Email and Forum Profiles in IT: Radia J. Perlman Website of the Week: Google Tech Talks Online Holiday Spending in 2007 Nears $28 Billion The 2038 Unix Millenium Bug Whitehouse Uses Faulty Backup Procedures for Email Printer Life Cycle Cost Food Science: Sous Vide
Question from Forum: What free software is available for scanning multiple images?
Tech Talk Answers: I have a Canon flatbed scanner and the bundled software can do multiple images and negative. Placing each image in a separate file. I have not found free version of the same software. All the free software is bundled with a scanner. You will need TWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name) compliant software.
Email from Logan: I have a Dell desktop with Windows XP installed on it. I’ve tried everything to erase this virus from my computer but it keeps on replicating itself. I would like to perform a clean install. How do I do this? Thanks a bunch! I learned so much from your show. I didn’t know anything about computers a year ago. Tech Talk has demystified computers. I’m technically confident now. Thanks again, Logan
Tech Talk Answers: Dear Logan. Chances are that you have a Master Boot Record virus that is taking control of your computer and reinstalling the virus whenever it discovers it missing, you have been infected by the virus that is hidden using a rootkit. If you have all of the original CD and the serial numbers, a clean install may be the best option if your OS to too badly corrupted.
Your computer may have come with a restore partition with all the software already installed. All you have to do is prepare a rescue disk and re-initialize the main partition, including all of the original software and crapware.
If you don’t have a rescue partition, you can boot on the Windows install disk and ask for a new installation. The disk will allow you repartition the drive (creating a new Master Boot Record) and then format each partition. Finally it will install the new OS.
Email from Dennis: Hi Dr. Shurtz, I bought a Dell Vostro 400 running Vista. I want to move the 2nd hard drive from my old gateway into the new computer. Could I just move the hard drive and install it into the new Dell? I really do not want to uninstall the programs and reinstalled them once the hard drive is in the dell. Thanks, Dennis
Tech Talk Answers: Fortunately, there are a number of tools to copy folders and files from one machine to another. The Windows Easy File Transfer program that comes with Vista can help migrate program settings while Laplink’s PCMover can migrate settings and try to move your software.
One strategy is simply to copy your data files from one machine to another and reconfigure everything from scratch.
When it comes to moving software, simply copying program files from one Windows machine to another rarely works because most programs have to be properly installed before they will run.
For software, the most reliable plan is to install your programs from their original CDs or DVDs or by downloading them from the Internet.
One way to get files to the new machine is to connect the two machines by a wired or wireless local area network and use built-in Windows tools to copy files.
Profiles in IT: Radia J. Perlman
Radia Perlman developed the baseline routing algorithms that are used on the Internet and is known as ?Mother of the Internet.?
Perlman was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1952 and spent much of her childhood in New Jersey.
She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a BS degree in 1973 and an MS in 1976, both in mathematics.
In 1976, she accepted a position with Bolt, Berenek, Newman, or BBN, a government contractor that developed software for network equipment.
She joined Digital Equipment Company 1980. Digital had been trying to get computers to share information in a reliable manner and asked for her help.
She very quickly produced a solution that did exactly what the team wanted it to; the Spanning Tree Protocol, or STP, allows a network to deliver data reliably by making it possible to design the network with redundant links.
This setup provides automatic backup paths if an active link fails, and disables the links that are not part of the tree.
This leaves a single, active path between any pair of network nodes.
Perlman’s work has been described as having put the "basic traffic rules into place" for the Internet.
STP ensures that a network remains configured in any event to ensure that data is delivered whenever a user or machine calls for it.
The concept was adopted as an IEEE standard for bridge technology (802.1) and remains in place to this day
Perlman also developed algorithms to make link state protocols such as Intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) efficient and scalable. In a link-state protocol, the only information passed between the nodes is information used to construct the connectivity maps. This contrasts with distance-vector routing protocols, which work by having each node share its routing table with its neighbors.
Perlman earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1988; her doctoral thesis on routing in environments where malicious network failures are present serves as the basis for much of the work that now exists in this area.
She left Digital in 1993 to work for Novell; in 1997 she joined Sun Microsystems.
Over the course of her career she has earned some 80 patents, 40 of them while working for Sun.
She is currently Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.
She has written or co-written two textbooks: "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols"; and "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World."
At Sun, Perlman specializes in network security.
Perlman has been honored with numerous awards for her work, including having been named 2004 Inventor of the Year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association.
She was also listed as one of the 20 most influential people in information technology by Data Communications Magazine, in both its 20th and 25th anniversary editions.
comScore released a holiday spending update that shows nearly $28 Billion were spent during the 2007 holiday season (November 1st to December 27th).
This is a 19% increase over the 2006 holiday season.
Here are some of the more notable dates analyzed during the 2006 to 2007 online spending comparison by comeScore:
Thanksgiving (29% increase)
Black Friday (22% increase)
Cyber Monday (21% increase)
Green Monday- (33% increase)
The 2038 Unix Millenium Bug
The year 2038 problem (also known as "Unix Millennium bug", "Y2K38," "Y2K+38," or "Y2.038K" by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038.
The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represent system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970.
This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C.
On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer.
The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901.
Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.
This means that end dates on 30 year loans will not be calculated incorrectly. The problem may already be affecting some financial software.
Whitehouse Uses Faulty Backup Procedures for Email
E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were "recycled," the White House’s chief information officer said in a court filing this week.
During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s name and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed.
From 2001 to October 2003, the White House’s practice was to use the same backup tape each day to copy new as well as old e-mails.
The court filing said tapes were recycled before October 2003, and at that point, the White House "began preserving and storing all backup tapes."
Two federal statutes require presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation’s historical record, and some historians responded to the court disclosure yesterday by urging that the White House’s actions be thoroughly probed.
The administration has previously acknowledged problems with the White House archiving system, but had not disclosed its practice of recycling backup tapes before 2003.
Payton’s affidavit confirmed that a chart prepared by an official whom she did not name "appears to have concluded" that White House records contain no e-mails from certain days or a "lower-than-expected" number on certain days.
Standard method is the 21 tape system (daily tapes, weekly tapes, monthly tapes)
Printer Life Cycle Cost
Printer companies have a dirty little secret.
Cheap printers cost a lot to operate.
Expensive printers cost must less to operate.
For instance, inkjet cartridges can cost anywhere from $12 to $60 and last only 100 or 200 pages. That is expensive
Approximate cost per page for three types of printers
Inkjet Printer is 7.4 cents per page
Personal Laser Printer is 2.6 cents per page
Business Laser Printer is 1.5 cents per page
Cheaper printers have higher recurring costs.
If the print volume is high enough, the most expensive is the cheapest.
Food Science: Sous Vide
Sous-French for "under vacuum",is a method of cooking that is intended to maintain the integrity of ingredients by heating them for an extended period of time at relatively low temperatures.
Food is cooked for a long time, sometimes well over 24 hours.
Unlike cooking in a slow cooker, sous-vide cooking uses airtight plastic bags placed in hot water well below boiling point (Usually around 60°C = 140°F).
The method was developed by Georges Pralus in the mid-1970s for the Restaurant Troisgros (of Pierre and Michel Troigros) in Roanne, France.
He discovered that when cooking foie gras (fat liver of duck or goose) in this manner it kept its original appearance, did not lose excess amounts of fat and had better texture.
The method is used in several top-end restaurants under Thomas Keller, Paul Bocuse, Joel Robuchon, Charlie Trotter, and other chefs.
Amtrak has used this method of cooking in the dining cars of its long-distance trains.
Sous vide cooking must be performed under carefully controlled conditions to avoid botulism poisoning.
Thermal immersion circulators are used to circulate precisely heated water.
English speaking countries, this technique may be known as Cryovacking