Dynex? WTF?

This actually happened several weeks ago.

The company I work for does not keep computer parts in stock.  We usually place orders through a distributor.  However, if the need is for one or two common parts, we’ll just make a quick trip to a local retailer.  On this particular day, I was at a client who had a computer where the network adapter (NIC) went bad.  The closest place that would have a NIC happened to be a Best Buy.

So… I make a quick trip.  I walked in to be dismayed by the dearth of networking options.  It seems that most of the networking products at Best Buy are now wireless.  I understand this since, for most people, it’s simple and cheaper than having to run cable.  Unfortunately, this sucks for people with office needs.

Since I was the only customer in the computers area of the store, I ended up with a shadow.  I looked around for a minute and finally found one NIC with an RJ-45 interface.  The brand?  Dynex.  I had never heard of it before.  Keep in mind:  I’ve been working in the Information Systems field for 11 years.  Ten of those years have been working with the infrastructure side of the field (non-programming). 

I said out loud:  “Dynex?  What the hell is Dynex?”  To which, my Best Buy employed shadow responded:  “Oh!  They’re a respected name in networking.”

???????

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO K.  I wanted to call “Bullshit” to his face but I exercised a little restraint.  I looked around a little more and found a Linksys adapter.  This was the only other option and cost $15 more.  Since I’m actually familiar with Linksys and they’re a division of Cisco I decided to go with that one.  I wouldn’t normally go with them but I didn’t see myself as having a real choice.  I made the purchase and went back to the client and installed the NIC without incident.

This got me curious — who the hell is Dynex?  Later that night I fed “Dynex” into Google.  There happened to be a sponsored link for the term.  Dynex at Best Buy.  When you click their link for where to shop it sends you to a page at Best Buy.  This tells me Dynex is a Best Buy store brand.  If you go to the “Contact Us” links at Dynex and Best Buy you’ll find the mailing address for  Dynex is in Richfield, MN and the mailing address for Best Buy is in Minneapolis, MN.  These two cities are approximately 7 miles from each other.  The Wikipedia entry for Dynex is redirected to the Best Buy entry.

I’m not terribly fond of Best Buy hiding their store brand (generic) behind a different name.  But that’s not really what bothered me in this situation.  What gave me a case of the red ass was the Best Buy schlub trying to sell me on Dynex being a respected name in networking.  Shame on you, Best Buy.

Office Space Moment

I had today, what I’m calling an “Office Space” moment.  For the second time in the last two months, someone got to my blog by typing “easiest cars to steal” into a search engine.  The reason my blog comes up when these words are entered into a search engine is because of a post I made in the first half of May.  In this post, I comment on a C|Net story about how the RFID remote starters from expensive cars make them easier to steal.

The first time I saw this, I thought it rather odd.  It could be a budding criminal.  It could also have been someone doing some harmless research for a paper, news story, or figuring out what cars not to buy.  When I saw this today, I flashed to a scene in “Office Space.”  The scene I thought of is where they’re trying to look up money laundering in the dictionary.  The guys are so straight laced that they don’t have the first clue as to what it means to launder money.  The point:  you’re not going to learn how to successfully boost cars by Googling the topic.  You might as well just turn yourself in to the nearest police station on the charge of stupidity.

Tech Ed 2006 Day 0: Keynote

I was rather unhappy about the Tech Ed Keynote.  They were pushing "software as a service" again.  Clien/Server/Service.  Hath we learned nothing from Divx?  What happens when a business gets totally reliant on a particular service and the provider folds or decides it's just not profitable enough anymore?  Do you really want to trust a third-party with all of your proprietary business information?
Also, Ray Ozzie told us all about the vast amounts of land both Google and Microsoft have purchased in Oregon and Washington. These are supposedly for huge datacenters to house all the data that would need to be stored along with running these services. It seems to me this is a case of everyone going backwards. What happened to the strength of the Internet being distributed and any problem just gets routed around. It seems to me they're building a humongous single point of failure. My boss pointed out that they're even near a dam — one disaster could beget another.

Sidekick Shenanigans

Stolen from…  everywhere:  How NOT to steal a SideKick.  The synopsys…

Some woman leaves her SideKick2 in a cab in NY.  What happens next is a little fuzzy.  It looks like the cabbie sold the device to some guy who gives it to her 16 year old sister… or the sister buys it form the cabbie… or something.  Anyway, the 16 year old girl ends up with it. 

Meanwhile, the original owner of the SideKick gets her friend involved.  They send text messages to the SideKick saying they would provide a reward for its return.  The girl ignores it and takes pictures of herself and family/friends and signs into AOL with it.  The original owner has access to this information still so her friend posts the pictures and additional info he and others have been able to dig up.  Hilarity ensues.  Check out the above link.

 So… this has inspired me to write about my run-in with some low-life criminals last year.  Before I get into it, I'll spare you the tedium and get right to two of the main things I learned from the experience.

1. Ohio laws concerning pawn shop liability are insane.  If some scumbag absconds with your goods and pawns them, you not only have to pay the pawn shop what they paid the scumbag, but you also have to pay the additional fee they charge to get the goods out of hock.  The idea is since they fill out all kinds of paperwork about the items they take in and provide them to the police, they shouldn't have to be out should they take in stolen goods.  Doesn't make sense to me but that's the way it is
2. Even in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, always plead not-guilty at arraignment.  Never plead guilty.  Taking a case to trial costs time and money — two limited resources in the American justice system.  Prosecutors will plea bargain with you to keep form going to trial.  If you plead guilty right off, you have nothing to bargain with when it comes to sentencing.

On to my story.  I came home from work one day in late July, 2005 to find my house had been burgled.  As I pulled up, I noticed my back gate was open.  This is almost always closed but I let it pass.  However, as soon as I walked into my house from the garage, I knew something was off.  I'had lived in the house for just over 6 years at that point and knew how it "felt."  I notice the change in pressurization when the windows are open and that's the way it felt.  Also, the stairwell was much brighter than usual.  When I got up the stairs I could see the backdoor was open and it began to dawn on my my house had been broken into.  They busted the window out of the back door and unlocked the deadbolt (I now have a double-keyed lock).  They then kicked the door at least twice to get it to open (footprints on the door).  You could tell they originally tried one of the windows in the basement because one of the screen windows was ripped out and there was a big handprint on the glass window — brilliant, huh?  After I checked the house to see if anyone was still inside I looked up the number to the police and started taking inventory of what was missing (I didn't call 911 because it wasn't an emergency at that point).

That night was rather rough.  I couldn't sleep in my bed for fear of disturbing evidence — a detective wasn't going to be able to make it over until the morning.  They had lifted my mattress to see if I hid anything under it and dumped some dresser drawers.  It was tough to actually fall asleep because of feelings of insecurity.  It's rather disconcerting to have a gaping hole in your house that anyone can enter through.

So, anyway.  They caught the ass-hats breaking into another house a few days later.  They decided to break form and broke into this house around 7 PM.  They got mine somewhere between when I left for work in the morning and 1:30 — the time on the receipt at the pawn shop for the computer they took from me.  The owners came home while they were there.  They ran out the back and left their car parked in the driveway.  The ringleader — we'll call him guy1 (21 years old)– decided to hang around the vicinity for some reason and got pinched. 

The car belonged to the girl — girl1 (19 years old).  She went to a police station in another jurisdiction and claimed she'd been car-jacked.  The officers there weren't believing her story and called bullshit.  She fessed up to how she lost her car.  Between her and guy1, they gave up guy2 (18 years old).  The detective investigating that burglary noticed the PDA and digital camera found in girl1's car sounded familiar.  He checked the recent bulletins and found they matched the description from my police report.  They ended up finding evidence of five burglaries which the ne're-do-wells confessed to.  The police think they were involved in more burglaries but could only come up with evidence for the five.

I got the PDA and camera back.  The station I picked them up from didn't have any memory card readers so I had to e-mail them the pictures on the camera.  The took a few pictures where you really couldn't make out anything.  One picture was apparently of an employee at a pawn shop.  I think one of the guys might have had the hots for her as they snapped a picture of her rather ample back side.  The last picture was of the inside of girl1's car.  Freaking Rhodes Scholars here.  I was later able my computer from the pawn shop and that's when I learned of Ohio's insane laws covering stolen property accepted by pawn shops.  All the pawn shop required was that they turn the computer on to prove it works.  If they'd taken it one step further and asked them to log on it would be obvious the computer didn't belong to them (I require a password for all of my computers).  The rest of my shtuff was never recovered.

Despite the fact they all confessed, they all pled not-guilty.  They weren't all charged with all 5 counts but each count was good for 2-8 years and something like a $10,000 fine.  What the prosecution offered was 2 years for girl1 and guy2.  They offered guy1 5 years.  Girl2 did not really have an adult record prior to this.  Guy2 had a pretty minor adult record.  Guy1 had a rather extensive juvenile and adult record.

Guy2 accepted his plea deal.  Guy1 and girl1 both requested a pre-sentencing investigation in which the judge could sentence them to what he felt the investigation showed they should get.  Girl1 was trying for probabtion and guy1 wanted the same 2-year deal as the others.  Girl1 ended up getting the two years and guy1 got 6 years — the judge doesn't like it when you waste the court's time.   Guy1 is currently appealing his sentence.

The thing that bothers me most about the whole thing is they stole firearms from at least one of the houses they broke into and those were never recovered.  Those firearms are most likely going to be used to bring pain and suffering to others.

Anyway… that's my story.  Congratulations if you made it through the whole thing.

MLB doesn’t like Sling

Found this at C|Net:

At the heart of the issue is that Sling Media, Orb Networks and similar companies cut out cable and satellite operators who pay great sums for transmission rights in their areas, according to Kliavkoff. Baseball sells transmission rights to specific geographical locations. So, a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.

Oh, come on!  Do advertisers really get anything out of the deal if you're only visiting their locale?  The advertisers in your home city get much more out of advertising to you.

This is another example of content owners trying to control how you consume their content.  The more and more they try to control us, the less and less we become interested in consuming.  This is one of the reasons I've never purchased anything off of iTunes:  I don't want my listening controlled.  I want to be able to listen to my music from any of my computers or any other device I have.  MLB, RIAA, MPAA et al: get with the times or go away.

Apple drops plans for Indian call center

So, I did my daily browsing of stories at C|Net today.  I came across about a story about Apple putting the kibosh on plans for opening a call-center in India:

An Apple spokesman confirmed that the company no longer intends to locate a call center in Bangalore, a hub for call centers in India. "We have re-evaluated our plans, and have decided to put our planned support center growth in other countries," Apple's Steve Dowling said.

The story has generated a number of comments.  One of them mentioned this was planned to be a call center for customers in countries other than the U.S.  I have no idea whether this is true.  If this was planned to be a call-center for U.S customers, I'm glad the plans were dropped — for the sake of Apple customers.

Now, I read an article several years ago about how outsourcing is good for America for some macroeconomic reasons.  I can't remember any of the article and I doubt I really understood what I was reading (I never took macroeconomics in college — I just did the basic econ classes required by the university and the the micro class the business school required).  I think it had something to do with the world economy or some such.  Outsourcing jobs will strengthen the economies of other nations which will provide them with the capital to purchase American goods and will in turn, strengthen the American economy… or something like that.

OK.  I'm all for the strengthening of the world economy.  In principle, I'm OK with outsourcing some jobs to India or wherever else.  The problem is, what works on paper doesn't always for in practice.  The world is not just economic theory.  People are involved.  And where people are involved, things get complicated.

Ever since tech companies started outsourcing their call-centers to India, I've found it increasingly tougher to get good support.  It used to be that whenever I called Microsoft support, I could be relatively confident the technician on the other end of the line was going to resolve my issue in relatively short order.  Now, it's a crap shoot.  I had an issue with Microsoft support last year that took two weeks to resolve and I actually ended up resolving it with the help of a colleague.  I had another issue last year that wasn't entirely resolved yet but I ended up ending the call (which was a couple weeks old) because I was just fed up with dealing with what they were passing off as support engineers.  Yes, both times the calls went to an Indian call center.

One of the problems is the Indians just aren't experienced enough yet.  That should work itself out over time.  I'm certain there are plenty of capable folks in India.  However, I think too many American executives have bought into the stereotype that Indians are oh-so intelligent and highly technical people.  India has their dunderheads just like any other country.

As I see it, the big problem is communication.  I get so drained while talking to Indian tech support because I have to keep so much focus on what they're saying in order to figure it out.  The English is more or less fine but the accent alters words enough that it's sometimes hard to figure out what they're saying.  The same must go for the other way around because it takes so much effort to try to get information across to them.  I wasted several days on a call with Microsoft because the tech either didn't understand what I was tellign them or didn't care because they were so focused in on whatever script they were working from.  I told the tech I knew what the problem was (and I explained what I thought the problem was) but I was having trouble fixing it.  It took two or three days and several techs before one of them finally declared what the problem was and it was exactly what I told them it was the day before.

I've had similar problems with Dell and have talked to many others sho've shared my experiences.  I've wasted hours on resolving trivial matters and days resolving sometimes business critical issues because of outsourced technical support.  Outsourcing has led to productivity problems and a destrution of good will.  I will advise anyone against buying a Dell computer.  If they have to buy a retail computer, I'd probably end up recommending Gateway because I'm pretty sure their support is still American based (and I used to cringe whenever I saw a Gateway out on support calls).

My dad has even experienced problems with call centers being outsourced.  A couple years ago he had a dispute with some charges to his credit card.  It took several days to work it out because the operators at the Indian call center couldn't understand him (he has no speach impediments and speaks clearly).  His issue didn't get resolved until he could talk to an American and explain his issue with them.  That wasn't such an easy thing to do because the first couple times he called he got transferred right back to India.

I hope companies will eventually realize a lot of the money they save by outsourcing call centers to India or other foreign countries (technical in nature or not) will be lost when consumers turn to their competitors.  If you want to outsource some jobs to countries with cheaper labor, then fine.  But in my opinion, it's a bad idea to outsource anything that's public facing.  People don't want a hassle when they call you.

Jack PC

I was scanning Engadget and came across their post on the Jack PC.  This is basically a thin-client that you can install into the wall or a cube like you would a telephone or networking jack (though, it looks a little larger).  Since this requires a central server to truly be productive on the desktop, this is definitely more for the enterprise rather than consumers.

To be honest, I think it's an interesting idea but not something I would recommend.  I don't like the idea of creating the holes for these things to be installed into.  I can see someone investing in the structural work necessary to deploy these then switch models after a couple years.  Then, you're either stuck with these things in your wall or are on the hook for repairing all of the holes.

Here's what I'd like to see — and someone might already have this solution.  I like the idea of a small form factor thin-client.  It should have ports for all the requisite connections.  It should also have a companion display/monitor.  This monitor should be designed so the thin client could be attached to or slid into a bay on the back of it.  The monitor should also have the standard VGA and DVI connections on it so it can be used as a standard monitor if you move away from that particular model of thin-client. 

Phone bills to get slightly smaller

I was visiting Gizmodo today and found a post with an update to a story I found out about a few months ago.  In 1898, the federal government enacted a tax on telephone calls to help pay for the Spanish-American War.  The war was only four months long but we're still paying the tax, 107+ years later.  Get more information at MyWireless.org.

<rant> This is why I'm always wary about taxes on the ballot  (or any piece of legislation up for a vote) that claim to be only temporary.  They convince you to vote for a tax by claiming you'll only be paying it for a few years.  Then, when the tax is set to expire, they put it up for renewal.  They encourage you to vote for it by saying "Voting yes for the tax will not increase the taxes you currently pay."  The renewal is either made permanent or it's continually put up for renewal each time it epires. 

The Patriot Act is similar.  It was enacted in 2001 and was to expire at the end of 2005.  In March of 2006, a four-year extension was voted through.  Who knows when this "temporary" Act will go away.  </rant>

Anyway…  Yay! for lower phone bills.

On OS X security

Mac enthusiasts always like to tout the security of OS X. Leo Laporte even says how he doesn't even run antivirus on his Macs. I think he, and many other Mac users, are flirting with disaster. I actually ran my PC's for several years without antivirus. But I was probably very lucky.

The problem is software is written by humans (who make mistakes). Even the various "security" software products used to lockdown PCs and networks have flaws and need to be updated periodically to patch flaws and vulnerabilities (even Apple issues security updates for OS X from time to time). When you're talking operating systems, you're dealing with millions of lines of code, within thousands of modules, written by hundreds — if not, thousands — of people. These modules have any number of interactions with other modules that were written by others. Humans are fallible and unable to make accurate and reliable correlations with that much information. Computers don't have the intelligence to validate complex code interactions for its security.

There truth is there have been far fewer people intensely looking for vulnerabilities in OS X than in Windows. Given the lack of market share of the Mac, there just hasn't been that much interest. In the past, the interest was in having the most widespread effect as possible in your exploits — mostly for attention and chest thumping. Now, it's all about the the volume of systems you have under your control to rent out to spyware purveyors and other ne'er-do-wells. Mac enthusiasts making claims to the superior security of OS X is an invitation to crackers to uncover vulnerabilities in their system out of sheer spite.

On the other hand, there's still the small market share issue and OS X might be considered not worth the effort. /shrug

Dvorak blog contributor blast Gates on incomplete information

OK. Here's a case where I think someone who only has part of the conversation is getting the analysis all wrong. SN, over at John C. Dvorak's blog, is quoting a post where David Card is only providing some highlights of the notes he took of Donny Deutsch's interview of Bill Gates. Card even specifies they aren't direct quotes.

The section SN picks out is Card's notes from the interview directed at search and Microsoft vs. Google. SN says it looks like Gates is saying there should only be one link to click on after performing a search query. My take is Gates is saying your search results should provide you with the answer to your query. Not a bunch of results that could be the answer.

Next, SN says it seems that Gates is saying "results should only be provided from sites where a prior business relationship has been made." I don't think that at all. This just builds on what Gate said previously. Not only should you be provided with the answer to your query but there should also be some way to insure the aswer is accurate and valid.

Lastly, SN claims Gates is saying "the Internet should fit his software" and Microsoft won't list your site in its search results unless you're using their software. What did Gates say? "Microsoft builds platforms for information organization. We’re not going to organize the world’s information for it." To me, this says Microsoft builds the tools to organize information. It's up to the rest of the world to actually organize it. This is the opposite of what SN is claiming. Gates isn't saying he's trying to exert control over the world's information sources. He's saying he's going to be a facilitator for everyone else to organize information. He doesn't even say everyone has to use his tools.

Remember, though, that I'm also working from only part of the story. I have not seen any of Deutsch's interview with Gates other than what Card is paraphrasing. I think this is a case of someone who's anxious to blow up at Microsoft jumping the gun. I'll certainly criticize Microsoft when I think it's waranted, but I don't think this is one of those times.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I pretty much owe my job to Microsoft. I don't work for them but I work for a Gold Certified Partner. The bulk of my billable hours goes to working with Microsoft products.