You can eat shit. A private investigator has a specific target and a specific complaint. The topic, blanket surveillance by a private company does not have either. Again, eat shit. Shame on you apologizing for this behavior.
Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
> Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like.
Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.
> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.
It's… fine? Unlike certain other brands, I've encountered no network of frothing, territorial, gatekeeping dealers with Beckhoff. For my project, I reached out to sales.usa@beckhoff.com, got a rep, asked for a quote, and went from there.
Secondhand can be viable too. Some of my "jellybean" EtherCAT terminals came from eBay. I won't get help from Beckhoff if they break, but given that I already have replacements on hand, I'm really not worried about it.
Beckhoff also lets you download almost all the development tools, runtimes, and PLC libraries without paying. In their words:
> Trial licenses can be generated in the TwinCAT 3 development environment (XAE) for many TwinCAT 3 functions for a validity period of 7 days. This can be repeated any number of times. An internet connection is not required for this. In this way, these TwinCAT functions can be used simply and cost-effectively in laboratory operations, e.g. in the education sector.
This is obviously useful for development and experimentation. It can also be an escape hatch in production if you need to substitute controllers. Beckhoff wants you to pay for what you use, sure, but their licensing scheme goes out of its way to avoid kicking you when you're down.
> Unlike certain other brands, I've encountered no network of frothing, territorial, gatekeeping dealers with Beckhoff.
This. They sell you gear then leave you alone. If you need help you call or email. Done. If the vendor demands you create an account to access simple datasheets - run like hell. Once they see you even glancing at a product they activate a frothing at the mouth sales rep who will launch a harassment campaign where they email and call multiple times a week seemingly forever or until you are EXTERMELY rude to them.
Sure, call. Do a back and forth with calls and emails for two days with their sales guy to make sure they got it right. Spending five to six figures. 5-15% of order shows up incorrect.
When you go to try another distributor: No, you're in crappy vendor's territory. So, sorry!
Waiting for that invisible hand of the free market to step in...
As i just posted, in this case, all you have to do is paste the part numbe rinto octopart and you would discover there are 5 no-questions-asked distributors that will sell you it without any issue.
I guess I'm fortunate enough to have never had any issues with the local yokels and haven't run into anybody with any distributor horror stories. Save Keyence, of course, but at least their salespeople are so desperate for sales that the salesman you have at any given time will usually let you walk all over them. AB's licensing entitlement processes have always given me more grief than distributors. If it's any slight consolation, there are at least a few places in the world that don't have too bad.
