I did some experiments this morning with some of the router stability issues I'd been having and reported about the Belkin router below. I replaced the Belkin with a Linksys WRT54G and what do you know, the same problem persisted. So my first conclusion was that my review below of the Belkin was totally wrong and there must be some other problem with my network.

An hour+ of debugging yielded the answer- I'd been playing with some torrent stuff lately and those applications by default can create 100s of incoming connections through the router's port forwarding. It looks like many of the consumer-grade routers don't have good scalability in this respect- the total bandwidth of the incoming traffic was well under reasonable levels - <50kbits per second. But the volume of connections was busting the router. I'm interested in checking out whether the DLink "gaming" router does a better job. In the meantime I throttled back my torrent client and things stabilized (but I haven't tried it with the Belkin yet). So my conclusion so far is that the router is at fault, but possibly they all have the same issue. Look for more reports in the coming days as I try the Belkin again and maybe some specialized tools to measure performance of the Linksys.

Interesting post from mini-msft on the Microsoft review curve. This type of thing is super-important and figuring out how to do these sort of things right at Pure is really important to me. The Microsoft system started out as something I really believed in, but it just seemed like over the years it became more and more bureaucratic and started reinforcing really bad things. Having a problem making your curve and rewarding your top performers? Whatever you do, don't manage out those low performers, especially the ones who are just coasting- you need someone to give the 3.0s. Also the yearly system (+ the fact that it takes about 2-3 months between when people start doing scores until they come back from the management roll-ups) makes the whole system so remote and distant. It means getting a poor review is an almost insurmountable barrier since its a whole year away (if not 2) from being back on track. Plus the way the curve system work inevitably leads to managers rewarding short-term results over long-term investment. If I need to worry about two people either of whom might leave the team, do I reward the guy who is delivering the stuff I need right now, or the stuff I'm going to need a year or two from now?