As we move toward very high speed flows in optical networks, particularly in agile, dynamically switched networks, the ability to ensure the security and integrity of these networks is crucial. It’s much better to get security right “up front” than to try to engineer it in after the fact…
See this press release from Nortel…
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.
Check out the National Geographic Water Hole Cam in Botswana.
A great use of technology. Just think of the educational opportunities here, esp. in the K12 arena.
Note: as of 10/4/05, the site appears to be swamped (no pun intended!) — hopefully usage will stabilize, and we’ll be able to access again soon…
I’m listening to a presentation on “Hot Topics in Video Conferencing” at the Internet2 meeting. Most discussions have been relatively predictable conversations, but just heard a fascinating discussion about the practicality of videoconferencing on a 3G cell phone. Due to the small screen, effective conferencing works at 64Kbps. I had not realized how near-term this technology is. An example of one possible application was the potential of showing insurance claim information to the home office. Of course, the same issues we have today with firewalls, etc. in today’s environment are still to be dealt with, hopefully through emerging standards.
This is a huge market — one panelist said that the market for 3G phones is growing at 40% per quarter! Already, more 3G phones have been sold than the installed base of H.323 videoconferencing units.
This is something I’ll be tracking with interest…
Saw this on slashdot today:
http://wifi.google.com/faq.html
Might not be up anymore, but I copied the text here…
Continue reading
Sat in on a very good and thorough session this morning on lambda-based networking. Joe St. Sauver of the University of Oregon gave a talk that was a good overview of applications and advanced networking and the things that led to creation of NLR. He talked about the place of lambda networks in supporting production and research, and speculated on the relationship of Abilene and NLR.
The slides of this talk are very detailed; Joe said that he intentionally made them this way to support the webcast or for folks that would read the slides in a standalone fashion. Therefore, this is a great overview/status report for anyone who is interested in getting better up to speed in optical networking.
Just sat in on a good session about SIP.edu. In particular, there was good discussion about numbering plans (i.e. how do we identify and dial) especially considering the “legacy” devices with 12-key interfaces that are difficult to use with the email address paradigm that’s what SIP.edu 1.0 focused on. A popular proposal seems to be to use what’s called the ISN (ITAD Subscriber Number, where ITAD = Internet Telephony Administrative Domain). Basically, there is an RFC that is was not widely used that set up a number (ranging from 256 up to 10^32 – 1) that would be used sort of like a domain name in conjunction with a locally defined number. There is the character ‘*’ used as the separator between the ITAD and the local number (local number comes first) so that if an organization had ITAD 256, then “phone” 12345 in that organization (not location!) would be 12345*256. This would use a bit of DNS configuration through an NAPTR record to rewrite to a SIP extenstion at a given gateway. Seems like a quite workable scheme…
Just a brief note to follow on my podcasting thoughts on 9/16…Duke is holding a podcasting symposium. Sounds interesting!
I’m off to the Internet2 meeting in Philadelphia in just a bit. I’ll try to post a few things from that venue.
Wow, a wireless broadband rollout covering 2/3 of the population of Canada. I hear that Clearwire is moving forward with putting up transmitters for WiMax wireless broadband here in Chapel Hill. It would be exciting to get further competition to the DSL and Cable companies. Looking forward to developments!
I guess I’m one of the late adopters of a number of technologies. I didn’t get my iPod until Christmas of 2004, though I did buy my oldest son one the year before, and #2 son is getting one from Santa this year. I’m intrigued by podcasting, though I’ll admit that I don’t listen to the ones that I subscribe to very often…I just like having them there. I’m quite intrigued by the idea of podcasting lectures. Not that from a conceptual standpoint this is new technology (folks have been doing casette recordings of lectures since the dark ages). However, now that Apple made podcasting easy by incorporating in iTunes (podcasting for dummies) even folks like me can easily subscribe.
A number of universities are experimenting with podcasting of lectures. Here’s a article from the Chronicle from March about Drexel, and a September Chronicle article about podcasting at Purdue.
The technology makes it much easier to contemplate doing this. Hey, maybe the folks at Duke were onto something when they distributed iPods to incoming students.
Those of us in IT who pooh-poohed Duke when this first came out need to remember that there are many ways technology development and adoption move forward, and we don’t have a corner on that understanding.
I’ll be interested to see how this all works out; here’s an article about the Duke experiment.
I’ve gotta say, though, that as an adjunct faculty member here at UNC (in the School of Information & Library Science), having all my lectures recorded would be a strange thing…I guess I’d get used to it, but I’m sure that I’ll sound like Gomer Pyle…well gollleee, y’all….