Sex, gambling and computer game sites being abused by Department of Interior; Novell’s ongoing Linux makeover; Virtual Iron launches VMware competitor; The trouble with vendor support; Carriers: Make stopping spam a priority
Waste of time
Regarding “Sex, gambling and computer game sites being abused by Department of Interior”: Think about the data: 7,763 department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. That works out to about 15 minutes per employee per week. They probably spend more time at the coffee machine. Sounds like the people really wasting time were the ones conducting the study and then trying to blow it up to be something “bad.”
John Wiltshire
Pittsburgh
Active X hurdle
Regarding “Novell’s ongoing Linux makeover”: Good information, but Novell, Linux manufacturers and anyone else interested in Windows alternatives have one big hurdle to clear: They have to come up with a solution to Active X under non-Windows operating systems. There are many vendors out there who only offer Active X browser-based solutions. Everyone in open source needs to band together to create a “wrapper” for Linux/Java that will allow Active X content to work or convince developers to create Java-only solutions and phase out Active X.
Jeff Kohut
Evansville, Ind.
No price drop
Regarding “Virtual Iron launches VMware competitor”: My vendors tell me VMware has not reduced the price of its product in reaction to Virtual Iron introduction. VMware VI3 was introduced in June 2006. At that time, the starter edition of VI3 was listed at $1,000. This is a stripped-down version of what was ESX 2.5. The equivalent of ESX 2.5 in Virtual Infrastructure 3 is still $3,750, no change at all in pricing. To make use of a SAN, you still need to pay $3,750 for a VMware license. This article is very misleading in making it look like VMware dropped its price in response to Virtual Iron introduction, which is simply untrue.
Geoffrey Shorter
IT infrastructure manager
The Charlotte Observer
Charlotte, N.C.
Support system
Regarding Mark Gibbs’ BackSpin column, “The trouble with vendor support”: Maxtor is in a highly competitive market segment, namely hard disk storage. Hard drives are almost completely commoditized; the average user doesn’t care much about the nuances of speed vs. noise vs. reliability vs. cost — it’s just a 250GB drive I can slap in my computer, and I want the lowest price possible. The few people who do care are the “techie buddy at work” or “local computer upgrades shop” who might make a little more careful selection. The only way Maxtor can distinguish itself in this segment and actually hope to profitably sell a brand-name, packaged product in a retail box at an office supply store is with a value-added feature such as automatic backup. The reader Gibbs quotes, Louis Smith, actually helped find and squash a pretty serious bug in this part of Maxtor’s product, and they didn’t give him the time of day. He saved them potentially thousands of tech support calls or “defective” drives returned to those office supply stores. How about free hard drives for him and three friends?
Jeff Saxe
Network engineer
Crutchfield Corp.
Charlottesville, Va.
I spent four years as a network administrator for an upstate New York school district. In that role I had a dozen vendor support experiences very much like the one Mark Gibbs describes. I had a support tech tell me that my system (a Macintosh) didn’t support a feature that was critical for a hardware add-on. I had to take a screen shot of his company’s Web site, send it to him and talk to a sales rep before they admitted their error. They must be getting bonuses based on the number of calls they can answer, even if they outright lie, cheat and steal to get there. I can see their leader board now: “Willy has 26 calls just in the last hour. Robert, why have you only had seven? You don’t need to be helpful, just get them to restore their systems and call back. Then it will count for two calls and maybe more!”
I am beginning to believe that very few companies really keep track of what is going on during tech support calls. It may be a case of “what I don’t know won’t hurt my career directly” even though it does irrefutable harm to that company. I will never purchase anything from a half-dozen companies that have burned me with inferior support or made me go through hoops.
Matthew Roe
Mac enterprise consultant
The Shadar Group
Canandaigua, N.Y.
Slippery spam slope
Regarding Daniel Briere’s column, “Carriers: Make stopping spam a priority”: Caution — slippery slope dead ahead! Who would Briere propose as the arbiter of what constitutes spam? And what, if any, standards should they use, beyond their own personal biases? (To paraphrase a past jurist, “I can’t define spam, but I know it when I see it!”)
Once we hand the content-censor baton to ISPs, why stop them at e-mail content? What about all the other trashy content on the Web and Usenet?
I share Briere’s dislike for spam. But absent a benevolent, fair-minded censor (the late Jon Postel comes to mind), I’d fear us “going there.”
Larry Huntington
Atlanta
