Not to be left out, Madge announced enhancements to its RingSwitch token-ring backbone switch. Added features include support for source route transparent bridging, broadcast control, full RMON support and FDDI and ATM uplinks.
SPONSORED BY VISA, brought to you by GE and made possible, in part, by Coca-Cola, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games floated in a sea of corporate sponsorships. The Olympic Games have long been a valuable marketing venue for multinational tiffany & co jewellery, but commercialism around the Beijing 2008 Olympics reached a whole new level as virtually every facet of the Games was auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The Beijing Olympics featured an "official noodles sponsor," an "official leather goods supplier" and an "air humidifier and purifier exclusive supplier," along with dozens of other official sponsorship arrangements from prominent and obscure companies alike.Corporate sponsors showered millions of dollars on each tier of the Olympic organizational committees: from the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and tiffany and co pendants international federations governing each individual sport, to each country's National Olympic Committees. Corporations sponsor many Olympic teams and national governing bodies for particular sports - including virtually every national governing body in the United States - and individual athletes themselves.
Corporate sponsors raced to sign up for Olympic partnerships because of the unique opportunity to access China's enormous and growing market of middle-class consumers. Companies from Adidas to McDonald's initiated a marketing blitz around the first Olympics ever to be hosted by a Chinese city.Official Olympic bodies eagerly exploited the opportunity. The 2008 Olympic Marketing Plan Overview of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) announced, "For international entities looking to expand into the thriving Chinese marketplace, a partnership with the 2008 Olympic Games will deliver a powerful tiffany and co rings opportunity for growth and product/service showcasing, while serving to strengthen and build ties of friendship throughout China." A record 63 companies became sponsors or partners of the Beijing Olympics, and Olympic-related advertising in China alone reached an estimated $4 billion to $6 billion, according to CSM, a Beijing marketing research firm.
"This year in particular, the commercialism is far more intense than previous Olympics," says sports commentator Dave Zirin. He calls the Olympics a "commercial, privatized, hyper-logoed atmosphere.""It is something that has certainly accelerated as part of the Olympic Games since 1984, which was the first privately funded Olympic Games. This year is like commercialization on steroids," Zirin says.The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.FAILING TO CURB COMMERCIALISM
The IOC acknowledges that excessive commercialism threatens the tiffany and co bracelets of the Games, as well as conflicts with the official ideology of "Olympism," which venerates healthful living and celebrates a pure blend of sport, culture and education. The IOC bans sponsorships from tobacco or hard liquor companies, or "other products that may conflict with or be considered inappropriate to the mission of the IOC or to the spirit of Olympism." The IOC prohibits billboards or advertising in Olympic stadiums or sports venues, and forbids NASCAR-style ads on athlete's uniforms. Also prohibited is the use of images of Olympic events from being broadcast with any kind of commercial association.
However, corporate sponsors were adept at finding the loopholes and limitations in these restrictions. Although athletes and officials were barred from wearing ads, manufacturer logos were allowed on uniforms and equipment. Adidas capitalized on this loophole by providing sportswear for all staff, volunteers and technical officials of the 2008 Games - apparel that carried Adidas' widely recognizable logo. Equipment used by athletes also prominently displayed manufacturer logos. Visa circumvented the ban on use of Olympic imagery with an ad campaign based around footage of past Olympic performances. And while distilled spirits tiffany and co cufflinks were banned, beer and wine marketing was not.
Managing the units can either be done using standard (SNMP) operating system tools, or via platform-independent Web browsing using a standard browser, such as Netscape's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A system administrator can restrict user-group access to the server and to individual discs, if needed. The native security system of the respective NOS's are used for mount access restriction, such as authorization in NDS on a NetWare 4x server, and PCNFSD for UNIX environments. Upgrading of new software is done by downloading new software versions to the unit's Flash Memory over a network. Upgrades can be done centrally for all units on a network, which saves time and resources.The AXIS StorPoint CD is priced at $799 for Ethernet and $999 for Token Ring. The product is scheduled to be tiffany and co earring in mid October. Products will be distributed through Ingram Micro (U.S. and Canada), Tech Data, GBC/Globelle (U.S.), and Litco Systems (Canada).
Axis Communications, Inc. develops and manufactures multiprotocol RISCbased network CD-ROMs, cameras, and print servers, as well as printer connectivity solutions for IBM mainframes and AS/400 systems. Its products enable users to easily share peripherals on heterogeneous networks with state-of-the-art, cost-effective connectivity alternatives. Founded in 1984, Axis Communications' headquarters is located in Lund, Sweden. Axis was appointed "Computer Company of the Year" in its home country in both 1994 and 1995.Judging from the onslaught of LAN switching announcements, the upcoming NetWorld+ Interop 96 trade show will be the place tiffany and co bangle be for checking out the latest in Ethernet, token-ring and ATM switches.
Just last week, Digital Equipment Corp., Agile Networks, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Madge Networks, Inc. rolled out new switching gear that will be on display at the show this month.Digital announced enhancements to its 3-yearold DEChub 900 switching hub, including new Ethernet and ATM switch modules and a backplane upgrade that more than doubles the box's capacity.The VNswitch 900 modules provide full wire-speed tiffany and co key ring performance and offer virtual LAN support. In addition, the switches support IP switching and distributed routing.Digital offers several 12-port versions of the VNswitch modules, including switches with two Fast Ethernet ports, one ATM port and one FDDI port, and a 24-port pure Ethernet switch.
For ATM connectivity, Digital unveiled the ATMswitch 900, which brings ATM's performance and quality of service features to department and workgroup environments. The ATMswitch has six 155M bit/sec ATM ports and two modular PHY interfaces.Agile will use tiffany and co money clip to demonstrate how it has made good on its promise to port Layer 3 VLAN capabilities to multivendor ATM networks (NW Feb. 26, page 1 ) .
The new ATMizer LS Layer-3 LAN Emulation Server brings Agile's automated VLANs to other vendors' switch and edge devices, including equipment from Cisco Systems, Inc., Fore Systems, Inc., 3Com Corp., Bay Networks, Inc. and Whitetree Networks, Inc. The server is a five-port device that offers five 155M bit/sec ATM ports and connects to other ATM endstations, routers, workstations, servers and edge devices that comply with the ATM tiffany and co necklace LAN Emulation (LANE) 1.0 standard.The ATMizer LS server is aimed at customers that want Layer 3 VLAN capabilities as well as LANE service benefits such as multicast control, but cannot yet get them from their current vendor.In related news, HP last week rolled out three Ethernet switching hubs and a switch module for its popular AdvanceStack hub designed to make it easier for workgroups and remote offices to migrate to switching.
HP's new AdvanceStack hubs come in 12- and 24-port managed and unmanaged versions and include two expansion slots for a switch and management module. By inserting a switch module, customers can transform a shared Ethernet hub stack into a switched environment. Users will be able to take advantage of new features such as port switching, autoconfiguration and load balancing as well as Remote Monitoring.
The boards provide real-time audio and video capture and compression. The software, called FluentStreams, manages video and audio processes in the network, including support for scalable video.That means a NetWare server with FluentLinks can dynamically allocate bandwidth and adjust compression rates on the fly to support changing video demands. In this way, FluentLinks can support from two to 16 concurrent video sessions on one Ethernet LAN (see Figure 1, this page).
FluentLinks stores digital motion video and audio files on NetWare servers for access by client PCs running Microsoft Corp. Windows and FluentStreams software. FluentLinks displays the video in a window on the user's PC screen, thereby enabling users to implement applications such as video training, voice-annotated file transfer and desktop videoconferences.While some vendors argue that products such as FluentLinks make it possible to support wholesale silver pendants alongside text and image data, others concede that users will still experience slowdowns on Ethernet and token rings.
Products such as FluentLinks cannot totally compensate for the perfomance limitations of today's LANs. The number of concurrent video sessions that can be run is limited. Furthermore, the potential adverse effect of a few video sessions on network response times for data users is a major concern.For full-scale networking of multimedia applications in which any number of LAN users can participate. CWRU's Neff believes that very substantial bandwidth --in the area of the 155M bit/sec provided by the SONET Optical Carrier-3 specification--will have to be installed to each desktop. "If you can't do that, you're going to be in trouble doing full multimedia on a daily basis," Neff says.
Recognizing this fact, many net managers are looking to FDDI and ATM-based networks for solutions. FDDI, which supports transmission rates up to 100M bit/sec, is considered an acceptable but not optimal high-bandwidth solution. Its main advantage wholesale silver earrings that it is available today.A great deal of interest is being focused on the longer term availability of ATM services. Initially targeted solely as a technology for wideband telecommunications networks, ATM now is envisioned as a wideband transport system for LANs.
ATM would be well suited for networked multimedia for three reasons:* It switches fixed-sized 53-byte cells, reducing and making predictable transmission delays to eliminate voice and video clipping.* It supports speeds from 51M to more than 1G bit/sec, sufficient bandwidth for full-scale multimedia applications.* It can allocate bandwidth while supporting connectionless channels for data traffic and connection-oriented channels for voice and video.According to wholesale silver necklaces Haigh, president of JWP Network Services' Technical Services Division, a Pittsburgh data communications consultancy, ATM cards for LAN hubs will be available within a few months at costs comparable to those for today's FDDI cards.Meanwhile, a Swedish government-sponsored research effort relating to multimedia support in wideband networks is investigating alternatives that support speeds in the multigigabit range. The program, called MultiG, is not only deploying ATM as one of many protocols, but is looking at a new protocol, Dynamic synchronous Transfer Mode, which reportedly offers bandwidth allocation capabilities superior to those of ATM.
So while a large number of U.S. users are focusing on ATM as the solution for wholesale silver rings multimedia applications on LANs, the Swedes are questioning just how efficient ATM is at allocating bandwidth on demand and are exploring alternatives.
This newfound interest in multimedia applications will require net managers to give careful consideration to the technology's impact on existing local-and wide-area networks. In addition, users devising new LANs will have to factor in the wild card variables associated with running various multimedia wholesale silver ring on a network.
The primary obstacle to supporting network multimedia applications is the performance limitations of today's LANs and WANs. Typical LAN speeds of 10M and 16M bit/sec "are inadequate for true multimedia distribution," says Raymond Neff, vice-president of information services at Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). He oversees CWRUnet, the university's end-to-end fiber network.
CWRUnet supports multimedia --to a degree. Data is run over 10M bit/sec Ethernet and 16M bit/sec token-ring networks, while audio and video run on parallel but separate LANs. A true multimedia network would have an ample supply of bandwidth to support wholesale silver pendant types of traffic on the same LAN.
But supporting data, voice and video on one network is no small feat. The network requirements for data are different from those for voice and video. Data tends to have moderate bandwidth needs and is bursty by nature, making it well suited for connectionless, packetized environments, where multiple transmissions are intermixed.In addition, data requires rigid error control, which is implemented via retransmission of errored data packets. Retransmission introduces unpredictable delays in a signal's arrival wholesale silver bracelets its destination. However, this does not materially alter the information the data represents.
Voice and video, by contrast, manifest themselves as steady high-bandwidth (16K to 384K bit/sec) transmissions for the duration of a session. That means a voice or video link could chew up an hour of connect time, while a 1M-byte data file can be transmitted in a wholesale silver earring second.Current 10M and 16M bit/sec LANs are not engineered to support such steady high-bandwidth traffic. Therefore, running voice and video over them poses the threat of traffic congestion, which in turn, would delay response times for LAN-based data applications.
"Most managers won't allow (multimedia applications) on their networks because it would melt them down," says Charles Giancarlo, vice-president of business matters for the ATM Forum and vice-president of marketing at Adaptive Corp., which manufactures T-3 Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) wideband switches for telecommunications networks.
Voice and video transmissions also differ from data transmissions in the amount of wholesale silver necklace control required. Unlike data, voice and video transmissions do not require strict error control because minor error rates and the dropping of an occasional frame are virtually unnoticeable.ut delays caused by data retransmissions can cause portions of the audio and video to be lost or "clipped," thereby distorting the message.Although Ethernet, token-ring and Fiber Distributed Data Interface LANs are designed for data, it is possible to run real-time voice and video over them using products such as Fluent, Inc.'s FluentLinks, which is currently in prerelease testing.
FluentLinks is a series of hardware boards for Novell, Inc. NetWare servers and workstations that come with a NetWare Loadable Module for storing digital video files on a NetWare server and transmitting them on request over the LAN to workstations.
The arrival of computers that plug into both Token Ring and Ethernet local-area networks is expected within the year, now that a chip vendor has begun supplying dual-protocol silicon in volume to computer makers.
Houston-based Texas Instruments, Inc. said late last month that it is shipping its TMS380C26 chips to personal computer vendors that will mount them right onto PC motherboards during manufacture. This would allow users to merge their PC and LAN hardware purchases and to have the option of tying a single PC into either Ethernet or Token Ring LANS. This "is just one less headache for the corporate MIS guy," said Paul Callahan, a senior analyst at market research firm Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Like many large corporations, "we're big in both Token Ring and Ethernet," so the wholesale tiffany pendant PCs "would make recycling computers easier and ease the burden on repair and installation employees," said David Ericson, manager of network services at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, ConnLeon Adams, open systems marketing manager at TI, said he expects product announcements and possibly shipments by November's Comdex/Fall '92 trade show in Las Vegas. He said the dual-networking capability should cost users the same or less than they would pay to add one extra network adapter card to their computers.
Ericson said he would be willing to pay a premium of about 25% of the cost of a $500 adapter card for the combined capability. He noted that in his current scenario of running two separate network cards in his PCs, "there is a problem with interrupt levels and memory allocation. If you're not a wizard at the internals of a PC, you're not going to be able to implement both."
Users will not be able to connect to both a Token Ring and an Ethernet at wholesale tiffany earring same tine. Whether they will have to make a manual or software-based configuration change to switch among LANs will be system-dependent, Adams said.TI will also reportedly bundle software drivers for the major network operating systems, such as Novell, Inc.'s NetWare, Microsoft Corp.'s LAN Manager and Banyan Systems, Inc.'s Vines, with the chips.The dual-protocol chip technology is expected to emerge within months from other chip makers, such as National Semiconductor, Inc. and Intel Corp. It should eventually find a home in other network devices, such as internetworking equipment and smart hub modules--"anything that would be considered a network node," Adams explained.The moves will "make LANs wholesale tiffany necklace free," Callahan said.However, smart hub and adapter card giant Cabletron Systems, Inc., for one, is not planning to implement the chips in its products.
"Those chips won't deliver any added flexibility that outweighs the additional burdens and costs they generate," such as possibly requiring add-on daughter cards, said Chris Oliver, director of engineering and manufacturing at Cabletron.He also aluded to possible performance issues with the combined technology, wholesale silver bracelet Adams said customer tests of the chip show Token Ring performance to be at the same level of TI's current stand-alone Token Ring chip and Ethernet performance to be "very competitive."
For years, multimedia has been branded as a specialized application with the ability to weave voice, video and animation with traditional text and images on stand-alone personal computers.Multimedia applications were beyond the reach of network users because few companies considered the ramifications of running them across a network."Right now, there are essentially no multimedia (applications) on networks," says John Gale, wholesale tiffany ring of the Information Workstation Group, an Alexandria, Va., consultancy.Rut all that is about to change.Digital Equipment Corp., IBM and Lotus Development Corp. are set to charge into the market this month with a volley of products that analysts predict will bring legitimacy to multimedia applications for networks. The result will likely be an uptick in user demand for multimedia, with firms increasingly turning to their network managers to support the technology across company networks.
The PC-based adapter cards will let LAN servers and LAN clients attach to an FDDI backbone. With FDDI on the backbone, however, IBM is forced to add FDDI support to its bridges, which the firm has acknowledged."We intend to provide (FDDI) bridging (capabilities)," Sager said. IBM currently offers two bridges: a software-only bridge and the 8209 combination software/hardware bridge.
Sager said the firm plans to release an FDDI management solution, although he declined to give more details. Analysts predicted, however, that the next release of IBM's LAN Network Manager, a centralized LAN management package, will support FDDI nets.
IBM executives said the company is looking into the possibility of wholesale tiffany pendants 100M bit/sec FDDI nets over shielded twisted-pair cabling, but they would not be more specific. Sager did say, however, that at the same time IBM releases its upcoming FDDI products, it will also reveal which of the two rival FDDI-over-shielded twisted-pair standards it intends to support.Officials also discussed a number of other technologies IBM is currently exploring, including wireless communications.
Donald Haile, IBM's new director of the LAN Systems group here, said that as workers become wholesale tiffany rings mobile and computers get smaller, there will be a growing interest in wireless communications. "We're looking seriously at packet (radio) and cellular communications," he said, adding that the company is also looking into the wireless LAN arena.At this point, however, IBM has not decided which type of wireless LAN technology it would use or whether it would make its own wireless LAN products or resell another vendor's.
Haile also said the company plans to enter the Ethernet market, not only with Ethernet cards, but also possibly through dual-protocol chipsets that would provide both Ethernet and token-ring connectivity on a single LAN card. Ultimately, support for both types of wholesale tiffany earrings could be built into a PC's motherboard."Traditionally, we've been the token-ring shop. But we see Ethernet as an area customers would like us to play in," he said.
Sager agreed, noting IBM will consider providing the products through an OEM agreement with an existing Ethernet supplier. He also mentioned the possibility of providing Ethernet management capabilities, but he declined to give more specifics.
Although IBM would not provide details regarding dual-protocol chipsets, analysts speculated that IBM would jointly develop such a product with National Semiconductor Corp.,which is involved in a technology exchange agreement with IBM.
IBM also outlined plans to bring out network adapters with built-in concentrator ports. The firm said it would introduce an adapter card that supports eight-port concentrators attached to it. This could save users money by enabling them to attach as many as wholesale tiffany necklaces additional users to a network through a single card. It could also be used in a superserver environment to attach multiple LAN segments to a single network interface card.
In the longer term, Haile discussed IBM's intention to bolster LAN support for multimedia capabilities. He wholesale tiffany bracelet making it easier to deploy multimedia applications on a LAN by providing support for isochronous communications. Isochronous technology lets asynchronous communications equipment communicate synchronously.