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Show of 10-26-2013

Tech Talk

October 26, 2013

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Tom Laird from LinkedIn: Hi Dr. Shurtz, I’m a long-time listener and lover of your Tech Talk “classroom on the internet radio show:)” Discovered it on Fed News Radio Online several years back (maybe 2007?) and have really appreciated it ever since. It’s cool. But please *please* explain to Jim & David why LI is the best platform for B2B — and FB and Pinterest for B2C, OK? (Don’t they get that?!?:) Also, what *is* the name of David’s walk-in “theme song” again? (Do tell.) Keep it up with your great (and always informative) Tech Talk shows. I kept pretty busy these days with my visual content/infographics and mobile marketing business, so I don’t often listen to you live these days — but the recordings I catch up on are always excellent. Keep delivering that worthwhile content. And thanks for joining my LI network! Sincerely, Tom Laird
  • Tech Talk Responds: Thanks for great feedback. I love to use LinkedIn for business and have many contacts. It is strictly business and a great tool for hiring or looking for a job. Written endorsements are very useful to highlight your accomplishments.
  • Email form Lauren in Bethesda: Dear Dr. Shurtz,   I have Verizon FiOS internet ONLY (no TV or phone through them). My Internet connection was not working and they replaced my Router. The Verizon instructions ask my to put in the Verizon CD to configure my system.  I have an iMac and no CD Drive. Is there a way I can get the router working without using the Verizon software/CD? Sure hope so.  Do you believe this new router will solve this issue?  Help is most appreciated DOC. Best, Lauren
  • Tech Talk Responds: If the problem was hardware related and not your fiber connection, this should fix it. You don’t need to use the CD to configure you computer. In fact, your computer as configured should work with the new router right out of the box. The only thing new will be the Wi-Fi password and the admin password. They should be on the label in the back of your router. Your computer will be configured to get its IP address and gateway from the router automatically. Any wireless devices will be required to use the new Wi-Fi password. If you laptop is wireless you will have to enter the new password when asked.
  • Email from Margaret: Doc Shurtz,   Thanks for continuing to provide your audience with content worth hearing and coming back to weekly! I don’t get what I am doing to find that my homepage has been Change to Yahoo search when I had it set to Google advanced search. What is it that I’ve done, or, what can I do to fix my iMac that was bought Jan. 2013 — so it is ‘hardwired’ to stay w/ my chosen home page! Also, why do I periodically get a colored spinning wheel –What is that…– on the iMac and have to restart the computer? Thanks.  Margaret, who has not mastered the iMac b/c I use a PC for work.
  • Tech Talk Responds: You browser homepage has been high jacked. It could have happened when you downloaded some new software or installed a toolbar. If you have a Yahoo! add-on, it may reset these to Yahoo! every time you restart your browser, so the first step is to check for that and remove or disable it.  I would also scan for spyware.
  • Email from Jim in Maryland: Dear Tech Talk. You made a mistake last week. You can delete you own comment in someone else’s page. Love the show, Jim in Maryland.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Thanks Jim. You are correct. There is a small symbol (v) in the upper right hand corner of the post. If you highlight that symbol, a drop down menu will appear. You can either edit or delete the post which you made on someone else’s Facebook page. This works for both the mobile version and the desktop version of Facebook.
  • Email from Ron in McLean: Dear Dr. Shurtz,  As a long-time weekly listener from all the way back in your WJFK  days and as an admirer of both your technical / scientific knowledge  and entrepreneurial success, I have never gone wrong applying your  suggested solutions to what I had often regarded as unsolvable  problems.  Now I have another one.
  •  I run many of my own and my company’s legacy programs in XP mode on a desktop PC using the Windows 7 Professional operating system.  Will my entire computer be at risk after the termination of security support for XP?  Apart from the anticipated headache of switching out of my old reliable software that runs best (or exclusively) on XP, is there any way after April 8 to protect my Windows 7 computer from destructive malware delivered through its XP mode?  Or is that mode just a virtualized feature of Windows 7 that won’t be affected? In my fondest dreams, some enterprising geek comes along next April to develop and offer subscriptions to a continuing XP security update service, totally independent of Microsoft Corporation and its ongoing strategy of forced obsolescence. As always, thanks in advance for your definitive advice.  Ron Krieger, McLean, VA
  • Tech Talk Responds: 37% of the installed base of OS is Windows XP. So it will continue to be a great target. As new security updates are released for later Windows version, hackers will reverse engineer these and apply the same vulnerabilities to XP. Expect a surge in XP attacks after retirement.
  • That being said, you should have no problems running XP after its retirement. There are many embedded XP systems that will continue to operate. Since you will only be running your XP with your dedicated applications, you can avoid the Internet and the use of any thumb drives (another way to spread viruses). Only surf the web when you are running the Windows 7 native mode. I would also suggest that you do a disk image in the event your computer is corrupted. You can then simply restore to a previous state.  It is possible to just backup the XP Virtual machine if you wish. Go to the MS Support to get the specific files required. There are several included an XML pointer file with the specific file locations.
  • Perhaps if may be easier to use XP-More. XP-More is a tool that helps manage Windows 7 Virtual Machines (XP Mode and any other). Specifically, it makes duplication of VMs easy. No more raw XML editing and manually duplicating files.
  • You can download it from http://xpmore.codeplex.com/
  • Email from Rachel in Lorton: Dear Tech Talk. I have an HP computer that came with 8 GB of RAM, but it will take 16 if I sacrifice the two 4 GB cards. Do you think this would be worthwhile? I’ve already optimized the machine by fitting a Solid State Drive and this has made a big difference in performance.  Thanks, Rachel in Lorton
  • Whether or not more RAM would be better depends on exactly how you use your computer and what it is that you do. Clearly, the Solid State Drive was a good idea. Whether or not additional RAM will have an impact on your overall computer’s speed is really difficult to say. It’s a function of what programs you run, how much RAM they require, and even how many programs you run at the same time.
  • I we run a desktop with 8 GB, that plenty. However, we want to run more than one virtual machine, then more RAM is useful. More than 8 GB won’t help most people today. Run Process Explorer. Hit Ctrl+I in Process Explorer and you’ll get a summary. Watch the memory usage. If it never approaches 8 GB, then you’re fine for now. 

Profiles in IT: Daniel Ek

  • Daniel Ek is co-founder and CEO of Spotify, a music streaming service.
  • Daniel Ek was born February 21, 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden.
  • Music and technology were introduced to Daniel Ek at age 5, when he received a guitar and a Commodore 20 computer. He was a natural at both instruments.
  • Within two years he was writing basic code as MTV played in the background.
  • At 14 Ek, began making commercial websites in his school’s computer lab.
  • The going rate then for a commercial home page was $50,000, but Ek charged $5,000. He recruited his teenage friends and soon was netting $15,000 a month.
  • He bought some servers and earned another $5,000 a month hosting Web pages.
  • At 16, he got a job with Jajja to work on search engine optimization.
  • After high school Ek enrolled in engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology.
  • After eight weeks, realizing that the first year would be theory, he dropped out.
  • A Stockholm-based ad network called Tradedoubler asked him to track their sites.
  • The company paid him $1M for the rights to it in 2006 and another $1M for patents.
  • A self-made millionaire at 23, Ek was without purpose, depressed, and alone.
  • He became a free spending bachelor with a red Ferrari and Stockholm bachelor pad.
  • But it was still hard to attract girls, and the big spending attracted the wrong ones.
  • Miserable, he sold the Ferrari and moved into a cabin near his parents.
  • He played guitar and meditated. He considered being a professional musician.
  • There in the woods Ek finally decided to combine marry music and tech.
  • Ek started hanging out with Tradedoubler’s chairman, Martin Lorentzon, who had taken Tradedoubler public in 2005, netting $70M. He too was bored and adrift.
  • The pair bonded over marathons of gangster films like the Godfather trilogy.
  • They wanted to start some kind of company together. Ek doubted Lorentzon would.
  • Lorentzon resigned and transferred $1M to match Ek’s in order to start something.
  • So they decided to ignore the dollars and aim for disruption. Their target: music.
  • Sitting in two different rooms at Ek’s apartment, the pair yelled out possible names.
  • Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s suggestions and typed Spotify into Google. No hits!
  • Ek and Lorentzon registered the name and started working on the ad-based plan.
  • They built a prototype based on Apple’s iTunes and the black styling of Ek’s TV.
  • He loaded Spotify with pirated songs and sent demos to record label execs.
  • As Ek negotiated, Spotify burned through cash. On top of salaries and overhead, Ek and Lorentzon were pledging million-dollar advances to labels for access.
  • VCs wouldn’t touch them. To stay afloat they invested another nearly $5M million.
  • In October 2008 Spotify went live in Scandinavia, France, the U.K. and Spain. It took nearly three more years to finalize deals in the U.S.
  • He raised three rounds of funding ($50M, $50M, finally $100M on a $1B valuation)
  • Ek still holds about 15% and Lorentzon owns 20%. Spotify is worth about $2B.
  • With 2.5 million paying customers worldwide (85% pay the $10 a month for portable and the rest pay $5 for ad-free access), plus advertising revenue,
  • As part of the licensing deals, Spotify granted equity stakes to the four largest music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony), putting their total stake at 20%.
  • As of 2012 he is ranked 395th on the British rich list with a worth of $307M.

The US is losing control of the internet

  • All of the major Internet organizations have pledged, at a summit in Uruguay, to free themselves of the influence of the US government.
  • The directors of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society and all five of the regional Internet address registries have vowed to break their associations with the US government.
  • In a statement, the group called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing”.
  • IANA stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. IANA is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources
  • ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Number and Names. ICANN coordinates unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination, we wouldn’t have one global Internet.
  • That’s a distinct change from the current situation, where the US department of commerce has oversight of ICANN.
  • In another part of the statement, the group “expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance”.
  • Meanwhile, it was announced that the next Internet Governance Summit would be held in Brazil, whose president has been extremely critical of the US over web surveillance.

Extreme Data: Beyond Zettabytes And Yottabytes

  • In the hierarchy of big data, there are petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and yottabytes. After that, things get murky.
  • The challenge is only partly one of coming to agreement on the right words to describe what lies beyond a yottabyte, which is a septillion bytes.
  • The time has come for the technology industry to sharpen its language around data sets that are thousands or millions of yottabytes in size.
  • A yottabyte is a mind-boggling 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Few database managers or storage architects are thinking beyond that because their IT environments aren’t that enormous yet.
  • We don’t have many prefixes left after yottabyte.
  • The tech industry has been circling around the terms brontobyte (a thousand yottabytes) and geopbyte (a thousand brontobytes) as the next levels in the big data hierarchy, but those are de facto terms.
  • And neither brontobyte nor geopbyte have their own entries in Wikipedia, which otherwise provides extensive background on metric, binary, and other unit prefixes defined by the International System of Units.
  • That brings us to yet another nuance in this whole discussion. While a megabyte is precisely 1,048,576 bytes, it’s also, as a matter of convenience, defined as one million bytes.
  • Wikipedia has a whole section on unofficial prefixes, including hellabyte—as in a hell of a lot of bytes—as another way of saying a thousand yottabytes.
  • Other terms that have been proposed include ninabytes (a thousand yottabytes), followed by tenabytes.
  • The tech industry has been mulling the question of life beyond yottabytes for a few years now, but the market is catching up to our ruminations as petabytes enter the mainstream and as we see more examples of exabyte and zettabyte computing environments.
  • Here is the complete rundown of prefixes: , kB kilobyte, MB megabyte, GB gigabyte, TB terabyte, PB petabyte, EB Exabyte, ZB zettabyte, YB yottabyte.

How Big is an Exabyte?

  • Gigabyte (1 000 000 000 bytes)
    • 1 Gigabyte: A pickup truck filled with paper OR A symphony in high-fidelity sound OR A movie at TV quality
    • 2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR A stack of 9-track tapes
    • 5 Gigabytes: An 8mm Exabyte tape
    • 10 Gigabytes:
    • 20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven
    • 50 Gigabytes: A floor of books OR Hundreds of 9-track tapes
    • 100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals
  • Terabyte (1 000 000 000 000 bytes)
    • 1 Terabyte: All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50000 trees made into paper and printed
    • 2 Terabytes: An academic research library
    • 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress
    • 50 Terabytes: The contents of a large Mass Storage System
  • Petabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
    • 1 Petabyte: 5 years of EOS (Earth Observation System) data (at 46 mbps)
    • 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries
    • 20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995
    • 200 Petabytes: All printed material OR Production of digital magnetic tape in 1995
  • Exabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
    • 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
  • Zettabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
  • Yottabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)