By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

A couple of months ago, KEYE-TV in Austin, Texas (where this blog is based) did a story on the Texas Legislature. That story found its way to YouTube and got to the front page of Reddit, which is where I heard about it.

In the Texas legislature, when it's time to vote on a bill. Texas has an electronic voting system - Congressmen press one of three buttons on their desks to register a Yay, Nay, or Abstention, and that vote is shown on the electronic board at the front of the chamber.

What the video shows is that representatives - both Democrat and Republican - are actually voting more than once on bills. They rush around like it's a free-for-all, pushing not only their own buttons but, it seems, as many of their colleagues' buttons as well - voting up to four times on the same bill.

Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) justified it as saying that since there's no bathroom breaks or breaks for lunch, that it's a matter of necessity - despite the fact that it's clearly against the House's own rules.

But the idea of politicians voting more than once on a bill came as a shock to many people - including myself. This is because, though the Lege, (as we call it here in Texas) is monitored on cable TV, the view changes and does not actually show the members voting when they do. It took a different type of monitor - the KEYE-TV crew - to actually show what's really going on.

It's a matter of deploying the right monitoring equipment in the right places at the right times - a matter of making sure you have the ability not only to view all of the information from end to end but to be able to drill down and see what's going on with individual instances. This is why monitoring is so important.

Or rather, if you just looked at this from a "fault" perspective - those red and green lights in the Lege still lit up fine. If you didn't actually see what happened when the legislators on the floor, you'd have no idea anything was amiss with the legislature's performance.
Louis P. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, famously remarked: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

The same can be said of network monitoring - you need to know what's happening on your network, otherwise things that look fine on the outside may actually be all screwed up.

TechDigest: iPhone gets VoIP courtesy of TruPhone

Truphone, notable for providing VoIP phone calls on Nokia-based phones now have a prototype working for Apple's iPhone, allowing you to make WiFi-to-WiFi calls via VoIP.

Consider the cat well and truly among the pigeons.

Indeed…

While we're on the subject of VoIP services -

Information Week: Interview with a Convicted Hacker: Robert Moore Tells How He Broke Into Routers And Stole VoIP Services.

Well, the headline pretty much says it all. The main way that Moore got access to all those companies was that the companies had used the default router password on the routers - usually "admin" or "Cisco0"

"It's so easy. It's so easy a caveman can do it," Moore told InformationWeek, laughing. "When you've got that many computers at your fingertips, you'd be surprised how many are insecure."…

He explained that he would first scan the network looking mainly for the Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) and Quintum boxes. If he found them, he would then scan to see what models they were and then he would scan again, this time for vulnerabilities, like default passwords or unpatched bugs in old Cisco IOS boxes. If he didn't find default passwords or easily exploitable bugs, he'd run brute-force or dictionary attacks to try to break the passwords.

While we're on the subject of hackers:

CNN: Sources: Staged cyber attack reveals vulnerability in power grid.

In one of those things that you think only happens in bad Sandra Bullock movies, researchers successfully hacked into the control system of a replica of an industrial electrical generator, and caused it to spew smoke, shake, and stop.

CNN has honored a request from the Department of Homeland Security not to divulge certain details about the experiment, dubbed "Aurora," and conducted in March at the Department of Energy's Idaho lab

While we're on the subject of law enforcement:

Stuff.co.nz: Police wiki lets you write the law

The Variety headline would be "Fuzz Buzzed over Kiwi Wiki."

Due to a new wiki launched by New Zealand police, members of the public can now contribute to the drafting of the new policing act.

I found this comment humorous on the Slashdot discussion:

This was a science fiction story in which anyone could create a law. The visitor from Earth created a law saying that only qualified people could create new laws, arguing that otherwise someone might create a stupid one. The native said "Someone just did, in fact". The revert happened almost immediately, and the visitor was advised not to start a revert war: the reverter was described as "very good with the ritual sword".

Special Editorial Comment
By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since we started this blog in October of 2006, I've been consumed with three questions: 1) "How can I help inform my readers?" 2) "What would my readers like to read about?" and 3) "Can't anybody find me... somebody to love?"

I still can't find the answer to #3, but I think we've done a very good job with the first two. And this is the 300th post on Network Performance Daily.

Yay us!

In all seriousness, we've covered some amazing stories over the past 300 posts. And just like the "Golden Girls" got suddenly nostalgic whenever there was a writer's strike, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the events of the past year.

Let's start with one of our earliest posts, Manish Chacko's "God Help The Help Desk"

Imagine a man walking into a hospital, saying that he doesn't feel good, and doctors around the country are immediately called in, starting with the cardiologist, who rules out heart trouble. The man is next wheeled to a podiatrist, who rules out any problems with his feet.He's then wheeled to a gynecologist (But I'm a man... Ma'am, I'm a doctor. I think I should make that determination - and only after the tests come back.) If your diagnostic process is trial by error, you're not, technically, diagnosing.

Remember this post from Carol Shiraldi, on "Why enterprise developers (generally) use Java and game programmers (generally) use C++"?

Gaming programmers are performance-oriented to the extreme, because if you release a game and it's slow, no one is going to use it no matter how cool it is or how many features it has. Other programmers often code first for functionality, and at the end of the cycle, start to worry about performance issues. Game programmers need optimized performance from the get-go. This means game programmers are willing to forgo certain things. For example, the enterprise side of the software world was very quick to move to Java when it first came out, but the game programmers didn't.

The first time I knew this blog would be big was when we got on Slashdot for our series on Windows Vista TCP/IP stack, including Ted Romer's "Vista's 'Next Generation' TCP/IP Stack and the Enterprise," and again for Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher's "Vista TCP/IP Promises and Perils".

There was also the day that Lowell Heddings, of Dzone, asked us "Aren't routers boring?" and we responded.

Routers are designed to be boring. You don't want any one router to get "interesting" because it's probably having a host of issues - buffer overrun, CPU pegged at 100%, memory, etc. Like a war zone, it's a good day when nothing happens. In the networking world, it's a good day when no alerts are sent concerning any one router.

Probably I'm most proud of our coverage of the Julie Amero case, including this interview with Herb Horner. Without overstating our role in her eventual exoneration, I'm glad that we were able to help get her side of the story out in the blogosphere.

Our most controversial post has to be Jim Sampson's "Ten years of pushing for Linux adoption in the workplace (and why I gave up.)" With over 100 comments, it certainly was an eventful day.

We've been on BoingBoing, Slashdot, Digg, but sometimes, there's just something about when your story gets on Fark... as it did when we first announced Netcosm.

Another story that got on Fark was when Wafaa Bilal gave an interview regarding his art project in which he was confined to a room with a paintball gun controlled by people on the Internet.

We've had our share of experts and celebrities chiming in, from Linden Labs' Joe Miller talking about VoIP in Second Life, to the day we were "schooled by Vint Cerf," the day we interviewed the man who invented the flying car, and when I got to speak to a teenage-geek-hero of mine, Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, editor of Slashdot.

Of course, to top it all off, ComputerWorld decided to interview us for a story they were doing on corporate blogging.

What a long strange trip it's been.

Network World: How one network exec persuaded coworkers that the network is not always to blame.

Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler talk to NetQoS customer Josh Hinkle of the American Heart Association about how his organization improved application delivery.

Josh pointed out that they wanted to get to the point where people did not always assume that the network was the source of every application degradation issue. With this in mind, they set out to implement better alerting and reporting and to improve relationships with partnering technology departments. They also set out to lower the mean time to repair (MTTR) a trouble by quickly identifying problems. …

One of the interesting aspects of Josh's situation is that he implemented some of the same tools from NetQoS as did the other reader. Josh, however, described an environment that is much more cooperative than the reception described by our other reader.

We also had a chance to talk to that other reader, if you'll recall.

Ars Technica: Apple: Firmware update likely to make unlocked iPhones "permanently inoperable."

Remember yesterday's post about the iPhone "sucking on purpose?"

Apple said that a firmware update to be released soon will "brick" iPhones that have been SIM-unlocked.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week reiterated the company's stance on unlocked iPhones: Apple will work against them. "It's a constant cat and mouse game," Jobs said.

Hey, Steve, you know those cartoons, where there's a big cat trying to catch a little mouse - let me ask you something. Do you think anyone ever roots for the cat?

Microsoft.Public.Excel: Bug in Excel 2007

In Excel 2007 (but not in previous versions) multiplying 850 by 77.1 results in an answer of 100,000, not 65535.

What's even stranger is this: Suppose the formula is in A1.
=A1+1 returns 100001, which appears to show the formula is in fact 100000 and a very Serious problem.
And if you multiply be say, 2 you get something else:
=A1*2 returns 131070, as if A1 had 65535. (which it should have been)
=A1*1 Keeps it at 100000.
=A1-1 returns 65534
=A1/1 is still 100000
=A1/2 retuns 32767.5
Using MAX() on a range appears not to see 100000.

Or, in other words: Excel 2007 has a big problem. How big? No one knows, because they calculated the size of it using Excel 2007.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I'm supposed to be a technogeek, right? Up on the latest and greatest gadgetry. I get called on international radio morning shows to talk about the latest trends, I'm a professional blogger - a career that didn't exist half a decade ago, I'm a smart dude with all the latest tech toys, doing viral videos with my $100 flash-memory vidcam. I'm 100% Web 2.0'n, YouTubein', Facebook Friendin', RSS Feedin', Linuxin', Twenty-First-Century-Digital-Boy.

But my cellphone is about four years old and I don't use it for anything other than making phone calls. No texting, no Web browsing. It just makes phone calls. And I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon.

My friends - especially those who live overseas - all wonder why I don't yet have an iPhone, the "wundertoy" of the century. The answer can be found in Cory Doctorow's post for Information Week. In short, the iPhone sucks on purpose. Sure, it's slick looking, has a beautiful interface, and provides a great playlist. But, does it live up to its full potential? Hardly. And you have vendor lock-in to blame.

It's possible to use a song in your iTunes library as a ring tone, but someone at Apple decided they wouldn't let you. It's possible to use the iPhone on multiple carriers, or to not lock-in customers for two-year service agreements, but someone at Apple decided, for whatever reason, they wouldn't let you. It's possible to switch out SIM cards so that you'd be able to use the iPhone internationally, but - well, you get the pattern by now.

This is where VoIP comes in.

Already, we have pocket-sized computers that we carry with us - Palm Pilots and Blackberries. Despite the lukewarm acceptance of Microsoft's "Origami" initiative, ultra-mobile computing isn't that far off.
Desktop computing took off because it was a general purpose device. You can play games with it. You can send messages with it. You can write papers with it, you can draw, you can compose music - you can do all those things with the right software on general hardware. That's the big draw.

So when the iPhone comes out, for all intents and purposes a semi-powerful computer that you can hold in your pocket, the first thing Apple does is lock it down so that you can only do what Apple says you can do. It turns a general purpose device into a limited purpose device.

Additionally, despite setbacks in getting municipal WiFi off the ground, I can't see, for the life of me, the possibility that wireless access points will decrease over the next decade - only that they're not increasing at the rate that we'd like. It won't be long before Wi-Fi coverage overshoots many of the major phone carriers cellular networks - it has to, because the cellphone companies have chosen non-interoperable standards and done their best to lock people into them. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, generally pushes out the same bits, no matter where you are in the world. So while AT&T may have deep pockets, the larger number of smaller pockets putting out Wi-Fi spots around the world will move faster and change with the technology instead of trying to halt technological change in order to milk more money out of an obsolete business model.

Companies such as Skype have already laid the foundation for VoIP's replacement of the cellphone network. Companies such as OpenMoko are working on the hardware aspect of cellphone computing. I'd be surprised if these two industries weren't already talking to each other about creating a "chocolate and peanut butter" solution which will make VoIP over WiFi the killer app of the cellphone, and cellphone connectivity the killer app of VoIP over WiFi.

It's an idea that Cisco had a while back. Remember the brouhaha over the "iPhone" trademark? Well, it turns out that Cisco put out the "Linksys iPhone" a while back - a phone designed to make calls over Skype. At $120 from Amazon - with only Skype fees to pay after that, this is a technology which fills a need. The only problems are that it is currently overshadowed by the Apple product of the same name, and that, for right now, the cellphone companies do have better network coverage. That won't last long though.

The big elephant in the room is that no one really likes the cellphone companies. Indeed, a great part of the AT&T/Apple deal was Apple banking on the goodwill of the Apple corporate brand name. And so all it takes to upset the apple cart of their market share is for someone to offer a product that offers everything - including the same or better call quality - that the cellphone companies do, and not "suck on purpose." (Oh, and maybe a slick looking slim-line case with chrome accents.) When that happens, VoIP is going to take off not just for enterprise networking but for personal computing - and VoIP monitoring becomes that much more important for providers to ensure call quality, and network administrators to make sure that VoIP traffic doesn't interfere with business.

Tired of playing Salieri to Microsoft's Mozart in the office suite area, IBM has been making a few aggressive moves into this market as of late.

The company recently decided to back open-source Office competitor, OpenOffice.org, dedicating engineers to working on the OpenOffice project - much as they dedicated engineers to working on Linux years ago. This is beneficial to OpenOffice.org if only because many of the features that OpenOffice.org have not yet implemented have already been solved with IBM's relatively less successful Lotus suite - from access to the visually impaired.

Of course, the move to back OO.o is a major turnaround from IBM's policy 18 months ago, when they said they had no plans to contribute to OO.o.

This shift in strategy is perhaps a response to Microsoft's aggressive stance towards making its OOXML document format a standard, (recently rejected,) as a way to enforce vendor lock-in. Recently, IBM announced combined OpenOffice and their in-house "Eclipse", called it "Lotus Symphony" and is now offering the Beta free for SuSE, Red Hat, and Windows users - with the main selling point being that there's no vendor lock-in with the Symphony product.

From the Symphony.lotus.com Web site:

How is Lotus Symphony different?

You're in charge! Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard-which means you're not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Finally, free tools and freedom of choice!

For the end-user in a corporate environment, the big deal is that IBM, unlike the OO.o team, can offer support and services for Symphony rollouts and maintenance. That may be music to the ears of those pushing for adoption of open-source application suites in their own companies to save costs, who can now justify that they will be able to get support for those same applications.

Once they do so, IBM can then turn around and sell them the not-so-free Outlook/Exchange competitors, Lotus Notes and the associated backend products. Irwin Lazar at Collaboration Loop points out this is a similar strategy to Apple using the iPod to drive Mac computer sales.

Those interested in finding out more about Symphony can take a look at ZDNet's review of the Symphony suite.

Full Disclosure: This article is about NetQoS competitors Network General and NetScout. Network Performance Daily is the company blog of NetQoS.

Today, NetScout announced the intent to acquire recently purchased Network General, formerlybest known for its Sniffer packet analysis products, in a deal roughly worth $205M. We believe that this move is primarily a response to our own OEM partnership with Network Instruments and product integration with its GigaStor long-term packet capture products, whereby we provide enterprise-wide views of application performance, highlight when and where problems occur, and then drill down seamlessly into the related packet capture data for forensic and root cause analysis. In fact, we will announce the commercial availability of this first-of-its-kind technology integration next week. A few customers are already using the NetQoS Connector for GigaStor.

Since the acquisition was just announced today, NetScout has a lot of catching up to do.

Here's what some other people are saying about the deal:

TechTarget: NetScout acquires Network General

This article presents a reasonably good rundown of the deal, with plenty of balanced praise and criticism of the deal and the company near the end of the article.

"Integration of products is never easy, and the performance of both companies has been spotty over the past few years," [Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group senior vice president] said. "I'd recommend that customers not invest any more into either company until [the release of] a clear roadmap of how the integration is going to happen."

For more in-depth analysis, LovemyTool.com presents a very detailed article.

Love My Tool: NetScout Aquired Network General, Will it Blend?

This article asks a serious question - is the NetScout/NG acquisition a sign that the industry is starting to enter a period of consolidation? If so, it's good for integration, but bad for competition.

However, Ed and I both agree that network managers today do need a broader solution set but with a common interface. The industry is ready for solutions that are tiered and can grow with their need…

In summary, the industry is in need of solutions and not just tools. Managers have way too much to do to have to take a bunch of discrete tools, figure out how to connect them and then deal with a bunch of different user interfaces. The industry needs solutions that can grow as customer networks do, with common user interfaces and state-of-the-art solution-focused technologies.

Finally, there's Network Instruments - also a direct competitor to Network General, and their take on the news. Ouch, this is likely to sting….

Network Instruments' Network Observations: Network General: Here we go again.

Both of these companies are among the leaders in their markets, but it seems they've lost their way. NG has seen shrinking sales and a patchwork of acquired product offerings that have never truly been integrated - and that was when these technologies were under one roof. Other NG troubles include:…Shrinking corporate value… Management problems…No core competency…

Harsh words. But harsh doesn't mean untrue - Network General has had its share of problems which made the company acquisition bait - NetScout got the company for a bargain compared to when the company was purchased by McAfee in 1997 for $1.1B, and even as recently as 2003 when it was spun out by private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group for $275M. It's going to take a while for NetScout to turn the company they acquired around.

In other news…

Hard News: Deriving Satisfaction from the Misfortune of Others

No, it's not about Network General. Russell Brown talks a little about politics and a lot about the fact that New Zealand's time zone changes a week earlier than usual this year, and Apple's Macintosh computers don't automatically recognize the changeover.

At 2.00am on Sunday September 30, New Zealand Daylight Saving Time will begin -- a week earlier than has previously been the case. And therein lies the problem. It's looking very much like Macs won't be there.

Although a patch to take account of the new date has been filed as a feature request with Apple for at least six months, Cupertino has given no sign it recognises the deadline.

Apple could still post the MacOS X 10.4.11 update, which contains the new rules (as do the test builds of 10.5, aka Leopard), but there's no sign that will appear before Sunday week. Even if it does, that doesn't give users a lot of time to act -- and it's no use at all to the people still running 10.3.x versions.

So what happens if 2am Sunday week arrives without a patch? In most cases it will probably simply be an irritation. Rather than setting a time zone, you'll have to manually adjust the time on your computer. As a result, the computer will miscalculate current times for everywhere else in the world; email you send will misreport the time; and timestamps on files will be out by an hour even after you are able to eventually set the proper time zone. But there may be more serious impacts on the kind of non-consumer applications where Apple should be looking to emphasise its credibility.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The frustrating thing about IPv6 is that as much as we hate to think about it, as much as the transfer might irk and infuriate us – we’ve just about filled up IPv4, and that means that someday soon, we have to move to IPv6.

You can only delay the inevitable, which, right now, looks like it will happen in less than five years.

One of the big selling points of IPv6 was autoconfiguration. Sure, it’s a pain in the but to enter in longer numbers, so the IPv6 standard was designed so that you’d have to enter in those numbers less often. Through “stateless autoconfiguration,” you eliminated the need to set up DHCP.

But there are some advantages to the existing DHCP protocols, especially with visibility into the network, tracking and debugging features, as well as additional manual control - and so many companies, among them Cisco, are pushing for DHCPv6.

In the stateless autoconfiguration, you get true plug and play. The client is assigned an IP when it connects – without the need for a special server. Boom. Done. That’s perfect for portable devices, accessories like printers, and smaller operations in home and small office networks.

But DHCPv6 lets network manajers know what devices are connected to the network, as well as their IP addresses (and if necessary, to reassign them.) This is a major component in troubleshooting and monitoring the network to improve performance.

The downside: In addition to the complexities of changing over from IPv4, network administrators and engineers would have to manage a DHCPv6 network service as well.

Now, as mentioned, small home networks will find stateless autoconfiguration to be a boon, and ISPs will also be happy to avoid using DHCP to assign the addresses of the end-user. But for everyone else, DHCP is no longer a requirement – it’s a choice.

The odd thing about choices in corporate IT environments… it’s usually a short time to solve a problem, but it can take forever to make a decision.

The Phoneboy Blog: HD VoIP? Oh, Brother…

Phoneboy talks about HD VoIP, or VoIP that sounds like it's coming from a CD Player, not a phone. That's entirely plausible, but, as he points out, it's a major increased bandwidth cost with minimal benefit.

Let's use Skype as an example. When you make a Skype-to-Skype call, the call quality is wonderful. Why? They use something called ISAC (warning: PDF link), which is a proprietary codec by Global IP Sound. It is a "wideband" codec that sounds pretty damn good. When you make a SkypeOut (PSTN) call, however, the codec used is G729, which is a narrowband codec that doesn't sound quite as good.

Presumably, if you are using a service that supports "HD" VoIP, then the "HD" codec, whatever it is, will only come into play on-net, meaning within the relevant VoIP provider's network. Once it goes off-net (e.g. to the PSTN), a different codec will be used (G711 or G729). This is all done on the fly and completely transparently to the end user, except for the obvious sound quality difference.

You blog as a Phoneboy. But someday, you will blog as a Phoneman.

ComputerWorld: Macs on the network: Time to panic?

We interrupt this blog post to provide a healthy list of times and places where it is appropriate to panic:

1. Your post-war recovering urban metropolis is currently under attack by Godzilla.
2. Your airplane is in dire straits and your only hope is Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges.
3. There is a Macintosh computer on the network.

We now resume our normal blog programming.

They're coming. Gleaming all-in-ones, metallic slimline notebooks and hand-size "mini" machines.

God help us!

Green did mention a few bugaboos, however, among his generally positive comments about the Mac. He said his group has seen more support issues related to the Cisco VPN for Mac than the version for Windows XP, although they have fewer support calls for the native VPN client for OS X.

"There have been problems with OS patches affecting wireless connectivity for a small portion of Mac laptops in the past -- specifically related to 802.1X," he said. "Those appear to have been corrected. We have found the Mac OS X client much easier for users to configure for wireless and 802.1X. It has been a benefit not having to deal with all the third-party drivers that come from the PC/XP world since this has caused a lot of problems for XP users during our 802.1X wireless rollout."

We've blogged about iPhones on the corporate environment before, but a full-on panic is silly. Prepare, know, and react accordingly. The only time you need to panic is if you don't prepare. Certainly, we've laid out our concerns with the iPhone and corporate environments, but they're just that - concerns. Not a dire warning of things to come.

ExtremeTech: AMD Confirms Addition of Three-Core Phenom Chips

Problem: A certain number of your quad-core processors have a single core of the four which doesn't hold up to specifications.

Solution: Disable that processor and sell it as a three-core chip.

SAN FRANCISCO-Advanced Micro Devices is adding a triple-core Phenom processor to its roadmap, AMD executives said Monday, selling processors that it would otherwise throw onto the scrap heap.

The chips will actually be a four-core Phenom with one core disabled, according to AMD representatives. It will be released during the first quarter of 2008, following the Phenom's launch this December, at an undetermined price.

(I can just imagine Mel Brooks as Moses, coming down from the mountain. "Your lord AMD brings you this four-- *crash* ... Oy. ... Three! Three-core chip!")

This is a godsend for budget-conscious power-users. Quad-core computing is price prohibitive, and there's no denying that three cores are better than two.

There are impacts for network servers as well, but not because of the chip directly. Since more of the quad-core chip-batch can be sold, AMD can increase production of quad-core chips across the board. and take advantage of greater economies of scale. That means lower prices, theoretically. And quad-core computers are great for systems running many virtual machines.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

There are a couple of big stories regarding consumer P2P today. Trent Reznor, fed up with his label's pricing of his albums in Australia has told his fans directly that they should "steal it," at a Sydney concert. A video of the concert, leaked to YouTube, made it to the front pages of many social news sites.

I can't endorse Reznor's suggested course of action, but I'm not going to not endorse it.

At the same time, e-mails leaked from MediaDefender, a company that patrols P2P networks looking for copyright violators, showed that, despite MediaDefender's prior public assurances, they were operating a video uploading site called MiiVi, which many suspected was a "trap" to lure copyright infringers - among other concerns.

And with all this coverage of P2P technology in the news, I thought - what ever happened to those promised P2P corporate networking apps? Back in 2005, Network World mentioned "Groove Networks Virtual Office." In that story, the author states:

"With the adoption of Globus 4.0 as the new XML-based protocol standard, grid services will become the P2P of Web services…."

"Be forewarned, get educated and be prepared for the network implications of corporate IT P2P applications. The corporate next-generation network future may be just around the corner in 2006."

Searching for Groove Networks on Google leads to Microsoft's Web site - It's an add-on for Microsoft Office now. Not surprising, as Groove's founder, Ray Ozzie became Chief Software Archetict at Microsoft. (He was also the brains behind Lotus Notes)

I looked up Globus as well. Globus's is more of a project to create a computing grid of corporate network computers - which is a pretty cool idea. 90% of the time, I'm not using 100% of my dual-core processor computer here at work. The other 10% of the time, I really could use more processing power to render video. If there's a way to grid-together peer-to-peer corporate computers so that everyone gets the power they need to do their jobs, sharing CPU power over the network.

Still, I don't think most companies are ready to go that far - mostly, I think, they just want their files faster and their latency lower.

So, where are the corporate P2P applications? Maybe I'm overlooking them (and if so, I'd love for contributors to point out projects to me in the comments) but it seems like this is an area of technology that was abandoned too quickly, and maybe deserves reexamination.

----------------------------

(N.B. We tried to contact Ray Ozzie at Microsoft for his thoughts on this matter, but was told by a representative of Waggener/Edstrom that Microsoft was unable to participate in this particular opportunity at this time.)