By Art Reisman
About six months ago, I was trying to access a web site when I got the infamous message: “Your Flash Player is out-of-date”. I was provided with a link to a site to update my Adobe Flash Player. At the time, I thought nothing of updating my Flash Player, as this had happened perhaps 100 times already. That begs the question as to why my perfectly fine and happy Adobe Flash Player constantly needs to be updated? Another story for another day.
In my haste, I clicked the link and promptly received the Adobe Flash update for my Mac and installed it. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of my Mac. This thing just took it over, destroying it. It would insidiously let me get started with my daily work and then within a few minutes I would receive a barrage of almost constant messages popping up telling me I had a virus and to call some number for help. Classic Ransomware. At the time I did not think Macs were vulnerable to this type of thing, as the only viruses I had contracted prior were on my Windows machines, which I tossed in the scrap pile several years ago for that very reason.
My solution to this dilemma was simply to re-load my Mac from scratch. I was up and running again in about one hour. A hassle yes, the end of the world – no.
Now you might be wondering what about all my data programs and files I store on my Mac? And to that I answer what data files? Everything I do is in the Cloud, nothing is stored on my Mac, as I believe that there is no reason to store anything locally.
Gmail, Quickbooks, WordPress, photos, documents, and everything else that I use are all stored in the Cloud!
For backup purposes, I periodically e-mail a list of all my important Cloud links to myself. Since they are stored in Gmail, they are always accessible and I can access them from any computer. Data recovery amounts to nothing more than finding my most recent backup list e-mail and clicking on my Cloud links as needed.
Once the IP’s were resolved to DNS names, I was surprised to see such high bandwidth from a specific PC. Bandwidth that was large and during closed office hours spreading across multiple days. I approached the user to see if they had any experience with slow or intermittent internet access and sure enough they did. Their experience of slowness was the NetEQ doing it’s wonderful job of penalizing them and normally it should, but the user experienced slowness due to a bug on the computer. They also stated they left their PC on overnight because they didn’t want to lose what they had been working on, so this explained why the traffic showed during closed hours. When asked if they knew when they started to experience slowness, their answer matched what the data showed in the four week report.
NetEqualizer News Blog 
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June 30, 2017 — netequalizerBefore founding my current company, I was on the technical staff for a large telecom provider. In the early 1990’s about half of our tech team were hired on the H-1 visa’s from India, all very sharp and good engineers. As the tech economy heated up, the quality of our Engineers from India dropped off significantly, to the point where many were actually let go after trial periods, at a time when we desperately needed technical help.
The unlimited supply of offshore engineering talent evidently had its limits. To illustrate I share the following experience.
Around the year 2000, in the height of the tech boom, my manager, also from India, sent me on a recruiting trip to look for grad students at a US job fair hosted for UCLA students.
In my pre-trip briefing we went over a list of ten technology universities in India, as he handed me the list he said, “Don’t worry about a candidates technical ability, if they come from any one of these ten universities they are already vetted for competency, just make sure they have a good attitude, and can think out-of-the-box.”
He also said if they did not attend one of the 10 schools on the list then don’t even consider them, as there is a big drop off in talent at the second tier schools in India.
Upon some further conversations I learned that India’s top tech schools are on par with the best US undergrad engineering schools. In India there is extreme competition and vetting to get into these schools. The dirty little secret was that there were only a limited number of graduates from these universities. Initially, US companies were only seeing the cream of the Indian Education system. As the tech demand grew, the second tier engineers were well-enough trained to “talk the talk” in an interview, but in the real world they often did not have that extra gear to do demanding engineering work and so projects suffered.
In the following years, many US-based engineers in the trenches saw some of this incompetence and were able to convince their management to put a halt to offshoring R&D projects when the warning signs were evident. These companies seemed to be in the minority. Since many large companies treated their IT staff, and to some extent their R&D staff, like commodities, they continued to offshore based on lower costs and the false stereotype that these Indian companies could perform on par with their in-house R&D teams. The old adage you get what you pay for held true here once again.
This is not to say there were not some very successful cost savings made possible by Inidan engineers, but the companies that benefited were the ones that got in early and had strong local Indian management, like my boss, who knew the limits of Indian engineering resources.
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