Month: September 2002

Extreme shares hit record low amid revenue doubts

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 27 (Reuters) – Shares of battered network equipment maker Extreme Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:EXTR – News) fell to a record low on Friday and closed down almost 40 percent on the week as investor concerns about its revenue goal heightened, according to analysts.

That had to hurt.

Mercury News | 09/26/2002 | H-1B issues going to court

For years U.S. engineers have grumbled that foreign engineers on work visas were getting their jobs. Now, for the first time, U.S. workers are filing formal complaints with the government and in court, charging that foreign guest workers are replacing them during the downturn.

The complaints contend that citizens were either laid off or not hired in favor of foreign workers on temporary H-1B visas. H-1B workers are supposed to fill only those jobs left vacant by a shortage of skilled U.S. workers.

While the previous griping was often dismissed as racial backlash, the new complaints spring from across the tech workforce — from men and women, white and non-white, native-born Americans and naturalized citizens. And labor lawyers researching the cases are finding something that stuns them: The H-1B rules give citizens almost no protection from being replaced by a foreign worker.

I don’t expect anything to happen in these court challenges, but next year would be a good time to prevail upon Congress to reform the H-1B program.

Just for fun, take this little test: name the two states with the worst business climate, and then the two with the best. When you’ve made your picks, check the survey in today’s Wall St. Journal by clicking “MORE…”.
Continue reading “Business climate”

The PhotoLink II protocol developed by Stan Fickes, Tom Kurata, and myself in 1991 for Photonic Corp. in Los Gatos was much of the basis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the standard used by all WiFi LANs. The key elements of our protocol — acknowledgements, fragmentation, encapsulation, hidden-node protection, and either centralized or distributed operation — are in the standard.

Greg Ennis, an old buddy from the IEEE 802.3 low-cost LAN wars of the 80s and technical director of the WiFi Alliance, tells me that the standard was based on something called DFWMAC that he, Phil Belanger, and Wim Diepstraten devised in 1993. (The name is an inside joke, from a side comment the committee chair made about wishing the principals would meet some place like the DFW airport and resolve their differences.) There was considerable interchange between the DFWMAC guys and we at Photonics; we gave Greg our protocol specs.

The backgrounds of all these folks were pretty similar as well: Phil was known as “Mr. Omninet” back then, because he was the champion of the Corvus LAN that was the first real commercial success in the field of twisted-pair LANs. Photonics’ hardware engineering director was a co-worker of Phil’s at Corvus. Wim was with NCR’s networks division in Holland, people that I had worked with closely in the development of the 802.3 StarLAN standard (NCR Holland eventually became AT&T, then Lucent, then Agere, and is now Proxim).

Greg was the 802.3 task force chair for PC Network while the StarLAN activity was going on, and later a consultant to Tandem, the company I worked for during the StarLAN standards development. His marketing director at Sytek, the PC Network company, was at Xircom when they developed their wireless product.

Any group of bright people with the appropriate background would have developed a protocol similar to DFWMAC at that time. Virtually all the protocol’s underpinnings can be found in Ethernet, AppleTalk, ARCNet, Omninet, Token Ring, and StarLAN provided you keep the relevant bits and toss the rest. Greg, Phil, and Wim combined the best ideas available at the time and had the persistence to get it through the committee, no mean feat in itself.

A couple of good articles on DFWMAC are here and here.

The dirty little secret about the tech press is that most of it isn’t very technical. While columnists like Dan Gillmor, Declan McCullagh, and John Dvorak opine week after endless week about computers, the Internet, operating systems, and security, it’s doubtful that any of them has ever seen the actual source code to any significant piece of software (let alone understood it), a block diagram of a significant ASIC (let alone the Verilog), or even an encryption algorithm.

Given this fundamental ignorance, it’s no wonder that, when confronted with a new issue they don’t understand, the tech press’ opinion leaders fall back on familiar old battle cries (which frequently have nothing at all to do with the issue allegedly under discussion,) and to quoting each other as if repeated ignorance becomes wisdom. Case in point is Dan Gillmor’s column in today’s Mercury News, echoing an earlier Cnet column by Declan McCullagh to the effect that the Bush Administration is missing the boat by not beating-up on Microsoft in the name of computer security. These are McCullagh’s remarks (Gillmor’s are derivative and therefore uninteresting):

But, according to people familiar with the draft report, it pays scant attention to Microsoft, which has been responsible for more online security woes than any other company in history.

Such an omission would be glaring. Intentional design choices and unintentional bugs in Microsoft Windows, Outlook, Word and Explorer have created vulnerabilities so numerous they’ve become legendary. Shoddy default settings have practically begged intruders to plunder Windows-equipped PCs. Any serious look at Internet security has to start with the world’s largest software company.

But the Bush administration appears to have punted. During an invitation-only briefing last Thursday, a National Security Council official told about two dozen attendees from civil liberties groups and trade associations that the White House had no problem with the Internet’s “monoculture” environment. Biologists warn against plant monoculture, which permits pathogens to spread like wildfire. The same principle applies to malicious code and our largely-Microsoft Internet environment.

In the first place, the plan is a high-level look at the security situation as it exists today, and a set of recommendations for improving security in the future. There is no reason for it to dwell on any particular piece of software or vendor; even if there were, I don’t want my government telling me what software to buy.

Then there’s the great and wonderful use of the term “monoculture”, the biological term popular among posers of all stripes in discussions ranging from culture to education to technology (but rarely to farming, where it actually applies). McCullagh brands Microsoft with the mark of the monoculture beast, a distinction they would deserve even if their software was next to perfect, simply because they have so much market share.

There are two problems with this, and they both speak to McCullagh and Gillmor’s lack of technical sophistication: 1) Not all Microsoft operating systems are the same; Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, Me, and XP have different vulnerabilities, as do the Office Suites at various release levels; and 2) the alternative to Microsoft, Linux, has actually reduced diversity across the Internet as a whole, by assimilating a formerly wide variety of Unix platforms under a single standard. In the example McCullagh cites, the monoculture curse can be broken by growing different varieties of rice, the relevant analogy of which is different varieties of Windows or Unix. They don’t see their own logic at work.

But more importantly, “monoculture” (or “standards”, as we engineers like to say) doesn’t inherently weaken network security, as long as the standard has strong safeguards. And when we shift the discussion around to the relevant safeguards, Gillmor gets all freaky about control:

But the much-ballyhooed, much-revised “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” looks alarmingly like a recipe for the world’s control freaks — the people who view security as a way to help big government and big business regulate the way we use technology.

It’s about control, alright — about people who own property having control over it, and the power to protect it from theft.

And that’s the thing that really bugs our columnists.