My education in trademark law a few years ago taught me this: The test of whether a case is winnable or not is that the plaintiff has to prove actual instances of customer confusion. TM law is not there to protect your trademark. It’s goal is to protect the consumer – hence this test.
Here’s Chrysler’s new logo. What do you think? [Rest assured that when the suit is filed, attorney’s from both sides will be taking your comments into account]
[Update at end of post] I love Dell servers. In fact I even love their network hardware. I’ve spent 0000’s (yeah that’s four zeros) with them during the last 2 years and Mick my old sales guy rocked! As did his hardware team.
I’m ready to spend more money. Yup, I’m going to take my hard earned dollars and hand it over for more of that great hardware they have. Unfortunately Mick got laid off. So now I’m dealing with a team of 5 people.
I get almost daily emails from someone called Loree Brown reminding me of how much Dell rocks and telling me about the great deals they have. I even have this cute guy with his cute chin fluff, silk tie and his cutsie pie little smile appearing in my emails. He’s really been a huge influence on my buying decision. He looks like he just got laid and I’d like to look like that right after I buy my servers.
But I’ve been emailing “Loree Brown” @ Dell with requests for quotes and I get nada response. Nothing. Hell I even put the $4000 server that I want to buy in my shopping cart ready for him or her or it to turn into a quote.
I’ve sent reminder emails. Follow up emails. To multiple addresses. Nothing.
So really what’s happened is that they fired Mick and “streamlined” operations and I’m going to end up buying my machines somewhere else. Which means getting rid of Mick cost them probably several 0000’s (four zero’s again) over the next 2 years from me alone.
Get your shit together guys, I want my quote!!
Update: Got a call from Loree’s manager Reed West apologizing profusely for the confusion. Apparently the problem is that Dell’s marketing emails come from username@midmarket.dell.com and the reps don’t actually receive emails at those addresses. I had sent several emails to Lori at the ‘midmarket’ address instead of her real address. Their real email addresses are username@dell.com. So Reed has undertaken to fix that issue – their marketing emails will now come from real email addresses. Nice to know Dell reads the blogosphere and twittersphere and responds – they got back to me less than 3 hours after I posted this. As I mentioned in the original post, their servers are unbeatable – looking forward to a better relationship with the new sales team.
My brother sent this to me. I’m not sure who the source is – the original is here. It’s Mt Hua in China.
Derek Perez posted a great site comparison comparing Earth Class Mail vs Zumbox. Unfortunately ECM comes off second best. But I have to say I absolutely love Zumbox’s home page. I’m sure the video actor and production cost a fortune, but I’m guessing they’re getting some serious ROI from it. The first time I saw this integrated video pitch was on brand guru Martin Lindstrom’s website, the author of Buyology. He’s changed the site around a little but he’s still pitching you in person when you arrive. Here’s Derek’s comparison.
For the warriors out there who are still awake and working at 1:45am on Monday morning, here’s some inspiration to keep you going. This is a spectacular poem by William Ernest Henley written in 1875. The title means “Unconquered” in Latin. When I read this poem I get chills, the hair on my arms stands up and I feel the need to either kill something or create something.
OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
In any company if you save $1 it goes straight to your bottom line. Meaning it’s as if you just earned another $1. The company that my wife and I have been running for about 2 years now serves over 30 Million page requests per day. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting more performance out of our hardware but about 6 months ago we started hitting pesky issues like limits on the speed of light and electrons.
So we’ve had to keep growing without going out and buying a Google-size web cluster. A lot of the wins we’ve had have been simply using every spare drop of capacity we can find. I’ve noticed a pattern during the last 6 months. It goes something like this:
Kerry (My wife, our CFO, and keeper of the graphs): Server 12 is hitting 10. [Meaning it has a load average of 10 on an 8 CPU machine which is 125% load]
Me: OK Dell has this great special on these new R410 servers that are about twice as fast as the previous generation.
Kerry: What about the other machines in the cluster?
Me: They’re already at 80%.
Kerry: OK what else do we have?
Me: Well the crawlers are maxed, the mail server’s maxed, the proxy’s maxed out, the load balancer is maxed….
Kerry: What about 25 and 26? They’re sitting at 2.
Me: Well we’d have to [technical and managerial speak explaining how complicated it’s going to be to implement]
Kerry: OK so lets do that.
Me: [More bullcrap this time rolling out the big guns desperately trying to get money for new toys]
Kerry: …[waits it out]
Me: OK so lets do that.
If you’re a CFO approving purchase decisions in your company, take it from me: Geeks and CEO’s alike love buying new stuff. I assure you there isn’t a web cluster or database cluster on this planet that you can’t squeeze a little more capacity out of without breaking things. So before you take the [technical and managerial bullcrap from your geeks and CEO] at face value, sit down with your team and have them explain all the data to you and go through all your resources with a fine tooth comb. Then, if you absolutely have to, spend some money.
And if you don’t have a CFO, nominate someone immediately!! It doesn’t matter how small you are, someone had better be the keeper of the cash-flow plan or you’re going to run out of money and wonder why.
Incidentally, this is the load decrease on one of the busiest servers in our cluster when we brought online some ‘found’ capacity earlier today.
This is a brilliant short talk by Tina Selig asking students “If you had $5 and 2 hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?”. Her point that capital can simply be a distraction is a view I’ve held for a long time – especially in the context of cheap-to-start-and-run consumer web startups.
I’m going to use the term “Cloud” in this post which I despise for it’s nebulosity. The press has bandied the term around so much that it means everything from the Net as a whole to Google Apps to virtualization. My “cloud” means a cluster of virtual machines.
I’ve been a huge fan of Mark Shuttleworth for a long time. Besides the fact that his parents have great taste in first names, he’s taken his success with Thawte and ploughed it right back into the community who’s shoulders he stood on when he was getting started. And he’s a fellow South African. Ubuntu is doing for online business what the Clipper ship builders did for the tea trade in the 1800’s. [Incidentally, the Clipper ship is still the fastest commercial sailing vessel ever built.]
Today the huge distributed team that is Ubuntu released Karmic or Ubuntu 9.10. Karmic Server Edition includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) that allows you to take a group of physical machines, turn one of them into a controller and run multiple virtual machines on the others and manage them all from a single console.
The reason this is a game changer is because this brings an open source cloud deployment and management system into the main-stream. I’ve been opposed to using Amazon’s EC2 or any other proprietary cloud system because of the vendor lock-in. To effectively deploy in the cloud you need to invest a lot of time building your system for the cloud. And if it’s proprietary you are removing yourself from the hosting free-market. A year down the road your vendor can charge you whatever they like because the cost to leave is so much greater. And god help you if they go under.
It’s also been much more cost effective to buy your own hardware and amortize it over 3 or 4 years if your cash-flow can support doing that – rather than leasing. As of today you can both own the physical machines and run your own robust private cloud on them with a very well supported open source linux distro.
The UEC is also compatible with Amazon EC2 which lets you (in theory) move between EC2 and your private cloud with ease.
The advantages of building a cloud are clear. Assuming the performance cost of virtualization is low (it is), it lets you more effectively use your hardware. For example, your mail server source repository and proxy server can all run on their own virtual machines, sharing the hardware and you can track each machine’s performance separately and move one off to a different physical box if it starts hogging resources.
But what I love most about virtualization is the impact it has on Dev and QA. You can duplicate your entire production web cluster on two or three physical machines for Dev and do it again for QA.
To get started with Ubuntu UEC, read this overview, then this rather managerial guide to deploying and then this more practical guide to actually getting the job done.
Disclaimer: You may brick your fancy new Linksys router by following the advice in this blog entry. A large number of folks have installed this software successfully including me. But consider yourself warned in case you’re the unlucky one.
I use SSH a lot. My wife and nephew love streaming video like Hulu instead of regular cable. For the last few years there’s been a cold war simmering. I’m working late, they start streaming, and my SSH session to my server gets higher latency. So every time I hit a keystroke it takes 0.3 seconds to appear instead of 0.01. Try hitting 10,000 keystrokes in an evening and you’ll begin to understand why this sucks.
I’ve tried screwing with the QoS settings on my Linksys routers but it doesn’t help at all. I ran across a bunch of articles explaining how it’s useless to try to use QoS because it only modifies your outgoing bandwidth and can’t change the speed at which routers on the Internet send you traffic.
Well that’s all bullshit. Here’s how you fix it:
Upgrade the firmware on your router to DD-WRT. Here’s the list of supported devices. I have a WRT320N Linksys router. It’s a newer router that has both a 2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz radio. Many routers that look new and claim to support “N” actually just have 2.4Ghz radios in them.
The DD-WRT firmware for the WRT320N router is very very new, but it works perfectly. Here’s how you upgrade:
Read Eko’s (DD-WRT author) announcement about WRT320N support here. The standard DD-WRT installation instructions are here so you may want to reference them too. Here’s how I upgraded without bricking my router:
Now the fun part:
You can use a lot of standard linux commands in SSH – it’s busybox linux. Type:
cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | grep <YourIPAddress>
Close to the end of each line you’ll see a mark= field. For your IP address it should have mark=10 for all your connections. Everyone else should be mark=0. The values mean:
Remember if no QoS rule is matched the traffic is Standard priority if you have QoS enabled on the router. So you are Premium and everyone else is standard. Much more detail is available on the QoS DD-WRT Wiki here.
The Linux distro is quite amazing. There are over 1000 packages available for DD-WRT including Perl, PHP and MySQL in case you’d like to write a blogging platform for your Linksys router. To use this you’re going to have to upgrade your firmware to the ‘big’ version of the WRT320N binary. Don’t upgrade directly from Linksys firmware to the ‘big’ DD-WRT – Ecko recommends upgrading to mini first and then upgrading to ‘big’. Also note I haven’t tried running ‘big’ on the WRT320N because I’m quite happy with QoS and a more powerful radio.
There are detailed instructions on how to get Optware up and running once you’re running ‘big’ on the Wiki. It includes info on how to install a throttling HTTP server, Samba2 for windows networking and a torrent client.
If you’d like to run your WRT320N at 5Ghz the DD-WRT forums suggest switching wireless network mode to ‘NA-only’ but that didn’t work for my Snow Leopard OS X machine. When I was running Linksys I had to use 802.11A to make 5Ghz work for my macbook. And likewise for this router I run A-only. You can confirm you’re at 5Ghz by holding down the ‘option’ key on your macbook and clicking the wifi icon on top right.
I prefer 5Ghz because the spectrum is quieter, but 5Ghz doesn’t have the distance through air that 2.4 Ghz does. So boosting your TX power will give you the same distance with a clear spectrum while all your neighbors fight over teh 2.4Ghz band.
