Posts by Oliver Munyaradzi

You get what you pay for

If you would like a 1:1 contended STM-0 internet connection (avec SLA of course), you are virtually guaranteed you can get one (and have FULL bandwidth 99.999% of the time allowing ALL traffic), but be prepared to pay mega-$$$ for it. I bet providers would even lay fiber to your house (no matter where you are), but again, more $$$. Bottom-line--tiered/capped/contended internet means you can have a fat pipe "most of the time" (what that means is in your contract) without paying enough to buy a new car to you provider every month.

To those comparing voice service expectations to internet access, remember that a voice circuit in the PSTN is 64kbps (a single E0). Now, if you multiply the number of 64kbps lines multiplexed into a 50Mbps pipe (64kbps x 800 / 1024), would you be prepared to pay 800x the circuit cost (plus any amounts for maintaining the fiber-optic equipment for the last mile of your link) of voice line for a line (connecting you to your ISP) meeting the same expectations each month? Thought not.

I second

I also feel I ought to say something too at this juncture. Like previous posts, not only am I lazy to the point of only noting negative experiences, but I too have to say that of all the companies I have EVER dealt with, Newegg's customer service is head and shoulders above the rest. While the issues I have had in dealing with them have been minor, they make me feel that having my custom is a privilege, and not the other way around.

I don't know the specifics in this situation, but I know that Newegg will take care of its customers.

Attorney Fees

Forget attorneys! They are the only ones who win in a class action suit. They get x-percent of the gazillion dollar settlement, and all the individuals get the rest divided by the people. If there is a real issue here, and the Apple lawyers think so, then they should settle out of court with these two individuals (NOT the attorneys) for maybe a couple hundred thousand AT BEST and consider the whole thing a misunderstanding.

"CONSUMER" not ENTERPRISE

I really don't see what all the moaning and complaining is about. I used to do computer assembly in a two man shop for individuals and small businesses alike, and as far as hard drives went, the deciding factor was price. The drives are all pretty much the same nowadays, such that individual end-users should mostly buy on price. If you buy a drive today, and it's still working after a year, it probably will continue to work for many years. Having a five-year warranty for end-users (through distributors) makes no sense really because pouring even a little money into those last two years is a waste considering that I, like most other people, buy a drive for e.g. $150, then if it fails four years later, the invoice/receipt/proof of purchase has been lost, I've had four years of service from it, and any hard feelings from lost data might result in a change of brand, but I wouldn't bother calling Seagate about a drive that's four or five years old. I refuse to sit in a call center phone queue wasting my time over a five year old drive that cost me $150.

In the Enterprise however, five years v. 3 years makes BIG DIFFERENCE. I won't calim to know much about the data center business, but to me if I build an enterprise storage network, because of the sheer number of drives I NEED to have that warranty even five years out, assuming of course that data centers aren't rebuilt every 3 years, which they most probably are not. BUT, in this case too Google's approach makes sense: buy a crap-load of consumer drives KNOWING that x% of them will fail and build a storage solution with appropriate algorithms to provide redundancy for those x% of drives, then you avoid having to buy enterprise SAS and other such solutions. Sure, performance won't be as high per drive, but through some clever logic and a huge number of drives, I believe the numbers could be made to work and provide performance while reducing cost. So even though the enterprise case for 5 year warranties makes sense, that's only for all who follow a more traditional approach to enterprise storage i.e. not Google.

Mines the one with "Makes absolutely no difference for Joe Six-pack or Jane Doe buying a hard drive for their home computer" on the back