April 2007 Archives

If you wanted to learn how NOT to do business.. especially if you are a new startup, you should learn from the guys at dreamhost. Dreamhost is a webhosting company.

You should read the below link and issues quoted before you consider hosting your website with dreamhost, EVEN if they are giving you server space for free.

Dreamhost is really starting to suk

Read below a response from a dreamhost support

----- Excerpts of a long STUPID response from dreamhost support -----

--- [harpal 11662296] request response on server problems. ----

To my question on uncomfortability of their downtimes per day, and the number of times they restart a server:

I'm sorry that you're not happy with the fact that we can restart the
server any number of times a day, but please keep in mind that this is
something that we do only when necessary. Would you prefer that if a
server locks up, that we do not restart it as we have reached some sort
of restart limit? That could leave your server and all of your websites,
email, etc... unavailable for quite some time. I hope now you see that it
is good that we can restart a server as many times as needed.

Restart services isn't something that we do for fun... we only do it when
it's required. You'll likely also find that there are hardly any
companies around that will say that they reboot servers only a certain
number of times per day.

Also keep in mind that your server has not been restarted for nearly 4
days. [That means, 4 days of stability is a great achievement at dreamhost]

To my question on whether they can provide me links to their uptime guarantee or maintenance window terms:

Unfortunately I can not provide you with any links regarding server
uptime or server maintenance as we provide no guarantees to either. We do
not provide any sort of uptime guarantee, nor do we guarantee that
maintenance will be performed only at certain times or a certain number
of times.

[ Yes, they are real replies by top officials in the dreamhost server maintenance and customer support divisions.]

To questions on the phone.. dreamhost support team lazily said that "your downtime problems are because I live in India and probably we don't have better connections here". To which I stated that my customers who use the service on my website in countries like australia, USA, UK, etc., also have the same problems with reaching my server, he simply said, "these countries that you are saying are all far away from our datacenter in brea, california, and possibly they also dont seem to have good connections to our servers for which we can't do anything."

For innocents: Dreamhost is dying as a webhosting business.
Reason: Focus on money, for losing focus on upgrading hardware and services, and for losing focus on importance of servicing customers who have paid money.

May they rest in peace.

Always been thrilled about warrior stories from the past, and future advanced worlds, in movies... I am sometimes dulled to a frozen being when I realize that neither do we have alexander the great with us like our hero, nor do we have one single flying taxi or train to beat the traffic of today like in sci-fi movies.

But then, thinking about it.. we, the present, are living great, because not only we have books to imagine how our past had lived or the future would live... but we also have great story teller directors making great movies these days. Think of 'Lord of the rings', 'Pirates of the carribean', and now 300 ..all executing some part of life that used to exist in the past. Of course, movies do show things little exxagerrated to make it interesting, but isn't that the best part.

We could today afford to imagine how Alexander the Great felt, his emotions, his king of the world feeling, etc., when at the age of 30 he had won almost all of land in what we call todays Asia. The movie Alexander does help, if you couldn't feel it while reading about him in your school History books. I only wish, if we had movies like that in my school days, I would have not felt so hard to answer a question in my exams, on Alexander's achievements.. and would have answered that to the date and year.

We can imagine how the future world would probably feel like, with flying taxis, bikes, trains, buses, and centrally controlled database of citizens in your country and where and what they are up to.

-----

But, thinking about it, people in the past, never would have known much other than their present life and the recent past, since they didn't have any stuff much like technology today.. people in the past travelled vast distances to communicate messages, not like the enemy team sending an email that they want to fight a war.

And whenever there comes a great movie that showcases some people of the past who did great, I only imagine what if the dead who are represented in the movie.. were watching it. :o) pretty cold .. but not a ghosty feeling. Imagine the real Alexander the great watching the movie Alexander or being told about his own biography... what would he feel like or say.

What if dead spartans saw the new movie 300.. and wonder "who on earth gave you guys that number.."

Thanks to the medium of movies.

Movies are taking us all somewhere.

Marketing Neccessity

They say Neccessity is the mother of invention..

When people thought that it would be nice to fly across land to transport things or people or yourself to a place, they invented airplanes..
When people wanted to some way get rid of doing the boring home laundry work, they invented the washing machine..

But... to feel a neccessity, one has to be motivated and convinced of the advantages of doing things faster or better. For instance, you have to market advantages of travelling in 30 minutes across the english channel to make people feel the advantages, before they can see the advantages working in reality... and then we would have kindled the need for it, the neccessity.

Who does this marketing ?
As of today.. movies, I think. Obviously we can't expect the government to run an AD in public interest on TV channels..selling the idea of flying taxis. Some movie showcases it.. and people say "hmm.. ", then we go about it.. ( yes, sometimes technologists might be praying that such movies run well...so the time the technology or the product comes )

These days, computer graphics and animations add a lot of capacity and power to movie making, giving good scale for imagination for the movie maker.

People are motivated to think big on the future of things.. Watch a movie like star trek, and come out of the hall, sometimes, you get a feel what would it be if there were such machines and beings outside the hall in real life,

and likewise,

most often we understand that its not so likely to see a flying taxi in our lifetime and it is a long time real life technology would catch up.

Be honest, we all thought about cloning this way, but what happened.. we have already heard of successfully cloned species around the world.. and who knows there might be some scientist somewhere who has already secretly cloned himself or his fellow researcher.

Movies feed thought.. and also technology these days. While new technologies and researches kindle writers, and writers kindle movie makers... successfly imagination goes around well, and good movies motivate technologists in return.

We all knew how much thrill we felt seeing dinosaurs finally out of the local museum.. in the movie Jurassic Park.. If the movie thrilled normal people so much, imagine how much it should have sympathised with the researchers searching every speck of sand for a dinosaur bone..

Movies help raise the benchmark in quality of living, advancement in technology.. in regular intervals. When you thought we are at our best, and saw a movie where they are showing flying trains, we are going to obviously think there are more things to do.. rather than sitting like the world has everything today.

That should explain things like, why the French keep breaking their own fastest train speed record. It should be giving them that thrill in breaking it, rather than to make customers happy by transporting them a few minutes early.

Is today's technology far off ..

If my opinion woul mean anything to you... we are not far off.

Technology today is definitely capable of making most of the things that we see in the movies, .. mind you.. including generating species that we saw in MIB2..

The reason why we dont hear of anything so futuristic in research, most of the time, is, there isn't any neccessity so we are not doing it in a rush. But, but.. people are moving towards the goal, though at a slower pace.

We always saw advanced weapon systems in movies... today, we DO have recognized labs or engineers trying to make the fastest fighter airplane that cannot be detected by even radar, we DO have teams that have already had success testing a gun like weapon that doesn't fire bullets but fires invisible rays at the target, and if the target is a human, the rays burn up body moisture to make the human feel enormous heat at the point of fire.

They keep mum over these inventions or research on purpose...and much of it is defence secret. There are systems that are slowly and cautiously being developed...cautiously because we don't want to have villians to acquire these systems or technologies like in movies...and one reason is because we don't have a hero to save us, like in the movies. Even Arnold schwarzenneger would only run for life if a power packed villain appears in real life. Real life is no movie.

If you are wondering whether any neccessity is being created at all, through movies... don't worry, it is. To put it clear, we could say, Things rise up to the surface to be noticed only when the weather is good.

We all know internet.. but know this, Internet was top secret technology invented and used in second world war times and has been so until the late 1990's when one of its features, the power of sharing information, overcame all risks of keeping the technology a secret any further, and so you are here reading this blog. Sharing information has been a serious neccessity since 1990's, which is proven now with the amount of information we have on the web in just 15 years of Internet's popularity.

Windows Vista.. the new operating system from Microsoft after more than an year of delay in its launch.. has many advantages.. and few disadvantages..

Is that so ?... ask yourself again after reading the article in below link.

Everyone who reviews Windows Vista only talks about new graphics screens, some new features of previewing contents of windows folders without opening them, and all that..

Vista seems to have, rather "luxurious" features, than having any advantages with the core of the operating system, its speed..over anything else.

So the advantages already seem meagre from people who have taken the pain to buy vista and try it... and these reviews I am talking about are from Microsoft's own Most Valued Professionals. So, imagine what could you find out in using Vista.

I think Microsoft is playing the George Bush for software.. through its selfish industry benefitting, customer ignoring, digital rights management software.

Read more details of what's wrong with Vista here.
What's wrong with Microsoft Windows Vista

Read about DRM and the problems in one of my earlier posts here.
Software Patents, Digital Rights Management, One-CPU licenses...truck load of Digital nonsense?