Technology

Overheard - Top 10 Internet Memes

Here’s my list of the Top 10 Internet Memes.  Want to know how these people felt about becoming an Internet phenomenon? So did I.

1. Dancing Baby
OO-ga-chuka. OO-ga-chuka.  Michael Girard’s software demo creeped people out even as they wondered — how did they make that???

2. Cookie Recipe from Neiman Marcus
True or False: After a woman and her daughter are ripped off dining at the Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas, they use the Internet to exact revenge.

3. Blair Witch Project
Before the film even opened, there were fan sites and Usenet Groups. BWP demonstrated the power of the Internet to create a buzz, no matter how bad your movie was.

4. LOLcats — I can has cheeseburger?
You can thank Eric Nakagawa for starting this digital photo craze.

5. Bad Day at the Office
We didn’t know his name back then, but Vinnie Licciardi did what a lot of us would have liked to.

6. LonelyGirl15
Is Bree real or is she some new kind of TV program on the Internet? Over two million people tuned in to find out.

7. RickRoll
When you’re RickRolled, it’s like you open a door on the Internet and your whole family jumps out and yells “SURPRISE!”

8. Thriller wedding dance
If you’ve been to a wedding lately, you may have noticed the trend towards a choreographed first dance. No, it’s not because of Dancing with the Stars.

9. Miss South Carolina
Dumb blonde? Nope — just a fascinating look at panic.

10. Here It Goes Again
Tired of your band playing in the garage? Put that gym equipment to good use.

Overheard - The cost of virtual server sprawl

Fundamentally, we believe virtualization sprawl can be a much bigger problem than physical sprawl. Thomas Bittman, as quoted in Virtual server sprawl kills cost savings, experts warns

Video - Christmas Display #5

Video - Christmas Display #1

Video - Christmas Display #4

Video - Christmas Display #2

Video - Christmas Display #3

Overdheard - The future of the Internet according to Pew

By 2020, the virtual world will  have blended with the physical world; to speak of them as separate spheres will seem anachronistic. Nicholas Carr, as quoted in Pew: 55% of Experts Herald Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality in 2020

Here’s a link to the newest Pew Internet Life report.

Overheard - PLM or “It’s hard to be proactive”

Companies often use lifecycle management as a last ditch effort, a “Hail Mary” pass…In reality, product lifecycle management is a difficult task. The root of its difficulty lies in its proactive nature. Lisa Roner,  Get the Most out of Your Brands: The Keys to Effective Product Lifecycle Management

Companies naturally take reactive stances to their products as they move through their lifecycles, responding to ebbs and flows in profits, reacting to competition, worrying about the inevitable patent expiration. Product lifecycle management must be a proactive initiative. It must be a key organizational aspect of the company and not a burden, a positive force for profit and for the future of the business. And that’s a difficult transition.

Overheard - How WAN accelerators work

In a typical setup, a WAN accelerator is placed at each end of a WAN link. The appliance sits on the LAN side, on the clear-text side of a VPN device and behind the firewall or Internet router, and intercepts all traffic. The traffic is compressed, sent across the WAN, decompressed by the remote accelerator and then forwarded to the destination. Mike DeMaria, Breaking the WAN Bottleneck

Peter Sevcik also does a really good job explaining how WAN accelerators work and the teaches us the difference between “transparent addressing” (term used by Cisco) and “correct addressing” (term used by Riverbed).

There are two approaches used as seen by the routers between the accelerators. Transparent addressing shows the original client-server source and destination addresses and hides the addresses of the accelerators. Correct addressing shows the addresses of the accelerators and hides the addresses of client-server. Both approaches work. Both approaches have their pros and cons…

In a transparent addressing architecture, the monitoring tools will continue to show network usage by the original client-server addresses and port numbers. But you will not directly see the total traffic carried between the accelerators. Remember that they are masked.

With a correct addressing architecture, traffic monitoring tools will show traffic as having come from/to the acceleration appliances. In this case the client-server traffic volume is masked. However, in both cases the traffic volumes that are reported by routers or probes between the accelerators will be dramatically changed from the original true traffic as seen on the LANs.

In both cases the best solution is to move the network monitoring probes to the LAN-side of the appliance or to gather usage information directly from the appliance itself. Ongoing real-time before-and-after picture of what the accelerators is doing (like how much compression is being achieved) can only be supplied by the accelerators. So we recommend shifting traffic monitoring to the appliance. That way you get same accurate data from either approach.