Burton Group: Don’t Wait for Windows Vista to Optimize WAN Performance; Do It Now

The Burton Group talks about Vista’s WAN performance improvements, but recommends “enterprise IT organizations currently evaluating WAN performance solutions purchase products now rather than wait a few years for the widespread installation of Microsoft Windows Vista.” Their chief reasons are because new operating systems can take a long time to fully deploy and WAN optimization devices can pay for themselves – according to the Burton Group – in only a couple of years.

Siegel reports that when wide-scale adoption of Vista arrives, the major performance changes will be in these three areas:

• TCP/IP stack: notable performance increases for high-bandwidth or noisy communications paths and for multiple-CPU or multi-core systems because of flow control, error recovery, and scalability improvements
• File services: faster access to remote files because of improvements to the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol
• Quality of Service (QoS): enhanced ability of administrators to manage QoS because of improved control over QoS markings

There are a couple of optimization techniques that can’t be implemented at the operating system level – caching, for one. Still, anything that improves network performance isn’t a bad thing – assuming the rest of the OS is up to snuff.

I, Cringley: Just Say No: David Harrison wants to replace your Internet

Robert Cringley talks about a plan from David Harrison to operate a competing DNS server to ICANN’s “official” Internet server – something Harrison calls Inet. This would effectively block out spammers, spoofers, squatters, and other nefarious s*ers by denying them domains on the new network, but would be backwards compatible with the ICANN DNS servers. It could be as simple as pressing a button on a Web browser to switch the old network to the new one, and vice versa.

Inet would operate its own DNS system parallel to the one run by ICANN. That's not really such a big deal, you know. Certainly a different DNS with different rules would not be hard to build from a technical or even a financial standpoint, and it could exist on the current network right alongside the current DNS system. The big question is why people would use it. They wouldn't at first, because without traffic and participating servers such a DNS would be useless, and that's why David proposes an Inet DNS filter as a crossover between the old/evil system and the new/good one…

What David Harrison is proposing isn't all that different from what happens when a nation replaces its currency, eliminating overnight through the substitution of new paper the counterfeiting, theft, and improper distribution of wealth that had come to characterize the previous currency. If you do it once you'll have to do it again, of course, but even if the changes happen only every decade, wouldn't it be worth it?

With a promise to “prohibit child pornography, phishing, fraudulent commercial services, spam, denial of service attacks, and zombie networks,” we’re wondering if this idea is quite the panacea as its proponent claims – nevertheless, I can see the value in creating an own, private DNS server specifically for business communication, and if you can have your Inet cake and ICANN too, the idea is worth consideration.

GigaOM: Desktop Apps, Reborn as Hybrids

Om Malik talks about the idea of “desktop services” – hybrid web applications that use client software to work offline, then connect to the Web for data storage and retrieval.

Zimbra is not the only one that has realized that many of us want our emails while sitting in a plane, or where Wi-Fi connections are not as commonplace as the Starbucks logo might suggest. Even Salesforce.com has an offline edition of its offerings. Some independent developers are attempting to build offline versions of GMail and some of 37Signals’ web applications.

I’ve often felt that there were certain offline apps that were simply better than online apps, ever since the days that my choices for accessing my college e-mail were Eudora Light or telnetting into the server and using PINE.

More importantly, having an offline app for SAAS means that SAAS sessions will become more popular (increasing the need for bandwidth) but may not require downloading the UI every time you connect (decreasing the need for bandwidth.) In the end, I’d rather download a single e-mail than download that e-mail, the AJAX code to format that e-mail, the graphics used to make the service look good, etc.