Cisco Smartnet Value

So I find myself at a cross-roads, I work on a relatively small network that runs on mostly Cisco Equipment. The switches and Wireless are Cisco, the router isn't (what other people make routers) and it is time for renewal. Now I bought the Smartnet subscription as part of installing the new wireless system. I am happy with the system and to day have had not a single outage even after a pipe burst and filled one of the ap's with water. The thing is, I don't see the value of the Smartnet contract.

I don't understand paying a percentage of the purchase cost yearly for the duration of ownership. Any one see the value that I am missing?

My Vista Experience

I now have a few machines running Microsoft Vista, and after sufficient testing in the "real world" have come to many conclusions. If you want to have a machine that works, and faster on the hardware with no apologies get Vista Business. Flat out faster, and more stable on my old P4 laptop than XP with the native drivers from Toshiba. The only reason I uninstalled and put XP back on the laptop is the screen was never bright enough in Vista. The laptop has a light sensor that determines the correct brightness for the screen, but because Toshiba never released drivers for Vista the screen was constantly at the bottom of the possible lumens. The brightness could not be turned up because the keyboard function keys where not supported without drivers, so I was stuck with a laptop that didn't support an external monitor, that was too dim for low light browsing, but was about 1.5x's faster than it was running XP.


Other than the speed difference I pretty much never noticed what OS I was in (I run a browser 90% so who cares).

Swoopo is most probably a scam

So if you read Techcrunch via feed reader you will be noticing several ads for Swoopo. The auctions where for all sorts of devices at ridiculously low prices... Too low.

For instance check to following auction:



Not terribly interesting, but does make you wonder how they can give away $1000. I decided to watch the auction for a bit, as well I wanted to see the winner, and the mechanics; plus the auction was almost over anyway. Well the timer kept looping and I decided to read the fine print, circled in red. The final timer(?) starts when the auction gets to 20 dollars. I don't know what the auction started at, but if every bid raises the price $.01 and costs $.75 each the auction will raise about $150k to go from $.01 to $20. What makes it dastardly is they create the urgency with the looping timer that flashes auction ends soon, and no one has any chance of winning until the minimum threshold is met. Also they make it look a comparative deal as the auction previously went for $141.86.

While I do believe there is a sucker born every second, I just cannot believe that there are as many suckers as I watched bid on this auction in the 10 minutes I watched it. I would offer that Matthias Voigt likely gaming the system to induce micro-fraud. I assume that as you can pay with Paypal, the frictionless payment system the world over this gets more than a few hits a day.

Hope Techcrunch takes steps to stop promoting what looks like a full on scam.