Category Archives: Business

Business School

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As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, those of us in business school really don’t think normally. Having found that there are a lot of good jobs in Nashua (versus my previously-narrow search in Boston), I started looking, out of curiosity, at real estate in Nashua. And I stumbled across this place, a home with an attached storefront.

It’s located in a very dense rural area, and seems like it may have a high percentage of renters in the neighborhood. So I thought a laundromat may do well. Of course, you also stock a lot of vending machines. Although labor really isn’t necessary, I’d probably want to employ one person to watch over things, and maybe to do laundry for people who want to drop stuff off, and to help customers who need it. I’ve read that it’s hard to keep good staff, but really, the job requirements are minimal–you have to be able to work a washing machine, be friendly to people, and watch over the store. You’d probably have a lot of free time, too, which could be spent watching TV, surfing the web, or whatever. And I don’t think I could bring myself to pay less than $8/hour or so.

It’s hard to find much information on commercially-available solutions, but a “water recycling” system could help cut costs, too–filtering the “waste water” and reusing it. Additionally, I’d sell plastic “gift cards,” at a small discount. ($50 for $45 or so.) The cards would also help everyone by not being coins, meaning that they wouldn’t have to lug around a pocket full of quarters, and I wouldn’t have to empty huge hoppers of quarters. (Although a lot of coin-based places seem to end up being “closed loops” of quarters–you put your bills into the change machine, get quarters, and put them into the washers or vending machines. So at the end of the week, I go in and move the quarters back into the change machine, and take the bills to the bank.) Selling the pre-paid cards, though, would generate a lot of cash up front, which could be put into a high-yield savings account. If you get a gift certificate for your birthday, how long until you spend it? Especially when it’s a “bulk” item (something you can spent on multiple visits), it may well be six months or longer before you’ve depleted it. Further, gift certificates also get forgotten and lost. Thus, if I sell $5,000 in gift certificates, I might only ever have an expense of, say, $4,500. And that $5,000 is in the bank earning me a decent chunk of interest.

They now make cheap security cameras that do resolutions like 1280×1024, versus the standard 640×480. And with things like ZoneMinder on Linux, it’s easy to set up an excellent camera system on the cheap.

I’d also pull in a cheap cable/DSL line and offer free WiFi for people doing laundry. Hopefully, while waiting for their laundry, they’d also buy some food from the vending machines. (As long as I have someone working there, actually, we could maybe serve fresh, hot food, like hot dogs or pizza!)

And of course, there are benefits to me besides the income. I wouldn’t need a washer and dryer in my home, since I’d have a dozen attached to my home. And I wouldn’t need to buy Internet access, since I’ve already got it at the laundromat. Plus, it’s occasionally a problem to have packages delivered to my house, as no one’s home and they might need a signature. Now I’ve got an employee who could collect them.

Of course, only after developing a killer business plan in my head did it occur to me that maybe I don’t want a home in a not-so-hot neighborood, especially one where I don’t have a driveway.

PayPal

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PayPal’s really been getting on my nerves.

About a month ago, they froze my account, citing protecting my security. They said someone had attempted to access my account, they said. I performed the first two verification steps, but now I’m waiting on mail at home with a “security code” I have to enter to confirm it. Of course, it’s been almost two weeks with no mail from them.

So, through the PayPal site, I sent them a message asking what was up. I should clarify that I’m absolutely positive it was the “real” PayPal site. The certificate matches, and I initiated the access, so it’s not like I’m getting e-mail asking me to click a link (to paypal.com.this.is.a.scam.geocities.com)

It just bounced back to me, citing an unknown user on their end.

So I’m now approaching a month with no access to my account. I am not impressed, especially by their internal contact form bouncing back to me.

Professionalism

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I frequent WebHostingTalk.com, a really good forum for people in the web hosting industry. There are lots of really knowledgeable people on there, but there are also sorts of people without so much technical knowledge….

There was one guy a while back who announced that he was starting a video sharing site (a la Youtube) and that he’d need 450 petabytes of transfer a month. No one was quite sure how to respond, since this is orders of magnitude more than anyone measures anything in. I calculated that he’d be using about 1,400 Gbps. (And that’s an average… Real traffic patterns for big sites are more of a sine wave, so you’d probably want about 2,000 Gbps aggregate capacity, which you’d be filling at peak hours.) I’m fairly certain that even a site like Google doesn’t use anything like that. In fact, I’m fairly certain that even if a site like Google called up their providers and asked for 1,400 Gbps, they’d be laughed at. No one out there can provide that.

But some are just distressing. One guy posted, maybe a year ago, that he was getting a “private room” and didn’t know what he’d need for equipment. Did he need a router? Switches? A “private room” in a data center, by the way, is to host your many racks of servers, walled off from others for maximum security. You’ve got to be a very big place, with a very big budget, to be doing that. This is kind of like asking, “I’m buying a 500,000 square foot warehouse. What do I need? Do I need a forklift? Lights?” (A lot of answers were basically, “What do you need? You need an IT department, and someone who doesn’t have to ask this question.” Although my favorite answer was, “Padded walls.” Normally it annoys me when people give rude answers online, but I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.)

Today’s post is from a guy who seems to have about 30 servers with one company, running what I can only assume is a successful hosting company. He’ll fill one server and order another, but he’s having difficulty “managing” the traffic–he wanted to pool all of the bandwidth together. This is something that most big companies will do for you if you ask, since you’re a huge customer and they know that their competitors will do it if they don’t.

If you buy a dedicated server, you’re usually given a bandwidth allocation in GB/month. I’m allowed 1,000 GB a month, for example. (And I don’t use 5% of it.) This comes out to using about 3 Mbps 24/7, but it’s much more convenient for me since I don’t have to worry about momentary usage, just the net amount of transfer moved. There are also subtleties here: I have 1,000 GB over a 10 Mbps line. 1,000 GB means that my average use can be up to 3 Mbps. But, in real life, as I mentioned, traffic patterns ebb and flow. If I were using 3 Mbps average (I’m not), I might be using 5 Mbps during the day, and 1 Mbps at night. So just giving me a 3 Mbps line wouldn’t cut it, since it’d be really crappy during the day.

But this guy’s host quoted him a price in Mbps. He was very confused by this. He was used to his GB/month, and didn’t know what to make of these foreign “Mbps” measurements.

Someone else just posted about how some guy with the IP 0.0.0.0 keeps connecting to him, and wondering if he should ban that IP, which he thinks is awfully suspicious. (It’s not as bad as the guy who was getting people with “blank IPs” connecting to him, and wondering if he could ban a null IP in his firewall… It turned out that he was running some random command which was returning way more than just IPs, hence a number of blank lines…)

Who are these people? I wouldn’t post a blog making fun of people who didn’t know otherwise obscure things, except that these should be basic little tasks for people in these positions. It’d be like a certified (not certifiable, but certified) sysadmin for Windows systems posting and saying, “I need to change my desktop background? How can I do this?” Or a car mechanic, who’s gone on and opened his third garage, posting and saying, “The oil in my car is old and dirty. Is it possible to somehow drain the old oil and put new oil in?” Or, for the more absurd requests we see, someone posting on a financial forum about how they’re starting a lemonade stand and think they need $750 billion in startup capital, wondering what bank will give them a better interest rate. It just shocks me that these people are successful and yet so clueless.

Security Forces

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I just finished a show on “NatGeo” about the private security firms working in Iraq. It was a really interesting watch. They’re not there to engage in combat, but they’re there for “security,” such as escorting construction materials for a new police station (something insurgents are eager to stop), and transporting VIPs around.

IEDs are apparently a huge problem, moreso than the news portrays. One of the guys brought back his SUV, with the whole side blown in and full of bullet holes. The SUV was “reinforced,” meaning that it had bullet-proof glass and huge steel plates over it, and yet it was still in terrible shape. He made it out alright, although the driver, an Iraqi, died. “That was my seventh IED,” he mentioned casually.

Most are apparently set on desolate roads, and are basically just tripped by any car. There are often just tripwires that set them off, versus manually being tripped. Which got me thinking of an old idea…

I want to build an “RC Car,” something radio-controlled. Except I don’t mean a little RC car. I mean an actual car that’s driven remotely. With GPS and a set of video cameras (plus a high-speed, low-latency data link), you could be pretty accurate. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to remotely drive one of these down Route 3 (although I think you could design it to work pretty accurately). But I think they might rock in Iraq. You send one out a quarter-mile in front of your “real” convoy. No one’s in it, but its main purpose would be to trip IEDs, and do some scouting for you. From the back of a van in tow, or from a remote headquarters, people could watch for anything suspicious. And, “worst case,” it trips an IED, effectively wasting the IED on blowing up a van with no one in it. The real people behind could either divert their course, or plow on through, knowing that the bomb had been detonated.

I’ve also thought RC planes would be interesting. These days they’re “UAVs,” unmanned aerial vehicles. What I have in mind is isn’t the military UAV, a “real” airplane remotely controlled, but something a couple feet long with some cameras. Outfit it with GPS and various data links, such that it can stream video real-time, or even capture higher-resolution still images and transmit those. (Heck, fit a high-end camera on it, but have it transmit a 640×480 image, and just store the full-res to an 8GB Flash drive…)

I always thought it’d be cool to have as a pet project. Fly it around and go “sight-seeing” from your room, with what’s essentially a wireless webcam in the sky. I think they’d also be popular with places doing mapping / “satellite” imagery, as you could send these little things up and just have them run autonomously, snapping photos of an area until the batteries / gas ran low, at which point they’d return “home.”

But these things would rock in combat, too. Send these out over areas you’ve got to travel. (And areas you’re not travelling, to keep them guessing.) At a remote command post, someone can spot potential threats and identify them long before they become a problem. (You could even try grazing them with your mini RC plane.)

I don’t know what sort of radio infrastructure over there (well, I know they’re running CDM1250s and HT1250s, but I mean, I don’t know if they run repeaters / what power they run), but you might even fit a portable repeater on the little UAV, ensuring that their portable radios could still keep in touch with their post miles away.

As an aside, the radios I saw them with in the show don’t support encryption, meaning that it really wouldn’t be hard for insurgents to tune in. Their bombs keep getting more and more complex, showing that they’ve got some technically-minded people on board. It seems like a pretty bad idea to me to not encrypt your radio traffic in those circumstances.

Activation

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My debit card expires this month, so I just got a new one in the mail. It has a number you have to call to activate it. So I dialed, and it rang twice. (I’m used to auto-answer systems picking up on the first ring, but whatever.)

I expected something like, “Thanks for calling Visa! To activate a card, press 1…”

Instead, I got:

“November 8, 2007!!!”

[awkward pause]

[lengthy message in Spanish directing Spanish speakers to press 2]

“Here’s how I can help you.”

[awkward pause]

[To activate a card, say “Activate a card.” To report a lost or stolen card…]

Me: “Activate a card.”

“Okay.”

[awkward pause]

“Please say the last four digits of the card.”

Me: [does so]

“All cards associated with this account have been activated. Goodbye.”

It was the strangest thing. And while “normal people” may like it, I find it extremely awkward to speak to computers on the phone. I’d think it would be less error-prone if I was asked to dial the last four digits. And it would certainly feel less awkward than me sitting in the living room saying, “Activate a card! 1-2-3-4!”

The worst is the greeting. Especially when it comes to credit cards, it’s important to at least pretend you’re a real company. Shouting (excitedly) a date and then having a couple seconds go by doesn’t inspire too much confidence.

Sysadmin

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I like to run a really good Windows machine. Firefox is my default browser (although IE’s come leaps and bounds since it’s “I’ll merrily install any program a webpage asks me to!” days), I keep a system free of viruses and spyware, I have a “background” disk defrag tool, I routinely run CCleaner, etc. to purge accumulated cruft, and so forth. In short, I’m a system administrator’s dream. (Actually, I think I’m their nightmare, since the only time I contact them is when I have a really hard question, and I never do anything they expect… But I digress. If I administered a set of desktop nodes, I’d want them to be setup like mine.)

If I ran a computer network, though, I really wouldn’t trust normal people with doing things. Virus definitions need to be updated, virus checks need to be run, recycle bins need to get emptied, stale caches need to get purged, clocks need to get synced, and disks need to be defragged. I do this naturally on my desktop machine, so I don’t think of it as taking a lot of time, but if you asked me to maintain a network of, say, 30 PCs, I’d want to cry.

There exist, of course, a bajillion different tools for administering clusters of PCs. But what I find interesting is that I can’t think of any that really do what I want. I want to make sure certain programs are installed, and run them unattended periodically. Most solutions still seem like they’re require me to go to each PC and do my work, or they’d limit things: an increasingly common thing to do is just reimage each computer when it reboots. In some cases, though, this is totally undesired: people might forget to use their network drive, losing all their work when they reboot. Or they might need to install a legitimate program for their work, and you’d end up losing a lot of productivity as they’re forced to reinstall every time they reboot. (Which means that they won’t reboot often, which complicates other things.)

Opium

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Afghanistan has a flourishing opium trade. They apparently produce most of the world’s opium. Ironically, it’s kind of our fault–the Taliban had pretty much eradicated all poppy cultivation, but with them gone, it’s come back. A recent news story suggests that the Afghani leaders in charge of fighting opium quit after their pay was slashed due to overseas funding drying up. (This one was poorly thought through…)

I want this job. Here’s my plan: encourage opium cultivation.

India has a flourishing, but regulated, opium trade. The product is sold to pharmaceutical companies, who refine it into morphine. Farmers are apparently limited to how many poppies they can grow. The government periodically does inspections of farmers to make sure they’re complying, and to make sure that their product isn’t being diverted into illegal usage.

This is what Afghanistan needs. You deal a crippling blow (again…) to the illegal drug trade, while also bolstering their economy with pharmaceutical sales.

Where do I submit my resume?

Saying It

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I think I mentioned that I signed up for a $7 VPS account, more as a trial than anything. It was a relatively new company, but I figured I had, at most, $7 to lose.

They sent out a fairly terse e-mail that they were transferring companies to some organization in New Zealand. Understandably, I wasn’t too pleased, but I didn’t cancel immediately… I still had some time left on the month I’d signed up for. So today a new e-mail arrived, this one explaining what had happened. The tone suggests that they’ve come under harsh criticism and lost many customers. They go on to explain their rationale.

They seem to have entirely misjudged the situation. They could have done it two ways:

  • Sent out a terse, cryptic e-mail that they were being bought by another company and that my bills would be coming from a new company in New Zealand dollars, or
  • Sent out an upbeat e-mail explaining that, to improve quality of service, they were moving the virtual server division over to a different company, one with more experience maintaining servers, and expanding offerings, all the while keeping prices the same.

In reality, both reflect the same situation. But the first message almost seems guaranteed to scare away customers. Since I pay with PayPal, I don’t really care about currency; the exchange happens automatically. But inexplicably changing your billing currency adds a huge level of sketchiness. On the other hand, what they’re doing is basically upgrading their offerings and improving reliability and support, by selling their business to a better-established one that would better look after this. How could you not want that?

It’s all in how you say things. They had the opportunity to make me eagerly want their products. Instead, they handed me an upgrade that caused half their customers to cancel.

This Is My Hobby

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I want to start a “meta ISP.”

When you sign up with your ISP, you’re paying for transit. They carry your data from one network to the other.

But now let’s say that I’m a mediocre residential ISP. I buy connectivity from a couple different upstream providers, and use BGP to make sure your data takes the fastest route. This is what most people do. It works.

Let’s further say that you run an extremely popular site, maybe one of the top 100 sites out there. You have a mediocre IT team. You have enormous bandwidth, coming in from three different carriers. You, too, use BGP to make sure that your outgoing traffic takes the quickest route.

So everything works. Traffic flows between the two networks. What’s the problem?

Well, it turns out that you, Mr. Big Site, have some of your core routers in a major data center out this way. And I, Mr. Big ISP, also have a few core routers in that building. This is really pretty common–there’s a (very aptly-named) network effect with transit. When several big guys move into a building, all of a sudden, more people want to be there too. So you get sites like One Wilshire, a thirty-story building in LA full of networking equipment. They’re very confidential about their tenants, but “word on the street” is that every network you’ve heard of, and plenty you haven’t, is in there. (When viewing that picture, by the way, it’s worth noting that these wires don’t go to some secretary’s PC. Each is probably carrying between 100 Mbps and 10 Gbps of traffic between various ISPs and major networks… Also an interesting note to the photo, they supposedly keep an elaborate database and label each wire, so that this huge rat’s nest is actually quite organized.)

Since we’re both huge companies, we’re each paying six figures a month on Internet. But when one of my customers views your site, they go through a few different ISPs, and across multiple states, before it arrives on your network. It’s asinine, but that’s how the networks work.

So we wise up to this. I call you up, and we run a Gigabit Ethernet line between our racks. And all of a sudden, life is peachy. Data travelling over that line–my customers viewing your site–is free. My bandwidth bills drop, and speeds improve, too. This is the world of peering. And, strangely, the mutually-beneficial practice is rarely done.

I think there’s a market for a big middleman here. The last mile (that would be a good book title, if a telecom magnate wanted to write his memoirs) is difficult–running lines to consumers’ homes. Similarly, it’s hardly trivial to become a Tier 1 ISP, a sort of ‘core backbone’ of the Internet. But an intermediary broker? Easy enough to do.

So you’d get space in the major exchanges, and peer with popular sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Youtube, Facebook, eBay, Myspace, Amazon, Akamai, etc.

Lottery

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I lost the lottery last night. Actually, I never even entered. The drawing was for $270 million (30-year annuity), or $164.3 million cash. The stakes were high, but I still didn’t dare risk life and limb to go buy lottery tickets. Further, I’d have to clear my car off and I was feeling pretty lazy. I hoped it would roll over. Sadly, this was not the case.

But some of us were talking about what we’d do if we won. Not the “I’d buy an awesome house” or lease a 10GigE line. But financial planning stuff. First, we started the debate over whether you take the cash or the annuity. $270 million over 30 years is $9 million a year. Not to knock $9 million, but if I won $270 million, $9 million a year would seem pretty pathetic.  So I pulled out my trusty old financial calculator.

Let’s call the $164.3 million a nice even $150 million. You take $14.3 million off the top to get your indulgences out of the way. At 4% interest (realistic enough for something like a treasury note) over 30 years, you’d make $500,000 interest a month. (Assuming that you took the $500,000 out each month to spend.) That’s $6 million a year, or two-thirds of what you’d be getting if you took the annuity. Except you’ve already paid cash for a house overlooking Hollywood and shared your riches with your friends and family bought a couple cars too. Conversely, if you didn’t take your $500,000 a month out, you’d have just shy of $500 million in the bank at the end of 30 years.

So I’d definitely have taken out the cash.

The other thing I overlooked in the past is the concept of using annuities. I might like to host a scholarship, for example. I’d want $50,000 each year to fund it. Assuming the same 4% interest, you’d sock aside ($50,000 / 0.04), or $1.25 million. And then each year take out the $50,000 accumulated interest.

But, alas, I didn’t win. So no 10GigE to my home (probably not feasible anyway–transit costs are much less than I expected, but the cost of a fiber circuit to your home isn’t accounted for, and I’m not sure you can just call up Verizon and ask for them to light up a 10GigE link to LAIIX for you…)