Discussion - Fiber to the Home Architectures

Brian and Andy discussed about fiber optics in the home. The article talked about two kinds of fiber optics architectures that are available today, Ethernet based and PON architectures. The article seemed to be biased towards Ethernet based architectures because the reading only mentions the flaws of the PON architecture but not of the Ethernet based. But after hearing the discussion, they both made it known that Cisco is trying to promote the Ethernet based architecture so the article will be on the biased side.

Discussion - Mobile Network Security

Yves Jean-Bart and Eugene led a discussion on the need for security in mobile networks. The article talks about how cellular providers are turning into internet service providers with the new capability of phones. The discussion focused around IP traffic being able to be used with new cellphones. This leaves phones open to getting viruses and also they must be protected from other threats such as a denial of service (DoS) attack. There are a few preventative measures that, unfortunately, not ever wireless carrier is using. Firewalls can be implemented to filter out malicious internet traffic from cellular network traffic. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used to secure transmissions that usually aren't secured. Anti-virus software for mobile devices, but it is underutilized by the cellular carriers. It was also brought up that this article may just be blowing the threat out of proportion. If the threat was great, there would be more being done to combat it.

Second Presentation

Our second presentation on "Hot Storage Mediums" focused on the current state of the two technologies we covered. The first half of the presentation was on holographic storage. Included in this section was a simplified view of how holographic storage works. There was also a picture of what the holographic drive and medium look up. This half of the presentation concluded with some specifications for this new storage medium. The second half was on hybrid storage. One of the slides highlighted which companies are contributing to this up and coming storage medium. Also included were some of the current hard drives on the market and the specifications claimed by the companies that produced them.

Discussion - IPv6

The discussion for Tuesday's class, led by John Lelia and Nelson Pimentel, was about IPv6. The article that was given to us didn't discuss much about the technology but rather talked about the problems that it would face if IPv6 was used. One of the main problems was the work that needs to be put into making servers IPv6 compatible.
Right now, many servers are only compatible with IPv4 addresses and not IPv6. If IPv6 is going to be used, a lot of money will be used to acquire and enable it. Since it takes so much money to acquire and enable, is it even worth for a company like Google to go through all of this trouble. Nelson and John explained that it was worth all of this trouble because more addresses are able to access their sites.

Discussion - Gordon Bell

Today we discussed an article on Gordon Bell. He is a Microsoft employee that has taken it upon himself to archive as much of his life in digital format as possible. This includes scanning documents, saving e-mails, and taking pictures. A few issues were raised in class. One of the more prominent ones was the question of why some one would do this; is there any value of the information collected? It's not just about the importance of the information collected, it is how this information is sorted and used. This helps develop the technology to integrate computers into everyday life and have them recognize the same trends our brains can.

Another issue that was mentioned was security and whether or not it is an invasion of privacy. There are a lot of people who would not want their privacy intruded but there are some people who can benefit from it. People who suffer from Alzheimer's, amnesia, and other memory impairments can definitely benefit from this technology.

Discussion - Video Compression

Today we had a discussion on video compression, led by Nathaniel Houlares and Vitaly Grinblat. The article they handed out was very technical for some one that isn't in the field. Luckily Nat's explanation of how forward and bidirectional prediction for video frames works was great. Many of the questions focused on the MPEG-2 standard and it's longevity, because the article is from 1996.
Although there is a new standard in video encoding, mpeg4, mpeg2 is still widely used in the industry. After doing some research on mpeg4, I found this interesting article where it compares mpeg2 and mpeg4. Within this page there is a picture that compares two types of mpeg4 efficiency, mpeg4-2 and mpeg4-10.

First Presentation

The first presentation on our topic of "Hot Storage Mediums" was on Thursday. The two storage mediums that we are covering are hybrid hard drives and holographic memory. The presentation was a brief overview of each. Also, it included some of the pros and cons of the mediums. We wrapped up the presentation with a quick Q&A session. Many of the students seemed to be interested in our topic and we'll have plenty more information for them during our upcoming presentations. The slides for our presentation can be found here.