News Flash:
Scientists struggle to explain the polar meltdown occurring at the McMurdo Antarctic base. "We've never seen anything like it" commented Don, one of the researchers serving at McMurdo.
"I posted my pictures to the McMurdo file server, and a few minutes later, the whole thing just started sinking into the ground!" One industry expert attributes the effect to 'The Slashdot Effect'.
Joe L. Expert commented "With bandwidth at McMurdo at a premium, the sudden onslaught of traffic from a posting to the nerd news site Slashdot.org caused a gigantic power spike. The land lines carrying power and data to the McMurdo facility became superconducting in the ultra-cold temperatures there, and some sort of resonance field appears to have formed." L. Expert went on to say "These scientists may have accidentally discovered a new way to start a fusion reaction. Of course, this reaction can only be shut down if slashdot visitors stop hammering the poor server into the ground. If we don't act quickly, the whole southern icecap may melt, flooding the world and destroying civilization as we know it"
Joe Expert was forcibly removed from his office a few minutes later by several men in black suits.
..."The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
... As soon as I manage to rid the galaxy of those pesky Jedi, I will be unstoppa - oh, hello computer. No, I'm really just a happy, pleasant senator from Naboo.
In all seriousness - if you're in a foul mood, does the PC darken the screen and turn all the colors to dark and forboding colors? Pretty soon it will just shut itself off: Please don't engage with the keyboard device while in a foul mood. My circuits are sensitive....
Actually, I did do my research. And you're not completetly off about your Cisco SE asking you to test NAC with L2 switches back in 2004 -- This phase of NAC has been in "testing" for some time, and was originally promised by Cisco several months sooner - not that you should ever trust the promises of a vendor. It doesn't surprise me that SE's were out talking to you about it a year ago - Cisco made its roadmap very public when it first announced the NAC program.
I'm disappointed that you fired a shot across my bow without checking your own facts first. Not all analysts are paper thin - I did my time building, evaluating, testing, benchmarking, and troubleshooting networks in the public and private sectors, and spent many a late night ferreting out bugs and sloppy implementations from vendors. And now I spend my time trying to help vendors and end users sort out the real juice from the Kool-Aid.
Joel "Clueless Analyst, must be too much time trolling/." Conover
Pardon me while I open this small box with Pandora's name written across the top...
IBM is a corporate entity. Corporate entities should be referred to as "it", not they. The title of this fine piece should be: IBM Opens Its Patent Portfolio to Open Source
Thank you for listening to my rant.
And in related news today, Symantec Corporation announced that it has developed innoculation files for the W32.Beagle.3@mm virus. Symantec officials commented that there is no apparent link between Beagle.2 and the crash of the Beagle lander, but it is not taking any chances.
I wonder if they use the same manufacturing facilities as Bungie's Halo 2? If so, we should be seeing the "0-day" copy floating around any minute now...
The author mentions that these products compete against the Cisco 3725, 3745, and 83xx (that should read 8xx series) routers.
In related news, Cisco today announced three new router families, the 1800 series, the 2800 series, and the 3800 series, which are positioned to replace the 1700, 2600, and 3700 series. Nice of 3Com to position against an obsolete technology platform
Competitors are crawling out of the woodwork with products positioned against Cisco's old tired iron, but Cisco isn't exactly sitting back on its laurels and scratching its head.
What all these competitors are missing is that Cisco's router strategy has subtly changed in the last 18 months: voice features and services are a key part of Cisco's differentiation, and none of its competitors, be it Juniper, ADTRAN, Tasman, Enterasys, or 3Com, have stepped up to challenge Cisco on that front.
VoIP is an ideal in the branch office, and Cisco is in a cushy position to get a corner on that market unless some of its competitors get their act together.
Of course, for that matter, why would you want to operate on that shakey, combustible operating system? (It is running *Windows XP* after all... see the screen saver)
This applet has incredible depth if you crank up the detail level. It would make a sweet screen saver, if someone took the time to convert the
Java applet into a more useable screensaver form.
I've noticed a bunch of discussion on this, so I thought I'd dump a bit of reality on to the situation...
First of all, there are currently two vendors that have working alpha chip implementations. The first is Radiata, which is discussed at length in this thread. The other is a company called Atheros (http://www.atheros.com). Both vendors create two-chip wireless CMOS solutions to operate in the 5 Ghz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure band (UNII). Both vendors are implementing what is known as the IEEE 802.11a standard for wireless networking. This standard was ratified at the same time as IEEE 802.11b (June of 99 or so). However, unlike 802.11b, which sends 11 million bits per second through the air using a flavor of direct sequence modulation, 802.11a uses OFDM ((coded)orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)... they drop the C from the acronym for asthetic reasons.
To answer some of the questions that have cropped up:
1) 802.11b and 802.11a use the exact same MAC. For the non-network literate, that simply means that the frame headers are arranged in the same way, and both use CSMA/CA (Carrier sense, multiple access with collision avoidance) as their method of transmission at layer-2. However, since 802.11b operates in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, and 802.11a operates in the 5 Ghz spectrum, there is no chance for interoperability. The good news is that if someone ever writes a good wireless sniffer (ala TCPdump, but for the MAC layer), it will work with both.11a and.11b.
2) In terms of distance, the 5 Ghz band is broken up in to three subsegments. At the lower end, there are two 100 Mhz 'sections'. The first section at 5.150-5.250 Ghz is limited to 50 milliwatts EIRP (Effective Isotropically Radiated Power). The second section, at 5.250-5.350 Ghz, is limited to 250 mW EIRP. The third section is way up at the top, from 5.725-5.825 Ghz, and allows up to 1 W EIRP. The products from radiata and atheros operate in the lower two sections, with a maximum power of 50 mW across the whole 200 Mhz. There are several reasons for this, mostly due to the fact that for proper channel selection, it would be difficult to move from one channel to another if you had to change power output... In any case, 50 mW on one of these radios is enough to get you roughly 300 feet.
3) It is important to note that while these radios
will offer a maximum distance of about 300 feet,
you won't get 54 Mbps at that distance (54 Mbps is the highest speed that these radios implement on a single radio channel). The 802.11a standard specifies a number of encoding and modulation techniques which result in different bandwidths from 6 Mbps, to 12, 18, and 24 Mbps. Since the amount of frequency being used isn't changing, something else must be. In this case, it is the number of bits being transmitted per oscillation. (1,2,3, or 4). There is a direct trade-off between signal complexity and distance. The more complex a signal (the more bits/oscillation), the more quickly it degrades, and the more succeptible it is to interference. Thus, at 100 feet, you might get 54 Mbps, but at 120 feet, the signal becomes degraded, and so the radio drops to a less complex modulation scheme, and your throughput drops to 24 Mbps.
Hope that clears up the issues regarding distance. Incidentally, the high 100 Mhz are 'reserved' for point to point wireless applications (at 1 watt). These have the potential to go up to 2 to 3 miles or more, depending on antenna design.
Another interesting thing to note here is that while Radiata is an australian based company, they had planned on targeting the US market from day one... 802.11a is an IEEE standard, and is currently only going to be adopted in the US.
In contrast, HIPERLAN/2 is the european standard
of choice. It does NOT share a MAC with 802.11b, which is one reason the HIPERLAN/2 system is still under development. HIPERLAN/2 works on a time-division multiple access system (TDMA), and has its roots in "wireless ATM". (ATM being asynchronous transfer mode, not cash machine protocol). HIPERLAN/2 offers the promise of better guarantees for signal (QOS), because there is no contention for channel amongst devices.
Let me keep rambling for one second more... Recently, Intelsil (the former radio electronics group from Harris Semiconductor) announced their own IEEE 802.11a wireless roadmap. The moral of the story here: The incumbants in this segment of the industry (intersil, lucent) are quietly making their own plans. 802.11a will take off, it will be big, it's just a matter of when.
Slashdot Mirror
But not your angry birds save game data. :(
I feel a Bastard Operator from Hell entry coming from this
FYI, the AXP solution is for Cisco Integrated Services Routers - the modular enterprise branch routers... Not for its switches. This is a branch play.
Human-Roach Hybrid - Don't they call that "Lawyer"?
News Flash: Scientists struggle to explain the polar meltdown occurring at the McMurdo Antarctic base. "We've never seen anything like it" commented Don, one of the researchers serving at McMurdo.
"I posted my pictures to the McMurdo file server, and a few minutes later, the whole thing just started sinking into the ground!" One industry expert attributes the effect to 'The Slashdot Effect'.
Joe L. Expert commented "With bandwidth at McMurdo at a premium, the sudden onslaught of traffic from a posting to the nerd news site Slashdot.org caused a gigantic power spike. The land lines carrying power and data to the McMurdo facility became superconducting in the ultra-cold temperatures there, and some sort of resonance field appears to have formed." L. Expert went on to say "These scientists may have accidentally discovered a new way to start a fusion reaction. Of course, this reaction can only be shut down if slashdot visitors stop hammering the poor server into the ground. If we don't act quickly, the whole southern icecap may melt, flooding the world and destroying civilization as we know it"
Joe Expert was forcibly removed from his office a few minutes later by several men in black suits.
Eww. How do I turn down the contrast on this thing? :-) I think I might be going blind.
..."The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
... As soon as I manage to rid the galaxy of those pesky Jedi, I will be unstoppa - oh, hello computer. No, I'm really just a happy, pleasant senator from Naboo.
In all seriousness - if you're in a foul mood, does the PC darken the screen and turn all the colors to dark and forboding colors? Pretty soon it will just shut itself off: Please don't engage with the keyboard device while in a foul mood. My circuits are sensitive....
Actually, I did do my research. And you're not completetly off about your Cisco SE asking you to test NAC with L2 switches back in 2004 -- This phase of NAC has been in "testing" for some time, and was originally promised by Cisco several months sooner - not that you should ever trust the promises of a vendor. It doesn't surprise me that SE's were out talking to you about it a year ago - Cisco made its roadmap very public when it first announced the NAC program. I'm disappointed that you fired a shot across my bow without checking your own facts first. Not all analysts are paper thin - I did my time building, evaluating, testing, benchmarking, and troubleshooting networks in the public and private sectors, and spent many a late night ferreting out bugs and sloppy implementations from vendors. And now I spend my time trying to help vendors and end users sort out the real juice from the Kool-Aid. Joel "Clueless Analyst, must be too much time trolling /." Conover
Pardon me while I open this small box with Pandora's name written across the top... IBM is a corporate entity. Corporate entities should be referred to as "it", not they. The title of this fine piece should be:
IBM Opens Its Patent Portfolio to Open Source
Thank you for listening to my rant.
And in related news today, Symantec Corporation announced that it has developed innoculation files for the W32.Beagle.3@mm virus. Symantec officials commented that there is no apparent link between Beagle.2 and the crash of the Beagle lander, but it is not taking any chances.
I wonder if they use the same manufacturing facilities as Bungie's Halo 2? If so, we should be seeing the "0-day" copy floating around any minute now...
The author mentions that these products compete against the Cisco 3725, 3745, and 83xx (that should read 8xx series) routers.
In related news, Cisco today announced three new router families, the 1800 series, the 2800 series, and the 3800 series, which are positioned to replace the 1700, 2600, and 3700 series. Nice of 3Com to position against an obsolete technology platform
Competitors are crawling out of the woodwork with products positioned against Cisco's old tired iron, but Cisco isn't exactly sitting back on its laurels and scratching its head.
What all these competitors are missing is that Cisco's router strategy has subtly changed in the last 18 months: voice features and services are a key part of Cisco's differentiation, and none of its competitors, be it Juniper, ADTRAN, Tasman, Enterasys, or 3Com, have stepped up to challenge Cisco on that front.
VoIP is an ideal in the branch office, and Cisco is in a cushy position to get a corner on that market unless some of its competitors get their act together.
Of course, for that matter, why would you want to operate on that shakey, combustible operating system? (It is running *Windows XP* after all... see the screen saver)
This applet has incredible depth if you crank up the detail level. It would make a sweet screen saver, if someone took the time to convert the Java applet into a more useable screensaver form.
I've noticed a bunch of discussion on this, so I thought I'd dump a bit of reality on to the situation... First of all, there are currently two vendors that have working alpha chip implementations. The first is Radiata, which is discussed at length in this thread. The other is a company called Atheros (http://www.atheros.com). Both vendors create two-chip wireless CMOS solutions to operate in the 5 Ghz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure band (UNII). Both vendors are implementing what is known as the IEEE 802.11a standard for wireless networking. This standard was ratified at the same time as IEEE 802.11b (June of 99 or so). However, unlike 802.11b, which sends 11 million bits per second through the air using a flavor of direct sequence modulation, 802.11a uses OFDM ((coded)orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)... they drop the C from the acronym for asthetic reasons. To answer some of the questions that have cropped up: 1) 802.11b and 802.11a use the exact same MAC. For the non-network literate, that simply means that the frame headers are arranged in the same way, and both use CSMA/CA (Carrier sense, multiple access with collision avoidance) as their method of transmission at layer-2. However, since 802.11b operates in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, and 802.11a operates in the 5 Ghz spectrum, there is no chance for interoperability. The good news is that if someone ever writes a good wireless sniffer (ala TCPdump, but for the MAC layer), it will work with both .11a and .11b.
2) In terms of distance, the 5 Ghz band is broken up in to three subsegments. At the lower end, there are two 100 Mhz 'sections'. The first section at 5.150-5.250 Ghz is limited to 50 milliwatts EIRP (Effective Isotropically Radiated Power). The second section, at 5.250-5.350 Ghz, is limited to 250 mW EIRP. The third section is way up at the top, from 5.725-5.825 Ghz, and allows up to 1 W EIRP. The products from radiata and atheros operate in the lower two sections, with a maximum power of 50 mW across the whole 200 Mhz. There are several reasons for this, mostly due to the fact that for proper channel selection, it would be difficult to move from one channel to another if you had to change power output... In any case, 50 mW on one of these radios is enough to get you roughly 300 feet.
3) It is important to note that while these radios
will offer a maximum distance of about 300 feet,
you won't get 54 Mbps at that distance (54 Mbps is the highest speed that these radios implement on a single radio channel). The 802.11a standard specifies a number of encoding and modulation techniques which result in different bandwidths from 6 Mbps, to 12, 18, and 24 Mbps. Since the amount of frequency being used isn't changing, something else must be. In this case, it is the number of bits being transmitted per oscillation. (1,2,3, or 4). There is a direct trade-off between signal complexity and distance. The more complex a signal (the more bits/oscillation), the more quickly it degrades, and the more succeptible it is to interference. Thus, at 100 feet, you might get 54 Mbps, but at 120 feet, the signal becomes degraded, and so the radio drops to a less complex modulation scheme, and your throughput drops to 24 Mbps.
Hope that clears up the issues regarding distance. Incidentally, the high 100 Mhz are 'reserved' for point to point wireless applications (at 1 watt). These have the potential to go up to 2 to 3 miles or more, depending on antenna design.
Another interesting thing to note here is that while Radiata is an australian based company, they had planned on targeting the US market from day one... 802.11a is an IEEE standard, and is currently only going to be adopted in the US.
In contrast, HIPERLAN/2 is the european standard
of choice. It does NOT share a MAC with 802.11b, which is one reason the HIPERLAN/2 system is still under development. HIPERLAN/2 works on a time-division multiple access system (TDMA), and has its roots in "wireless ATM". (ATM being asynchronous transfer mode, not cash machine protocol). HIPERLAN/2 offers the promise of better guarantees for signal (QOS), because there is no contention for channel amongst devices.
Let me keep rambling for one second more... Recently, Intelsil (the former radio electronics group from Harris Semiconductor) announced their own IEEE 802.11a wireless roadmap. The moral of the story here: The incumbants in this segment of the industry (intersil, lucent) are quietly making their own plans. 802.11a will take off, it will be big, it's just a matter of when.