Misc. Ramblings

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July 14, 2003

Monday Minikin

The first law of bureaucracies is never, ever, voluntarily downsize. Indeed, some would say the primary mission of bureaucracies is to grow larger, regardless of the why the bureaucracy was created and regardless of whether growing larger would have any positive effect.

Thus, when victory against Cold War communism was declared and you had a bunch of billion dollar Trident submarines with no mission the question was never how to decommission the subs. Rather, the military (which may be the most expensive government bureaucracy of all) went looking for a mission the submarines could do, regardless of whether it made economic sense to do it.

While the missions found for these subs (covert insertion of forces, intelligence gathering, and Tomahawk missile platform) may be critical to the safety of the nation, one must wonder if the Trident-class submarine is the most efficient way of doing it?

In either case, see this glowing article here about the conversion of four Trident submarines to the above missions.

While I was working on my Masters, access to the Internet was not just a Good Thing, it was critical to our success. If it weren't for e-mail, we would not have been able to shuttle drafts for our paper back and forth as easily. If it wasn't for the sources on the Internet, it wouldn't have been possible to do research as efficiently.

Hence, I was willing to pay for redundant broadband sources - one being the Road Runner cable modem from our cable TV provider and the other being ADSL from Verizon, our phone service provider. I did this so that if one went down, I had access through the other. And I'm glad I did because several times during the last six months having that backup saved me from a lot of extra work.

However, now that I've graduated, the need for redundant Internet access is decreased. While access is still important, it does not rise to being critical to my professional success. So this past weekend I decided to terminate one of the services.

Which to terminate was a difficult choice. Road Runner was clearly faster than ADSL. Using real world download speeds, the cable modem would typically clock 1.5MB/sec while the ADSL would strain to reach 700K/sec. On the other hand, Road Runner at about $45USD/month was about $10 more (now that Verizon has dropped their rates to about $35/month).

But in the end, the paramount criterion was reliability. For it matters not how fast a theoretical connection is if it's not working at all. Therefore, I terminated the Road Runner because it had service outages on a daily basis. Sometimes, more than once a day. Further, when I would call support to get help, it would take two weeks before someone could be scheduled to come out and check the connection.

So, I reluctantly traded speed for reliability. I am hopeful that someday Road Runner will become more reliable or that Verizon will provide faster speed, but I guess I'm not holding my breath.

Aloha!

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Comments

Posted by: sjon at July 14, 2003 10:29 PM