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Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Blogging is Like Flossing?
Welcome to 2007. Yes, I realize that it's almost the end of February and this is the first post of the year. In the new world of technology, an absence of two months means I might as well be dead. Of course, in that time, a lot has happened here at the Zoo. We've had some well publicized organizational changes. We've had a number of great product and technology announcements, and there's been a lot of activity. A lot of that, especially in the past couple of weeks, has been around our support of Open ID, which I'll also touch on in a separate post. But at the moment, I want to do so something I told myself I wasn't going to do here, and that's blog about blogging (metablogging). And I'm going to let you all in on a little secret (I can do that because I don't have the tens of thousands of readers that some tech blogs do). I don't really like blogging. Of course, that's likely to be about as popular a statement in the blogosphere as a famous sports figure saying he's homophobic. And I'm not saying that I don't like blogs. I just don't like the act of blogging. For me, it takes too long. I know people who can whip out an interesting blog post in a few minutes. And it's true that many of the speakers - and participants - at the Future of Web Apps conference where I spoke yesterday are devoted bloggers that post several times a day. But I can't. It takes me a good hour or more to churn out a blog post. Maybe that's because I'm such a perfectionist that I agonize over every word I write. Or perhaps it's a reflection of some of other latent insecurity. Or it could just be that I'm never really sure if I have anything interesting to say. I'm not that brilliant. I don't have huge pronouncements on People and Stuff. I don't even actually "build" anything at AOL. All of that hard, honest work is done by folks far more skilled in their craft than I am now. And so what I could talk about is either broad strategy statements, silly observations, or shout outs to great things that other people are doing. I can also talk about some of the challenges that we face, both technical and organizational, but in many of those cases, I'd much rather fix the issue than to write about it. I recognize that sometimes just talking about the problem can be valuable and educational. And that also there are cases where talking about it can lead to a great solution from a reader. But somehow, it's not natural for me to do, and blogging isn't yet part of my daily (or weekly) routine. Perhaps it's like flossing, which became a habit only after I'd made myself do it day after day even when I didn't feel like it. For the more prolific bloggers out there, how did you start?
eaokiatwork at 11:24:00 AM PST
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Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Random acts of commerce...
It's been a while since I've posted anything here (do all of my entries start that way?), but I figured that rather than try to come up with something meaningful and deep, that perhaps I'd be better served by trying to just get in the habit of being timely. So to kick off this new strategy, I figured I'd point out a couple of "things that made me go hmmm." 1) Yesterday, I was in a Radio Shack store buying some solder (yes, I solder things in my spare time; what of it?). While I'm checking out, the clerk tried to upsell me. Ok, that's just retail. The odd thing is that what he tried to upsell me to: a 42" LG LCD television (with interest free financing). Now, for those of you who haven't stepped foot in a Radio Shack in some
time, solder is $2.99 (there's even less expensive $1.99 solder as
well). What kind of consumer walks into a Radio Shack intending to make a $2 purchase and gets upsold to a 42" LCD TV? Mind boggling. 2) I spend a lot of time on planes, and you hear snippets of very strange conversations. My favorite in recent memory: "Can I get a glass of ice water... with no ice, please." 3) And finally, here in the Bay Area (California), a lot of technology companies put up billboards on Highways 101 and 237 that would be incomprehensible (or just plain weird) to most of the rest of the world. Other regions get ads for alcohol, or some for churches. Here, some number of years ago, there was one that was promoting a company that had produced a new technology that could "double the number of FPGAs per millimeter"... or something like that. And there was a great Oracle/Informix billboard war that broke out around that same time. But more on that later. Recently, AMD put up a billboard that touts their lower energy CPUs, and has a countdown of how much money could be saved if everyone had just used these new energy efficient CPUs instead of whatever they're using now. Of course, the countdown is a giant, illuminated display. Does anyone else see any irony in that? And on that technology note, back to our regularly scheduled program. The next timely update will be about technology - or something like that ;-)
eaokiatwork at 1:06:48 PM PST
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Thursday, September 14, 2006
Blogging about... blogging.
In case you missed it, there was a recently published research article that found that Celebrities are more narcissitic than the average person. Now, I'd submit that the sampling methodology for selecting the celebrities is biased, but this is hardly the kind of thing that you'd think would need serious research. But at the same time, I do wonder whether the same standard applies to bloggers. It's been my observation that many (though certainly not all) bloggers - at least the "personal" as opposed to "corporate" bloggers - do tend to evidence some amount of the attributes that were supposedly tracked in the survey: superiority, exhibitionism, entitlement, vanity,
authority, and exploitativeness. And, like the media, who often are accused of enjoying most talking about... the media, many bloggers spend a lot of time talking about blogging as an institution (I guess with this post I've also become guilty of this). I suppose what I'm wondering is whether or not blogging is creating a new form of instant celebrity - one that can spread with lightning speed and can disappear just as quickly. Perhaps Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has been supplanted by the web's 15 million clickthrus of fame. And to my 3 regular readers, don't worry, I'll return to dry technical topics soon enough; this was just a diversion along the way. :-)
eaokiatwork at 12:23:16 PM PDT
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Monday, September 11, 2006
Looking back and looking forward
It was almost five years ago to the hour. I remember I'd gotten up early, and I was sitting in the living room writing a few emails. For some reason, I'd uncharacteristically decided to bring up www.cnn.com, just as the news was breaking about the first plane hitting the tower. Everyone thought it was a tragic accident at the time. I told my wife (then girlfriend), and turned on the television to see what was going on and watched with the world in horror as we learned that the events of the day were no accident. We watched the television, often in silence, often holding one another, as the rescue efforts were broadcast, wondering whether there was even more terror to come. The emails I had been so determined to finish of course were forgotten, and I remember that sitting in California, it all felt a little surreal. We weren't quite detached from the situation, but we were thousands of miles away, and neither the Twin Towers nor the Pentagon were landmarks that we'd seen each day on our drive into work, as was the case for many of my colleagues. But we were still affected. The world was, and the events of that day would lead us all down a path that, for better or worse, would be impossible to reverse. Since this is a blog about goings on at AOL, I should point out that to our company's credit, we responded quickly - among other things, providing communications services in New York and at the Pentagon, a source of reliable information to those who were trying to reach family and loved ones in the area, and outreach, both in the form of grants as well as with our involvement with Network for Good. This was, perhaps, the first disaster for which the Internet really came into its own. Bloggers recounted events in their own words and as events unfolded. The world was riveted - not only to TV screens as in past times, but also to coverage on thousands of websites worldwide. IM and email were the media of choice as people reached out - not only to those in the area who might be directly affected - but to friends, family, and loved ones for support, encouragement, and community during the days that followed. Relief agencies received millions of dollars in support through Internet donations, and the web was instrumental in coordinating relief and rescue efforts. At the same time, we should recallthat even then the Internet helped launch hundreds of donation scams from those that wanted to take advantage of people's generousity. On the Internet, it's hard to separate truth from rumor, and so a lot of misinformation spread in those early moments. And the same communications mechanisms that made it so easy for the world to stay informed and in touch, were likely the same means that the terrorists employed to plan and carry out the attacks. The Internet, like any tool, is neutral as to intent. It can be used for good or evil, and it's up to the collective us to decide which way it should go. After September 11, the tsunami in Indonesia, earthquakes in Iran, and the flooding after hurricane Katrina would provide even more unwelcome opportunities to make these choices, and for us to come to terms with just what a global medium really means. In the days following September 11, I'd heard about colleagues who were stranded after air travel was stopped. I'd learn from my friends in the area about the fear, but also the solidarity that filled the streets of New York. And I would learn that a coworker of a friend of mine was one of those leading the heroic struggle on Flight 93. I didn't know then, and I don't know that I know now, how really to respond to all of it. Shock, fear, anger - it was all there then, and although time has passed since then - it's still there at some level now. We can't go back to the world before September 11, 2001. But here, five years later, we can reflect on what's really important - friends, family, community, peace. And each of us has at our disposal a powerful global medium that we can use to honor those values and to make our own mark on the world, not just today, on the anniversary of September 11, but every day.
eaokiatwork at 5:44:29 AM PDT
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Monday, August 7, 2006
Interesting Times
The thing about working at AOL is, it's never boring. It's been a very
long time since I wrote - in fact, my most recent entry is from the
last time this year that the month has started with the letter 'A', and
I've been remiss in providing my oh so colorful commentary on all
that's gone on here in the zoo that is AOL.
One of the downsides of updating so infrequently is that a lot of stuff
gets piled up, and then it gets trumped when something else of interest
comes down the line. Take this week for instance. I was going to say
a few words about our recent announcement
that we would finally be unlocking the potential of our products and
services to everyone, not just to those that get their Internet access via
AOL.
But of course, as it happens, there's other news
about AOL today. A short while ago, some of my colleagues over in our
search group thought that it would be a good idea to help out the
academic community by providing access to our white papers,
researchers, and some sample data sets that could be used to assist
those who were developing new algorithms and models in search. Those of you in academia know that one of the hardest
things about research is finding a set of representative, real-world
data that you can use to actually test and refine your theories. Our
folks wanted to assist these researchers and advance the state of search and
search methodologies, so they provided data on a slice of our user
population for folks to download and use.
I'd wondered, when I first heard of the effort, whether people would be
surprised or shocked that a large number of sexually explicit questions
were among those asked in the top 100 question-based search queries
(i.e., those that begin with a word like who, when, what, why, or how). It
turns out that I needn't have worried. Far before people started
scrutinizing the questions, they started scrutinizing some of the raw data we provided.
You see, although the metadata associated with our search queries did
not include any personally identifying information, it did include two
things that caused quite an outrage in the blogosphere. First, a
numeric identifier was assigned to each searcher, allowing someone to
correlate one search madeby an individual to other searches made by
that same individual. Secondly, as it turns out, people search for
things that might allow themselves to be identified, such as their own
name, home town, or other sufficiently narrow queries.
Thus, if I searched for "E. Aoki", or my driver's license number (who searches for their driver's license number?),
and then I searched for "Democratic Party", you might conclude that I was a democrat, even though my login ID was anonymized. And, the story
goes, if I had instead used various other interesting search terms,
perhaps implying that I was trying to commit a crime, or cheat on my
spouse, or what have you, that you'd be able to "ruin a lot of lives,"
as one blogger put it in a comment to the story.
Now, I personally think that this is a fairly gray area. To be sure,
we as a company have an obligation to keep our user's data safe, and we
probably should have thought harder about the manner in which we
released this data and how it could be mined. But I really don't
believe that we've provided the smoking gun to indict anyone in the
court of public opinion or the court of law.
Take the Democrat example above. Sure, it could mean I'm a democrat.
But it could mean that someone who was interested in me was also
interested in Democrats. Or, that someone I'd met at a party decided
to search for me, and that they were a Democrat. Or any number of other things.
You see, I don't think that the real cause of the outrage here is that we released a bunch of data. Indeed, if it were Yahoo! or Google that released similar information,
there would probably be some outcry but not nearly the same as we got.
(Microsoft apparently released some search data to the academic
community last year that included some identifying data; I assume that
they got as slammed as we did today). But even discounting those that
automatically assume that anything we do is the result of incompetence
or malice, I think that the reason why this story has gotten so much
attention is because we've basically reminded people that companies
that provide services on the Internet (yes, including AOL) can get a
lot of data about their users, and they can aggregate it. That's not an excuse for having released
the data, especially for anyone who might be affected by it. But let's face it. Ad networks, search engines, bookmark sites, commerce sites. All of these companies track your movements and your data and mine them in huge data warehouses that even AOL's marketers would likely salivate at. That's how Amazon can mix their local content, commerce, and A9 search results in a form that's tailored for you. It's the basic premise behind targeted advertising and personalized content. It's the analytics behind almost any experience where you feel as though an Internet provider can anticipate your needs. And while those other folks certainly did not package the data and make it available in as neat a bundle as we did, I think that the real issue today was that we reminded people of something they'd rather not remember: that this stuff is out there, and that it's a matter of trust as to whether someone is going to use it to make your life easier on the Internet, or to send unwanted junk mail or try to make conclusions about your character. For our part, we released the information under a license for research; commercial use was prohibited. But if you're really planning to send out a ton of spam using hijacked zombie machines that you got using spyware, you probably don't care that you're violating the license. Our corporate reaction to this incdent was swift
and humble, which I appreciate, though I still believe that the public reaction was heavily overblown. And in light of that, I think it's a sad day for AOL on many fronts. I feel badly for the researchers that could have used this data that now likely won't have access to real-world search results - from us or from any of the other providers that would want to avoid this kind of publicity. It's obviously unfortunate for those users who feel that their privacy was violated by the release of this information. But speaking more from my inside point of view, I think that the saddest part is that this will likely make our management, and us as a company, more reluctant to try to engage the community - whether that be academics, developers, or users. That's why, as the saying goes, "May you live in interesting times" is more of a curse than a blessing. What will tomorrow bring? Hopefully a less interesting day and a more interesting blog post. See you then... P.S. There are those who've argued that we should have "cleansed" the search queries before making them available. But think about what that means from an academic sense. If you removed every name, every set of numbers that look like a phone number or social security number, every reference to something illegal or immoral, any health issue, every employer, organizational affiliation, religion, gender, or sexual preference.... what data would you have left that's of any value to researchers? And how could you be sure that you got it all if you didn't actually go through and look at each query independently?
eaokiatwork at 11:35:24 PM PDT
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Tuesday, April 4, 2006
What's in a name?
Well, it's official.
AOL has changed its name to... AOL. Or rather, to be more
specific, America Online, Inc. has changed its name to AOL LLC (as our
internal mail points out, no periods, no commas). In doing so, we
join a list of illustrious corporate giants that have changed their
names to their initials, including American Telephone and Telegraph
(AT&T, which, of course is enjoying its naming renaissance after
being bought by SBC, itself an acronymized name), International
Business Machines (IBM) and NCR (National Cash Register). Ok, so
maybe the last one wasn't so illustrious.
But I do have to say that the idea of droping the "America" from our
name is an idea that I think is welcome. We've been a global
company for some time, with extensive operations in Europe, Canada, and
earlier joint ventures in Japan, Australia, and China which didn't
quite pan out. At a time when nationalism is running high (thanks
in no small part to our involvement in the Middle East and continuing
debates about immigration domestically), I think it's healthy for us to
take a broader view and to just be AOL.
Of course, there's much more to it than that. There's all of the
PR materials and notepads and business cards and signage that will need
to be changed, and I think even my voicemail message at the office says
"You've reached Edwin at America Online." I can just imagine our
corporate printing partners smiling as they read the press release.
But sometimes that's the price of progress, I suppose. Until the world uses electronic paper,
we'll have to do this each time our name changes. Then again,
it's been over 15 years since our last name change, so we've still got
some time to get that right. Then again, who knows, maybe by
then, vCards will have their renaissance. :-)
eaokiatwork at 4:44:43 AM PDT
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Monday, April 3, 2006
Back to our regularly scheduled...
For me, one of the most amusing things about yesterday's B3 browser
announcement wasn't the fact that a number of people (albeit none of
this blog's esteemed audience) didn't recognize that it was an April
Fool's joke. No, it was that the rest of the posting about the B3
browser (B3, incidentally, stands for Browser Based Browser, which I
suppose would mean that "B3 browser" is redudant), was actually based
in reality.
At Netscape, almost a decade ago, we really did create a DHTML
application that simulated a browser, complete with the URL bar, all of
the usual navigation buttons, and even movable toolbars. We
weren't really crazy (well, alright, we were but not for that reason);
the whole idea was to prove that the web browser was a sufficiently
rich environment that you could build interesting applications in
it. Keep in mind that this was in 1998, so building applications
inside a browser was still a revolutionary concept, and in retrospect,
still a bit ahead of its time. Back then, we didn't have the "Web
2.0" moniker (the marketing folks called it "crossware", and us
developers just called it "layers and javascript"), but the promise was
there. Nice to see that it's finally getting its day in the sun -
despite my distaste for the phrase "Web 2.0".
Curiously, had this blog entry run a year ago, people would have felt
that the real April Fool's joke was the premise that we would be
opening up APIs to
AIM. This effort has been a long time in coming
for the company, and I'm thrilled that we finally were able to do
it. The hard parts weren't the technical aspects; though there
was some real heavy lifting on the development side, the AIM
infrastructure - both host and client - were designed to be modular and
easily integrated from the beginning. No, the hard part was in
working through the organization to open up one of the crown jewels of
the company to the rest of the world. Of course, there have been
alternative clients that access the AIM network for a long time.
But, with the exception of a few enterprise vendors that
were part of the Certified AIM Developer program and the Macromedia
Central environment, we've never taken the AIM SDK out to the
masses. Until now (well, until a couple weeks ago).
Now, by signing up for a free developer license key, you can
integrate presence into your web-based applications, create plugins for
our AIM Triton client, even build a whole new client. Imagine
integrating your AIM buddy list with your favorite application or
sending IMs directly from your website. In my opinion, we should
have done this a long time ago (and it wasn't for lack of
trying).
Of course, there are some limitations. The developer
keys have rate limits built in so that most personal and development
tasks should work fine, but full scale commercial use probably
won't. We got a lot of flack in the development community for
these limitations, and for using the term "Open" which many people took
to be synonymous with "Open Source," which wasn't the intent.
Part of the rationale for this is just plain economics. As much
as we would love to give away this stuff, AIM does
cost money to run. In addition to the servers and network
infrastructure, we have a top notch operations staff that makes sure
that AIM is available whenever you are. We're trying hard to
strike a balance between openness and our business realities, and
sometimes we all have to make compromises. Personally, I think
that the license we managed to get out is pretty generous.
The Mapquest folks have the same issue with the Mapquest
OpenAPI. Certainly this, too, was a long time in
coming, especially after all of the excitement surrounding Google Maps. But
again, hopefully, the developer community will see that it was worth
the wait. Although certainly not as widespread as Google Maps
(yet), Mapquest's OpenAPI has geocoding, which Google Maps does not,
and you can also leverage Mapquest's highly accurate routing engine
(i.e. directions). And until May 1, we're running a contest
where you can win $1,000 for the best Mashup using the Mapquest OpenAPI.
Up next time, notes from the world of standards, courtesy of
the IETF meeting in Dallas. Email, IM, anti-spam, and the
pleasures of a real TexasBBQ. Stay tuned!
eaokiatwork at 6:24:55 AM PDT
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Saturday, April 1, 2006
It's been a while, but it's worth the wait (hopefully!)
Mischievous
It's been a long time since I've last posted, and I've got so much that I want to talk about - the AIM Developer program, for one, and in the same vein, the Mapquest Open APIs. There's also news from the 65th IETF meeting in Dallas, Texas, enhanced by real Texas downpour complete with flash floods. But
those will have to wait until next time (which will be soon, I
promise), because today, what I really want to talk about is something
really pretty exciting, the B3 browser.
B3 is the embodiment of something I worked on way back when when I was
at Netscape, but for which the technology wasn't quite ready for at the
time. B3 is an entire web-browsing experience built with Dynamic
HTML. It's not quite AJAX, but that's actually a plus, since B3
will actually run in almost every browser - probably even the one
you're using right now. Now, of course, this is only an alpha
version; future versions will include better support for bookmarks
(though in the meantime, you can use our Favorites Plus,
which also includes automatic RSS feed reading), as well as new skins
and customizations, but even this early preview is quite usable.
Go check it out!
eaokiatwork at 2:49:24 PM PST
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Thursday, March 2, 2006
That Which Can Not Be Named
The other day, I got an email from the good folks at Pasta Pomodoro
(I signed up for their newsletter, so it wasn't spam), that encourages
me to "Celebrate the Big Night!" Now, I wasn't entirely sure what
Big Night they were referring to, so I clicked on the email (I'm sure
that that was the point). Turns out it was the Academy Awards,
but the whole episode got me to thinking about all of the times when
advertisers have to use euphamisms because they can't say the actual
event (usually due to trademark or licensing reasons).
I'm not talking about the " Brand T" laundry detergent* or the " Brand H" car rental agency, but rather the ads which remind you to buy chips and beer for " The Big Game" in January (in the U.S.), or " The 2006 Winter Games in Turin".
The advertisers and broadcasters that pay the National Football League
for the rights to use the "Super Bowl" or the 32 official worldwide
partners that have paid to use the O-word would be understandably upset
if I could just call this the Super Bowl of Blog Entries or to use the
Olympic rings on my site.
I'm sure that there are some other Unmentionables, like that big
collegiate basketball tournament that we have here in the U.S.
But I wonder if this particular solution is a worldwide
phenomenon? Surely the Internet, as a proxy for "things that
happen in the world" has run into similar problems with trademark
disputes for domain names, or iframe/link propagation issues where a
site incorporates data or content and blurs the distinction between the
author and the display point. With RSS and ATOM feeds
increasingly commonplace, I have to imagine that this phenemenon will
only accelerate and will have its own set of licensing and legal mumbo
jumbo, replete with high-tech and not-so-high-tech workarounds.
I can imagine my website supplemented by a feed from That Gadget Blog. Or a photo album with a set of photos taken at The Charitable Worldwide Concert Event.
Maybe I need to copyright my blog so that someone can't pilfer my
content that will be worth millions some day. 'Course I probably
already spent it on this entry mentioning that O-thing....
* interesting and little known fact that was explained to me at some
point by a Brand Marketing Manager at a well-known Consumer Goods
Company. Next time you see a product comparison, take a look at
the competitor. Chances are that they're comparing the product to
another product by the same parent company. In the same way that
Mae West (reportedly) said that any press is good as long as they spell
your name right, it's apparently more important to get the impression
as the "leading brand" or the "leading contender" than to necessarily
be the one that brings you the whitest whites every time.
eaokiatwork at 2:55:26 AM PST
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Sunday, February 12, 2006
A Cat in a Dog's World...
Honesty, as the saying goes, is always the best policy. But
sometimes a little white lie is needed to get the job done.
Forgive me, father, for I have told a falsehood. You see, I have
a Mac. A couple of them, actually. In fact, I don't have a
single Windows PC at home, unless you count the Virtual PC instance
running inside my Mac. Most of the time, this is fantastic.
I've got all of the software I need, and it all works together to let
me have the illusion of being creative (see my other post on that topic). But
when something goes wrong, like when my wireless router went south this
past week, nirvana fades fast, since the majority of companies that
offer tech support really can only deal with Windows. So, when I
called their tech support (pro: it's free; con: they're really not set
up to deal with anyone who knows a little about networking), and the
first technical question they asked me was "What version of Windows are
you using?" I realized that I wasn't going to get anywhere by telling
them I was running Mac OS X. So I did what a lot of Mac owners
do. I said, "Er, Windows XP." "Home or Professional?" he
countered. "Professional Edition," I answered confidently. Of
course, like a lot of Mac owners, I'm pretty fluent in the ways of
Windows as well, so I was pretty confident that I could pull this off. "Alright," he said, "Now go to the Start menu and choose Run." I did nothing. "Ok?" I prompted. "Now type in C-M-D and hit return." Still nothing. "Uh huh?" "Now type I-P..." At
this point, I knew where he was going. But, since the router
wasn't giving me anything - no link lights, no IP address, nothing,
doing anything at this point would have been pointless. "C-O-N-F-I-G," he continued. "And what does it say your IP address is?" "Nothing," I answered confidently. "It says that it's not connected." "What's not connected?" he seemed confused. "The network interface. It's not connected." "Ok," he continued. "Then go to Start button and choose Control Panels, then Network." I pulled up my System Preferences/Network panel. "Yeah?" "What does it say about your Network Interface." "It says it's not connected," I replied cooly. "What's not connected?" "The Local AreaNetwork." This
continued for a while longer. He had me bring up the System
Hardware Manager, we went through the command line interface a couple
more times, and I seemed to answer all of his questions
correctly. Finally, after a half hour, I'd finally won. "Alright,
it seems like your unit is broken," he concluded. If it were me,
the fact that the router never exited the power-on self test, that it
wouldn't establish a link on any port, and that a hard reset just made
it ask for a firmware upgrade would have been a giveaway, but hey, I'm
just the customer. It hardly mattered; I'd gotten to the point
where they were going to fix my problem. "I'm going to transfer
you to a second level support technician to give you an AMA number so
you can send it back." "Great," I answered, feigning appreciation as best as I could. "Hi, this is someone-or-other," came the voice on the other end of the line. "You need an RMA number, is that right?" "Yes," I said. "Alright. Now, before I do that, I need to verify a couple of things. What version of Windows are you running?"
eaokiatwork at 2:11:49 AM PST
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