Device Manufacturers and the fleecing of consumers

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I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:

I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.

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Outlook 2007 and Gateways

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I recently got a call from a client who was having a hard time connecting to their Exchange 2003 server. They kept getting a “disconnected” error. I told them to ping the exchange server and other computers on the network to see if they would get a response, they did and everything looked fine. I … Read more

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Employee Surveillance on Steroids

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So the other day I went to a conference on security and listened to a couple of rehashed arguments on why business owners should secure their networks, data and mobile devices. Pretty standard stuff.

Then we got into the latest development in employee monitoring and surveillance technology and I found myself going “whoa”, can they really do that? Sad fact is, yes, employers can really strip you down to your bones in terms of keeping tabs on what you do at work.

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Backup Options for Small Business Owners

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You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.

The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.

The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.

For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.

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I know where you are!: Mobile devices and GPS

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The other day I was in Houston for a seminar and as usual, got lost, despite the fact that I had a printed map and directions to the venue. I called the hotel I was going to stay at for help and they hung up on me. Oh well. After taking a few more wrong turns, I suddenly remembered that my G1 has a built-in GPS. I pulled over and opened the “Maps” application hoping to use it get new directions. The menu had an entry called “My Location” so I tapped on it and lo and behold, it brought up a street map of my exact location.

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