Category Archives: Smackdown!

I keep seeing hysterical reports that Bill Gates wants to impose e-mail postage to stop spam. A quick Feedster search for “gates spam postage“, for example, turned up 90 posts. Most of these are based on this CNN/AP story .
Unfortunately, virtually all of the articles and commentary miss the point: Microsoft’s not calling for people to pay money for postage. Instead, they’re floating the idea of using a hashcash-like system that requires the sender to perform a calculation (something like a hash of the message plus the sender’s address, with some additional crypto thrown in) before sending the message. The MS Research system (described somewhat here) uses a similar idea: if you require a certain amount of computation to send messages, that raises the cost to people who send out millions of messages, i.e. spammers. (Interestingly, the BBC article says that Cynthia Dwork, who first floated the idea of computational-postage systems in 1992, is now working at Microsoft Research. Her original paper, here, makes for interesting reading).
Now, here’s the part that most people are missing in all the “Bill Gates wants my postage” kerfuffle. If the message doesn’t have a valid hashcash token, it can be passed through a normal spam filter. . In other words, if it has “postage” (which is created by burning a few CPU-seconds on the sender’s machine), it can be directly accepted (or not), but if it doesn’t have “postage” it gets the full proctologist’s treatment with SpamAssassin, the Exchange IMF, or whatever. (n.b. Ecto‘s spellchecker recognized “proctologist’s”– pretty cool, huh?) This is exactly analogous to what we all do with postal mail: if I get something that was mailed bulk rate (thus lacking “postage”), it’s much more likely to get canned.
Microsoft is not suggesting that we pay actual cash for any of this (although these guys, and others, are). Calm down, everybody. Considering that there aren’t any viable micropayments systems (and yes, I include Peppercoin in that dismissal), the idea of requiring actual micropayments for email is laughable, and no one knows that better than MS. However, a hashcash-like system is a useful adjunct to (not replacement for) other filtering systems. In fact, there’s already at least one hashcash implementation, FirePay.

So, Ed Brill has been reading the Exchange team blog, probably for much the same reason that Microsoft PMs read his blog– know your enemy, and all that. So, let me leave aside the fact that it’s disingenuous (and, IMO, slimy) of Ed to say “I’m not spinning, but $spin…” and point out one key difference between IBM and Microsoft’s support programs.
With Microsoft, any customer with a credit card can call Microsoft PSS and get support for any active product. If you want to buy a support contract, fine, but if you don’t, you can still get support. The PSS org thus has to be sized for variable call volume from an unpredictable mix of 5.5, 2000, and 2003 customers, calling at unpredictable intervals. As far as I can tell, the only way to get any support from IBM (apart from their relatively useless support forums) is to buy a Passport Advantage contract, pricing information for which isn’t publicly available. This gives IBM a pretty good way to predict required staffing levels, given that they know exactly how many customers they’re obligated to support.
It’s an interesting tension: limiting your support to contracted customers helps screen out a large percentage of customers, who are then hosed when they do need support, but that smaller support base means you need fewer support engineers, who will generally have lower utilization. Of course, MS would hire more PSS engineers if they could; in fact, they’re aggressively hiring for the Exchange support team, but the skill bar is pretty high, so it takes time to fill the open positions.
Ed and I are in agreement on one thing, though: it is refreshing to see the blog-driven openness that is slowly permeating Microsoft, IBM, and other large companies. (Well, we agree on two things: AT&T’s new upgrade program stinks.) That openness is all the more refreshing when it’s factual and technical, not just more marketing spin and hype.
Update: Ed was kind enough to link here from the comments to his post, in which he points out that edbrill.com isn’t an IBM web site. That’s true, and I should have made it more clear that Ed is of course speaking only for himself, so I retitled this post slightly.

After I saw this item on BoingBoing, I couldn’t hold back:

The Pentagon issued a secret report to Bush warning him that catastrophic climate changes in the next 15 years are a bigger threat than terrorism, and will lead to massive riots and nuclear war.

Actually, this is bogus, so I sent Mark Frauenfelder a note (which I’ve made HTML-friendly here):

Mark, I saw your item about the Office of Net Assessment report today. A few things become clear if you read the original Fortune article in which the report was mentioned.
First, the Pentagon is a building, so it didn’t issue the report itself. The report you cite was commissioned by Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Andy Marshall is the director of ONA; see this article for background.
Marshall’s job, which he’s had since about 1973, is to think of radical scenarios and assess which ones the Department of Defense should be preparing for. This has a long tradition, dating back at least to the Navy’s “Plan Orange” for fighting Japan in the 30s. . In the more immediate past, this forward thinking has led to a renewed focus on ballistic missile defense and a variety of interesting ARPA projects (including the recent “Metabolic Dominance” project, which personally I think is very cool).
Radical scenarios, and potential consequences thereof, is exactly what they got with this report: ONA hired Peter Schwartz (who is famous for helping Royal Dutch Shell prepare for an oil market where prices *dropped* instead of monotonically increasing) and his Global Business Network firm (see here for more on GBN). GBN’s mission was to prepare a menu of *possibilities*, which, if you read the Fortune story, is exactly what they did.
I haven’t read the report, but some of the scenarios that Forbes cites as possibilities from the report (water wars between Canada joining the US in an alliance, à la Fred Pohl’s “Foodies” in JEM) are familiar to futurists and sci-fi readers. The more interesting question is whether Marshall’s influence, coupled with the clear scientific evidence that there are tipping points at which dramatic climate changes happen *quickly*, will prompt any changes in US policy. (for one example, see this NOAA page).
Unfortunately, the interesting aspects of this project have been buried under an avalanche of bogosity, like the Guardian article that breathlessly labeled the *speculative* “secret report” as an official Pentagon *prediction*. It’s not.

Update: the report itself is available from Greenpeace. Interesting reading.

I’m trying to look at the Library page for the Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook product. Oddly, the feature comparison promised on the library page is 404. Hmmm. Not such a good selling tactic.
Because I have too much good sense to try fighting my way through 17 layers of IBM webmasters, I’ll ping Ed Brill about this; I bet he can get it fixed.
Update: after a nice IM session with Ed, he’s promised to look for the document, which indeed does seem to have disappeared from IBM’s public site.

I tried to use BestBuy.com for some Christmas shopping, and the results were dismal. I needed a Sony Clie TJ-25, a Kodak DX4530, and a Kodak Printer Dock 4000. First, I ordered the Clié. I got back an email saying they were out of stock. I tried again later and got another email telling me it was ready for pickup, so I ordered the dock and camera on a separate transaction.
When I went to the store, they found the Clié but couldn’t close the order in the computer. The sales rep’s advice was simple: buy the Clié, camera, and dock together and ignore the orders; they’d automatically expire after seven days of not being picked up. But that’s not what happened…

Continue reading →

Obviously these guys have been using Notes.

This is sort of a reverse smackdown; normally I post complaints in this category, and that’s what this started as, until it was happily resolved. I use a WiebeTech FireWire DriveDock, a little pod that snaps into the back of any IDE hard disk or optical drive and makes it visible with FireWire. This is a great way to speed up running VMware or Virtual PC on my ThinkPad, since its internal disk is pretty slow. I was running out of space on the 40GB drive I had plugged into the dock, so I bought a 120GB WD1200 and found that it wouldn’t start– the motor would start and give a little torque kick, but then it would shut down again. I thought the drive was bad, but it tested OK, so I emailed WiebeTech’s support alias asking them for suggestions on how to fix the problem. About two hours later, I got a response:

Hello Paul,
As you have witnessed first hand, Western Digital has changed the power requirements of their newer drives. To compensate for this, we have a device
that plugs in-between the DOCK and the drive, called a Power Filter. Send me
your WiebeTECH Invoice number and/or shipping information, and I will be
happy to send one out to you.

Problem identified and solved, politely and at no cost to me. If only every company were so responsive! I’ve been recommending Wiebe’s products for a while because they work well, but I’m really pleased by their attitude toward customer service.

It turns out that NASA engineers really were sounding the alarm about potential damage to Columbia; it’s just that their managers were actively resisting, or passively ignoring, their claims. I saw a lot of boneheaded, turf-protecting, politically-motivated decisions when I worked at a NASA subcontractor, but nothing like this. My favorite part of the story is this:

Since the accident, Mr. Rocha said, engineers and other colleagues have thanked him enthusiastically for speaking up, saying things like, “I can’t imagine what it was like to be in your shoes.” His immediate supervisor has been supportive as well, he said, But from management, he said: “Silence. No talk. No reference to it. Nothing.”
Except, that is, from the highest-up higher-up. One day Mr. Rocha read an interview with the NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe, who wondered aloud why engineers had not raised the alarm through the agency’s safety reporting system. This time, Mr. Rocha broke the rules: he wrote an e-mail message directly to Mr. O’Keefe, saying he would be happy to explain what really happened.
Within a day, he heard from Mr. O’Keefe, who then dispatched the NASA general counsel, Paul G. Pastorek, to interview him and report back. In a recent interview, Mr. O’Keefe said Mr. Rocha’s experience underscored the need to seek the dissenting viewpoint and ask, “Are we talking ourselves into this answer?”

Indeed.

I am fuming after reading this article in the New York Times. Titled “For Citizen Soldiers, an Unexpected Burden”, it’s the story of some folks from an MP company in the California National Guard. They got deployed to Iraq, and their tour has now been extended. This is another in a long series of reports featuring people who signed up and took the king’s shiling taxpayer’s money and now claim they didn’t know they might actually have to do their jobs!
I vividly remember sitting in a college English class in 1990, a week or so after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Thanks to my nifty haircut, my classmates knew I was in the military, and on this particular day they peppered me with questions. “Will you have to go?” “Are you worried that you might get deployed?” “Did you know this might happen when you enlisted?”
Of course I knew it might happen. Anyone who says “gee, I never thought I’d be activated” is either fooling themselves or you. For example, take this fellow:

Specialist Jory Preston, 30, of Pleasant Hill, Calif., signed on with the National Guard in January and was assigned to the 870th. He was working at a small telecommunications company and, having served in the Army in the 1990’s, saw the National Guard as a way to earn extra money. He was married in February, and his wife was already pregnant by then. The next month, he was on his way to Iraq.

Here we have a 30-year-old with prior Army service. Undoubtedly he knew that, in the Army, people get sent overseas, away from their families. He enlisted in January, after it was already crystal clear that US forces were heading to Iraq. Then he acts surprised when he gets deployed.
I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of being separated from loved ones, or the financial impact of going from a good civilian job to crappy military pay. But don’t act surprised, people. It’s not like you were drafted; you knew, or should have known, what you were getting into.

Tom Clancy has a new book, Teeth of the Tiger, out. It’s not a very good book, IMO, although it’s better than his last two pieces of crap, err, novels. However, I notice that Amazon doesn’t have any user reviews! This, for a book whose current sales rank is now 4, and which has been shipping since 8/11 or so. I find that suspicious. Given how many readers (if, perhaps, no longer fans) Clancy has, one would expect a torrent of reviews on such a hot-selling book, but there are none. That makes me wonder why there aren’t any reviews, and none of the possible answers (incompetence, systems failure, reviewer latency, desire to keep sales up by failing to post bad reviews) are good for Amazon.
Update: BN.com does have reviews listed on their page for the book. Of course, BN also has reviews for John Grisham’s latest, as yet unreleased, book, so maybe they aren’t the most reliable source. I just sent email to Amazon to ask where the reviews were for Clancy’s book; we’ll see what they say.
Update: I got a return email from Amazon’s “community service” team. They claim that the review problem was a temporary technical glitch; indeed, there are now 219 reviews averaging 3 stars. (The number of reviews hasn’t changed since late Thursday, which seems a little unusual.)

Among others, CNet is carrying this story. There’s a great deal of additional material at their site, including this interesting architecture diagram. Is this a credible threat? Not yet. These guys have literally millions of man-hours of catchup to do before producing a product that does what Exchange and SharePoint Portal Server (their apparent targets) can do. I won’t even attempt to list the hundreds of features that have to be implemented before they even reach parity with Exchange 5.5, much less Exchange 2000… much less Exchange 2003. Of course, since they’re not trying to implement a mail engine they get off the hook for a lot of stuff. We’ll see.

I got a response from Verizon after the letter I sent. This afternoon, I got a call from Josh, the assistant store manager here in Maumee. He apologized and promised to “take care” of the problem. I was (barely) able to refrain from asking whether that meant that Bob would be found in the Maumee River wearing a cement overcoat.
So, on one hand Verizon gets points for quick action; I faxed the letter the afternoon before a long holiday weekend started, and I got a call back on the next business day– not too shabby. On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether the CEO’s office handed out the kind of preemptive butt-chewing that prevents these kind of problems instead of just patching them. I guess the store manager was too busy with his other stores to handle this particular problem, so he delegated it to his assistant. C’est la guerre.
Update: I just got off the phone with Drew Moss, assistant to the Verizon Wireless CEO. He apologized profusely and promised that the director of retail services for this region will be looking into the matter. Since the store manager already knows what’s up, I expect that to be a short conversation. Drew also offered me a month’s credit on my bill, which was a nice gesture. VZW is now officially back in my good graces.

In which Paul suffers a broken phone and gets satisfaction from the warranty while simultaneously getting rudeness from a store employee; a missive to the CEO

Continue reading →

Is there some reason why you can’t just give me a context menu item to add a sender to the server’s whitelist? Having to review messages in the console and then add them to the configurator is a pain in the butt– just let me right-click an item in the console and say “add to Friendly Senders” or “Add to Friendly Listservers”. Just a suggestion that your competitors have already implemented…