On Standards

My recent grapple with an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router brought this out.

The Airport Extreme does not talk to the Westech ADSL modem that Verizon provided us. Our Linksys router has no problem with seeing the modem, when it's working.

Tech support on both sides blamed the other side for the DHCP being implemented incorrectly.

I mentioned this to Geff, who postulated that one of them had gotten the RFC wrong. Something I said led him to say that it was even possible that Apple did it right and Westech AND Linksys did it wrong.

Since Belkin and Linksys see the modem and Apple cannot, and if the Airport Extreme is in compliance with the RFC I would say that adherence to the standard is worthless. I've done some searching online and found that it's a Verizon/Apple problem. Belkin, Linksys and NetGear have all managed to figure out how to talk to Verizon's equipment. It's just Apple, primly sitting in their Ivory tower, that cannot.

If everyone else is doing it wrong, but it works and you are doing it right and it doesn't work I don't give a shit that you did it right. Congratulations! you made a $192 paperweight that consumes electricity.

The total lack of instructions included in Apple products is also galling. Actually, there are instructions, they are useless. They are definitely geared at someone who only bought an assembled router because he didn't feel like taking the time to hit Radio Shack for the parts to make their own. Linksys, by contrast, includes screen shots of what you should be seeing as you start things up.

The single dual color status light on the Airport Extreme reminds me of something I saw on Venture Brothers. The control room of the Gargantua-1 space station has a white monolith in it with a light labled "PROBLEM"! The instructions tell me that if the amber light is blinking, there's a problem...