Tag Archives: ccna prepration

The IT gender gap in the industry, approaches for learning to program, and a writer’s revelation about his average coding skills are topics that are among the hottest Programming and Development discussions of 2010.

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1: IT gender gap: Where are the female programmers?

Justin James presents data points and theories about why more women aren’t getting into and staying in development roles, particularly in Western cultures.
2: Seven ideas for learning how to program

When you want to learn to program, taking classes and reading texts are useful exercises, but Chad Perrin says it’s not enough. To really learn programming, you need to start writing programs.
3: Confessions of a mediocre programmer

Alan Norton reveals how he makes the best of his average coding skills to survive as a mediocre programmer.
4: A skeptic’s history of C++

Was C++ originally meant as a joke? Why did it beat Objective-C? Will anything replace it now?
5: Poll: Would you sign Apple’s iPhone Developer agreement?

Although Justin James finds the terms of Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License agreement unacceptable, he can see why some developers would be willing to sign it.

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When the Internet was first created under the auspices of academic and military institutions in the United States, part of the design goal was decentralization so that it could survive damage to arbitrary sections of the complete network. A big concern at the time was the ability of the nascent Internet to continue functioning as a whole even after key sites had been destroyed by nuclear attack.

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Years later, in a 1993 TIME interview, EFF co-founder John Gilmore said “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This has, to some extent, proven true over the years. When small, regional organizations try to impose censorship controls on segments of the Internet, technology seems to almost magically find ways to bypass those controls.

Gilmore’s quote makes things sound a lot more one-sided than they have appeared to be in recent years, however. China gets a lot of press for its “Great Firewall of China”, by which a lot of Internet traffic available around the world is filtered out of availability for residents of China. Some savvy Internet users find ways to get around the filtering, but many do not — and those who do run the risk of getting in trouble with a government widely recognized to treat peaceful protest as a crime. China has reinforced its international reputation with high profile activities like cracking Google security to gain access to information about dissidents.

China is not the only nation-state that has been imposing Internet censorship controls and getting a little bit of press about it. Australia has been subject to some news attention over the ACMA imposition of national Website blacklist filtering, essentially copying China’s national firewall approach. Meanwhile, the US government has taken a different approach, doing things like outlawing gambling sites and having WikiLeaks shut down.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Internet censorship is the central role played by ICANN, a California-based organization whose job it is to perform Internet administrative tasks on behalf of the governments of the United States and other countries. It is nominally independent, but in practice, easily subject to pressure from governmental entities. As the final arbiter of the Domain Name System, and as the top-level policy setter for IP address assignment, ICANN effectively has the ability to shut down any Website it likes. In general, the danger of ICANN interference in the operation of a Website is limited to domain names, because ICANN’s control over IP address assignment is not nearly as fine-grained as its control over domain name resolution.

In the wake of recent troubles surrounding WikiLeaks, it looks like we may get to see a more substantial case of Internet technologies being leveraged to route around “damage” in the form of censorship. Peter Sunde is one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, and his colleagues Carl Lundstrom and Fredrik Neij are joining him in appealing to the Supreme Court of Sweden to overturn a recent judgment against them on issues related to their involvement with The Pirate Bay. In late November, Sunde posted a message to his Twitter account that expresses his disappointment in ICANN:

Hello all ISPs of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of ICANN. Please contact me to help.

He later posted more on the matter in a new Weblog, P2P Dns, in a “hello world” entry:

We haven’t organized yet, but trying to. The background for this project is that we want the internet to be uncensored! Having a centralized system that controls our information flow is not acceptable.

By using existing technology for de-centralization together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We’re not going to re-invent the wheel, we’re going to build on existing technology as much as possible.

There will be a press release shortly with more details.

If you’re interested in talking to us, we’re at the IRC channel #dns-p2p on EfNet.

A number of similarly distributed DNS replacements have been proposed, and in some cases even implemented — as in the case of TOR’s .onion top-level domain resolution — but for one reason or another each has failed to catch on enough to have any hope of rivaling the widespread usage or even recognizability of ICANN’s TLDs. Timing, and the growing recognizability of the Sunde name, might give it a leg up in the search for success by a competing domain name system.

The question, of course, is whether we need a second Internet. Taking a personal look at it, I favor the proposal: yes, we absolutely do need a second Internet. It seems like about every three or four months lately that the United States Congress debates the passage of yet another bill that would effectively censor the Internet in one way or another — including so-called “net neutrality” legislation that achieves nothing like what most advocates of “net neutrality” want, measures that allow the US Executive branch of government to shut down all Internet name service and peering within national borders, and other disturbing ideas. As my significant other puts it, “I don’t want them to screw up the Internet.”

Of course, the technical details of trying to create a “shadow” domain name system are subject to the restrictions of reality. Time will tell whether a truly distributed system is entirely compatible with the kind of organization it takes to have a name resolution system that works. Given the tendency of centralized management as represented by ICANN to undermine the very principles on which the Internet was founded — principles of distributed management and persistence in the face of attacks on its infrastructure — the very existence of the Internet as we know it, as a universally accessible medium for information exchange, may depend on an alternate domain name system’s success.

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Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems are close marketing partners, but the relationship could face new strains as HP beefs up its line of low priced corporate network switches to capitalize on recent sales gains.

HP’s ProCurve networking group has quietly sold switching gear for years, garnering a tiny 3 percent share of the enterprise market. But now it’s beginning to make some noise with new products and features aimed squarely at Cisco, the market leader responsible for more than two-thirds of all Ethernet switch sales.

Among other things, HP on June 8 agreed to spend $28 million to acquire high-speed Ethernet switching technology from Riverstone Networks, in an effort to build a more complete line of networking gear to match Cisco’s portfolio.

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Though HP won’t threaten Cisco’s dominance in the enterprise switching market anytime soon, heightened rivalries between the two companies could fray their long-standing alliance at a time when Cisco is aggressively courting new partners to fuel growth.

“HP is one of Cisco’s biggest distributors,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst from The Yankee Group. “HP’s sales guys are being compensated for selling Cisco gear. It may not be a problem right now, but over the long term, I see this becoming a much bigger issue for them.”

Cisco is increasingly basing its future on big alliances, and managing relationships with partners such as HP will be crucial to its plans. Cisco CEO John Chambers has repeatedly underlined the importance of partnerships for the company. The strategy was manifest in a deal announced in April to expand Cisco’s sales partnership with wireless phone giant Ericsson, as well as in recent comments signaling Cisco’s openness to a possible tie with rival Nortel Networks.

Cisco’s outreach efforts come amid growing competition among makers of corporate network switches and routers–an arena Cisco dominates with more than 90 percent market share. Earlier this month, Juniper Networks announced the J-Series to compete directly against Cisco’s 1700, 2600 and 3700 enterprise routers. Juniper has been stealing market share from Cisco in the high-end router space, providing hardware to Internet service providers and telephone companies.

Unlike the case with Juniper, which has always been a straight competitor to Cisco, HP and Cisco are also strategic partners. In fact, until last year, HP CEO Carly Fiorina served on Cisco’s board of directors. With $56 billion in sales last year, HP offers Cisco a major sales channel into corporations. The two companies often sell into the same accounts. HP often provides network integration services in addition to certain products, such as servers, storage hardware, network management software and computing gear, while Cisco contributes networking gear.
ProCurve an upward one
Over the last couple years, sales of HP ProCurve networking products have grown more rapidly than those of competing products from companies such as 3Com, Cisco, Nortel Networks and Enterasys Networks, said Josh Johnson, an analyst with Synergy Research Group. In the first quarter of 2004, HP ProCurve moved to third in terms of revenue, from fifth place in the previous quarter. Cisco led the market both in terms of revenue and ports shipped.

During the first quarter of 2004, HP Procurve had about 3.1 percent of the total $3.367 billion Ethernet switch market. Cisco had about 69.1 percent of that market, according to Synergy Research.

Though HP may be coming from a smaller base than Cisco, the company has aggressively grown its revenue over the past year. In four of the last five quarters, HP has seen double-digit growth. Meanwhile, Cisco’s growth has fluctuated.

“We make no bones about the fact that we want to be the alternative to Cisco,” said Brice Clark, worldwide director of strategic planning for ProCurve Networking by HP. “And I think we are doing a good job. In the past three years we have been one of the fastest-growing networking companies. We doubled our port shipments between 2002 and 2003.”

HP primarily competes with Cisco on price. Clark said HP can undercut Cisco’s pricing by at least 30 percent to 50 percent on most product offerings.

Because of its focus on price, HP has been very successful in penetrating certain niche markets, such as education and government. But it has been less successful breaking into Fortune 500 companies, said Joel Conover, an analyst with Current Analysis.

“HP is a big company and a formidable competitor for Cisco,” he said. “But the biggest problem for HP is that they sell entirely through the channel. They don’t have direct contact with the customer, which is critical in dealing with large enterprises.”

Cisco downplayed HP’s increasingly aggressive stance in the enterprise networking market.

“HP is a valued partner working with us in a broad range of technology areas,” said a Cisco representative. “Together we are providing solutions for our many joint customers. However, like many of our other partners, there are spaces where we may compete. Cisco continues to strengthen the market transition to Gigabit Ethernet, and its switching portfolio provides the optimal solution for security, availability and reliability.”

HP has also tried to downplay the conflict of interest.

“The market doesn’t need another Cisco,” said John McHugh, vice president and worldwide general manager of the ProCurve business unit. “We offer a different value proposition for customers. If you’ve got a simple network and you’re looking for a cost effective solution, HP’s a good choice. But if you’ve got a complex need for an end-to-end solution, then HP wouldn’t be the right vendor. That’s Cisco’s forte.”

Still, HP’s recent steps signal that competition between the two companies will likely increase in the coming months.

For example, HP is using the Riverstone technology to develop more in-house Ethernet switch expertise. Traditionally, the company has made work-group and wiring-closet switches. At the high end of the market, it has resold switches from Foundry Networks. Clark said the Foundry relationship will continue, and the new switches based on Riverstone’s technology will augment these products.

In addition to broadening its portfolio with new products, HP has also enhanced older ones. For example, it has introduced higher density Gigabit-Ethernet and power-over-Ethernet modules for its 5300 series switches. It has also added new software to its 700wl wireless gateway product to improve usability, and it’s improved aerials for the its 420 and 520 wireless access points.

“Cisco has carried the lion’s share of the routing and switching market for several years,” Kerravala said. “They have to be careful about protecting their dominance in these markets.”