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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Google gives away 900 mil
Google has put $90-million into a newly-created foundation, Google.org, which will donate a further $175-million to (non-profit) charities as well as (for profit) socially-useful enterprises over the next several years. The company will go on to pursue its philanthropic aims to the tune of 3 million shares of its stock over the next 20 years - about $900-million or 1% of its IPO shares. The global objectives on the foundation's hit list are to solve poverty and energy and environmental problems. Sheryl Sandberg, VP, Global Online Sales & Operations said, "we hope our philanthropic efforts could some day have a greater impact than Google itself".
Google Foundation: www.google.org
Google Grants: www.google.com/grants
Management on ICE
The £10,000 award that Co-Operative Systems received from the Inner City Entrepreneur (ICE) Fund, together with internal funding was invested into a 1-year supervised management development programme over 2005. We are pleased to announce that the 6 staff on the programme Philip Anthony, Nicole Antonelli, Zorina Baksh, Mark Curtis, Ken Flury, and Anslem Munroe, all successfully completed the programme and gained National Vocational Qualifications in Management in early 2006. Many thanks to ICE for their support. We are seeing the benefit of the skills acquired on a daily basis.
New numbers ring changes
If anything could chart how much we Brits are addicted to phones, it would be the length of our telephone numbers (compared to other countries) and how often we change them. Yes, it's time for another change! Ofcom’s latest proposals are for new '03' UK numbers (charged at a nationwide rate), '06' to replace the current '070' personal numbers, simplification of the 08 and 09 range structures used for chargeable services. Other key changes cover six key areas allocation of geographic numbers for better efficiency and measures for consumer protection against phone scams.
Ofcom number change proposals
Windows Defender name change
The free Microsoft product formerly-known-as Windows Antispyware is now to be called Windows Defender (Beta 2). Running possibly the longest ever Beta of any anti-spyware offering, the product will at last receive its validation when it is bundled with Vista, successor to Windows XP, thus far still slated for release at the end of 2006. All users of previous Windows Antispyware products should update now to Windows Defender, which offers automatic updates, a clearer interface and collaborative voting similar to Cloudmark.
Windows Defender home page
Ask Jeeves to collect his P45
... and close the door behind him. The mascot butler on the Ask website is retiring from his duties as overseer of searches after a long stretch working for various masters of his household since late 1995. The original idea was as the icon to represent a question-answering service, putting forward a human front to those difficult-to-find answers. The current Ask.com web site has a much slimmer staff and shop front à la Google. The official putting-out-to-grass ends the indecision about the poor butler's uncertain fate, which hung in the balance while current owner IAC/InterActive Corp polled user feedback about his possible axing.
Your Communications will be THUS
In an interesting press release headed simply "Fyi", THUS plc (owner of Demon) announced its proposed acquisition of Your Communications, a provider of telecomms services for business customers and the public sector. This modest missive heralds their intention to "benefit from ongoing consolidation within a highly fragmented UK fixed line telecommunications market", or more specifically, to create a leading nationwide alternative carrier for business customers, deliver more VoIP services and extend THUS' network reach across the UK, particularly in the North West of England. The deal will add around 14,000 DSL customers to Demon's existing 106,000 in the UK.
Internet cafe on a shoestring
A new business venture has just pioneered shared Internet access using just four screens each with a keyboard and mouse, one PC and a mobile phone. The town of Bogra in Bangladesh is host to this wirelessly Internetworked "Community Information Centre" with customers browsing the Web and reading email. The solitary PC serves up Internet access from the mobile phone, but the key to the affordability of the network are the 4 wallet-sized Nivo workstations, tiny boxes that aim to provide client machines at a fraction of normal costs, as part of the Ndiyo project.
Full story.
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1. Strategy: Running on MT?
At what level is IT decision-making represented? The only sure thing is: there's no right answer. | ||
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One of the longest running arguments is whether IT should be represented directly at management level or even board/trustee level. After all, a computer is only an everyday tool, like a photocopier for instance so why give the technology such prominence? On the other hand, computers and networks have the capability of fulfilling organisational strategies and moving them forward in a way that no other piece of office equipment ever did. Partly because of ready access and familiarity with computers in the home, management team (MT) members, and gradually trustees and boards, are beginning to realise the strategic importance that networked and Internetworked computers play in decision making. How did IT get here?Finance people were arguably the first to take up computers in the mainstream. Why? Simply because they had suddenly discovered a faster way to add up, and s/he who holds the purse strings ... If your role is part finance/part IT, or you work for the Finance Director, your situation is typical of that in most charities and voluntary organisations; around 70% of FDs count responsibility for IT on their job description. This position of IT support officer often sits awkwardly in the organisational tree, being neither a function wholly defined as financial, yet not sufficiently strategically wide-ranging to warrant being moved 'up a notch'. Ironically, IT's traditional overseer, the head of finance really does have a finger in every pie, so is nearly always placed in a top-ranking position, after all, every project, function or service must have its beans counted. "MT Crowd" or "IT Crowd" ?
Some, arguably forward-looking, organisations have taken the leap and pushed IT strategy and its representation to the highest levels, while others are even known to have gone round the loop to arrive back where they started, something like this:
When IT doesn't workThere are two recurring reasons when IT fundamentally doesn't come up to scratch for any given organisation. The 'pat' answer is to blame under investment, but the psychology is deeper than that.
The one should follow the the other as a matter of simple logic. Sure enough there is a 'but' ... and it's a big one ... The problem of lack of sources for core funding to the charity sector began in the 90s and still remains; we only have to trawl the list of recruitment ads for the word "fundraiser" to see the explosion in the demand for income the last 3 years! This cash-strapping can result in damaging reactions:
Most typically this means buying computer hardware (viewed as an easy cost to weigh up), but omitting any form of user support to help when things go wrong (a harder cost to pin down), consumables and media, broadband subscriptions, backup, disaster prevention and so on. Only one third of the cost of giving a user desktop PC over its system lifespan (often called Total Cost of Ownership of TCO) is represented by the hardware element, with invisible part of the 'cost iceberg' being soaked up by setup time, software, support and training. Often one sees hours of effort spent trying to shave, say, £30 off the PC price with little consideration given to the other costs. Funding rules are worth checking in this respect, as some more enlightened funders will allow three years worth of maintenance costs to be rolled up into the capital cost of the PC, but it does mean that these costs have to be calculated in advance. SummaryTop level strategic interest generally follows the areas of change in an organisation. 'Change management' is a key buzzword and valuable experience in today's management skill sets. Thus, IT systems that are settled and fulfilling organisational requirements simply don't need much managing. When technological changes in IT happen, and that is often, management teams must be aware, because to some extent their organisations compete for attention: for grants and funds, for audience, for column inches and airtime. Likewise, when an organisation imposes a path of change on itself (new CEO, additional trustees, altered mission), the coming era often demands (and gets) fresh funding and deserves modern ways of working, and all this implies updated tools. The key lesson is that IT, ironically, is not an armchair service. Perhaps appropriate to its nature, IT does not occupy a settled sofa in the organisational drawing room, but ramps up and down flights of stairs between board room and basement, according to the dynamics of the time. The general approach to purchasing decisions has to be that of getting the balance right between effort and payback. Fortunately, IT has the capacity to be as flexible as its Management Team commands, if they understand the issues. Learn more about strategy -IB- Acknowledgements: Phil Anthony |
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2. What to look for in a new PC
When it comes to sizing up the right PC, there's more to it than dimensions. | ||
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How does the not-for-profit sector set about its strategy of upgrading and buying new PCs? A careful analysis of requirements, perhaps, followed by an assessment of equipment specifications, honed to down to a survey of what PC offerings are actually available on the market? Dream on! Far too many groups, especially smaller charities, start the decision process with a colour brochure that drops out of a Sunday supplement, flashing headline specifications at what appear to be bargain prices. Reaction: "Well that PC looks good. Let's have one of those!" Sold cheap what is most dearAnd why not? It is now possible to buy a PC base unit including a keyboard and mouse for less than the cost of a decent flat screen monitor. There are quarter- and half-page newspaper ads full of them, screaming heaps of GHz and double-memory. First off, such budget computers are aimed at family use and are built to a shrewdly-marketed price, and one intended to pull in newbie buyers who don't yet have a PC in every bedroom, a media centre for the living room and so on. Multiple-choice test
Dell GX620 - business-level PC available in four form-factor sizes For quite a long time, the three bedrock parameters to assess a computer were processor speed (GHz), memory (MB), and hard drive space (GB). Now it's no longer all about raw GHz. One has to weigh up the processor series, whether to go 64-bit, are dual cores and hyper-threading appropriate, how much L2 cache, what speed front-side bus, and is the drive SATA/II and NCQ. Unfortunately, this all means that choosing a suitable PC results in more research. Essentially, the refining of the PC market and its burgeoning technologies dedicated to particular sectors - such as home, office, business, gaming - is translating into more choices for the consumer. Off-the-peg solutions are now as broad as made-to-measure. The computer animator and gamer are driving the 4GHz-plus PC solutions of tomorrow in terms of performance, but equally, consumers picking up their third or fourth sub-£300 machine for home use are determining future PC markets by price. Somewhere in the middle of this vast spectrum will be a specification appropriate for business-level charity PCs. Here we look at a short glossary of some of the new performance parameters to consider when making new purchases. Processors by numbers AMD's Opteron 100/200/800 series are aimed at servers and high-end workstations, while its 'everyday' Semprons offer affordable performance. However, its Athlon 64 series has suddenly risen to prominence by offering an upgrade path to 64-bit computing in conventional desktop and laptop scenarios. Likewise, Intel's Itanium and Xeon are intended for high-end applications, while a raft of Pentium and Celeron processors cover desktop and mobile ones. Its answer to 64-bit upgrades is Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel® EM64T) which can address more than 4GB of memory and supports 64-bit applications of tomorrow (or whenever they arrive). 64-bit A technology that makes the processor bus twice as wide to allow twice the amount of digital traffic to pass through, though unlike their motorway counterparts often quoted in analogies, it actually works. The traffic bottleneck in question is the one between processor and the bus that passes data to and from other devices like RAM memory. However few applications have yet to take up the 64-bit mantle and most current ones are 32-bit running on 32-bit operating systems like Windows XP. Only Windows XP x64 has straddled the divide, capable of running both 32- and 64-bit applications. Hyper Threading Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT) is essentially a method of making the processor work more efficiently by using unused cycles. In older processors the tasks are effectively queued up and executed one at a time. So for instance, this means that a database query you are running on medium level donors has to be put on hold temporarily while you suddenly ask for a vast spreadsheet of last year's donors to be loaded into memory; trouble is, that resides on a different network drive and the processor has to wait while the server is found and the spreadsheet file loaded up. Multi-threading processors and software would allow the query to continue running and avoid losing valuable processor cycles. HTT (or HT) is actually Intel's implementation of simultaneous multi-threading technology, as in the Pentium D 600-series, denoted where you see "Pentium 4 HT"; up to a 30% speed improvement is claimed over a non-multi-threaded P4. Dual core Why buy one processor when you can have two? On the same chip, in fact! This is essentially what dual-core means, being a subset of multi-core processing aimed most suitably at servers, where demands for operations come from many directions at once; if one processor and/or its task stalls and encounters a delay, the other carries on without affecting all the client PCs connections it is serving. Like multi-threading, the main benefit here is their ability to process more software 'threads' simultaneously and we are increasingly seeing the appearance of threadable applications that need continuous processing, like music, video, image rendering, (especially 3D) and backup. Dual cores are now finding their way on to desktop PCs, like the recent AMD Athlon 64 X2 family, being driven significantly by the gamer's market with its demand for high-quality moving graphics, sound and 3D. Memory Two major changes have begun to filter through: the first is speed and the second is capacity. A fast processor and slow memory chips do not a happy marriage make. Such a combination will hamper a processor's ability to run on full load. Fortunately the speed of RAM is now more frequently published so we often see things like "1GB DDR400 PC3200 RAM". This jumble of figures shows two different ways of referring to how fast data can be transferred between memory and processor (in MHz), firstly for chips and secondly for memory modules, thus:
It is likely that future improvements will standardise on up-and-coming DDR2 with doubled clocking speeds, to achieve a theoretical bandwidth of 1.6 GB/second. Thus:
We are now beginning to see machines shipped with 2GB (GigaBytes) or 4GB of memory (RAM), the latter being the largest that the original Windows XP Pro operating system can handle. To extend beyond this we must switch to Windows XP x64 or wait for Windows Vista. Level-2 (L2) cache Many people will have heard of a cache in the context of web browsing. Typically, displayed web site graphics (like menu buttons) are saved temporarily on the hard drive, to avoid having to fetch them over and over via the (slow) Internet, so they can be redisplayed again quickly. The more often they are called on, the more likely such images will remain in the temporary cache. It's a bit like assembling a pool of gardening tools around you, rather than trekking back and forth to the shed for each one. Processors have a variety of caches to hold oft-used data and instructions. This saves the time taken for signals to travel across the mother board, since caches sit directly on the processor chip. Level-2 cache is increasingly being employed as a key element to make such handling more efficient and the larger this cache, the more data it can have ready for the processor at any one time. So for instance, adds and multiplies will get a lot of use when a spreadsheet is being worked on. Low-end PCs are now often seen with only 256KBytes of L2 cache while later ones have 1MBytes or more. Dual-core processors (see above) will have cache allocated to each core, shown for example as 2x 1MB L2. Front Side Bus (FSB) Nothing to do with Routemasters and everything to do with traffic, Front Side Bus is the physical set of 'wires' that carry bi-directional data between the processor and devices within the PC such as memory (RAM), video cards, expansion cards and the hard disc. The faster this runs, the more quickly the processor can handle its instructions. FSB figures are expressed as MHz, with 800MHz being better than 533MHz. SATA, SATA2 Disc capacities are now enormous and it's not uncommon to see 400 or 500GB on machines in a media centre scenario. However, if recording films and TV is not your bag and all that's needed is to connect to the office network, the money is better spent on a smaller faster disc, say 80GB; just enough to hold Windows plus some temporary storage space. Older disc drives, that we commonly refer to as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) or ATAPI, use a technology called Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), defined as an interface for attaching storage devices like CD-ROMs and discs inside a PC. Retrospectively it is now referred to as Parallel ATA (PATA), to distinguish from the latest Serial ATA drives that are pushing the boundaries of hard disc performance. The latter employs only 7 wires instead of IDE's 40 or 80, with the result that SATA drives and connectors can be packed into smaller spaces. Because chips are now cheap, SATA wires have dedicated controllers handling the data at either end, meaning that it goes faster (theoretically up to 300Gbits/second) and that cables can be twice as long as IDE; indeed the new eSATA standard permits drives to be sited up to 2 metres outside the box. Other advantages are the ability to swap the duff drive in a set for a new one while it is still running (hot-plugging) to avoid shutting down a machine, and Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a technique designed to speed up the way in which fragmented data is fetched from the disc surface - a process the human brain already manages very efficiently with scrabble letters. Second generation SATA2/SATA300 drives are backwards compatible with SATA/SATA150 interfaces, but will only run at less than 150Gbits/second. Thus the acronyms to look for in fast drives are SATA/SATA150 or SATA2/SATA II/SATA300 and NCQ, or eSATA if add-on extendible drives are needed. SummaryThe experience of buying a bottom-of-the-range PC from a magazine may be that it works OK out of the box, but by the time it's networked and running a browser, two office applications and the main database, the performance feels pretty sluggish. A hundred pounds or so more and a bit of research could save 2 minutes waiting time every day; payback time about 6 months. However, if the above shows anything, it's that choices are becoming wider and more complicated and potential buyers are turning increasingly to advisers and system suppliers to fit a specification to their needs. -IB-
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3. Going, going, gone: charities under the hammer
The people that converted us all to virtual-car-boot sellers have set their sights on charities. | ||
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Even auctions can provide a place for charities to strut their fundraising stuff. Now it's become all the easier to do so online with charity fundraising on eBay. This venture helps charities by giving people an easy way to support charities both through buying and selling on eBay and works in two possible permutations:
Charities selling on eBay can represent a stronger 'moral' force for bidding. Because potential buyers know that their money will be contributed to a good cause, they can bid (perhaps with gay abandon!) without bothering their consciences. How it workseBay has defined these two fundraising streams as: Community SellingItems can be sold through the eBay for Charity programme and part, or even all, of the final sale price can be donated to your charity. Direct Selling Charities sell their own items directly to eBay members. 
Charity sales on eBay are denoted with a blue and yellow ribbon and buyers can pick them out easily with the advanced search facility. With more than 10 million 'eBayers' in the UK alone, either of these streams clearly present huge possibilities for increasing your audience, whether those are customers, potential supporters or new members. Depending on what you might sell (publications, T-shirts, old office equipment, donated goods you don't want) there is also the potential of increasing the selling price of items by listing them on eBay. The hope is to provide unrestricted, consistent income for participating charities. 
Direct Seller organisations must have an eBay sellers' account, and the whole process starts by becoming certified with MissionFish, once itself an independent online auction site whose model has been taken up by eBay. MissionFish collects the donation from the seller, pays the charity and provides Gift Aid. Items for sale are subject to the same standard selling fees as other eBayers MissionFish collects an amount to cover processing costs - 4% of the donation. However, charities gain a further small donation in the form of eBay contributing the same percentage of its Final Value Fees as the seller donates of the final selling price. The Big Issue started the eBay for Charity ball rolling last December and now over 400 charities are signed up. Contacts
-IB-
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4. Windows XP x64
Microsoft's 'next' Windows is not Vista. In fact, it's already here. | ||
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Despite the impression gained from the computing press and 'gadget web sites' in particular, fundamental changes in Information Technology still take a long time to move from hype to fruition. None more so than 64-bit computing. Windows XP x64 requirements
Note: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is not suitable for 64-bit Intel Itanium-based systems. What now seems like aeons ago, 2003 in fact, 64-bit computing was announced as the new successor to sliced bread. The new 64-bit hardware seemed leagues ahead of what most people required and the only suitable Windows operating system (Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003) ran only on 64-bit processors. Now we have Microsoft's first 64-bit 'mainstream' desktop operating system, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The main advantage here is that the x64 version runs 32-bit applications - the ones most of use today - but it also paves the way for PC hardware with much larger memory. Gone is the limitation of today's 32-bit Windows XP where only 4GB can be accommodated. x64 Release Candidate version 1 (RC1) allows us to fit up to 32GB, while final versions are expected to permit a whopping 16TB (16 TeraBytes) or around 4000 times that of today's Windows XP. With applications like Microsoft Office ones becoming integrated more tightly with each other with each successive software version, the amount of memory required to load them increases. More memory means avoiding dumping data sets on to disc temporarily, a process which really slows things down, since disc access time is often a thousand times slower than memory chips. So bigger memory capacity means faster and more efficient handling of applications. Much of the operation and look of x64 will feel familiar to Windows XP users who have the full Service Pack 2 (SP2), including the Windows Security Center, Internet Explorer (IE) pop-up blocking, and Windows Media Player 10.0, though an additional 64-bit release of IE is bundled in too. Gone however are the last vestiges of 16-bit, so those old shareware programs and giveaway trials of DOS fundraising applications will no longer work - and anyway you should have moved on from those a long time ago! Moving on to 32-bit applications, reviews are mixed with some people reporting good, but not necessarily better, performance than the same desktop running Windows XP Pro, while others found their apps ran more slowly. On this basis the sole advantage of x64 becomes the promise of 64-bit applications that will capitalise on huge memory resources potentially available, though thus far only a handful of (mostly large) developers provide any, and they are for Windows Server 2003 or 64-Bit Itanium-based systems. The first 64-bit packages will doubtless concentrate on graphics-intensive operations like 3D editing and effects or games. The news gets worse though as we learn that some 32-bit apps - including anti-virus, toolbars, security, and photo editors - won't even install. Moreover, the bugbear of any new operating system - namely: are there drivers that will run my external hardware? - is a continuing saga for x64 too. It's no good using the old HP printer and scanner drivers or sound cards on CD as those are 32-bit ones, though Nvidia is reported to be providing 64-bit drivers for its graphics cards. Photographers, graphics editors and film professionals are likely to be early adopters of the XP x64 operating system, but given that the system allows for very much more memory capacity than is commonly available, they may be in for a wait. To get an idea of how dedicated an adopter you need to be, read Barb Bowman's account of her Windows XP x64 laptop upgrade. Contacts
-IB-
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5. Passwords: gambling the keys to the kingdom
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Yet another survey has illuminated the challenges we face with applying passwords to maintain security. But this time the issue thrown up is a plethora of passwords, according to a study by RSA Security Inc. A quarter of the 1700 respondents polled have to cope with memorising or recording more than 13 passwords in the workplace, with a resultant 90% feeling frustration at the strain. Stronger password enforcement policies for employees (eg more variance in the typed characters, more frequent changes) can lead to loss of time for IT support personnel and potentially risky behaviour by staff in attempts to circumvent security barriers. The storage of so many passwords has caused common but insecure workarounds like holding them in a PC spreadsheet or document, on a PDA or easily accessible paper files. Seventeen percent of those surveyed reported password problems taking more than a quarter of an hour to solve. Responsible staff are increasingly looking to encryption and 'master password' techniques (the One Ring that binds them all?) to protect the abundance of security phrases in circulation. Contacts
Learn more about encryption and passwords -IB-
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6. Q&A: Open additional Exchange mailboxes
Question 
Hi Mark, I used to be able to open one of my team's mailboxes so that I could check his messages while he was away on holiday, but now I can't get into it any more. How can I get it back? | ||
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The ability to delegate your inbox (and other email folders) for someone else to read and reply from is a really handy team working feature and requires you to be using a Microsoft Exchange Server email account. Assuming your colleague has not just simply revoked your permissions to see his mailbox, it should be a trivial process. Note that the person granting delegate permission can change individual rights, for instance to continue reading email folders but preventing the creation of new ones or responding to messages as if from that account. In Outlook 2003:
-IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - Turn off grouping of Outlook 2003 emails
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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