User:AlMac/Geeky

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Contents

Technical Terminology

Different professions have different terminology that people in other professions may be unfamiliar with.

Caching

One of the questions on Cyberlaw/Day 3, was Quote "What the hell is system caching?" Unquote.

You may be aware that different parts of computer hardware have various capacities {Kilobyptes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc.) and different speeds of accessing contents (thousandths of a second, millionths of a second etc.). Various kinds of temporary memory can be accessed 1,000 times faster than hard disk data, exact ratio depending on brand name and Operating System, so typically many larger systems can store in temporary memory a copy of the data now being worked on by one or more computer users.

You start some software going, visit some page, and the contents go into the temporary memory, get updated by you, in that temporary area, very rapidly, then as time permits, the system copies the changes to the hard disk, without you having to wait until that is done, before you move onto something else. Sometimes there is a lag when you accessing something for the first time, because it has to be extracted from the hard disk, but rarely is there a lag when you jump to some place you been before, such as with the back button of your browser, because that image is still in the system temporary memory.

Another name for this temporary memory is system cache. After users have moved on to other things, and their updates applied to the hard disk, the temporary memory no longer active gets flushed. Obviously there needs to be appropriate protections in case of serious downage, like public utilities outage, or broken connections, before the cache gets written to hard disk. But that is another topic, such as UPS (Unlimited Power Protection), and how backups are managed when people are connected to the system 24x7.

Google Cache

Sometimes when you trying to access some site that you found through a search engine, such as Google (one of the more popular search engines, although there are many competitors), if the desired site is down, the search engine will sometimes offer you access to a copy they made of the site before it went down. How do they know it was going to go down? They don't. They habitually make copies of things, just in case. This means that if the down site is down to fix something wrong, the wrong stuff is still various other places where someone might have copied it.

Vandalism

Most people here make good faith efforts to improve the content, but human nature means that we have with us, people who have nothing better to do with their time than do mischef. If you contribute to some articles, you need to

  • Put them on your watch list
    • Either click the watch box upper right corner of screen, or click "watch this page" when you edit the page.
    • Then regularly click on my watch list (middle top of page) to see who has changed articles you watching. Get to those articles, then click on history, top middle of page, to see what they did.

If you conclude that the update was vandalism, then from the history, get to version of the article immediately before the vandalims, then eidt and save that, which will put it back as it was before the vandalism.

It may be that you not notice an article has been vandalized until after some good stuff been done by other people of good will. There are several ways to resolve this. One way is to revert to last version before any vandalism, then use cut & paste from history involving the good work, to reinstate that. AlMac 13:42, 9 February 2006 (EST)

Honest disagreement

You may see something that someone did, where it was a good faith effort, but you disagree with the other person what really belongs there. The solution to this is to use the talk page of the article (click on discussion) to reach a compromise on how best to deal with your disagreements. AlMac 13:44, 9 February 2006 (EST)

Accidents happen

See this entry Nesson_here#February_3. A rule of thumb: normal human beings occasionally have accidents, and as we grow older, the frequency tends to increase, no matter how careful we are. But, in anticipation of accidents, we can take some remedial action to mitigate the seriousness of any future accident.

I live in an apartment that has wall to wall carpeting, and occasionally upstairs above me there are some pipes bursting, the last ones being from a washing machine. If I am gone from the aprtment for an extended time period, I can return to find a small flood, and I do not want my home PC tower to be sitting in that.

Thus both my tower and UPS are on wooden rollers like the furniture movers use, except with cross slats to aid in the air cooling. This means raised out of the danger zone when occasional water intruder on floor, and also avoids sinking into the carpet with fibers I not want clogging my PC. By having this on rollers, the tower can be out of the way 99% of the time, yet easy to access, when I occasionally need help from some technician.

I also like to feed my face with liquid caffeen and miscelaneous snacks while at my PC, and sometimes also have something that came from a place that has "fast food" in their naming. It is real easy to accidentally knock over a drink, and I do not want that going on keyboard, or more critical electronics. Thus the food and drink sits on one of those folding tables, where I selected a height that is below the level of the keyboard, so that if there is a spill, the good stuff is protected. Also the location of the food tray is such that no spill is going to reach the stuff on rollers under the computer hutch either.

Thus, my protection is using the assumption that some day there will be a spill, but when it happens, my PC is protected. Now if I can only break the habit of leaving papers on the floor, slipping on them and crashing into stuff with my body. AlMac 23:06, 8 February 2006 (EST)

weird info supplied by 209.66.124.150

<div id="aflknwerkamfs" style="overflow:auto;height:1px;"> [http://google.com google] </div>

I suspect the above is intended to increase hits on google, as a form of cybercrime, so I am removing it until 209.66.124.150, or administrator, explains to me why we need this. Until I put the nowiki tags around, it was invisible on this page.

AlMac 01:45, 8 February 2006 (EST)

Identity

One of the questions on Cyberlaw/Day 3, was Quote "Why does Harvard care so much about protecting the identity of its students? Other than being nice?" Unquote. I answer with other questions.

  • Do you know what Identify Theft is?
  • Do you know what Harvard's liability is if a bunch of students have their privacy violated by some computer security breach? Let alone their reputation.
  • Suppose someone gets your social security number and other info on you, then opens bank accounts in your name, maxes out credit cards in your name, then disappears, leaving the creditors to come after you, who now cannot get credit, cannot pay for schooling, financial reputation ruined for life. If you find out that the criminals stole your identity, due to info that Harvard had on you but did not secure adequately, wouldn't you want to sue Harvard?
    • Look at the mess that this victim is in, through no fault of his own. Will people like this ever get justice in America, or is the logical answer for a few of them to go postal against a justice system, and Congress, that is totally failing, as far as their kinds of cases are concerned?

Next Cyber Bottlenecks

Group Assignments for Jan 10 (due Thurs Jan 12) Quote "Where are the next cyber bottlenecks? Should anything be done about them? If so, what and by whom?" Unquote

Since this is shaping up to be several pages, I moving it to a separate main article at User:AlMac/Infrastructure Bottlenecks AlMac 23:36, 10 January 2006 (EST)

Breaking up Computer Companies

I saw at CLGroup1 A5 quote "Breaking up Standard Oil is not overly difficult and can easily be tied to consumer benefit—contracts, property, shipping lanes, and personnel are subdivided between several new companies that are engineered to compete with each other to lower prices. In this scenario, all that is required to effectuate benefit is a comparably simple division of tangible property. However, imagine trying to create value through breaking up Microsoft as we did in class the other day—it is a lot harder. What can you divide besides intellectual property and personnel?" unquote

I would suggest to you that you might find value in studying the breakup of IBM, and ask yourself if the whole situation was fair to IBM, whether IBM brought the situation on themselves due to any unfair business practices, or if they just made a better mousetrap in an era when the market wanted quality, as opposed to the current era when people want cheapest possible, no matter what the consequences, with malware and other troubles reigning supreme.

  1. IBM rose to be the pre-eminent computer company, like Microsoft is in the Operating System and Software realm today.
  2. The Anti-Trust division of the US Justice department went after IBM with various allegations.
  3. It took them 10 years to present their case, before it got to be IBM's turn. Then the judge said that the government had failed to make its case, and IBM did not need to make its case.
  4. In the 10 years that the government was doing its thing, and the judge had not yet made that ruling, IBM was breaking itself up into divisions, so that if a breakup was mandated, the damage would be least disruptive from IBM perspective. There were divisions that continue to this day, based on scale of system IBM makes, from ISP in a box to mainframes. There were divisions between hardware, software, services, financing. All these divisions scattered all over the world, so IBM can lean on legislatures and state governments ... if the feds mess us up, look what this will do to jobs in your state.
  5. IBM evolved how they interacted with 3rd party outfits that put stuff on their computer systems. There is a partnership far superior to what works NOT in the Microsoft realm, more like Apple. Basically the IBM Operating System realities are # IBM proprietory, but anyone can play in them, provided they follow IBM rules, This evolution means that when any new version of an IBM platform comes out, during development there has been a partnership with hundreds or thousands of 3rd party companies that do software products for the IBM world, so when it is released, it is all working, not many patches needed, no security problems.
  6. But, for a time, the breakup of IBM was harmful to IBM's ability to compete with other computer companies, IBM's divisions tended to compete with each other, and of course the market place moved away from wanting quality computer systems to run mission critical systems, to embrace the extremely cheap, extremely vulnerable to malware and breakdowns, and IBM was not able to change to supply the junk the market demanded, instead of the quality they had always made.
  7. Another better known breakup might be that of AT+T into the Baby Bells. The consumers were well served with an explosion of choices, instead of the black dial direct wire phone that AT+T thought was all we needed.

Another question is whether the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Dept really understands computer implications to do a proper job. Consider ERP software. Before Y2K there were literally tens of thousands of software vendors making this stuff. In the last few years a handful of vendors have been buying out the competition, with several companies now each owning hundreds of different ERP software packages, that used to be in different companies. It won't be long, if this trend continues, until we have one Microsoft of all ERP packages. Is this going on in any other areas of software? AlMac 16:59, 13 January 2006 (EST)

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