VoIP: more survivable than legacy PBX

Tolly on Technology:  VoIP: more survivable than legacy PBX

For many years, those of us in the analyst community had been talking about the coming migration to VoIP. While we touted the benefits, virtually everyone acknowledged that the price we would pay would be to say goodbye to the vaunted “five nines” of 99.999% uptime. But innovations achieved during the current VoIP revolution illustrate that VoIP systems can be demonstrably more survivable and reliable than their predecessors.

Cache Advance:  Free software: It all ‘ads’ up

I can see it now: I’m in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation to a potential client. Just as I get to the part where I am explaining the true value of my proposal, up pops an advertisement for a feminine hygiene product.

‘Net Insider:  Carbonaceous computers at Christmas

If things go as some people in the French government have proposed, Parisian parents may not be able to buy a computer for their kids next Christmas. I bet you can guess, without much difficulty, what narrow-minded topic would cause such a possibility.

Nutter’s Help Desk:  Networking a military field unit overseas

Nutter helps a 140+-person Army Field Artillery Company in Iraq fix its network issues

Eye on the Carriers:  A look at the big happenings of ’05

If you’re tracking telcos, 2005 has been a pretty momentous year. The big theme? Seismic shifts in the communications industry. Take a look at what’s happened.

‘Net Buzz:  Paul English vs. Angel.com: It’s getting ugly

Angel.com’s attempt to turn lemons into lemonade has left a sour taste in Paul English’s mouth. And yet, in a bit of lip-smacking irony, it was English who provided the lemons.

Cool Tools:  Listen to your e-mails on an iPod

Also: The perfect stocking stuffers for your favorite network engineer

Editorials:  Reviewing our ’05 predictions

At the beginning of the year we laid out a handful of predictions and it’s time to review.

Gearhead:  VMware Player follow-up

One interesting aspect of the VMware Player that we hadn’t noticed and isn’t in the manual is that if you shut down the Player before shutting down the guest operating system running in the virtual machine, the Player will automatically save the state of the guest operating system VM!

Dr. Internet:  Building SQL reports with Eclipse BIRT

Is there desktop software (preferably open source) that can easily generate reports from SQL databases connected to our network? We want to pull report data from the database into a format that we can edit by hand. Is there something you recommend?