The tutorials are ideal for:

1. students and teachers in an entry-level marketing course
2. those entering the business world who have not been exposed to business courses
3. anyone starting a business but who lack an understanding of key marketing concepts.

What makes a successful MAN?: The successful delivery of high-speed services across the MAN will be dependent on the combined implementation of new metro technologies - Value-added services - Brief Article

Until recently, the development of the metropolitan area network (MAN) had been restricted by the incumbent technology of mid-capacity synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) rings. But now, technical advances in optical infrastructure equipment are breaking the bandwidth bottleneck and bringing high-speed connectivity to the metro.

These new technical developments in the MAN have a critical role to play in the delivery of services to end-users. From basic e-mail, remote access, videoconferencing, hosted applications and virtual private networks (VPNs), the growing array of networking applications demands that providers offer tiered levels of services so that their customers can buy the right one for each offering. To deliver these services, providers need highly granular control over the quality of service (QoS) they deliver to each customer or application. To do this, they will have to rely on the developments of optical technologies - namely dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), 10 gigabit ethernet, multi protocol label switching (MPLS) and resilient packet rings (RPRs).

The promise of DWDM

The greatest advances in optical networking have been made in the long-haul core. In this area, it is difficult to understate he significance of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. DWDM holds great future promise for optical networking in the metropolitan envionment because it allows more efficient use of fibre already in place by simultaneously transmitting multiple wavelengths over a single one. Indeed, most metro areas have an existing fibre infrastructure which makes the implementation of a DWDM solution into an upgrade of existing deployments (more specifically, replacing SDH signalling equipment) a reasonably easy task, This is a critical factor in the metro environment because obtaining the necessary rights-of-way for new deployments can be difficult in densely populated areas. The provision of DWDM bandwidth, however, is fast and flexible.

DWDM, though, does have its problems. The most notable being that DWDM equipment is extremely expensive. These costs have previously been easy to justify on the long-haul network, where the greatest costs come from laying fibre and regeneration tools over significant distances. But in the MAN, the length from one point to another is much shorter and signal generation equipment costs predominate. In addition, DWDM continues a share some of the limitations of SDH technology. In particular, it lacks service awareness capability. This creates a need for an extra overlay to provide the tiered services for different application flows that are increasingly sought after in the metro environment. WDM wavelengths also present special switching and routing challenges. While DWDM is a technology with bright long-term prospects in the MAN, it will probably be a solution that comes in gradually in conjunction with other optical networking solutions.

Indeed, over the last year, 10 gigabit ethernet, MPLS and RPRs have also emerged at the forefront f metro networking. Each of these technologies individually adds features to MANs that are currently lacking but little attention has been focused on the question of how they ore meant to work together. There is no debate that they will co-exist and need to interoperate with each other (along with legacy technologies), but there is an unfortunate tendency to describe each one individually as the 'magic bullet' which will relieve all service provider concerns. But the combination of these technologies, however, could be the answer to the future of metro networking.

10 gigabit ethernet

Today's network-based applications are business-critical and include corporate local area network (LAN) connection, backend server connections, real-time streaming and telecommuting. Beyond the obvious need for higher bandwidth, all of these applications have several requirements in common, such as the need to be feature-rich, work across converged networks, and be accessible and reliable. Ethernet meets these requirements but it has so far lacked the scalability to serve the MAN.

The development of 10 gigabit ethernet promises to remove this restriction and offer a new option for data transport over dark fibre or DWDM. Driven by the desire to interconnect ethernet LANs that may now be operating at 10Mbps, 100Mbps or even 1 Gbps, standards for 10 gigabit ethernet are being developed by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and will be promoted in the marketplace by The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance (10GEA). Drafts are now available and the formal standard is expected in early 2002, with conforming products and deployments arriving shortly afterwards. In the meantime, there are now some proprietary products that can support existing ethernet networks in the MAN. The forthcoming 10 gigabit ethernet standard will carry distances of up to 40km over singlemode fibre with a physical media dependent layer for 1550 nanometer serial lasers, rated at up to 80km.

by Richard Benwell

How To Get Work Done While Working From Home











1. Step 1

   Make your landline phone number your emergency phone number and your cell number for all other phone calls. If you have people assuming that they can just attempt to reach you at both your cell phone number and landline number, they're going to try. You can set your cell phone ringer on silent so that if people call and it's not an emergency, they can simply leave a message and you can get back to them when your work day is finished.

2. Step 2

   Set a break schedule. Taking short breaks is important. If you sit in one place too long your eyes get tired, your body could get sore and you can start to get worn out, none of which is good for your productivity. Schedule breaks and take a short walk outside or clean something around the house. Give yourself a few minutes to concentrate on you and to clear your mind.

3. Step 3

   Don't let your home have an open door policy during work hours. Make sure that people call before coming over or stopping by. Before you know it, an "I just stopped over to bring this to you" visit can last two hours.

4. Step 4

   Stick to a schedule for when you can check your email. If you frequently check your email, it can severely interrupt your work time. You start to answer everyone's emails and then before you know it an hour has passed. Check your email once an hour if you want to, but limit it to 5 minutes and that's it. Leave personal emails until after your work day is completed.

5. Step 5

   Have willpower. When you work from home you have the flexibility to do what you want, but that flexibility can also put a dent in your work time if you don't use it the right way. Have the willpower to stick to doing your work and what you need to do.

6. Step 6

   If you have instant messenger, sign yourself off. Leaving it on during the day can only lead to temptations of getting involved in conversations. Even if you have your away message up, people can still message you. If you really don't want to leave yourself signed off, set yourself to invisible. You can see everyone that is signed onto your friends list, but they can't see that you're signed on.

by Steve Pavlina

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

David Brooks, New York Times Service

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation's human capital. But when policymakers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care and try vouchers.

The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. Yet policymakers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success? To ask that question is to leave the policymakers' comfort zone -- which is the world of inputs and outputs, appropriations and bureaucratic reform -- and to enter the murky world of psychology and human nature.

Yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol. For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teenage pregnancy, drug use, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you're a policymaker and you are not talking about core psychological traits such as delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That's probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don't work. Sheer willpower doesn't seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn't stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off -- and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

5 Proven Steps To Get Success In Life

1. The first step is to identify what you want to achieve in your life. This is a very crucial step as it will determine every decision and action that you are going to take in the future. If you don’t know what you want in your life, you will be just like a lost sheep, you don’t have a clear direction of where you are heading. So find out what you really want in your life before you move on.
2. To get success in life, you need to believe that it is possible for you to achieve it. If you don’t believe in it, you will never achieve it. When your beliefs are strong enough, you will do whatever it takes to achieve it because for you, it is something true and you will do it to make it come true.
3. Set clear goals to achieve what you want. Do not underestimate what goal setting can do for you. Take out a piece of paper and write down your goals, and then paste it somewhere you can see it often. Remember, your goals must be measurable, specific and have deadlines.
4. Create an action plan on how you can achieve your goals. This is going to be your to-do list and you need to take action according to this plan everyday. The key to get success in life is to do what you should in order to get closer toward your goals each and everyday. If the action is not moving you toward your goals, change your strategies and go all out again.
5. The final step is to take consistent action so that you will eventually reach your destination someday. Once you have identified your destination, all you need to do is to take action to move towards it. Correct your course and you will reach there in the end. Do not procrastinate and do not delay your action. Stick to your action plan and do what you supposed to do.