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January 2007 Choosing Windows Vista, Phone-to-Calendar synchronisation, Blu-ray v. HD DVD, How full is your inbox?, How safe is that web site?
August 2006 Dell 9G PowerEdge server overview, Shop online? You'd have to be certified!, ADSL to the power of 8, Control your server 100ft away, Computing and telephony converge, Where are my Outlook pictures?
December 2005 Fly away on my cell phone, $100 laptop, Email etiquette: subject for discussion, lastminute IT strategy
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Following our review of 
Salesforce.com has become a commercially well-known supplier of its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. By setting up its own Foundation, salesforce.com is now able to satisfy requests from non-profit organisations who typically require software for tracking contacts and managing donors. The nature of their donation is an Enterprise Edition of the complete on-demand CRM product for up to 10 users, including standard support, with around 150 non-profit organisations in the UK currently using it. Although licenses donated like this are for 12 months, they renew themselves if the licence is actively in use. More details from 
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1. Eee PC: Mighty small laptop
... and a price to match. Will all computers look like this one day? | ||
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This baby laptop boasts ease of use, robustness, sub-Kilogram portability and keen sub-£200 pricing among its many features. Earning itself a slot in the rave parade, the new Asus Eee PC doesn't sit on the shelves for long, so eager have consumers been to snap one up. So just what makes this little marvel so desirable? A PC in name only?A long time ago, a PC was defined as a machine conforming to the IBM specification that ran an operating system such as DOS and eventually Microsoft's Windows. Even longer ago, to an older generation, a PC was chap with a funny hat and a whistle who you stopped on the street to ask the time - but let's not get distracted. What both of these former icons have in common is that our impressions of them have become blurred. Coming back to the PC as Personal Computer, we find those two sacrilegious letters penetrated even the hallowed Mac stables in the 1990s in the form of PowerPC, who later veered even further towards what was becoming the Microsoft/Intel/IBM norm by running on Intel chips instead of their partnered Motorola ones. Nowadays the 'PC blur' continues with machines adopting the mantra that are neither Windows nor Macintosh, but the Eee PC is perhaps the most blatant in that the letters "PC" actually turn up on the case, and yet ... it's pure Linux inside. E-reading, e-writing and e-arithmaticThe emphasis of the Asus Eee 700-series PC is on the student and educational market with its title morphing the Three Rs into the Three Es - namely, "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play". The friendly-looking 7-inch screened portable presents itself as a sub-notebook format available in Dell-style black or Apple-style white with application icons defined as simply as possible. 
Eee PC work tab ApplicationsA selection of the application icons shown in the tabs:
These applications are overwhelmingly free, open source ones and are gathered under a series of tabs entitled Internet, Work, Learn, Play. Some icons are necessarily oversimplified, so that for instance OpenOffice also contains the spreadsheets and presentations modules of that suite. However, the basics are all there, not only for your average student or early-learner, but even for a typical mobile worker, and that includes the software for accessing the web cam built into the screen surround. Thus at the top end, even video-conferencing and phone calls are catered for, yet the graphical interface would be familiar to almost any Windows XP user. So solid hardwareToshiba flashes 128GB solid-state drive 
Giant memory-chip maker and laptop PC producer Toshiba recently announced it would offer flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) suitable for notebook PCs with a SATA interface in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities starting May 2008. The world's no.1 memory-chip producer, Samsung Electronics, already makes solid-state drives, as does SanDisk, Toshiba's partner. One of the deficiencies that many laptop owners are finding of late is that a spinning hard drive is a source of unpredictable and sometimes premature failure. That recipe of thin platters spinning microns away from their drive heads doesn't make for a robust combo, especially when we bang them on and off trains, buses, shelves and desks. And any motorised drive is bad news for power consumption too. Take away those moving parts by substituting flash-based chip technology and the result is a sturdy solid state drive (SSD) capable of storing data just as rotating drives do, but faster, drawing less power and without wear and tear. Using memory chips as bulk permanent storage is not a new trick of course and has major benefits in silent operation and faster boot times, but solid-state drives have been held back from widespread adoption by high price and limited capacities. Indeed, it is now apparent that the 2GB, 4GB and 8GB drive options offered with the Eee PC are a drop in the SSD ocean, not only compared with the 100+GB conventional platter drives shipped with today's laptops, but also when measured against the SSD drive capacities we will see appearing during 2008. The only potential perplexity of SSD is that the conventional PC delineation between 'memory' (live working RAM) and 'disc space' (permanent storage space) is likely become blurred itself as hardware technologies converge on chip-based memory. The picture is further complicated by the inclusion of a Secure Digital card slot for reading cards or adding memory. Nonetheless, owners of PDAs and smartphones don't suffer from such confusions simply because they don't care what their data is stored on. Throw in the benefit of an average 3.5 hour run time at this price level and SSD laptop users will cease to care too.  Security simplifiedThe Eee PC operating system is a Xandros installation of Linux customised for this purpose by Asus. Moving to Linux-based system has other advantages. In a stroke, one leaves behind viruses and bloated software updates and welcomes system stability and speed of operation. Well almost. Linux is not without its own viruses, and although anti-virus software is installed on the Eee PC, we're currently looking at an arsenal in the range of a few tens for Linux compared to tens of thousands for Windows. 
Aside from external security threats, 'internal' ones too are taken care of, meaning that the user can't wipe the pre-installed applications because they simply don't show up in the Add/Remove Software panel. Again, Asus are keeping prying children at bay, but in doing so are protecting curious adults from their meddlesome selves. You said "How much ...?"When it comes to price, this device may be more shockproof than its shoppers. With its 7-inch LCD flat screen, the Eee PC is also a diminutive near-A5 size (225mm x 170mm), lightweight (0.92Kg), networked (both wired and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi), expandable (3 USB2 sockets and SD card slot) and presentable (VGA/D-Sub socket for external monitors and projectors). To bundle all of that into a less-than-£200 street price tag including VAT (for the 2GB drive option) is both simultaneously astounding and attractive for a significant section of potential laptop/sub-notebook buyers, especially those who just want to whack off emails, do some online shopping and store a few documents. The larger disc models rise to just over £250. So are potential purchasers making any compromises? DrawbacksIt's a given that the keyboard is inherently cramped into a small format and thus, with only a millimetre or so between key tops, awkward for people with stubbier fingers, of which "absolutely none at all" is the number of such people photographed in Asus press shots. There is a small trackpad for mouse functions, but both of these can be supplemented with plug-in full-size versions for serious desk work. More seriously, the screen resolution of 800 x 480 pixels now rates as low, rendering less than 20 lines of typed text at a time for a typical document in OpenOffice. We've been used to models like the JVC XP731 affording us a 7-inch screen of 1024 x 768 pixels for quite some while, so this climb down to around three-quarters of the resolution would mean very limited windowing of applications on the desktop. Interestingly, hints of a 10-inch screen version were announced and then denied by the company. Printer support is limited to a built-in PostScript driver, and while this certainly reduces the software bloat of interminable numbers of printer drivers and applications, not all printers support it, so it's worth checking that your favourite printer actually prints via PostScript before committing your purchase. The lack of disc space on the solid-state drive has been mentioned, with a current maximum of 8GB on offer, with the actual capacity available to the user reduced by up to a further 2.5GB to accommodate the operating system and installed applications. However, the USB expansion ports means it's easy to plug in a USB stick with another 4GB or so, or even a conventional platter drive with hundreds of GigaBytes available for working with larger media such as pictures and audio. 
Specifications
Easy come, Eee-sy goOf course, the genius of producing a value-for-money machine that any child/student/old fool can use, is that the same ease of use applies to just about everyone, and in stimulating a consumer demand, no doubt other variations on the Linux-based, solid-state laptop will follow. When you are looking at four to five times the cash for a contemporary laptop, the Eee PC provides some tough competition. Perhaps one day this will be the most popular type of personal computer we buy. Contacts
Suppliers-IB-
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2. Tapping into VoIP telephony
The last bastion of private telecommunication is about to fall prey to the modern eavesdropper. The hackers are back. | ||
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Suggest that calls might pass openly through any number of unknown administrators to reach their destination and you'll probably be met with a look somewhere between incredulity and horror Initiation rightsOne would think that phishing, phreaking, scamming and spying were quite enough to fill an organised crime boss's portfolio, but now a new and highly lucrative prey is stumbling naively into the fraudster's net - the digital telephone call. Whilst many UK callers natter away happily, probably blissfully unaware that their conversations remain legally private (barring authorised wire taps), they will likely bask in similarly blissful ignorance of the fact that VoIP-digitised calls piped over broadband may be completely devoid of such a security blanket. Indeed one of the most popular protocols on which Voice-over-IP phones and exchanges are based, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), deals with the means of transportation but not protection. 
See, I'm PhoningSession Initiation Protocol is a sort of TCP/IP for voice calls - a signalling protocol that sets up calls between VoIP users and terminates them cleanly. SIP's simple peer-to-peer functioning has been moulded to help implement additional functions that ordinary callers can understand - such as 3-way calling, call forwarding, automatic redial, and caller ID - by means of elements such as proxy servers for routing requests and User Agent Servers. Streaming data through leaky pipesHowever, the lack of built-in protection leaves digitised conversations as much out in the open as ordinary emails, passing via any number of ISPs and through the control panels of unknown administrators to reach their destination. Fine perhaps for ringing up your mates or booking a restaurant. However, suggest this level of exposure to your average retailer accepting phoned credit card orders, or a human resources director communicating personnel details and you'll probably be met with a look somewhere between incredulity and horror. Certainly SIP is not the only contender in the VoIP protocol stakes: there is H.323 and SS7, while Skype uses its own peer-to-peer version providing end-to-end encryption for PC-to-PC calls, though because it is proprietary, this cannot be definitively verified. This might explain why we've not heard of major criminal underworld strikes on digitised calls thus far; the diversity has simply confounded the effort involved. Indeed if reports of the poor quality of digital calls are as widespread as rumoured, then any master criminal could find more lucrative avenues to explore than attempting to piece together snatched fragments of crossed calls. But once a clear protocol contender emerges, users will flock to VoIP calls, attracted by the flaunted benefits of lower costs and flexible routing - with cybercrime wire tappers following swiftly on their heels. One SIP at a timeVoIP security is not insurmountable though. The techniques for encrypting email are well established and those for Internet telephony are following. The US Government's standard for secure voice and data communication Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol (SCIP) has been in use since 2001. Another protocol developed by cryptographic experts from Cisco and Ericsson, Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) is intended to provide encryption, message authentication and integrity as well as 'replay protection' to prevent the digital equivalent of rewinding the tape. Other analogies put forward to help explain digital fingerprinting functions such as 'hashing' in cryptography have been "tamper-evident" seals as used on a CD cases and jam jar lids. However, encryption produces an inevitable hit on hardware performance as voice bits are encoded at one end and decoded at the other, which demands faster, more expensive processing, potentially forcing up the cost of communications equipment and wiping out call savings - at least for early adopters. To help beginners decide, a list of phone hardware and software that support SIP and SRTP interoperability is shown in the Wikipedia entry for Secure Real-time Transport Protocol. -IB- Acknowledgements: staff team |
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3. Slicing an inflated inbox instead of just shuffling it
Returning to work after a holiday you find that the excesses of self-saturation were not just a private indulgence. Your mailbox has been at it too. | ||
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On the Internet, email never sleeps and your "Out of Office" AutoReplies are useless because senders have already committed their persistent requests to their outbox before they realise you are already getting a better life than the one they have. To cope with inbox bloat, we need to engage filtering techniques so that the largest and drossiest elements out of the way and we must do this in a way that minimises eye strain and therefore the onset of boredom. Otherwise left-over lethargy from the break will already have sapped our enthusiasm for dealing with the important issues (surprise legacy bequeathed - yes!) or exciting ones (foreign sister organisation wants to co-operate on new venture). First of we need to implement a couple of additional views that make things clearer: In Outlook, 
In Thunderbird, With your new-found dexterity you can turn these columns on and off at will:
Now you're ready to tackle messages en bloc without doing much reading and saving your effort for the stuff that matters.
Remember to be date conscious; avoid boo-boos like "I'll get on to this right now", when someone has since realised you were away and assigned the task elsewhere. Having cleared the junk, the irrelevant and the low priority, you can get down to drafting some replies with plenty of time on your hands and space in your head to think. -IB-
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4. IT's time to decide
Charities now have business-experienced staff we are told, but has their decision-making impetus lost its business edge? | ||
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RevolutionThe 1990s saw a small tide of professionally-qualified execs and managers flooding into the charity sector, euphemistically 'trying their hand at something different', or more realistically escaping the recessionary effects on businesses of 1992 and its wake. Many such market-focused leaders brought IT skills and commercial nous with them as well as a certain penchant for moving things along before the organisation was already 'on its uppers'. Spin the clock hands fifteen years forwards and one wonders whether these entrepreneurs have returned their allegiances to the once more profitable corporate sector, since the lethargic snail's pace with which some third sector groups make IT decisions is a disastrously poor match for the speed of change of that same technology they must decide upon. EvolutionIn today's web2.0 world, software and tools evolve faster than even many techies can keep up with. Everywhere you look, The Interface is now 'in yer face'. 
We are regaled daily with news items about Facebook and similar social networking sites and many 'everyday users' are probably members of some forum that discuss issues close to their heart (or their organisation's heart), maybe even making the odd contribution. Perhaps they even use web click-through links provided by Skype to call phone numbers shown on web sites quickly without the hassle of dialling, or maintain a daily blog. In terms of humans interacting with each other, rather than merely their machines, we have barely scraped the tip of the tip of the iceberg where new communications are concerned. Pull up a list of ordinary everyday communication media and you should be able to count off: phone, fax, email, SMS texts, chat (Instant Messaging), forums, blogs, Internet telephony, white-boarding, video-conferencing, virtual spaces, social bookmarks – to name just the most common. Resolution (New Year's)Not-for-profits often declare that budgets are their limiting factor, but more frequently it's knowledge. You can tailor your needs to fit a budget, but can you tailor your choices to fit your knowledge? Sometimes it's possible, or even essential. And maybe better to plump for something, at least one identifiable computing advance anyway, before lethargy forces you to skip yet another IT generation. -IB-
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5. Emailing at the speed of a text
The human race seems to have lost its capability to read, at least those in the digital spectrum. | ||
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When was the last time you emailed someone more than two lines of text and actually got the impression they read it all? And as for a whole document, dream on! Just about any given support centre that responds via email these days seems to drip feed back its responses one line at a time. It's as if they were somehow constrained by the 160-character limit of a text message. Worse, the feeling is they only bothered to read the first sentence of your query, when in fact the essence of your complaint/question/pent-up rage lay another two sentences further down. At the height of its popularity the "Wells Fargo" ('pony express'?) delivered mail faster than its postal delivery successors would manage decades later. One could argue that the comparatively sparse supply of news and information incited an eagerness in its readers. Contrast that with today where it is often a blessed relief to turn off or tune out from the incessant blare of email alerts. Perhaps this apathy is the inevitable consequence of information overload or work overload. IT systems have made it faster and easier for us all to communicate directly - desktop to desktop and mobile to mobile - but our biological capacity to absorb the stream of data hasn't changed a jot. The prevalence of mobile-armed road warriors has instigated a new era of short attention spans and similarly curt replies, since that is all that can be reasonably managed on a 3cm square phone screen. Is all communication destined to asymptote downwards to a grindingly slow, inefficient, lowest common denominator? If anyone has answer to this conundrum, please write and tell us. -IB- |
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6. Q&A: Read email without revealing letting sender know
Question 
Hi Mark, When I try to forward or reply to an email, Outlook 2003 says something like "picture download, you may get junk email as a result of doing this". I only wanted to forward the text to a colleague. What's the answer? | ||
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You probably feel stuck in a dilemma: there's no way to forward the mail without revealing your email address is indeed valid and therefore a potential target for heaps of spam. Even composing a reply (so you could copy/paste the resulting text) will pop up the same message and alert the sender and the fact that you have read the email. Of course, if you know know the sender well, it's not usually a problem, but if a new e-zine has popped into your inbox, or if the mail is a result of one of those “mail this article to a friend” type links, you may not trust the source 100%. The solution is simple. Close the viewing window in Outlook (and its pop-up). Go back to the inbox message list, right-click the message and forward or reply. This way the new forwarding message doesn't attempt to download pictures. Your recipient won't get a full, picture-laden version of the original but it's less stressful - both for you and the email systems at both ends.
-IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - permanently delete Outlook items
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | ||||
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-IB-
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Opinions expressed within InfoBulletin do not necessarily represent the views of Co-Operative Systems.
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