Soft phones can never replace all hardware IP phones

Intersection (DSCN0462),
originally uploaded by Li-Ji.

I was in a voice conference inside company Intranet using a soft phone in my Intel Core i5, 2G DRAM notebook. Unfortunately, I encountered voice loss several times during the conference. I noticed it might not be the problem of network QoS, because when voice loss happened again, my notebook was also busy accessing the hard drive, which is also 7200 rpm model.

Long scheduled down time again! People are watching!

Screen capture upon Facebook down incident
(Sep. 24, 2010).

I received this notification from Cisco Network Academy mailing list. WOW! It's going down for 72 hours! That is 3 whole days!

Subject: Reminder: Scheduled Academy Connection Downtime begins January 8 (1 AM GMT)
...
Cisco Networking Academy is upgrading its data center infrastructure. This change will help Cisco in continuing to give you excellent services and support.

During the upgrade, Academy Connection and all Academy Connection services will be unavailable for 72 hours. The outage will start Friday Jan 7th at 5 pm and finish on Monday Jan 10th at 5 pm (San Francisco (-8 GMT)).
...