Essays in the Category "Non-Security Articles"
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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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.