|
|
|||||||||||||
**** NewsBytes ****
Vista isn't just for Christmas
Computer manufacturers have had to pull back from installing Windows Vista on PCs they expected to sell before Christmas. The delay (not counting the last 2 years) is due to last minute alterations to Microsoft's latest multi-flavoured operating system, going on sale 30th November (home consumers have to wait another 2 months). However, with the Windows brand showing a presence on 90% of PCs globally, even industry analysts are tending towards the supplier's prediction that Vista will be the fastest-selling operating system so far. Ironically, the early-adopters and beta testers may be laggards when it comes to real take-up due to the scale of integration in large businesses and the number of applications that need testing.
Demon/BT reclaims routers in a Jiffy
Demon customers may have received a letter recently saying that their broadband service will cease, offering an upgrade and that the old router must be returned in a Jiffy bag, to be supplied. This is because the service was originally leased from BT Wholesale who are ceasing that service and reclaiming their managed ADSL routers. At this point, Demon/BT customers can either a) apply for an upgraded broadband service with Demon at www.demon.net/faster in which case a new router will be supplied FOC by Demon a few days before the switch-over which should be seamless or b) migrate to a different ISP of their own choice, from which point they will be responsible for the choice of router. Arrangements for affected customers of Co-Operative Systems on FM programmes are in place, but do contact us if this concerns you.
V&A hosts Technology Leadership Group reception
This year's Christmas reception of the Prince's Trust Technology Leadership Group promises a stimulating debate with Richard Holway who will focus on the disruption, challenges and opportunities facing the UK Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) industry. The Deloitte-sponsored event is followed by a private view of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition and takes place at The Victoria and Albert Museum on 14 December. Tickets are £250 for a single and £400 for a double. Event details and booking
Techies take two to tango
For every ten people who have heard that binary is how computers function, only two understand it, according to I.P. Freely, author of "Binary for Dummies".
MS Firefox
Confused about IE7 and Firefox 2? And what about all those Google beta products? You're not alone. All the new browser technology is sending us into a spin, this site does nothing to clarify the situation - in fact it positively adds to the spin. Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional is the latest web browser released by Microsoft as a direct result of their acquisition of Mozilla Firefox. The all new MS Firefox, based on TakeOver™ technology, allows you to "upgrade from other shoddy browsers with confidence" it says, presenting the user with the benefits of advanced marginal manipulation, Competition Disabled Mode and RSS (Real Simple Sex). Check out the features to discover how this browser marks a major step forward in user-friendly ways to access non-Google Microsoft content.
http://www.msfirefox.com/
"Guess what I had in back of my cab the other day"
A laptop. Over 3,000 of them. The rest of us are just as bad a the police when it comes to misplacing 55,000 mobile phones, losing more than 4,000 handheld devices and nearly 1000 memory sticks. In fact Londoners are the most-absent-minded culprits of all capital cities, surpassing runners-up Mumbai and Sydney, says a survey was carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of security company Pointsec. Learn more about
laptop security.
4.6 virtual pals
Never 2.5 children, nearly half of online networkers rate their online presence as important and make virtual pals there, an average of 4.6 in fact, according to a study of 2000 US participants by the Center for the Digital Future.
Broadband boom is bust
We may be coming to the end of the broadband phenomenon with European broadband take-up rates diving below previous levels. Market research company ScreenDigest claims broadband growth is 5% down the previous year of 11% in Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain for the third quarter in a row. The rise of so-called 'free' broadband by some mobile companies has been a factor
**** end of NewsBytes ****
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1. Does a second ISP guarantee your Internet connection?
When Internet services are your lifeline, it doesn't pay to rely on just a single provider. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Sooner or later, every Internet customer is likely to suffer some sort of breakdown in service, whether that's email, web browsing or just a complete absence of connection. As we have outlined before, the risk of loss is higher at present because, particularly in the broadband sphere, new equipment is being installed in local exchanges by competing telecommunications suppliers in the universal quest to try and pump more data through existing UK phone lines. SLA-vish optimismThe trouble is that, eventually the day arrives when you the customer will come to test your provider's reliability and your chosen service suddenly disappears off the radar. Unless there is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to hold them to, there is little one can do but wait. Even then, some ISPs fail to deliver: a recent case demonstrated that a customer on a 2-hour SLA still needed up with a downtime in the order of 3 days! The alternative is to make plans to avoid a repeat performance next time ... These days, that doesn't necessarily mean spurning your current provider in search of the perfect ISP (there isn't one) or a crushingly expensive tariff. We can use statistics to achieve more reliable Internet services, as long we have a modicum of understanding about where things go wrong.
The first thing to do is get a broad perspective on which of the services that pass in and out of your broadband line are the key ones propping up the organisation's Internet presence. Most charities will need the protocols and services shown here to work in roughly this order of importance. Note that web can be placed higher up than, say, email simply because it requires just one or two protocols to get working and also gives ready access to web-based email accounts. What this means at a practical level is that, quite quickly, one can re-route a service if it is possible to determine where in the 'chain of IT sophistication' the failure is. Suppose you have a basic connection (IP) but for some reason the provider's Domain Name Servers machines have collapsed. At this point you can still surf the web using IP numbers, but only the most desperate will want to type entries like http://72.14.205.104 just to Google or access their webmail; a quick re-configuration to another ISP's DNS servers may provide the temporary workaround. Further up the IT food chain, it may be that connectivity and web browsing work fine (IP, DNS and HTTP all in place) and just the remote email servers are down (not necessarily the same ISP as the one used for connection). In this case, it may be possible to re-route email from an online control panel typically provided at the ISP where you registered your domain. Location, location, locationGeography matters too in the topology of Internet networking. The aim is to create a resilient connection strategy to protect ourselves against failure of the primary Internet circuit. The wires of your broadband network will typically follow this physical path:
Looking at this physical layout shows there are few options to exercise in the bulk of the network route, as most of the terrain is literally outside our control. This leaves us with the section between our router and the connection in the street, or perhaps only as far as the wall, if the building has shared facilities.
Tiers before bedtimeMost of us will normally purchase from a so-called Tier 3 provider that buys all its provision from other Tier 2 or Tier 1 companies. We could attempt to choose a higher tier of ISP - one that operates further up the hierarchy, requires no upstream and forms the Internet backbone more directly than lower tiers. While this can be expensive, such providers may be able to offer true network redundancy in the form of split locations for their Points of Presence (in exchanges), peering with comparable tier providers, street cables that follow diverse routes so that an errant bulldozer won't take both routes out in one hit, separate routers at the ISP end, duplication of data centres that house equipment, and so on. Making your ISP redundantThe ideal scenario is one where the backup connection runs via a completely separate, parallel route until it reaches a top-level upstream ISP - what is known as a long haul carrier (Tier 1 or 2) Among the options for physically separate Internet connections are:
Taking these options in reverse order, that is, starting with the most robust (separated) and finishing with the most pragmatic ...
Of all the options available, by far the simplest is taking out a subscription to a second ISP. Even retaining just the one router, it needs no more than 5 minutes to reconfigure the box to pint to your backup ISP in cases of Internet loss. The small consolation here is that if the fault is a due a physical disconnection in the exchange, everyone else in the area is likely to suffer too. Is it worth the cost?At present it is still common for broadband customers to suffer connectivity problems because of failing in switches, routers and servers at the remote end rather than the local exchange. One has to reckon such connectivity failures happening at least once a year, which makes a second ISP worth a look. When you stack up the costs of being without any Internet connection, even just for the one occurrence, then the payback time of even a cheap ISP service (now available down at £140 per annum or so) could be a mere couple of hours for just 5 staff. In other words, it will pay back the first time that ISP disaster strikes. Contacts
-IB-
|
Good read? | ||||||||||||||||||||
| I | B | |||||||||||||||||||||
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
2. Wireless broadband, wherefore are thou?
WiMax leapfrogs many of the limitations of today's Wi-Fi with increased bandwidth, longer range and stronger encryption. It could be our broadband saviour – if it ever arrives. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
WiMax, a short-hand for wireless broadband, is quite a neat idea and solves several niggling problems associated with current broadband services. And it's a heck of a lot easier to say than Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. The first problem is getting a faster Internet connection down the street from your local exchange to the building – the so-called 'last mile'. This final stretch of the Net neighbourhood is an extremely expensive hurdle to tackle: digging up millions of urban streets to lay some faster wiring direct to each building would in theory cost more than customers are prepared to pay, so the providers have gone at it in various ways.
WiMax hopes to circumvent all these mundane, earthly troubles by simply sticking a wireless transmitter on a pole in the street. It's the modern version of the telegraph, Granddad. Just bung it in the microwaveThe second poser WiMax overcomes concerns the high sharing demands on both wireless and broadband access. Today's Wi-Fi boxes (called Access Points or APs)– the 802.11a/b/g flavours we have installed in offices now – allow the stations (any client computer device) to interrupt the Access Point, thus competing with each other for attention on a random basis. Closer stations can shout louder, severely hampering more distant stations which have to back off and reduce their bandwidth or throughput to maintain any connection with the AP at all. You can imagine how popular this scenario would be in any street or industrial estate with nearby broadband users downloading happily while, further away, others struggle to maintain a Skype telephone call that continuously breaks up! Fortunately a new 802 protocol comes to the rescue – 802.16 – which reigns with an air of calm in the chaos of subscribing wireless stations. The 802.16 algorithm makes the AP schedule an access slot for each station, so there's no more continual competition. The time slot can even grow and shrink according to demand and the whole arrangement is generally much more efficient than 802.11. A human analogy might be to compare Question Time with "hands up for questions" versus "hassled by hecklers". There is also better encryption and the potential of non-line-of-sight propagation – broadband round corners. Couple these benefits with a theoretical 70-mile range and 70Mbps transmission (not both simultaneously) and we're laughing all the way to the end of the street, perhaps even to the end of town. A single Access Point enabling broadband speeds 10 times faster than today's for a whole borough? From born to Borg in just one assimilationNow for the downers. WiMax is expensive, so it's for the big players. This is partly because Wimax doesn't play with any other WiMax network. With no in-built interference protection it simply makes the Borg-like assumption that all networks belong to it alone, which means disastrous data loss if two networks bump into each other – a distinct possibility where operators employ WiMax for mobile purposes. The financial spanner in the works is that, like a cellular/mobile networks, someone needs to pay up front for lots of masts to be installed. WhereMax?WiMax is ... barely ... slowly ... coming on stream. Milton Keynes recently became the first major WiMax town in the country to benefit from trials with Pipex who acquired a licence early on from an OfCom auction of the wireless spectrum. Rural areas are being served first and best, probably since the ruralites suffer badly in the provision of conventional broadband where copper wires range from difficult to impossible to lay. Parts of Kent and Norfolk are now supplied with WiMax networks too, from the likes of SoBroadband and Telabria, with Devon, N. Ireland, Reading and Westminster beginning to appear amongst the select few. For those who are paying, as opposed to joining in a free trial, the costs are hovering around the £100 per month mark for a symmetrical upload/download service of up to 10Mbps. WiMax UK broadband suppliers and links
-IB-
|
Good read? |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
3. Document collaboration made simple
Every once in a while, somebody comes up with brilliantly simple piece of software that does the job just right. This time it's collaboration that's been nailed. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
"Collaboration" has been one of those terms that scares people, because it reminds us of vast projects, bloated software and lots of consultants scurrying around collecting organisational requirements (preferably in shiny suits). In complete contrast to this, the folks at 37signals have done the usual throw-out-the-rule-book thing and decided to treat the challenge as simple problem, simple solution. This group operates with a kind of "Small Is Beautiful" philosophy of writing software and are trailing these free products as teaser to take up their more powerful Basecamp™ collaboration suite. 
Document collaborationNow that everyone is back from the season's round of Autumn conferences, it's time to compose list of things to do, create papers, documents, minutes and generally organise all those thoughts and useful bits of information we tripped over. That's fine if you get back to the office where it's just a matter of linking up notes with colleagues on a local network; the Track changes in Word feature takes care of that. But what if some of your associates are scattered somewhere else in the UK, or in another country? Many people resort to emailing copies of Word documents, which (because nobody ever changes the file names or marks them with version numbers) means duplicates are forwarded around all over the place, with valuable contributions and edits being lost. Now you can do it across the Internet divide! And it's dead simple too. Writeboard is a small, free online application that makes it easy to write notes without fear of losing or overwriting a good idea and comparing different versions of a document. 
Essentially it posts up a kind of private whiteboard on the web, which you can choose to share by sending email invites to colleagues. It gets better: there is a separate copy for each edited draft and the authored versions are time-stamped and cleverly marked to indicate the number of changes at a glance. Pros
A good starter for the first comment might be: "We need to get this draft hammered out by Friday!" Taking up this theme, one could even use Writeboard as a forum - it's 100 times faster to set up than conventional forum software. 
Writeboard makes innovative use of 'relative changes dots' next to each document version, making it easy to spot where big changes occurred. The more the text changes over a previous version, the bigger the dot. Another neat usability feature is that there's no need to god looking for the Writeboard you created; you (and other co-editors) can simply lodge the location in an RSS reader (Thunderbird email has a good reader) so it's always available at a glance. The export feature is obviously good for locking down the final document draft, but also to take intermediate backups in case you lose an Internet connection or web site disappears temporarily. Cons
VerdictA real boon for authors, journalists, PR people, editors, publishers, bloggers or independent writers, creatives, students, and research groups. 
To-do list collaborationTa-da Lists simplifies keep track of little things that need doing and keeps them all online, so that you - and co-workers, associates, project collaborators - can share and subscribe to them in RSS. To-do list sharing happens in one of two ways which you choose:
Pros
Cons
VerdictAnother excellent web-based application from 37signals, but with fewer features than Writeboard. You can access this too via RSS or even on a mobile phone, but the limited scope of features is more appropriate for one or two users than larger projects. Contacts
-IB-
|
Good read? |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
4. How many out of 10 does your web site score?
Find out how your web size ranking stacks up against others - in under 30-seconds. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Spending time working out how popular web site is can be a frustrating task. Any number of promotional sites promise to make you the most visible web presence going in the large print, but the small print covers the fact that they send you endless spam and promo emails and the results are often that in the popularity stakes, your site stays exactly where it always was. Here's a quick way to get ball-park, top-ten rating. PageRank10.co.uk generates a fast 1-10 ranking. Aficionados have abbreviated the PageRank badge of honour to just "PR". For comparison, the New York Times gets 10, the BBC gets 9, the BT Phone Book gets 6-7 and most charities will be lucky to get 5. There are a few provisos to be aware of however. Since we are comparing sites on the world stage here, the competition of multi-national mega-giants is pretty stiff. Note also that all 12 data centres referred to under PageRank10 belong to Google - just one search engine (though an important one) out of many. Having said that, the PageRank10 is fast and completely free. Swallowing its own medicine, PageRank10 has set its a mission to reach the Holy Grail of "PR10" status within 730 days. When we measured it, www.pagerank10.co.uk was currently rating itself at PR4 so there's a slim chance it might succeed. Need an alternative to convince yourself? Visit GoogleRankings, a site that allows you to check your rankings against several engines including Google™, Yahoo™, MSN™ and Ask™ . However, this site can only test the ranking of one or more particular keywords. For instance the keyword "technology" ranks bbc.co.uk 7th on Google, only 4th at Yahoo! Search and not ranked at all at MSN or Ask. Clearly the inconsistency of cross-engine results says as much about the search companies' engines as the sites and keywords you check. Ticking the Google search box will require registration of a Google Web APIs Licence Key (which is free if you have a Google account http://www.googlerankings.com/what_is_this.html) ; the Google API licence is free and is good for 1000 ranking search runs for non-commercial use. If Google is the be-all and end-all of your site ranking quest, then http://pagerank10.info/ elaborates on the intricate nuts and bolts of the PR mechanism. If it isn't, then don't get side-tracked or hung up about it. Perfecting a global presence when all you want to do is reach a bunch of people down the road can be very costly. Don't forget to be clear about who the target audience is first, in order to measure your web site success. 
Contacts
-IB-
|
Good read? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I | B | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
5. Small mouse, big cheese
Here's a nice idea: a wireless mouse that looks after itself. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Some PC owners like to stick Post-It notes all over their screens, Blu-Tak business cards to the side of their computer base units and surround the workstation with as many furry animals as conceivably possible. Perhaps it's sub-conscious reaction of softening a work environment embedded in so much 'hard' technology. People at the other end of the spectrum go for the clean-desk policy where the only animal in sight is a mouse, and a distinctly non-furry species at that. For these minimalists, even wires and cables are an insult to the Zen of an empty workspace. Fortunately, technology has again come to their rescue in recent years with the appearance of short-range wireless in peripherals like keyboards and mice, banishing unsightly cables forever. However, the wireless purist is soon plucked painfully from the airwaves and back down to earth when the first set of mouse or keyboard batteries dies. Suddenly the wireless spectrum is a bare as the desk surface, and with it comes the realisation that no more work is going to get done until after a trudge down to the shops to buy a couple of AA cells. 
Now however, you can get your mouse to eat its cake and still have it. A new rechargeable wireless mouse from Belkin sits the mouse in a holder or recharging cradle. Because it's optical too there's not even a need for a mouse mat. No balls, no batteries, no bother. Combining a receiver and charging base into one, the unit plugs into a standard USB connector at the back of your computer, allowing constant operation. When not in use, the mouse sits quietly in the cradle, its Nickel Metal Hydride cells soaking up electrons via the USB to be ready and charged when needed. Here you have a small tidy mouse that never runs out of cheese, so you get that virtual pet, Tamagotchi-feeling thrown in for free (but without all the fur). Designed to accommodate left- or right-handers equally, the device will work up to 6 feet (1.8m) away from its mouse house with 800 dpi precision optical tracking and includes 3 one-touch hot keys and a scroll wheel. The unit is compatible with all operating systems after Windows 98SE, and at around just £22 will make a great Christmas present or work bonus for minimalists and animal lovers alike. Get the Belkin Rechargeable Wireless Optical USB Mouse ContactsWant to know more? Ask us. -IB-
|
Good read? |
| I | B | |
from Amazon now.
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
6. Q&A: How to measure the success of our web site?
Question 
Hi Mark, We have a project coming up soon, an overhaul of our web site. I was wondering, how do you measure the success of your web site. Sure - we can see x amount of pages viewed per month, but does that make it a success? Would appreciate your thoughts! | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Sadly there is no simple answer for any given web site on this subject! It depends on who your site is aiming at; in other words, first define your audience. Obviously the IBMs and HSBCs of the world truly want to capture global interest. On the other hand a fund-raising site for the village hall has smaller aims, even though their site may exist in a global space. For a national organisation, you are presumably interested in knowing how most of the UK responds to your output and perhaps especially UK members, Local Authorities and councils. If you email electronic newsletters to members, then a very simple way of collecting purely quantitative response data is to put a unique image tag in each circulation. Polls and surveys are a good way of soliciting qualitative feedback too. There is heaps of software to do web site analysis now - we have done past projects with Analog/ReportMagic (ask us) - but also tools like Webalizer, which you may find bundled as part of your web space deal and bravenet.com who have lots of free software including counters, polls and analysers. WebTrends is probably still the top benchmark if you can afford it: CA$750 upwards. Once the data start coming in, the tough bit is separating out the flak - all those bots and search engines like Google that scan your site, international visitors who stumble on your site and aren't really interested, people who clicked the wrong link in a search, etc. Many packages do have a system for analysing IPs and converting them to real web addresses, so you can make a fair stab at where visitors come from, but it's still a time-consuming process if you want to understand the behaviour of a specific few hundred or thousand people. If the latter is your goal, try to make most use of your members private area and analyse which links they click on most frequently there, since the field is much narrowed then. The more intelligent analysers can even track the most common paths (sequences of pages) that visitors follow on your site, so it's possible to determine if site design is optimum or whether they struggle with the navigation. A really broad brush approach is to run the PageRank10 analyser, but that really only gives you a marks-out-of-ten result. -IB-
|
Good read? |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | |||
|
Clicks of the Trade - save text typed into web forms
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
-IB-
|
Good read? | |
| I | B | ||
^ Back to contents ^Overview of InfoBulletin Opinions expressed within InfoBulletin do not necessarily represent the views of Co-Operative Systems.
E&OEViewing IB Implementation Privacy |
Subscriptions ^ Back to contents ^Contact details
|
|
|
Read recent and past issues of InfoBulletins on the Web at http://www.coopsys.net/ibindex.htm or search our archives and subject index.
We hope you found InfoBulletin useful! If you would like to comment on any of the articles or request particular subjects to be covered, mail us here.
| ||
