Archive | May, 2009

The (Network) Engineer Update

There’s a game called “Team Fortress 2” – and if you’re not familiar with it, imagine a Norman Rockwell painting superimposed on secret mercenary forces with outrageous personalities by the Pixar team that worked on “The Incredibles,” set the whole thing in the mid-1960s, and create a gameplay mechanic where you introduce teamwork and strategy [...]

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What the Fluke?

It’s a standard rule in marketing that you don’t point out your competitor’s advertising, as it just draws attention to your competitors and makes it look like they’ve struck a nerve and therefore have a point. But I’m not a standard marketer – I’m a blogger. Woo! Look at me! I’m spontaneously subverting the accepted [...]

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Mi, a name, I call myself, Fi, a long long way to run.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size [...]

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Termination Packets, Oranges, and Re-Piratebay.

Anyway, since it’s a Friday before a 3-day weekend, combined with many of you just getting back from Interop, today’s not likely to be a high traffic day. So I decided it might be a good idea to de-clutter some of the stuff up in my brain. Terminator 4 just came out – having not [...]

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Survey at Interop: Network usage is up, while management resources are down.

Everyone’s putting out surveys at Interop; we’re no exception. Surveys are how we know what you need in products, how we should focus our efforts, and how to game the system when illegally betting on American Idol results, an often overlooked source of secondary revenue for mid-sized businesses in these bleak economic times. So we’ve [...]

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Interop Links

Interop in full swing in Vegas; and already both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail are filled with press releases, press-releases disguised as e-mail, and in one odd case, ninja disguised as press-release. If you’re asking how a ninja can get into my e-mail, you don’t know much about ninjas.  Ninjas can get anywhere. [...]

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Show & Tell: NetQoS Performance Center 5.0

We’ve got some added features and functionality in the recently announced NetQoS Performance Center version 5.0 and we’d like to show you how they work in practice. First, the Application Performance Dashboard, which provides an at-a-glance view of response times per application and site across an organization. Second, Maps with Real-Time Event Notifications, which show [...]

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Oh, by the way…

…if you work in networking, and have little to no recollection of the previous night’s events, and are currently wondering why you woke up in a strange hotel room in Las Vegas, it’s probably because Interop officially starts today. FYI. NetQoS will be in booth #663 & Cisco pod #1719.

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That thing under the desk.

I’m not referring to the Crown-Royal Drinking Chupacabra, although he is lurking under your desk, and he is hungry. No, I’m referring to the big boxy thing under your desk. Probably is either white, grey, or black, and has “Dell,” “HP,” or “Gateway” written on it somewhere. You know. That thing. The hard drive. No [...]

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The International Network Conspiracy

The Bilderberg Group, an annual invitation-only conference of 130 high-influence politicians and businessmen is currently meeting in Athens, Greece. Quite a lot of secrecy surrounds the Bilderberg Group – quite a lot of security goes into making sure that photos and recordings of the meetings do not get widely distributed, and combined with the high-profile [...]

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Google is Down! Everybody Panic!

More accurately, Google went down for many users today, with a total failure of the Google search, Gmail, Reader, Docs, and Youtube. Most of these outages occurred because of a problem with anything touching AT&T’s network. In order to communicate during the outage, journalists and bloggers covering the story flocked to Twitter. Ironic, if you’re [...]

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Budget Teleconferencing

Network World’s Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick ended up talking to the CEO and Senior VP for Marketing of Vidyo, a company that makes high definition teleconferencing solutions. Vidyo’s differentiation? It uses the Internet. This wouldn’t be such a big deal – Skype has had video capabilities for three years now – except that in [...]

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