The V305W is well-equipped for a low-volume small or home office. It has integrated 802.11b/g wireless connectivity, a 100-sheet rear input slot, and a 25-sheet front output tray. It offers manual duplexing (two-sided printing) with helpful prompts. Two media-card slots let you work with photos easily. Dell bundles ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint (a simple OCR package) and Dell Imaging Toolbox, which centralizes scanning, copying, and photo-editing features. The only thing I missed was an automatic document feeder (the similarly priced HP OfficeJet J4680 does offer that feature).

Dell put a lot of thought into the documentation: There's plenty of it, and it's extremely thorough. Though the company had some ups and downs on various criteria in our most recent Reliability and Service survey, its overall rating was average.

The control panel's layout, though very simple, has some quirks. You surf menu options, shown on the two-line OLED text display, using two navigation buttons and a third, big button labeled with a checkmark. The display also shows ink levels, but you can't tell which cartridge is which. It's also hard to guess how to wake up the printer; you're supposed to press an arrow button, but Dell doesn't document this explicitly.

In our tests, the Dell ranged from awesome to adequate. It blasted through plain-text documents at a rate of 10.7 pages per minute--more than twice as fast as Epson's Stylus NX400. The text itself was black and crisp. But when we sent color photos and other graphics through the pipeline, the V305W slowed considerably, to 1.2 ppm or less. Images printed on plain paper looked anemic; on Dell's own photo paper, the same images smoothed out and looked a little yellow, but had nice detail. Scan and copy quality were mediocre: dark, rough, and fuzzy.

The ink costs will make your jaw drop. The machine ships with a standard-size black cartridge and a tricolor cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Each of these cartridges lasts for a mere 125 pages in a best-case scenario. The (relatively) high-yield versions of the cartridges offer little relief: A 210-page black cartridge costs $19, which translates into 9 cents per page, while the corresponding color cartridge costs $25 and last 190 pages, or 13.2 cents per page.

It's too bad about the inks, because the V305W is a nice printer in many ways. But even if you don't print all that much, you'll notice the dent in your wallet fairly quickly. And unfortunately, this printer doesn't print money.

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(Update: Microsoft explains Seinfeld-Windows TV ad: just a 'teaser')

That was oddly appropriate, considering that Seinfeld's eponymous '90s hit comedy was described by both admirers and detractors as "a show about nothing."

The minute-and-a-half commercial can be seen below.

It co-stars Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and is set in a shopping mall. Seinfeld, who did most of the talking, helps Gates buy a pair of shoes called the Conquistador. He also asks if Gates ever wears his clothes in the shower. The commercial ends with Seinfeld asking Gates if Microsoft will "come out with something that makes our computers moist and chewy like cake so we can just eat them while we're working." Gates wiggles his rear to answer in the affirmative.

The commercial ends with the Windows logo and the phrase "Delicious."

It was aired early during the broadcast of the first National Football League game of the season.

Immediate reaction online was almost uniformly negative, with bloggers calling the commercial baffling and unfunny.

The part that bloggers liked the most was when Gates showed off his "Shoe Circus Clown Card." The picture was of Gates' notorious mug shot when he was caught speeding by New Mexico police in 1977 at the age of 21.

Related Blog
Preston Gralla: Is Microsoft's Seinfeld spot the worst TV ad ever?
The commercial lacked the flashy camera work that is considered the trademark of French director Michel Gondry. Gondry reportedly shot a Microsoft commercial earlier this summer.

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Overall, the Stylus NX400 has a good design. The roomy, 120-sheet rear input tray can handle many types of paper. The output tray is barely there--a series of thin, bendy plastic sections pull out from a front panel--but it's adequate, holding 30 sheets. The control panel includes nicely labeled buttons for copying, working with photos from a media card, or restoring scanned photos: Press a button, and task-specific options appear on the tiltable, 2.5-inch color LCD. Helpful cues make navigation easier.

The photo-restoration feature is interesting: You load photo paper in the machine, place a discolored photo on the scanner plate, and press the Photo button. The Stylus NX400 automatically scans the photo, fixes color flaws, and prints out a restored version. It doesn't send a digital version of the restored photo to your computer, but if you restore the photo using Epson's installed software on your computer, you can save the restored image as a file.

The Stylus NX400's performance in our speed and output quality tests varied. Text printed on plain paper came out very slowly--5 pages per minute (ppm). On the other hand, graphics pages came out as quickly as 3.4 ppm. On plain paper, text looked a little fuzzy, but nicely black. Graphics looked grainy, but nicely colored. Printed on Epson's own photo paper, the same graphics looked smoother. A routine copy of a plain-text document looked fine, but color scans looked dark and, in some samples, a little rough.

As is often true of low-cost inkjet printers, replacement ink is expensive. The machine ships with four standard-size cartridges--one black, plus cyan, magenta, and yellow. If you buy the three-color multi-pack, each color cartridge costs about $12.34 (which works out to 3.7 cents per page each at Epson's specified yields, for a total of 11.1 cents per page for all three colors). The high-yield (385-page) black cartridge is pricey, too, at $20 (or 5.2 cents per page).

Epson gets some of the unit's details wrong. For example, the Stylus NX400's rear USB port is very difficult to see. The documentation does not provide a thorough overview of the control panel, and a survey of the printer's parts is hidden in the troubleshooting section. Epson logged an average overall score in our most recent Reliability and Service survey.

If you're printing out your novel, don't get the Epson Stylus NX400: its text speed is way too slow and its ink prices too high. But in most other respects, it's as good as or better than its peers. Bargain-hunting users should be pleased.

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This successor to the LifeBook T4020 offers several improvements. The T series now uses Intel's Santa Rosa processor line, and the hard drive, sealed before, is now user upgradable.

Most important, the T4220 has a single, bidirectional hinge that is a first for a convertible and a major convenience breakthrough. When you want to switch between the tablet and notebook forms, you can swivel the screen right or left on its hinge--no worries about having to double-check a directional arrow or twisting the screen the wrong way on the first try.

The T4220 has a few protective features, starting with a shock sensor that protects hard-drive components during a fall by retracting the drive's read-write head. Sturdy plastic port covers attach to the notebook, so they can't fall off and disappear; they keep dirt and moisture out of the network, modem, and monitor ports. The T4220 also automatically shuts down the optical drive during tablet use to protect it from breakage.

Our unit came with a nonglare screen coating for outdoor use, a $150 option. The 12.1-inch, XGA, standard-aspect screen feels thicker than a standard tablet screen, needs firmer taps, and has a visible sheen. These things aren't too bothersome, however, and the special coating allows you to work in direct sunshine--as long as the screen is displaying a light-colored background. When I tried it with a solid-colored desktop, I could barely make out its icons, but the white input panel stood out and was easy to write in with the T4220's tethered digitizer pen.

The T4220 is a nice-looking, squarish, tri-tone unit that is thoughtfully designed overall. It has a small but comfortable keyboard. At 4.6 pounds, it weighs a tad more than the average convertible, but it doesn't feel heavy. Tablet buttons are plentiful and all within easy reach, plus they double as a combination-number input panel--serving as yet another layer of security beyond the built-in SmartCard slot and fingerprint reader.

Another nice extra is the modular bay, capable of holding the standard DVD burner, the included hollow weight-saving piece, or a second six-cell battery ($134 extra). A handy side release lets you eject and swap devices with one hand. Wireless communications is not completely covered--integrated mobile broadband is not an option--but Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are included. A $150 port replicator, which snaps onto the bottom of the T4220, adds a DVI port.

Equipped with a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 processor and 1GB of RAM, our $2099 review model earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 65. It's unimpressive in comparison with a ThinkPad X61t convertible that scored 75 (13 percent better), but the T4220 we tested came with a slower processor (a 1.6-GHz Core 2 Duo L7500), and the score is still well above the ultraportable average of 53. The T4220 can handle anything but sophisticated 3D games; in our tests such games wouldn't play at all because of the machine's shared video memory. Battery life was good, though, at almost 4.5 hours, about 30 minutes longer than the average ultraportable.

The only false step in the design is the screen latch, which you must manually rotate and line up for insertion into a small slot below the keyboard; with practice, though, even this goes fast. All in all, the Fujitsu T4220 might not be the cheapest or lightest ultraportable you can buy, but for tablet users desiring a little extra ruggedness and peace of mind, it gets along nicely with Mother Nature.

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Equipped with a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo T7700 processor and 4GB of RAM, the JFT2500 notched a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 92. That result is faster than the mark of any other model in our current test batch of ultraportables. In fact, only three desktop-replacement laptops have come close to matching its performance. A midsize HP Voodoo Envy M:152, equipped with Intel's new 2.6-GHz Core 2 Extreme X7800 gaming processor, earned a tying score of 92. Two large notebooks equipped with desktop quad-core processors, the Micro Express NP9261 and Eurocom D900C Phantom-X, scored 96 and 97 respectively.

Battery life, on the other hand, was way shorter than average in our tests--2.2 hours shorter, in fact, than the 4.2 hours that the typical ultraportable lasts on one charge. Only two other ultraportables (out of a field of 17 currently tested machines) ran down faster.

The rest of the design is satisfactory. At 4.4 pounds, the JFT2500 is a little heavy for a notebook with a 12.1-inch screen. The 1280-by-800-pixel display is reasonably bright and easy to work with. The small white keyboard felt a little too snug at first, and I was disappointed to find my favorite keys--Ctrl, Del, and Page Up and Page Down--somewhat buried, but typing quickly became comfortable. The lower casing, a nice contrasting black, has a fair assortment of ports and slots, including three USB ports and an ExpressCard/54 slot--but no FireWire.

Our review unit came with no productivity applications. If you don't need the Windows Vista Business operating system, you can save $20 by configuring the JFT2500 with Windows XP Home. Full Wi-Fi comes built in, but Bluetooth is an extra $25.

With its short battery life, the Micro Express JFT2500 would be a poor choice for frequent travelers; but if you can work around this shortcoming, it's a cheap entry into the world of fast, light notebooks.

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The Air and the X300 do have some similarities. They both have crisp 13.3-inch displays, although the X300 has a higher resolution--1440 by 900 pixels versus 1280 by 800--and with both, you can get a 64GB solid-state drive (it comes standard with Lenovo's machine, but tacks about $1000 onto the Air's price).

Whether you're afraid of dropping your laptop at the airport or accidentally spilling some coffee on the case, the X300 is built like--and resembles--a black-box recorder. The keyboard is spill-resistant, and the textured carbon- and glass-fiber exterior is supposed to protect the innards. Unlike most ultraportables, the unit has both an eraserhead and a touchpad. The keyboard feels great, with full-size keys.

The X300 is a little on the chunky side for a true ultraportable--just over an inch thick and weighing 3.4 pounds (4 pounds with an AC adapter) versus the Air's 3-pound heft. Then again, you can pop a disc in the ThinkPad's integrated, paper-thin, 3-ounce DVD drive and watch movies (the Air's optical drive is an external model).

The X300 has a decent amount of power for an ultralightweight notebook--in fact, it performed surprisingly well against other ultralight models. With a 1.2-GHz Core 2 Duo L7100 processor and 2GB of RAM, it scored a 64, outpacing the MacBook Air by a healthy 7 points in our WorldBench 6 benchmark tests. On the other hand, the X300's performance is exactly average compared with the broad field of ultraportables we've tested. It also posted an average score in our battery life tests, lasting 4 hours, 22 minutes on a charge.

Another thumb in Apple's eye is the X300's many features. Here you have a notebook not much thicker than the Air, yet not only does it manage to include a DVD drive, it also has three USB 2.0 ports, a VGA-out port for an external display, a Webcam, headphone and microphone jacks, and an ethernet port. The Air has a Webcam, but it has only one USB port, and you have to use an optional adapter to connect via ethernet.

To make life even easier, the X300 has the one shortcut key to rule them all--the ThinkVantage button. Most notebooks have some sort of shortcut to helpful utilities or a "For Dummies..." version of the control panel. However, the ThinkVantage button accesses by far the most helpful, complete, and concise collection of such tools. You can use the button to access a backup utility, to set security protocols, or to find a wireless data connection, and if your computer won't boot, the button will make the computer boot a small non-Windows OS from a hidden hard-drive partition, after which you can diagnose problems and even download drivers, if necessary.

And when you do start searching for wireless connectivity options, you are fully covered with the X300: The notebook has built-in support for 802.11a/b/g/n, wireless WAN, wireless USB, and Bluetooth. Finally, it has the "gee-whiz" feature of the month: GPS (somewhere, an army of travelling salesmen are cheering over that addition).

What the ThinkPad X300 lacks in style, compared with the Air, it more than makes up for with better features and more functionality.

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The new MobileMe service also arrived with about 70 new bugs, many of which PC World had occasion to experience during the service's first few weeks of life, and many of which remain unresolved as of this writing. Apple is aware of the problems, however; Steve Jobs himself admitted that the application was "not up to Apple's standards" and said that it would have benefited from more time and testing.

The good news: If you're a long-time Mac user with an existing .Mac account, switching to MobileMe won't be much of an adjustment. MobileMe's existing support for syncing iCal calendars, bookmarks, and connecting two Macs via the Back-To-My-Mac feature still work as they always have. In our tests with the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the service reliably synced calendars and bookmarks with our Macs.

With our PCs, it has been a different story. MobileMe's support for Windows focuses almost entirely on Microsoft Outlook. If you aren't a fan of Outlook and would just like to sync calendar events to Vista's built-in Windows Calendar, forget it. That omission wouldn't be so bad if Outlook syncing worked smoothly, but it doesn't. Instead, we continue to get daily error messages informing us that the MobileMe Sync Server is configured incorrectly, along with a vague message directing us to the MobileMe control panel, which offers no further help.

Even with the service's problems, however, our calendar events do consistently migrate from Outlook to iPhone and iPod and Mac, and back again. And MobileMe's Web interface is one of the finest we've seen, living up to Apple's reputation for slick software design. Snappy menus and intuitive drag-and-drop controls guide you through calendar entries and the iDisk online-storage service.

Nevertheless, it's difficult to justify the $99 yearly subscription fee for such a half-baked syncing tool. In an all-Mac world, MobileMe might be a worthwhile expense, due to the undeniably handy Back-To-My-Mac remote control feature. But with limited support for Windows calendar apps--and a barrel of configuration problems--MobileMe is no bargain for Windows users.

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Besides reading this review, you can watch our video of the Slacker Portable Internet radio player in action.

The strongest aspect of the Slacker Portable is the associated Slacker Web music service, which you can listen to for free without the player. I suggest that you do so right away, even if you don't plan on buying the player. As with the Pandora online music service, users can enter an artist's name on the Slacker site, click Enter, and create a custom "station" consisting of free music from that artist and others similar in sound or genre. The Slacker site does a great job of matching your demonstrated tastes to other music that you might enjoy, though Slacker's artist roster and music-matching abilities don't seem quite as deep as what I've experienced with Pandora's service.

Here's where the Slacker Portable is unique: After entering an artist's name and creating a custom station at the site, you can sync your stations to the player, for free. As a result, you'll always have a pocket full of music that you like, plus the element of surprise as to what's coming next on your station's playlist.

The free Slacker Web service is supported by targeted ads that the Slacker Portable will run, beginning with tips on how to get more out of the Slacker experience. Slacker says that a user's station will never begin with an advertisement and that there will be, at most, about 3 minutes of ads per hour. In accordance with Digital Millennium Copyright Act guidelines, users of the free service may skip only six songs per hour on the player. A paid version of the Slacker service avoids such restrictions, for a price.

With the paid version of the service ($9.99 per month for three months, $8.33 per month for six months, or $7.50 per month for a year's subscription), the ads are gone, and the Slacker player lets you save songs for playback later and lets you skip as many songs as you want. However, the paid version still lacks a way to skip backward to hear a previous track again unless you've saved it. Also, any songs that you saved while a paid user will disappear when your subscription ends.

Windows XP and Windows Vista users can transfer their own MP3 and WMA digital music files to their Slacker Portable, with some limitations. On the $200 (15-station-limit) 2GB model, only 500MB of storage space is accessible; that maximum grows to 1.5GB on the $250 (25-station-limit) 4GB model, and to 4GB on the $300 (40-station-limit) 8GB model. The Mac OS doesn't support personal content transfer.

Once you're listening to music, the Slacker Portable shines. It's like having several iPod Shuffles at your disposal, each focused on a different genre of music. Budget-minded music fans who are also looking to discover new bands will especially appreciate the chance to hear songs by musicians who are similar to artists they already know and love. While playing to the music, the device displays extensive biographical information about the artist on its 4-inch, 480 by 272-pixel wide screen.

The Slacker Portable player is fairly large (2.76 by 0.67 by 4.2 inches) and light (4.6 ounces)--about the size of a cassette tape. The device takes about 3 hours to charge its replaceable battery completely; the battery is rated to last about 10 hours on a charge.

Navigating the on-screen menus is done entirely by buttons and analog scroll wheels. Slacker gives you the option of switching controls to the player's touch strip, which extends down the left side of the player's screen, but I couldn't get the strip to work reliably. Consequently, I recommend sticking with the analog-style buttons and scroll wheel.

Though navigation is easy and intuitive, the scroll wheel is sometimes unresponsive to clicking or takes a few seconds to register clicks. Moreover, because it's located slightly too close to the skip-forward and pause buttons, you may simultaneously select a station and skip or pause the first track. Five buttons run along the device's sides and top: pause, skip forward, 'home', 'heart' (for adding songs to your hard drive if you subscribe to the paid Slacker Premium service), and 'ban' (to remove songs from your stations). A volume rocker appears on the top of the device.

The power button on the right side of the player doubles as a lock switch, which you'll definitely want to use. Though the controls are intuitive and easy to use, you'll inevitably press them unintentionally at times. Accidentally skipping forward on a track is especially frustrating if you don't have the paid service--you'll want to hoard your half-dozen skip-forwards as if they were free steaks.

On the connectivity front, Slacker's Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) capability is a major drawing point. Having a player that can refresh a station's songs wirelessly while you're on the go is wonderful. Alternatively, you can use the bundled USB cable to refresh your station's song lists. In my tests, updating 19 stations over USB 2.0 on the player took about 30 minutes.

You'll also definitely need better earbuds than the awkwardly big pair that come with the player. I doubt that the included earbuds would fit in most peoples' ears, and the sound they produced was neither deep nor rich. Sound quality improved markedly through a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SL Fontopia earbuds, however.

Even with all the bugs, it's hard not to love the Slacker independent approach to things. It doesn't do video at all, but this is an ambitious player. Slacker's Web-based music service is great and accurately matches your musical tastes to tunes you'll like but may not be familiar with. I recommend trying Slacker's music service immediately, but waiting to buy the hardware until some of the kinks are worked out.

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The big news here involves the Photoshop.com service, which due to launch in October as well. Adobe says that the service will supplement its existing Photoshop Express. However, it wasn't accessible at the time I tested this beta version of Elements 7; we'll update this review with more info on the service when it launches.

According to Adobe, Photoshop.com will have two levels of membership: a free, basic membership; and a $50 per year Plus membership. The free membership provides 5GB of storage and automatic backup of your images to Photoshop.com's servers. You can also access your account and online galleries from any Web browser. When you edit your pictures, the changes you make will be synced up with your home PC-and similarly, changes you make on local photo files will be uploaded and synced to your Photoshop.com storage. Adobe is also working on a mobile uploader that will let you post photos from your cell phone. With the Plus membership, you get 20GB of storage, as well as the option to have Adobe send you design advice, new tutorials, tips, seasonal artwork, and templates as these are developed throughout the year.

Even though the Photoshop Elements 7 software that I tested was still in beta form, I found much to like. New to version 7 of Adobe Photoshop Elements is a Smart Brush tool borrowed from Photoshop, as well as a handy Scene Cleaner that has been added to the Photomerge tool. Disgruntled users of Photoshop Elements past will be pleased to learn that this version lets users adjust the background tint from charcoal all the way to stark white. More good news: Photoshop Elements 7 has FTP settings, so you can upload galleries directly to your own Web site.

Unfortunately, Elements 7 still lacks the Fade slider tool available in Photoshop that lets you adjust the intensity of a filter immediately after applying it, so you can get exactly the look you want. Considering its many impressive creative filter options, Elements 7 would benefit from such a tool.

The application continues to straddle the line between novices and more seasoned users, offering three levels of editing: Full Edit, Quick Fix, and Guided Editing. You can switch between the levels by clicking on tabs, and after a while I became familiar with which options are available at each level. Still, the three-level structure feels a bit clunky at times, especially when you're forced to blunder through a combination of menu options and tabbed screens to find more-advanced options such as editing color curves.

Full Edit provides essential controls similar to those in the full-fledged Photoshop, with advanced editing tools, filters, and layers. Quick Fix offers sliders for common tasks such as brightness, saturation, sharpening, color balance, and red-eye reduction. A "touch-up" panel makes Smart Brushes available, including a toothbrush for whitening teeth, a brush for saturating dull skies, and a high-contrast black-and-white tool for applying effects to selected areas in your photo. As in Photoshop, you can customize the brush's size, hardness, and spacing. The program's selections were impressively accurate at whitening teeth; and you can also use the "add" or "subtract" tool or adjust feathering to refine your selection.

If you're new to image editing and not up for all of this complicated stuff, Elements 7's Guided Editing is for you. In this panel you'll find text-based guidelines that you can select from a list. Guided Editing shows you how to adjust specific image properties such as contrast; or it can walk you through the process of antiquing a photo, showing you various effects. Guided Editing can be a useful educational tool for people new to image editing and for more-seasoned photographers who are learning to use the program. It's also fun to play with.

Photoshop Elements' Photomerge capabilities are a boon to anyone who's ever taken a snapshot. With its new Scene Cleaner, the program does an excellent job of removing unwanted interlopers in a photo of your brother in front of the "Rocky" statue. As it could in Elements 6, Photomerge can fuse subjects from several photos into one, creating a scene where everyone is looking at the camera, eyes open. Such compositing used to take hours, but now you can do it in just a few seconds.

For anyone seeking a combination image editor and organizer that doesn't break the bank, Photoshop Elements 7 is a powerful contender. The program's new online components permit you to do more from within a familiar interface, and its new tools alone make it worth the upgrade.

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Telephone operators Telefonica SA and Iusacell are teaming up with big banks such as Citigroup Inc and BBVA to launch the service, marketed at first toward technology savvy teenagers and expected to debut over the next few months.

Cell phone users will be able to have their bank link their savings account to their telephone so they can make payments to participating stores, restaurants and taxis by sending a text message, Roberto Rodriguez, in charge of the service, said at a news conference.

Most big banks are participating in the service, but Latin American mobile giant America Movil's Telcel, which accounts for more than two-thirds of Mexico's mobile telephones, has yet to sign up.

Using phones to buy items such as train tickets or products in vending machines is commonplace in Japan, but the trend has yet to catch on in the United States.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Andre Grenon)
Copyright 2007 Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

* Sponsored Resource:Are you ready for virtualization? Try the sever assessment tool.

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A vendor has been industriously selling the Slingbox to incoming students, who set it up in their dorm rooms where they have cable TV service. The WLAN then lets them stream TV programs to their notebooks anywhere on campus. Imagine a hit like "American Idol" streaming wirelessly to hundreds of student notebooks.

"This could be challenging," Hanset acknowledges, with masterful understatement.

The development is typical of the new scaling challenges facing WLAN administrators as WLANs continue to grow in size, in number of users, and in more demanding applications. With big WLAN deployments, higher education is a kind of ground zero for many of these issues. (Compare enterprise WLAN products.)

Early WLANs focused on growing the number of access points to cover a given area. But today, many wireless administrators are focusing more attention on scaling capacity.

That focus is a broad one, calling for a deeper understanding of what access points are capable of, and paying more attention to scaling back-end systems, servers and networks.
The Rise of High-Density WLANs

"We've been used to 20 to 50 wireless users in an area, with another 20 to 50 maybe 50 or 100 feet away," says Brad Noblet, a former college IT director, at Dartmouth and Harvard, who's now an independent consultant. The assumption: few users, who wanted just e-mail access or Web searching.

Low-density WLANs are giving way to high-density ones, with new challenges for network administrators. "When we first put this [WLAN] in three years ago, there were few wireless clients," says John Turner, director of network and systems at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass. "Now everyone has a laptop."

The scaling challenges include ensuring adequate wireless, and wired, bandwidth for the applications being served to wireless users. "These scaling issues are becoming more and more apparent where lots of folks show up and you need to make things happen," Noblet says.

What has to happen is that lots of clients have to associate with an access point, get an IP address, be authenticated, get enough bandwidth (wireless and wired) for their applications, and behave themselves as network citizens.
Emphasize Capacity, Not Access

Noblet urges network administrators to configure access points for performance (or capacity), rather than for access. He's found some access points are configured without any limits on the number of client associations. If a large group of users coalesce around an access point, they'll find slow associations or none at all. "What it's really about is understanding the throughput performance of a particular data stream," Noblet says.

But everyone agrees that capacity planning at the level of the access point is more art than science. "When I speak on this topic, I always emphasize that we, the IT professionals, not the vendors are the ones who best understand the user and application scenarios we'll be dealing with in our deployments," says Dan McCarriar, assistant director of network services at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh.

CMU is about halfway through an 802.11n deployment using gear from two vendors, Aruba for academic areas and Xirrus for residence halls. Xirrus packs a WLAN controller along with four, eight or 16 Wi-Fi radios into a single oversized "smoke detector" like package, called an array, with sectorized antennas to prevent interference. The result lets CMU plug a single array into a high-density area, without having to do complex microcell planning and administration.
Keeping Up With DHCP

In some cases, DHCP servers can't keep up with a flood of clients. "We're definitely seeing this," says Turner. But CMU's DHCP servers are able to keep pace. The key is designing the centralized IT infrastructure for these kinds of services, which are used by both wired and wireless clients, so it can scale quickly and easily.

In the future, Turner plans to create a more seamless mobile experience across the campus by tying location and mobility services into DHCP. "The DHCP server is not aware that someone has disconnected," he says. "We might be able to do something between the central WLAN controller and DHCP so we're not holding addresses for people who are never coming back."

The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has run into a slightly different DHCP problem, says Hanset, from the school's network services group: Some returning student notebook PCs or "rogue" access points in dorms act as DHCP servers themselves, serving out useless DHCP leases to requesting clients. The school blocks these hosts at switch ports or the Aruba WLAN controller.

Another scaling issue is that once clients are issued IP addresses, they may end up keeping them far longer than needed, so they can't be reissued to newly arriving clients on the same subnet. In some cases, addresses can be exhausted.

At the University of Tennessee, these address leases are limited to two hours, at Brandeis, to just 30 minutes. Both institutions make use of Aruba's virtual LAN pooling, which associates a pool of addresses to a given VLAN. It's an efficient and effective tool, says Turner, but network administrators still "have to think carefully about this."

Carnegie Mellon currently has a flat WLAN, essentially configured as one campuswide subnet, with one large pool of addresses. The university is planning to carefully segment the network, probably into several geographical zones, once the 11n rollout is completed. Then, address exhaustion could become an issue if not properly managed and monitored, says Scott Ambrose, CMU's manager of network design and development.

Ambrose plans to collect a mass of statistics on such things as average number of devices on the network and peak numbers of users, and the locations of the access points they associated with. All that data will go into planning the size and number of zones, and how to allocate the available IP addresses to each one.
Scaling for Multimedia

Multimedia use is surging, and 802.11n is expected to make it surge still more. All these universities are configuring their wireless LANS for multicast support, to minimize bandwidth demands where possible. Users in effect tune into a single multicast stream (analogous to viewing broadcast TV) rather than each one receiving his or her own separate, unicast stream. "You have to look at your application and ask 'what am I trying to serve here?' " Noblet says. "That will dictate whether you have to make use of a unicast or multicast transport."

"We enabled multicast everywhere we can," says the University of Tennessee's Hanset. But with that, to further improve performance, the university also disabled the slowest WLAN data transfer rates, of 1M and 2Mbps. "So every broadcast packet is sent at 5.5Mbps," he says.

Test everything, says Carnegie's McCarriar. "Support for multicasting [by vendors] is all over the map," he cautions.
11n is No Silver Bullet

These users are all adopting or evaluating 802.11n, which promises five to six times more throughput than existing 802.11abg WLANs. The additional capacity will be very welcome, but all agree that 11n won't eliminate the need for careful, thoughtful, end-to-end capacity planning.

"It guarantees faster speeds, but it doesn't prevent one bandwidth hog from taking most of that," says Hanset. "I'd like to have a 'fair-share' mechanism in the WLAN, so that can't happen, especially in high-density areas."

Hanset also cautioned that 11n throughput can be dramatically affected by inadequate upstream links and, in the University of Tennessee's case, power injectors. Tests showed an Aruba 11n access point delivering 80M to 90Mbps, but 160Mbps with a gigabit connection and gigabit-capable power injectors," he says.

In many migrations, enterprises simply are replacing existing 11abg access points with 11n devices. But if the 11n products are making use of the 5GHz frequency, because there are more channels and less radio noise, some tweaking will be needed, warns Brandeis' John Turner. That's because 5GHz signals don't propagate as well as those in the 2.4GHz band.

"We've seen where we've installed an 11n access point and expected great performance in the 5GHz band," he says. "But you walk behind two walls and your signal vanishes. It's not dead-simple."

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There are several free Web 2.0 offerings which help users who are new to wikis get their feet wet without installing software on a computer. We take a look at a four of them here:

1. Wiki: Google Sites (part of Google Apps)

Where it came from: Google Sites was built upon Google's acquisition of Jotspot, one of the companies that realized early on wikis had a future as a technology for the workplace.

Getting started: Signing up merely requires a Gmail account. When you sign into Gmail, click on the "More" tab and then "Sites" and you're into the app. You will be prompted to "create site" and you'll be able to decide rather quickly how you want to arrange things as they give you a few templates to choose from. A good starting off point is the web page view.

Ups: Have as many users as you want, and you can make the site publicly accessible if you wanted to take it beyond the corporate walls. Very easy editing tool that looks largely like what you'd use in your e-mail program, or a basic word processor. Like all the wikis mentioned here, you don't need to know how to write software code.

It's easy to embed video, links and other forms of media. There is great version control (so that if you don't like changes that were made, you can revert to an earlier form). Easy admin controls that allow you to make someone an administrator (who has the ability to create and terminate sites), collaborators (who can work within sites), and viewers (who can merely look at what's being done but can't edit). The ability to draw from Google Gadgets (a collection of widgets offered for iGoogle, such as a map or a stock ticker) is also nice.

Downs: No real mobile app to speak of. No offline mode. Though there are no ads to look at now, that could change as Google reserves the right to put ads on its consumer apps. Only 100 MB of storage per site. Pretty stingy considering Google's big server farms we always hear about.

2. Wiki: Socialtext

Where it comes from: Since its founding in 2002, Socialtext has been in the business of bringing social software such as wikis to the enterprise. They don't make their money off ads, so the free version of Socialtext (up to 5 users) is more or less a way for them to show businesses it is worth their time and money to sign up for their enterprise version that supports more users and contains more features.

Getting started: Go to Socialtext's customer login page and click on "get your own free Socialtext wiki."

Ups: Wikis do very well at providing users with context for the content their reading and consuming, and Socialtext is very good in this regard. You can embed content from within the confines of a social software environment (such as another wiki page or blog) as well as areas of the public Web. As an example, you can embed Google search results and RSS feeds rather easily by clicking on the "insert" drop down menu. It has good mobile access and the ability to take a wiki offline. Ability to tag content for easy discovery later on. If you're enamored enough by Socialtext's wiki, and want to expand your social software usage, the company also now gives you platform in which to create a blog.

Downs: While the editing tool allows for someone to post with no coding experience (just like Google Sites), it's not as pretty looking as the Google Sites text editor and has fewer options around font types. It's only free for only up to five users.

3. Wiki: Wikispaces

Where it comes from: Wikispaces is a three-year-old San Francisco start-up that focuses on hosting wikis for everything from businesses to schools.

Getting started: Pretty easy. Go to wikispaces.com and a light green sign up box can be found in the right corner.

Ups: The free version of Wikispaces doesn't have any limit for the amount of users and offers 2 GB of storage. The WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor is cool in that you can move it around the page to where you like it best. One elegant feature allows users to embed widgets (such as a YouTube video) very easily and have it appear nicely on the page. A "history" tab allows you not only to list previous versions but to compare them as well.

Downs: No mobile access and they've got to pay the bills, so they might serve up some ads along side the application.

4 Wiki: PB Wiki

Where it comes from: Since grabbing its first round of funding in 2006, PB Wiki has been hosting wikis for schools and companies such as AT&T, Citi and Cisco (see these examples on the company's home page).

Getting started: Go to pbwiki.com and click on the red button that says "create a wiki."

Ups: PB Wikis recently released a new version of their wiki that provides a good starting off point for someone with no wiki experience. It simply has two tabs at the top: "view," which would be like a read-only form, and "edit," to make changes/edits/deletions. You can backup your wiki offline if you're worried about something happening to it. The "Insert PlugIn" button in the text editor allows you to add content like the other leading free wikis. It includes the ability to add video (such as YouTube) and Google Gadgets. You can also upload views of key productivity apps, such as a calendar or spreadsheets. While most wikis rely on tagging and search as their primary ways of discovery (which it has), PB Wiki helps you bring the old fashioned folks into the fold with optional folders. Like Google Sites, it has a nice selection of fonts.

Downs: Only free for up to three users.

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But starting next week, Microsoft will fighting back with its own ad, starring funny-man Jerry Seinfeld. And not a moment too soon.

"Microsoft let Apple have the podium and dominate the communication space," said David Graves, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. "It's not how you would do things in politics, where it's tit for tat. So it was time for Microsoft to strike back."

The reported US$300-million "Windows, not Walls" campaign will kick off next Thursday, September 4, with the airing of the first Seinfeld commercial, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. No coincidence, the NFL season kicks off that night on NBC.

Little else is known, but it has been reported that French director Michel Gondry, the man behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, may have directed the commercial.

That didn't keep the blogosphere from weighing in. And the reaction wasn't positive, reported Brandweek .

"Microsoft doesn't like being 'cast as a stodgy oldster' by Apple's advertising and has turned to Jerry Seinfeld. Oh, so they want to be cast as late-middle-age almost stodgy oldster," one blog quoted by Brandweek said.

Advertising industry experts say that whether choosing Seinfeld, 54, is on- or off-target depends on Microsoft's ambitions.

"Who is Microsoft really trying to target? If it is the thirty- and fortysomething business community, I think he's a great choice," said Marc Ippolito, president of Burns Entertainment and Sports Marketing.

But if the goal "is to woo the college-age and younger crowd to convince them not to switch to a Mac or to switch back," said Ippolito, 38, isn't so sure. "If you're 20 years old now and the show ended [in 1998] when you were 10, that's going to seem a long time ago."

Though the sitcom is widely seen in reruns, Ippolito says the "college kids in our office talk about Gossip Girl or The Office , not Seinfeld."

Steve Hall, publisher of AdRants.com, is more blunt. "If you want to make Vista a cool operating system, give it some cool. I don't think Jerry Seinfeld does anything that's cool."

Hall, 46, says it's more than just Seinfeld's recent lack of hits. "Advertising is cool. And cool, by default, is supposed to be young."

Car ads, which tend to feature actors and extras decades younger than the target demographic, follow that maxim.

"There is one general rule that people in the auto industry swear by: You can sell a young person's car to an old man, but you can't sell an old man's car to anyone," one industry expert told The New York Times .

Choosing Seinfeld would violate that rule. The long-time bachelor and, at least according to his semi-autobiographical sitcom, "man-child", is not only a father of 3 but, as noted earlier, is 54 years old -- only a few years younger than the late Lorne Greene was when the Bonanza star began pitching Alpo Dog food in the 1970s.

Microsoft rejected younger comedians Will Ferrell, 41, and Chris Rock, 43, because it did not want its campaign to be seen as pandering to the youth market or be seen as too hip, a Wall Street Journal report said.

Noting Rock's reputation for profanity-laced standup routines, Ippolito agrees that he may have been too edgy for Microsoft. But Ferrell would've not only had broad appeal but through his many successful movie comedies, "clearly is very relevant to the twenty-something audience."

But others, such as Graves, think that Seinfeld "may be above" such an ageist rule.

"He's ageless," says marketing guru Sergio Zyman, who argues that choosing Seinfeld is consistent with what Microsoft, as the still-overwhelming market leader, really needs to do.

"I think the strategy has to be to reassure all of the consumers still using Windows that 'Hey, you're OK, you're still cool,'" said Zyman, who was chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola in the 1980s . "If you actually came up with a commercial that was kind of the reverse of the 'I'm a Mac' ones, with a cool guy portraying Windows, that'd be too much on the edge, and you're not going to get away with that."

Zyman, whose consulting firm has helped Microsoft on past launches such as Excel and the Xbox, says that Apple, as the underdog, can afford to do aggressive, "insurgent" ads. Microsoft, which still must cater to senior executives and mainstream buyers, is limited to doing "incumbent advertising."

Not that he believes that the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials have led to a lot of actual PC-to-Mac conversions. "It's still more noise than numbers," Zyman said.

AdRants' Hall expresses a similar sentiment, though less kindly.

"Maybe Microsoft is throwing its arms up and acknowledging that the people who are going to buy and use Vista are not on the cutting-edge of anything, and that Apple users will be younger, cooler, hipper, the early adopters and the 'good' geeks," Hall said.

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