Customer Deflation Mismanagement
Submitted by doc on Mon, 10/30/2006 - 22:35.I've been a customer of DishTV since 1997 or '98. Not sure which. We signed up when we lived in Emerald Hills, between Woodside and Redwood City in the Bay Area. Back then Dish had one satellite to pick up, but the number of channels it received far exceeded what we could get with cable, or with terrestrial TV. Their system also figured we got no terrestrial TV reception (in fact it was excellent), so they made local terrestrial signals available from our choice of city. My wife is from Los Angeles, so we picked that one. Worked fine.
In that first location I ordered everything online and hooked it all up myself. Everything worked. What's more, I was impressed by DishTV's service, which as easy to reach, informative and always helpful.
Those were the good old days, now gone.
Linksys, 0; Netgear 1.
Submitted by doc on Mon, 10/23/2006 - 00:46.Our new house comes with structured wiring. That is, we have varieties of conduit, co-ax and CAT6 running from drop points outside the house to a wiring closet, and patch panels that let us connect gear in the closet out to RJ45 (ethernet) and co-ax jacks in rooms throughout the house.
So, after we patched co-ax from the cable connection outside the house to the cable modem's new location in the wiring closet, I went out and bought a router/switch to patch the Net to various locations.
I got a Linksys BEFSR81.
Long story short, it served the Net by Ethernet to various laptops connected directly to it. But it wouldn't deal with My Netgear RangeMax 240 wifi access point. Nor would it get the Net to our home Sonos audio ZoneController, which is a wifi-hub thing. Yes, I powered those up last, and otherwise followed the directions provided by A) the lame CD that comes with the unit and only runs on Windows; B) the chat session with tech support that went nowhere, and C) the phone call at the end of a very long hold session. In that last session, service stopped when the tech support person told me I'd have to call Netgear tech support to deal with my Netgear access point. Bad enough that she already insisted that she could only talk to me if the unit was connected to a Windows XP PC (requiring that I reboot the ThinkPad from Linux to Windows).
Users paying programmers directly for software
Submitted by doc on Wed, 10/18/2006 - 23:17.In Software by Bounty, Doug Kaye says, This is a tangible manifestation of what Doc Searls has described as the demand side taking control, and I think it bodes well for the further formalization of a demand-driven economy of software products.
New containerized penguin habitat?
Submitted by doc on Wed, 10/18/2006 - 22:55.Just wondering...
The art of business vs. the business of art
Submitted by doc on Tue, 10/17/2006 - 15:08.Yesterday I heard from an Apple enterprise customer who had recently bought 80 Macbooks. Ten of them, so far, have had to bo back for heat, shut-down or freezing problems. This customer wondered if they were taking a risk buying another 300 of the things. I told them they clearly were, and suggested holding off on the purchase — since, far as I know, Apple has not acknowledged the problem or dealt with it in a serious way.
Gotta say I'm amazed at Apple's persistent silence on this issue. The company has worked very hard, ever since Steve Jobs' return, to build a reputation for good technical support. (While Consumer Reports forbids quoting any of their editorial, I encourage people to look at what the magazine says about Apple vs. everybody else — and to draw their own conclusions.)
Dinosaur saves Eudora
Submitted by doc on Thu, 10/12/2006 - 23:45.I've always loved the Eudora user interface, and hated the now-standard all-in-one multi-pane email UI pioneered by Outlook and now used by just about every email client not operating in a shell.
Well, now, finally, Qualcomm is getting out of the email business. To their enormous credit, Qualcomm is turning Eudora development over to the Mozilla folks, who have named the project Penelope. They say,
The "Penelope" project's intention is to join the Eudora® user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It's *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it.
Anybody played with Koobox?
Submitted by doc on Thu, 10/12/2006 - 23:13.Koobox has had a Linux-based Mac-Mini-like $399 (after rebate) unit on sale for a few months. Now they've added a couple of wireless options for that unit, in addition to some low-priced upright tower offerings, also running Linux.
So I'm just wondering if any of ya'll have played with any of these, or what comparable offerings in this price/performance/feature range you'd prefer.
Figuring out FOSS in schools
Submitted by doc on Sun, 10/01/2006 - 14:03.Steve Hargadon is a smart, interesting and modest guy who's exploring out loud the utility (and futility) of free and open source software in schools. And, for that matter, in home schooling too.
So far he's interviewed John "maddog" Hall, John Selmys, Eric S. Raymond and three of the OpenOffice guys, and myself. The others are already up, at those links. Mine should be up soon too.
Microsoft's Open Specification Promise
Submitted by doc on Wed, 09/13/2006 - 00:35.It isn't entirely a joke (or a fair statement) that Microsoft has become a legal department traveling as a software company. Yet there are some upsides. One is that some very smart lawyers at a very large company have had to engage Reality through company technologists brave and determined enough to engage the open source community in constructive collaboration.
With positive results.
That's what has been going on with the corner of Microsoft that has been involved in the Identity Space.
Content is Serf
Submitted by doc on Sat, 08/26/2006 - 20:09.Andrew Odlyzko's Content is Not King is Required Reading for anybody (and that's most of us) who think the Net's main practical and economic virtues involve content distribution. A sample:
The main reason to question whether content will ever make giant contributions to network costs is that by the time convergence is likely to occur, at least a decade into the future, content transmission is likely to be a small fraction of total traffic. Further, most content will probably be distributed as ordinary file transfers, not in real-time mode.
Our preoccupation with real-time is supported by our experience with telephony and television, the primary carriers of which unfortunately provide last-mile service for approximately all of our homes. But this will, inevitably, change. Kevin Marks has been saying Live is Dead for some time. Of course it's not completely dead; but the case for its death has been made by TiVo for many years now.
Andrew's conclusion...