Networking

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh blogged Thursday on "Ten things that finally killed Net neutrality."

Most of his reasons related to a lack of political support from both Republican and Democratic politicians and bureaucrats. But those all sound like temporary delays to me.

I'm pretty sure Net neutrality will pop back up again because there's an inherent conflict between the business interests of network operators and the desires of… Read more

I'm sure I'm going to get in trouble with the CNET IT team for this, but I just set up my computer to run Spiceworks, a business network scanning and monitoring application. Spiceworks scans a PC's local network and reports on the health of various items. You can tell which printers are running out of ink, which PCs have out-of-date virus scanners, and so on.

To monitor PCs, you need to be a systems administrator with a network administrator login for the computers in your office. I don't have that access, but I was able to peer into the data the system returned on my own PC, as well as on printers and a few open-access computers here in the office. I found the level of information both deep and clearly presented. For example, administrators with this tool will easily be able to see which applications are installed at the company and which users are running old versions. It can also kick off Windows remote control sessions for hands-on tech support.

Spiceworks also has a full help-desk system through which users can submit service requests. The system then lets you assign and track tickets until they are done.

… Read more

You might wonder why I'm posting again so soon after that twelve-post blogging marathon at Hot Chips. Well, I got a new gizmo last night and I just had to write about it.

Two years ago yesterday, I bought a Sierra Wireless AirCard 860 (a PCMCIA cellular modem card) from Cingular for my Apple PowerBook G4. I also… Read more

On to the networking session at Hot Chips. Previous Hot Chips installments covered the Reed Hundt speech, AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!

After the highly political talk by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, the Networking session pulled us sharply back into… Read more

Yes, I'm still at Hot Chips. This post covers a special presentation by Reed Hundt of Frontline Wireless, who is a former chairman of the FCC. (Michael Kanellos has also blogged about this speech, here.) Previous Hot Chips installments include the AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!

Reed Hundt is best known as a former chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), where his role in enacting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 generated considerable controversy.

He opened his talk by regaling us with… Read more

This is the seventh in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

This session has two presentations--one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.

The SiBeam presentation is easily summarized: It describes a chipset that sends uncompressed HDTV video over… Read more

This is the sixth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

We began Tuesday morning with a session on assorted technology developments.

The first talk was from Sun Microsystems, about the company's Proximity chip-to-chip interconnect technology. Today, to put multiple chips in a package--a common technique in high-end servers, for example--each chip will be individually connected to the package substrate through conductive… Read more

This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)

This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream… Read more

The usual CNET Buzz Out Loud podcast crew is operating at reduced capacity this week. Molly Wood and Jason Howell are out; only Tom Merritt is in the office. He's too chicken to do the podcast all alone, so he roped me in. Normally, I wouldn't blog a BOL guest appearance, but today we spent a good amount of the podcast discussing Web-related issues, including American Airlines' attack on Google, the Skype outage, Comcast's sabotage of BitTorrent transfers, Japan's drive to build a replacement Internet, and a guaranteed net-neutral ISP, Copowi.

Give it a listen. And … Read more