Stumbled across this, which is an episode of Computer Chronicles on PDAs from 1993. The preview alone is good, although the AT&T combo cellular phone/PDA is funny. And people today complain their PDA phones cost $400 - that one was $2100. In the "Random Access" portion they talk about the announcement of the win32 API to allow things to work across different versions of Windows. I had all but forgotten about GNN too.
Some funny quotes I found while looking at data in my web server logs.
stopping in the middle of an electrical storm to answer a cellular phone can increase your risk of being outside rather than inside (s)
Unfortunately, it's politically incorrect to advise people to stop being tall during a thunderstorm. (s)
It's been a busy summer so far, and it doesn't look like it's gonna get any better soon. The last week I've been poking with Exchange clustering and integration with our current system. It's been an interesting time, and I'm now at the point where there are two virtual servers that can move between buildings in about 30 seconds (it shuts down and restarts, not like vmotion or anything), but they can't really integrate with the current setup. That's requiring unlocking ACLs in places as needed so the new servers have access to the data, and enabling HTTP in places where we only want HTTPS (so it needs to stay restricted). Hopefully that won't take too long. Also been a lot of server room rearrangement, mounting new equipment, planning power, installing/updating other things, and fixing broken things.
For now though, it's time to ignore all that through the joy of vacation time. Last night I decided to finally fix the headphone jack in my mp3 player. Unfortunately in the process of removing the audio output board from the player I ended up pulling the jack off the board (surface mount is too week for that kind of use IMHO), and in preparing to solder that back on I pulled off a power wire from one of the battery packs. It's all back together as good as new now, although I wish had silver bearing solder for the jack connections. I wasn't planning on having to fix that, but at least I'm now listening to music portably again. Just got back from buying mostly junk food at the grocery store, so that part is covered. Also have the work email appropriately set up for ignore (so far the filters say 460 emails filed to ignore for now, and it's only been one weekend day so far - I dread what that will be in a week). BTW, those that still send non-work email to my work address should probably note this. :) I suppose I should probably do some stuff around the house during this time, but we'll see whether anything actually happens. Beginning of the week is booked already, but I'm up for movies or whatever else if people are interested in the latter half of the week.
So there was a study, and a resulting /. thread about it being dangerous to use a cell phone outside during a lightning storm. Someone posted a comment with a top 10 list of lightning safety tips. Here's #9:
If you are talking on your cell phone in the middle of a field during a lightning storm, Saint Darwin will announce "You! Out of the gene pool!" and take your soul.
This rant on legal notices being attached to messages for which they make no sense (due to the horrible policy of attaching to every messages which dilutes their legal effectiveness anyways). It reminds me of my response. "You will want to contact <Help Desk contact address> for assistance with this. Your message has not been forwarded directly due to the confidentiality notice attached to the message."
Net Neutrality: This is serious. I'm not sure why I didn't post this yesterday when I first read it, but I realized it has one of the best simple descriptions of network neutrality that I've seen. And now I've had a chance to think about it and rant a bit too. :) He defines it as:
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
The only improvement I could see is stating rather than implying that the companies between the ends want to get at least one end to pay them as well to keep up that level of service. Explaining that fully brings up the need for a bit of background. Take the FCC's principles to Preserve and Promote the Open and Interconnected Nature of Public Internet. That's a press release, if you're interested you can see the full policy statement which gives some reasoning and jurisdictional justification. That was published by the FCC as an official general guidance a year and a half after the initial ideas were proposed.
In 2004, Michael Powell, then chairman of the FCC, also gave a speech titled Preserving Internet Freedom: Guiding Principles for the Industry. In this he stated, "it is time to give the private sector a clear road map by which it can avoid future regulation on this issue by embracing unparalleled openness and consumer choice." He then goes on to challenge voluntary compliance with the precursors to the FCC's principles.
He even goes as far as to state that they have every right "to offer a variety of service tiers with varying bandwidth and feature options," but says they have to be open about it to the customer. I find it rather sad that this is effectively the entire point of the Telcos pushing against any regulation. It's unlikely that any of this would be brought to light if a provider's access was stated as "Internet access, 0Kbps CIR, 8Mbps burstable, maximum 3GB per month general traffic, unlimited traffic and 2Mbps CIR to our services and services of certain partners." That would be paying for the specific quality of service as mentioned in the timbl quote. Instead they want to say "Unlimited High-speed Internet Access" and hope you won't use it.
Of course the Internet caught on, and people started to use it for their own content, and now it's overloaded the ISP backbones. A simple fix would be to start charging more accurately for their costs to provide the service, allowing the backbones to be upgraded properly (or usage to be reduced accordingly if the cost is too high). Instead, they first tried to silently stop or degrade certain services without telling the customers. Madison River effectively got smacked down for that, although there wasn't really any legal force behind it. Now they want to start charging content providers, taking the approach that a business is less likely to stop providing service with a cost increase than consumers cutting back with a price increase.
That wouldn't be a problem if they did it by charging for transmitting data to their network. Due to the wonders of how the Internet works, you'd eventually end up with costs going up for everyone. Unless there was collusion, people would switch ISPs. The result is competitive prices. They want to structure it in a way where all the content providers pay them directly. This allows precise tweaking without proper competitive control, as the costs of the connections are externalities. You pick an ISP because they sell "the same" product as other providers at the best price. Your video provider's ISP does the same, and the ISPs have negotiations on how transfer between them is handled. Suddenly your ISP decides that if the video provider wants to get content delivered in an adequate manner, they have to pay your ISP directly. They don't try to charge the video provider's ISP excessively, as there's bargaining power there. The video company is forced to choose between paying or losing you as a customer, unless they somehow convince you to switch despite your ISP saying they offer the same product as everyone else. In a way this is somewhat inverse competition, in that it's more likely the higher price will be paid when more prices are cheaper - cheaper to pay for protection than lose customers. Effectively but not legally extortion (assuming they're careful, thus the need for regulation to keep things in check. It's barely "Network Neutrality" — it's effectively "Truth in advertising".
So yesterday was the second Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft released it's monthly bunch of patches. In the middle of the list of security and other software downloads, was a link to Interview Worksheets. There's also Microsoft Standards of Business Conduct. I thought maybe these were supposed to be internal but they weren't flagged properly, but the one says "modified from the original version distributed to our employees" and "to facilitate communications from the public at large", so it's intentional. It'll be interesting to see if this is part of a larger campaign or just a general trend to be more open. Of course that's as they just added the needing a live account to view the support site this week...
One thing that's sorta funny/odd is the supported Operating Systems on the business conduct document are HP-UX and Windows XP. No other versions of Windows are even listed.
Yea, it's 11 years old, but I saw a reference to it online, so here it is. Old Glory Robot Insurance.
I'd say this is a good reason not to put server rooms in a basement. At least they had a raised floor in there, and it looks like a pump too. The audio on the clip is just music, so you can leave it muted while watching it if you want.
And this kind of thing is why phishing emails still succeed.
Dear Jeremy,
I understand you are interested in [details removed]. We would be more than happy to accomodate [sic] your request, however we cannot do this through email.
At Comcast, we are focused on providing our customers with the most secure high-speed Internet experience. To protect our customers from Internet fraud, we do not request or provide any sensitive customer information via email.
To minimize any inconvenience caused by this policy, we recommend that you use our secure Live Chat channel to chat with an agent immediately. Our agents are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please click on the link below to chat with an agent who can help resolve your issue right now.
http://www.comcastsupport.com/sdcuser/asp/default.asp
I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you understand that this policy is to protect your valuable customer information.
[generic security/ending stuff]
OK, so they dump their contact forms on the site through email. It'd be nice if if they did a non-real-time messaging through their web site like some other companies. There's the issue that most of the account data is included in the email reply anyways... As for other things, the domain isn't in their main domain for account management (or the one they use for the customer portal). Yea, they probably outsourced it, but they could use support.comcast.com or something similar. And the fact they sent an email asking people to click a link in it. Those two alone are pretty bad. At least it was plain text and not HTML, but I doubt many people would notice the difference.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
