Stories about: SMC

U4EA Technologies has released a low-priced wireless-LAN controller and access point that can be up and running securely in 15 minutes.

A recent study by In-Stat says that fixed-configuration 24- and 48-port switches can vary by more than 600 per cent in terms of how much switching capacity they support in relation to how much electric power they draw.

One of the challenges in mobile computing is battery life. It's hard to be productive with a dead battery, so IT personnel and users alike need to think about maximising run time between charges.

Although Apple updated its MacBook Air this week with a fix for the laptop's fan, some owners of the ultra-thin notebook continue to report that their machines overheat and stagger to a stop when watching video or playing games.

I sometimes wonder why there aren't any movies made about IT superheroes. Sure, there's always Superman (able to leap tall buildings in a single bound) and Batman (the caped crusader), but what about WANman -- the IT superhero that accelerates high-latency traffic and saves the company from additional Internet bandwidth costs? Well, the tights and cape might not go over well (except on casual Fridays), but any IT staffer that can give enterprise users more performance is well on their way to superhero stardom.

Some day the IEEE will get around to finalizing the 802.11n standard that it began working on in 2003. That some day was supposed to be 2006. Then 2007. Then 2008. Maybe, the standard will be finalized in 2009. Maybe 2010.

When London-based investment bank Numis Securities, moved to more posh quarters in the city's financial district, it also upgraded its wireless network and streamlined its guest logon process to project a more professional image.

Riverbed has begun shipping a PC client for its Steelhead WAN acceleration devices that does away with the need for a Steelhead at both ends of the link.

Skype has been found guilty of violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) by a Munich, Germany regional court, a decision likely to influence the way companies approach GPL compliance in the future.

A federal court in Texas has granted Australian science agency, the CSIRO, an injunction to prevent infringement of its wireless network patent by the Buffalo group of companies in the United States.

Call it NAC (Cisco's Network Admission Control) or, well, NAC (network access control), or even NAP (Microsoft's Network Access Protection). Any way you refer to it, these schemes for shutting out unwanted users at the LAN switch port level are among the most buzzed about network technologies.