Change

I've been a follower of management theory ever since I was in college, and have been an observer on how people relate to each other and operate (predominantly workplace, but increasingly in personal situations).

Change is frequent, but when it's happening around you rather than directly at you, it becomes very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. At my age I should know better of course.... but it is very seductive when you think you know where you stand and that you have a modicum of control.

The last few months have been intensive - extremely intensive - periods of change. The pace has been unrelenting, the scope unremitting and the size.... unsurprising. Eventually all change has to consolidate and calm down, before another period begins.

Reading this, you might think, OKaaaay.... I could be speaking of the credit crises, the technology industry or even my personal life.

Reality is a state of mind. People don't see life as it is - they see life as they are. We are often in situations where we have little or no information, yet are trying to make sense of the 'reality' around us, as we see it.

Where it gets exciting - or destructive - is where the stress goes up, the pressure comes on... and then stays there. Most people in the mid-30's know this feeling, that exotic cocktail of being out of control and wondering when it will all just 'stop'.

So why do I write about this now?

There is a lot of change happening for me. A fair amount I expected, but it still needs to be worked through, and emotions experience - a quote I remember from Men in Black is Will Smith saying to Tommy Lee Jones' character 'Ah well, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved to all'.... and Tommy turning round and saying 'Just try it'.

All change makes us stronger, but there is a cost every time. Left unmentioned is that the process of making one part stronger - wisdom - leaves another part weaker - stamina.

The next period is one of personal journey; where one has to 'walk the walk' and other such comments. Knowing what you need to do - and then doing it, with a huge feeling of being alone - now that is truly frightening change.

---
AK

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Oracle WebLogic Server (formerly known as BEA WebLogic Server) is vulnerable to a buffer overflow, which would cause a denial of service and potentially remote code execution. Read More

The Microsoft Windows Media Encoder wmex.dll ActiveX control is vulnerable to a buffer overflowthat could result in remote code execution. Read More

Running a little behind schedule, Microsoft have in the last few hours made Silverlight 2 RC0 available for developers to download. Originally the final release of Silverlight 2 was slated by end of the U.S. Summer which has now been and gone. Indica... (more in the full post)

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I just got this in my Inbox, and decided it was interesting to spread:

The Xbox team is hard at work getting ready for the launch of the New Xbox Experience, coming to Xbox 360s around the world later this Spring. In order to prepare to bring you new features, games and experiences the team is going to need to take Xbox LIVE offline for a short time. On September 29 Xbox LIVE will be unavailable from 8.01 PM and will restart at 7:59 PM on September 30.

These are New Zealand times, please adjust accordingly...

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After reading pages and pages of rants about users being affected by heavy downloaders in another small ISP, I've posted this reply:

Folks, reading these pages again made me think of one solution: increase the prices.

Seriously, while I'd love to have cheaper Internet access (believe me I don't) money is still a natural way of filtering customers.

Small ISPs should differentiate their services by quality and value added services. For example Telecom offers Flickr Pro (US$24.95/year) and McAfee Internet Security (NZ$95/year) free with their services. WorldxChange offers a good VoIP service and it seems it had good services.

Why I am saying that? It has become clear that smaller ISPs can't compete with large ISPs in terms of price because of scale. When they offer good price they sacrifice something - and most of the times this goes into quality of service. which for many (if not everyone here) is speed.

The reality is that the price charged seems not to accommodate plans for expansion and those are very slow and spaced in between.

For a small ISP the solution would be to work in "niches". Either offer services only for high download users (or have separate "circuits" just for those) or charge more and offer a premium service for "normal" users.

By charging more they would obviously scare away heavy downloaders that would move to "Go Large" type of plans where there are no limits, but speeds are not so great - two things that don't worry that many heavy trafficers.

On the other hand users paying more would do so in the knowledge that this extra price is the guarantee they get a speedy service.

Why do you think large ISPs have small allowances like 40GB/month? Because then they start charging dearly, making sure heavy downloaders go somewhere else.

Seriously, how many of you would pay $150/month for a fast service? And that's exactly how much it costs for 10Mbps services on TelstraClear's cable modem service, with a 80 GB allowanc. On the other hand "slow" episodes on this network are mostly due to some fault and not because of contention.

I guess this post is more of an observation on small ISPs practices than agreeing with the rants in this thread.

We are talking about managing a scarce resource. Some large ISPs could even have different resource pools for each niche. That's what Telecom did with Go Large.

When Go Large was "unleashed" people were attracted by the "unlimited", which in PR speak meant "no caps". Even people who really didn't need the "unlimited" and would comfortably be served by plans with 20GB or 40GB caps decided to go for Go Large - just in case.

Telecom created a niche plan, with its own pool of resources. The only problem was that it was badly implemented and the solution adopted to "prioritise" packets was broken. Since no one seemed to be able to fix it Telecom decided to gandfather the plan - it's no longer available and whoever is in it could change to another plan, etc, etc.

So while the implementation was bad, the idea was good. If you are a heavy downloader get into a "no caps" plan, but share with others. On the other hand they offered a range of more expensive plans more suitable to "normal" users.

But those "normal" users decided to use the Go Large plan, because it was cheaper, not because they needed the "unlimited" - so the idea of using price as a filter didn't quite work right?

Well, perhaps because Telecom came up with plans such 1GB, 5GB and 10GB as "premium". Who in their right mind would get a 1GB plan? Only newcomers to the Internet, that  soon realise that 1GB or even 5GB is nothing really these days and afraid of paying too much in overuse decided to go for the unlimited plan -even though they didn't need it.

And a lot have changed in the last two or three years since. We can easily see Apple releasing 400MB updates for their OS. If you have a couple of iMacs at home then there goes your month's cap.

People are using Apple iTunes to download legal movies now. TVNZ launched TVNZ OnDemand. TV3 released their news on the web. People watch Campbell live on the Internet after the program finishes because it's a more convenient time.

People even download - gasp - one or two "illegal" movies a month. Nothing like the heavy downloaders, but certainly now the 10GB plan is not a good thing.

People started migrating from ISP to ISP. The ISP of the day was the fast one. The news of a fast ISP spread quickly, and soon it was overloaded, and the cycle starts again. Like grasshoppers.

Then we have the WorldxChange experience. It's not done yet, but they decided to create a "soft niche". I don't know exactly the technical side of it, but the idea was to create a "virtual resource pool". They've done that by creating a plan that charged a bit more for day traffic, but made evening traffic free.

So people flocked to WorldxChange. But we then found out that heavy downloaders really don't give a damn to other user's access to resources.

And now people move from this to the next ISP.

Perhaps WorldxChange should have created a complete different pool, including different network access and routes?

What do you think?

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Opening BLOB from DB as Attachment

Background

·         I'm storing attachments in a Binary Large Object (BLOB) field in a table in a database.

·         I also store the MimeType.

·         I want to open them.

·         I list the attachments for the user to peruse, with a HyperLink under the name.

·         The hyperlink opens a new blank window and redirects to a blank ASPX page.

·         I also pass the Attachment ID to the new page.

·         The ASPX page has a Page_Load event.

·         The Page_Load event gets the record and Binary Writes the byte() to the Response.

·         Also, I envisage that if it was a spreadsheet, I want to launch Excel.

 

Problem Description

·         This works for JPG.

·         But didn't work for a text file.

·         I haven't tried PDF yet, for instance and the text file I chose was a .reg file so that might not have been a wise test!

·         First I get a debug window

·         Second the browser says 'The XML page cannot be displayed'

·         'Invalid at the top level of the document'

 

Problem Resolution

·         Me.Response.AddHeader('Content-Disposition', 'inline;filename=' & fileName)

·         Now the browser asks if I want to run or save the .reg file.

·         I must specify the filename, even though I’m not loading the response from an actual file (but from a Memory Stream).

·         This works for XLS, PDF, and JPG.

·         I haven’t tried ZIP yet.

 

 

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Here we go, for your viewing pleasure:







I like those. Why? Because when Apple launched the "I am a Mac, I am PC" ads they decide to approach the whole game as a battle between stereotypes. They also had no moral problems in comparing the platforms directly. Which is ok, when done by a independent party - not by a company that will of course show some bias.

So the Microsoft "I am a PC" ads are not like that. They don't try to make the competition look bad. Instead they try to show you why you should care.

And yes, I do have Macs here at home too.

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