Schneier on Security

For many years, the only way for distant computers to communicate over the public telephone system was via a voice-quality link, either a dialup line or a point-to-point leased line. Big companies needed better connections, and several data communications standards, such as X.25, were developed to provide them on these lines. As networks expanded and applications required speedier transmission rates, time-division multiplexing (TDM) technologies stepped in to provide cheaper and faster data transfers on large-bandwidth circuits, often making it cheaper to lease a dedicated T1 line than to run several low-speed lines…

Originally a nonvolatile storage standard, PCMCIA has grown to be a much more versatile interface. With its small size and low power draw, it has gotten a lot of attention from computer developers looking to reduce both bulk and power on their portable products.

Apple is evaluating PCMCIA for its PowerBook line, and Newton will ship with a PCMCIA slot; the slot also will support an Apple-proprietary 32-bit bus called TrimBus. Using PCMCIA, users can plug in cards containing everything from interactive maps to network connectors.

A PCMCIA card is a removable device about the size of a credit card (2.126 by 3.37 inches). It has a 68-pin interface along the short edge that works with eight- and 16-bit computer buses and supports physical access of up to 64 Mbytes of memory. (Apple’s 32-bit TrimBus can address up to 256 Mbytes on a single card.)…

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…

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…

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.”…

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…

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.”…

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…