SuperTuesday is coming up in less than a week, and many people, (including myself,) are chomping at the bit to talk about politics.

Don't get me wrong; this is a blog focused on issues that affect network performance in enterprise (read: business) environments, and politics and vendor blogs go together like potassium chlorate and gummi bears - a whole lot of heat, sparks, and violent reactions that take forever to die down. But, if nothing else, U.S. technology policy affects U.S. technology companies. Network neutrality and broadband policy will affect those companies hoping to roll out SAAS solutions, H1B visas will affect the tech job market and innovation, and of course there are the fundamental questions about data security and privacy that have become issues over the past decade.

Among the tech blogosphere there were two politics-related events that may be of interest to our readers. The first was that Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch interviewed Mitt Romney. Arrington focused on technology growth policies in the U.S., Internet taxes, H1B visas, venture capital tax issues, and renewable energy, and it's an interesting read if you're a Republican currently mulling which candidate to support in the primaries.

The second, from a stranger source, came from Randall Munroe, the author of the technology focused webcomic, XKCD, who used his public forum to endorse Barack Obama, because of Obama's association with copyright-reformer Lawrence Lessig, his support for network neutrality, among other reasons.

(This may not seem significant, but Munroe is not just any comic artist. XKCD focuses on high tech issues - including a few editorial cartoons regarding technology and science policy - and it is one of the most popular on the Internet, rivaling Penny Arcade. Because of this, Google invited Munroe to speak last month as part of their Authors@Google series of lectures, an honor shared with Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Brokaw, among others. In less than two years, Munroe has become the pre-eminent technology editorial cartoonist - all with a few crudely drawn stick figures.)

Whether or not Munroe's endorsement will carry any weight is yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean that technology issues aren't real and considerable, and if the guys who actually know something about technology don't speak up, well, then we're left with the talking heads on cable news shows who have trouble understanding even basic computer concepts, let alone subtle computer issues.

During the main election season, technology issues will probably not be the foremost on voters' minds, so primary elections are extremely important for those who believe that a solid technology policy is important to U.S. national prosperity. While we'd feel uncomfortable (and kind of icky) endorsing any particular candidate, we've put together a list of the top ten current technological controversies which you should consider before voting.

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1) Intellectual Property Laws

There is not one portion of the tech industry that is untouched by the intellectual property laws, both current and proposed. First, any company that makes software, either for resale or in-house, has to be aware of their rights under copyright law to preserve their own products. Any company that uses - in whole or in part - open-source software needs to be aware of how open-source licenses work - that is, open-source code remains under the copyright of the author, who may be very specific about who may or may not use the license.

Additionally, the current entertainment industry crackdown on pirated materials affects enterprise networking in a number of ways. First, there's the question of liability of an end-user on the corporate network uses it to distribute material when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder - while traffic is a consideration, it's also a consideration that if you aggressively patrol your network for copyright violations, you can find yourself liable if a copyright violation gets through the tracks. This leaves enterprise networking in a precarious position - police the network and assume the legal liability, or take sanctuary in "safe-harbor" provisions and allow the traffic of illicitly traded files to clog up your network.

There is a middle ground where certain types of traffic can be prevented from taking up bandwidth necessary for business applications - without looking at the individual files in deep packet inspection, using QoS policies, and that seems to be the best solution right now. However, any changes to copyright law would have a profound effect on the ways that companies do business, and that is why everyone in IT should be keeping an eye on this issue.

2) Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure

American broadband infrastructure is simply not quite up to the standards of other countries. Japan, Korea, and France are often touted as having much better broadband than the U.S., with various explanations given regarding U.S. having a lower population density. However, it seems dubious because there's little correlation between population density and broadband penetration when you look at actual states.

The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.

Just as the highways developed by the Eisenhower administration helped to foster America's post-war manufacturing boom, better broadband infrastructure can help foster America's technology industry. An ubiquitous, high quality broadband can mean more applications can be run as a Web service out on the Internet instead of the WAN. More bandwidth for everybody means that the bandwidth for your company becomes cheaper and they can afford more of it, which means that existing apps will run faster (presuming there aren't other network performance problems) and that you'll be able to run high-bandwidth apps such as Cisco Telepresence.

Even if your company is sitting on more dark fiber than a bowl of NinjaBran™, every company relies on smaller companies as vendor product makers, as distributors, as customers - and those smaller companies are relying more on SAAS solutions. In the grand scheme of the business world ecosystem, communications infrastructure policy can have far-reaching effects.

3) Spectrum Regulation/Allocation

When people think of bandwidth, they often think of bits traveling down pipes. The other type of bandwidth is just as important; the bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because you can't run two different signals on the same frequency (they would interfere with each other,) the FCC allocates which frequencies are going to be used for which purpose - and some frequencies are better suited towards different purposes.

For example, currently, there is an auction for the 700MHZ band - a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum which can penetrate through walls, and can cover a very wide area. This made it very desirable for the television stations which now control the bandwidth, and also very desirable for cell phone companies currently bidding for the bandwidth when the television stations must return the bandwidth to the FCC as part of the analog/digital TV switchover in 2009.

Anything that deals with broadcasting of any sort - wireless networking, WiMax, even telecommunications ownership - goes through the FCC, making it one of the most important and powerful Federal commissions. Decisions made by the FCC can affect any rollouts your company makes regarding wireless networking or cellular technology.

4) Network Neutrality

If you haven't been keeping up on this one, it's a doozy, and you might want to check out the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject. The possibility of network neutrality legislation - or the actions of big-business players in the absence of network neutrality legislation, can mean fundamental changes in the way that bits travel over the wire.

We won't get into a rundown of issues here, but while you can plan for a neutral Internet or a non-neutral Internet, it is much harder to prepare contingencies while this matter remains up in the air.

Some candidates have expressed support for network neutrality legislation, others opposition, and still others ambivalence - and depending on which position is the best for you and your company, it may be something to consider.

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We'll cover Telecom Immunity and Privacy, Open Government Initiatives, Energy Policy, and Immigration and Education in Part II of this series tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment below to discuss these issues.

Douglas Gourlay from Cisco has posted a comment on this site which probably explains some of the features of the Nexus 7000 much better than I possibly could. Please check it out.

Cisco just announced its Nexus 7000 switch will be available in the second half of 2008.

The Nexus is a rather large machine that boasts a number of improvements over the 6500 series switches. If you have recently made a large purchase of 6500 series switches for your enterprise, you have my sympathy.

Andy Greenberg covers the technical beat at Forbes.com and explains some of the benefits of the behemoth box in plain English. For example, the Nexus has Gigabit Ethernet support (as well as support for future delivery of 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s,) so that you can run your whole data center with just Ethernet.

The killer feature, according to Greenberg, is that the Nexus 7000 allows distant virtual servers to use parallel processing. In other words, the virtual server in San Juan can now take advantage of idle cycles on the virtual server in Philadelphia, and vice versa. But there's more to it than that. The Cisco NX-OS, the new OS for the Nexus 7000, is said to allow switches to be virtualized at the device level, doing for switches what VMWare did for servers - that is, it not only helps get virtualized systems into parallel processing clusters but network engineers can create "domains" which define particular combinations of "bandwidth, processing, storage, and software," according to an article in BusinessWeek.

In addition to the obvious benefits, using previously unused resources can do a great amount towards reducing energy consumption and costs.

For a real look at the Nexus 7000, Cisco has provided an interactive model of the Cisco Nexus 7000 on their Web site.

What are your thoughts on the Cisco Nexus 7000? Feel free to discuss it in our comments section.

The Ten Other Reasons To Attend NetQoS Symposium 2008.

As you may know, NetQoS's annual Symposium will be held April 20-23, 2008 at the Barton Creek Resort in Austin, Texas. And if you're not familiar with the Symposium, it's three days of presentations, workshops, training, and entertainment.

Combining the best parts of "seminar," "study group," and "shindig," the marketing department has come up with ten reasons to attend the Symposium. You can view these on the Symposium Web Page, but we'll just re-iterate them here.

1. Hone your skills at Network Performance Management Best Practices Workshops.
2. Broaden your horizons and hear about emerging trends in the General Sessions delivered by leading network management experts.
3. Maximize the value of your NetQoS investments through product-focused best practices tutorials.
4. Roll up your sleeves in Hands-on Labs with NetQoS technical experts.
5. Don't just take it from us, benefit from real-world examples, presented by your peers in Customer Case Study sessions.
6. Advance your skills by attending Cisco IOS® NetFlow Boot Camp and network traffic analysis best practices.
7. Enhance your career through expanded technical tracks on:
   • Networking Theory and Best Practices
   • Network and Application Performance Management
   • WAN Optimization
   • Next Generation Network Operations
   • Network Behavior Analysis
   • VoIP Call Quality Monitoring
   • Packet-level Forensics, Capacity Planning, Troubleshooting, and more
8. See the future at NetQoS Product Roadmap Sessions.
9. Flock to Birds of a Feather sessions to share advice and collaborate with your peers on the topics you care about most.
10. Keep Austin weird and experience "Austintatious" nightlife. Enjoy Texas BBQ and Live Music Entertainment provided by Mingo Fishtrap at Stubbs.

However, those aren't the only reasons that you should attend. Goodness gracious no.

Here are the top ten real reasons to attend Symposium 2008.

1. First 100 confirmed attendees automatically become Libertarian Party delegates.
2. Pulse-pounding action as you ride "The Elevator™!"
3. Finally, an excuse for over-40 year olds to come to Austin!
4. Barton Creek Resort's Fazio Foothills golf course is a lovely shade of green in April, is considered the best golf course in Texas, is par 72, 7,125 yards long, and if you hid a body there, no one would ever find it.
5. On Tuesday, April 22, Texas BBQ and Live Music Entertainment will be provided by Mingo Fishtrap at Stubbs. On Wednesday, April 23, Pizza and a Dungeons and Dragons Session will be provided by Brian Boyko at his apartment.
6. Discuss the results of WrestleMania XXIV, and hypothesize about the results of the upcoming Backlash Pay-Per-View event, with your intellectual peers.
7. Feel invigorated by knowing that, due to Texas's liberal "concealed-carry" laws, any of your fellow network engineers could be "packing heat."
8. Every fifth application delivery controller at the symposium is filled with delicious candy!
9. Every day starts with a prayer session, thanking Huitzilopochtli, Left-Handed Humming Bird, for postponing the end of the world. (We will choose an MCSE to sacrifice at noon the previous day.)
10. Slumber Party!

Linda Leung, the editor of the Cisco Subnet of Network World is compiling a list of Web sites that are useful to Cisco networking professionals - the sites you go for for news, how-tos, resources, and so on.

Hey, wait a minute! We're a Web site! And we cover networking news - a lot of which has to do with Cisco networking. We'd be perfect!

Seriously, though. We'd really appreciate it if our readers could go to this Web page on the Cisco Subnet and either leave a comment or e-mail Ms. Leung. And as an aside, we'd also like it if you would mind telling us about your favorite network-related Web sites other than Network Performance Daily in the comments section of this post.

As for the previous article that Network World did on the 20 most useful Web sites for networking professionals, I have to admit that it was incredibly useful. One particular example is a site I was previously unaware of called Informed Networker - a Pligg-based social news site catering towards networking professionals.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that we used to have a social news site initiative of our own, called "The Pipe." Unfortunately, it just never caught on, and the thing about social news sites is that you need an involved and engaged audience. The Informed Networker is doing pretty good job at this so we urge you to check it out.

You've probably already seen the video below. 2.6 million people already have.

Obviously, the material covered is amazing and it's an ingenious hack - the fact that the rig consisted of some cheap goggles, LED lights, and a $40 kid's toy hooked up to a PC made it even more impressive.

NetQoS is working on our own user-interface initiatives. Network management software can be hard to grasp - it's a complicated subject - and so the user interface for our products have to be designed with human interaction and ease-of-use in mind. Network engineering is hard, we don't want to make it harder. This is why we've spent a great deal of time working on the interface of NetQoS Performance Center - and we've been pushing the boundaries of network monitoring UI design with our Netcosm project in the NetQoS Performance Labs.

This reminded us that it was probably a good idea to check in with Dr. Jon Schull, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who specializes in human-computer interaction and asked him what he thought about the video. Dr. Schull had previously helped NetQoS get the "Netcosm Immersion Experience" up and running at Cisco Networkers in 2007, and we wanted to get his input on this development.

"My main thought was: 'Johnny Lee has done it again,'" said Schull. "If you look at his Web site, you'll see that he's done half a dozen really interesting hacks involving the Wii and another half a dozen involving other things. He's a very interesting and creative guy. This particular one is… is just cool!"

"I don't know how likely it is for us to see this in [gaming] practice, just because I think increasingly the Wii is a social gaming platform, and this is mostly a one-person interface. But, these are the early days and I can see that people are already thinking of ways to have this work for more than one person."

It seemed impressive in an industrial age of multi-person programming teams and high-tech equipment costs, that this was all done with relatively cheap consumer-level equipment.

"There's this other movement that's going on - and this work is exemplary of it," explained Schull. "If you look at Make: Magazine and Instructables and a Web site called 'Hack-a-day' you'll see there's this whole emerging sub-culture of people who are… getting to interesting new results faster by disassembling and reconstructing things from consumer products than by trying to develop these new technologies from scratch."

"I guarantee you there are people who are making those systems right now - they're going to Home Depot, they're getting the goggles, they're getting the Infrared LEDs, and they're having some fun with it. A couple months later, someone's going to sell a kit, and a few months after that, someone will have found a distribution channel for a retail product… That $40 Wii remote contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth transmitter, an infrared camera - there's an amazing amount of hardware in that $40 item. Eventually someone will put them together in a new device which is optimized for new uses."

Schull pointed out that these new uses are usually found and implemented within months, rather than decades.

"Within weeks, [of the Wii release] you had people figuring out how to hack the Wiimote to use with computers… There are already on the market designed for PCs which are clearly Wii knock-offs. It took less than a year for those commercial products to come out. I think you'll see things like this within six months because Johnny Lee's video has been traveling like crazy. Off the top of my head, it's usable in games, looking at 3D models of architectural sites, 3D models of medical anatomy. There are some major applications - and those latter two could be six-or-seven figure products."

"Another venture of this sort is the whole Multi-touch phenomenon. You've certainly seen the iPhone now, where you can use more than one finger, and you can rotate and drag and move images around by laying hands on them in a way that wasn't possible two years ago. Just two years ago, we saw another set of videos taking the world by storm by a guy named Jeff Han, who demonstrated all the things you could do with multi-touch interfaces. It was approximately a year before it was part of an Apple product."

Schull's work at Rochester University of Technology in Interface design has helped him to design a product like this himself - a large room called the "Collaboratorium" which consists of multiple projectors in a large, enclosed room with a camera that can be controlled remotely. We asked him what was more difficult for innovators - coding the software and hacking the hardware, or just coming up with the vision for new and innovative ways to interact with computers.

"The funny thing is, I think the hardware and software problems are pretty straightforward right now. The social - and market issues are really the tough ones… We haven't seen a room-sized head-tracking stereoscopic multi-touch environment for cheap. Not because you couldn't put one together for cheap, but because it'll be another 6 to 12 months before they get integrated, and then you have to deal with the packaging. No, the real challenge is going to come from defining some come of human interface device standard which will let these things work by themselves or in combination without having to rewrite software for each configuration."

Considering that we at NetQoS have been experimenting with new and interesting user interfaces for network monitoring software, we'll keep an eye - and two infrared light beams - on this technology.

Do you see a use for head-tracking 3D software in your enterprise? Tell us about it by leaving a comment!

The Aberdeen Group, a provider of business research services surveyed 205 organizations last month to identify best practices for enterprise network visibility initiatives and controls. They called the report "The Real Value of Network Visibility."

In the interests of full disclosure, it should be said that NetQoS co-sponsored the study but we did so only after the survey was conducted and the analysis complete. That said, though, the study pretty much validates our entire "performance first" approach towards network and application performance management.

What the Aberdeen Group suggests is a PACE model (Pressures, Actions, Capabilities, and Enablers) to achieve corporate goals. The idea is that businesses are pressured to be responsible to customer needs, and the actions that are effective are to establish a proactive control of the network. In order to do this, you need to be capable of defining your escalation pathways for network performance issues, having normal networking performance baselines, understand interdependencies between applications on the network, be able to segment round-trip application response times into delays caused by the server, the network, and the application, and finally, have a centralized point for looking at the network performance data.

Frequent readers of this blog will no doubt notice that this is the point where I usually mention that NetQoS makes some of the products which enable those capabilities. The Aberdeen Group reports that these "enablers" are network performance monitoring through a Web interface, tools for remote analysis and troubleshooting of network performance, tools for creating custom profiles for monitoring groups of network hardware, a unified network performance and security platform, tools for Netflow data analysis, and a lab environment to simulate network performance.

There are some other gems in there to be found. The survey results showed that that top 20% of performance scorers:

• Were the most likely to have the capabilities and enablers mentioned under the PACE model.
• Were spending less time on troubleshooting network performance and application performance, managing changes to network design, or enforcing network usage policies.
• Were much more likely to have merged application and network management into a single job role, and more likely to merge the application, network, and systems management teams into a single organizational unit.
• Were able to fix problems faster and less likely to rely on calls to the help desk for determining network problems.

What do you think about the Aberdeen Group's report? Feel free to leave a comment below.

So much happening in the world of network management software today, here's a quick look:

2008 Network Computing Awards Finalist - Cast Your Vote Today

The NetQoS Performance Center has been named as a finalist for the 2008 Network Computing Awards for "Test and Monitoring Product of the Year" based on the number of user nominations. Network Computing readers are now able to vote for finalists in each category until March 3rd - all you need to provide is a valid e-mail address when casting the vote. The results are announced on March 13th.

We really want to win this thing, mostly because there's a rumor going around the office that if we win, everyone in the company will get a cookie and a gold star sticker, so please go vote for us.

Jogging and drinking. It's almost a good idea.

Donald Johnstone, one of our QA testers wanted to promote the "First Annual South Austin Gulp It Down And Run Around," coming up on February 2nd at Austin's Circle C Metropolitan park. It's a one mile race with required beer drinking every quarter mile, and the proceeds from the $10.00 entry fee goes to help April Delaware, who was diagnosed with MS.

Designated drivers are required for all runners, so I suppose the only problem with it is that they scheduled it for the cold February and didn't wait until it got a little warmer around St. Patrick's Day. You could also get rid of that long name which is hard to remember, and replace it with something memorable, say, "The Green Mile."

The Obligatory Link to A Story from Slashdot

Slashdot is such a cool site and Rob Malda, a cool enough guy, that you really should be visiting it every day. That is, provided you haven't already subscribed to its RSS feed. In case you missed this one, one IT/Ask Slashdot post poses the question: How do I become an IT/IS Manager? The answers run the gamut, but mainly boil down to: "Know the business side of IT," "Show you can do it," and more than a few guys asking: "Why?"

It's interesting that we're coming out with an announcement about our support for Cisco Application Control Engine modules and appliances today, considering it's the same day when Juniper announced that it's not going to continue their DX application acceleration offerings. Juniper made the decision, because, according to Network World, "[Juniper] regards it as insufficiently distinguishable from competitors' devices."

Application accelerators and application delivery controllers can indeed be hard to differentiate. As one poster on Fark (and I have no idea how it ended up on Fark) put it, "The load-balancer market is starting to commoditize. This is not unlike the HTTP cache market about ten years back."

We just put out a press release with details about our support for the Cisco ACE application delivery controller. The NetQoS Performance Center and its application response time, network traffic analysis, and device performance modules are available today, integrated with Cisco ACE - a module to Cisco's CAT6500 switch and 7600 series router which provides load balancing and content switching, focusing on acceleration, security, and availability.

And it's particularly important because one of the reasons that this partnership developed was because players in this market, including Cisco, are looking for ways to differentiate their offerings.

One of those ways is being able to quantify the performance gains of the solution - with NetQoS Performance Center integration, network engineers and sysadmins can tell exactly what benefit they got for their investment in the hardware. Being able to justify your budget easily and quickly is a major selling point, and while there hasn't been a lot of focus on using response times to measure the effectiveness of load balancers, it seems a logical next step, considering we've already worked with Cisco before to provide this functionality in Cisco WAAS WAN Optimization devices.

Often, network engineers are forced to rely on CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk usage as measurement. However, in order to really get an idea of how the application is performing for the end user, network engineers need to baseline and track server response time and application performance. In order to continue to provide good performance for the end-users, it's important to get alerts when deviations from normal performance occur and automatically investigate the source of performance issues. Combining response time metrics, historical SNMP data, and NetFlow traffic analysis is a very powerful combination.

Now, I can't tell you that there aren't perhaps other ways to differentiate your offerings. If I had a solid but unremarkable application-delivery controller and I was trying to compete with the Cisco ACE/NetQoS Performance Center integration, I could probably… paint it pink or something. You know, so that it stands out in the data center, so that people looking around will say: "Hey, what's that pink box?" Would spread word of mouth, maybe.

Or I could give away beer from a microbrewery with every purchase. I know a guy named Orf who has his own brewery. He's a good guy.

Wait! I've got it! every fifth application delivery controller is filled with delicious candy! Mmm, Candy…

What would make you choose one application accelerator over another? Please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. Or want candy. Mmm, Candy.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Anne Bednarz, Network World's associate news editor, is currently compiling a followup to "Five Raves" in which customers talk about their favorite, must-have products. The idea is that the solicitations for suggested topics come not from a company's PR department or from a reviewer but from the IT pros that have to use the products in the field.

To contribute your views, feel free to e-mail Ann Bednarz at her Network World e-mail address, and she'll give you a quick phone call, talking about why you chose the product in particular, why you like it, what business problems it addresses, etc.

Now, you may think that we, a network performance management blog for a network management software company that makes many of these products may be mentioning this because we want you to write in and tell Network World that our products are the best. Unfortunately, it would be unethical to do so.

It is NOT unethical because it would be wrong to ask for such a favor. It is unethical because it has been made clear to me on a recent visit to one company's data center that NetQoS may not, in fact, make the most important IT-related product of all.

This small company, which shall go unnamed here, used to have major network problems - servers failing, corrupted data from hard drives, and occasionally, physically damaged servers. Worse still, these problems seemed to coincide with whenever the boss angrily walked in! And while I'd like to say that their problem was solved by application performance monitoring, NetFlow traffic analysis, or device performance management, they managed to fix the problem with an in-house solution, that I call the "DoorSlinky™."

This device, I believe, will revolutionize IT. It greatly increases the capacity of acceptable force levels used in IT environments on ingress and egress installations. The DoorSlinky™ provides added insurance against data storage failure or network disconnections caused by, but not limited to: blunt force, sudden impact, excessive pressure, rapidly-subjected stress upon the various types of aperture technologies found in IT environments, which is important because as we all know, IT can get very frustrating.

While application performance monitoring and response time measurements can help identify whether your current IT problem is in the application, server, or network, until that is determined, your application team, server team, and network team could fly through IT's doorway in a fit of anger, trying to place the blame on any IT team other than their own. Here, the DoorSlinky™ prevents a bad situation from becoming even worse.

And while VoIP Performance Monitoring can help you ensure VoIP calls go through, until then, people will most likely be communicating by running into each other's offices. Here the DoorSlinky™ also preserves existing physical-layer infrastructure necessary for separation of discrete workspaces.

Finally, while SNMP polling products may help you identify problems with infrastructure availability and resource consumption, no device performance management tool on the market makes the cool "Sproinggggg!" sound of the DoorSlinky™ in use.

For that reason, we undoubtedly endorse the DoorSlinky™ as the IT product of choice for 2008.

Disagree with our selection? We humbly invite you to suggest one of the NetQoS line of network performance management products. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Does art imitate life, or life imitate art? I don't know, and really, it has nothing to do the fun we at NetQoS are having with the new movie Untraceable and it's uncanny resemblance to our Network Performance Daily post on Wafaa Bilal. Here's a little slice of life into our day:

Pam: Hey, Brian, have you heard about this new movie, "Untraceable?"

Brian: No, Pam, I haven't, actually. What's it about?

Pam: It's about a serial killer who kidnaps this guy, ties him up and puts a webcam on him, and then hooks him up to poison, and the more people who view the site, the more poison he gets. Or that's the impression I got from the trailer.

Brian: Uh…

Pam: I think you should write about this in the blog.

Brian: Uh… Pam, I'm not sure that's a good idea. I mean, I'm working on this post about Time Warner, and…

Pam: Well, what's the problem? Can you imagine the spike in network traffic something like that would generate? It would be amazing.

Brian: Well, it's just that the entire premise is a little shaky. First, even if you can't trace him, I mean, everyone who visits the site is an accessory to murder. Unlike the eponymous serial killer, the site visitors aren't untraceable. So why not charge them with accessory to murder?

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. This isn't supposed to be something that could really happen. It's funny!

Brian: And I mean, the guy has to register a domain name, there's live traffic going through, he's got to have an IP address somewhere, and that's probably enough to narrow it down to get the cops to find him. I mean, the entire thing's really implausible from a technical standpoint.

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. I think you actually inspired them with your Wafaa Bilal post.

Brian: Then there's the whole fact that if this guy is expecting a lot of incoming hits, even through a proxy he's going to have to lease at least a OC3 line to handle simultaneous streaming video to that many people, and it's not exactly hard to cross reference who bought or leased OC3 lines in the past whatever months…

Pam: Brian. You're overthinking this...

Brian: Of course, if he does get a lot of hits, he's going to want to have a whole bunch of load balancing servers and you'd probably be able to pick him out if nothing else by being the only creepy cabin out in the woods that draws - oh, I don't know, three gigawatt-hours more every month more power than the other creepy cabins - with a constant load of 5kWh constantly, even during off-peak hours.…

Pam: Brian, it's a movie!

Brian: Okay, yeah, but there's also the idea that - well, I'm uncomfortable with it. I mean, it looks like it's just one of those stupid serial killer movies, probably based off of that episode of Millennium. I mean, it seems like it's going to be something like "Saw" or "Hostel," something like that where people get killed without any real plot - torture porn, really.

Pam: Anyway, you could tie in this "Untraceable" movie in with your Wafaa Bilal coverage on virtual dehumanization and take an angle about recreational network traffic.

Brian: Pam, unless you're Matthew Broderick playing Global Thermonuclear War with Joshua, no one out there is worried that their recreational network traffic will kill a guy. And despite my most cynical judgments, I think that even people who would shoot a non-lethal paintball at a guy over the Web wouldn't participate in actual murder.

Pam: You really think that you can't get a good blog post out of this?

Brian: The truth is that I'd really not like to talk about the movie. I mean, I've seen the trailer, and the idea is that the more the cops talk about it, the more visits the guy has. Me, I think it's a stupid movie, and I really don't want to give it more publicity. I think I'm more likely to get a good blog post out of "Teeth."

Pam: Uh…. I don't think so.

Brian: … Give me a couple of hours to think of something. "Teeth: Why you should always test before deployment" maybe?

Pam gave me a little sumo wrestler toy if I promised not to mention "Teeth" again. Would you like to name him? If you would, feel free to post in our comments section.