cedemic institutes seek to provide a large number of workstations to their students. The more workstations, the more of computer-based education fits into the school’s curriculum. An observation can be made which says that schools buy the wrong computers. Licences for the software they run, despite the bulk discounts, can cost as much as the computer itself, if not exceed that cost. When accommodating a computer cluster and paying over $1000 per Windows-based machine, the number of available computers will inevitable drop. As Linspire.com shows, each student in Indiana will soon have his/her own Linux box at school. This is particularly important where kids do not have a computer at home. Will more schools follow suit? This certainly happens in Manchester as well, albeit rather slowly.

RedHat Linux

As hardware costs drop, it is gets harder to defend the purchasing of commercial software. The price of development does not not necessarily rise because of offshoring, but the availability of richer Open Source software goes up owing to the Internet, killing commercial equivalents in the process. This, in fact is one of the reasons for the success of Windows 95. Back in the days, plenty of software was bundled while getting new applications remained a time-consuming task in the absence of rapid access to the Net.

Google Talk

s Google release an instant messaging and voice application, as well as a re-loaded desktop search application, one cannot help but wonder if they now target the desktop at full force. Google are even rumoured to have interest in Skype

To balance this discussion, let us mention those who say that Google might become the next Microsoft, honouring all operating systems, but putting a barrier at the front of competing companies all over the Internet. Instant messaging, voice, maps, conversion tools and of course — above all — the search engine seem to be drifting Google’s ways. An article just released in The New York Times agrees with such accusations:

For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

The shift towards the desktop does not contradict a shift towards on-line operating systems. A more recent article by Kottke supports my views as well. Will ten years of being enslaved to Microsoft ¹ come to an end sooner than anyone dared to predict?

¹ Windows 95 is one milestone among several, but today we mark the 10^th anniversary of that milestone (placebo rather).

uto-responders, also referred to as “vacation messages”, are a valuable feature of E-mail accounts. These are not only helpful when an account gets checked irregularly, but also when it becomes deprecated.

Auto-responders can be invoked by the E-mail client (e.g. recent versions of Outlook), but they require the computer to remain switched on. This, in fact, is the big con: the method unnecessarily consumes electricity in cases of an actual vacation. The computer needs to stay on for days or weeks at a time. Messages can be checked upon return, assuming the computer has not crash beforehand.

Alternatively, autoresponders can be handled at server level. It is worth noting that this will not always be a supported feature, especially when you do not have ownership of your E-mail address’ domain. The exception are Web-based mailing systems that support the feature fully, e.g. Yahoo Mail and CommuniGate Pro.

There is an ad-hoc alternative to autoresponders, which I adopted since I was able to set up a mail forwarder, but not an autoresponder.

• Set up a forwarder to a meaningful but non-existent E-mail address, e.g. I_am_away_at_the_moment@no.domain or This_account_has_been_intentionally_terminated@no.domain.
• Since the account you forward mail to resides on an address that does not exist, the message will bounce, though often not immediately.
• Subsequently, a delivery error will reach the original sender. Budging by the odd E-mail address that triggered an error, the message sender will receive information regarding the situation rather than assume that the recipient stayed silent.

To sum things up, forwarders to made-up addresses can guarantee that in the absence of auto-responders, all correspondents will receive meaningful feedback.

Three major risks are involved with the ownership of a handheld device. Below is a brief overview on fragility points to watch out for.

1. Vandalism

From Insecure Magazine comes a comprehensive document on Pocket PC security (PDF) which states:

These devices (PDA‘s) are easy to smuggle into a business and can be used to propagate an attack against network devices. Don’t make the mistake of assuming is a PDA is a simple data keeper. As the cliche’ goes… it is how you use it that matters.

2. Viruses

Palm viruses were created as “proof of concept”, but haven’t been found “in the wild” frequently, if ever. The Treos, however, might make the exception. Either way, AV software for the Palm seems unnecessary and you are advised to spend your money where it makes a greater difference and does not cripple your CPU. Data gets backed up during the frequent synchronisations in any case.

3. Privacy Invasion

Lastly, as more handheld devices incorporate Wi-Fi, it is worth mentioning how penetrable data packets actually are. To convince yourself that Wi-Fi is not secure at present, simply follow the links below:

• WEPCrack
• How To Crack WEP
• Cracking WPA

Cited by: PalmAddict

A ZDNet item that got Slashdotted moments ago reminds me why I back-up my data so frequently and frantically.

…A woman placed her laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about the laptop, which slid off the back of her car, and she then reversed straight over it and reported hearing a ‘crunch’…

My seriousness when it comes to backup peaked a couple of months ago. As part of my ‘paranoia approach’ to backup, I have bi-weekly procedure which includes mirroring my entire hard-drive (~150,000 files), doing data integrity tests and a shallow sanity check using ‘diff‘ to ensure that no data was explicitly erased by accident.

Related items:

• Copy is Power – duplicating data excessively
• Cron-based Backup – backing up with pre-defined cycles
• One-Click Backups – automating the backup process
• Backup Fallacy – a common mistake
• Palm SD Card Backup – backing up PDA‘s using a tiny memory card

Scrapers: where is the original content? Left or right?

everal companies including Google have devised mechanisms so as to avoid becoming the hosts to spammers. It is broadly agreed that spam blogs (also referred to as “splogs”) and spam-generating E-mail accounts can easily damage the reputation of the ISP or the on-line service which provides the bandwidth. Consequently, Google have reacted to spam blogs in a variety of ways and required Google Mail subscribers to be invited by another existing member (“friend brings a friend”), thus establishing trust. Moreover on the issue of spam, content spam can finally be reported and feedback acted upon.

The brand-new WordPress.com, a service similar to that of TypePad and Blogger, takes the same approach as GMail and distributes “invites”. A limit on the number of invites helps the battle against spam over HTTP. While their mechanism appears similar to that GMail invites, it serves a different puspose and has different implications. With spam blogs being endemic, one needs to gain control over who creates blogs, as well as how many. The requirement for a referral from a friend is a novel idea, which can result in a highly-reputed network of blogs. It would attract the best bloggers from ‘junk networks’ characterised by plagiarism, hotlinked (sometimes stolen) graphics or content that provokes hatred and intolerance.

Where else can this idea of invites be used? Virtually in any domain which involves public account instantiation, e.g.:

• E-mail accounts
• Blogs
• Webspaces
• On-line bookmarks such as del.icio.us

Many other services are moving online (possibly reaching out for on-line operating systems), so we shall see spam hitting many other types of services in the future. Not so long ago I wondered if there would be a place for invites trading on eBay. I guessed it was only a matter of time. Links and PageRank likewise. It was a few days that a WordPress invite ended up in an eBay auction, much as I had predicted. That means that people earn money for subscription to services they do not own! So, under certain circumstances, spamming appears to be substituted by scalping.

Only months after the release of Google Desktop, the much richer Google Desktop 2 has been announced. This native desktop software, as well as indexing and searching one’s hard-drive, incorporates a controversial sidebar. This sidebar contains RSS feeds, a virtual Gmail inbox, news headlines and more utilities and plug-ins like a scheduling toolset.

Will this truly provide the infrastructure to what might become a Google homebred Web browser? This kind of browser would make the Google-centric application everything that you will ever need. Would such strategy move all the users’ data on-line, namely mail, schedule and settings? Will this make our lives even more portable? Surely there is potential for this vision, which is not baseless. Google have strong ties with the Mozilla Foundation and they may have pondered the possibility of a Google browser in the past. Some sources claim they have.

Related items: Google OS – What if?, Towards On-Line Operating Systems