The thing that strikes me most about the Thirty Six views series is that there is a single unifying theme, Fujiyama (Mount Fuji), but Fujiyama’s role is ever-changing. At times Fujiyama looms large, as in Rainstorm Beneath the Summit, while in others, such as Great Wave off Kanagawa, Fujiyama is a minor element, diminutive though still a powerful part of the picture. So, it is, with Three views of Quality of Experience in which I will present four different perspectives on QoE, all different, yet all with a unifying theme and varying emphasis.

Definition: What is QoE?

QoE is quality of (user) experience. QoE is a touchy-feely qualitative measure that is very fragile and subject to change, very hard to pin down exactly. Some might even call it fleeting or ephemeral. QoE is subjective. It is subject to the mood, gender, age, prior experience, expectations, environment and present health of the listener and can change more than a little bit from measurement to measurement. It is more of a feeling than anything else: the type of a thing engineers hate most but the opinions to which users cling tenaciously. QoE is quite difficult to describe in a trouble ticket and even more difficult to quantify in a Service Level Agreement.

QoS, on the other hand, is qualitative: it can be measured or calculated precisely. QoS is objective, undistorted by personal opinion or mood. QoS can be measured repeatedly and consistently under the same conditions. How many packets lost per hundred transmitted? How much inter-packet delay? How much variation in the delay? These are components of QoS.

View 1: Service Provider’s View of QoE

Organizations providing Voice over Packet (VoP) services have struggled, and are still struggling, to provide a service that replicates historical Plain Ol’ Telephone Service (POTS) over a groaning IP infrastructure that was not built to handle a global multimedia load of data, telephony and video. Today’s services are predominantly VoIP-based and most recently are delivered using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Going into 2008 it is a bit hard to believe that the era of IP Telephony started 14 years ago and that all services are achieving a fairly consistent level of service albeit not quite yet at the level of consistency, quality or reliability of POTS.

The question now is “what is next for VoIP service providers?” With reasonable consistency in quality, reliability and pricing, the next era will be the era when VoIP must surpass POTS’s quality of experience perceived by the users. One of the areas of positive differentiation, addressed in a previous Eogogics ezine article, is wideband voice wherein more of the actual voice quality and meaning are delivered. Wideband voice is one of the dimensions, including traditional QoS areas such as tighter control over packet loss, delay, delay variation and availability and including new considerations such as time-to-dial-tone (TTDT) and other metrics that influence the ultimate opinion of the user.

It is also noteworthy that current packet voice service providers are all over the map in terms of QoE but none are where they ultimately need to be to be successful in the long term. It is also noteworthy that in the service provider picture QoE is almost imperceptible in the background with price and availability looming larger in the foreground.

View 2: Manufacturer’s View of QoE

As service providers begin to wake up and understand the value of QoE, it is the job of manufacturers of the equipment used in service provider and large end-user systems to incorporate elements that allow QoE-enhanced services to be delivered. Big bandwidth alone will not do the job. Dynamic buffer handling, prioritization, queue management, feedback loops, wideband codecs and a plethora of other tools must be provided to allow service providers, and large end-user organizations acting as internal service providers, to deliver QoE-optimized services that surpass POTS.

In the manufacturer’s view QoE is a larger element but is still not the central theme though that is changing as manufacturers vie for positive differentiation and the resulting market predominance and carve out the market niches which they may occupy for decades to come.

View 3: VoP Users’ View of QoE

More than one VoIP initiative has suffered an early death due to user revolt based on nothing more than “it doesn’t feel the same”. The objective, of course, in many cases today is that the new system feels the same as the old system, but all that is changing. With QoE-enhanced systems, the new system should feel better than the system it is replacing.

Voice, and, in fact, video QoE is hard to define but users generally recognize it when they experience it. And then they want more of it. With all, or most, other factors being the same QoE, that “little something extra”, will increasingly become the differentiator, the tie-breaker that determines which system is implemented and which one is sold for its scrap metal value.

Another odd phenomenon, from the user’s perspective is that somewhere during the 1980s, telephony users in developed nations began to give up high-availability, consistently “toll quality” phone service for very low availability and inconsistent mobile and, eventually, cellular phones. QoE represents a return to an emphasis on the quality metrics long held near and dear: always-ready service that works consistently and delivers a high quality audio experience. From the user’s QoE perspective, in fact, the high quality audio experience covers not just the live, interactive human speech of telephony but also the fact that the device with which they are interacting produces music and also sound tracks to accompany their increasingly mobile/wireless video experience, as well.

From the perspective of the user QoE is the picture, literally, and the sound. Many older users long for the simplicity of the old desk phone: a simple hardwired device with 10 digits, a # sign, a * and maybe, just maybe, a hold button and some multi-line buttons that light up if you have more than one line. Today’s user, however, would not recognize one of these devices if it showed up out of the clear blue sky. They opt for small hand-held computers with complex user interfaces and often full keyboards, but are setting ever higher bars for their service, be it landline or untethered.

View 4: QoE as Objective/QoS as Tool

And, in a manner consistent with Hokusai’s math, that brings us to the fourth of our three perspectives. QoS has long been the domain of the network engineer and many of us -- because this author, too, is a network engineer -- fear the day when QoE will take over and replace QoS. But we don’t need to worry. In fact, QoE will never replace QoS. We need both. Quality of (user) Experience is the objective: it is how our work will be, and is being, judged while Quality of Service is how we achieve QoE. We need both and, in fact, both will be with us until the end.

To be successful we engineers will have to learn to translate. We will have to learn how to translate those metrics that we hold near and dear, such as packet loss, delay and delay variation into squishier, more subjective measures such as calculated Mean Opinion Score values that are not exactly 4.21 of something, but rather 4.2 +/ .4: less precise but more meaningful. We must be able to translate into “good”, “better”, “best” or “telephony quality” vs “CD quality” and similar units that will press the right buttons in the heads of our users and let them understand what all of our behind-the-scenes work means to them.

For engineers, QoE is a central figure in the picture and getting bigger, but our traditional elements are all still there, albeit ones that require a close look at the picture to truly appreciate.

Conclusion

QoE started as a video consideration and soon grew to include voice and now has been wrapped around the entire multimedia experience that is increasingly being called unified communications. QoE now knows no bounds: the concept applies equally to wireline and wireless, to data, voice and video, to “phone calls”, video conferences and telepresence sessions and to the home “TV” experience. QoE is all around us and must be considered seriously by service providers, manufacturers, end-users and the engineers who support these groups and their users. QoE has become a permanent, and important, part of the picture.

Editor's note: The often witty, occasionally poetic and always enlightening Jim Cavanagh is one of the Eogogics IP networking specialists. He teaches courses on Unified Communications, Everything over IP (EoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over Packet (VoP), IPv4/v6, IMS, network security, ATM, Frame Relay, and more. Check out the newly added EoIP course in the New Courses section of this newsletter.

1. If a transmitted packet is received in error, how does the receiver know, at least with a very high probability, that it is (a) correct or (b) corrupted (contains some erroneous bits)?
2. From your data communications background, what does the receiver do with a corrupted packet?
3. How does the receiver end up receiving the correct packet?

1. A Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) is typically used to determine if a packet is received correctly. Recall that if the received packet fails the CRC, it is guaranteed to be erroneous. If it passes, there’s a very high probability – though not quite 100% -- that it is correct. In this case, it’s nevertheless treated as being correct. Thus the concept of “the probability of undetectable error.”
2. The erroneously received packet is typically discarded, and layer 2 invokes the retransmission strategy.
3. The transmitter, having been told of the failure to correctly receive the packet, retransmits it. The process is repeated until, in principle, the packet is received correctly.

Which brings me to the question of the day: Can the receiver obtain the correct packet after one or more retransmissions, without it ever being received correctly? This may seem like “Mission Impossible”. To figure out whether it is or not, we’ll consider a brain teaser. You may have run into a version of this teaser before, but here is the version suited to the discussion of the problem at hand.

A road divides into a fork, with one branch leading to New York and the other, to Boston. There are no signs or other landmarks, except for two identical twins who will answer any well-defined binary question for ten bucks a question. However, there’s a catch. One of the twins always tells the truth, while the other always lies. And of course you don’t know who’s who. So here’s our question: Can you determine which road leads to which city without ever discerning the twins’ identity?

By spending $10 you can ask a question to which you already know the answer, e.g., “Does the sun rise in the East?” If the answer is “Yes”, you know you’ve stumbled onto the truth teller. If “No”, you know you’ve got the fibber. Ten bucks well spent! Now, for another ten dollars you ask the same person, “Which way is it to NYC?” Having already determined who’s who, you will know exactly how to interpret the answer. So for a $20 investment you know everything you wanted to know---and a little bit more, since we had never particularly cared to tell the twins apart.

The real question, though, is that of finding the way to NYC and Boston for only $10, i.e., with a single question. Can we do it and still not know which twin is which? I am not saying that it is doable, but here is the problem:

• If you believe it is doable, what’s the question that will get the job done?
• If you don’t think so, can you prove that in fact two questions are the minimum required?

By now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with CRC’s and the like. Well, it may seem like finding out which way is which with only one question (and getting the correct packet without ever having a successful transmission/reception) are “Mission Impossible”. But they actually are a “Mission Possible”! “For an answer to how both of these apparently impossible feats can be accomplished, tune in next week.

The other day, a colleague of mine asked me if I could sum up the benefits of Project Management in 10 words or less. “Pay me now or pay me later,” I said. Looking quizzical, he asked me to explain.

“Well, project management promotes the power of the plan. In some complex projects, planning can add up to 25% of the total time requirement. However, the planning time is at the front end of the project where the project team consists of just a few subject matter experts and the financial burn rate is a lot lower than during the execution phase of the fully staffed project.”

During the execution phase of the project, if you discover a task critical to project success that had not been planned for, the work on that segment of the project must cease, but the team members must still be paid -- and the clock for delivery keeps ticking, of course. In my experience, what further complicates the situation is that people want to be productive, so they look for ways to keep busy by inventing work on the project, a phenomenon dubbed Scope Creep. When work lags behind the schedule, costs rise, penalties accumulate, and customer satisfaction (and confidence in the project team) slips. The loss of future business from that client may be the ultimate cost of the delay.

This concept can be demonstrated in any of the nine Project Management Knowledge Areas. In Project Quality Management, for example, it is referred to as the Cost of Quality. Studies have shown that if a good quality plan including the necessary skill levels, inspection techniques, and quality metrics is put into place early on in the project, quality costs are meaningfully impacted.

Similarly, if there is a Project Risk Management plan that identifies any and all risks, quantifies those with the greatest impact on their project, and determines what course of action – whether mitigation, acceptance or avoidance – will be used to manage those risks, all before the first risk event actually occurs, that greatly reduces the impact of the risk events that will inevitably occur.

That’s the power of the plan: Pay me now $ or pay me $$$ later!

A high school basketball player got his 15 minutes of fame, but not in the manner he had ever expected. His coach taught the whole team an interesting play but said, “We can only use this once in a lifetime, so be sure you choose the right moment.” Well, that moment came in a championship game with seconds left on the clock. His team had the ball and were down by one. They had to make this shot and were being heavily defended. This young man watched his teammates pass the ball back and forth without being able to penetrate. The clock was ticking. He knew it! This was the moment his coach had talked about in practice many months earlier.

He quickly dropped to his hands and knees and began barking wildly! All defenders turned to him for just a second to see what he was doing. There, on all fours, he just barked and barked like a dog. His distraction allowed his teammate to get inside to the basket and make the final shot to win the game.

When asked after the game why he did that, he said that although he would have rather been the one making the final shot, he was willing to do whatever it took to win the game.

It’s a story that made the national sports headlines a few years back. It’s a fine example of creative risk-taking as well as teamwork, and one that I often use in my team-work classes. If you’ve read or heard about or experienced an incident of this type, please share it with others by posting it to the Eogogics blogs.

One little known network element crucial to the success of IMS, and thus to the future of NGN communications, is the Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM). Its role is to provide service orchestration and brokering between the IMS networks elements, leaving core functionality such as the Call Session Control Function (CSCF) to focus on signaling mediation between the network elements. While many early IMS-based applications will not require the SCIM, it will be vitally important for the network operators to deploy an SCIM as part of their IMS deployments or risk service problems as they add multiple applications. This is due to the fact that the IMS-based applications require complex and interdependent interactions between various network elements, often involving ad hoc multimedia attachment to media with various protocols and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.

In many application scenarios, special logic may be required to handle certain message sequences. For example, multiple SCPs/Application Servers are registering for notification of certain events in the network. These have to be aggregated during the registration time and de-aggregated and sent to appropriate Application Servers/SCPs when the event is generated by the network. Example in GSM is handling of RRB and ERB when SCIM is appearing as a single Virtual SCP to MSC and connecting to multiple SCPs. All applications that use RRB and ERB will need this type of logic. Suffice to say that service interaction is a complex issue that becomes even more complicated when a generic solution is provided that is service transparent (i.e., service logic is not pre-known and must be discovered as part of the service mediation process). For this reason, bundling SCIM type functionality inside other network elements such as the MSC, STP, SCP, CSCF or App Server is not recommended.

It just so happened that, about two months after a different wireless carrier implemented SCIM functionality into its IMS infrastructure, Susie was talking to a friend who used IM, PTT and a new service called dynamic address book. Her friend, Rick, said that the service worked well. “It’s great! I only input my contacts on the Web and determine who is related to which service and what permissions they have to communicate with me. That’s it!” Rick showed Susie how easy it was to use. She signed up with the new carrier the very next day. Her old carrier never even knew why she had left. Had they understood the problem in the first place, she might have still been with them!

Editor: Check out the 3-day public course on IMS that Gerry is teaching in Washington, DC on Nov 13-14-15, 2007

PS: If you think about it, we really never have heard a human voice at a distance farther than a yell could carry. In original analog voice systems, the analog acoustic wave of the human speaker would be converted into an analogous electrical wave and that electrical wave – not the human’s voice wave – would be transmitted over the distance and cause the creation of a new acoustic wave very close to the original. PCM causes codes representing the heights of the input waves to be generated 8,000 times per second and transmitted in circuits, or, if used with VoIP, in packets. The subsequent wave that is generated at the destination – and played into the ear of the listener – is not the original wave either. So, new LPC-based systems are really no different in that regard, but the way that the translation is done is different.

Editor: James teaches our VoIP courses. See the VoIP (Jan. 28, 2008) and Advanced VoIP (Jan 30, 2008) seminars scheduled in Washington, DC.

Then came the real kicker! I remember thinking “wow” as he flipped to his next slide. It contained the spectrum graph shown below. As you can see it represents the same phrase but also shows speech above 3,330 HZ and below 300 Hz. Without the context of the telephone call it would not be possible to listen to a tape made of a traditional telephone call at the receiving end and know the difference between “pass the books” and “pad the books”. I have been studying, consulting on, teaching and writing about voice and video Quality of Experience -- defined loosely as the user’s perceived “quality” of a call -- for over a decade and I now had the “photographic evidence” to demonstrate what is often the topic of class discussions.

I often tell a class a fact that is reasonably consistent across studies: females tend to give lower Mean Opinion Scores (a human listener’s opinion of voice quality on a 1-5 scale, 5 being best) when listening to traditional voice systems than males do. Interestingly, younger females tend to give lower scores than older females and females generally give lower scores when listening to other females than men do listening to females. “Why?” I ask. The answers range from “women are pickier” to a fascinating discussion of how girls are raised to listen well while boys are allowed to run amok to “men probably aren’t listening that closely during the test”! It turns out that researchers tend to agree that the higher frequency ranges are a more important part of female communication than of male communication though the higher frequency ranges figure prominently in both – see graph above. Interesting points, and now I had the evidence for all to see. Jeff from Polycom, Inc. had my undivided attention for the next 50 minutes – a rare situation, indeed!

Jeff went on to explain that we already have wideband sound – which is the name for the technology that includes a much richer spectrum of frequencies than traditional telephony or basic, vanilla VoIP – from Skype, iPods and MP3 players, traditional television audio, videoconferencing audio, FM, AM and satellite radio and increasingly from VoIP. The G.722 wideband codec standard was published in 1988, G.722.1 in 2000, and G.722.2 in 2002. When VoIP devices negotiate the codec they will use at the beginning of the call, the choice increasingly is a wideband codec.

Jeff summarized the webinar in five bullet points:

• Wideband VoIP is better matched [to today’s QoE needs], because voice is wideband.

• Open [wideband] VoIP standards give much higher sound quality [than their traditional counterparts].

• Today's wideband codecs use bit rates comparable to narrowband.

• Most common wideband codecs are open standards.

• Excellent standards-based wideband endpoints are openly available today [from a variety of manufacturers].

Bottom line: the next time I am going to pass anything I want to do it over a wideband VoIP system. I’ve been discussing this for years and now I’ve got the photographic evidence. And, thanks to this Eogogics newsletter article, so do you.

Editor’s note: For more VoIP education, sprinkled with stories and humor, check out the upcoming Convergence series taught by the author: VoIP Basics (Jan 28-29) and Advanced VoIP (Jan. 30-Feb. 1). Both are public classes, held in the Washington, DC area, and open to individuals.  Details at: http://www.eogogics.com/class-descriptions/announcement

Jung’s Theory of Eight Mental Processes

Jung noted that we’re always either taking in information (perceiving) or organizing that information and drawing conclusions (judging). Perceiving can involve sensing (what is) or intuition (what could be). Similarly, judging can involve objective considerations (thinking) or its impact on people (feeling). Now, each of these four Jungian functions can be used in an intro- or extraverted manner. That gives us the eight Jungian processes. Are you still with me? Good, because we’re about to embellish on it a bit further.

From Eight to Sixteen: Enter Myers and Briggs

Jung believed that each person employs all of these eight mental tools to some degree. But he or she displays a built-in preference for one tool over the others. This is the core idea behind Jungian types.

Now, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers were life-long students of Jung’s ideas. This mother-and-daughter team extended Jung’s typology to 16 based on the following four preference dichotomies:

From the eight letters of the above preference table, we get 16 four-letter type descriptors. That gives rise to the following alphabet soup:

ENFJ, INFJ, ENFP, INFP, ENTJ, INTJ, ENTP, INTP, ESTJ, ISTJ, ESFJ, ISFJ, ESTP, ESFP, ISTP, and ISFP.

Putting the Theory to Test

MBTI®, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test is a standardized test that allows an individual to determine his preferred style for interpersonal communications. MBTI has been applied to every aspect of human relationships. It’s obvious how it may be applied to collaboration and conflict resolution. It has also been applied to learning and teaching, parenting and family dynamics, and decision-making and investing. It’s even been applied to marketing. The MBTI instrument was originally put out by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the good folks who are also behind the SAT and the GRE. But it’s now published by CPP, Inc. It’s been translated into 30+ languages.

Sure, the test has its critics. Some question its scientific underpinnings, to the extent that psychology can be a science. But that has not stopped it from being used around the world as a tool to help people try to work more effectively together.

So What’s Your MBTI Personality Type?

The next time you’re at a company gathering and don’t know what to say to that guy down the hall, try, “What’s your MBTI ® type?” That can be as good a conversation starter at corporate get-togethers as “what’s your sun sign” at parties. There’s no dearth of free and for-fee versions of the test on the worldwide web. Many of the Eogogics courses on interpersonal and management skills include tests like the MBTI. If you take such a course, you will be asked to complete the test before or during the class. The instructor, who is certified to administer and interpret these tests, will use the results in discussions and exercises to help you understand how your work preferences differ from those of your office mates and how you can bridge this preference gap. While MBTI is popular, it’s not the only game in town. Other assessment tools, such as FIRO-B ® and DiSC ®, are often used.

By the way, I’m one of the INTJs. Often nicknamed “masterminds”, we’re around 4% of the population. However, I’m known to be able to emulate the other four-letter combinations quite well as the occasion may require. So what’s your (Myers Briggs) type?

The general area is known as Incremental Redundancy (IR) as well as Hybrid ARQ. I personally prefer the latter, for a simple reason: It demonstrates the limitation of the “divide and conquer” approach of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model commonly used when discussing data communications.

The OSI ‘divorces’ the physical layer from the data link layer (also called layers 1 and 2 respectively), while IR ‘marries’ them together. In short, when a packet is received in error (the result of a physical layer failure), clearly not all bits are wrong. In fact most bits are right, just a few are wrong. When using IR/H-ARQ one decodes the bits using “soft decoding”. All that means is that not only does the receiver attempt to determine if a given bit is a 0 or a 1, but it also assigns a level of confidence in its decision. If the packet is determined to be corrupted, it is still kept in the receiver’s memory---and it’s important to note that what’s kept is the packet’s ‘soft version’, i.e., the value of each bit along with the assigned confidence in its value. A retransmission is usually accompanied by a different, sometimes ‘incremental’ form of error control coding (that is redundancy) and the receiver attempts to decode the new version, again, soft decode it. The physical layer will often fail us again, resulting in a corrupted packet. However, the two versions are then “soft combined” and while it is very likely that both transmissions contain some errors, it is also very likely that the combined version is error-free! Thus neither transmission is ok, but we got the right packet! Of course, if the mission is not quite accomplished with two transmissions, we can keep trying.

This concept has been implemented for the first time in mobile communications in EDGE. It’s employed in UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA and cdma2000/EVDO and, needles to say, also in WI-FI and WiMAX. You may ask why it was not implemented sooner. The answer is: Computers! As you can probably imagine, it takes a fair amount of storage and processing speed, neither of which was available in the earlier days of mobile communications. It is the convergence of computing technology with communications engineering that has made the idea practical at this time.

By the way, did you figure out how to deal with the twin brothers at the intersection?

Yes, it is possible to get the job done with only ten bucks, and thus getting the right answer without ever knowing if it is provided by the truth teller or the liar! You just ask, “If I were to ask your brother which way it is to NYC, which way would he point? Whichever way the twin points leads to Boston and the other, to NYC. You know the answer, you still don’t know if you’ve stumbled on the truth teller or the prevaricator!

So the next time you make a quick stop at the gourmet coffee shop on your way to work, think of the person who goes the extra mile to make sure you have what you need to get your job done. Spend an extra couple of bucks to bring her a frappuccino. When you put it on her desk, say “No reason in particular.”

When that coworker across the organization helps out in a capacity that’s “only expected of him, show him that he is not taken for granted. Send him a thank-you e-mail. Copy his boss.

In a meeting, instead of zeroing in on the major flaw in someone’s idea, focus instead on what’s creative or suggests other possibilities. Acknowledge what’s good. It might even help the other person more quickly see the aspects that won’t work, so no one has to put down his or her idea.

After each of these actions, focus on how you feel. Not only have you made someone else’s day a bit better, you have also added a dose or two of happiness to your own day. Remember the expression, “What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)”? Try a new phrase, “What’s In It for Others” (WIIFO). Yes, what’s in it for others! A bit of cheer and helpfulness can go a long way in making us and others feel better about the people we work with.

I sometimes get asked at parties why dropped calls occur as often as they do.  “Why not just ‘connect’ to the ‘tower that has the strongest signal?’ a layman’s approach to handover.  If you run into that question, you may wish to challenge the questioner to a brain teaser that highlights the perils of trusting our intuition when it comes to “greedy algorithms” -- the strongest signal being a form of greed in this context.  If you’re a non-technical reader, just ignore the bit about handover and enjoy the following as a puzzle.

The brain teaser goes like this:  Ten pirates come across 100 bars of gold.  The pirates have a pecking order, with #10 and #1 indicating the top and bottom-ranked pirates, respectively.  Each pirate wants to maximize his share of the gold bars.  There are no coalitions or collusions between them.  They are all very analytical—they can think things through!

Their process for splitting the loot is somewhat democratic.  It begins with the top-ranked pirate making a proposal on how to divvy up the loot.  (Note that the gold bars can not be broken up, glued together, or otherwise changed; there are 100 bars of gold, period.)  Each man gets one vote, up or down on the entire proposal.  Remember, each man votes his own pocket and there are no side agreements of any sort.  If the proposal gets 50% or more votes, it wins!  If it fails to muster majority, the pirate who made the proposal is thrown overboard, and the process continues with the next pirate down the hierarchy.

The question is quite simple:  What is the maximum number of bars that the most powerful pirate can get and what allocation to each pirate will ensure him the 50% vote that he needs?

Look for the answer next week.  It may surprise you!

Editor: Paul is scheduled to teach the 2-day UMTS seminar scheduled for Nov 5-6, 2007 (Washington, DC).

If you missed the question, it's in the article that was published in the previous issue of our ezine.  (Read puzzle.)  Here is the allocation that the #10 pirate must propose to ensure for him the maximal share and to allow him to be able to live to enjoy his loot.

#10:     96 bars

#9:       0 bars

#8:       1 bar

#7:       0 bars

#6:       1 bar

#5:       0 bars

#4:       1 bar

#3:       0 bars

#2:       1 bar

#1:       0 bars

To prove this, we need to run through a bit of inductive reasoning.  Suppose we got down to just two pirates, #1 and #2, #3 having been just thrown overboard.  Pirate #2, being the ranking pirate, proposes the following:

#2:       100 bars

#1:       0 bars

Clearly # 2 votes ‘yes’ and # 1 votes ‘no’, so #1, having received 50% of the votes, wins.

Obviously # 3 could do this analysis also, so he would try to “bribe” either #2 or #1 for his vote.  The smaller the bribe, the more is left for him, of course.  Who should he bribe?  One who has the most to lose, and that is #1.  So here is his proposal:

#3:       99 bars

#2:       0 bars

#1:       1 bar

As expected, #3 votes ‘yes’ and #2 votes ‘no’.  So the “control” lies with # 1.  And this is where our intuition can get us into trouble:  it’s the least powerful pirate who has the ultimate control!

Clearly, #1 could vote ‘no’, but then the consequences are that (i) #3 is thrown overboard and (ii) # 1 gets 0 bars.  Since 1 bar is better than 0 bars, he votes ‘yes’.

From this point on, it is a breeze!  Pirate #4 knew all of that before we got to this point.  Therefore, #4 would make the following proposal:

#4:       99 bars

#3:       0 bars

#2:       1 bars

#1:       0 bar

So #4 gets #2 to vote ‘yes’ with him, while #3 and #1 vote ‘no’.

And so on!

Editor: Paul is scheduled to teach the 2-day UMTS seminar scheduled for Nov 5-6, 2007 (Washington, DC).

Do you know what the following have in common: television broadcast studios, automated fare collection systems, airborne military platforms, energy distribution systems, and emergency radio networks? It’s SNMP, a protocol designed to manage a diverse set of networked equipment.

SNMP, short for Simple Network Management Protocol, depends on centralized Managers (software) managing Agents (also software) on distributed devices, based on data defined in MIB (Management Information Base) text documents.  Managers use the protocol to “get” data from Agents and to “set” read-write data to Agents.  Agents are also able to send unsolicited alarms (called “traps”) to Managers.

SNMP was originally designed with the thought that it would be an interim standard.  However, the design of more sophisticated standards took longer than anyone thought.  Moreover, many users find the simplicity of SNMPv1 to be quite attractive.  Consequently, SNMP is still around and growing in use and popularity.

SNMP Management was initially aimed primarily at the network appliances, but a variety of industries quickly realized that it could be used to manage and monitor nearly any kind of device, so the use of SNMP has now literally exploded.

As do most technologies, SNMP has its own unique terminology, some of which is quite intriguing.  Here are some examples: managing agents, agent control, shared secret keys, view access control, passwords, trivial security, and on occasion the need to “kill an agent”. Armed with this new vocabulary, your friends’ image of you could quickly change from Dilbert to something more like James Bond!

Despite Simple in its name, and indeed the building blocks of SNMP are simple enough to understand, the totality of SNMP can take six months or more to learn.  But there’s help!  For starters, you can check out our SNMP tutorial. We also offer a comprehensive set of courses on SNMP.  Mastering SNMP can be that Simple! Sorry, could not resist it. :-)

Whether the need is to know or be known, almost everyone (a good 70% per a recent study) first turns to the Internet.  How many times do you see something of interest on TV, in a print ad, or mentioned by a friend and say to yourself, "Oh, I'll look that up on the Internet."  I say that to myself a few times each day.  Then I sit down with my laptop, open the browser, and invariably get lost in a web of meaningless minutia.  Two hours later, I have hard time recalling what it was that launched me on my web quest.  Oh yes, I remember now; it was dieting.  I can probably tell you about every amino acid and its effect on metabolism but I’m clueless on how to lose weight.  I once asked a nurse who works for a diet center what their special secret is.  “Take in a few less calories than you use in a day,” she said.  Hmmm, I did not need an Internet search to figure that out.

Looking up VoIP on the worldwide web is no different.   If you plug VoIP into a search window, you are invariably led into a forest of technical specs -- site after site of the latest in IP PBX's, release 3.0 and 9.5's, gateways, media servers, Internet Protocol, real-time protocol, and a yellow brick road with lions, tigers, and bears.  The simple fact is that most executives, "just want their phone to ring", as a friend of mine who’s responsible for quality at a major engine parts manufacturer put it.  Most business managers aren't sure why they need VoIP other than to keep up with the Jones's.

Executives take note:  VoIP will affect every   employee and every desktop in your organization -- and at no small expense.  VoIP is a technology that impacts every business and every consumer. Traditional phone lines will soon become a thing of the past.  Therefore, knowing what VoIP is and why it matters can help save some time and money while mitigating the risk of business disruption during VoIP deployment.

When it comes to the bare technical essentials of VoIP, there are just a few things that are a "must know".  These include:  Why you need a network assessment, what deployment model best fits your organization, and how VoIP can help with disaster recovery and other mission critical business issues.  And, oh, picking a vendor who can make the phone on your desk ring.

If you have five more minutes, our "CxO Five Minute VoIP Guru Guide" can give you what an Internet search will not uncover in five minutes, or perhaps even five hours!  The best part is that it’s free.  Just click and download CxO 5 Minute VoIP Guru Guide

Editors’ Note:  Peggy Gritt teaches Eogogics’s VoIP courses for decision-makers and technical professionals.   For more on the courses, see http://eogogics.com/wireless-engineering-deployment/core-network-engineering

I’d like to share with you an experience I had while visiting one of my clients some time back.  I’ve used this example in motivation training ever since.

I walked into the client’s customer service department and saw stuffed Easter Bunnies sitting on every single person’s desk. Asked what that was about, the client services manager explained that they were going through a hard patch.  Their phone service had been cut off for failure to pay their bill.  The customer service reps were getting yelled at, cussed at, hung up on, and even threatened.  The manager was worried that her fourteen employees were on the verge of burning out.  She tried many things to alleviate their frustration.

One day, shortly after Easter, when she was out shopping in a dollar store, she saw some odd-looking stuffed toys that looked like a comical, pink colored stretched out version of Bugs Bunny. (Their odd appearance accounted for why so many of them were on the after-holiday clearance sale.)  This creative manager bought fourteen of them and gave one to each of her reps.  “I know the customers can be frustrating.  Every time a caller screams at you, beat this bunny on your desk.  The caller won’t hear you, but you’ll feel so much better.”  From that moment on, they were beating their bunnies and even tossing them about -- pink fur flying everywhere. More importantly, they were once again starting to relax, smile, and enjoy the job.

So throw away your sand and rake. A creative out-of-the-box gesture may be what’s needed to relieve stress, raise morale and build teamwork.  There are times when a $15 investment will accomplish what a fat pay raise may not.  I’d love to hear about a similar experience you may have had.