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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Hotmail cools off
Microsoft has had to end free access to its well-known web-based mail service, Hotmail, due to an increase in attacks from spammers via simple scripts. From April 2005, new subscribers will have to pay a US$19.95 subscription for Hotmail Plus or US$99.95 a year for an MSN Premium account. The underlying WebDAV protocol that allowed only Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express users to access their mail has been the weak link. Earlier in June, Microsoft upped the standard Hotmail inbox capacity by 125 times in a bid to win mailbox account wars against competitors like Yahoo!.
Acknowledgements: Tony Weeks
A database too far?
Nearly three quarters of non-profit organisations are not using a single database to manage their crucial donors and supporters. So says an informal survey by software service provider Kintera® Inc., which goes on to highlight a widespread lack of effective data management in the sector. The poll, entitled "How many online databases does your nonprofit use to store donor/supporter contact information?" revealed that around half the 250 responders employed 2 or more databases to store
donor and supporter information for online use.
www.kintera.com
Windows NT - Now Terminating
End of the line for 'New Technology', the Windows operating system that spawned Microsoft's "professional" line of platforms. Their support for the Windows NT4 Server range will cease on 31st December 2004 and hence, from the beginning of 2005, so will ours.
Free Secure IT Forum event
The Secure IT Forum is about to return for its 6th time at The Barbican, London. A silver service lunch is provided on both days of the event (15-16 November 2004) and combines keynote sessions, in-depth workshop sessions, case studies and practical round tables meetings with the aim of addressing IT security needs and meeting solution providers. Contact: Shelley Cook, Project Director 020 7779 8931.
Intel heats up
Intel's latest fast-clocking processors run so hot compared to earlier chips that special cooling hardware is needed. Worse, they don't even offer a huge performance gain over predecessors. So much so in fact, that the chip giant has dumped plans to ship its much-delayed 4GHz Pentium microprocessor in favour of ploughing effort into more effective methods of boosting real processor performance than sheer raw MHz speed counts.
All WAVE together
The digital media collaboration event, WAVE, covering web, audio and video conferencing and collaboration converges on Olympia during 17-18 November. With an extensive free conference programme, speakers include European Space Agency, London Grid for Learning, Pfizer, World Bank and sessions from Cisco, MCI, Microsoft, Polycom, Tandberg, Wainhouse Research and WebEx. www.wave-conferencing.com/home/
£20K for Britain’s oldest HP LaserJet
Hewlett Packard is celebrating its 20th anniversary of HP LaserJet printing with a special prize - a £20,000 voucher. The lucky winner will be the owner of Britain’s oldest working HP LaserJet and, with their reputation of 'hanging on to things that last', there's a good chance that the individual will be lurking somewhere in the UK not-for-profit sector! The prize covers new HP imaging and printing equipment, such as colour LaserJets, mobile printers
and projectors. To enter your HP LaserJet, you'll need the model number on your printer, but don't wait another 20 years to dust it down though - the oldest HP LaserJet competition ends on 30th November.
DPA accreditation
For protection of not only your systems, but also your confidential data, Co-Operative Systems is now fully accredited under the Data Protection Act. Read full details of our registration, no Z8698929.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Towards an IT Environmental Policy
With global warming climbing up the agenda, it behoves all of us to minimise our environmental impact on the IT front. | |||
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Although Co-Operative Systems has not strictly pursued a defined environmental policy, we are putting one together. This comes partly from our realisation that we already apply a number of small efforts everyday towards preventing both landfill and consumption of non-renewable resources, these being unsustainable side-effects from the fallout of today's computer industry.
These measures include : Re-Use
As a major Dell and HP vendor, we are glad to see large firms like these complying with new environmental directives and even running their own schemes. 
In the mid 1990s, computer manufacturer Acer launched a range of PCs produced largely a small variety of plastics (rather than a large number of difficult-to-recycle materials), with the plastics clearly coded by type so they could recycled at the end of their life. Additional benefits were that these PCs were some of the first that needed no tools to open the case. InfoBulletin has covered PC recycling on several occasions and continues to do so because the area remains 'faddy', with new organisations frequently appearing and then failing due to lack of organisation or funding. These articles are available in the Subject Index at: www.coopsys.net/ibindex.htm or by using the search engine to find more recycling entries. Contacts
-IB-
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2. What is Total Cost of Ownership?
What You See Is Not What You Get | ||
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It's about the big pictureRemember the last time you waited what seemed like aeons in the queue at the supermarket checkout for someone else ahead of you? It was probably because either :
In each respective case, the supermarket gains valuable stock flow information or the customer in question saves money, but there's a time penalty for everyone else in the queue. The total cost of owning a PCMost of us can relate to the idea of buying a cheap brand of PC that degrades into retirement or expires much sooner than a reputable make. Spending hours coaxing a waning bit of hardware back into life is something that far too many people have experience of and it's only because they don't count the cost of their own labour, often spent fruitlessly, that there's no realisation that the 'cheap' PC ends up with an overhead to the value of its original price tag. However, aside from the human investment in sheer hours, there's a much wider impact. Emissions ... What is TCO'99?With its beginnings in the 90s as a means for curbing unknown levels of radiation emitted by displays, TCO'99 became a standard reference for low monitor emissions. Nowadays, 50% of monitors worldwide are TCO-approved badge. TCO sets the world’s toughest standards to create environmentally and employee-friendly offices. Its remit is fast extending, not just across IT equipment but into all areas of office life, from office furniture and flooring to mobile phones and lighting. Contacts
-IB-
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3. Email etiquette: right on or write-off?
At work, we are still bombarding each other with pointless, poorly-structured and irrelevant mail, to the extent that it represents as much of daily hindrance as spam from outside the organisation. Move towards a more polite and focused email environment with these top tips. | ||
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If one ever doubted the central rôle that email has asserted in our organisations, then we can all bear witness to the fact that it is one of the few applications that newcomers are introduced to; we just take it for granted. What's more, our use and abuse of email shows. How did we get to this state? The naughty 90sUntil the 1990s, the paper office memo ruled the roost with its boxes for "From", "To", "Subject" and "Message Body" which subsequently set the standard fields for email headers that we are familiar with now. The tight format of the memo and also the fact that its compilation (namely word processing, printing, copying and distribution) took quite a while meant that only the brave middle managers with confident messages to disperse took to the medium. With responsibility and accountability being a key item on the job description of these early 'publishers', this group was keenly aware of the potential backlash from a poorly-worded memo or an ambiguous restructuring announcement. 
Enter Email - the 'killer application' of the 90s. Suddenly every keyboard-worthy employee - from maintenance workers to board level - was empowered with the capability to deliver person-to-person messages, critically slicing through the old memo compilation procedure and broadcasting their tomes faster than you could say "photocopier queue". However, what was also stripped away in the same process was accountability. That beautiful, big message body space placed no A4-size limits on what the sender could say. and its virtual digital format seemed to be unverifiable, after all, anyone could surely reconstruct a fake digital message so it was easy to refute a message sent in the heat of the moment. This new-found freedom wasn't restricted to internal conversations of course. Much of the reason for email's success was that it was a natural 'play medium'; essentially you could chat to mates during office hours and this strong interest encouraged users to experiment and learn the new email client software. Cliquey groups formed and the circulation of jokes and other work-distractions quickly cropped up as a kind of currency for membership to informal clubs who traded work secrets, myths and rumours. Groups could encompass many workers in remote offices and allowed them to sympathise on the common pains of office life as well as discussing passions and hobbies, all while being apparently glued to their instrument of work, the office computer. The noughtiesFollowing Year 2000 (seems like a century away now!) with its widespread predictions of PC and network meltdown all from the lack of 2 digits, everyone started taking computing, and digital messaging, a lot more seriously. This was due in no small part to the fact many large companies and quite a few small ones had just spent an awful lot of money on new computers and weren't going to suffer their shiny new acquisitions being exploited chat rooms quite as liberally. Moreover, with key cases of confidential leaks occurring via email beginning to hit headlines, all sorts of organisations woke up to their lack of an in-house email policy, or indeed any sort of restraining conditions on the behaviour of employees when it came bad-mouthing and whistle-blowing in the digital messaging arena. Whose email is it anyway?The resulting privacy debate was put on the boil by the clash of:
Inevitably a whole series of counter claims about whose information it was that was being circulated and/or abused followed, as well as some amendments to all three Acts, but most companies, logically enough, clamped down with contractual clauses to protect their own security and confidentiality. Messaging had grown up and the email policy was born. Have a goof dayHere are a few pointers for getting your message across without boring or enraging your recipients.Not an exhaustive list!
Above all, be forgivingIt's the 'email era' in this particular bit of human history, but don't assume that everyone takes naturally to writing and keyboards. Contacts
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4. Recycling does compute: new schemes
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive comes into force in August 2005, ushering in a new 'one-in, one out' era for computer equipment and the like. | |||
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WEEE ... !When the WEEE Directive does take effect, retailers and manufacturers will have to take back such goods on a like-for-like basis upon the sale of new ones and arrange for WEEE-approved disposal or recycling.Unfortunately the vast proportion of those who will be in this position of responsibility are precisely the ones who are least aware of the Summer 2005 deadline. Reassuring then to hear that firms like HP and, last month, Dell, are ahead of the game with the launch of their own recycling schemes. Both are operating a no-cost recycling scheme for old hardware when you buy a new item - 'one in, one out'. 
DellDell is one of the first to offer a free computer recycling scheme in the UK, as well as recycling equipment as charitable donations. Upon purchase a new Dell computer, Dell aims to take care of the old one by collection within 5 business days and delivery to recycling partners at no cost, though the owner must provide packaging. Alternatively they may be re-used by donation to the National Cristina Foundation, that provides computer solutions to people with disabilities or who are at risk or economically-disadvantaged. Consumers can recycle up to 31Kilograms by weight per box through Dell Recycling, including desktops computers, mini-towers, notebooks, keyboards, mice, monitors (both CRT and LCD), PDAs and scanners, as well as most printer types. Computers and monitors have to be boxed up as separate items. Whither the parts?Dell's recycling partners disassemble and sort the material into its raw components, like steel, copper, glass and plastic, for them to be re-used as new products or environmentally-friendly disposal. The main benefits are landfill reduction and minimising the UK's consumption of new raw materials in manufacturing industries.
Dell's survey reveals there is much to be done: 70 per cent of those surveyed failed to recycle their laser toner cartridges - mainly because they didn't know it was possible - and nearly three-quarters said they would donate their old computer to charity, but 52 per cent didn't know they could. Furthermore, almost 10 per cent of British households currently risk prosecution by dumping their old computer hardware in their domestic wheelie bins. Recover and resellFor larger businesses, Dell's Asset Recovery Scheme (ARS) even offers guaranteed buy-back options so that some value for customers is recovered from equipment that has resale value, as well as removing tags and labels and overwriting hard discs for customer confidentiality. 
Hewlett-PackardVia its Planet Partners™ recycling service, HP provides an easy way to recycle any manufacture of computer equipment or its own HP printing consumables. HP's take back service www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/uk/uk.pdf collects the equipment from the front door or goods exit of your organisation for recycling. 
Their "take-back" scheme is implemented through carriers and the procedure is laid out clearly on the web site, providing forms to list the equipment to be recycled and allowing the ordering of boxes to package up used printer supplies, like laser and inkjet cartridges. HP return and recycling within the UK Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Tony Weeks, Matt Whipp |
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5. The greenest storage technology yet: good ol' paper
A blu-ray of light for green computing | ||||
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This Autumn, Sony announced it would be adopting its Blu-ray Disc ROM (BD-ROM) format for next-generation computer entertainment consoles of PlayStation®, the eventual PlayStation®2 successor. This will be a shot in the arm, not just for its new optical storage technology (branded 'Blu-ray'), but also for those campaigners keen to see computing clean up its environment-polluting practices. 
Optical Storage: looks good on paperThat's because the innovative storage medium, a product of Sony's joint venture with TOPPAN Printing Co. Ltd, is not made using scarce resources like aluminium or potentially polluting ones like plastic - it's 51% paper. There are other beneficial side effects too, aside from environmental ones. The first disc under development has a capacity of 25GB - over 5 times that of conventional 4.7GB DVDs currently used for recording films, television and large data archives. The Blu-ray disc thus allows for more than 2 hours of high-definition program recording. 
Don't wipe - Shred insteadToday, fanatical 'burner's of CDs and DVDs use sophisticated programs like 'Nero' to wipe and re-use their collections of plastic discs and a full CD wipe can take up to 20 minutes. Tomorrow, they could be just be bunging their paper discs in the shredder! As Hideaki Kawai, Managing Director, Head of Corporate R&D Division, TOPPAN Co., Ltd comments: "Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc".
Vinyl plus plastic equals paper?Collectors of old 12-inch vinyl music records covet their finds as much for the artistic sleeve designs as for the music in the spiral grooves. Combine that with a better-than-DVD storage capacity and make it paper-based and you have a medium-designer's dream: huge recording time and a printable surfaces for labelling. More pixels per pennyWhatever you want to store on optical discs - be it photos, music, videos or even boring old documents - you are likely to get increasingly better value out of Blu-ray paper discs. Since there is basically less "raw material used per unit of information" on such large capacity storage media, disc unit prices are bound to fall. Perhaps one day we'll even see Blu-ray Discs printed on the side of cereal packets! Contacts
-IB-
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6. Redundant kit
It may seem like yesterday that the HP Laserjet IV printer in the corner was installed, in fact it was over 10 years ago! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Like old yoghurts lurking in the back of the fridge, some organisations may have old kit for which parts are not available, has limited functionality and slow performance, but is nevertheless still being used for mission critical functions! This is a list of equipment that is well past its 'sell-by' date.
Contacts
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Clicks of the Trade - show a public contact list in your address book
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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