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Eating The Powers That Be
I almost never send e-mail to anyone bold enough to put his or her thoughts in print, but Kevin Cooke pushed my buttons with his March 18, 2002 column ("Compromising on High Availability," page 11).

I am a communication engineer for a power utility, and reliability and availability are just about the only things that matter here. We don't use the telephone companies for anything important (translation: If we can't live without it, it's not on the PSTN). We have our own communication system that covers four western states. We design for 99.986 percent availability, but most of our systems have run at 99.999 percent or better for the past 15 years.

If we operated like a telephone company, the West Coast would black out on a regular basis. You see why I don't think the telephone network is a good benchmark for availability? Perhaps envisioning your bathroom light switch would be more accurate. Every time I see a reference to the goal of 100 percent uptime, I have to smile--we live that goal today just as we did back when no one knew about Cisco and Microsoft was still in a garage.

David Stewart
Electronics Engineer
Bonneville Power Administration
dcstewart@bpa.gov

Cleaning House
I want to point out something relating to Don MacVittie's BuzzCut, "AOL Shuts Out Instant-Messaging Competition --Don't Take It Lying Down". Interesting enough, AOL is under a court restriction: If it offers high-speed IM, it must offer interoperability to competitors. According to AOL, it is not even considering offering high-speed access. Care to guess why? The company wants to make it clear it will run its business as it pleases. Your only option? Clean it out of the corporate house.

John Beharry
Helpdesk administrator
Company name withheld on request
Beharry@post.com

Netscape Versus Netscape?
I paid for a CD-ROM of Netscape Navigator expecting to receive the latest version and was disappointed to receive an older version without the higher encryption capability. Netscape's response was, "Sorry, but the version we sent was on the shelf when you asked, and the newer one won't be out for a week."

I would have waited a week. A free copy of the software was available over the Web, but who wants to download a 30-MB file at 28.8 Kbps?

As Lori MacVittie wrote in her BuzzCut "Browser Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Moaner", Netscape is its own worst enemy. What it can't accomplish in the free market it tries in the courts. Compare the quality of the icon buttons in Microsoft IE with those in Navigator. Navigator reminds me of the original browser taken from freeware lists like Mozilla. I compare it with the attempts by Sun to give away a clone of Microsoft Office that's also covered with "cloudy" icon buttons.