This isn’t much of a post today because this afternoon, the entire company is going out to catch a matinee of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I think now would be an appropriate time to link to our “careers” page, don’t you?

Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today (May 6, 2008) the House Telecommunications subcommittee is meeting to debate network neutrality legislation; the ramifications of which are likely to be far reaching and quite controversial no matter what the conclusions are.

Neither this blog’s editorial stance nor the position of NetQoS is to endorse or denounce any particular piece of network neutrality legislation. But that does not mean that there are not deeper issues that the debate over Net Neutrality is part of, nor does that mean that where aren’t some more fundamental truths that we cannot agree on.

Richard Stallman at MIT
--Credit: Sam Ogden

The only problem with this is that this isn’t a software development blog – we deal with networking. So I wrote an essay to him about what I felt were the moral issues behind the network neutrality debate – something I personally feel has a moral component.

I’m printing some of our conversation below. Now, this is not a debate in the classic sense – we agree on many things and disagree on others; and what I am trying to do is not so much to convince our readership of a position, but rather to convince our readership to think about this issue philosophically, and to join into our conversation – whether via the comments section here or elsewhere.

EDITOR BRIAN BOYKO: …Just as you believe that free software is a moral right, I happen to think that effective and efficient networks are a free speech issue. Throughout history, improvements in the quality of life – whether through technology or social activism – have been proportional to the abilities of people to communicate. Europe suffered 1000 years of the dark ages until Arabic scrolls allowed them to recapture the lost wisdom of the Greeks. Technological development booms with every innovation in communication; the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet.

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system; I believe that Metcalfe’s law can be applied to humanity as a whole – that the value of us as a species is proportional to the square of the number of us who are in communication with each other.

For these reasons I believe that open and effective communication is a fundamental human right. Now, as I believe communication is a human right, the only limit one should have on their ability to communicate should be when that communication harms someone else’s right to communicate.

RICHARD STALLMAN’S RESPONSE: It is hard for me to accept that, as stated, because it would imply that until the 1990s all governments were acting unjustly no matter what they did. That cannot be justice.

I think it that the term "human right" can only properly apply to matters of not hurting other people. Thus, it is abuse of language to speak of the "human right" to have food to eat. I think states have a duty to provide food to the hungry, and more generally, to operate a welfare system to help the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps we have reached the point where wealthy states also have a duty to provide broadband to everyone. But that is a different kind of duty from that of respecting rights.

It is easy to imagine a situation in which there is insufficient supply of food for everyone to eat. But there cannot be an insufficient supply of freedom of speech to go around.

BRIAN BOYKO: But bandwidth is a limited resource. It is entirely possible for some types of traffic to overwhelm others, and this is not an exaggeration; at NetQoS we see this happening on corporate networks all the time.

Right now, Network Neutrality proponents believe in the idea of a “dumb” network. Yet, this does not reflect the realities of the situation; if UDP traffic (VoIP, Gaming, Streaming Live Media) is on the same pipe as TCP traffic without some sort of limitations on the traffic in place, the UDP traffic will eventually overwhelm the TCP traffic entirely, blocking it out.

The scenario that Net Neutrality opponents trot out of heavy users degrading the quality of communication for light users is entirely plausible. Overhyped, to be sure, but plausible.

On the other hand, this does not in any way make the anti-neutrality position in any way correct. Neutrality detractors often argue for solutions that are worse than the problem. Some want to block certain types of traffic – BitTorrent is seen as the perpetual scapegoat – others want to limit the amount of data that people can download, or charge them more for more data. But data is unlimited. Given enough time and enough reliability, I could download a GNU/Linux distribution over a 2800 baud modem. Data is not the issue; bandwidth – or the amount of data that anyone could download at any one time – is.

RICHARD STALLMAN: I think it is legitimate to give small transfers priority over big ones. I do not understand why UDP traffic would overwhelm TCP traffic, but I have no objection to giving TCP priority over UDP if that is useful -- because anybody could, feasibly, use either one to talk with you.

I also see nothing wrong with charging you as a client more for more bandwidth.

What I object to is that your ISP privileges some sites over others when you, as a client, access them -- either explicitly, or indirectly as a consequence of something else. If your ISP does that, it is not working honestly for you.

As mentioned above; this is not so much an endorsement of any position as a hope that we can start talking about these philosophical issues openly. (If you have any problem with the CAPTCHA, feel free to e-mail me directly at brian.boyko@netqos.com and I will be happy to publish your comments.)

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released their 2008 report comparing countries around the world in broadband access, speed, and price; the United States comes in at 15 out of 30. 

Every year since 2001, the United States has fallen further behind in broadband access.  We are now being beaten by Australia.

Last month, we released an editorial entitled: “U.S. falling behind in broadband; enough is enough.” We ended that column with the following words:

What I’d like to see are articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.

The report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation actually does propose a number of solutions to increase broadband adoption in the U.S.  Here are some takeaways from the report:

• The United States poor performance is roughly about 25 percent to blame on poor policy, about 75 percent on environmental issues like the distribution of homes in suburbia and exurbia, as well as the very long copper loop lengths that such an arrangement necessitate.


• The culture of Wall Street also plays a large part – Japan’s NTT faces less pressure to continually post quarterly profits; as such they can plan on a more long-term basis.  The United States focus on quarterly performance discourages investment in infrastructure that will not show a profit in 90 days.


• Support at the highest levels of government for broadband correlates positively to broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing.


• Competition between providers both inter and intra-modal usually correlates positively to  broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing – but not always.


• There is an upper ceiling on broadband penetration in the U.S.; as only two thirds of American households have computers, the maximum broadband penetration can be is 66%. 

And here are some of the recommendations:

To encourage the development of broadband infrastructure (supply) in the United States, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take the following steps:

1. Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.

2. Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks.

3. Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available.

4. Reform the federal Universal Service Fund program to extend support for rural broadband to all carriers, and consider providing the funding through a reverse auction mechanism.

5. Fund a national program to co-fund state-level broadband support programs, such as Connect Kentucky or North Carolina e-NC Authority.

6. Promote the widespread use of a national, user-generated, Internet-based broadband mapping system that would track location, speed, and price of broadband.

7. State and local governments should take action to make it easier for providers to deploy broadband services, including making it easier to access rights-of-way.

To encourage the growth of consumer demand for broadband, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take these steps:

8. Support initiatives around the nation to encourage broadband usage and digital literacy.

9. Fund a revitalized Technology Opportunities Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.

10. Exempt broadband Internet access from federal, state, and local taxes.

11. Support new applications, including putting more public content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine, and online learning programs.

What are your thoughts on these recommendations?

Recently, there’s been some discussion on Slashdot regarding MySQL in the past few months, after MySQL (the company) was bought out by Sun Microsystems.  MySQL (the company) has announced that they will be developing some proprietary add-ons to the backup capabilities of MySQL (the database) which will only be available to MySQL’s (the company’s) customers of MySQL (the database) enterprise edition, and not to MySQL (the database) community edition. 

This has been blown a bit out of proportion.  (The headline, on Slashdot, “Sun may begin close-sourcing MySQL” was misleading at best).  We e-mailed Steve Curry at MySQL (the company) and he pointed us to some information clearing up the situation.

· Anything that has been released as open-source under GPL continues to be released as open-source under GPL. Sun and MySQL (the company) are not going to start “closing” the open-source MySQL (the database,) and it seems unlikely that they will be able to legally do so even if they wished to.

· Improved backup capabilities are being planned in MySQL (the database) 6.0 for both the open-source community and open-source with proprietary add-ons enterprise version. 

· Proprietary add-ons are being added to the Enterprise version of MySQL (the database).  These add-ons are not core critical, they are essentially added-value for paying customers, which add compression, encryption, specific native drivers – things that a particular business might need but which aren’t critical to the core functioning of MySQL (the database.) 

· The decision to do so was done before MySQL (the company) was acquired by Sun Microsystems. If anything, Sun has been very open-source friendly, with Star Office forming the basis of OpenOffice.org, and Solaris and Java both open-source now.

· There is nothing preventing people from forking the MySQL (the database) source code and producing open-source versions of the proprietary capabilities.

The use of proprietary add-ons to an open-source system isn’t even all that rare.  Click N’ Run for Linux systems adds proprietary software to the open-source Linux; MacOSX is based on the BSD-licensed Darwin, a BSD-like distribution.

We also note the irony of a number of proprietary Web applications running off of LAMP stacks, where the L, the A, the M (the DB) and the P are all “free software.” 

There are a number of proprietary Web applications running with MySQL (the database) – and a move to “close source” MySQL (the database) would have messed with the business models of many companies – including NetQoS.  NetQoS uses MySQL (the database) Enterprise edition in our network monitoring and reporting products and we’re customers of MySQL (the company).  So we’re glad this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. 

I tried to think of a prominent case where someone successfully “closed the source” of a flagship product after it was open-sourced - but couldn't until I went much, much farther afield.  There is a company “closing the source” on its major flagship product.

That company is Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro.  And the flagship product is “Dungeons and Dragons.” 

Wizards (the company) makes Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing, computer-less tabletop game where you play knights, elves, and powerful wizards (the characters) – a game that has a history of being very attractive to the technology-oriented crowd because of our love of math and power fantasies.

What makes Dungeons and Dragons particularly interesting is that a while back, Wizards (the company) released an “Open Gaming License” (OGL) which allowed third parties to develop additional content for Dunegons and Dragons, and, in fact, create entirely new games in different settings and genres using the rules established in Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition.  If you were a third-party company, you could publish supplements to provide traps, monsters, or new spells for wizards (the characters) to cast.  And many did.

This had numerous benefits all around; players needed to learn how to use only one system, and they had tons of D&D supplements to choose from, game companies found they had an audience in D&D players that they might not have otherwise had, Wizards (the company) found a sea of “developers” for their system which made ownership of D&D’s “core books” more valuable, and while it may not have resulted in a rebirth of the roleplaying game industry, it sure propped it up for a little while longer.

Because game players only had to learn one set of rules to play, the roleplaying game industry standardized quite a bit and the system used in Dungeons or Dragons (known as “d20”) became quite widely used, dominating the RPG field for a time. 

D&D “version 4.0” will soon be released, and many game beta testers believe the system has been radically overhauled and improved.  However, this new system will not be released under the OGL.  It will however, be released under the “Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition Game System License” (GSL). 

The GSL license has not yet been made public, but there are rumors, speculations, and concerns, fueled by online posts made by the brand manager and licensing manager for Dungeons and Dragons, and relayed by the lead writer of third-party publisher Necromancer Games that the GSL will contain a “poison pill” clause – that is, in order to use the GSL, a game company must not publish anything under the OGL.  

This would be like Microsoft saying that developers for Windows Vista are forbidden from publishing anything under the GNU public license.  And the upshot is now that developers have to choose between not developing games with the improved system or destroying their back-catalogs. 

Even if you don’t have a huge interest in D&D – in which case, I envy your normal social adjustment and relatively less awkward adolescence – it pays to keep up with this developing situation to see how a fight to close an open-source software product might actually go down.  Will Hasbro fail in its efforts to dominate the RPG industry, either shrinking their portion of market share or shrinking the size of the entire market?  Or will Hasbro succeed with this business plan, and the publishers of Monopoly (the game) end up with a de facto monopoly (the economic term) on this niche industry?

Update: On May 2, 2008, a week after this article's publication, Wizards of the Coast released an FAQ about the 4th edition licensing terms. The FAQ states:

Q. Can companies still produce 3.x products under the OGL?
A. Yes, but we anticipate that interest in the 4e GSLs will be greater.

Q. Can publishers release new products under both the OGL and 4E GSL?
A. No. Each new product will be either OGL or 4E GSL. If a new product is published under the 4e GSL, it cannot also be published as 3.x product under the OGL; and vice versa.

Q. I have multiple product lines. If I update one product line to 4th Edition, do they all have to be updated?
A. No. Publishers are able to choose on a product line by product line basis which license will work best.

Q. Will there be a different license for other lines, such as d20 Modern?
A. The d20 GSL will allow for other genres of roleplaying games.

Q. Why are there two different licenses?
A. The D&D 4e GSL is specific to the Dungeons & Dragons brand. The d20 GSL allows for non-fantasy genres. Both licenses tie to the 4th edition rule set.

Q. Do I have to give up my right to publish 3.5 OGL products in order to publish 4e compatible products?
A. No. Publishers are free to print product lines under either the OGL or 4E GSL. We would love to see our industry colleagues convert their entire product offerings to 4E, as we are doing, but we do not expect or require entire companies to convert to the new edition.

Q. Can publishers update their previous publications from older editions to the D&D 4th Edition rules?
A. Yes. Publishers participating in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition GSL will be allowed, and encouraged, to convert their publications from earlier editions to the 4th Edition rules.

Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The dateline reads “4 April 2008.”  And it’s yet another story – this time from the BBC – about how American broadband adoption trails the world. 

This may be news to BBC’s U.K., general knowledge audience, but how many times has this issue been covered by how many different publications?  We even put it in our “Top Eight Network Performance Issues you should keep in mind for Super Tuesday”

A rant follows – one perhaps uncharacteristic of NPD as a whole, but hey, there’s only so many times you can see the same story before something clicks.  The U.S.’s inferior broadband is a problem, and nothing is being done about it.

The article by Ian Hardy places the blame somewhat on infrastructure, but mostly on Internet backbone and last-mile service providers who would rather provide competing services that eschew the Internet for older, more established business models.  It’s about distribution – and control of the distribution avenues. 

But in the meantime, the companies who rely on Internet access to run their business are being choked off.  It’s well known that bandwidth is expensive in the U.S.  But it’s not expensive because demand is outstripping supply – like oil – it’s that supply is being artificially constrained – like diamonds. 

And this is important to IT groups because almost all remote connectivity has to occur over the Internet.   Applications once designed for the LAN made their way to the WAN, now apps are moving to the cloud.  Even those applications for which SaaS is a poor fit can almost always enhance functionality through having access to online databases of information – databases that connect through the Internet. 

International entrepreneurs will set-up shop in places where the Internet is cheap and powerful.  And right now that means Korea, Japan, China, France, and Canada.  It’s getting harder to find good news in the American economy in the post-Bear Stearns era; the country is saddled with debt, the U.S. dollar is drawing analogies to the peso, and the only way to get out of this mess is to build and grow our way out of it.  That means being technological leaders and innovators.  And here, we are dangerously close to losing that edge. 

The last thing most people want is government intervention, but even if it’s not recognized now – even if people are dancing around it, this is a problem.  Politically, people differ on whether the government should – or even can – intervene through regulation to solve problems. However, I think most agree that if the free market can come up with a solution that works, that solution should be tried first. 

What I’d like to see is articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.

by Joel Trammell
CEO, NetQoS

We’ve been hearing some rumors that some customers and prospective customers have been told that some NetQoS-branded products might not come with the same level of service and support that customers expect from NetQoS.

First, NetQoS has earned some amazing customer approval ratings – a First Market Research report found that 88 percent of NetQoS customers reported “very favorable” ratings for NetQoS compared to other IT vendors.  The other 12 percent reported “favorable” ratings.  We place a lot of pride in the service and support of our products.

So allow me to address these concerns: If there’s a NetQoS logo on the product, we own the issue.

When someone buys and uses a product, the technological aspects are only part of the decision. Any technical product, including our own, isn’t a “whole product” without installation, training, service and support, expansion capabilities, and a path to future development. 

In order to build the best solutions to manage network performance for application delivery, we sometimes partner with and source technology from outside vendors.  However, when our name is on the box, we take direct ownership of every customer experience – no matter what suppliers may be involved – and never communicate that the blame for an issue somehow rests outside of our company.

And if we ever do not take full ownership of a problem, please let me know. 

Joel Trammell, CEO, NetQoS.

I'll be frank - I couldn't think of a good idea for an article today. There are a couple of interesting links in the news, of course, which I could share with you. And we will get to those in a second, but…

…truth is, I wanted to get a little introspective about things.

This blog is based on Movable Type v.3, and while we can talk about what I should have done, switching to a different system, such as WordPress really didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The one problem that MT had was that we were getting deluged with spam. Hundreds of spam messages a day.

Now, there is a setting that is supposed to catch junk posts. However, this was worse than useless, as it didn't catch a great deal of the junk messages - and it was classifying some good messages as junk mail. In fact, I think it might have been classifying most good messages as junk mail, which may be one of the reasons that we didn't get many comments on this blog for - oh, the first 16 months or so.

A few weeks ago, we moved to a CAPTCHA based system, using ReCAPTCHA. This has been working well - we've gotten more comments, more frequently, and spam is almost entirely gone. Yeah, I know CAPTCHAs are a pain, but it's the only solution we can think of at this time.

Still, 16 months of bad comment moderation may have discouraged regular readers from becoming regular commenters. What I'd like to ask is that, if you've tried to comment in the past but got discouraged, try it now. And if it still doesn't work, for whatever reason, feel free to send me an e-mail to my work address, brian.boyko@netqos.com. I really could use your suggestions for stories to investigate or issues in technology to talk about.

That said, here are those interesting links:

New York Times: Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out:

EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that "the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction." Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed.

For Cesar DeLaRosa, 15, however, the concern is more specific. He said he was worried about his science project on global warming.

"If we don't have Internet, that means I've got to take the bus to the public library after dark, and around here, that's not always real safe," Cesar said, seated in front of his family's new computer in a gritty section of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. His family is among the 1,000 or so low-income households that now have free or discounted Wi-Fi access through the city's project, and many of them worry about losing access that they cannot otherwise afford. Philadelphia officials say service will not be disconnected.

"We expect EarthLink to live up to its contract," said Terry Phillis, the city's chief information officer.

The problem was that EarthLink's plans required more routers than they initially predicted, which makes me wonder if those predictions were tested on smaller scales first. However, there is no problem with the technology - it performs as advertised. The problem is that there's no real clear way to make a profit from that technology - which, to me, makes it an ideal service that the municipality should provide, rather than outsourcing it to a private company.

George Ou: Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control:

George Ou at ZDNet claims that "swarming" is causing a significant bandwidth problem, and goes to great lengths to explain why, in a four page article.

Simply by opening up 10 to 100 TCP streams, P2P applications can grab 10 to 100 times more bandwidth than a traditional single-stream application under a congested Internet link. Since all networks have a bottleneck somewhere, a small percentage of Internet users utilizing P2P can hog the vast majority of resources at the expense of other users. The following diagram illustrates the multi-stream exploit in action where User A hogs more and more bandwidth over User B by opening more and more TCP streams.

But as I read it, it seemed a bit dubious to me. After all, if my multiple TCP-stream connection on my home computer allowed me to have multiple bandwidth links, wouldn't that mean that a download on BitTorrent of a Linux distribution operating at max capacity would be faster than a single TCP stream and FTP connection to a server? In practice, I've found that both speeds are roughly equal - except when there's a lot of demand on the server side; like the first few days after a new Ubuntu version comes out. Then the multiple TCP streams come in handy because they are coming from multiple TCP connections to different locations. But it's impossible for the multiple TCP connections to take up more bandwidth than had been allocated by the service provider under their QoS policies.

Where there is some validation to this is when the pipe gets completely congested to the point that the available bandwidth per user is less than the bandwidth allocation provided by the ISP to the individual users. In other words, it only occurs when the provider has under-provisioned for the network demand and is delivering less than promised to begin with.

Ou suggests an update to the TCP/IP stack that prevents this problem, but for ISPs, the solution is simpler. Either add more bandwidth so that you can deliver the service promised, or promise less if you can't deliver.

PC World: Tech Workers favor McCain, Obama:

Not getting into politics, but this little fact from the article is interesting:

The survey, of 600 self-identified IT workers, found that 27 percent have used the Internet to contribute to a political campaign. By comparison, less than 0.3 percent of U.S. residents have contributed more than US$200 to a U.S. political campaign during the 2008 election cycle.

Which implies that the techies, who by definition are likely to be Internet savvy, are highly politically motivated and therefore very interested in events from the 2008 presidential race.

Hmm, did you experience a bump in recreational network traffic around the time of Obama's speech on race?

Network World recently posted some industry commentary by Frank Dzubeck which talks about how CIOs are starting to become more concerned with application performance and the inter-process latency - i.e., concerns over "chatty apps." When you consider additional need for real-time application - the most notable of which is VoIP, but which can reach to tele-imaging and telemedicine, interactive three-dimensional virtual conferen-

I'm sorry, can you give me a minute to collect my thoughts?

Right. Sorry.

Anyway, Dzubeck makes the point that with consolidated data centers, and less latency-sensitive operations moved to SAAS, latency between (virtual) servers is may now measured in microseconds, not milliseconds, but these data centers must be connected to users over high-latency WAN connections… and these users are almost always as scattered and far-flung as the Rod of Seven Parts--

Oh god. I'm sorry. Just give me a moment to compose myself.

*sniff*

*sniff*

I'm going to be okay, right? I can do this. Let me just shake this out here, take a couple of deep breaths. Whoo. Oh boy.

Alright. I'm ready. I'm a pro. I can do this.

Right. The point is that companies are relying on WAN link service providers for low latency connections, but carriers rarely advertise their latency and even requiring a service-level agreement commitment does not guarantee low latency, because the measures of latency used are often complex and don't give an accurate picture of actual latency - something Joel has talked about earlier - and the language of the SLA agreement is more complex than trying to find THAC0--

Oh god. I thought I could do this. I just can't. I'm sorry. It's just… too great a loss. I know that ultimately, Gary Gygax's creation will live on in all of us - every time we roll a d20 to decide what pizza toppings to order, every time we swap stories about former D&D characters in the lobbies of technical networking conventions like Interop, every time we try to engineer the lowest latency network configuration and are reminded of how we min-maxed our characters.

The guy changed the world for us geeks, you know. While other kids rebelled from their parents through punk music, drugs, or sex, we geeks rebelled by pretending we were mighty warriors - where our knowledge of mathematics and probability was far more powerful than any football playing jock… where we were kings, gods, and monsters.

The problem solving skills and imagination skills helped us when we went into our lives as the proud geeks we were. We took a lot of our geek culture from that one man and his game.

Gary Gygax is dead. And unlike one of his characters, we can't just bring him back with a spell. The world lost a good man.

Now the only thing we can do is mourn, grieve, remember the man as he was, and split up his gold and magic items amongst the rest of the party.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today primary election and caucus day in Texas, where we're based. Usually our elections don't really matter, so this is somewhat of an exciting time for the state. Politics is on my mind… and when politics is on my mind, I find it hard to think about anything else.

(This is annoying when you're trying to write a blog post about the future of network engineering, and dangerous when you're so absorbed explaining to your significant other the nuances of the Texas dual primary/caucus system that you temporarily forget that "red means stop" at a busy intersection.)

But here's the thing; there are some areas where changes in political communication herald changes in business communication, and those events are worth talking about, because it may have a lot to do with the importance of keeping latency low when the next generation of C-level executives - the generation raised on, and still playing video games, will want to use video games as a business tool.

There's an old joke that when there's a new technology, the first people to exploit it are the pornographers. This may be true, but there is a certain pattern to technological communication adoption. Usually, when a new media hits on the Internet, it's first hit by the techies, then by the politicians, and lastly by the business. This pattern is true for blogs, true for online audio, online video, and social networks - the technological early adopters build up a mass audience with no risk, the politicians move in when a population has been built up, risking little, and businesses - classically risk averse - move in last.

But what's interesting about this pattern is that if you look at where political discussions are cropping up, you can almost predict the future of where business communication will be. And lately, political discussion is taking the form of video games.

Back in 2004, there was the political flash-based 2D shooter "BushGame.com," in which you took control of Fat He-Man and John "Voltron" Kerry and mowed through a field of Republican opposition. This year, you've got AtomFilms' "Kung-fu Election."

If presidential elections are decided by who we feel is the best candidate to lead us into a no holds barred mixed martial arts tournament -- and most political theorists believe we do…

This is all very silly, of course, but more seriously, I recently completed an ">interview with Wafaa Bilal (Remember him? The guy who locked himself in a room with a paintball gun?) for the GeeksAreSexy.com site regarding his new project, a very controversial, and very political video game that he re-coded and will present at an art exhibition this Wednesday.

Political games really aren't that rare. The U.S. Defense Department uses "America's Army" as a "cost-effective recruitment tool." "BioShock" makes criticisms of the political philosophy of objectivism. "Defcon," with its abstracted, "WarGames" style visuals and haunting soundtrack makes a subtle point about the dehumanization necessary to wage a global thermonuclear war. Those are just the well-known hits - "I Can End Deportation" is a videogame about immigrant issues, for example, and Kuma Games is a game publisher whose entire business model is designed around quickly developing episodic video games based on real-life battles that happened just months or weeks earlier.

As I mentioned earlier, risk-averse business always tends to be the straggler when it comes to taking on new forms of media - aborted efforts at commercializing and politicizing "Second Life" aside - but if politics is starting to make its way into the interactive medium of video games, how long will it be before, like online video and blogs before it, commercial game development will be considered a crucial part of business marketing?

Another old joke is that most business deals don't take place on the board room but on the golf course - but in this upcoming generation, the CEOs are more likely to be comfortable playing World of Warcraft than golf; and if the adage holds true, they'll be conducting business deals, man-to-man (or dwarf-to-elf) over some sort of game-enabled VoIP. Both gaming applications and VoIP applications require low-latency connections.

I'm not saying that this could affect business over the next quarter - or that it could affect business over the next 10 years. But maybe it's just something to start thinking about now.

I'm reading some "at-a-glance" promotional material for a major new network hardware product. There is a slight problem though. I can't make heads or tails of it.

Certainly I can't figure out what it's trying to say either "at a glance" or after hours of technical study. This could be because I don't have the necessary educational background to appreciate it - although I'm a smart guy, my formal education and my experience is in editing and writing.

But it is exactly that - my experience in editing and writing - that leads me to write this.

The problem is that this promotional material is packed with technical details presented without context. I couldn't tell you anything particularly insightful regarding it, because it seems to be a bunch of buzzwords strung together. In the end, I'm having trouble figuring out what business problems this piece of hardware solves.

While no one would ask that technical material to make it more accessible but less accurate, there are ways of writing which provide context and enough information for the uninitiated to make informed decisions.

But tons of material which supposedly explains the benefit of IT products from scores of companies is written in a confusing manner which simply doesn't make the information clear. These may be written for "the experts" but not everyone who needs to know about networking will have an expert's level of comprehension of the subject. IT managers and CIOs are often generalists whose greatest skills are in management, rather than engineering, and it is IT managers and CIOs who have to decide what projects get funded and which ones do not.

IT executives are busy today with a whole host of problems. Infrastructure, Sarbanes-Oxley, Network Performance, Application Development… combine all of this with the belt-tightening of the predicted upcoming recession, and it becomes important to make your case with the absolute least amount of time and effort required by the person who makes the purchasing decisions. It's critical in enterprise IT to explain things as simply as possible, and relate the information to the business.

At last year's symposium, Joel Trammell, CEO of NetQoS, made communicating to IT executives a key part of his keynote address. It's a well-established truism that if the CIO doesn't have time to understand it, he's not going to buy it.