Forum Questions and Email Outgoing packet count increased after last Windows update. Check outgoing packets as you did. You could use a packet analyzer and look at the outgoing destination address and attempt to see if there is a legitimate reason to send the packet to that location. Profiles in IT: William Henry Gates III Lesson Learned from Gates Career Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica Flight Controlled Move toward GPS Guidance Systems How Does GPS Work? Website of the Week: Pandora Internet Radio AMD Versus Intel My New Laptop Top Five Complaints About Buying My Laptop
Outgoing packet count increased after last Windows update.
I am not sure if this was a coincidence or a security breach.
I have run TCPView from www.sysinternals.com recommended by SANS, but it doesn’t show anything exotic or very abnormal.
I have turned off automatic updates for Symantec and the Windows update.
Tech Talk Answer
Check outgoing packets as you did. You could use a packet analyzer and look at the outgoing destination address and attempt to see if there is a legitimate reason to send the packet to that location.
The program you used looked at connections (TCP) rather than actual packets.
You could use a packet analyzer to see the packet headers. A nice program for this activity is Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/). I tried it this morning, but it does not work on Vista .
You could install a firewall that tracks outgoing traffic and provides the name of the program that generates the traffic (ZoneAlarm, $49, www.zonealarm.com)
Of course run an adware/spyware program like Ad-Aware
Profiles in IT: William Henry Gates III
Position while at Microsoft: CEO, Chief Software and Chief Software Architect
Holds 8% of common stock with a net worth of $56 billion
Gates founded Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000.
Early Years
Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.
He and other students sought time on other systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers. PDP-10 was owned by Computer Center Corporation.
Computer Center Corporation which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalties as well.
At age 14, Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. That first year he made $20,000; however, when his age was discovered, business slowed.
He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree, but did not have a definite study plan.
Beginning of Microsoft
After reading in Popular Electronics (Jan 1975) about the Altair 8800, Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter.
Over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter.
The demonstration, held at MITS’s offices, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC.
Paul Allen hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, dubbing their partnership "Micro-soft" in November 1975.
The hyphen was dropped the next year in the trademark filing.
Microsoft’s big break and expansion
In 1980 IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC.
After Digital Research failed to negotiate with IBM for the CP/M OS, Gates proposed QDOS (Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products).
MS signed a deal with SCP to be the exclusive agent, and later full owner.
After adapting the OS for the PC, MS delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS for a one-time fee, without transferring the ownership of the source code.
MS was quick to license DOS to other clone manufacturers, calling it MS-DOS.
In the early 1980s Microsoft introduced its own version of the graphical user interface (GUI), called Windows. (Based on ideas pioneered by the Xerox, not Apple).
Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) sold around 10 million copies in the first two years.
Finally the 32-bit operating systems arrived (Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista)
Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000, when Steve Ballmer took the position.
Lesson Learned from Gates Career
Work on real projects to pursue your interests.
License your work carefully.
Own the code when paying for development.
Hardware not software is the best focus (MS versus Apple)
Anti-competitive behavior (good or bad for the industry)
Will Google do to MS what MS did to IBM and Netscape?
Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica
Wikipedia has faired quite well in the errors department.
However, it is sometimes wording and not written as tightly as EB
Here are some errors that have been corrected by Wikipedia (as listed in WP)
History: 24 articles
Mathematics: 6 articles
Science: 10 articles
Language: 6 articles
Geography: 5 articles
Other topics: 11 articles
External peer review analysis of 40 comparable articles in EB and WP
EB (Total word count: 22, 733, Errors: 123)
WP (Total word count: 45, 254, Errors: 162)
EB (Errors per word: 0.0054106, Errors per article: 2.9286)
WP (Errors per word: 0.0035798, Errors per article: 3.8571)
Flight Controlled Move toward GPS Guidance Systems
The System We Have Now is Antiquated
Radar plane detection and tracking
Planes have no knowledge of other nearby aircraft
Currently, a plane is guided to its destination via a series of radar handoff’s.
With today’s radar, it can take up to 36 seconds to get an accurate read on a plane’s position ? a long time for an aircraft flying 500 mph.
So safety buffers err on the conservative side: The minimum distance between planes is 5 miles horizontally and about 3 miles on landing and approach.
NextGen is designed to change all that by providing air traffic controllers and pilots with much more accurate and detailed real-time information
Instead of radar, the new system relies on ADS-B, or automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast.
An aircraft equipped with ADS-B receives GPS signals via an on-board receiver to determine its position in the sky.
That information, plus data on the plane’s identity, position, speed and intended flight path, is broadcast to other aircraft and ground stations within 150 miles. For the first time, both pilots and controllers will see the same real-time displays of air traffic.
Planes will be able to fly closer without jeopardizing safety, so more flights can be scheduled, easing congestion.
This procedure is known as self-separation.
Several airlines aren’t waiting for government action
Cargo carrier UPS Airlines has already equipped nearly 300 of its planes and its main airport hub in Louisville , Ky. , with ADS-B technology.
By shortening flight times and using more efficient approach paths, UPS expects to save about 800,000 gallons of fuel annually.
Next year, Southwest will install a similar system.
Southwest is forecasting big fuel savings when it re-equips its fleet of 520 737s next year
How Does GPS Work?
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a world-wide radio-navigation system formed from a constellation of 24 satellites and their ground stations.
GPS receivers use these ?man-made stars? as reference points to calculate positions accurately to an accuracy of meters using unclassified data.
GPS Satellites
Name: NAVSTAR
Manufacturers: Rockwell International
Orbit: 12 hours, 55 degrees to the equatorial plane
Ground stations in: Hawaii , Ascension Islands , Diego Garcia, Kwajalein, and Colorado Springs
Three satellites are needed for triangulation, but the receiver must have an atomic clock
Four satellites provide the time information and allow for cheap receivers.
Create a personal radio station playing your music
Select an artist your song that you like
It will suggest other artists and songs that match the Music Genome
Based on Music Genome Project
Assembled hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome.
Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.
They have analyzed Jazz, Pop, Rock, Electronica, Country, Latin, and
Hip Hop. Classical is coming soon.
I just create a radio station stream of my choice and work on my computer. Very relaxing. They have some nerdcore rap in this genome project.
AMD Versus Intel
Intel’s Core Duo (64 bit) is superior to AMD’s Turion 64 X2, but not by much
AMD is undercutting the price by $150 and gaining market share
Both companies have 65 nm technology and are soon to launch 45 nm chips
AMD is confident that it can catch up (lost 600 million the second quarter)
Competition is good for the consumer.
My New Laptop
Last year’s technology at a good price
AMD Turion 64 X2 (1.8 GHz)
2 GB DDR II (533 MHz FSB)
160 GB Hard drive (serial ATA)
DVD/CD (read and write)
Wi-Fi (802.11b/g, but no Bluetooth)
17 inch screen
$850 plus $87 extra to upgrade RAM
Top Five Complaints About Buying My Laptop
5 — Mail-in rebates
4 — Free software trials that vendor gets paid to install (?crapware?)
3 — Forcing RAM throwaway to upgrade (gave away two 512MB DDR2 modules)