Archive | October, 2009

Preview of Upcoming Video

We’re working on some product videos and had a chance to try out the green screen lately, and we wanted to give you a little preview of our corporate communications. Click play below. The audio’s a little weak, so you may want to wear headphones.

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Hockey Night in the Data Center

Harwell Thrasher, author of “Boiling the IT Frog: How to make your business information technology wildly successful without having to learn anything technical,” has a blog post out talking about how, during the current economic situation, which has gone beyond “depression” and towards “the pit of despair,” companies are making dangerous cuts to IT staff. [...]

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Why Britain’s Three Strikes Policy Harms Network Engineers

For a couple of years now, lobbyists for large copyright-holding businesses, most notably the music industry, have lobbied in multiple countries and jurisdictions for what they call the “three strikes” rule. Under the “three strikes” rule, if you are accused of infringing someone’s copyrights online three times, the ISP will be mandated to cut you [...]

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The Robots Are Coming For You

As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night.

There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now.  Well – song lyrics anyway.  “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.

The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption.  Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even furtherby centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider.

Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent.  “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…

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The Re-Education of NetFlow

by Ben Erwin NetFlow or NetFlow-esque technology (Jflow, Cflowd, NetStream, IPFIX, etc.) has been around the network management world for quite some time.  Thousands of IT shops worldwide leverage its capabilities to analyze traffic flowing across the network. Recently, some vendors have recently made somewhat misleading statements about NetFlow’s capabilities.  There are very good reasons why [...]

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Jim Metzler looks back at his 2009 predictions

In this video (part two of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they’re shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

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The Blue Screen of Deathly Hallows.

In April 2007, I was freelancing for HardOCP.com, writing an article called “30 days of Windows Vista.” And at the end, I concluded that “this product is unfit for any user.” On the other hand, I’ve been using the beta of Windows 7 on my personal laptop, desktop, and media PC without problem for months [...]

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Jim Metzler looks back at his 2009 predictions

In this video (part one of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they’re shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

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Worst. Year. Ever.

Gartner has made it official: 2009 was the “worst year ever” for IT. I’m here at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando and about 15 minutes into the opening “parade of analysts” keynote yesterday, I was really hoping the Disney location would lighten the mood a tad but the Halloween nightmare continued for a while. The [...]

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Jim Metzler on Network Management Trends

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Conclusion of FCC commissioned Harvard study: Open Access Makes Better Broadband

U.S. broadband lags behind international competitors.  And yet another studyrecently showed how much the U.S. lags behind international broadband. This is not news.  What is news is that the study was commissioned by the FCC and executed by Harvard University’s Berkman Center, and they came to the conclusion that  the most successful countries in broadband [...]

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Ars Technica vs. Nemertes Research

In May of this year, Nemertes Research president Johna Till Johnson wrote in Network World that “The Internet Sky Really Is Falling.” The next day, we came out with a story about that column, in our much more irreverent style, entitled “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake: Is the Internet dying?” In that article, [...]

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