How many markets has Microsoft failed in? - File and print took 5-10 years, but they own that. - Word and Excel's initial releases were "suboptimal", but they own that. - Web browser market is a similar story - Exchange's first release followed a similar path. they may not own messaging, but at ~50% and climbing, they're well on their way.
similar stories in other markets.
What impediments are there to MS owning search? maybe not this year, but 5 years from now. Sure Google has cash now, but so did Netscape.
I'd have to second that. I regularly use both MS Office and OpenOffice Beta2 and do not notice significant differences between the two. Some of my spreadsheets are fairly complex and some of my documents are large, but most are the garden variety items that get passed around the Fortune 500. Both applications work fine and neither of them cripple my very modest laptop with 512 MB of RAM.
I thought finding obscure weaknesses in products and crafting tests to exploit was a task for vendors not industry commentators.
Cisco's routers have supported v6 for a very, very long time now - at least 4 years, but probably longer. This includes their software routers as well as those that make extensive use of ASICs. Even merchant silicon includes IP v6 support.
I have a similar issue with an intern. You have to ask some questions about your product and the total value of each component of the process. Who is responsible for: - determining the market - setting the price - paying for sales and marketing expenses - acquiring and negotiating with customers/clients - determining the products feature set - establishing what the product will do, who will buy it, how much they'll pay etc.
I can continue, but the sad reality for developers like your partners is that while their code is of value, they haven't created the "product" just the code to execute it. If you've done all the other work, then they deserve about 10-20%. If you've actually done the other work, you can take your development specs to another developer. If they came to you with a finished product and all you had to do was sell it, then things reverse, but the percentages are highly variable depending upon the product and your market. If you're selling to small niche that requires special relationships just to get customer attention you get 30-60%. If you're selling a "me too" product with broad appeal you become the commodity as they can replace you quite easily with another sales partner.
Some simple questions to frame this are: If you walked away could they: - replace you quickly - continue to develop the product with features it's customer base wants - acquire new clients and or expand reach within existing clients
I've had the opportunity to watch scenarios like this play out over the years. Companies that don't reward the sales channel properly fail. It's that simple. Developers usually have little concept of how hard that process actually is. It's somewhat of an ignorance-based arrogance.
Of course at the end of the day all negitations boil down to how much each party needs the other. My guess is that these guys would have no means for selling the product without you and that you could find another means for developing it.
After writing this, I'm beginning to realize that the 20% I offered my developer is actually too high. Simply put, he would have no product without me, just the untapped, unfocused ability to write code.
Just a shot in the dark, but my Sony wouldn't work for over a year. I recently checked Palm's site and found: HotSyncCheck.zip It's worked since I ran that utility.
The RBOCs didn't miss the boat and jump in at the last minute, they slowed the industry and got in cheap. They had a war chest full of cash and the upstart IP and DSL providers didn't. By continually making it extremely difficult for CLECs to access their copper facilities, the RBOCs made providing DSL a slow, expensive process - which in turn made it a horrible product for consumers. (Any guesses why cable modems flourished much earlier than DSL?) After the RBOCs starved out the CLECs, waited out the IP providers, tortured the IP equipment providers, and studied their operational models, the RBOCs began building and acquiring IP networks in earnest and at a small fraction of the cost. In their minds and business models, they had to slow the adoption of broadband because they hadn't depreciated the 5E's they bought to handle the surge of modem lines. (They were forced by regulations to support POTS lines).
Believing that they were to dumb and arrogant to recognize that the Internet existed is just false. The RBOCs/ILECs sold the damn modem lines and local loops for T1's and T3's that the Internet ran over. They knew it was there and they knew it was too fast moving and expensive for them to engage in. So they starved their competition and waited out the storm.
Don't expect VoIP to be much different. Most RBOC and IXCs are offering some form of VoIP now.
Also, the VoIP that most people are commenting on is not what the article is referring to. It's talking about in-house IP-PBX's not IP Centrex or similar. Examples of an IP PBX are Cisco's Call Manager, Nortel Business Communications Manager (BCM), Avaya's IP office or Communications Managere, etc., etc.
Also, EVERY major PBX manufacturer is and has been focused on VOIP for some time now. NONE of them are developing TDM features, phones, etc. At the last VoiceCon vendors were asked whether they would even sell a non-IP system.
In summary, I found the article and commentary to be relatively wanton and uninformed.
1. People (especially self-proclaimed techno-geniuses) often look down on Psych majors trying to play with technology. The minor will help with that - especially if 2 years from now you decide to work in IT.
2. Perhaps more importantly, people hiring into positions that would entertain a psychology degree are very happy to have someone on their side to help them deal with those nasty nerds. Perhaps reason 1 has something to do with this feeling?
3. Most positions require a level of computer savvy these days. Even if it's a simple as knowing how to graph data points in Excel or helping with Internet applications.
4. It rounds out your education and demonstrates that you can perform well in left-brained a right-brained tasks. This is not common and positions you well within the marketplace. It's very common for non-technical managers to look at a resume and say "too geeky" or for technical managers to say "no tech skills"
A few hundred dollars is nothing if it helps you as much as I think it will.
You didn't state the size of your network other than to say small-to-mid size, but most small to mid-size networks can run fine without a distribution layer. You're also correct that it is an artifact of 1996-1999 switching technology limitations and large vendor propaganda that sells ports. You need to be careful about:
1. how you link your merged core/distribution switches: if your access uplinks are layer 2, you then have to span VLAN across core/distribution switches. If you plan on having your access switches perform layer 3 routing look into the costs your vendor may charge for that functionality. Some charge as much as $10,000 for the license.
2. Be careful you grow your VLANs and spanning trees. Definitely use per-VLAN spanning trees. Also seriously consider rapid spanning tree or vendor specific hacks (uplinkfast, backbone fast, etc.)
3. Use server access switches. Seriously consider redundant control processors in these.
4. Seriously consider redundant control and switch fabrics for the the core/distribution switches. In the three-layer model, this was not as much of a requirement. Also seriously consider the failover time associated with the redundancy you bought. Times ranges from stateful/1 second failover to 90 second reboots to the redundant processor.
5. If you do layer 3 routing and the access layer be very careful with your routing protocol design and avoid black-holes. Run through all failure scenarios and make sure you're covered.
6. Consider where you want to perform filtering for security, QoS, etc. By eliminating the distribution layer, you're forcing this the access layer. (arguably it belongs there, but think about how many places you'll be configuring and monitoring)
7. Most importantly, consider the costs after you've considered the above. You may find out that you're not saving much. Most of my clients do save, but some find out that after they've added redundancy and possibly upgraded switch models they are close the same cost.
8. Consider your support group. What are they used to? Can they adapt? Can they handle the added functionality that's been pushed to the core or access switches.
Again, I have clients with 1500 nodes running fine with a combined core/distribution. I also have a clients with 200 nodes that mandated three layers. IMHO the break point is somewhere around 1000-1500. As always every place is different, be careful, plan and you'll be fine.
When I got into audio I thought all of these things mattered, but I slowly realized that I couldn't tell the difference. Much like I can't tell the difference between a diamond with E color and F color. 12 years ago back a company introduced a cable that somehow carried different frequencies at different rates or some other similar magic - I really can't remember. A friend of mine swore he could tell a difference, I couldn't. He dropped hundreds on the cables, I didn't. Visit one of your friends who is recommending monster cable, listen to his system. Swap the cables with lower-end ones, and see if you can tell the difference. That hour of time may put your mind at ease.
Nomadix is probably the leader in this space. Their products are good, fast, and relatively cheap considering the functionality and low maintenance requirements. For small sites there is the wireless gateway and for larger ones (up to 200 concurrent users) there is the HotSpot gateway. You can review the products and feature list here
Someone else mentioned ZoneCd from publicip, which we looked into, but my client decided that a support contract was more in-line with their operational model. However, if you're posting here, chances are you would be fine with
ZoneCd.
Either way, you can avoid the mess of RADIUS and MS.
I'm sure I'll regret voicing this, but I'm curious why there's such a strong reaction from such a pro-Linux community. Wouldn't this enable you to create a myriad of products, gadgets, etc. that ran Linux, looked more elegant, and carried a much lower price point than custom system builds? It seems like a boon to the Linux hacking community.
The 806 is a dual Ethernet router that will do a good job
with QoS. It handles Low Latency Queuing for VoIP (essentially
priority queuing - whenever it sees a VoIP packet
- or any other type you define as high priority - it places it at the head of
the output queue. It also supports Committed Access Rate (CAR) for restricting
traffic rates for traffic patterns that you define (e.g. by IP address, protocol,
mac address, combinations of these). Class-based traffic shaping
which smooths the output rate to specified bit rates. CAR polices, shaping
controls the actual rate of transmission. It also supports a number
of other congestion management features along with a good deal of Cisco's
higher end features.
The 831 is similar to the 806, but includes a built-in
hardware accelerator for encryption that enables 3DES at rates of 2 Mbps or
more.
The 1710 includes all of the above, including the encryption
module, and many more features for QoS and general router functionality.
All of the above support a stateful firewall, IDS signature
matching, syslog, etc., etc.
If you like/need a web GUI, then the 831 or 1710 are the way
to go. Be sure and download Cisco's SDM for greatly improved web-based
configuration and management.
Data sheets for the above can be found in the following
locations:
I can't speak to the 2400 directly, but I have an 7 year old 2100 that has yet to fail at all. My office has used 23xx printers for (I think) 2 years without issue. My understanding is the 24xx is that it's the next generation of the 2300.
I believe MS got around this by ensuring compatibility with the then leader WordPerfect. There were special features for WordPerfect users and I believe, but don't remember, that you could even set it up to use WordPerfect keystrokes. It's OK to follow the smart things that MS does.
"you're wrong" - What about XORP
on
Router Wars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
http://www.xorp.org/
I haven't had time to play extensively, but it worked well during initial tests.
Of course, some of you may run and scream because Intel, the NSF, and Microsoft have provided some funding.
No, they use dual PowerPCs (don't know which model) on the Route Processor card, see: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/p roduct s_data_sheet09186a008022d5f1.html
and mostly likely similar chips on the line cards. Keep in mind that the system makes extensive use of custom ASICs for packet processing, switch fabric, and other functions.
This is a large battle, but not one that is won or lost over a few months and not one that is won by comparing simplistic metrics that the press like to use. Software, management, and operations support have always been key in the routing market. Many faster or bigger router companies with unique technologies have gone nowhere. The list is long and depressing. In any case, Cisco has made a dangerous jump ahead by introducing a new operating system that is loosely based on QNX and enables multi-chassis systems. It also enables in-service software upgrades and host of other operations friendly features. Juniper was perceived as having an edge in software, but Cisco will have leapfrogged them if their software delivers (and that's a big if in many people's minds).
Juniper's TX is somewhat handicapped in it's first release (I believe only 2 systems can be linked) and doesn't have a paying customer. Cisco's CRS-1 is limited in interface types in it's first release and has adubious first set of customers. There are many more issues including: weight, power consumption, scalability, support for specific features, handling lawful intercept across a system that large, integration with management systems, etc., etc, etc.
In short, the market is hesitant to purchase either system due to tight CapEx budgets and other pressures. Given the relatively diminutive size of the core router market when compared to edge routing and LAN switching, this a more a battle for prestige than for anything else.
For more info and industry commentary, see: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc _id=63 958&site=lightreading http://www.lightreading.com /document.asp?doc_id=63 916&site=lightreading http://www.lightreading.com /document.asp?site=test ing&doc_id=63606
IP Telephony is a reality. If you have a reliable network than you should investigate it. If you don't have a reliable network, then you've got some other business issues.
The following link is a year old, but provides a good overview of the market: http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/01 /eedge/bc m/collateral/nn103560-032103.pdf
All of the major vendors have low-cost small-mid sized solutions that are very price competitive. Those that do a better job in the small-mid size market are:
Avaya - IP office - tends to be expensive - especially for maintenance. NEC - very competitive on price - excellent integration with aerospace for wireless Cisco - via CallManager Express (call manager on a router) Nortel - newer Succession systems are better, phones are old and lesser than the others Alcatel - can be price competitive. offers a IP adapter for their digital phones so you can upgrade to IP for a small fee. Shoreline - no experience, but I've heard reasonable things.
For a single office, follow some simple rules. - Put voice on it's own VLAN and disallow traffic to/from other VLANs - protect your server IP call server as you would any other business critical server - plan extensively - enable simple Qos on your switch for the phones - pay for Power Over Ethernet capable switches (or powered patch panels) - connect all relevant components to a UPS - retain a few POTS lines for emergency purposes don't forget analog/IP adapters for fax machines and modems. - manage your data network better. there are many free tools available
They invoke a business model that applies to established markets not emerging markets. In a word they are efficient. In three words, they are good, fast, and cheap.
They sell to the masses and therefore gain economies of scale with their suppliers, support, sales channels, etc. The volumes and their leverage enables them to sell at lower margins.
If the consumer PC market was still highly customized, Dell's model would probably fail. If Walmart sold items that weren't commodities and required customized sales or support - their model would fail.
AGREED. I published a book and paid out a much greater sum to contributors than what Mr. Mitnick is offering. Especially for the components that will make is book interesting to a wider audience. The key with publishing is to attract as large as an audience as possible - which the anecdotal stories will certainly help to do because they give the masses an insight into the hidden world.
In general, royalties for U.S. sales are 5-10% of the sale price of the book from the publisher - usually 50-55% off of the cover price. Foreign sales often yield a fixed price per unit sold. Really geeky books have an audience of 5,000-10,000 readers. Mass market geek books 2-10 times that. The anecdotes will push this book well beyond that. I rant, but do the math and you'll see that $200 and $500 is very exploitive.
Slashdot Mirror
How many markets has Microsoft failed in?
- File and print took 5-10 years, but they own that.
- Word and Excel's initial releases were "suboptimal", but they own that.
- Web browser market is a similar story
- Exchange's first release followed a similar path. they may not own messaging, but at ~50% and climbing, they're well on their way.
similar stories in other markets.
What impediments are there to MS owning search? maybe not this year, but 5 years from now. Sure Google has cash now, but so did Netscape.
I'd have to second that. I regularly use both MS Office and OpenOffice Beta2 and do not notice significant differences between the two. Some of my spreadsheets are fairly complex and some of my documents are large, but most are the garden variety items that get passed around the Fortune 500. Both applications work fine and neither of them cripple my very modest laptop with 512 MB of RAM.
I thought finding obscure weaknesses in products and crafting tests to exploit was a task for vendors not industry commentators.
Cisco's routers have supported v6 for a very, very long time now - at least 4 years, but probably longer. This includes their software routers as well as those that make extensive use of ASICs. Even merchant silicon includes IP v6 support.
Please stop assuming everyone is out to get you.
I have a similar issue with an intern.
You have to ask some questions about your product and the total value of each component of the process. Who is responsible for:
- determining the market
- setting the price
- paying for sales and marketing expenses
- acquiring and negotiating with customers/clients
- determining the products feature set
- establishing what the product will do, who will buy it, how much they'll pay etc.
I can continue, but the sad reality for developers like your partners is that while their code is of value, they haven't created the "product" just the code to execute it. If you've done all the other work, then they deserve about 10-20%. If you've actually done the other work, you can take your development specs to another developer. If they came to you with a finished product and all you had to do was sell it, then things reverse, but the percentages are highly variable depending upon the product and your market. If you're selling to small niche that requires special relationships just to get customer attention you get 30-60%. If you're selling a "me too" product with broad appeal you become the commodity as they can replace you quite easily with another sales partner.
Some simple questions to frame this are:
If you walked away could they:
- replace you quickly
- continue to develop the product with features it's customer base wants
- acquire new clients and or expand reach within existing clients
I've had the opportunity to watch scenarios like this play out over the years. Companies that don't reward the sales channel properly fail. It's that simple. Developers usually have little concept of how hard that process actually is. It's somewhat of an ignorance-based arrogance.
Of course at the end of the day all negitations boil down to how much each party needs the other. My guess is that these guys would have no means for selling the product without you and that you could find another means for developing it.
After writing this, I'm beginning to realize that the 20% I offered my developer is actually too high. Simply put, he would have no product without me, just the untapped, unfocused ability to write code.
Just a shot in the dark, but my Sony wouldn't work for over a year. I recently checked Palm's site and found: HotSyncCheck.zip
It's worked since I ran that utility.
The RBOCs didn't miss the boat and jump in at the last minute, they slowed the industry and got in cheap. They had a war chest full of cash and the upstart IP and DSL providers didn't. By continually making it extremely difficult for CLECs to access their copper facilities, the RBOCs made providing DSL a slow, expensive process - which in turn made it a horrible product for consumers. (Any guesses why cable modems flourished much earlier than DSL?) After the RBOCs starved out the CLECs, waited out the IP providers, tortured the IP equipment providers, and studied their operational models, the RBOCs began building and acquiring IP networks in earnest and at a small fraction of the cost.
In their minds and business models, they had to slow the adoption of broadband because they hadn't depreciated the 5E's they bought to handle the surge of modem lines. (They were forced by regulations to support POTS lines).
Believing that they were to dumb and arrogant to recognize that the Internet existed is just false. The RBOCs/ILECs sold the damn modem lines and local loops for T1's and T3's that the Internet ran over. They knew it was there and they knew it was too fast moving and expensive for them to engage in. So they starved their competition and waited out the storm.
Don't expect VoIP to be much different. Most RBOC and IXCs are offering some form of VoIP now.
Also, the VoIP that most people are commenting on is not what the article is referring to. It's talking about in-house IP-PBX's not IP Centrex or similar. Examples of an IP PBX are Cisco's Call Manager, Nortel Business Communications Manager (BCM), Avaya's IP office or Communications Managere, etc., etc.
Also, EVERY major PBX manufacturer is and has been focused on VOIP for some time now. NONE of them are developing TDM features, phones, etc. At the last VoiceCon vendors were asked whether they would even sell a non-IP system.
In summary, I found the article and commentary to be relatively wanton and uninformed.
check out: http://netdisco.org/
It also draws a layer 2 map and records device IP, MAC, and switch port locations which can be very handy.
Selling OS-X may gain them earlier insight into Apple's designs. This would help them in their "let's make PC's that look like Macs" process.
Michael Dell is no longer CEO. He's chairman of the board. Kevin Rollins is CEO.
1. People (especially self-proclaimed techno-geniuses) often look down on Psych majors trying to play with technology. The minor will help with that - especially if 2 years from now you decide to work in IT.
2. Perhaps more importantly, people hiring into positions that would entertain a psychology degree are very happy to have someone on their side to help them deal with those nasty nerds. Perhaps reason 1 has something to do with this feeling?
3. Most positions require a level of computer savvy these days. Even if it's a simple as knowing how to graph data points in Excel or helping with Internet applications.
4. It rounds out your education and demonstrates that you can perform well in left-brained a right-brained tasks. This is not common and positions you well within the marketplace. It's very common for non-technical managers to look at a resume and say "too geeky" or for technical managers to say "no tech skills"
A few hundred dollars is nothing if it helps you as much as I think it will.
You didn't state the size of your network other than to say small-to-mid size, but most small to mid-size networks can run fine without a distribution layer. You're also correct that it is an artifact of 1996-1999 switching technology limitations and large vendor propaganda that sells ports. You need to be careful about:
1. how you link your merged core/distribution switches: if your access uplinks are layer 2, you then have to span VLAN across core/distribution switches. If you plan on having your access switches perform layer 3 routing look into the costs your vendor may charge for that functionality. Some charge as much as $10,000 for the license.
2. Be careful you grow your VLANs and spanning trees. Definitely use per-VLAN spanning trees. Also seriously consider rapid spanning tree or vendor specific hacks (uplinkfast, backbone fast, etc.)
3. Use server access switches. Seriously consider redundant control processors in these.
4. Seriously consider redundant control and switch fabrics for the the core/distribution switches. In the three-layer model, this was not as much of a requirement. Also seriously consider the failover time associated with the redundancy you bought. Times ranges from stateful/1 second failover to 90 second reboots to the redundant processor.
5. If you do layer 3 routing and the access layer be very careful with your routing protocol design and avoid black-holes. Run through all failure scenarios and make sure you're covered.
6. Consider where you want to perform filtering for security, QoS, etc. By eliminating the distribution layer, you're forcing this the access layer. (arguably it belongs there, but think about how many places you'll be configuring and monitoring)
7. Most importantly, consider the costs after you've considered the above. You may find out that you're not saving much. Most of my clients do save, but some find out that after they've added redundancy and possibly upgraded switch models they are close the same cost.
8. Consider your support group. What are they used to? Can they adapt? Can they handle the added functionality that's been pushed to the core or access switches.
Again, I have clients with 1500 nodes running fine with a combined core/distribution. I also have a clients with 200 nodes that mandated three layers. IMHO the break point is somewhere around 1000-1500. As always every place is different, be careful, plan and you'll be fine.
When I got into audio I thought all of these things mattered, but I slowly realized that I couldn't tell the difference. Much like I can't tell the difference between a diamond with E color and F color. 12 years ago back a company introduced a cable that somehow carried different frequencies at different rates or some other similar magic - I really can't remember. A friend of mine swore he could tell a difference, I couldn't. He dropped hundreds on the cables, I didn't.
Visit one of your friends who is recommending monster cable, listen to his system. Swap the cables with lower-end ones, and see if you can tell the difference. That hour of time may put your mind at ease.
Nomadix is probably the leader in this space. Their products are good, fast, and relatively cheap considering the functionality and low maintenance requirements. For small sites there is the wireless gateway and for larger ones (up to 200 concurrent users) there is the HotSpot gateway. You can review the products and feature list here
Someone else mentioned ZoneCd from publicip, which we looked into, but my client decided that a support contract was more in-line with their operational model. However, if you're posting here, chances are you would be fine with ZoneCd. Either way, you can avoid the mess of RADIUS and MS.I'm sure I'll regret voicing this, but I'm curious why there's such a strong reaction from such a pro-Linux community. Wouldn't this enable you to create a myriad of products, gadgets, etc. that ran Linux, looked more elegant, and carried a much lower price point than custom system builds? It seems like a boon to the Linux hacking community.
The 806 is a dual Ethernet router that will do a good job with QoS. It handles Low Latency Queuing for VoIP (essentially priority queuing - whenever it sees a VoIP packet - or any other type you define as high priority - it places it at the head of the output queue. It also supports Committed Access Rate (CAR) for restricting traffic rates for traffic patterns that you define (e.g. by IP address, protocol, mac address, combinations of these). Class-based traffic shaping which smooths the output rate to specified bit rates. CAR polices, shaping controls the actual rate of transmission. It also supports a number of other congestion management features along with a good deal of Cisco's higher end features.
The 831 is similar to the 806, but includes a built-in hardware accelerator for encryption that enables 3DES at rates of 2 Mbps or more.
The 1710 includes all of the above, including the encryption module, and many more features for QoS and general router functionality.
All of the above support a stateful firewall, IDS signature matching, syslog, etc., etc.
If you like/need a web GUI, then the 831 or 1710 are the way to go. Be sure and download Cisco's SDM for greatly improved web-based configuration and management.
Data sheets for the above can be found in the following locations:
806
831
1710
SDM
I can't speak to the 2400 directly, but I have an 7 year old 2100 that has yet to fail at all.
My office has used 23xx printers for (I think) 2 years without issue. My understanding is the 24xx is that it's the next generation of the 2300.
I believe MS got around this by ensuring compatibility with the then leader WordPerfect. There were special features for WordPerfect users and I believe, but don't remember, that you could even set it up to use WordPerfect keystrokes. It's OK to follow the smart things that MS does.
http://www.xorp.org/
I haven't had time to play extensively, but it worked well during initial tests.
Of course, some of you may run and scream because Intel, the NSF, and Microsoft have provided some funding.
No, they use dual PowerPCs (don't know which model) on the Route Processor card, see:p roduct s_data_sheet09186a008022d5f1.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/
and mostly likely similar chips on the line cards.
Keep in mind that the system makes extensive use of custom ASICs for packet processing, switch fabric, and other functions.
if that's not redundant.
c _id=63 958&site=lightreadingm /document.asp?doc_id=63 916&site=lightreadingm /document.asp?site=test ing&doc_id=63606
This is a large battle, but not one that is won or lost over a few months and not one that is won by comparing simplistic metrics that the press like to use. Software, management, and operations support have always been key in the routing market. Many faster or bigger router companies with unique technologies have gone nowhere. The list is long and depressing. In any case, Cisco has made a dangerous jump ahead by introducing a new operating system that is loosely based on QNX and enables multi-chassis systems. It also enables in-service software upgrades and host of other operations friendly features. Juniper was perceived as having an edge in software, but Cisco will have leapfrogged them if their software delivers (and that's a big if in many people's minds).
Juniper's TX is somewhat handicapped in it's first release (I believe only 2 systems can be linked) and doesn't have a paying customer. Cisco's CRS-1 is limited in interface types in it's first release and has adubious first set of customers. There are many more issues including: weight, power consumption, scalability, support for specific features, handling lawful intercept across a system that large, integration with management systems, etc., etc, etc.
In short, the market is hesitant to purchase either system due to tight CapEx budgets and other pressures. Given the relatively diminutive size of the core router market when compared to edge routing and LAN switching, this a more a battle for prestige than for anything else.
For more info and industry commentary, see:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?do
http://www.lightreading.co
http://www.lightreading.co
IP Telephony is a reality. If you have a reliable network than you should investigate it. If you don't have a reliable network, then you've got some other business issues.
The following link is a year old, but provides a good overview of the market:
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/0
All of the major vendors have low-cost small-mid sized solutions that are very price competitive. Those that do a better job in the small-mid size market are:
Avaya - IP office - tends to be expensive - especially for maintenance.
NEC - very competitive on price - excellent integration with aerospace for wireless
Cisco - via CallManager Express (call manager on a router)
Nortel - newer Succession systems are better, phones are old and lesser than the others
Alcatel - can be price competitive. offers a IP adapter for their digital phones so you can upgrade to IP for a small fee.
Shoreline - no experience, but I've heard reasonable things.
For a single office, follow some simple rules.
- Put voice on it's own VLAN and disallow traffic to/from other VLANs
- protect your server IP call server as you would any other business critical server
- plan extensively
- enable simple Qos on your switch for the phones
- pay for Power Over Ethernet capable switches (or powered patch panels)
- connect all relevant components to a UPS
- retain a few POTS lines for emergency purposes
don't forget analog/IP adapters for fax machines and modems.
- manage your data network better. there are many free tools available
J and R (www.jandr.com) down on Park Row (N, R train to City Hall, 2,3 train to Park Place) has reasonable prices, wide selection, etc.
I've found Steve's digicams to be an excellent source Of in-depth reviews.
The main site has volumes of info on cameras, printers, software, and even batteries.
Good luck
They invoke a business model that applies to established markets not emerging markets. In a word they are efficient. In three words, they are good, fast, and cheap.
They sell to the masses and therefore gain economies of scale with their suppliers, support, sales channels, etc. The volumes and their leverage enables them to sell at lower margins.
If the consumer PC market was still highly customized, Dell's model would probably fail. If Walmart sold items that weren't commodities and required customized sales or support - their model would fail.
AGREED. I published a book and paid out a much greater sum to contributors than what Mr. Mitnick is offering. Especially for the components that will make is book interesting to a wider audience. The key with publishing is to attract as large as an audience as possible - which the anecdotal stories will certainly help to do because they give the masses an insight into the hidden world.
In general, royalties for U.S. sales are 5-10% of the sale price of the book from the publisher - usually 50-55% off of the cover price. Foreign sales often yield a fixed price per unit sold. Really geeky books have an audience of 5,000-10,000 readers. Mass market geek books 2-10 times that. The anecdotes will push this book well beyond that. I rant, but do the math and you'll see that $200 and $500 is very exploitive.