In our news analysis section, we detail sparring by VMWare and Microsoft over the future of virtualization.

Software licensing is going to have to change in the age of virtualization. Who's got it right, Microsoft or its upstart rivals?

Our tech editors analyze the situation with some surprising results. Read on...

The Green Grid is a new standards body promoting energy efficiency in the IT industry. Its goals are to reduce energy costs and help enterprises better manage energy usage by developing industry-wide metrics for measuring power usage and efficiency, create technology standards, and promote best practices for data center power management.

NWC's wireless experts Frank Bulk and Sean Ginevan had a chance to talk with Siemens executives about the new offering and the company's approach to unified communications. Read the news story here:

Then click through to read their he said/he said analysis on the NWC Blog.

Mark Lewis, chief development officer at information-storage giant EMC, talks about his company's growth through acquisitions--a total of 23 companies in the past three years.

Listen Now | Read the Interview

Over in our News Analysis section today, we have a story on the IEEE working to boost WiMAX speeds. That led a couple of our editors, Frank Bulk and Sean Ginevan, to debate the prospect of a wireless technology overtaking wired options as a primary wide area data option.

Read their debate now:

A recent discussion about a Cisco speakerphone vulnerability reminded me this is far from the first time Cisco's had password problems. You'd think a company that has spent so much on security branding and indeed is recognized as the first company that "comes to mind as a Networking Security leader" in six of their eight target locales (7th in Japan, 5th in China, first in US/CAN, UK, Germany, France, Italy and India -- data courtesy Cisco Systems), they'd be a bit more careful about getting the basics right.

Charter Communication’s wildcard DNS resolution maybe useful to users surfing the web through a browser, but will break all other IP applications. Error handling needs to be performed locally by the application receiving the error. Handling errors in the network for application traffic causes more problems that they solve. Using wildcard domain names to handle unresolved hosts is bad engineering. Period.

Behind the discussions of innovation and enterprise-focus that permeated the keynotes and speeches here at the Alcatel-Lucent enterprise forum in Paris, the company demoted the SIP focus that will occupy much of is innovation this year.

I'm here at the Alcatel-Lucent user forum on the day of love in the city of love getting a brain dump on Alcatel-Lucent's

Mark Lewis, Chief Development Officer at information-storage giant EMC, talks about his company's efforts to grow through acquisition.

It can sometimes be challenging to convince folks that Network Computing is serious about the motto, "For IT, By IT" (see banner, two inches to the right). It's not just a nice sounding phrase, but a major cornerstone of the philosophy of the magazine.

When I started covering the security beat, the most important challenge was learning the ins and outs of the magazine, working on my writing and other skills, not so much learning the technology. Security isn't just something I write about, it's what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Extrusion protection is heading for the desktop. Once defined by gateway appliances that monitored Web, e-mail and IM traffic for sensitive information that might be slipping out of the enterprise, a new crop of products put an agent directly on the desktop to plug potential leaks.

According to Neil Wu Becker, PR Manger, Security, for Cisco, "Cisco is NOT open-sourcing CTA, nor do we have any plan to do so. We're not even considering it -- it's not something on our radar and it's not a pressing issue on our agenda."

As I traveled out to San Francisco for RSA 2007 I was again struck by how, in many ways, the "real world" could use a security refresher. There are a number of examples where security researchers have exposed flaws in physical systems simply because they applied the same critical eye that they're used to using in their electronic analysis. Matt Blaze's research on master keyed locks, is one example, along with the Princeton group who found both physical and software security flaws in Diebold voting machinery.

To that end, I'd like to propose my list of obvious real world security flaws:

Extreme's ExtremeXOS 11.6, available on the X450 and BlackDiamond switches are getting an uplift that starts to make DHCP NAC enforcement comparable to 802.1X for enforcement. The feature enhancement tracks DHCP leases as they are handed out and applies ACL's on access ports. Extreme has a solid foundation that enhances NAC DHCP enforcement, but needs to work on a few niggling, but critical details with handing mobile computers, before it is truly enterprise ready. DHCP lease awareness is not new. Cisco has a feature in IOS 12 called DHCP Snooping and IP Source Guard that offers similar functionality. Switching software from other infrastructure vendors like Foundry Networks, and Nortel, also have DHCP snooping features.

Listen to Jon W. Dudas Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office explain why more rejections are a sign of success.

Read the Article

A while back we asked our readers to come up with their ideas for a livelier substitute to Microsoft's infamous, but visually mundane Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). You can find all those lovely submissions here at the Top 11 Wacky Replacements for Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death.

If you’re still thinking of network capacity planning as speeds and feeds, then take a deep breath. Electrical power may well become the limiting factor in equipment purchases. Low wattage desktop devices like VoIP phones are on the market and are being deployed and powered using Power of Ethernet as defined by IEEE 802.3af. PoE is designed to run over regular CAT 3&5 cable and not interfere with other network devices. As more devices are powered over PoE, the load on the switch infrastructure will increase. Power meets networking.