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Table of Contents
============== Web Page Madness
Several users have complained to me that they have had to change email addresses now that Time Warner has acquired Adelphia. They've had to reprint letterhead and business cards and aren't happy about it.
Another client had their web site on a content publishing system where they uploaded data to a database and when users clicked on a web site link, the server compliled the web pages on the fly, but the pages never existed in html. The vendor notified that with 3 weeks notice that some of the changes in Internet Explorer 7 had caused such severe problems with their program that they were going out of business. Imagine scrambling to download and copy 175 pages, recreate the menu system, grab all the graphics and get this monster going. Three weeks isn't really enough time, although we do have it all running now. There are a couple of loose ends we'll be tidying up the next week or so.
What do these events have in common? The user was never in control of their fate. All businesses should have their own URL (www.mybusiness.com). The reason isn't so much that the business-server websites aren't doing a good job, it's that they can go away with virtually no notice. As soon as you own your own domain name, you can move it anywhere. Then, do NOT allow a vendor to keep your pages hostage. Make absolutely sure that you can keep copies of html for everything, including the menus and other plumbing. It doesn't make any difference how large the company is that is providing services to you. Mergers continue at an alarming rate and the big companies are going faster than little. You will only have to redo all your letterhead and business cards once before you'll be getting your own domain.
If you own your own domain, you can host it anywhere. Move to Moscow? No problem. Sergei is running an ISP there that can host it. Shanghai? Ditto. In Southern California, there are more than 10,000 places where Rick and I could host www.vccomputers.com if we ever stopped running our own server. We'd nave have to reprint anything. And our website is completely portable. We could have it up and running in under 24 hours on another site.
As an online presence becomes more and more important, it is critical that businesses keep their online presence portable, so they never go offline.
Even for home users, the Adelphia/Time Warner merger has been a mess. Lots of people will lose contact with them. For $25 per year, CIPCUG members can have a cipcug.org email address. CIPCUG won't be merging with anyone soon, so that is a cheap price for excellent protection. And beside, the money goes to an excellent cause.
============== Disk Drive Intelligence
There was an interesting paper that won "Best Paper" at FAST '07 (an industry conference). In it the author, Bianca Schroeder of CMU's Parallel Data Lab, presented her findings regarding 100,000 drives in commercial applications. Some of the findings are significantly different from the common perception and have implications for all computer users. For example:
Disk failure rates accelerate as the drive gets older. Many people believe that there's a spike of failures at the beginning, followed by a period of relatively steady use and ending in the failure patch. Her data says that the failure rate gets worse with every passing day. There is no period when drives don't fail. This has important implications for drive arrays. After several years of use, the drives start to have high enough failure rates that it is entirely possible to have two or more drives in an array fail at the same time. OUCH!!!
There is virtually no difference in reliability among manufacturers, nor is there any significant difference between high end SCSI drives and pedestrian SATA drives. In her words, "Interestingly, we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, potentially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors." The fact that home users have so much poorer results suggests strongly that home users don't treat their drives as well as companies do. At VCC we get lots of home (and even small business) computers in for repairs with the innerds clogged with dust, cat fur and other less-than-desirable thermal blankets. Add the lack of adequate power conditioning to the mix and you have the reasons for home users having such poor results.
One of the implications of all this is that it is better to have full backups of smaller drives than to have huge arrays. For small businesses, having three copies of your data probably protects you about as well as it can be protected. If you keep all three on site, you still have the risks of fire, theft, earthquake, etc. Take one copy home and most of that risk goes away.
Rotating two cheap USB drives for backup will give you more data protection than just about any other strategy employed by small businesses. A single USB backup is probably adequate for most home users.
============== Audacity
Lots of readers have been looking for a way to edit audio recordings. Most of the software is expensive, but there is a free, open source project that may do the trick for you: http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/
It will run on Linux, Apple Mac OS Classic and ... oh, yes, Windows (32 bit). The November 2006 version, 1.2.6 is the most recent, and has been downloaded over 3 million times in three months, so it is hugely popular. It's definitely worth a try. Be aware that any sound editing software will be somewhat complicated, so plan on spending some time on it. There is a copy on the CIPCUG Freeware disk.
============== Rick's Rant: Are Two Really Better Than One
With all the marketing hype we receive about computers and all the related components it's getting harder to understand what's what any more. I'm going to spend some time and try not to get too technical to explain what we've been hearing a lot about lately, Dual Core Processors! Currently both Intel Corp. and AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) have products on the shelves. Intel started with Pentium and Celeron D and morphed into Core 2 Duo. AMD has its version called the X2. This time I have to give some credit to Intel because it kept the MB socket 775 unchanged while AMD went from socket 939 to socket 940. In the course of one year, AMD has wiped out two whole classes of main boards; sockets 754 and 939 are now retired to bone yard, which includes our old favorites, Slot 1, socket 478, socket A and socket 462.
So let's get down to "brass tacks" and talk about the differences and enhancements the new technologies offer. Oh, I forgot to say where that saying came from. To the best of my knowledge, it comes from when you used to buy bolts of cloth at the local mercantile. After choosing the appreciate fabric you would lay it out on the counter, which had brass tacks inserted in it to mark the yards and would haggle over the price. This has since come to mean "let's get down to business" and finish the deal. With that I'll do the same.
Intel was the first processor vendor to push thread-level parallelism into the mainstream with its Hyper-Threading (HT) technology five years ago. It was implemented as a way to make more efficient use of Pentium 4's onboard resources. The ability to address multiple threads simultaneously supposedly benefited power uses, but, Hell, I never noticed the difference. Intel came out with the first dual-core desktop chip in 2005, The Pentium D. Whereas hyperthreading divided one physical CPU into two logical processors sharing a single set of resources, the Pentium D fused a pair of physical processors together. Dual-threaded applications were faster and could multi-task more efficiently. But really, why you ask? Keep reading, and I'll explain. Anyone who needed performance could benefit from dualcore over HT.
Dual-core didn't win over everyone's heart. Since each multi-core chip incorporated twice the number of transistors as any predecessor, pure complexity necessitated a reduction in operating frequency. Power users broke up into two camps at that point: those who favored frequency above all else, generally because they played single-threaded games, and those who preferred the overall alacrity of a dual-core system. Speed became the hallmark of singlecore and productivity the domain of dual-core.
The passing of time has seen even the fastest single-core models lose their luster. Clock speed is no longer considered the measuring stick by which benchmarks are won -- a fact proven by Intel's Core 2 Duo processor. Although the flagship Core 2 Duo operates several hundred megahertz slower than the Netburst chips before it, plenty of cache and an optimized execution pipeline help procure unprecedented benchmark numbers.
The technology underlying Core 2 Duo is the product of a perfect storm. Intel's Core Microarchitecture, on which Core 2 Duo is based, follows a design philosophy centered on efficiency. Whereas the Pentium 4 was built to deliver super-fast clock speeds and featured a long, 31-stage execution pipeline as a means to achieve those numbers, Core boasts a 14-stage pipe endowed with the resources to field more instructions at once. The result is an architecture that inherently -- without any other enhancement -- functions more efficiently.
As Core development continued, Intel was also finalizing its 65nm manufacturing plans, yielding the ability to build smaller processing cores with more transistors. Thus, the first desktop Core 2 Duo included a maximum of 4MB L2 cache, implemented as a shared repository between both processing cores. Taken alone, the cache infusion would have given Intel's best effort a decided boost in performance. Added to its Core Microarchitecture, however, the extra memory helps even more.
Right from the get-go, Intel intended Core to operate natively in a dual-core environment -- a claim evidenced by that shared L2 cache. Each execution core sports unique 32KB data and instruction caches. But the L2, either 2MB or 4MB in size, can either be used in part or as a whole by each core, depending on the workload. Dual-core Net-Burst processors used the front-side bus to share data from one cache to the next. The Core Microarchitecture simply transfers ownership of that information, giving Core 2 Duo chips a significant advantage. Moreover, cache is allocated dynamically, enabling real-time optimization when the execution cores aren't being used evenly.
There's more, a lot more, but my head is starting to spin. I hope this gives you more answers that it creates questions. If the readership likes, I can spit out lots of techno-babble each month and educate everyone to the point of nonunderstanding. BUT I really prefer to talk about what irritates me the most, and this month, it's Microsoft Vista, but I'm out of space and the editor has me on a short leash after being so late on my articles. So see you next month.
============== CIPCUG Notice
You don't have to be a member of CIPCUG to subscribe to this E-letter, but we do make a short notice of upcoming events.
This Saturday, February 24, Bill Shelton will be showing us the ins and outs of researching our family trees.
March 24: TBA.
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