By Michael Aldridge
When my wife became pregnant with our first child, we had no idea what to expect. So we prepared by reading pregnancy books, searching online, taking childbirth classes, and talking to friends who had already gone through the experience. Sure, there were a few things that we weren't prepared for, but we were ready for most of the situations we encountered along the way.
By Michael Aldridge
I've got three favorite quotes on preparation:
"Every battle is won before it is ever fought."
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln
By Andrew Messier
Hey Everyone,
NetSim 9.9 was released yesterday, 4/22/14. This is a content and application update. It resolves all outstanding ERRATA labs, contains several bug fixes, optimizes every loading configuration in our Standard and Courseware labs, and adds a user engagement feature. Users are now prompted with a new Guided Tips service that briefly outlines the basic features in NetSim.
Boson Training, LLC, was presented with the Quality Distinction Award at the 2014 Cisco Global Learning Partner Awards, which were held on March 23rd in Las Vegas, Nev. This award is presented annually to Learning Partners in each region who deliver quality training with high customer satisfaction scores. Boson Training is proud to accept this award signifying our commitment to excellence in presenting the highest quality training to our customers. "I am thrilled to work with such a talented team of instructors, at a company that so highly values customer satisfaction," said Andrea Horne, Sales and Operations Manager.
By Kailin Acheson
The previous two parts of this blog, Part I and Part II, covered the seven layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. This installment will cover the four layers of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model and contrast the TCP/IP model with the OSI model.
By Kailin Acheson
In Part I of The Seven Layers of Networking blog, John began a discussion about the layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. The first four layers, which you can read about in that blog, are the Physical layer, the Data Link layer, the Network layer, and the Transport layer. In network discussions, you'll most often encounter the first four layers. The final three layers, the Session layer, the Presentation layer, and the Application layer, are not as commonly discussed but are still essential to a network. This blog will cover those three layers and the encapsulation process that occurs when one host communicates with another. Then you'll have to stay tuned for Part III, which will cover a related-yet-different layered model, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model.
By James Hanback
Very few Sierra On-line adventure games from the 1980s and early 1990s contained the kind of first-person shooter action that would later come to dominate the PC gaming landscape. Mostly, the Sierra adventure gamer had to rely on his or her wits, knowledge, and perhaps the printed manual to piece together the clues that would eventually lead to the game’s solution. Some games, like Police Quest, required some real-life knowledge of police procedure to even get past the parking lot of the fictional Lytton, Calif., police station. Others, like Conquests of Camelot, required some research into arcane flower symbolism (which was helpfully documented in the game’s printed manual, the Liber Ex Doctrina). Similarly, you might find that you need to rely a little more on your own knowledge of your computer hardware to complete this phase of our adventure as we restore our game from the previous three posts and continue our quest to use Boson software in a non-Windows environment.
2.8.4 EFS – Part 2
By Val Bakh
In part 1 of the blog post about Encrypting File System (EFS), we described how EFS works, in common-sense terms, using a story of your attempts to secure the door of your house as a convenient example. Now let’s continue this discussion and translate that story into technical terms. We’ll also talk about certificates because they are virtually inseparable from matters related to encryption.
By James Hanback
As 1980s home computing graphics technology improved and paved the way for the early 1990s, so did the animated graphical adventure worlds created by Sierra On-Line grow more detailed and artistically rendered. By the time the first King’s Quest was unleashed upon the world, Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) technology had given way to Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) technology. By the early 1990s, EGA gave way to Video Graphics Array (VGA) technology. More pixels and more colors meant a better level of detail for the gamer. VGA graphics were such an improvement over previous display technologies that Sierra actually rereleased some of its classic games with updated graphics and some modified play. Instead of typing commands to interact with the game, you could use a mouse to select icons or tools that you could apply to the character to make him or her perform actions in the game. However, some gamers—your humble co-adventurer among them—actually preferred the older command interpreter-style play of those first editions.
By James Hanback
It probably came as no surprise to the developers of mid-1980s computer role-playing adventure games like King’s Quest that some players might get impatient, frustrated, or just plain stuck while trying to decipher the varied solutions to the puzzles they encountered along the way. In fact, guides to completing such games, known as walk-throughs, became a clever way to make a little bit of additional revenue on the sale of a game. For many games, you could purchase a printed walk-through. Some of them even came with little red cellophane decoders that enabled you to reveal only specific clues to yourself as you followed along, thus allowing you to preserve some of the mystery of playing the game without a guide. Late in the decade, there were also some automated 1-900 hint lines you could call that, for a per-minute fee, would guide you through the particular part of the game that was frustrating you. These days, of course, you can get all the walk-through you need for free on the Internet. Back in 1984, the term Internet had only been around for a couple of years and the world’s first Web browser was still six years away.