Google's Sinister(?) Plans 287
puppetman writes "This week, Robert X. Cringely makes some interesting observations as to what Google's up to next. He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms (often with the blessing of the ISP/cable/telephone company). The evidence: leasing massive amounts of network capacity, and huge data centers in rural areas (close to power-generation facilities). The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc. Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"
Bookmark Owners of Core 2 duo Mac laptops have 802.11n built in (daniweb.com)
Submission + - Commercial firewalls overpriced for what you get?
Anthony Walters writes: "We recently did some traffic throughput testing on an OpenBSD server firewall using 'nttcp' and I would like to ask slashdot readers firstly if anyone has performed similar tests on commercially available firewalls and what sort of throughput they measured, and secondly if they think that expensive commercial firewalls are overpriced? We found that at worst case on the OpenBSD firewall, with a packetfilter rulebase loaded, we got a throughput of about 850Mb/s. Which means that, when disk I/O and protocol overheads are eliminated as much as possible, an 800MB file would get transferred in under 8 seconds. More details on the test setup and results can be found here"
Is it Time for Open Office? 449
lazyron asks: "I've been using Open Office a bit more lately, and got to thinking: this is much more like my current version of Microsoft Office than Office 2007 will be. Could it be time to try Open Office in the workplace, especially since there is still some time left before Office 2007 will be forced on us by the demands of the product cycle? Are there any IT admins out there thinking about trying Open Office, either with a few users or all of them?"
