The Telepresence myth

I picked up this Dilbert from the Cisco CTO's twitter feed. It is a humorous take on video conferencing which Cisco has renamed Telepresence. Video conferencing failed to become a saturation technology and was limited to a niche market. Telepresence will be no different as it is video conferencing in a different and more expensive guise and it is a myth to expect it to replace the jet plane.

If video conferencing is to suceed it must be made cheaper and not more expensive and as such, Telepresence misses the boat. It is the credit crunch, people, more equipment expense and greater bandwidth costs cannot translate to greater cost efficiencies. (Unless you swallow the marketing bull, hook, line and sinker!) If memory served me right Ethernet clobbered Token-ring because it was cheaper and thus the path to collaboration nirvana should be with technologies that cost less.

Video conferencing cartoons are far and few between, mainly because it's reach is limited. Telepresence is appropriate for cartoons as its a joke.

'n Moerse groot slaggat

Now this was an impressive pothole, even by Meerkat standards! Potholes are a daily occurrence in this neck of the Kalahari!

Sandton Drive fibre installation

Installation of fibre in Sandton Drive, South Africa.

iBurst earthstation

iBurst earthstation.

The Meerkats from the iBurst bolthole

Sam-san

Ian-san

Mike-san

Neil-san

Neil Grey-san

Pierre-san

Rod-san

Ronald-san

Lost marbles?

My mate from the far northern burrows, wrote about the over exaggeration of statistics in a security context. I have long believed that IT security types have lost their marbles, and are absolutely besotted with the fake world of statistics and forsake reality. This realization dawned on me after the following episode:

The Chief Lost Marble Person (CLMP) in charge of Information Security commissioned the regular scanning of the network with Nessus. This report had an extremely long list of vulnerable workstations. I spoke to our AD admin who created a GPO to enable the desktop firewall on all our workstations.

The list of vulnerable workstations dropped by 80% on the next report. The CLMP instead of being pleased, said we had buggered up his stats and we had to disable the firewalls. Somehow in his head a disabled firewall and statistics was more secure?

ATM overview

Download the full ATM slidedeck here. This seems strange with hindsight: "ATM has the potential to displace all existing inter networking technologies, ATM has the potential to displace all other LAN technologies in the backbone."

Madge Smart Ringswitch Version 2

The version that went dirty with transparent switching!

Madge Smart Ringswitch Version 3

The Ringswitch, "Cadillac of the network!"

Winners and losers

From the glory years of Mr Shel Musiker!

The Madge Smart CAU

A trip down memory lane, when men were men and networks were token-ring.

OpenDNS exterminates the worms

Dan Goodin writes in OpenDNS rolls out Conficker tracking, blocking: "With an estimated 10 million PCs infected by the stealthy worm known as Conficker, it's a good bet that plenty of administrators are blissfully unaware that their networks are playing host to the pest. Now, a free service called OpenDNS is offering a new feature designed to alert administrators to the damage and help them contain it."

OpenDNS does a damn fine job and this is yet another reason to use the service, which I do.

cisco sheep

According to Twittersheep, I'm a ciscofanboy. I wonder if my flock are sheep or lemmings?