Network World: Users demand better net hardware mgmt.
Hardware vendors have long supplemented their gear with management applications – take CiscoWorks, for example – but industry watchers say the trend is to make gear easier to manage alongside competitive hardware and by third-party software applications such as CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.
This should come as a shock to no one – one of the reasons we made third-party integration a priority in developing NetQoS Performance Center was because IT guys want to be able to go to one tool in order to manage their network, no matter how many companies made the hardware and software on the network. Multiple administration tools lead to stress and headaches. And with enough stress and a bad enough headache, network engineers, ever the clever sort, will find that the one tool they reach for is a hammer…
ZDNet: Cisco invests in networking start-up Avega
Between Xbox360s being used as HDTV media centers, the AppleTV, and the Windows Home Server, home networking seems to be a growth market. This may be one reason why Cisco decided to invest in Avega – to get into that “home networking” space.
Avega, with employees in the United States and Australia, specializes in technology that can wirelessly connect home entertainment gear such as media center PCs, portable media players, cell phones, stereo equipment, networked storage and set-top boxes. The company has also developed technology that controls and manages these devices and the content it wirelessly shuttles through the house.
Cisco is well known as an infrastructure equipment maker. For years, it has supplied large businesses and Internet service providers with the switches and routers that shuttle Internet traffic from one place to another. Cisco now wants a piece of the burgeoning market for home entertainment networking gear.
Personally, I’m not looking forward to explaining home networking to my parents. Try explaining “The network is the computer” to people who thought for quite some time that the monitor is the computer.
Yahoo News: Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet
The same openness that makes the Internet such a valuable communications medium, leveling the playing field between digital distributors also made it a system without safeguards from hackers and spammers. This story from Yahoo details some of the initiatives designed to “replace” the current “dumb network” Internet.
No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.
Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was “generally healthy” because the current technology “does not satisfy all needs.”
One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
Or keep it very secret until an exposé in Wired Magazine….
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Time stands still for Hempfield teen in lockup
A quick summary of this case: Cody Webb, a sophomore at Hempfield Area High School, made a phone call at 3:12 a.m. to his school’s automated line. It was March 11, the day that the new Daylight Savings Time took effect.
At 4:17 a.m., a as-yet unidentified caller phoned in a bomb threat to the school on that same phone line.
However, the school failed to update their phone systems to the new Daylight Savings Time and logged the call at 3:17 a.m.
By now you can probably tell this story doesn’t have a happy ending. Cody Webb – a student who, according to his mother, didn’t have even so much as a detention on his record – spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before someone finally did the math.
High school Principal Kathy Charlton confirmed that some of the district’s clocks were wrong because of the changeover to daylight-saving time, which was three weeks earlier this year.
“All the time stamps were screwed up. Some did (change over), some didn’t,” Charlton said. “Everyone’s system had to be set manually. There were a lot of clocks involved.”
[Cobb family attorney Tim] Andrews said state police and school officials botched the investigation. The school received 35 calls early on the morning of March 11, and few were actively investigated, he said.
“All it would have taken was 10 more minutes to look at the information. Everybody jumped the gun and caused this kid and his family to go through this,” Andrews said.
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