Microsoft FUDDITES at it again

Apparently open source software has gotten too complex. At least according to Microsoft. This particular type of FUD has a familar pattern. Microsoft finds someone who used to use Linux, but no longer does as "Linux was (whatever Microsoft wants them to say)." Microsoft then has the partner repeat whatever talking points they want to mention. In this particular market it's the ISV marketplace which has long been Microsoft's bread and butter. To be entirely fair to Microsoft, this practice (of having a business partner spout your talking points in return for marketing support is absurdly common).
In this particular instance, the MS Fuddites have trotted out a couple of partners in Malaysia.

"Lim Han Sheng, general manager of IBS Synergy, a Malaysian software vendor specializing in chain-store management applications, agreed: "We had to learn [how to build on the] different versions of Linux distributions to meet the demands of customers."

IBS Synergy had started developing products for the Linux platform back in 1998 but gave Linux the boot in early 2004, and now builds its software on the Windows platform. Lim said this was because the company's developers were spending more time hunting for Linux technical support on the Web, and had less time to focus on actual development work.

This doesn't make a lot a sense when you actually look at the claims. IBS Synergy sells chain store management applications. Yet typically that application is sold with bundled hardware and software. Here's another problem - what retail stores were demanding different linux distributions in 1998? I can guarantee the retail stores were certainly not making demands on the type of Linux to use. That strikes me as the tail wagging the dog.

Secondly Redhat has been around since 1993 - why didn't they simply join the Redhat reseller program and be done with it? Well because they didn't want to pay money to Redhat for support. Yet they have no qualms about joining the Microsoft developer program and paying for support. The idea that the developers were spending too much tme "hunting for support on the web." Why on earth would you expect your support to be free?

Here's what really happened. Management found out there was this free os called Linux. Instead of seeking out a reputable partner for the os, they decided to "save some money" and just use web based resources for their linux support. They do this for 6 years and then evenutally notice that their development team is spending a lot of time and energy doing a function that should be outsourced. So instead of actually figuring out what the problem is, they decide that the problem is Linux. Imagine if you will if you had decided to build a commercial application on Windows but instead of joining the Microsft developer network, you decided simply to rely on what random information could be found on the web. Could you develop an application? Sure. Would it be far more difficult than it it should be? You bet.

This ZDNet Asia article is a largely a reprint from a Microsoft case study. The real problem is the IBSS undercharged for it's product and didn't properly set consumer expectations. Here you can find the Microsoft IBSS case study. The case study has some straightforward MS Fuddite quotes.

Free Software Dilemma
IBSS initially thought that offering a free solution was to its advantage. However, the company soon realized this was not true, because Linux was keeping the company from charging for services rendered or charging less. “We had customers requesting backup tools, which MySQL doesn’t provide for,” says Lim. “After we had sourced it, customers were often reluctant to pay our service fees because they assumed it was free. They also wanted us to install it at no cost. This created problems for us.” Lim adds that this invariably reduced profit margins.

Because IBSS is focused on customer service, the company often did not make its customers pay the fees. However, this inevitably led to the company having to send a junior staff member to do the job. “This sometimes results in a delay in delivery and the customer would complain,” says Lim. “Unfortunately, the customers’ unrealistic expectations of ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ software and services mean that everybody loses in the end.”

The problem is that IBSS used the zero cost of Linux as a selling point and didn't properly set customer expectations that services cost money. This really isn't a free software problem, this is a business problem. IBSS set itself up for a fall. Support costs money, you need to charge for it.

Lim says that the tools available for MySQL were quite basic and “you also have to know how to use the text-based commands.” Its limited functionalities also hindered the development efforts of IBSS. IBSS could not integrate stored procedures into MySQL as it could with SQL Server 2000, and this slowed the performance of the database. “With SQL Server 2000, this is not an issue,” Lim adds.

Once again IBSS in an effort to save cash, doesn't spring for any of the support options available for MySql or any of the commercial upgrades that are available. (ie stored procedure support). This is less of a Linux problem and more of a business process problem.

The problem with much of MS's case studies is that real problem is a management/business process problem, not a problem with Linux itself. Had you made the same decisions using MS products you would be in similar trouble now. While it's convienant to blame the OS, it's not really the problem. Refusing to pay for support and then blaming the OS is silly.

Common Internet Myth #12 - An IP address represents a single user

The Explainer is a column on Slate that is usually good at explaining annoying minutia or trivia. This latest column fails short of the mark. The column cover how the MPAA finds people who share on p2p networks such as bittorrent, heres' their factual error

"At this point, the security firm will have the screen name and the IP address of the person they suspect of trading copyrighted material. An IP address is a unique identifier that your computer gets whenever you log on to the Internet."

Well yes and no. While in individual has an IP address it may not be a true routable IP. For example my computer has an ip address of 192.168.1.100 because I have a home wireless network (192.168.1 is a no routable IP and commonly used in home setups). My wireless linksys router has internally assigned IP address that my ISP uses but once again is not a true (ie routeable on the Net) IP address of 10.3.241.11 .

The IP address that shows up when I use http://www.showipaddress.com/ is 67.131.78.241. In fact anyone using my local provider (Desertgate is Las Vegas NM) shows this very same IP address. In short an IP address is less a unique identifier and instead it's a machine (in this case Desertgate's outgoing router) on the network.

The post is inaccurate for several reasons. You assume that everyone on the net is assigned a routable IP. This simply isn't feasible anymore. Large networks such as AOL have similar cacheing and routing schemes. True IP addresses are expensive and giving every user a routable IP just isn't feasible.

This the problem with the explanation for certain networks, the IP address of all the users would be the same. Yet the explanation implies that the ip address is unique to each user. While a user indeed has a unique IP address, very often that IP address is not routable and is private to the ISP. Yet the security firm is only able to see the public facing IP (which in all likelyhood is a router). The post leaves the impression this is akin to a fingerprint and a unique identifier.

This highlights the problems with the approach that MPAA has taken. The find out the IP address and then send out blanket lawsuits to the people who could have that IP. Most people lack the financial means to fight them and simply settle for 2-3K . Leaving out the fact that an IP addresse can represent hundreds or even thousands of users means it's less of a smoking gun and more of a smoky haze. Sure there's a fire there but you have no idea may be responsible for it.

MS Open Source Wake Call =-> Your market share is at stake.

After spending a few years dening that alternative office suites and formats even existed, Microsoft has realized they need to get ahead of the issue and actually listen to their customers. If Open Office has done one great thing, it's to force Microsoft off their asses to begin to compete again. Market share like MS Offices' breeds complancy which is why nearly every Office from 97 onwards looks almost incredibly identical. I am not certain what great new features I got in Office2003 (the version I currently use when forced to put documents on paper) but I am sure there are some minor improvements.

So now I will be able to open badly designed presentations from open source engineers just as easily as the badly designed presentations from marketing. Score one for both MS and open source!

Net Neutrality Debate - Terms decide the issue.

I have posted quite a bit about the network neutrality debate. In this post I have decided to handle some of the problems with the terms being thrown around by the telcos and cable companies paid pundits. These individuals often are using deliberately misleading langauge to skew the debate. It's time to control the language of the debate, since many of the opponents of net neutrality often lie during the debate. Here's a great example of a straight faced lie in the editorial section of the Washington Times

"So, for example, Comcast would have to charge Microsoft the same price to send broadband-consuming video content as the individual blogger who uses far less band space.

This is simply false. Microsoft would be charged far more since it consumed far more bandwidth (not fucking band space - band space is the fucking rental garage your band practices in and stores it's gear in). Net neutrality in no way means that prices are the same, it means you don't discriminate on individual packets. With that's example let's dig right into the common false talking points being repeated by these pundits.

1. Google/Yahoo/Microsoft want a free ride.

This of course is completely false. These companies have mammoth isp bills running into the millions of dollars a month. They pay for their bandwidth. No one is getting anything for "free." The end consumer pays for their bandwidth. The telcos want to bill someone twice for the same service, namely access to the someone else's content. It's roughly akin to forcing a telemarketer to pay extra money to "call" AT&T customers. Imagine that if you wanted to telemarket someone, you would be forced to pay additional money to the phone company as they are its customers. Yet that is EXACTLY what the telcos want to do.

2. "Smart networks" are better than "dumb networks"

This recent talking point was highlighted by Tom Giovanetti who said in a recent Mercury news OP/ED piece,

"Smart is always better than stupid. Smart networks are better than stupid networks, and smart public policy is better than stupid public policy."

This is a clever bit of punditry indeed. Since prima facie it would seem reasonable that smart network is better than a dumb network. People like smart. Smart sounds good. Yet the choice of terms is setting the debate. I would suggest when talking about this particular issue, I would always recommend properly framing the debate in the real terms of what is really happening. Let's plug in the accurate terms and see how Tom's quote sounds.

"Discrimination is always better than non discrimination. Discriminatory networks are better than non discriminatory networks."

So when discussing this online or on a television show, make sure to describe the situation accurately. Telcos want the ability to discriminate between services and then charge a fee to those services they want to. The problem is this isn't even good engineering. By trying to examine every packet in the network, you inevitably build a a more brittle failure prone network. The Internet was designed to be a flexible platform different than the switched phone network or a cable. As Farhad Manjoo has pointed out in Salon,

"Unlike other large communications systems -- phone or cable networks -- the Internet was designed without a specific application in mind. The engineers who built the network didn't really know what it would be used for, so they kept it profoundly simple, making sure that the network performed very few functions of its own. Where other networks use a kind of "intelligence" to define what is and what isn't allowed on a system, the various machines that make up the Internet don't usually examine or act upon data; they just push it where it needs to go.

The smallest meaningful bit of information on the Internet is called a "packet"; anything you send or receive on the network, from an e-mail to an iTunes song, is composed of many packets. On the Internet, all packets are equal. Any one packet hurtling over the pipe to my house is treated more or less the same way as any other packet, regardless of where it comes from or what kind of information -- video, voice or just text -- it represents. If I were to download a large Microsoft Word e-mail attachment at the same time that I were to stream a funny clip from Salon's Video Dog, the Internet won't make any effort to give the video clip more space on my line than the document, even if I may want it to. If the connection is too slow to accommodate both files at the same time, my video might slow down and sputter as the Word file hogs up the line -- to the network, bits are bits, and a video is no more important than a Word file.

The notion that the Internet shouldn't perform special functions on network data is known as the "end-to-end principle." The idea, first outlined by computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1984, is widely seen as a key to the network's success. It is precisely because the Internet doesn't have any intelligence of its own that it's been so useful for so many different kinds of things; the network works consistently and evenly for everyone, and, therefore, everyone is free to add their own brand of intelligence to it."

Let's take a look at Internet Two - the super high speed network that is a test bed for new internet technologies. In the same article "Gary Bachula, vice president for external affairs of Internet2, a nonprofit project by universities and corporations to build an extremely fast and large network, argues that managing online traffic just doesn't work very well. At the February Senate hearing, he testified that when Internet2 began setting up its large network, called Abilene, "our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to assure that they arrive without delay. As it developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment."

Today, Bachula continued, "our Abilene network does not give preferential treatment to anyone's bits, but our users routinely experiment with streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high-quality two-way videoconferences simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe without loss of packets."

So in other words the telcos attempt to prioritize traffic is less about making it work and more about extracting more money by providing less bandwidth.You can find a full transcript of Bachula's testimony before the Senate here. Let's keep in mind something - I2's bandwidth usage far exceeds anything AT&T is proposing to build for consumers. They are testing thousands of high definition channels simultaneously. As Bachula also points out,

"For example, if a provider simply brought a gigabit Ethernet connection to your home, you could connect that to your home computer with only a $15 card. If the provider insists on dividing up that bandwidth into various separate pipes for telephone and video and internet, the resulting set top box might cost as much as $150. Simple is cheaper. Complex is costly.

A simple design is not only less expensive: it enables and encourages innovation."

How much bandwidth are we talking about at Internet2 installations? More than you can possibly imagine, Bachula goes on;

"At Internet2 universities today, we routinely provide 100 megabits per second to the desktop, and many of our schools offer 1000 megabit (1 gigabit) per second connections to their faculty and students. We have done so using commercially available, open-standards technology and our traffic flows on the very same fiber used by today’s Internet service providers. Today’s typical home broadband connection – which admittedly is a big step up from dial-up – is only about 1 megabit. So the goal of broadband legislation should be to encourage ever-increasing bandwidth.


3. We will not degrade anyone's internet experience or access and if we do, then you can go to the government to fix the problem.

This is the strangest talking point of all. Most of these pundits spend a large part of their post talking about how the government shouldn't regulate the internet. Then any proposed remedy for censoring access to the Internet or services is going to the FTC to complain. Ok and in 10 years after your start-up is bankrupt you might have a favorable decision. Furthermore the random spouting of telco ceos such as AT&T Ceo Ed Whitacre and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg seem to indicate that's precisely what they are planning on doing. See here, here, and here. They then say they won't "affect the Internet". If you aren't going to change anything why say you are? Oh the previous examples where he was actually thinking about what he was going to do and then someone, probably his lobbyist, pointed out that was a bad idea to mention what they were actually going to do. As I pointed our previously, Comcast has cut off access to Craigslist - a text only site that competes with Comcast's newspaper classifieds.

Control the terms of the debate and you control the debate. We need to continue to push hard for a network that has it's intelligence on the edge of the network for continued flexibility and growth. The end to end principle of the net must be maintained.

Stupid Internet? Stupid Lies is more appropriate

The telcos are at it again. This time they have a paid pundit going on how network neutrality is literally going to end life as we know it. Your phones won't work. Emergency services will shut down. Cats and dogs living together! From his article,

"Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.

Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.

Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.'' Extremely high demand on the Internet is overwhelming available bandwidth, and regulations passed back in 2006 make it illegal for network operators to differentiate and prioritize content."

That's right folks network neutrality is GOING TO KILL PEOPLE!!!! Google must be stopped. Think of the children!

This scenario of course would never happen. All telco have packet throttling already. Users exceeding their limits often find themselves cut off. His scenario actually highlights the real problem - telcos consistently over sell their bandwdith at a 10 to 1 ratio. They want the government to come and protect this practice as it's actually quite expensive to provide what you actually promise users. Additionally there are already of dealing with his proposed meltdown. Simple content cacheing solutions have been available for over 12 years now. Telcos aren't going to melt under the new traffic load. Phones will continue to work fine. As I noted in a previous post non discrimintory networks are more efficient from an engineering prospectative.

Here is my favorite quote from this article

A world where somebody decided that a stupid network is better than a smart network. Well, how well did that work out?

Well Tom that was a decision decision made 36 years ago about the Internet as dumb networks as he calls them are more flexible and robust than networks that attempt to prioritize traffic. The terms "dumb" and "smart" are inherently biased and more importantly isn't accurate. The Internet isn't "dumb," currently it is non discriminatory. What would you rather have a network that discriminates against or one that doesn't? It's sorta a no brainer. But Tom makes the argument that in a bandwidth starved world, we need to manage these packets.

Maybe someday we'll have the techno-utopian world of infinite bandwidth, but the last time I checked, there isn't an infinite supply of anything. So, in a world with limited bandwidth, should traffic from an Internet-connected toaster have the same network priority handling as the VoIP traffic from police and fire departments?

Network neutrality proponents answer that question ``yes.'' But the correct answer is so obviously ``no'' that there is clearly some other agenda at work.

Notice that Tom betrays what the telcos really want to do. They want to make bandwidth artificially scarce so they can charge more for it. Bandwidth shouldn't be scarce for two reasons. First off there is a massive amount of fiber that is currentl y dark. Roughly 90% of ALL fiber in the US is dark and not in use. Why? Well having this much bandwidth available would case prices in the local telecommunications markets to drop through the floor. Remember almost all telcos have local monopolies on the fiber or in the case of DSL the copper. So after accepting billions from the federal government to bring symmetrical fiber optic cable to the American consumer,the telcos didn't. In the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, the major U.S. telcos promised to deliver fiber to 86 million households by 2006. We paid them 200 Billion dollars to do so. They simply pocketed the money. Read more here.

What's really going on is that major content companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com want to use the strong arm of government to lock in the certainty of their existing business models. And they've enlisted an army of anti-corporate activists to stir up a frenzy in the name of ``saving the Internet.''

But government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models. Net neutrality regulations would severely restrict broadband providers' right to enter into contracts and to try new business models while protecting the business models of Google and Ebay.

Well he's right about one thing. It is about preserving someone's business model but it's not the companies that are incredibly successful internet startups. It's about preserving the telcos' ability to ration bandwidth. Let's keep in mind, according to the 1996 Act, 86 million American homes are supposed to 45Mbit connections. Yet after pocketing $200,000,000,000 from the American consumers we still don't have it.

I find it amazing after calling for the government to protect the poor telco (by staying out of the market and not regulating it) that if the telcos discriminate, why

". . . the FCC, the FTC and the Justice Department, which all have existing authority should a telco or cable company misbehave."

Except of course when in this current regulatory environment you can count on them to do nothing. This has allowed Cox Cable to cut off access to Craigslist for it's users. Cox which also owns a large number of local newspapers (which derive their revenue from classifieds) for which Craigslist is a very large competitor. If telcos act this way during the age of net neutrality what would it be like if the telcos get their way. Far worse where we wouldn't have the Internet net we now have and would be somehting resembling the propriatary online services of the 80s - which consumers have soundly rejected.

Flash 9 Player for Linux

File this under - ok it's about time. Macromedia has confirmed through Emmy Huang's blog that flash player 9 will be released for Linux with an emphasis on performance. Flash has it's place, games and rich web apps that can run effectively on the desktop. One of the lead enigineers on the effort is guy named Mike M. his blog with the latest updates can be found here.