I had a situation where we had token ring, ethernet and voice all in the same patch frame once. Rather than getting huge supplies of different coloured cables in lots of different lengths myself and a colleague just got some large packs of very small cable ties in a variety of colours and would then just put a little coloured collar around each end of the cable in the frame to indicate the type of data it was carrying.

If you don't have the budget for an every port live situation or you have an environment where you have multiple use frames then the cable management bars between each pair of panels and switches are the best way I've encountered along with decent space for cables at the side of the cabinets [ie don't use 600x800 or 600x1000 cabs, or any other depth for that matter, always go for 800x versions so you have room at the sides.

Another situation I had to deal with was where we had multiple frames between end points in a data centre [don't ask - bad design!] and lots of glass to glass fibre patching. What we did was put a label tag on each end of the cable, on one side was the ultimate source/destination patch points and the other side was the source/destination points in the local cabinet so we could easily trace a cable through the mess of patching without manually tracing each cable.

Ultimately though in 20 years now I've not found a really good way to make patch frames that get used on a regular basis look tidy except making sure the entire building uses ethernet for just about everything from telephony to the building management and getting the budget to make every single data point live [and introduce lots of redundancy] and then mounting the switches between the patch panels and using tiny 20cm patch leads to plug every single port into it's neighouring patch port.

There's grey and there is grey. As you've already noted a lot of grey market Cisco in the UK channel comes from within the UK or frequently from within Europe. The common market means that if you can get it cheap within one part of the EU you can sell it in another and because of Ciscos channel setup you can frequently exploit promotions or pricing differences to make good money and failing that there is the good old purchase a bulk load of kit at a heavy discount and sell it on piecemeal approach that you describe. Then there is the grey stuff that comes from outside of the EU, typically China, that will quite often be counterfeit. Cisco, however, lumps all this together and calls it grey - probably to try and scare people into buying from channel.

The SFPs, GBICs etc are a somewhat different story. All these devices actually conform to a standard - the Multi Source Agreement, or MSA, - that was agreed between companies to simplify production etc. However Cisco [and HP for that matter] deliberately chose to check the specific details of the SFP in it's firmware [like serial number/mac address etc] to make sure it is one of theirs and to reject any generic ones - thus breaking the compatibility agreement. As a result there is a huge markup on optical transceivers for Cisco switches and why you can make silly money selling those compatibles that are made in the same factories from the same parts and all they have done is change the firmware to report the appropriate numbers. But since, in my understanding, you can't copyright/patent a number in this context, so long as these devices are not labelled with Ciscos branding there is little they can do to stop it except issuing scare stories about how they invalidate your warranty/will blow up your switch etc.

I'd tend to agree. In my experience I've found that a class of players will want to constantly grind and level up and a number of people will then portray that as the only way to play the game and highlight it as a disadvantage. I think it's a human nature thing - some people will always want to have bigger numbers of some arbitrary metric than the people around them.

Where some MUDs were, and still are, undoubtedly grindfests others have been built with variety and provide many ways to play them. I like to think my particular MUD (Discworld FWIW) does but I know there are a lot of people that would disagree. I think that ultimately a lot of peoples dissastisfaction with social networking games, muds, or any other game is that for most people the game will eventually get boring and that's when it's time to walk away rather than bitch about what's wrong with it that makes it boring. Even great open ended games like elite got boring for most people and games like chess or go get boring after a while for most people but some others will always take it on furthur and furthur.

In the sense that they are a fun diversion then social networking click games are a fun diversion, just like MUDs, but when they are done to excess they take on that grind element so the rule would be, when it becomes a grind rather than fun you're probably spending too much time doing it!

J

Sadly yet another article that talks about collossus and seems to give all the credit to Alan Turing without mentioning the contribution of Tommy Flowers :(

It has been. The Nokia N900 is basically that - although Nokia have now abandonded it to the wind it's still an immensely usable device.

As a westcountryman I don't know how anyone can drink Bulmers - Give me a Thatchers and keep it coming!

Definately agree with you on the storage in a pint bottle however.

Actually they did a release of the special editions a number of years back that had the original theatrical prints

IT's still available from some places such as http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Episode-IV-Widescreen/dp/B000FQJAIW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1281865521&sr=8-1

J

Zyxel do quite an easy to use one

http://www.zyxel.co.uk/web/product_family_detail.php?PC1indexflag=20040520161256&CategoryGroupNo=4E14C850-478D-4204-8C85-2994C9552426

but it's still going to be quite a few hundreds of dollars and with the margins etc on coffee that could take quite some time to recoup.

I'm having flashbacks to playing Starglider! Recharging via powerlines was one of the hardest things I found to do.

J

Actually it appears to be Lambda switching/Optical Cross connects. Lucent sell similar gear and I think the tech was invented at Bell Labs back in the 90s.

Essentially you're switching the path to destination based on it's optical components rather than the encapsulated data - so you pick the destination node(s) by selecting the appropriate colour(s) on a tunable laser and blast the data out effectively switching the data at the optical level without decoding it to electrical signals.

It's very fast and very expensive so I'm not sure it really has a cost/benefit equation right now over using traditional kit with a passive DWDM solution for example.

J