Monthly Archives: June 2006

John Chambers, Tele-Presence, Santa Clause

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Yes John, let’s hope there is a Santa Clause and he’ll bring us all Tele-presence for Christmas.

Perhaps he’ll stick it in your stocking or under the tree. Or if you’re Jewish during the nights of Hanukah he’ll bring you one unique “Unified module” per night and you click them together like legos.

As we sit here in our 2nd day or putting together our Cisco Unified Contact Center Express support tele-presence solution it is clear. There simply aren’t enough smart people in the world to be able to build out tele-presence John Chambers described during his keynote in our life time.

While the tools are getting better and so is the hardware as well as the platform. It’s still not good enough. There is plenty of good software out there but it seems Cisco is hell bent on reinventing the scripting wheel and quite a few others along the way.

10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

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This article lists some pretty good reasons why HDDVD is going wrong, and I agree with most of them, but this had me nodding and going “yes!”:

For many people, getting into HDTV is all about the widescreen and being able to see their DVDs with more clarity than ever before. When Billy Bob comes home with his new high definition 720p display, the difference between that and his older SD TV is amazing – at least when he’s watching DVDs. You see, that’s the problem – and it’s two-fold. While most consumers are still getting into the HDTV craze, they’re already impressed. And the difference between SD TV and HDTV is more amazing than the difference between 480p DVDs and 1080i downrezzed high definition discs.The other side of the coin is the lack of HD content available on TV – and this is a biggie. While Billy Bob is impressed by his DVD player, he is dumbfounded by his cable TV – which actually looks worse than it did on his old set (mostly because it’s bigger). You see, nobody told Billy Bob that he’d have to get an antenna or subscribe to HD service from his cable/satellite provider. He was also not told that most of his favorite shows (Billy likes sitcoms and the Sci-Fi Channel) aren’t yet available in HD, regardless of technology or service provider. As a result, many Americans are underwhelmed or feel like they got burned by HDTV. The last thing they’re going to do is rush out and buy the next greatest thing.

Count me as already pretty impressed with HDTV, and yet here I am watching the latest reality show, on a broadcast HD channel, and it’s in the plain old SD format.

The networks need to get it together.  And I am not upgrading anything to HD-DVD for a long, long time.

Cisco Networkers 2006 Customer Appreciation Party

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If there is one thing Cisco has down it’s taking care of its customers and vendors at Networkers.

I’ve heard in the past that the Customer appreciation party was a little hard to swallow, and yeah this year, probably wasn’t much different for the same folks that bitched about that before.

But think about it. What are you going to do? What kind of party are you going to throw for 10,000 Nerds and net freaks?

Cisco did an outstanding job in my humble opinion.

First the setting was the Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV. They rented the entire stadium or a significant portion thereof.

The entire concourse was open (inside) and all concessions were open free of charge. Free beer, free pizza, and free burgers, free everything. All along the concourse were video games, all of them free. You name it, it was there.

Inside was a special edition of Battle Bots. What more do you need to get the nerds excited?

Outside, a mini amusement park, a few rides, and some rather interesting games. Tricycle races, and electric beer barrel races. There were dome dudes running sprits in Velcro boots. Now I don’t know about you but doing that at night in 100 degree heat after a beer or two just didn’t sound like a good idea.

Also part of the show was a really sweet stage setup for what looked like a band. But it turned out to be Rock-Star Karaoke. Now Karaoke isn’t my thing but some folks got an opportunity to try their talent or lack thereof with a real band, and a good one at that. Some folks definitely shouldn’t have tried.

Probably what was most impressive for the geeks in all of us was the Fatal1ty challenge. We originally looked at this on the access card and wondered what kind of game or challenge this was. Then we realized. It was the opportunity to challenge Fatal1ty, the professional gamer. Uh, no thanks, but it was fun to watch. Yes, all very impressive. Cisco knows how to party that’s for sure.

Thanks Cisco.

(Photos to be added later)

Cisco Networkers 2006 Blog

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There is a blog for the 2006 Networkers conference.

http://blogs.cisco.com/networkers/

Unfortunately comments are censored and moderated before being posted.

Lots of comments about things like the backpacks and the weather proofing flap which is really a pain in the butt. Hey a free backpack is a free backpack. But in our industry a roller backpack like the 2004 backpack rules. Now I can certainly understand not wanting to give 10,000 people roller laptops to use and trip over for a week. That would be bad.

Wireless is still spotty, bandwidth is still spotty, it comes and goes. Not sure if we’re all being proxied or not, I have taken the time to look. Half the time it’s great, the other half the time it’s non-responsive.

In my opinion, this should be something that should just work at this conference.

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