That's a fair enough commentary. Regarding the training piece I always tell my students we teach Cisco because 1) they probably have the most complete networking certification program available, 2) 90%+ of what you learn is transferable to any other networking equipment vendor you just need the syntax, and 3) it's what employers want regardless of what they run (see points 1 &2).

You're absolutely right about the proprietary protocol bit and pushing them. I would defend Cisco a bit on that though because 1) they (at least in the past) were an early mover so they did stuff like PAgP before LACP was standardized, IGRP when RIP was still the common standards based protocol, ISL before 802.1q was standardized, HSRP before VRRP was around, etc. and 2) because they are so big they often times get into situations where they need to build something unique for one or a handful of huge customer(s) that have edge cases (for example places where running EIGRP is still preferable to OSPF due to designs) or who want to move the technology along before something is standardized (e.g. GLBP has no standard equivalent yet). Now we could chide them for not just proposing their proprietary protocols as standards but I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing if I were running things there and trying to maximize differentiation and profit.

I will say the used equipment market is flush with Cisco equipment because of all that forklifting so it ends up being one of the less expensive ways of getting into enterprise gear if you're willing to run older stuff without support (e.g. for homelab or very small businesses/nonprofits). Often times you can buy 3 spares of used Cisco for what the next comparably featured new stock is from Extreme or HPE. I do think that the very large enterprises and government contracts can get enough of a deal on the equipment (and even smartnet) to bring the Cisco stuff into the range of the other players.

On the training and certification front I am amused by their current push of network automation in their training and certification programs. I love infrastructure automation more than the next person (especially for virtualization, cloud, and servers) but it seems to me that we're still a very long ways off from that being especially relevant to most networking jobs (small and mid-sized businesses). I think they spend a bit too much time talking to a few people with giant networks to manage. Oh, and let's not get started on the push for the vastly over-priced DNA Center stuff as automation when the whole point is actually to commoditize the network with YANG, netconf, restconf, and the like.

Tell me more about what you don't get along with Cisco. There are plenty of reasons you might choose not to use Cisco (cost/value being a huge one, licensing, etc.) but from a technical standpoint they are still the standards-bearer of enterprise-grade networking equipment. I teach networking as well as being a practitioner so I'm genuinely interested in hearing what people do and do not like about different vendors.

Why is this so far down, +1

Alas, that's not true. Several school districts in the US use public buses for student transportation: Portland, ME, Minneapolis, MN, New York, NY, Oakland, CA, Washington DC, etc. Though it is typically not done for elementary/primary school students.

The problem is there is no direct feedback to the consumer about the rising prices due to this so most consumers won't be aware. If a restaurant really wants to offset these costs they should charge more for orders through one of the online services. I suppose that's probably prohibited by the agreement they have with them though so an alternative is to raise prices across the board for take-out/delivery and then offer a "direct order discount" or some such thing. In this way you are much more likely to actually change the behavior of more consumers than just telling a few people to do it.

I strongly encourage people to read all of the articles in the summary and the proposed changes and to file comments. This is absolutely a money grab by the legacy gTLD providers who wish they could charge much more for domain names. Instead I'd like to see a reverse auction where qualified bidders would make offers for an agreement with a price cap and we see how cheaply people will go. PIR which runs the .org registry right now rakes in $90 million a year from registrations. There is no way on earth they need that much money to maintain a database.

See my submitted comments on the proceeding below:

I do not support the removal of the price cap provisions from the renewal of the .org gTLD agreement. These provisions which limited the price of registrations and allowable price increases for registrations, are important to allowing small organizations, especially non-profit charity organizations to exist on the Internet. Many of these organizations have long-held .org domain names and a substantial percentage of their meager funding is tied to donors being able to find them via those domains. The massive potential price increases (as opposed to the moderate ones that are already possible) would prohibit smaller organizations and personal projects from having a place on the Internet.

Let me be clear, there is no inherent 'worth' to domain names and no registry 'deserves' to profit from the sale of domain names. These are in infinite supply and simply a ledger entry. They are not a product where the registry provides any innovation nor are they a product which costs any substantial amount of money to produce. The costs of domain registration must ONLY cover the costs of administering said registry which are very minor costs given the automation level possible.

While I understand that legacy gTLD providers are upset that they are limited in what they can charge when newer TLD providers are not they do have a distinct advantage of being more recognizable and are thus more than making up for it in volume. The greed of gTLD providers should not be a reason to allow unreasonable price increases. If a legacy gTLD provider does not feel they can cover their costs in a price-capped arrangement we should instead seek out a new provider for the gTLD. I'm certain that there are many organizations who would be more than happy to take over the oversight of these legacy gTLDs while still agreeing to the price caps.

Indeed I would support a reverse-auction of qualified bidders for all legacy gTLDs where the winner would be the organization which would guarantee the lowest price for registrations. THIS competition would best serve the users of the Internet, not the opposite which is to remove price caps.

Let me quote from an excellent article on this subject which well explains why competition is a false idea in this marketplace -- :

"If price caps are eliminated, competition will not keep prices in check. Competition is effective in restraining prices only if registrants can easily switch one domain name for another. An organization's domain name becomes its online brand for the life of the organization. Moving to another domain name requires undergoing the hugely expensive and disruptive ordeal of rebranding and is to be avoided at nearly any cost. Organizations wish to continue using their existing domain name, for which there is no adequate substitute. When there is a unique product that cannot be easily substituted for any other, there is no effective competition.

In the absence of competition, registrants can be protected from extortionate pricing only through pricing constraints, such as price caps. ICANN as the trustee for the legacy name spaces has the responsibility of an owner"

Sincerely,

Dr. Benjamin Franske

Intel has been hiring away all the tech hardware reviewers it seems. Ryan Shrout from PCPerspective, then one of the people he sold PCPer to (Alvan Malvantano) and now Kyle from HardOCP have all gone to Intel. It's quite the interesting strategy on Intel's part. On the other hand if you want to work for Intel it seems like a good idea to start a hardware review site and you'll probably get a job offer if you can attract any sort of following.

They DID both of the things you asked for last year: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... It was included in the ill-fated Windows 10 1809 update though so it may not have yet reached your computer. Next time you update your Windows 10 version it will have both of the features you seek in notepad though.

I don't mean priority on their personal service, I mean that what you would want to prioritize is their agency/organization owned service devices (i.e. the data connections in firetrucks, etc.)

I would tend to support prohibitions on throttling for any emergency service and recovery personnel but it seems counterproductive to prevent throttling of typical consumers. During an emergency is exactly the best time to triage and prioritize some communications over others. Given that networks, wireless ones in particular, have limited total capacity I would not want to see emergency service and recovery service traffic taking a backseat to someone in the area watching YouTube videos. It seems emergencies are exactly the sort of thing QoS is designed for! It just needs to be applied properly giving the bandwidth resources to the people who will help the most other people.

I think it's pretty clear they mean the router itself shouldn't have other services open. This is all about reducing router attack surface as they have become a popular target for botnets.

There are ways to sort out those conflicts, see for example the Uniform Commercial Code.

This is not to say that I'm for doing things in a patchwork way. However, state legislatures have shown themselves to be much less bought and paid for by corporations than congress so until we can deal with the corruption that money brings to congress I think we're forced into a situation where the best path forward is to do things at state levels.

Actually this is a pretty interesting idea that could potentially garner bipartisan support (though the fact that politicians on both sides are in the pocket of big business will likely kill it). My rationale is that Republicans like to claim that there are all these 'slackers' collecting welfare benefits who should be working. In this case these are 'working poor' people though who are trying to earn a living but the jobs they have simply cannot cover the costs of living. If Republicans truly want to encourage people to work they need to ensure that everyone can get a job which will cover their costs of living. This would seems to do that without any Government expense at all (also very appealing to Republicans, many of whom are not particularly against government services but are fiscally conservative and don't want the government spending --or collecting-- money). Of course Democrats would support this as providing a social safety net for people trying to work for a living but who need a little extra help making it -- and they can claim a win in doing it without raising individual taxes. This is probably the sort of thing that the majority of Americans would support. Don't worry though, the big business lobby will kill it.

Yep. This. I'm a reluctant Tunderbird user but it definitely sucks at a lot of things including memory/disk usage and horrible caching. I'd love to quit Thunderbird but what would I go to? I have 10 different IMAP/SMTP accounts that I need to send and receive mail from. I also need the client to run in Windows, something multi-platform is even better. Other that Outlook which is equally terrible but for somewhat different reasons, what other options are there? I would think by now that someone would have written a decent open-source web-based client which can connect to multiple IMAP providers just like a local client could using HTML5/Javascript for the frontend and as an offline/progressive web app but I haven't been able to find one...

I'd love to quit Thunderbird but what would I go to? I have 10 different IMAP/SMTP accounts that I need to send and receive mail from. I also need the client to run in Windows, something multi-platform is even better. Other that Outlook what other options are there?