CRTC: No to Fee-For-Carriage

I don't think that the broadcasters deserve extra money from the cable carriers.

The cable companies are providing me a service, that is access to a signal of better quality than I can get over the air. For that, I pay.

On the other hand, the cable companies are providing local broadcasters with access to an audience beyond their ability to directly broadcast over the air to, in effect increasing their audience and the value of the commercial airtime that they sell. They do this for free -- in any other business model, the cable companies would charge the broadcasters for carriage, to monetize the extra value that they bring to the local broadcasters.

Witness what happened when the WNPE/WNPI PBS station was almost dropped by the Ottawa cable company. It would have devastated the PBS station. The station reported that Canadian contributions made up 70% of their pledge revenues. Given a choice, I am sure that PBS would have paid a fee to be carried on the Ottawa network.

The fact that cable companies make money reflects the fact that they provide a service that has value to their customers. The fact that broadcasters are losing money reflects the fact that their audience is shrinking due to increased competition for their attention.

I don't see why I as an end-viewer should have to pay extra to compensate some broadcaster for their inability to attract my attention.

And it will be me as the end-viewer who pays the extra fees. The cable companies would be well within their rights to pass on increased costs to viewers. If such a rate increase costs them subscribers, then everyone loses -- both the cable companies and the broadcasters.

If I am going to be required to pay a per-household fee for these channels, I should have the ability to pick channels a la carte -- why should I pay for channels I don't watch? But even this in the end affects the cable companies, since it will lower their revenues. If revenues drop, profits will drop, and eventually prices will rise.

I remain unconvinced by these "Local TV Matters" commercials telling me what a good thing it is that such-and-such a local interest has access to a local broadcaster to get their message out. The issue isn't about access to a local audience -- it is about who is going to pay for the platform providing access to that audience. And while these local interests are beneficial in the long run for the community, it does not change the fact that I as a cable subscriber am going to have to pay for that platform they use.

5K on ServerFault

Hooray. Broke 5K on ServerFault today.

(Previously.)

There's always an emergency somewhere

Citizen writer Leonard Stern shares his horror at the lack of service in hospitals:

The complete indifference of staff was striking. My friend was still waiting for the doctor to see him, if only to offer pain relief, when the doctor decided to give an improptu computer tutorial to a junior staffer.

My comment:

It isn't unbelievable.

Know what? There's always a fire. And in the emergency room, there's always an emergency. (Thus the name). It's probably buried there under a mountain of sniffles and bumps and bruises, but there's probably a legitamete one in there somewhere.

You can't possibly expect doctors and nurses to come to work and treat every walk-in as if he was in trauma-one in ER. You can't run at "emergency" service levels constantly. If fire fighters had to fight fires 12 hours a day, six days a week, they'd get a little relaxed about it. Because, you know, there's always something on fire, and if something's always on fire, there will never be the time to make sure that the hoses are stacked and rotated properly so that they work properly when requied. So some guy would stop fighting the fire, and deal with the hoses, and make sure that the new guy knew how to deal with the hoses. Because there's always something on fire.

Similarly in your job, if there was always someone getting shafted by the system, if someone was going without help because of insufficient funding, if politicians were always treating the laws as something that applied to other people, if innocent people were getting killed by drunk drivers -- well the media would soon start to treat that as a routine state of... oh wait, bad example.

Want to get mad? Get mad at the system which ensures there are not a sufficient number of family doctors. Get mad at the people who come to the ER with a bump or a bruise or a sniffle or to fish for a doctor's note to explain some absence or other.

But that doctor who was making sure the data was entered correctly?

Don't blame him.

There's always somebody waiting on his attention.

Truth

But after HP integrates 3Com, they have the whole portfolio too. In fact, not a very good one since 3Com equipment is not exactly recognised as quality. Most importantly, the people who design networks and lay out strategy remember being completely shafted by 3Com in the early 2000’s and they haven’t forgotten.

( Source )

It's true. In the late '90s when we deployed CoreBuilder 3500, SuperStack 9300 and 3900 switches as edge devices, they worked as advertised. We still have some 3900 switches in service and really the only two reasons they are being retired is 1) they don't do POE and 2) in our experience 3Com legacy hardware support totally blows[1].

We had some disquiet when we saw the 4300 family be released, they appeared to be a step backwards in a lot of ways. The 4007 switch was a big heavy boat anchor. The 4005 was a pretty good switch and probably did well as routers in general, however we had one in a hardware developer's network and it had some interesting problems[2]. When we tried to scale up, the 4005's limitations started to become restrictive, and now we have almost no 3Com gear in our network save some basic 3900s.

Since then our experience with 3Com has been less than ideal -- one customer tried to use a 4500G switch as a core router, but its limits prevented that and it had a really weird way of doing ACLs. The step up, the 5500G, was weird in its own ways.

So yes, we remember. Now we buy Cisco for core services, with Linksys or Dell for the edge. And because Dells have 3-year warranties, and are cheap enough to buy two of, we just use cold-standby as our switch-failure coverage.

--

[1] : several years back, we had 24/7, four-hour onsite advance replacement coverage on a switch that was pretty important. It cost an unreal amount of money because the switch was getting on in years. So the switch dies, and the replacement switch fails to show up as per our contract. It turns out that 3Com had sold the support contract to a company which basically did nothing except collect our money. Eventually someone had to ship us a switch via air from Toronto. Four hour onsite? Ha, ha. That 3Com switch is gone now.

[2] : Their product did IP-failover. Problem is, the 4005 didn't update its arp cache if contradictory information was seen on the network, and it took ages for the cache entries to expire on their own. (I seem to also remember that you could set arp cache timeout manually, but the switch ignored those settings.) So when the failover happened was simulated, the IP was reachable in the lab but not across the 4005s' router. First time a bug we reported to a vendor triggered an entry in a firmware update release. Oh, and the telnet interface to the management brain kept dying too, so you could only talk to the switch through a serial connection.

Drugs: you're on them

See this Craigslist ad. This is for an unpaid internship. 10 hours a week, over two or three days a week, for three months. You need:

• a degree
• three years of experience
• Server 2K3 and Server 2k8 experience
• communications + problem sovling + documentation + capacity planning skills

In return, you get:

• Experience working in an 'exciting industry'
• Resume builder
• Recommendation letter

Are these guys on drugs? Three years experience, including Server and capacity planning experience, for an unpaid position?

"Degree + Experience == Unpaid Internship?"

I have two words for you: In Sane.

There are three positions, so my guess is they are trolling for three desperate people and then they will play "Survivor: Sysadmin" with them. Winner gets the job.

I'm almost tempted to apply just to find out who they are.

Stupid Questions

Philip Greenspun on business plans:

I said “Why can’t you show me all of the ways that your product creates value for people. Then, for each value that is generated, show me how you can turn some of that into revenue. Obviously you can’t capture 100 percent of the value that you generate because there would be no consumer surplus, but you can probably capture some. And if you’re not generating value to begin with, you won’t be able to get any revenue at all.”

This is why I didn't want anything to do with companies involved in the 'tech bubble' of '98-'01. If you can't tell me how you are going to make money, why should I invest?

Of course, I'm merely an unsophisticated investor, and therefore not the kind of person who understands these things.

I have no idea what this is selling