|
|
|||||||||||||
**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Dell/Sony battery call
Just in case you missed August's world headlines on the biggest-ever recall by Dell, anyone with a recently-purchased Dell laptop should check the serial number and point of manufacture of the laptop battery, some of which had been found to overheat and in rare cases catch fire. It appears the Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries became contaminated by small metal particles causing failure in various degrees. To check your own battery go to: https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/
Project "Win over Firefox"
Such is the success in the uptake of the Firefox web browser that Microsoft have invited Mozilla developers over to their Redmond headquarters to ensure the popular browser will work happily with the impending Windows Vista operating system. Perhaps because of Firefox's 20% plus popularity in Europe, the Vista readiness team have become committed to accepting open source applications on board, as well as large purely commercial ones.
Broadband regrade headaches
The regrading of broadband lines of up-to-8Mbps is causing big headaches at a variety if ISPs. Typical side effects are that lines frequently go down, and the client is forced into a compulsory switch to a 'wires-only' service, often with no notification, meaning the ISP will no longer support the router they supplied, and which effectively becomes obsolete. Contact our helpdesk for more info and help.
Mapping the name space
Nothing to do with file names and everything to do the geographical mapping of surnames, this fascinating site evolved out of a project based at University College London (UCL) and provides an invaluable research tool for anyone concerned with family names, population movement and cultural identity in Great Britain. On the purely whimsical side, you can plug in a family surname to the search engine and find out how your ancestors moved around the country, though the baseline is that 100 or more names should appear on the 1998 electoral register. For instance, "Higginbottoms" were only found around Cheshire and Derbyshire in 1881.
www.spatial-literacy.org/UCLnames/
Dell gets green top spot
Greenpeace has released its Green Electronics Scorecard which ranks major electronics companies who are doing most to remove toxic chemicals from their products. Dell and Nokia share the top place jointly, followed up by HP, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Surprise laggard Apple, noted for their modern design status, bring up the rear along with Acer (once the greenest of green) and Motorola. Greenpeace green electronics guide
Email/broadband giveaway bonanza
Hot on the heels of AOL's 'free' AIM.com email offer to broadband customers, Virgin Mobile/virgin.net (now both c/o NTL) has joined the scrum with a broadband offer ending on 31st October, after which "free" will mean "£17.99", virgin.net's normal monthly tariff. The deal is a year of bundled 8Mbps broadband, as long as customers take a Virgin Mobile SIM-only pay monthly tariff.
Leaky sticks
Refresh my memory! Twice as many IT professional employees as last year are doing just that, by downloading company information on to their memory sticks, despite the fact that over two thirds of them realise the dangers of using unencrypted USB memory sticks, according to a survey conducted by mobile security company Pointsec.
IT management trends
This ZDNet UK article labels their nominated IT management trends as the five "most dangerous", but where IT outsourcing, auditing and strategy are concerned, they certainly apply as much to the not-for-profit sector as to the commercial. We couldn't have summarised it better in two short pages so visit Tackling today's five most dangerous IT management trends and read for yourself.
Mission statement: more games and sound
nfpSynergy is holding another of their popular free seminars for VCS organisations on Thursday, 7th September, from 3-6pm. Register now and you could learn about using online games to maintain visitor interest, more on web usability and how to get your message across with audio and podcasting.
www.nfpsynergy.net/eventsandseminars/
**** end of NewsBytes ****
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
1. The PC 25 years on
Memories of your first PC? We polled early adopters for their experiences of 25 years ago. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
12th August 1981. This is defined as Year Dot for the PC, the day when the IBM personal computer model 5150 was launched. Despite earlier unsuccessful attempts, it was only when IBM ditched its traditional 'big production' approach that it found a winning formula. The new kid on the block was based on more open standards that allowed other companies to build components for the 'IBM PC standard', resulting in more affordable machines that occupied the space of a desktop rather than a department and even linked up to a TV set for versatility. Its success soon leapfrogged forerunners such as Apple, which had been popular with hobbyists, and captured the interest of corporates who were to employ them as indispensable business tools. 
Life without a PCEven before the PC, we had computers but they were labelled 'dumb terminals' - just a keyboard and a green screen text-only screen linked up to fridge-sized mainframe computers. Already by then one could multi-task, setting print jobs or processes to run in the background while getting on with something else. However with only a text-based screen, and no colour graphics or mouse, the learning curve was prohibitively steep for everyone except techies. 
Life without a monitorThe mechanical alternatives to monitors were 'teletypes' - basically a keyboard teamed up with a printer - all linked into the mainframe. The only way you got output was that the teletype spewed out paper with results on, but it was a bit like trying to have a conversation with a ticket machine. The PC as remembered by ...We polled Co-Op staff, industry pundits and people in the sector about the experiences of their 'first PC', as well as getting a peek into what Michael Dell, founder of the world's largest PC company, thinks about PCs past and future. Zorina, products manager, Co-Operative Systems 
The first PC I had was a Sinclair ZX80. It was small and plastic in look and feel and I felt to throw the whole integrated unit in the bin each time I turned it on as it seemed to take so long to start up and made such a noise. I was about 8 or 9 years old and Dad brought it home from work one day. It was plugged into a small VDU and the characters were green. I desperately wanted the newer, flashier ZX81 with its rubber keys - someone had put the manual for the ZX81 in our box and I felt they got the better deal! We didn't really use it much but it was probably at the time that households started to feel `we need a PC'. I remember too about a year or so later my primary school got a PC. It was locked in the Library which also had the TV so we only saw the computer each Monday afternoon when we assembled to watch "How we used to Live" - life during wartime Britain. It was a Commodore 64 and was never turned on or seen in use...though we were led to believe it could do great things. Stephen, Co-Operative Systems helpdesk engineer 
My first machine was the Commodore 64 ... (very powerful machine ...) I saw an advertisement on TV saying "it's the best PC in the world ..." I think I drove my parents crazy, till they finally bought me one. I was such a geek (not that I knew anything about computers I was like 6 or something!). I sat there typing in pages of code from THE MANUAL that resulted in a short animation, ie a ball bouncing on screen. This kept me entertained for hours, then for fun I pretended to hack banks ... I obviously used the "hack command" ... This never did work. I kept getting ... I remember calling my friends to tell them "I'M IN". Oh well! That was my experience with my first computer! 
Troo, Co-Operative Systems engineer Mine was a Sinclair ZX81. My father, who was an electrician, despised the soft-touch keyboard, and re-housed the guts of the machine inside a custom-built housing with a "proper" keyboard inlaid in the top. It was still a godawful machine that was next to useless, though. Experimenting with tape drive volumes until a game loaded correctly was deeply tedious. That's why we progressed on to the deeply superior Amstrad CPC464, with its amazingly innovative separately-purchasable, all-singing, all-dancing ... floppy disk drive! It was a revolution. Phil, Co-Operative Systems director My first PC had 2 floppy drives each of which held 360KBytes or about a third of one Megabyte (ie 2 million times less than a PC hard disk today) and there were about 3 office applications Wordstar, Lotus 123, Dbase. It was truly amazing to be able to type stuff in, correct it on the fly and save it. The first one I installed had a price tag of about £2,000 - or about £10,000 in today's money! Some office would go mad and buy two. And of course there was no network, no email, no internet, so it was a very secure device actually. Paul, freelance IT consultant 25 years ago I was designing navigational electronics for shipping using individual transistors, each about the size of a match head. Such components are now packed by their millions into computer chips of roughly the same size. Our company networked a traditional mainframe computer with dull green-on-black screens and although a complete word processing and layout package (spellchecker, tables, text flow) was included, it was grindingly turgid and seemed to have been written by the inventor of the printing press. The only way to change a font was to walk over to the printer and change the head to 'the other font' - a grand choice of two. (Tell that to the young folk o' today and they'll never believe yer). 
The first proper PCs they bought were made-in-Britain ICLs running a kitchen-table Windows version 1.03. The select few who received these machines marvelled at the bright colours and Graphical User Interface that allowed you to click icons with a mouse, but the euphoria only lasted about a week since there wasn't a lot of actual work you could do with them and even setting up a printer was a major project. This particular Windows came only with a clock, Notepad, Filemanager, Paint and Write (a predecessor of WordPad), all of which haven't changed fundamentally from today's. As engineers, we ignored this 'progress' and hooked up the PCs to the internal mainframe as a better way of accessing the central database of electronic stock parts and generally 'hacking' around the company network. It was to be at least a year before useful tools like Word and the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 came along. Barely a month after the first PC was installed on the first desk, a technical problem occurred. This first 'support request' (cry for help) was directed to the in-house engineers as we were the only ones who knew how the machines worked, and anyway there was no such thing as a support contract. Hugh, TCL Communications I remember playing the first Microsoft Flight Simulator and converting the power supply units on (American) IBM imports from 100V to 240V! Jeremy, freelance database designer 
My first home computer was a Nascom 2, about 26 years ago I think. It came in kit form and was assembled by a (brilliant) friend of mine - individual components needing to be soldered onto the circuit board correctly! For some reason, it didn't come with any kind of case, so I kept the collection of circuit boards, power supply, etc, in an old wooden drawer, with the keyboard balanced across the top of the drawer, and with a piece of wood nailed across the back of the drawer for a small TV to stand on, to be used as a monitor. I spent many (happy?) hours programming in Z80 assembler, and Basic, creating games and databases (without the aid of any database package such as the beloved MS Access.) Originally I recorded programs onto cassette tape, so a couple of years later, when I got floppy drives, it was great. Then, the BBC Micro. Henry, Happy Computers training My first PC was (I think) a North Star in 1982, running WordStar. I do remember that for the first month I diligently pressed return at the end of each line, until somebody pointed out the automatic word wrap!
John, Tate Technology Ltd I got my first PC for work in 1981 I was working for the European Head office of a US transport company doing financial modelling and setting prices in 13 European currencies for short/medium/long term rental/leasing deals for a whole range of equipment I asked the US head office for a computer - as I had heard great things about PCs. They sent me an IBM system 34 mainframe which required a crane to get into the 7th floor office and builders to remove the windows. It was not what I was looking for and I persuaded a leasing company to swap it on loan for a humble PC and dot matrix printer. When I first saw a spreadsheet (was it Visicalc?) I couldn't believe my eyes. Within a few days I had the printer producing hundreds of pages of prices lists - which would have taken a team of people weeks to put together. I rolled up my sleeves and did a bit of basic programming and developed a discounted cash flow model which saved a huge amount of work. The USA got to hear about my work and got very worried that they were losing control of IT - but that is another story! Eight years later I set up an IT company - initially to help organisations gain advantage from PC networks in the finance function. Joining up the botsDell looks back Seller of 200 million PCs world wide, the man who founded the world's largest PC company thinks the best is still to come after a quarter-century of the IBM PC. To some extent we are returning to the multi-tasking roots set down by mainframe computers. The difference is that where computing power was once expensive, and therefore centralised to capitalise on investment, IT is now affordable and indeed so abundant that whole processes can be hived off to their own bit of hardware (think of: level 1 & 2 cache, disc RAID controllers, networked storage, TCP/IP offload engine). The worst 25 tech products PC World magazine has ranked its 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. Slated among the worst 5 are AOL, RealPlayer and Windows ME (Millennium Edition), with items like Iomega's Zip drive and the concept of 'free PCs' making it into the top 25 hall of shame. Distributed computing has now come of age with a standardised infrastructure and manager (BOINC) for models like the Climate Change experiment, where researchers can effectively borrow the spare computing capacity of thousands of PCs around the world to do calculations that would otherwise require budget-breaking super-computers. Equally as sophisticated, though more sinister, has been the growth of 'bots' and 'zombies' - malware programs that infect PCs with the intention of circulating spam emails or viruses, collecting confidential information or launching flood attacks at large corporate computers to bring them down. In those early days nobody imagined that the owner of a computer would ever need another computer, indeed, around this time popular urban legend has Bill Gates of Microsoft stating "Why would anyone need more than 640KB [of RAM memory]?"; current PC memory capacities are heading for 10,000 times this figure. Twenty five years later, the lifetime of a typical Windows PC is now 5 years, as measured by the expiry of mainstream support for the operating system, an indication of the level of complexity the humble PC has reached. -IB-
|
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
2. A server on every desktop
Tiny NAS boxes are now so easy to use and affordable that they are going down a storm at home. But what about at the office? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Over 30 years after Microsoft's Bill Gates proclaimed that there would eventually be a "computer in every home" we are nearer (only 15%, so not that close) to this kind of saturation simply because of the mind-boggling array of computing devices on the market. Is a Windows Mobile-equipped PDA a PC for instance? At what point does a music centre become a fully-fledged computer? Moreover, different types of revolution have sidled up alongside the growth in ordinary PCs which make the 'PC in every home' scenario too simplistic a representation of the way we soak up computing in our everyday lives. One of the latest stealth trends has been Network Attached Storage, commonly referred to as a NAS box. 
Computers for breakfastHere at Co-Operative Systems we nicknamed these devices 'toasters' for their visual similarity to the breakfast electronics that so many of us switch on of a morning. However the user-friendliness, and increasingly the cost, of these storage boxes is also coming within reach of ordinary consumers, so that it's running for the title of Next Desktop Accessory. NAS-tastic, pop-pickers!Music and photography are the drivers in this new consumer market. Music lovers want to pipe tunes around the home without having a PC whining away in the background of the family living space. Digital photographers and amateur movie makers soon outstrip the capacity of a drive supplied with a bog-standard PC and anyway they daren't rely on this being their only repository of their precious life's work. Putting boxes into boxesWith a plethora of drive-based storage devices coming to market, is there a way to categorise them and make them easier to assess?
Features
Owners can share out parts of their beloved collections of media and documents with friends, family and colleagues. They can do this because the boxes on offer increasingly bundle ready-built applications inside allow web sites, photo collections and databases to be instantly accessed by people outside, meaning those on an internal home or office network, or, given a suitable broadband connection, visitors via the Internet. 
One company, Fabrik, has made a feature out of easy-to-use media and documents combined in a single interface (video demo here) and has teamed up the implementation with Maxtor's Fusion drive. NAS solutionsThis is one technology that caught large manufacturers on the hop, though some have now produced low end solutions affordable for the mass market, like Netgear and Maxtor. The kind of book-sized or toaster-sized boxes being produced here are ideal for:
Ain't NASessarily so
However, while home networks are not yet best placed to make efficient use of such mind boggling storage, like the 750GB hard drives just coming on to the market, departments and organisations are crying out for extra storage and hassle-free backup. Companies that were in at the beginning, like Thecus and Infrant, are now coming to the fore, their pioneering efforts showing dividends as they add more features to each successive model. Indeed, improvements to existing models are common since firmware upgrades are simple to download and implement and bring benefits like an added FTP server, web server or photo station. Others, like Qnap, are spinning off products aimed at professional applications from their home and music-orientated ranges. 
The kind of benefits that make such boxes attractive for a small organisation or department are:
The big drive players like Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi have been even more cautious to enter the fray, but it will only be a matter of time as this is one market that won't fade quickly. Contacts-IB-
|
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
3. Windows Genuine (Dis)Advantage?
Did you know you Windows PC may be 'phoning home' every day? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Over the years Microsoft's persistence in chasing down the pirates on the High Seas Of Software Theft has lead it to adopt more and more sophisticated means of detecting whether a given Windows installation is derived from genuine source discs. However it's latest 'detector van' may have lead it into troubled waters, to mix up a few metaphors. If you have seen the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) update downloaded on to your PC recently, this is Microsoft speak for a programme that examines whether the Windows installation in-situ "appears to be non-genuine" and you'll receive a message when you log on to let you know. Basically this software device currently runs at start-up, and attempts to 'phone home' once a day to authenticate your copy of Windows, even though this may already have been done on one or more occasions. This is all well and good when it works but apparently that's not always the case, even for some genuine installations. The topic has been the subject of some heated discussion of technical forums recently, in part because the device appears to function in a manner not dissimilar to spyware, but also due to the fact that the software really is 'work in progress' or in Beta as they say, and began to be distributed to Windows users as a matter of course in April 2006. Naturally, some bona fide owners of bona fide Windows installations are fairly annoyed about what they see as distributing Beta software of this type via Windows Updates, a service which millions of users take for granted as improving the security and reliability of their PCs. In the past, Microsoft has normally invited people to join test programmes before initiating trial software downloads. More galling for irate techies has been the time they have spent trying to remove WGA, which is installed such that conventional start-up utilities like MSCONFIG won't see all the WGA components and requires manipulation in the Control Panel, registry and file system areas. Fortunately Microsoft have responded by giving an explanation of the removal process in their knowledgebase article How to disable or uninstall the pilot version of Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications. Needless to say, Microsoft is piloting Office Genuine Advantage (OGA), a similar tool to WGA that requires users of Microsoft Office software to validate their copy. Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Andy Humphreys |
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
4. PictureCloud 3D photos
Turn your photos into 3D objects on the web. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Some ideas are just brilliant in their simplicity. Because the concept is so clear you can grab the practicalities just as easily. One such idea is PictureCloud. 
Turning the tables on picturesYou upload a series of photos taken from all angles of an object, say, your latest sculpture. Flash, bang! - your new creation appears rotating in space and, because it's on the web, this vision is there for friends, fans, family, membership, patrons, customers, whoever. The site effectively transforms the static shots into a kind of poor-man's 3D photo rendered version. This kind of thing isn't hard to do with a decent photo/paint package, but anyone who has ever tried this route for creating what is effectively a short movie will groan and reveal it's a mighty tedious route at that. Or you could create a Flash movie, as long as you can get to grips with one of Macromedia's many Flash-based tools first. Or you could grab a copy of Microsoft's photo research project, Photosynth, which creates a kind of Google-Earth fly-through scene out of your photos; 3D photo-stitching if you like. Except that you can't: thus far you can only fly through a video tour of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome because at the time of writing the software is as virtual as the tour. One can bet they won't be giving it away and, as with the rest of the alternatives here, putting it all on the web is still another hoop to go through. In the meantime PictureCloud offers an extremely accessible method of objects you want to sell, showcase or simply show off. How it worksAll you need is the knowledge of how to work a digital camera. Set up an account at PictureCloud, then drag-and-drop your photos to the site. The process converts your uploaded pictures into a Flash player movie. They generate a piece of HTML code that you can paste into any web site you choose. People who want to view your 3D illusion on the web will need to have the Flash player plug-in. They can play (rotate) the object in one direction or a small Adobe-style hand allows them to step through the images one at a time. The basic version is free while the paid-up option upgrades the picture resolution available and provides longer storage life. The trick is take 20 photos or more (equivalent to every 18 degrees of arc) to make a relatively blur-free transition between each frame and give the impression of the object rotating. Also your 'walkaround shots' should be in order otherwise you'll get a sequence that jumps around since the conversion just processes pictures in the same order it receives them. Contacts-IB-
|
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
5. The (virtually) portable computer
How flat is your laptop? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
We just had to include this apparently giant portable computer found on the The Strand. Examine the flat screen closely to gain a clue of its true nature. Hint: it's a really, really flat screen! 
In case you haven't come across them before, it is one of a large series of pavement drawings by Julian Beever, a pavement artist with a difference. Over his 10 year artistic span, his 3D anamorphic illusions have captured a particular interest, being distorted to create an impression of 3 dimensions from one particular viewpoint. Find Julian's temporary masterpieces made digital at: http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/-IB- Acknowledgements: Colin Metvier |
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
|
6. Q&A: Does our web site cause us spam?
Question 
Hi Mark, Is the amount of spam that an organisation or company receives linked to the content of their website? If so, can they do anything about it? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
You bet! And "Yes", in that order. Public-facing mail addresses on a web site are one of the biggest attractors of spam. Spam robots crawl millions of web sites every day (not unlike the ones used by search engines to glean content), except these are looking for email addresses to which they start sending junk mail and add them to spammer lists. Here at Co-Operative Systems personal staff accounts receive relatively little junk, but the infobulletin@ address easily pulls in 1000 a week as it's plastered all over each InfoBulletin and on the site, a historical mistake which is too late to correct now. Fortunately we have excellent spam filters, so the amount we actually view in a week you could count on the fingers of one hand. What to do about it? And by this we mean a new address that isn't out in the public domain yet, say, for a new campaign or project. The simplest answer is to obfuscate email addresses placed on your site. That means making them difficult for spambots to harvest while humans can still read (or deduce) them easily, by putting in spaces or whatever, so for example ...
The no-brainer solution to the problem of course is not to display any text, but to show the email address as an image. At least half a dozen paint shop packages could do this but the Just Like Ed site presents the process of turning an email address into an image as 3 easy stages online. Of course, all these take away the ability to reply easily with a single click. A method that is less cumbersome - for anyone who actually wants to write it - is to put a form on your web site or employ a small piece of Java script or Perl script like this one at http://ostermiller.org/ or a script called "formmail" (search the web) which normally resides in the cgi-bin directory on your web server. Your web designer or maintainer will have to implement these. Another easier implementation, which revives the single-click functionality for users, is the cut-and-paste model shown at www.faketp.com/safemail, which is a Java plus Javascript implementation and will require you to locate an area on your web space where your store javascripts. Another method is to employ a third party, whereby clicking Submit on one of your web forms sends the results to the third party's secure site, which then passes them on to you. The advantage is that your email is hidden securely on the web form provider's server and the the process is generally much more suited to non-technical designers. Typical providers offer a 14-day free trial after which an annual fee is payable, depending on how many forms and addresses you sign up for, but do check out the pedigree of your potential web form provider, preferably using a test address from an entirely different domain, or you may find you get more spam rather than less. The damage is probably done for existing addresses that get spam, but it's worth using for new public addresses. Another tip is to avoid accepting absolutely any mail from the 2 most spammed addresses in any domain, namely sales@ and info@, and that's whether you have publicised them or not. -IB-
|
Good read? Rate this article |
| I | B | |
| ^ Back to contents ^ | |||
|
Clicks of the Trade - pin-ups for your Start Bar
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
-IB-
|
Good read? Rate this article | |
| I | B | ||
^ Back to contents ^Overview of InfoBulletin Opinions expressed within InfoBulletin do not necessarily represent the views of Co-Operative Systems.
E&OEViewing IB Implementation Privacy |
Subscriptions ^ Back to contents ^Contact details
|
|
|
Read recent and past issues of InfoBulletins on the Web at http://www.coopsys.net/ibindex.htm or search our archives and subject index.
We hope you found InfoBulletin useful! If you would like to comment on any of the articles or request particular subjects to be covered, mail us here.
| ||
