With Christmas fast approaching, it’s time to prepare a Christmas wish list. Here are some of the things NWC is hoping to find under the tree come the morning of Dec. 25:
An edict banning the use of IT acronyms
– How many people really understand the following sentence? – “I’m using the NBAR feature in IOS 12 to give me enough QoS to run VoIP over my WAN.”
If you do understand the sentence it means you’re keeping up with your homework, which is a good thing. But how many “ordinary Joes” working outside IT are going to have a clue what NBAR, QoS, IOS, VoIP and WAN mean?
Other professionals use some incomprehensible jargon that makes conversations between members of the same occupation impossible to understand. But IT and its seemingly endless parade of acronyms is becoming more and more inaccessible to the ordinary citizen. Small wonder then that the industry is having a hard time finding enough workers for all the IT jobs available.
Besides, I want to write out asynchronous digital subscriber line over and over and over again.
Standards-based meaning standards-based –
Every vendor claims to want to be standards-based. Yet incompatibility problems still regularly crop up between products that are all supposedly build to industry standards. How can this be? One reason is that there seem to be a billion different standards. A particular product might comply with some standards, but not with others, making it incompatible with products that comply to different standards. Also, every vendor needs to build some sort of product-specific functionality into its wares to differentiate them from what competitors are offering. But this added functionality shouldn’t be allowed to affect one product’s compatibility with another product.
Storage area networks in actual production environments –
All year long we’ve been hearing about storage area networking standards and storage area networking products. But NWC has yet to hear about a corporate SAN that’s actually up and running. Before another SAN story appears, we want to hear about a real, live, working SAN.
Less Windows 2000 hype –
Microsoft has yet to ship the successor to Windows NT, but that hasn’t prevented Windows 2000 from generating more hype than any OS, with the possible exception of Linux. Sadly, since Windows 2000 is supposed to finally ship in February, this wish at least is highly unlikely to come to pass.
More wireless activity
– The federal government handed out broadband wireless licences for LMCS in 1996. Yet Canadian enterprises have yet to benefit from LMCS installations. What’s the hold-up? Rumours abound that the technology isn’t economically viable, yet last mile connectivity still seems to be a problem in all but the downtown cores of a handful of cities.
I could probably add a dozen or more additional points to this list, but I don’t want to risk boring any of our readers to death with my own pet peeves. If you have any peeves of your own, send them in. We’ll see what we can do to help out.
I wish all our readers a happy holiday season. I’ll avoid the usual happy New Year wishes, since many of you will be working. But I do hope you ring in the New Year in the least stressful way possible.