Essays: 1992 Archives
Removable Storage Keeps on Track toward Faster Access, Bigger Capacity
Since 1984, RAM capacity has climbed more than tenfold, from 128 Kbytes to 256 Mbytes. CPU power also has increased dramatically, from the sluggish 8-MHz 68000 to the 33-MHz 68040 in the Quadra 950.
Yet, the capacity of floppy disks – that almost ubiquitous storage media – has lagged far behind the others, barely tripling from 400 Kbytes to the current 1.4-Mbyte disks.
Desktop publishing, digital photography, multimedia and CAD all have put pressure on vendors for storage media that is much larger than floppy disks. To fill this need, several different storage technologies have emerged, each with different storage capacities and formats…
Flash Memory Offers Potential for Compact Storage Solution
While many types of removable media are good for long-term storage, they are often too bulky and expensive for compact devices such as printers, palm-size computers and network hardware.
That’s why a growing number of vendors are swinging over to flash memory, also known as flash ROM, a form of nonvolatile memory that blends the rewrite flexibility of dynamic RAM with the permanence of ROM.
Though not a silver-bullet solution for all memory requirements, flash memory currently works well for storing a few megabytes of printer fonts, software or configuration data and has the potential to store much more…
Different Configurations a Problem: Managers Adopting Varied Approaches
It’s rare to find two people who configure their Macintosh the same way. Some users swear by System 7; others won’t touch it. Some machines run QuickTime; others – The Talking Moose.
For those in charge of hundreds of machines, it’s a potential nightmare. “Trying to manage several hundred Macs is, well, [almost] impossible unless you maintain coherency and consistency across them,” said Roy Roper, assistant director for network information technologies at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“We try to create nearly the same look and feel: utilities, software, network resource access across as many Macs as possible,” said Roper, who has defined a standard set of software for every machine. “We have centralized ordering, configuration, delivery and training. We install everything before the user sees the Mac.”…
Taking Backups out of Users' Hands
Convincing people to back up their hard disks is a universal struggle. Most people make backups irregularly, if at all. And whether or not the backups are labeled or even if they can be used to restore data in the event of a disk crash is usually the responsibility of the individual user.
As companies downsize their computing centers, more critical applications are moving from mainframe computers to networked microcomputers.
The data on these microcomputers can be crucial to the life of the company, and network managers are loathe to leave the important task of backup to chance…
Remote-Link Details Matter: Gatorlink Vs. LanRovers
Both Shiva Corp. and Cayman Systems Inc. are readying multiport Ethernet remote-access products for shipment sometime this fall. At the Boston Macworld Expo in August, Cayman announced GatorLink and Shiva demonstrated LanRover/E. Shiva’s LanRover/L, a single-port LocalTalk remote-access product, has been shipping since April. Both the LanRover/E and the GatorLink are hardware devices that connect AppleTalk Remote Access users directly into the network without the need for a dedicated Mac.
One interesting difference between the products already has been brought to light by the vendors: the way in which they connect users to the network. GatorLink will be a bridge. LanRover/E also will be a bridge, but users also will be able to configure it as a router…
Does Telecommuting Work? Bosses, Employees Hammer out Terms
San Francisco – When you consider commute hours and the expense of travel, as well as traffic and its accompanying stress and pollution levels, there’s a strong case to be made for telecommuting as beneficial to workers. The advantages for business may be just as compelling.
The Department of Public Works in both San Diego and Los Angeles County reported productivity increases of 34 percent among some telecommuters. Tom Peters devoted an issue of his newsletter On Achieving Excellence to telecommuting. In it he called telecommuting “the ultimate bureaucracy-bashing tool.” He suggested managers seriously consider it because “you can find unexpected labor sources – the handicapped, your own people on sick or maternity leave [who you might otherwise lose], etc. – by allowing them to work at home.”…
Dylan: A New Language Is Blowin' in the Wind
Cupertino, Calif. – Programmers will be able to use a new computer language called Dylan to build applications on the Newton Personal Digital Assistants. While this language incorporates numerous advances from the world of academia, many developers wonder how well it will perform in the real world.
Dylan is an object-oriented dynamic language – one that makes it possible to modify programs, at the source-code level, on the fly. (In fact, the name Dylan is short for dynamic language.) It retains much of the basic syntax of LISP, the language from which it is derived, but it offers far more power, its developers say…
CDDI Breathes Life into FDDI Standard
Why should anyone care about Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) anymore?
Wiring an office with fiber is expensive, as is purchasing fiberoptic switching and relay equipment. And with Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) on the horizon, which promises flexible data rates of 150M to 600M bit/sec, FDDI’s 100M bit/sec data rate hardly seems worth it.
But the recent emergence of FDDI over copper wiring under the evolving Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI) standard changes all that. CDDI has breathed life into the protocol and given network managers a new option for wiring high-performance data networks…
Doing it Randomly: Probabilistic Algorithms in Programming
The approach to using probability algorithms is a powerful and innovative way to solve sharing problems.
It may seem strange that programming, which has long been a bastion of exact algorithms behaving in precisely the same manner every time, occasionally turns to probability to solve some of its more difficult problems.
In some people’s minds, algorithms should be proveably correct at all times and for all inputs (as with defect-free programming and formal methods). Probabilistic algorithms give up this property. There is always a chance that the algorithm will produce a false result. But this chance can be made as small as desired. If the chance of the software failing is made smaller than the chance of the hardware failing (or of the user spontaneously combusting, or whatever), there’s little to worry about…
Is Working Out-of-Site on Your Mind?
Observers are predicting a massive increase in the demand for remote LAN access, fueled by the convergence of several trends. High-speed links have become available through standardized, low-cost modems, making it easier to perform complex computer tasks via a dial-in connection. Portable computers are becoming more powerful. And more companies are downsizing, moving applications to personal computers and making LANs a significant part of their computing system.
“As the LAN becomes a central part of the information infrastructure, access to it becomes more important,” said Dan Schwinn, president of networking vendor Shiva Corp. of Cambridge, Mass…
How to Beat the Backup: Phone from Home
If you’re not looking at telecommuting yet, you soon might have to. The 1990 amendments to the Federal Clean Air Act require states to enact strict clean-air policies, and by 1996 all businesses with more than 100 employees at sites classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as “severe” or “extreme” will be required to reduce the number of cars commuting to their locations.
Regulation XV, enforced in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California, is the most aggressive air-quality legislation in the world, imposing fines of up to $25,000 a day for violators. In Northern California, the San Francisco Bay area is drafting Rule 13, which promises to be just as stringent…
Developer Tools Begin to Get LAN Smarts
The advantages of computer-aided software engineering tools running over a LAN can be spectacular, according to users, but such Mac-based tools are rare.
For developers on Macs, sharing programming results and communicating with each other is getting easier. CASE analysis, modeling and prototyping are easier when personal computers can share resources as well as merge results. Even code generation can be sped up through multiprocessing. For the most part, LAN-based CASE tools have been limited to networked DOS environments, but they are starting to migrate to the Mac. Here are four:…
System 7's Security Shortcomings
System 7 and the Mac were designed for ease of use, not security. Networked Macs suffer from many security risks that stand-alone machines don’t and, unlike mainframe systems, there is no central computing machine from which to control access.
AppleTalk is a dynamic “plug-and-play” system – any Mac can plug into an existing network and immediately become part of it. AppleTalk also is a peer-to-peer system – any Mac can access resources on, send files to and exchange messages with any other machine. “Macintosh users are used to having an open platform and freely sharing files,” said Andrew Sneed, computer coordinator at The Analytical Services Corp. (TASC) in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. That openness is not conducive to network security, he added. “They want to be able to get any file on any machine painlessly and effortlessly.”…
Bedrock Has Developers Wary; MacApp Community Waits for Answers
Apple Supports Symantec Corp.'s Bedrock Program Development Environment
Cupertino, Calif.—The Mac developer community has been bubbling with speculations, questions and, in some cases, fear since Apple last month gave its blessing to Symantec Corp.’s Bedrock cross-platform development framework.
Not surprisingly, developers who have followed Apple’s often-repeated advice and adopted its current application framework, MacApp, have the most questions.
“There is a lot of concern” among MacApp developers, said Jeff Alger, a Palo Alto, Calif., consultant and former chairman of the MacApp Developers Association (now MADA). “Apple is being secretive about Bedrock in ways that they haven’t been [with MacApp].”…
Keeping Viruses Off Net a Battle
Macs sitting alone on desert islands don’t catch viruses. Even Macs whose users frequently trade disks with each other can be protected easily. With Macs on large networks, however, virus prevention can be a lot more complicated.
“If you have a published volume on your hard disk, someone can drop a virus on your machine without your knowledge,” said Jeffrey Shulman, author of Virus Detective and Virus Blockade and president of Shulman Software Co. of Morgentown, W.Va.
Many holes.
Shared disk space, on servers and local disks using System 7’s file sharing, are an often unprotected means through which viruses can spread…
QuickRing Architecture Could Revolutionize Data Transfer
The QuickRing architecture, announced last month at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., could have a profound effect on many areas of high-end Macintosh computing, such as video processing and high-speed networking.
QuickRing is a communications system that lets plug-in NuBus cards exchange data with each other or external equipment at rates of up to 200 Mbps. This is more than 10 times faster than non-burst-mode speeds available in the existing NuBus architecture and opens the door to new applications that Mac developers could only dream of before…
'Fire Walls' Stand as a Protectant Between Trouble and the Network.
Large buildings are often built with fire walls—fire-resistant barriers between vital parts. A fire may burn out one section of the building, but the fire wall will stop it from spreading. The same philosophy can protect Macintosh networks from unauthorized access and network faults.
A network fire wall usually is nothing more than a router configured to prevent certain network packets from traveling between parts of the network. For instance, a router can partition off the machines in the R&D department, so other network users can’t access secret information. Some routers can be programmed to transfer electronic mail but restrict remote-terminal log-ons. And the chairman of the board’s laser printer could be hidden from the rest of the network, so the average user can’t print on that machine…
What is Happening to the Internet?
Recent changes to the Internet are turning the network of the military-industrial complex into the most likely prospect for an all-encompassing electronic-mail system.
Business cards used to be simple: name, company, address, telephone number and maybe a logo. Then came facsimile numbers. Now something with an @ in it is appearing on more and more business cards. It’s an Internet address; you probably have one already, although you may not know it, and sometime during the next couple of years you will have to learn it.
With an estimated 25 million users, the Internet is by far the world’s largest electronic-mail network, and its reach is extending to more private and public mail systems every week.
“If [people are] serious about electronic mail, I can get to them via the Internet; if they’re not, I probably don’t have time to figure out how to reach them,” said Bob Halloran, network manager at AT&T Co.’s Universal Card Services in Jacksonville, Fla…
Sharing Secrets Among Friends
Whether you're protecting a nuclear missile or your new recipe for burger sauce, polynomial encryption can prevent people from stealing your secrets.
Let’s say you’ve invented a new, extra-gooey, extra-sweet, creme filling; or a burger sauce that is even more tasteless than before. This stuff is important; you have to keep the recipe secret. You can tell only your most trusted employees the exact mixture of ingredients, but what if one of them defects to the competition? Before, long every grease palace on the block would be making burgers as tasteless as yours. That just wouldn’t do.
You can take a message and divide it up into secure pieces. Each of the pieces by itself means nothing, but put them all together and the message appears. If each employee has a piece of the recipe, then only together can they make the sauce (employees could type their portion into a central sauce-making computer or something). If any employee jumps ship with a piece of the recipe, the portion is useless by itself…
Computer Security: Key Management Issue
MacWEEK Special Report: Emerging Technologies
Back when computers stood alone on desks, unconnected to the rest of the world, computer security was simply a matter of locking an office door, putting a lock on the power supply or installing a security software package. Today, the rules of computer security are changing, and in years to come, it’s going to be a whole new ball game.
What used to be the concern solely of the military is required by more and more companies. “Between LANs, file servers and dial-up connections, it’s hard to regulate who has access to what,” said Steven Bass, principal software engineer at Codex Corp., a division of Motorola Inc. in Canton, Mass…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.