Recent events in New York prompt me to go back to a further clarification of the importance of BACKUP.
Normally, I am so desperate to have people merely get the BACKUP accomplished that I despair at the concept of assuring that there is a copy off-site to take care of situations such as the catastrophe in New York.
There are going to be entire companies that will just disappear from the corporate world because, even though they might have been making BACKUPS regularly, they failed to get the records out of the building and they are lost forever.
The big companies use the services of Iron Mountain and Datasafe; most of the smaller ones fail to do even the minimum.
The question you have to ask yourself is: How much effort is it to give your data tape to a neighbor to avoid having to start over? We give it to a friend about three miles away on a regular basis.
Do you?
Members present: Jim Dinkey, John Sleeman, Bev Altman, Susan Mueller, John Buck, Stan Hutchings.
Upcoming speakers: Sept. 26 is Hank Skawinski; in October is PowerQuest; in November is Nancy DeBiccari; nothing is planned for December yet, but a social event or party is possible.
Jim Dinkey has received a replacement bulb for the projector, and he will practice replacing it.
Susan Mueller has found that using Lockheed's printing is a good deal.
The club membership is about 75, we're doing OK.
Marvin Kraft is doing a good job as publicity manager.
The WebSIG will meet at Jim Dinkey's on Sept. 11. The topic will be Microsoft FrontPage. The WebSIG will meet on Sept. 18th at Stan Hutchings.
Jim Dinkey would like to further compress the newsletter and get rid of redundant and repetitive material. Perhaps some announcements that now occur monthly could appear every several months instead, alternating with each other. Members having suggestions or criticisms of the newsletter should convey them to Jim Dinkey directly; he will then discuss them with the planning committee.
Smart Computing magazine will no longer give us cash when we direct a subscription their way. Instead, they will give a certificate of subscription, which can be given as a door prizes or sold to members. Susan Mueller is working on a subscription order form that we can distribute at the general meeting.
Susan Mueller has lesson plans for Microsoft Word. She has offered to make them available to the club. How can we best use them? She does not want to lead a SIG. She will send the tutorials to Stan Hutchings and John Buck; Stan Hutchings will start a Word tutorial on our club web site. John Buck will consider how to add the material to our newsletter.
John Buck says the Netscape Smart Download is very handy when downloading large files.
August 29, 2001 General Meeting
Announcements: elections will be held in November. The Web SIG continues to meet the Tuesdays when there's no following Wednesday SPAUG meeting. The local colleges and adult education courses will be starting soon, people interested in taking courses should look into the schedules and register now.
Comment: demonstration disks seem to be causing problems. DLLs get overwritten, and other problems develop. Suggestion: get the PowerQuest program GoBack; it requires a lot of space, but allows you to go back to previous good setups. That way, when a demonstration disk (or other malfunction) causes problems, you can go back to previous good setup. This requires a lot of hard drive space, but hard drive space is cheap now. And it sure beats the hassle of reformatting and reloading all your applications. Newer versions of Windows have a similar feature.
Question: when multiple-page e-mail comments, CompuServe does not put carriage return/linefeeds. I have to copy the text to Word in order to read it properly, is there a better way? Answer: perhaps it's time to change e-mail programs. Or perhaps CompuServe has a FAQ section or Customer Support to answer the problem.
Beverly Altman reports a problem with animated ads and pop-ups from Web pages. Isn't there a way to control these nuisances? Answer: there are several applications designed to control pop-ups and animated ads. Use these links to the freeware programs" "PopUp Killer", AdSubtract, and "AdAware" .
Our guest speaker was Gilman Louie, who started his career at Spectrum HoloByte (known for various flight simulators, Tetris and other games), continued working at Hasbro when Hasbro bought Spectrum HoloByte, and then went to work for the CIA. The company In-Q-Tel (the Q is from the character "Q" in James Bond movies) was started to get the best technology into the CIA. In-Q-Tel is modeled like a venture capital company -- this was a new concept to government. You might ask, why did the government choose a "toy" person? Well, computer games are extremely complex technology: they use artificial intelligence, have a carefully designed user interface, often involve networking, push software and hardware to the edge, etc.
The CIA was started by President Truman to coordinate intelligence from all sources into one place. Today, information is once again fragmented, and there is lots more information, so there is information overload. There is dissimilar information distributed across dissimilar networks, networks that don't even talk to each other. In addition to text, multimedia adds orders of magnitudes of complexity.
The Federal government had an idea: develop a "skunk works", get about 300 smart people together, and let them develop new technologies in secret. This seemed like a good idea, and it had worked before (Manhattan Project, U-2, etc.) until they asked the major players of Silicon Valley what they thought of the idea. The advice was: you would never be able to hire people, and certainly not the best ones. The government could not offer sufficient incentive to attract the best people. There's much more money to be made developing products and selling them on the open market. Instead, the government formed an all-star Board of Trustees to invest about $40 million, to create a nonprofit organization tasked to solve the data overload problems From 1998 to 1999 they created In-Q-Tel.
"Equity" was a key concept: get companies to solve your problems and let them get rewarded for it in the marketplace. It's a question of bureaucracy vs. "cool stuff". Most engineers and designers choose to do "cool stuff" and abhor bureaucracy. However, the CIA's problems are very similar to everyone else's. Everyone needs a good search engine to mine data; everybody is concerned about malicious code; everyone worries about cookies that track their movements on visited Web sites. The major difference, is the cost of failure is extremely severe for the CIA -- it's a matter of national security.
Ten years ago, the bad guys were known ( Russia, China) and there were rules that everyone followed. Today, it is a "pit of snakes", relationships change -- today's friend may be tomorrow's competitor or enemy. There are also non-state players, untrustworthy allies, etc. the problem is, bad intelligence leads to bad policy, which leads to bad situations. Ten years from now it will be even more complex -- there will be biological weapons, chemical weapons, cyber attacks. In-Q-Tel will engage the best and brightest to develop technologies to defend against these dangers.
Bens.org has a report from Congress on how successful In-Q-Tel has been. Barron's magazine criticized the In-Q-Tel philosophy: the CIA was providing seed money, but $28 to $40 million is peanuts. However, results have been better than expected. Many high-tech companies tried to solve big problems as a challenge; for example, dealing with petabytes of data, extreme security challenges. Over 800 companies called In-Q-Tel and showed what they could do. Also, In-Q-Tel leveraged their choices by advising other venture capitalists which companies would be good bets. The most critical skills are knowledge management, sensitive and very tiny sensors, accurate search engines, defense against cyber attacks, etc.
The collection and evaluation of intelligence as been a slow process up to now. Collectors, otherwise known as spies, gather intelligence and pass it to analysts; analysts analyze the information, and send it to delivery persons, where it gets passed up the line to policy makeers. In today's fast environment, the slow process cannot be tolerated; we need real-time services.
The criteria to determine if In-Q-Tel was a success, will be to look back from the future and see if the technology worked to improve intelligence processing and national security.
Question: if the CIA detected a threat, would be announced to the general public? Answer: In-Q-Tel wants to encourage commercial uses of their technology, as off-the-shelf solutions, because it is cheaper and more efficient. The consumer market would be a beta test of the technology. In-Q-Tel investments are public knowledge; the investments are in startups and publicly held companies. Any profit will be reinvested, rather than paid to investors or returned to the government.
The companies In-Q-Tel is investing in are national, and even some international -- there are companies in Houston, TX, Denver, CO, Orlando, Florida, Utah, San Diego, New York, and some foreign countries. In-Q-Tel has nonpartisan support, both Republicans and Democrats are strongly in favor.
The technology to deal with meta-data is progressing. Meta-data is the kind of data that is collected by insurance companies, medical services, governments, etc. These huge repositories of information are getting shared and linked. People problems are more difficult, cultural challenges to unite and combine agencies, encourage sharing of information. Another problem is foreign nationals in companies in which In-Q-Tel invests. This creates a challenge and a grave concern. There are many foreign nationals working on H1B visas, who will eventually return to their home country.
How to buy components and put them all together - and WHY was discussed Saturday, August 18 @ 9:30 AM Jim Dinkey's house by Bruce Benz, a hardware integrator and internal consultant. Much wisdom was imparted. Some photos are available here, allow time to download..
Plan of presentation was:
Start the assembly process as follows:
Why did I do it? Prices are so low right now, I couldn't pass it up! This will be a very high end machine for about as cheap as it's going to get. Note: I got the OS and Office as well at the reduced OEM prices, so everything is legal. I bought from sofsoft.com.
Here's the list of what I bought, with all costs:
| NAME | CODE | # | Cost Each |
| MSI K7 Master AMD-761 MS-6341 Motherboard | 01-MS-K7MASTER | 1 | 129.00 |
| Matrox G450 16MB DDR AGP (Bulk OEM Package) Graphics Card | 09-G450 | 1 | 79.00 |
| Thermaltake Copper Shim (part of CPU Heat Sink) | 03-H0095 | 1 | 10.00 |
| TT Dragon ORB 3 4900RPM Thermaltake (CPU Heat Sink) | 03-A1132 | 1 | 30.00 |
| 1.33GHZ 266MHZ Athlon CPU (15 DAYS Warranty) | 03-A1330-6 | 1 | 139.00 |
| 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor Hard Drive | 02-5T040H4 | 2 | 114.00 |
| 256MB PC2100 Micron DDR DIMM RAM | 04-2562100M | 2 | 46.00 |
| Green Mid ATX Case 300W | 07-219-C08 | 1 | 36.00 |
| MS Windows 2000 PRO (Full OEM) | 14-W2KOEM | 1 | 149.00 |
| Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business Edition (OEM) | 14-MSO2000SBE | 1 | 179.00 |
| 1.44MB Floppy Drive | 02-FDD | 1 | 11.99 |
| Green Keyboard, Mouse, Speaker, Pad Set | 07-C08 | 1 | 19.00 |
| Sound Blaster 256 Live Value (OEM) Sound Card | 05-SB4670 | 1 | 44.00 |
| 8X8X32 Ricoh CD-RW Drive (OEM) | 05-MP7083A | 1 | 72.00 |
| 400W ATX Power Supply AMD Recommended Up To 1.33GHZ | 07-HPC-400-101 | 1 | 59.00 |
| 3COM 905CTX Network Card | 13-3C905B-TX-NM | 1 | 38.00 |
| 56K V.90 FAX MODEM Intel Chipset PCI | 12-FMINT56V | 1 | 13.00 |
| Hard Disk Cooler (optional) | 02-HD-1000 | 2 | 6.00 |
| Hardware and Software Subtotal | 1339.99 | ||
| Shipping | 119.49 | ||
| Tax | 107.20 | ||
| Total | 1566.68 |
N.B.—there is an article titled "Build Your Own PC" by Stan Miastkowski from the September 2001 issue of PC World magazine, which will go into great detail on all aspects. Read it if you are planning, or even considering, to build your own. If planning to build, buy, or you're just planning to upgrade, read Upgrades--the Senseless and the Sensible to find out which upgrades make sense, and which just spend cents. There's good advice on what to buy (our build) in to avoid having to upgrade later.
Computer Recycling Corp. (where we all take and donate our used computers for recycling or salvaging) has a sign posted on their 2971 Mead Ave. Santa Clara shop that says they will be moving in late August to a new location. Specifically they say that they will be moving to 1292 Forgewood, Sunnyvale.
Their "new" building is currently unoccupied and a "For Lease" sign is posted out front. However, lets assume that they will get moved there. This new location is near the clover-leaf intersection of the Lawrence Expressway and the Route 237 Freeway, in the South-East quadrant. From Lawrence Expressway turn East onto Elco, (one block South of the 237 crossing). Turn left - North - in a block or two onto Forgewood. Building 1292 is a cream colored building on the right (East), at the far end, one building short of the intersection at the end of Forgewood.
A while back, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is only putting that anti-piracy junk into the Consumer version of the software and not in the version for Businesses. I guess that they don't trust us consumers. I think this will create a lot of headaches for those who put it on their existing Pentium II or faster Pentium III machines they have now and when they want to upgrade something like a hard drive, it will create headaches. I don't think upgrading a hard drive or video board is a crime. When I had my 5 gig hard drive fail last year, I decided to put in a bigger 15 gig model. If I would have had XP on my machine, this would have created a headache for me to call Microsoft just to get this little operation approved by big brother. I have heard about piracy stuff on Tech TV all the time about illegal copies of software. From this, I heard about all types of businesses are using illegal copies of software as well. This shows that businesses using illegal software are just as guilty as any consumer that makes illegal copies. Not every family out there with multiple machines can afford to spend a hundred bucks or so, for every machine they have . They will probably opt to keep what they have. I certainly will do that when the time comes to build a new machine. Every one knows it, that Microsoft favors Business over consumers. Not every Tom and Harry with a CD Burner will make illegal copies of software.
I remember the days of using the Apple II back in the early 80's, the copy protection made me jump through hoops just to use my software on the machine. After hackers kept breaking into the code, the software companies eventually gave up on anti-piracy crap and that was the end of it, this it what I though until now. I think Microsoft should have used the CD Copy protection Macrovision told us about at a meeting a while back that is transparent to the user and blocks users of CD Burners from making good copies. This makes sense, but what they are doing now is unacceptable.
When the time comes for me to buy a new computer, either a desktop of laptop, I will consider a Macintosh from Apple. They don't do this crap on their operating systems. They are much more friendly to consumers. They provide the same great reliable operating systems to both consumers and businesses.
N.B.— In "Great XPectations: Next Windows Rocks, but Copy Controls Could Hamper Reinstalls," PCWorld Contributing Editor Scott Spanbauer highlights the key ingredients in Win XP. Read the article to get a solid handle on XP's features, including information on the problems Robert describes. www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,44741,tk,sb091901x,00.asp
