Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I missed yesterday's news of Cisco's purchase of WebEx. When I came across it on various news sites this morning it gave me something to think about - something I turned into quite a long piece over at IT Pro.

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs of the argument to one side, it's likely we'll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer's been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution's market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft's Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx's investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Read the rest here.

From the fine folk at Lynda.com at PMA 2007:

A black shirt, with the slogan "What happens in Vegas, gets Photoshopped out".

I managed to acquire one for me, and one for marypcb. Not that I'll do much photoshoppery on my Vegas shots - the city and its desert surroundings are just too photogenic. Well, apart from using some of the newer graph cut-based stitching tools to build artefact-free panoramas.

In related news, my hefty Photoshop CS3 tutorial is in the latest copy of Computer Arts Projects. Rush out and buy the camo-wrapped issue now, and be ready for March 27^th

Rust on a metal wall, near Paddington Station. Think of it as entropy in action.

I managed to get a reference to my favourite Woody Allen film into a hefty piece on the history of portable media for Tom's Hardware, which I helped marypcb research.

Heh...