that with a complicated organism like a human than it is with a computer.) And I doubt they reduce their bills because of it. I do.
Heh, back when I was doing customer support for BofA on their cash management product, I once spent seven and a half hours on the phone - the entire day - walking a client through rerunning a month's worth of processing because they didn't make a backup and their software got hosed.
Got a written letter of commendation from the client out of that one (and of course fired later when I cussed out a supervisor for being fucking incompetent.)
The important thing: tell the client NEVER to buy some POS that doesn't have a CD drive again!
Why any company would sell something like that is a mystery to me. And the user has to be a real moron to buy one (of course, some users get their little laptops from friends or relatives - after said "friend" decided it was a POS.)