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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Oh, Vienna!
"This means nothing to me", you're saying, but you'll be hearing more about it soon. While Microsoft labours away at preparing its Windows Vista launch, slated for the end of this year, it is already heralding the über-next version. The successor-formerly-known-as Blackcomb is now branded Vienna with the possibility that some features abandoned by Vista (like the WinFS file system) might re-appear. City names (Sparta, Daytona, Cairo, Chicago, Memphis) were used to denote previous Windows development models, later giving way to Canadian ski resorts: Whistler now XP, Longhorn (saloon) now Vista, Blackcomb now Vienna. "We walked in the cold air, Freezing breath on a window pane" ... perhaps someone in Seattle is an Ultravox fan?
VPN forum
The IP VPN (Virtual Private Networks) 2006 Forum takes place on Thursday, 23rd February 2006 and is free to delegates who pre-register. Aimed at IT/Network Managers from both private and public sectors, the forum aims to give a thorough insight into the ‘pros and cons’ of VPNs, covering SSL, IPSec, MPLS and Managed as well as implementation and management. The programme finishes at 3.30pm and the venue is Inmarsat Conference Centre, 99 City Road, London, EC1.
Registration and info here
Learn to speak iPod
No matter how poorly you understand computers, technology or even the old-fashioned video recorder, you can be sure there's dummer dummy elsewhere on this planet frantically stabbing at buttons and tearing out hair. Ergo it was inevitable that a company would rush to the aid of 'iPod dummies', Sloane Rangers et al. That company is Selfridges, who have begun classes at £65 for 40 minutes at their giant Oxford Street store. Only they're not the first, since iPodders have for some time had access to free advice from Apple specialists themselves, and for free. Just a short bus ride down to the Genius bar at the Regent St Apple store, about as long as it takes to listen to an iPod track, if only you can figure out how to work it.
Story at the Business Scotsman.
Quaero sought but not found
Viewed within Europe as a potential 'Google-blaster' - a riposte to "the global challenge posed by the American giants Google and Yahoo" - Project Quaero has gone to ground. Developed as a multimedia engine by French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom, Quaero drew the attention of a speech given by President Chirac in Reims, where it was billed as a "competition for technological supremacy". The exciting development is based on a mix of existing technologies, but the press ensuing scrutiny proved too much for Thomson's chairman, Frank Dangeard, who put the project's web site behind a protected login. Fortunately, or not (depending on your point of view), the aforementioned American giant Google's search engine had already cached a version of the previously visible Quaero home page.
Intel inside ... Apple
Apple's new MacBook Pro laptop has 2 or 3 times the performance of its previous PowerPC G5s, but is for the first time based on an Intel processor chip, the Intel Core Duo. Apple's other desktops, consumer portables and servers will follow the switch to Intel chips by end 2006. The MacBook Pro continues Apple's innovative stream with a 15.4in, 1440x900 pixel widescreen display, a camera for webcasting, a backlit keyboard, wireless Bluetooth 2.0, dual-link DVI video out, Gigabit Ethernet and optical digital and analogue audio in/out, making smart moves into content creation on-the-go, video editing and TV stand-in. It also features MagSafe, a magnetic power connection that detaches safely when someone trips over the power cord to prevent physical notebook damage.
Lexmark plant closes
The last bastion of printer cartridge manufacturing in Scotland is to close, losing 700 jobs in the process. American-owned Lexmark are citing high production costs and over-capacity in the industry for the decision and the Rosyth plant closure is just part of a world-wide restructure, shedding 1400 jobs altogether.
Fraud shifts up a gear
With card fraud becoming a harder target, 2006 will likely see fraudsters moving increasingly to online and Internet scams. Logical then that the Financial Services Agency (FSA) are urging UK banks to step up protective measures. Although the £14.5m Internet banking fraud losses for the first 6 months of 2005 represent a trebling of the previous year's period; Card-not-present (CNP) fraud increased by 29%. Problem is, the FSA are concerned that if the banks simply shift the responsibility for security on to online customers and their computers, the majority will dump Internet banking. A quarter of online banking users admitted their software is always up-to-date but many consumers are not aware they can take advantage of verification schemes such as those provided such as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode.
See APACs fraud figures.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Wicked encyclopedia!
The encyclopaedia has added 3.7 million articles in 200 languages since it was founded in 2001. The English version has more than 45,000 registered users, and added about 1,500 new articles every day of October 2005. Wikipedia has become the 37th most visited website, according to Alexa, a web ranking service. | ||
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Once upon a time, an encyclopedia was a set of books defined as too heavy to carry and too expensive to afford. Owning one inferred a certain exclusivity, a membership of an intangible club just by owning a private collection of the world's global knowledge at the time. Many of the books languished on the shelves in bookcases carefully commissioned by their proud owners; not least because heaving one of these tomes out of its shelf slot called for a week's worth of bench presses at the gym first; but also because the content wasn't necessarily the entire rationale for such an extravagant outlay. The serried ranks of glorious spines mattered too and, above all, the imputed status that encyclopedia ownership brought with it. One immediate aspect of this old method of recording of recording information was precisely that it stayed old - a snapshot of outdated knowledge. Indeed emphasis was given to non-changing, historical subject matter, rather new developments. Nowadays when it comes to cataloguing, the book format no longer necessarily cuts the mustard, especially where it concerns human lore, because no other type of material turns over faster. How Much Information?
An attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year, produced by faculty and students at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. Computers are ideally suited to storing facts and allowing them to be changed at will thereafter. But, for a long while, our natural human instinct for hierarchies dictated that we imposed them on the information structures we built; thus every digital knowledgebase required an Editor With Ultimate Control before information could be approved and published. Which is fine for the newsletter on a local history society web site, but less appropriate for encapsulating the goings-on of human society at large where, in any given year, every member racks up as much stored information as it took the whole of humankind 25,000 years to produce. In the space of half a century, we have suddenly rocketed not just the volume, but the accessibility of our knowledge to the other end of the spectrum. Not only can anyone with a web-accessible computer navigate and read vast chunks of facts in the blink of an eye, the information on offer is up-to-date and can even be edited by the reader! This, in a nutshell, is what Wikipedia achieves par excellence. Collaborative or competitive?The strength of Wikipedia, over and above harnessing the power of computing merely to hold the data, is to allow readers to edit it too. That means each page comes with a tab entitled "Edit this page" and also a "History" tab showing updates. One's first reaction is to imagine openly editable content will lead to an anarchic mess of authoring, continually trashed by would-be wreckers. However, exactly the opposite happens. By opening up editorship, the elite in any given subject will invest time and effort in looking after 'their bit' which means not only making sure it is factually correct, but that it stays that way despite any potential malevolent alterations inflicted by casual visitors. The "History" tab reveals the authors, frequently originators in their field. That's not to say 100% accuracy is guaranteed, indeed some coverage has exposed the possibility of posting false information or hoaxes. However, a study comparing Wikipedia and Britannica published by the scientific journal Nature in December 2005 found a similar error rate among scientific articles in both encyclopaedias. This vastly decentralised content management system numbering more than 600,000 contributors to date, also deters any wide impact by the odd vandal by its sheer scale - currently 890,462 articles and counting. Controversy: Talk to the hand The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. Where there is a dispute about the edits on a particular Wikipedia page, for instance, the obviously contentious issue about how crop circles are formed, a notice at the top and a 'talk' area lets conflicting authors air their views. And who are these writers? 
Wikipedians are the people who write and edit articles for Wikipedia. Started in 2001 (English version), Wikipedia is growing on the order of fifteen to twenty million words a month, a rate of around 6 times greater than the most avid reader could consume, knocking paper-based competitors off the scale. Wikipedia - define thyselfWikipedia naturally has its own entry defining itself recursively as "a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... not to be confused with ...Encyclopedia Galactica A new angle on researchWhy bother to stray from Google, or indeed any other search engine? Google maintains an increasingly harried position on the accuracy of the Google search engine and the results it produces, with arguments centring around who thinks what should get priority. Given the possibilities, we also prefer to examine information from different angles, which is where database features start to shine. A paper encyclopedia can be accessed alphabetically and through its occasional linked references to other entries. By comparison, digital versions bring the all power of modern database to bear down on the data allowing us to really approach a topic from several sides For example suppose we want to research the development of the bicycle - an internationally contentious issue! Scanning through the Wikipedia entries in traditionally alphabetical order, beginning "Bi", we immediately see other references of interest:
The entry we want is simply "Bicycle" and on this long page we find a good summary: "No single time or person can be identified with the invention of the bicycle".However, it correctly cites three men - Baron Karl von Drais (Germany 1810 - hobbyhorse-style pushbike), Kirkpatrick MacMillan (Scotland 1840 - treadle drive) and Ernest Michaux (France 1850 - front wheel pedals) - as the pioneering contenders. On the same page we get useful links to the 19th-century, to set the mechanical innovations in their historical context, and a fascinating Timeline of transportation technology, all grist to the mill which shows other transport technologies going places in the 1800s, like George Stephenson's railway engine. From here, a sideshoot takes us to a Timeline of motorized bicycle history. The main page lists other ways to slice-and-dice the bike's development too:
Among other advantages of the digital format are multi-lingual versions and direct links to external sources. Thus in "Myths and Milestones in Bicycle Evolution" (William Hudson), we discover that the pneumatic tyre was actually first invented in England in 1845 by R. W. Thompson and only later in 1888 commercially developed in Scotland by the man we associate universally with its appearance - Dr. John Boyd Dunlop. 
The beauty of this presentation of encyclopaedic entries is that, although all the classic historical info is there, so too are the very latest events. Continuing with our topic, the Tour de France link brings us shortly to a listing of Lance Armstrong's record-breaking 7-year reign as race winner. On Wikipedia's front page there is even a Random Page link, for those that want to discover and educate themselves on some new topic - a bit like the old-fashioned method of sticking a pin in a book! Perhaps some things haven't changed so much after all. Contacts
-IB-
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a fictional or hypothetical encyclopedia of a future galaxy-spanning civilization, containing all the knowledge accumulated by a society with trillions of people and thousands of years of history.
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2. Outlook Personal Folders Backup - automated
We all forget to make copies of our personal email folders, but this neat utility remembers on a regular basis and avoids losing emails. | ||
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By creating copies of your .PST files at regular intervals, the Personal Folders Backup download makes it easy to keep all of your Microsoft Outlook folders safely backed up. Outlook folders are stored in .PST files, containing things like the Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, etc. You may have additional .PST files for Internet Folders, Personal Folders or archives. This handy tool lets you choose which of your .PST files to back up, and how often, with 7 days being the default. The installation takes just a few seconds and is trivial to perform, though it's best to have Outlook closed while you do it. PFbackup in useOnce installed, the only noticeable change is a new menu item within Outlook.
Open a Personal Folder or use "Open a backup" button to access an Outlook.pst file. The default location is conventionally: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\ To change which .PST files to back up, click Options button to show the Backup Options window. 
Here is where the reminder interval is set, while the Browse button allows you to choose a location to place the backup. For instance, if this at home, you might choose a (large!) memory stick or external drive, say drive F: or if this were at work, a private space, say H:\myOutlookPersonalFolders\. Note that PFbackup only backs up .PST files. Mailboxes within Microsoft Exchange Server normally have folders backed up regularly by the server backup, typically a tape drive system. However, you can still use PFbackup within this scenario to copy any Personal Folders not held within Exchange. Contacts-IB-
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3. Gone: Phishing
Online scams could soon go the way of online spams. | ||
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What is phishing?'Phishing' is increasingly prevalent as a method of online fraud. The ruse is to lure victims, usually with a cold-call email as first contact, to a web site that is a very good copy of another site, say a popular bank or shopping site. These fake sites trick people to log in with their normal account details and passwords, but instead capturing that confidential information, so the perpetrators can commit fraud with the stolen IDs. Such forgeries are often presented in the body of an email with obfuscated hyperlinks and hidden text, making a convincing masquerade. Until recently, the only way to see through such scams was to muster common sense and keep up to date with the latest digital dodgers. Fortunately, the fear of visiting unknown web sites can be allayed by a new browser toolbar - The Cloudmark Anti-Fraud Toolbar. 
How the anti-fraud toolbar worksUsing the collaborative techniques employed in their pioneering anti-spam tools, Cloudmark are providing a plug-in that will rate any web page you surf on the Internet in order to help you identify its credibility, though this is still only a Beta version, meaning it's a piece of software that's still running with its stabilisers on. The toolbar displays buttons to block sites where you spot fraudulent content. This information, along with other that of other toolbar users, contributes to a vast pool which helps Cloudmark's service rate sites' safety from fraud. Clicking on a link to a harmful web page - one containing spyware, viruses, worms, identity theft or phishing attacks - the anti-fraud toolbar detects the web address as being "Unsafe", using information from the Cloudmark pool, and blocks it from being viewed. Well-visited sites may be rated as "Safe" and relatively unknown ones as "Untrusted". The Cloudmark anti-fraud toolbar works for webmail too, blocking unsafe pages that your web mail provider misses. This kind of technology is so crucial to protecting the web browsing experience of the future that late in 2005 Microsoft announced its collaboration with three firms to add phishing filters to its next Windows operating system, using phishing threat data compiled by US companies Cyota, Internet Identity and MarkMonitor. The tools will be integrated into Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 and will also appear as a free add-on to Microsoft’s MSN Search Toolbar. ContactsLearn more about Cloudmark anti-spam and protection products. -IB-
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4. Do you Google or swallow it?
Can too much gargling with everyone's favourite search engine leave a nasty taste? | ||
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Few products have pioneered their paths to such lofty status as to be able to usurp one of the most fundamental entries in the English dictionary; when it comes to the web, we no longer "search", we "Google" instead. The anecdotal evidence suggesting that Google really is so dominant is disputed however by Dr Eszter Hargittai, Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the US. She maintains that the search strategies used by people is more important than which particular search engine they choose. More incisively, "The problem with the overwhelming focus on Google is that we end up putting too much faith in one proprietary service without knowing where the profit-seeking goals of the company may lead its quality down the road." How Google works The company view: Google's PageRank™ technology The geek's view: PageRank is Dead The industry view: A mish-mash of technologies This blind faith, engendered by a simple-to-use search interface, has played its part at the centre of criticisms of the company, whose technology for rating the importance of web pages remains proprietary and therefore secret. Rank and fileGoogle's method for deciding which web sites get closest to the top 10 results, given a particular set of search criteria, has tried to mimic human societal customs - those of recommendation, endorsement and testimonial - by acquiring the same sense from the way web sites are linked and referred to each other. Those who depend on appearing on the first page of results - the Holy Grail of web site ranking - are the small commercial firms who do business almost exclusively online, relying on the virtual medium of the web for marketing, presence and trade. Some years ago, such traders noticed they had experienced a sudden shift out of the search limelight, pushing them off the top rankings. A fierce backlash ensued when it was suspected that new search algorithms had been slipped in under the wire, practically overnight it seemed. Backtracking
More recently, the rise of popular blogs appearing in search results caused further concern to lose trust in the Daddy Of All Search Engines as a beacon to finding reference works. Not that all blogs are just mindless, opinionated diaries; on the contrary, leading experts in their field have often chosen the blogging medium to spout their wisdom, justifiably elevating some blogs to reference status. The new troubles started with the trackbacks problem. This auto-citation feature allows people to see which other bloggers have read your page, but the empty pages generated as a natural consequence were picked up by Google web crawlers, skewing results that showed meaningless empty pages high up the list. 'Beans means ads'These weaknesses and compensations have been well-documented by Google-watch and others. Don't forget that most Google services remain largely free to its users, but that the commercial nature of any company means it must derive an income and in Google's case, that means being beholden to its advertising revenue. Google facts Did you know :
The search giant hasn't done itself any PR favours in the recent past, with such clangers as a blacklisting of CNET News.com over reports on their CEO, Eric Schmidt, with information gained largely by use of its own search engine. Lately, there were more criticisms surrounding 'topic censorship' in a deal with China on running the search engine on Chinese servers. Trust v. RelianceIf there is a lesson to be learned here for charities, that too is a commercially-derived lesson, namely know your market. Or, to relabel the context, know your audience, be they supporters, members, donors or trustees. Familiarity with the audience helps you realise the extent of your reliance on the methods employed to communicate with them - newsletters, phone campaigns, news media, the web, email, volunteers on the street, and so on. A heavy dependence on any one strand may simultaneously win fame in the PR and funding stakes, but also skew the balance of your overall strategy in one direction. -IB-
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5. Environment: Walking the walk
In step with the times. | ||
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British Telecom, a large telco by any standards, has had a commendable approach to environmental policy for a long time. Way back in the mid-90s, the giant had set itself a goal of bringing its carbon dioxide emissions down 25% by 2010. Far from labouring to reach this objective, BT had already achieved a 46% reduction by 2004, with a £119 million energy cost saving into the bargain. Key to this accomplishment were simple ideas like curtailing the size of its vehicle fleet. Avoiding the use of vans in London simultaneously slashed costs, due to parking charges and congestion, and carbon emissions. The solution was more use of public transport, generating a troop of so-called 'walking engineers'. The new, fighting-fit workforce also found personal benefits in improved health and were less stressed because of arriving at jobs more punctually. At Co-Operative Systems, we're proud to say that 'walking engineers' is a modus operandum we have employed from our inception, bringing benefits in efficiency for clients and well-being for engineers alike. -IB- Acknowledgements: Paul Brown, Sustainable income, RSA Journal |
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6. Q&A: Sleep mode saves laptop batteries
Question 
Hi Mark, I'm never quite sure what happens when I press the power button while my Windows laptop is on. Sometimes it seems to 'go to sleep' or blank the screen, so to be sure I usually shut down via the Start button. However, I've heard that sleep mode is good for laptops because it helps save battery power. Is there a way I can force it to sleep? | ||
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It's true that Hibernation mode does save valuable battery time. By forcing the hard drive to stop spinning, it reduces one of the larger consumers of energy - the drive motor. You can configure this to happen automatically when the laptop (and you) are idle - no offence intended!
A variety of power schemes are shown and yours should already be set to "Portable/Laptop". Now in the same window, click the Hibernate tab and tick the box. After the configured idle period, this function wraps up all the work you were doing on screen and in memory, caches it temporarily on the hard drive and puts the drive at rest. The next time you nudge the mouse or tap a key, the process instantaneously reverses, splurging the cache back to whence it came from ,so that the PC looks just as when you left it. What many don't know is that you can do this with a keyboard shortcut and avoid the 10 or 15 minute wait (or whatever you set) until the machine registers that it's idle - a boon if you know you are getting up to leave the laptop for a while.
When you click the Sleep (or whatever you called it) icon, Windows XP puts the computer into StandBy. It may also put it into Hibernate mode if this is how the When I Press The Sleep Button On My Computer setting is configured on the Advanced tab of the Power Options Properties dialog box. Either way, you can look forward to batteries than are less battered. -IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - Don't 'Backspace'. 'Insert' instead
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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