The internet at 40: how Arpanet laid the foundations
Forty years ago, a simple message was sent between two Californian research labs and a net was born The internet at 40: full coverage Today is the internet's 40th birthday. Well, not exactly the internet but Arpanet – the Pentagon-funded research project that is the predecessor to the internet. Forty years ago, a simple message "Lo" (it was supposed to "Login", but the system crashed) was sent between two computers at two Californian research labs and a net was born. What happened next – the development of the now global internet, the web that you are reading this on – has had an impact on all of us. Last week, the Guardian published an interactive people's history of the internet telling the story of how that happened and interviewing some of the people who made it so
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The internet at 40: how Arpanet laid the foundations
Missing drive space on a Windows PC
David Menarry has installed his software on a new Vista PC and thinks he has less space left than he should have I've bought a new desktop running Vista Home Premium. After copying files from the old computer and installing and setting up the programs I need, which add up to about 120GB, I find almost 200GB of the 500GB hard drive has been used. David Menarry The hard drive industry uses "decimal bits" (powers of 10) because that gives a bigger number than the "real bits" (powers of 2) used by software. Your 500GB hard drive is seen by software as around 466GB. The hardware manufacturer has probably taken a chunk for a "restore partition" so that you can easily reinstall the operating system. Microsoft has probably taken some for System Restore and a Shadow Copy
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Missing drive space on a Windows PC
Letters and blogs | 29 October 2009
New Windows Microsoft appears to be mired in its past ( Who needs new Windows? , 22 October). Windows 7 looks to be a serious upgrade over its Vista predecessor, but in 10 years' time, will we care? Or will we have moved on, forgetting about those quaint days when we used to care about the operating system and applications like Office? news.cnet.com Last product of the dying giant? twitter.com/andydolwin So it's more intuitive? Than XP? Is that a problem which users need solving? Good PR job. twitter.com/SiriusCorp Crowd wisdom Could e-anything progress if Wi-Fi was the new asbestos? twitter.com/jpallis001 "We have a science class you could attend" ( What should you say to a parent scared of Wi-Fi? , 22 October). twitter.com/herrdoktorc Coming out gaming No one introduces themselves to new people with "Hey, I'm a geek" – unless you're wearing some geeky outfit ( Coming out as a gamer still turns you into a social n00b , 22 October). It just doesn't happen. At least when people ask "What subject do you research?" and you reply with "computer science", they come back with something nice like "There's lots of money in that! Good for you" (and occasionally "Can you fix my computer?"). It's the follow-up question I don't like. This is a real conversation: Them: "What part of computer science do you study?" Me: "Oh, I research video games, it's really important you know! Huge sums of money, lots of big, hard problems." Them: "I've got two eight-year-olds that could tell you all about video games." terranova.blogs.com People seem to allow for, say, a Giants fan to not go out on the day/night of a game because of said game. Or a Patriots fan. Or a Celtics fan
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Letters and blogs | 29 October 2009
Google Earth beware: the Brits are coming
A backroom team in the UK have built a world map that they hope could become the Wikipedia of a 3D internet I intended to give the 3D internet a miss for a while after writing last week. But that was before Mike Fotoohi, a freelance software engineer from London, emailed me. When he told me that he and a few friends, working for five years in their spare time, had built a 3D version not just of capital cities, as others have, but of the entire planet that was better than Google Earth, my first reaction was to get off the phone pronto. But his enthusiasm was infectious and it ended up with him bringing his own bulky PC to our house for a demo. I was impressed. He uses public resources such as US aerial maps, geographical data from GIS.com and the wonderful openstreetmap.org, in which people the world over are mapping streets for public benefit. His team has welded the data from these sources together using their own 3D engine to reproduce every street on the planet in three dimensions. Unlike Google Earth or other versions you can, in theory, walk around the entire world with your avatar, or "virtual you". They have mapped streets in central New York in detail and an avatar – customised to look like me – successfully wandered around the Times Square area (hhttp://bit.ly/timessq). Buildings further away become 3D shells as his team hasn't the resources to fill in details. How can he get around this? Simple. Anyone, anywhere can build on the 3D foundations of any mapped house in the world. He wants it to be the Wikipedia of a 3D internet with a revenue stream to finance expansion which their own company, micazook.com, can't afford
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Google Earth beware: the Brits are coming
LaCie d2 Network | Hard drive review
Network drives have made astonishingly limited progress in the home. I suspect there are two reasons: first, people can't see the benefit over having a single (cheaper) drive to plug directly into their machine. Second, configuring them with Windows is an utter pain because it introduces the unnecessary idea of "Workgroups". Er, hello, Microsoft? I'm at home. Why do I need a "workgroup"? Windows 7 improves this over XP: it has (Windows 7-only) "Homegroups". Hmm. But as we have more computers – and internet devices – at home, and need to share files among them, as well as having big media files and collections we want to be network-accessible (for, say, Sonos's music system or the Neuros OSD, both of which I've reviewed in the past 18 months), a networked drive becomes less a luxury, more an obviously smart move. However, when you buy a networked hard drive, make sure it's your last one ever. That is, make sure that it's big enough to have tons of room for huge amounts of files; because if you have to replace it after a year, copying the files over from the old one will be tedious. I think I've found the last networked hard drive I want to buy: the LaCie d2 Network, which comes in 500GB, 1TB (that's terabyte) and 1.5TB flavours. The prices are respectively £145, £170 and £230. You can see that the sweet spot is 1TB; apparently the hike in price-per-gigabyte for the 1.5TB version is to do with how many platters can be squeezed into the enclosure, and the high price-per-GB of the 500GB version is to do with the cost of, well, the enclosure and so on.
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LaCie d2 Network | Hard drive review
Does Twitter really cost British business £1.4bn a year?
Of course not. If you are weak-willed enough to believe that – or if your manager is, and has therefore cut off your access to the social network – then consider a few facts. The "survey" that came up with that number was carried out, as Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe has noted , by a company that makes staff-monitoring equipment. It has an interest in selling things to companies to stop their staff "wasting" money by – allegedly – spending 40 minutes a week on social media. If the company (which we won't name) succeeds in selling some of its equipment to anyone as a result of the survey, then that will be a net gain for the UK economy through its sales. So Twitter won't have lost the economy money – why, it'll have generated some, though one would have to offset that against lost productivity through not being able to contact customers, clients and others through the social network. But the economic justifications for Twitter go well beyond selling slightly spooky monitoring equipment. Louis Halpern, CEO of the digital marketing agency Halpern Cowan, thinks that idea that time on social media sites is "wasted" is nonsense: "The first step to getting a return on investment from the time employees spend on social media is to empower them to use social media to help their business," he said in response to the "survey". "A company's employees are its most effective advocate, and can directly sway the opinion of customers and stakeholders … Customers will only continue to buy if they feel good about the service they're receiving, which staff actively posting positive sentiment online can impact directly." Sometimes, naturally, the use of social media goes awry. Halpern acknowledged as much when discussing the recent case of Dixons Store Group staff being abusive about customers on Facebook . But with companies such as Dell and JetBlue recording millions of dollars in sales through Twitter, it's clear that the network has value; and newspapers find it useful in contacting sources, getting readers to their site and even, occasionally, helping overturn injunctions – the latter service being hard to price but definitely socially valuable. The fear that employees let loose on the internet will waste time is as old as Sir Alan Sugar, who thought it had "obvious disadvantages" when used by web-surfing staff and that it could "all go pear-shaped". (He did answer his own emails, though.) The reality though is that people at work have always found ways to waste time. The key problem for managers remains, as ever, finding ways to make them like their work enough not to
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Does Twitter really cost British business £1.4bn a year?
Wisdom of the crowd | Do friends let friends hack into extremist groups’ websites?
A friend who's into hacking says he's found a flaw in the website of a political group whose views you both detest.
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Wisdom of the crowd | Do friends let friends hack into extremist groups' websites?
Call for green label on laptop chargers
If laptop users were willing to pay an extra two dollars to upgrade their power supply units, the world could save more than 200m tons of carbon a year, according to a leading component supplier in Taiwan. Delta Electronics, which makes more than half of the boxes at the end of the world's power cables, wants consumers to be informed of the carbon and energy efficiency of its products so that they can make a choice about whether to pay extra for greener computers. The current energy efficiency standard for switching power supplies on laptop computers is 87%, though many firms fit devices that fall well below this level. Delta says its best equipment could reach 93% for $1 or $2 more. It is not yet widely adopted because computer firms such as HP and Dell are reluctant to pass on the cost to consumers. "The point is, consumers never know the efficiency of their computers," said Delta Electronics' founder and chairman, Bruce Cheng. "We are serious in our efforts to reduce global warming by our unrelenting research into ever more energy efficient products." The firm expects to sell about 63m adaptors this year. With an improvement of eight percentage points, it estimates the average laptop could save 8.8kWh a year. "Consumers should ask for higher efficiency. That's why we want a carbon label on goods. We would be the biggest benefactor," said Emelie Yeh, a company spokesperson. Taiwanese firms supply most of the IT components, fans and power supply adaptors in computers and household appliances. Peter Rowling, of the environmental consultancy ERM, welcomed the push to inform the public. "This is good because carbon labelling is about disclosure, but what is important is that it looks at the whole life cycle of the product. We also need to know the energy and resources that go into products." Taiwan is moving in this direction.
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Call for green label on laptop chargers
Tech Weekly: A history of Windows and Windows 7
In this week's episode of Tech Weekly, there's also a potted history of Microsoft, including how Solitaire helped the world learn to use a mouse, as well as a look to what the future might hold thanks to the launch of Windows 7 . Our own Jack Schofield gives his definitive conclusion as to whether it's worth upgrading, and Charles Arthur discusses where Microsoft fits in, in the wider OS landscape, with competition from Snow Leopard , Ubuntu and Google's new Chrome OS
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Tech Weekly: A history of Windows and Windows 7
Internet Explorer 6: the browser that won’t die
Few people love Internet Explorer 6 – but millions still use it. Could Windows 7 finally remove the thorn in Microsoft's side? Internet Explorer 6 is the most popular web browser, according to Net Applications' Market Share website , and it's also the most hated. Its use has been raised in parliamentary questions , and even Microsoft would dearly love to be rid of it. The browser is "insecure", lacking in features, and just too old to observe almost a decade of new web standards. Yet despite internet campaigns against it, such as IE6 No More , the browser launched with Windows XP in 2001 seems likely to continue for a few years yet. The current supremacy of IE6 is, of course, a temporary aberration. Both IE7 and Mozilla's Firefox 3.0, previously its main rivals, are in decline as users switch to IE8 and Firefox 3.5. However, it's a sobering thought that even adding the market shares of Firefox 3.0 (9.62%) and Firefox 3.5 (12.65%) together, the open-source browser still falls short of the antique IE6 (24.42%) on NetApps figures for September 2009 . Force quit The sort of people who would be outraged if Microsoft were to change a single byte on their hard drives without permission have been calling on Microsoft to force users to upgrade. Microsoft, naturally, won't. People who use Windows Update have already declined to upgrade to IE7 or IE8, and as the man in charge of IE's development, Dean Hachamovitch, says on the IEBlog: " The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC. " Hachamovitch's phrasing is deliberate, because "the person responsible" for keeping IE6 often isn't the user. An unknown but probably large proportion of IE6 users are inside enterprises, where software is locked down and infrequently updated. If a big company is running hundreds of thousands of PCs, any changes have to be tested against hundreds of applications to make sure everything will continue to work. Also, rolling out software changes on a large scale is expensive, even though there are tools designed for the job. Simply because the majority of large companies are still using Windows XP, many of them are still using the browser that came with it. From their point of view, it's the simplest and cheapest option – productivity be damned. Telling these locked-down IE6 users to upgrade "is not only pointless, it's sadistic", according to Digg's Mark Trammell . Another brake on progress is bad programming.
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Internet Explorer 6: the browser that won't die