Email and Forum Questions Profiles in IT: Padmasree Warrior Apollo 11 Blasted Off 40 years ago NASA Lost Moon Footage Microsoft moving Office online in duel with Google Stratford IT Career Advice Flaw Opens ATMs to Hackers War of the Open Source CMS
Email from Jim: Dear Tech Talk, I just bought an Apple iPhone. Can I use Skype for long distance calls? Thanks. Jim
Tech Talk Answers: The good news is that you can download Skype for the iPhone or the iPod from the iTunes store. It is free. The bad news is that it can only be used with Wi-Fi and cannot be used over the 3G cell phone network. At least you can make Wi-Fi calls and not use your minutes.
Email from Alice: Dear Dr. Shurtz. I have a laptop and have been warned that I need to keep a backup. What do you recommend? Love the show, Alice
Tech Talk Answers: You have several options: online backup (i.e. Carbonite, $54 per year for unlimited storage), USB hard drive backup (either single disk or RAID), backing up over your LAN to another computer.
Email from Andrew: Dear Tech Talk. I have a wi-fi access point in my house. I can connect to the internet everywhere except from my office in the corner of the basement. What can I do? Andrew
Tech Talk answers: You can try moving your access point to the middle of the house. More than like the further and ducting is attenuating the signal. If that is not possible then you can buy another antennas to increase the signal. Each time you increase the gain of the antenna by 3db, you double the signal. When you increase the gain, you also reduce the antenna beam width, so you may need to aim it.
Profiles in IT: Padmasree Warrior
Padmasree Warrior is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Cisco Systems, and the former CTO of Motorola.
Padmasree Warrior was born and raised in the city of Vijayawada in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, India.
She went to school at the Children’s Montessori School and Maris Stella College in Vijayawada.
Warrior received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
She holds masters in chemical engineering from Cornell University and serves as an advisory board member at both schools.
Padmasree Warrior joined Motorola in 1984, as one of only a few women in its Arizona facility.
She served in a broad range of roles over the course of her twenty-three years at the company, eventually achieving the position of Chief Technology Officer in its Semiconductor Products Sector.
When named Motorola’s CTO in January 2003, Warrior became Motorola’s first female executive and in 2005 she was promoted to executive vice president.
She led a team of 26,000 engineers and directed Motorola Labs, with an annual R&D budget of $3.7 billion.
As an evangelist for what’s possible, she pushes the organization to stretch beyond its current capabilities ? not just in technology, but also in its strategic partnerships and new business models.
Warrior’s energetic, approachable and pragmatic leadership style integrates ideas from diverse sources, which include engineers, sociologists, technologists, marketers, policy experts and others.
Under Warrior’s leadership, Motorola was awarded the 2004 National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States, the first time the company had received this honor.
On December 4, 2007 she left Motorola to become CTO at Cisco Systems.
At Cisco, she is leading the effort in Unified Computing which seeks to all components to virtualize of the data center (storage, server, and network).
In Unified Computing, the compute and storage platform is architecturally "unified" with the network and the virtualization platform.
Fortune Magazine called her one of four rising stars on its Most Powerful Women list, placing her between the 10 "highest paid" and the "Young and Powerful" categories.
In 2005 the Economic Times ranked Warrior as the 11th Most Influential Global Indian.
"That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
With those words, astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon.
Man walked on the moon for the first time on July 21 1969, when Armstrong stepped off the space module ?Eagle’ and uttered his unforgettable line.
Shortly afterwards he was joined by Buzz Aldrin.
Millions of people around the world saw history being made before their eyes, and now you can relive the whole Apollo 11 mission on the internet from start to finish to celebrate the anniversary.
The original, unseen footage and a computer animation in real time of the historic mission is available at wechoosethemoon.org.
Apollo 11 took four days in all from the countdown of the Saturn V rocket at the start to the journey into space to finally landing on the moon.
NASA Lost Moon Footage
NASA could put a man on the moon but the original video of the live TV transmission.
The space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.
A huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused.
The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon.
In the 1970s and ’80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.
Hollywood is coming to the rescue.
The studio who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969.
They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.
The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness.
The original, unseen footage and a computer animation in real time of the historic mission is available at wechoosethemoon.org.
Microsoft moving Office online in duel with Google
Microsoft on Monday said that the 2010 version of its popular Office software will feature online collaboration as the technology giant duels "in the cloud" with Google.
Microsoft made the announcement at the opening of a Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.
A key upgrade to widely-used Office is that online hosting will make it possible for users to access projects from any Internet-linked computers and to collaborate online in real time.
Office Web applications will be lightweight, browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote that provide access to documents from anywhere, according to Microsoft.
There will be online "co-authoring" capabilities in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Microsoft’s current version, Office 2007, allows online collaboration, but not in the real-time manner promised by its successor.
The war between Microsoft and Google has been escalating, with Google last week announcing plans to create an open-source "Chrome OS" computer operating system tailored for netbooks.
Chrome OS will be a direct challenge to Windows operating systems at the heart of Microsoft’s global software empire.
Stratford IT Career Advice
Starting a new career in Information Technology is not as difficult as you might expect.
First understand where the field is going by reading industry magazines or "rags." Most of these publications are free and give you something interesting to talk about during the interview.
Second, get the competencies demanded by the industry, either through self-study or through an educational institution, like Stratford University.
Third, learn the standards and procedures that support your industry in order to demonstrate that you will be in a position to make valid technical decisions.
Fourth, package yourself with a well written resume that emphasizes where you are going rather than where you have been (particularly if you are making a radical career change).
Fifth, network by joining user groups and trade associations (and don’t make the mistake of asking for a job at these meetings!). You will uncover opportunities and make many friends through this process.
Finally, survey employers to find out where they are going. Research each firm you visit and send thank you notes after you the complete informational interview. This process normally leads to a "lucky" discovery. Remember, you can’t find a gold coin in the grass unless you are walking around the lawn.
And, if you are a woman, don’t forget to tap the Women in IT support groups. They are excellent. (Tech Talk note: We haven’t found any IT sites for men only!)
Flaw Opens ATMs to Hackers
A conference presentation would have exposed flaws in some cash machines.
Barnaby Jack, a security researcher at the computer networking giant Juniper, had planned to hack into an automatic teller machine (ATM) live onstage at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.
But his presentation, designed to demonstrate the insecurity of various ATMs, attracted the attention of the financial industry as well as security professionals, and under pressure from ATM manufacturers, Juniper canceled the presentation.
The vulnerability Barnaby was to discuss has far reaching consequences, not only to the affected ATM vendor, but to other ATM vendors and–ultimately–the public.
The presentation would have focused on exploiting vulnerabilities in devices running the Windows CE operating system, including some ATMs, according to a source familiar with the details.
While the presentation was canceled to allow manufacturers more time to fix the vulnerabilities, Juniper had originally notified the company almost eight months ago.
Drupal vs Joomla: Which Content Management System is Best?
Content management systems are used to make managing the website easier.
In general, there were a lot of responses that fit expectations.
Drupal Users Love Drupal, Joomla Users Love Joomla
Drupal users list the highest client satisfaction with Drupal, and Joomla users list the highest satisfaction of their clients with Joomla.
Drupal developers feel that Drupal is easier for developers to learn, and Joomla users feel that Joomla is easier to learn..
Drupal Better for Extensibility and Large Sites
Drupal users rate their CMS higher than Joomla users rated theirs in areas such as documentation (especially core and module documentation) and bugs (core and modules). Drupal users apparently feel that their add-ons integrate better with the core, and their framework makes it easier to extend their CMS’s capabilities.
Drupal users also rated Drupal higher than Joomla users rated Joomla for their support of multimedia, social networking, SSL, forums, event calenders, blogging, document management, SSL, internationalization, user management and permission features (a huge gap of 40%), ease of external integration, the ease of developing large, complex web sites, and the quality of add-ons for enhancing functionality.
Joomla Easier for the Non-Geeks
However, Drupal didn’t win in every aspect. Joomla users rated Joomla higher than Drupal users rated Drupal when it came to the ability for non-technical people to learn the CMS interface (another large gap), maintenance and upgrading, the ability to create a new and functioning site quickly, the ability to teach clients to use their CMS effectively, and their willingness to put time and money into improving poorly performing extensions.