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The December 18 gathering will be our Annual meeting. President Rollins said he would like to have this traditionally "social" meeting also be a swap meet session. We haven't had a swap meet in a while and it might be fun to bring in and swap/sell things before Christmas. So, if you have any old software or hardware you'd like to get rid of, you are invited to bring it to the December meeting and help fill another members stocking.
We'd also like to thank renewing members Benjamin P. Johnson, Harold Ravlin, and William R. Zwicky.
We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. Welcome to the group.
President: Richard Rollins () Vice-President: Emil Cobb (e-cobb@uiuc.edu) Secretary: Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu) Treasurer: Richard Hall (rjhall1@uiuc.edu) Corporate Agent: Kevin Hisel ()ToC
Microsoft plans to reorganize its Windows unit, creating a new division more tightly focused on the development of the core operating system, CNET News.com has learned.
The new Windows Core division will be headed by Brian Valentine, according to a source familiar with the company's plans. Valentine currently serves as senior vice president of the existing Windows unit.
The move to have a unit dedicated more exclusively to development work comes as Microsoft is ramping up efforts around Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, which is expected to be released in late 2005 or 2006. Other software makers, including Oracle, have set up units focused on core technology in the past, leaving the work of creating specific products to separate teams.
Such a move would more narrowly focus Valentine's responsibilities, one analyst said.
"He's a very inspiring leader, and I think he really motivates the technical teams," said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent market research firm.
A Microsoft representative declined comment. The company is expected to announce the reorganization later on Monday.
The reorganization would more clearly separate Microsoft's product units from those developing the core operating system. While much of the company's development efforts focus on new versions of the operating system, those that run the company's software are often working with products that are one or two versions old.
For example, a study released last week found that only 6.6 percent of businesses are running the up-to-date Windows XP issue of the operating system. Half of businesses are on the relatively modern Windows 2000, but more than a quarter are still using Windows 95 or Windows 98, products that are at or nearing end-of-life status from a support perspective.
Longhorn is seen as a critical development project for Microsoft. The company plans to offer both server and desktop operating systems based on the new technology and will also tie the release of a new version of Office and several pieces of server software to the arrival of Longhorn.
Analysts have cautioned that such a strategy could leave the company vulnerable if the core Longhorn technology takes longer than expected to arrive. Microsoft, which earlier said that Longhorn would arrive in 2005, now refuses to say when it will be released, typically stating that the operating system will ship when it is ready.
Longhorn consists of several new components, including a new file storage architecture known as WinFS, a graphics engine dubbed Avalon, and Indigo, a new communications subsystem. It will also feature a new user interface, dubbed Aero.
In addition to his role within the Windows unit, Valentine was an early advocate for the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative, Helm said. That effort, aimed at making the company's code more secure, has taken on heightened importance amid several prominent threats this year, including MSBlast and SoBig.
Microsoft has said repeatedly in recent months that security is its top priority, but the software giant still faces criticism that it has not done enough to shore up its products. The company has responded by changing some of the settings within current versions of Windows and offering promises that future software will be designed to be more secure than current products.
Apple Computer has nearly doubled sales of digital music through its iTunes music store since launching a Windows-compatible version of its iTunes software in October, the company said.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple said Monday that customers have downloaded a total of 25 million songs from iTunes since April, when the online store opened, with 12 million songs purchased during the past two months alone.
Apple has been widely credited with sparking a boom in sales of downloadable music following the music industry's crackdown on illegal Internet file-swapping services such as Kazaa and Napster. Unlike its no-pay-to-play predecessors, the iTunes service charges 99 cents per song.
iTunes' rapid growth has exceeded some analysts' expectations. "This really underscores the pace at which people are accepting legitimate online music distribution," said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media.
iTunes customers download an average of 1.5 million songs from the service per week, said Apple Vice President of Application Marketing Rob Schoeben. Apple expects that customers will download 100 million songs by the first anniversary of iTunes' launch next April.
Apple executives are "blown away" at the rate at which people are purchasing songs at the company's store, Schoeben said. "You normally have a launch spike, and then you see it taper off," Schoeben said. "We're not seeing that. We're adding more and more accounts. We're not seeing people trying it and then going away. What we see in the numbers is that they're getting hooked."
Though Apple makes very little money on song sales, iTunes helps fuel sales of the company's iPod digital music player, Apple executives have said. As of October, the company had sold 1.4 million iPods, and it expects the device to be a popular holiday gift this year. Apple has introduced electronic gift certificates and a section of the iTunes site that showcases holiday music, both of which should further boost holiday-related sales, Apple said.
Apple has a 70 percent share of the legal music download market, and Digital Insight's Leigh predicts iTunes' sales this year will be at least five times that of all the legal competition combined. But competition is expected to grow. In addition to Musicmatch and the recently revived Napster, iTunes rivals may soon include Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Microsoft and digital music services provider Loudeye said on Monday that they're teaming up to help companies create new online music services based on Windows technology.
[Brought to you by the same people and the same technology that is used in their voting machines. Whoopee.]
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Automatic teller machines at two banks running Microsoft's popular Windows software were infected by a computer virus in August, the maker of the machines said on Monday.
The ATM infections, first reported by SecurityFocus.com, are believed to be the first of a computer virus wiggling directly onto cash machines.
Computer security experts predicted more problems to come as Windows migrates to critical systems consumers rely on.
An unknown number of ATMs running Windows XP Embedded were shut down during the spread of the so-called "Nachi" worm, said officials at Diebold Inc., which made the ATMs and refused to name the customers affected.
The Nachi worm, also called "Welchia," was written to clean up after the MSBlast, or Blaster, worm. Instead it crippled or congested networks around the world, including the check-in system at Air Canada. Both worms spread through a hole in Windows XP, 2000, NT and Server 2003.
In January, the SQL Slammer worm led to technical problems that temporarily kept Bank of America Corp.'s customers from their cash, but did not directly cause the ATM outage.
"It's a harbinger of things to come," said Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer of network monitoring firm Counterpane Internet Security.
"Specific purpose machines, like microwave ovens and until now ATM machines, never got viruses," said Schneier, author of "Beyond Fear." "Now that they are using a general purpose operating system, Diebold should expect a lot more of this in the future."
'HORRENDOUS SECURITY MISTAKE'
John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner, agreed.
"It's a horrendous security mistake," he said, of specific-purpose machines like ATMs running Windows, written for general purpose computers and for which Microsoft Corp. releases security fixes on a regular basis. "I'm a lot more worried about my money than I was before this."
Diebold switched from using IBM's OS/2 on its ATMs because banks were requesting Windows, said Steve Grzymkowski, senior product marketing manager at Diebold.
"They have been asking us to ship ATMs with Windows because of the graphics capabilities. They want a common look between the ATMs and Web banking sites," he said. "Another advantage is they are familiar with Windows."
To help prevent future problems Diebold is shipping ATMs with firewall software designed to block out viruses and other attacks, he said.
"As far as it happening again, I wouldn't want to speculate on that," Grzymkowski said.
Schneier and Pescatore said they were worried about the security of other Windows-based Diebold appliances -- voting machines, which run Windows CE.
But a Diebold spokeswoman said the company's voting machines are not used on a network, so "that is currently not an issue."
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[From the Editor of the Status Register:
I, for one, am not reassured by this spokeswoman's assessment.
You might want to take a look at this wondrous bit of information:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm
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"Shortly after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch". Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.
That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
..........
A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them senior Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the system. One of these, Diebold's vice-president of research and development, Talbot Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later obtained by the campaigners - making it clear that he wanted to shield the operating system from Wylie Labs, an independent testing agency involved in the early certification process.
The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to make the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system used for handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could be manipulated from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle [sic] reviewing and certifying the operating systems," the e-mail reads. "Therefore can we keep to a minimum the references to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."
............
What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?"
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If you think the theft of the election in Florida in 2000 (http://www.gregpalast.com/columns.cfm?subject_id=1&subject_name=Theft%20of%20Presidency) was a fluke, get ready. They were just warming up.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/11/1620228&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=126&tid=99
Enjoy.]
CERRITOS, California (AP) --Browsing the Web from this Southern California city may soon become an outdoor sport.
The first phase of a project to establish citywide wireless Internet access is slated to begin next month. Ultimately, anyone with a laptop or wireless device will be able to surf the Web from virtually anywhere in the city's 8.6-square-mile (22-square-kilometer) area.
Scores of wireless networking transmitters are being placed atop public buildings, traffic lights and other structures to blanket the city.
The project is being touted by Aiirnet Wireless, its operator, as the largest wireless networking, or Wi-Fi, deployment in the nation.
The city struck a deal with the company that allows Aiirnet to place transmitters throughout the city for free, city spokeswoman Annie Hylton said.
Cerritos, meanwhile, agreed to buy 60 subscription accounts, each at $34.95 a month, for its field employees.
Brian Grimm, spokesman for the Wi-Fi Alliance, which certifies and promotes the technology, said he couldn't verify Aiirnet's claim, but noted Cerritos is the only city so far that has said it intends to establish citywide wireless access.
Wi-Fi radiates an Internet connection that multiple computers within 300 feet (90 meters) can share at fast speeds. Wi-Fi hot spots have cropped up over the last couple of years in coffee shops, hotels and airports.
Some small towns, including Half Moon Bay, California, and Athens, Georgia, have started experimenting with Wi-Fi as a way to provide relatively cheap, easy access to high-speed Internet.
The 51,000 residents of Cerritos, located 26 miles (41 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, have not had DSL broadband access to the Internet because the city is too far from the telephone company's central office. Cable Internet access has not been an option, either, Hylton said.
Residents in Cerritos have asked city officials to find a way to bring broadband to the city for some time.
"We're pleased that our residents will at last have an option for broadband that will be more affordable than is currently available," Hylton said.
The already crowded market for digital-music services is going to get a bit more crowded next year when industry giant Microsoft enters the ring. Microsoft confirmed this week that it will join Apple Computer, BuyMusic.com, MusicMatch/Dell, Napster, RealNetworks, and other companies next year to offer its own service--tentatively called the Microsoft Music Download Service--for streaming and downloading music from the Internet. "We are excited to confirm that MSN will deliver a download-music service next year, and we look forward to sharing more details at a later time," said Lisa Gurry, an MSN group product manager.
Currently, the market is divided into three types of digital-music services: digital-music download services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store, which loses money on every song sold; digital-music streaming services such as RealNetworks' RHAPSODY service, which makes a healthy per- subscriber profit; and services that offer both features, such as Napster, which subsidizes the downloads with profits from streaming subscribers. Currently, which tactic Microsoft plans to use is unclear.
One fact is clear, however: Microsoft's entry into the digital-music market will further strengthen the Windows Media Audio (WMA) 9 format, which is used by all music services except the iTunes Music Store, which uses the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. Microsoft already operates a music service in the UK called MSN Music Club, which offers digital downloads of songs that users can burn to CD; this service might be the impetus for a wider US-based service.
One advantage Microsoft will have over the competition is that the company can afford to take a loss on the service until it irons out the kinks, thanks to its $50 billion in liquid funds. Companies such as Apple, MusicMatch, and Napster are working with dramatically fewer resources. And although Apple touts the number of downloads it has provided, the company is losing money on each download and hopes to translate its iTunes Music Store overhead into iPod sales, a debatable long-term strategy. At some point, portable media players will become commodity items, and Apple won't be able to charge customers the high prices it does now.
Windows XP Service Pack 2, a major update of the most current version of the desktop operating system, will enter beta testing in the next few weeks, according to E-mail from Microsoft posted on a Windows enthusiast Web site.
Neowin, which frequently posts copies of E-mails from Microsoft's beta team on its site, displayed a copy of a message to beta testers alerting them that Service Pack 2, which Microsoft has said would release sometime during the first half of 2004, will be "available in a few weeks."
The E-mail confirms what Microsoft has been saying publicly: that Service Pack 2 will turn on Windows XP's personal firewall by default, contain an improved Windows Update service (the Microsoft service for retrieving and installing security updates), and offer a roll-up of security fixes for Windows, including Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.
Some analysts have touted Service Pack 2 as more like a major update than the usual operating system Service Pack.
AUSTIN -- In a surprising about-face, Dell is returning some technical- support jobs from India to the United States.
The new U.S. employees will provide phone-based tech support for business customers. Dell employees in India have been answering some of those calls. Calls from individual customers will still be routed to call centers in India.
"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes," said Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division. "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast."
Dell's reversal comes as many U.S. companies are rushing to outsource operations to India and other nations with low labor costs. It suggests the savings some achieved by moving jobs overseas may sometimes be outweighed by the cost of antagonizing loyal customers.
It's unclear how many jobs the move might create in Central Texas, where Round Rock-based Dell operates several call centers for tech support and sales and employs 16,500 people. Dell's other U.S. tech support call centers are in Nashville, Tenn., and Twin Falls, Idaho.
Dell was among the first large U.S. companies to move tech-support jobs to cheaper call centers in India when technology spending plummeted three years ago. The list now includes Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett- Packard and Computer Sciences Corp.
English-speaking Indian workers are highly educated but earn a fraction of American salaries. Some customers have complained they can't understand Indian workers because of their accents and that tech support workers rely too heavily on scripted answers.
Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
A newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser could be a powerful new tool for scammers, allowing them to convincingly mask the real origin of Web pages used to trick targets into revealing sensitive information.
Attackers could use a specially crafted URL to display a different domain name in the address bar than the Web page's actual location. This practice is known as "spoofing."
Spoofing is a favorite tactic of spammers hoping to con users out of passwords and other personal details with e-mails pretending to be from banks, e-commerce sites, software vendors, and other trusted institutions.
Security Loophole
The new security hole was first publicized earlier this in a posting to BugTraq, a mailing list for discussion of security vulnerabilities. The post's author set up an illustration of the bug.
Denmark-based security services firm Secunia issued its own advisory on the loophole this week, rating it a "moderately critical" threat.
The vulnerability afflicts several versions of Internet Explorer, including a fully patched edition of the software's latest release. Several other popular browsers, including Mozilla and Opera, are not affected and correctly display the actual location of sites taking advantage of the URL hack.
Microsoft says it is investigating reports of the vulnerability. When that inquiry is complete, the company will take whatever steps it deems necessary, such as issuing a new patch, a spokesperson says.
Seeking Help
Standard PC-protection practices like antivirus software and firewalls may not help in thwarting exploitation of the new Internet Explorer bug, since it relies on social engineering rather than a technical attack. Secunia's advisory recommends that users avoid following links from untrusted sources. Firewalls with URL-filtering capabilities may also defeat the vulnerability, the firm says.
Microsoft says it has not received any reports of the glitch being actively exploited, and objected to the bug's disclosure on the BugTraq mailing list before it had been notified.
"We continue to encourage the responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. We believe the commonly accepted practice of reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone's best interests," a spokesperson says in a written statement.
New regulations have made it harder for small-cap companies to get noticed, but this is certainly not the case for The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX). Whether you like him or not, CEO Darl McBride is a master of PR. In March, he sued IBM (NYSE: IBM) for $3 billion, hiring "take-no-prisoners" law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner, and raising a cool $50 million to pay for the battle.
Of course, mega-message PR has a downside: It demands a steady flow of mega messages. Last week, McBride declared in an open letter, "There is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress ... The future of the global economy hangs in the balance."
Wow, McBride has elevated this thing to the pantheon of constitutional issues. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Professor of constitutional law, posted his own open letter, saying, "if you want a clue of just how clueless this case is, consider the constitutional arguments made by SCO."
Odds are the Constitution will survive this dispute. The big question is whether as much can be said for SCO Group investors.
Last Friday, the federal judge in the case ruled for IBM on two motions. The SCO Group must provide evidence of IBM's intellectual property violations within 30 days. This won't be easy during the holiday season (attorneys may have to make an upward adjustment on fees). The judge further ruled that IBM does not have to turn over source code to The SCO Group.
There's more. Also on Friday, The SCO Group postponed filing its fourth-quarter earnings report until December 22. The reason: To allow time to hammer out the details of its $50 million private placement.
While the company insists this would not affect its prior guidance for revenues of $22 million to $25 million, it does seem strange that a public company would have problems with what looks to be a relatively routine process. For short sellers, this is a textbook clue that there may be internal disarray or perhaps, even some finagling.
However it shakes out, the lawsuit has managed to make some noise and is creating some uncertainty -- if not headaches -- among some pretty heavy hitters. Count among them Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). Not mention, some drama for investors.
More and more, SCO Group is like the mouse that roared. PR only goes so far. You have to back up with substance. The SCO Group has 30 days.
Tom Taulli is the author of six books on investing, such as Investing in IPOs (Bloomberg Press), as well as a professor of finance at the USC School of Business . You can reach him at tom@taulli.com.
Some things are inevitable. Death, taxes, and disk crashes. One day you will try to open an important file, only to receive a dire error message. Or perhaps you'll discover that an entire folder has vanished. Worse yet, maybe your Mac won't even boot, thanks to some sort of disk corruption.
Fortunately, you have a full backup of all your data, so you just restore the missing data from your backup, and you're back in business. What's that you say? The last time you backed up was during the Reagan administration?
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then surely the most effective disk repair program is actually a reliable backup utility. My favorite is Dantz's Retrospect. But whatever backup program you choose, you must use it regularly, so you have a current backup when your hard disk is called to that great clean room in the sky. (See the TidBITS article series, "Have You Backed Up Today?" for more details on setting up a good backup strategy.)
http://www.dantz.com/
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1041
Yet just as so many of us would prefer to lose weight by taking a magic pill rather than through diet and exercise, we'd rather fix a corrupted disk with a disk utility, rather than restoring from a backup, even when a recent backup is available. It can take many hours to do a full restore from a backup, whereas a good disk utility can often fix minor disk errors in minutes.
Some of the Macintosh world's favorite disk repair programs have recent upgrades, and here I'll compare the Norton Disk Doctor tool in Symantec's Norton Utilities 8.0 ($100), Alsoft's DiskWarrior 3.0 ($80), Micromat's Drive 10 1.1.4 ($70), SubRosaSoft's DiskGuardian 2.2 ($70), and Apple's Disk Utility (free). Although these programs contain a wide variety of disparate features, I concentrate on their disk repair functions in Mac OS X. I chose not to include Prosoft Engineering's Data Rescue X, because it recovers files onto another disk and does not repair the damaged disk itself.
http://www.symantec.com/nu/nu_mac/
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.micromat.com/drive_10/drive_10_introduction.html
http://www.subrosasoft.com/
http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/data_rescue.php
The user interface and ancillary features of a disk repair program are secondary, because in the event of disaster you care about only one thing: will it get my data back? So let's concentrate on the heart of the issue: what are the most common disk errors you may experience, and which disk repair programs can save your bacon when you're unfortunate enough to suffer disk corruption?
In my experience, most people run into three general categories of disk problems: hardware failure, bad sectors, and damaged directories. After a brief examination of how you get started with these programs, given that you can't repair an active startup disk in Mac OS X, I look at the worst type of problem - hardware failures, after which I examine the soft errors and compare the performance of the disk repair programs.
Booty Call
One disadvantage of Mac OS X is that a disk repair program can't safely check the startup disk. Despite this, and the fact that Apple's official line is that checking startup disks is not supported, Norton Disk Doctor and DiskGuardian both allow checking of the startup disk, although they warn against doing so. I consider messing about with startup disks under Mac OS X dangerous, and I advise you not to do it.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Restart in "single user mode" by holding down Command-S while the Mac is starting up. In single user mode, you're dropped into a command line version of Mac OS X, without windows or a mouse pointer. Type "fsck -y" to check (and repair, if necessary) the boot disk, after which you restart the Mac by typing "reboot" (sans quotes for both commands). Disk Utility and fsck rely on the same engine, so running fsck in single user mode is exactly the same as running Disk Utility.
If you're uncomfortable with the command line for even two commands, you have an alternative. If you boot your Mac using the Mac OS X Installer CD, you can run Disk Utility from there. At the first screen in the Installer, choose Open Disk Utility from the Installer menu.
What about the other disk repair programs? All except DiskGuardian (for now, but a new version is expected soon) come on bootable CDs. Insert the CD, turn on your Mac, and hold down the C key to force the computer to boot from the CD. Bootable CDs are essential in the event that your hard disk is so badly damaged that your computer won't even start up.
It's Dead, Jim
Let's look at what can go wrong now. Hardware failure can result from the electronics on the drive's controller board burning out, or the heads or the arm developing mechanical problems. Sometimes a problem with the lubricating grease prevents the disk from spinning or the read arm from moving, causing a problem known as "sticktion."
These problems are caused by dropping the disk, by defective components, by static discharge, or even by sheer age. Usually the disk won't even show up on the Desktop. As far as the disk utilities go, Drive 10 can detect hardware errors with a "Unit Ready" test, which is just what it sounds like. Drive 10 asks the drive "Are you ready?" and the drive replies "No." This test is mostly helpful for confirming hardware errors you probably already suspect.
Hopefully there's no vital data locked in the dead drive. No software program can repair a disk with hardware problems. If you desperately need to retrieve the data, your only option is a data recovery company such as DriveSavers, who I've found to be professional, competent, and expensive. (Also see Jeff Carlson's report in "DriveSavers to the Rescue" in TidBITS-495_.)
http://www.drivesavers.com/
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05530
Extended Warranties
If your drive has just suffered a hardware failure, you're probably checking the warranty and hunting for your receipt. Don't despair, even if your computer or external hard drive is out of warranty from the manufacturer. Many hard drives, even those installed in computers, are also covered by longer warranties provided by the OEM (original equipment manufacturer), the company that actually made the drive. If you're willing and able to open a case and remove the drive mechanism, you can take advantage of this warranty.
Here's the trick. Although you may have bought the computer from Apple, or the drive from VST, those companies don't make drive mechanisms. Instead, your drive was probably made by IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, HP, Western Digital, or another hard drive manufacturer. These companies often offer an independent warranty on their drives, and it's often longer than the warranty on your Mac or external hard drive. Drive mechanism warranties may be two years, and some run as long as five years. Better yet, if you've lost the receipt, the company can sometimes look up a drive's serial number to verify that it's still under warranty.
Both HP and IBM have replaced dead drives for me, without a receipt, simply by checking my serial numbers. Even better, IBM didn't make 14 GB drives anymore, so they replaced my dead one with a 20 GB unit.
SMART Stuff
Some modern hard drives have a feature called SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Originally developed by IBM, SMART-compliant drives constantly perform diagnostics to monitor variables like drive temperature, spin up time, and how well the heads stay on track. By noting when these physical parameters slip out of spec, SMART can predict some types of drive failure before they happen, giving you time to back up your data and buy a new drive.
Unfortunately, most hard drives have no way to tell you about an impending disaster; you need a program to query the drive's SMART statistics. Both DiskWarrior and DiskGuardian can check the drive at regular intervals and alert you if they find trouble.
Using SMART works well if your disk has a factory defect that's slowly getting worse, because it gives you time to move your data to a new disk. But SMART doesn't help you deal with the occasional bad sector or corrupted directory, much less catastrophic hardware failures. Since I don't have a drive with impending hardware failure, I was unable to test the SMART capabilities of DiskWarrior and DiskGuardian.
Unsavory Sectors
Now it's time to move from pure hardware problems to problems that could be either physical (hardware) or logical (software). Disks are broken up into sectors. Each sector usually holds 512 bytes of data. There are two types of problems that lead to bad sectors: hard errors and soft errors.
Hard errors are caused by physical damage to the disk surface. Dropping the disk and manufacturing defects are the most common causes of hard errors. Although there's no way to repair hard errors, they can be "fixed" by "sparing" the bad sector. Disks maintain a small number of spare sectors in reserve; when a hard error occurs, the drive controller maps out the bad sector and uses one of the spare sectors in its place.
How are these bad sectors spared? SCSI hard disks provide a SCSI command - "reassign" - to spare a bad sector. A low-level format also spares any bad sectors. On pre-SCSI disks, a low-level format was the only way to fix bad sectors.
Many modern disks, including many internal ATA, FireWire, and USB drives, automatically spare sectors with hard errors the next time the sector is written. That's helpful, but if data is stored on that sector, programs may be unable to read it successfully, causing problems and making it difficult to spare. Erasing the disk with Apple's Disk Utility spares any bad sectors if you select the "Zero all data" option.
What about soft errors? In addition to the 512 bytes of data stored in each sector, a few additional bytes hold an error correction code (ECC). When the sector is written, the drive's controller computes and records the ECC. When the file system later reads that sector, it checks the ECC to make sure the data hasn't been corrupted. If the ECC doesn't match the data, it's called a soft error. The disk surface is fine, but the data on that sector has become scrambled.
Soft errors can be caused if the disk is jarred while it's writing or if power is lost while writing, either of which can leave a sector half written. Large magnets (such as can be found in electric motors) next to hard disks also tend to have bad effects on the data. As with hard errors, most modern disks repair soft errors automatically the next time the sector is written.
Bad Sector Detector
Norton Disk Doctor, DiskGuardian and Drive 10 (but not DiskWarrior or Disk Utility) claim to detect bad sectors using a test called either a "defective media check" or a "surface scan." Using a proprietary tool that creates soft errors on disks, I tested each program.
Although Norton Disk Doctor claims to be able to find and repair bad sectors, its defective media check didn't detect the bad sectors on my test disk, erroneously giving it gave a clean bill of health.
DiskGuardian detected the bad sectors, although it took several hours to run a full check. Unfortunately, it didn't tell me which files used the bad sectors, so I had no way of finding out which files were damaged and would thus need to be restored from backup. DiskGuardian lacks the capability to repair bad sectors.
Like DiskGuardian, Drive 10 detected the bad sectors, but didn't identify which files were damaged. Confusingly, Drive 10's report describing the damage claimed it could fix the bad sectors, but I couldn't find a command to fix them. Micromat tech support confirmed the report was wrong; Drive 10 can't fix the bad sectors it finds. It's too bad, since Drive 10 could fix the bad sectors merely by writing zeros to them.
Although Disk Utility cannot scan for bad sectors, it can fix bad sectors on modern disks if you erase the disk with the "Zero all data" option selected.
I must rate all these products unacceptable in dealing with bad sectors. Even though two could detect bad sectors, none of them could tell you which files contain bad sectors, making it impossible to learn which files you should restore from your backup. Only Disk Utility successfully fixed the bad sectors, but at the price of erasing the entire disk.
Ripping the Yellow Pages
We've now looked at pure hardware failures, and bad sectors, which can be either hard errors or soft errors, and so far, our disk repair utilities don't help much at all. Now it's time to move on to problems that exist entirely in software, the most common type of which are errors in the directory, which tracks the files and folders on the disk. In the case of directory errors, there is nothing wrong with the drive mechanism or the disk surface; instead, the directory information that's necessary to locate your data on the disk has simply become scrambled. Often your data is intact, if it could just be located.
As an aside, people with important data sometimes use mirrored disks or RAID arrays, which faithfully duplicate each byte on the main disk to a backup disk. If the main disk suffers a hardware failure or develops a bad sector, the backup disk can save the day. However, it's worth noting that this strategy provides absolutely no protection against directory damage. That's because the RAID faithfully records all data to the backup disk, whether or not that data is good, which results in both the main disk and the backup disk containing corrupt data. I may sound like your mother telling you to eat your vegetables, but the best protection really is regular backups.
The most common cause of directory damage is crashing. If the computer crashes while a file is being created or saved, causing only part of the change to be written to disk, the directory will contain inconsistent information. Mac OS X crashes far less often than Mac OS 9, but directory-corrupting crashes can and do still occur. Both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X automatically check and repair the startup disk after a crash, which reduces the incidence of disk damage dramatically.
A new feature in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther that should reduce directory errors even more is the journalled file system. You can enable it in Disk Utility, and it's usually turned on for disks onto which you install Panther. Here's how journalling works. Before the file system changes the directory, it leaves a note on the disk saying, "I'm going to make this change in the directory." Then the file system makes the change, and once it finishes, it clears the note. If the file system ever sees an incomplete change note on the disk during startup, it knows something bad happened and "rolls back" the directory to its previous state. You will lose your last change, but the directory won't suffer any damage.
Other causes of damaged directories include buggy programs that write bad data to disk, buggy programs that overwrite cached data waiting to be written to disk, and even bugs in the file system itself. The first two are much less likely in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9 because of its file privileges and memory protection, respectively. Bugs in the file system are extremely rare but have occurred at times in the past.
It's worth noting that directory damage is not always readily apparent. A damaged disk may appear to operate perfectly, but regular use can cause minor errors to grow into serious problems. Most directory problems are easy to fix if they're caught early but can be difficult, if not impossible, to fix later. That's why checking and repairing startup disks automatically after a crash is so important, and why it's essential to leave the Check Disk option turned on in Mac OS 9's General Controls control panel (the disk check isn't optional in Mac OS X).
To test how the disk repair utilities perform with different types of directory errors, I created an HFS+ disk image, copied an assortment of files and folders to it, and then used a low-level disk editor to damage various directory data structures. I then duplicated the damaged disk image, and let each utility try to repair its own copy. Each utility repaired an identical disk image, with identical damage.
Errors Speak Volumes
For my first test, I started with relatively simple damage in the volume bit map, which is also known as the allocation file. The volume bit map tracks which blocks on the disk contain files, and which are unused. All five utilities fixed my damaged volume bit map easily.
Next up was damage to the volume header, which tracks vital information about the disk, such as the amount of used and free space, and the locations of the catalog and allocation file. The volume header is stored at the beginning of the HFS+ partition. I erased the volume header's signature, which makes the file system assume the volume header is corrupt and refuse to use the disk. Fortunately, the file system keeps a backup copy of the volume header at the end of the disk; it's imaginatively called the alternate volume header. All five of our utilities successfully repaired the disk, although Drive 10 and DiskGuardian couldn't figure out the name of the damaged disk.
Catalog Catastrophe
The catalog b-tree tracks all the files and folders on the disk. It's a vitally important part of the directory, and many of my tests focus on it. The catalog is divided into nodes, and each node is divided into records. Most records track a file or folder on the disk, although some contain threads or indexes, which are used internally by the file system to look up files and folders.
The first node in the catalog is called the header node, which points to other key nodes. I erased the header node. Norton Disk Doctor, DiskWarrior, and Drive 10 recreated the header node properly; Disk Utility and DiskGuardian failed to fix it. Once again, Drive 10 couldn't figure out the name of the damaged disk.
The header node also contains a map which tracks which nodes are used and which are free. I corrupted this map, but my corruption didn't faze any of the utilities, all of which successfully fixed the header node map.
The nodes in the catalog are linked together in a precise pattern of connections. Horizontal links connect nodes on the same level, and downward links connect the levels. The file system relies on these links to look up files and folders. I damaged these links. As happened when I erased the catalog header node, Norton Disk Doctor, DiskWarrior, and Drive 10 fixed these links, but Disk Utility and DiskGuardian weren't able to put the links back together.
File and folder records are stored in alphabetical order in the catalog. I rearranged these records, putting them in random order. All the utilities restored the alphabetical order.
Certain characters, such as a colon, are illegal in file and folder names. Normally, the operating system prevents you from typing an illegal character when saving a file or creating a folder, but it's not inconceivable that unusual circumstances could cause one to appear. I renamed a folder with a colon by inserting the colon directly into the folder record in the catalog. With this test, the results start to become more interesting. Disk Utility and DiskGuardian didn't detect any problem. Drive 10 noticed the illegal character, but didn't fix it. Norton Disk Doctor and DiskWarrior both fixed it properly by replacing the colon with a legal character.
More Catalog Corruption
Each catalog node ends with a map that points back to the records in that node. I damaged the map for one of the nodes, which sounds bad, but it's still possible to find the records by calculating the size of each record to find the next record. Disk Utility and Norton Disk Doctor realized there was a problem, but they couldn't fix it. Drive 10 and DiskGuardian both identified and fixed the problem, but in the process lost five and six files, respectively. Partial repair isn't always better than complete failure, since you may believe the disk was repaired successfully and only later - potentially much later - realize that some files have been lost. DiskWarrior fixed the catalog node map properly.
Next, I changed a thread record to be an unknown type of record, which creates two problems. A thread record that the file system relied upon was missing, and it was confronted by a record with an illegal type. Disk Utility and DiskGuardian detected the corruption, but couldn't fix it. DiskWarrior fixed the problem but lost some of the data in one file. Only Drive 10 and Norton Disk Doctor managed to repair my damage properly.
Note that DiskWarrior moves any files it suspects may have problems into a folder called Rescued Items. In my tests, most of these files turned out to be fine. This approach has the advantage that it's clear which files may be damaged. But if the Rescued Items folder contains many files, checking them and putting them away can be tedious. Norton Disk Doctor can optionally put aliases to damaged files in a folder, a potentially more helpful feature. But in my tests it didn't work. Norton Disk Doctor also lists the names of damaged files in its report.
The most important aspect of a file record is the location of the file's data on the disk. One of the worst sorts of directory damage that you may see happens when two files try to occupy the same physical space at the same time. Different utilities refer to this problem as "overlapping extents" or "cross-linked files." In the best case, one file has entirely overwritten the other, since then one file has valid data, while the other's data is completely gone. In the worst case, the two files somehow manage to interleave their data, which results in both being damaged beyond repair. I cross-linked two files, thus damaging the files' catalog records, as well as the volume header and volume bit map. Disk Utility and DiskGuardian repaired the catalog records, the volume header, and the volume bit map, but they didn't actually separate the two files. In contrast, Drive 10, DiskWarrior and Norton Disk Doctor fixed the damage and separated the files. It's important to realize that the data in the overwritten file couldn't be recovered, but not through any failing of these repair programs. When one file overwrites another, the unlucky file has no chance of surviving the encounter.
I See Fragged People
Some months ago, I wrote an article for TidBITS explaining why defragmenting disks generally isn't worthwhile (see "Optimizing Disks Is a Waste of Time" in TidBITS-686_). Although fragmentation is totally normal and acceptable, serious fragmentation requires additional directory structures, and they too can become corrupted and require repair.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07254
Using another proprietary tool, I fragmented a disk very badly, which breaks files into so many pieces that the file record in the catalog b-tree can't track them all. The file system responds by creating new records in the extents b-tree to help track all the pieces. The extents b-tree is like the catalog b-tree, but exists solely to help track highly fragmented files. Again, severe fragmentation is not inherently a problem, but I had put the disk into a precarious, if legal, state. I then damaged two extent records so the file system couldn't find all the pieces to two files, but I damaged each in a different way. Disk Utility, DiskGuardian, and Drive 10 all detected my damaged extent records, but weren't able to repair the damage. DiskWarrior and Norton Disk Doctor performed better, fixing the problem but losing part of the data in one file. Considering the type of damage I inflicted, they did as well as could be expected.
HFS+ volumes are enclosed in a "wrapper," which is actually a plain old HFS volume. The reason for the wrapper is historical. Apple first released HFS+ with Mac OS 8.1. If you connected an HFS+-formatted disk to a Mac running Mac OS 8.0 or earlier - in other words, one that understood only the older HFS format, the wrapper kept the older system from deciding the HFS+ disk was damaged and offering to initialize it. For my next test, I damaged the catalog b-tree header node in the wrapper. Disk Utility and DiskGuardian didn't notice anything wrong. Drive 10 and DiskWarrior detected the corrupt wrapper, but didn't fix it. Norton Disk Doctor identified the damage and fixed it properly.
Disks can contain multiple partitions, which are listed in a partition map at the beginning of the disk. Since disk images don't have partition maps, I used an external FireWire hard disk for this test, in which I damaged the partition map, making the disk driver's partition overlap the HFS partition. Of all these disk repair utilities, only Norton Disk Doctor claims to check partition maps, and indeed it was the only one to detect the problem, although even it proved incapable of fixing the overlapping partition map. Luckily, damaged partition maps are extremely rare, which may be why none of the other utilities bother to check them.
The Grand Finale
Finally, I decided to recreate the worst damage I've ever seen on a Macintosh hard disk. Starting with the badly fragmented disk above, I corrupted and overwrote various parts of the catalog and extent b-trees. In some nodes I corrupted the node header (not to be confused with the header node), in some I munged the data records, and in others I zapped the record offset map. A few lucky nodes suffered all three types of damage at the hands of my disk editor. Only DiskWarrior was able to bring the disk back to a usable state, although 35 files were either lost or partly damaged. That 35 files were lost or damaged is not an indictment of DiskWarrior; the program couldn't have done any better, considering how much vital information had been destroyed. None of the other utilities managed to repair the disk successfully.
And the Winner Is...
Of my 15 tests, DiskWarrior fixed 12 successfully, Norton Disk Doctor fixed 11, Drive 10 fixed 9, DiskGuardian fixed 5, and Disk Utility fixed 4. "Fixed" includes cases where recovery may not have been perfect, but was good enough.
So what, in my professional opinion, should you do if your disk starts acting up? First, try Apple's free Disk Utility. It may fix only a limited set of problems, but when Disk Utility finds a problem, it's invariably correct, and it applies fixes only when it's absolutely certain it knows the correct fix. I've never seen Disk Utility accidentally make a problem worse, something the other utilities can do, even if only very occasionally.
If Disk Utility doesn't succeed, let DiskWarrior do battle with your damaged directory. It was our overall winner, and it deserves its excellent reputation. DiskWarrior can also show you a preview of the repairs before you accept them, which lets you check that a damaged file or folder really was fixed before DiskWarrior makes the fix permanent.
If DiskWarrior fails, give Norton Disk Doctor a try, since it can address some problems that DiskWarrior misses. After that, try sacrificing chickens. Seriously, if the combination of Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, and Norton Disk Doctor can't repair your disk, you can either restore your data from backup, or, if that's not possible, decide if the data is sufficiently important to pay DriveSavers for recovery.
I still think the most important data protection utility you should own is a backup program. But sometimes a good disk repair program can save the day by repairing minor damage quickly so you don't have to run through the time-consuming process of reinitializing your hard disk and restoring from backup.
[David Shayer was a senior engineer on Norton Utilities for Macintosh 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0. Before that he worked on Public Utilities, a disk repair program that won the MacUser Magazine Editor's Choice Award, and on Sedit, a low-level disk editor.]
PayBITS: If David's detailed and expert testing told you which
disk utility you should rely on, reward his efforts via PayBITS!
http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P12NE4WQ7K8ODD
Read more about PayBITS: http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/
AppleScript is Apple's system-level programming language for driving and automating applications. It was first made available as an option for the ill-fated System 7 Pro in late 1993; shortly thereafter Apple came to its senses and AppleScript has been present in every new system and on every new Mac since then. Meanwhile, the lack of proper documentation for AppleScript has been astounding. Danny Goodman made an early attempt, but it wasn't up to the standard of his brilliant HyperCard book, and Apple's own manual is often surprisingly vague, allusive, and incomplete.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02388
http://www.dannyg.com/pubs/
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptLangGuide/
Which brings us to my latest book, AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, published by O'Reilly & Associates. AppleScript is a fairly small language, but I was amazed by how difficult it was to write this book! It took more than twice as long as I'd expected. My approach, as readers of my Frontier and REALbasic books know, is not to rely on documentation, but to bang away at the language itself, testing and experimenting, trying to deduce the underlying rules. Well, the underlying rules of AppleScript turn out to be really strange. As a result, my book contains a great deal of material I never knew before and have never seen documented elsewhere. And, needless to say, I present it all in my usual ruthlessly Euclidean manner - with the usual measure of hidden humor, of course.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/applescpttdg/
This book teaches AppleScript to beginners and explains it to experts; it's an assessment, a guide, and a reference. If you've been curious all these years, or want to get into AppleScript for whatever reason (perhaps to take advantage of AppleScript Studio to write your own apps), or if you're an AppleScript user but would like to put your understanding on firmer ground, I hope you'll consider asking Santa for AppleScript: The Definitive Guide. It lists for $40, but you can get it for $28 at Amazon and support TidBITS with the affiliate percentage at the same time.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/tidbitselectro00/ref%3Dnosim/
I apparently have solved my slowed Ethernet connection under Panther.
I tried a wide variety of suggestions, trashed the Network preferences which Apple suggests as a cure for the "other Firewall Software " problem (see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107786), and recycled my DSL modem.... nothing worked until today, when I started playing around with which port has Appletalk enabled.
On the iBook I wished to connect to, Appletalk can only be enabled on the Ethernet port. But on the G4 which is connected to the DSL modem, I had the option to have Appletalk enabled on either the Ethernet port or the DSL modem port. I had been turning it on under Ethernet.
I was already aware-from previous fumbling- that a new IP address is created for both machines when the DSL modem is disconnected (which by itself restored previous Ethernet speeds). So while switching back and forth in the network preference panel, I realized that having a new IP address created was an option one could turn off.
So I stumbled on the solution: turn on Appletalk in the DSl network pane (which disabled it under the Ethernet). Then in the Ethernet panel, under the setting for Configure iPv4, I selected Off. The IP address, Subnet Mask, etc, then turn blank. I did a test at this point and discovered I was again getting rapid Ethernet transfers. (I had manually configured Ethernet to a speed of 100baseTX at half duplex on both machines. On the iBook, where Appletalk can only be turned on under Ethernet, I used DHCP to set up the IP addresses under Ethernet.
I then locked the settings and tested the USB printers, which previously were not accessible from the machines they were not connected to. At first I could print only from the iBook to the G4's printer and not from the G4 to the iBook's printer. Upon closer examination I discovered that the iBook's Epson printer showed up in the iBook's Print Utility both as the connected printer and as a shared printer. It was mirroring the shared printers on the G4. I deleted and re-added all printers and things returned to normal.
So now I can both print and get fast Ethernet connections. But to be quite honest, I haven't a clue as to why any of these "techniques" worked, and still have no idea what went wrong when I switched to Panther.
Thanks to all those who offered suggestions. And lets hope 10.3.2 comes along soon.
Responding to a security vulnerability where an attacker could gain unauthorized access to a user's cookies in Safari, Apple has released Security Update 2003-12-05. The update is available via Software Update, as well as separate downloads for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (a 1.3 MB download) and Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (a 2.6 MB download). [JLC]
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120282
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120283
November 20, 2003 - The meeting was in session as I arrived. The first thing I was set-up to take notes on was...
Talk of CD scratch repair. A game station disc was scratched and the person wanted to fix it as opposed to buying a new one. The discussion ranged from car polish to jeweler's rouge to devices. One of the devices cost as much or more than the game disc did. The ever intrepid, Kevin Hisel 'surfed-up' a site (http://www.btinternet.com/~ zturner/) that is focused on repairing discs for free using household items.
Discussion of PDF files. Person asked how to make many pages one document. He wanted to turn a series of images into a PDF file. One suggestion was to create a document in a layout or MS Word-type document and then go to print the document. But instead of printing to a printer you print to a PDF file. And again, Kevin Hisel surfed out an application called CutePDF a freeware app for creating and manipulating PDFs. Some additional conversation about compression programs for PDF files as well.
George Krumins has a complaint regarding a freeware NavHelper. Seemed it redirected many websites through it's own site. It came on a disc as a helper freebie. He seemed to feel that it was anything but helpful to him.
Nero - CD burning software - a freeware version that times out after a short amount of time. Discussion of CD Creator vs. Nero. Kevin Hisel relates his problems with Roxio's Napster 2.0 which wiped out his system restore points in Windows ("So you can't go back in time!"), unhid a hidden partition, installed it's own driver package which wiped out his Roxio EZ CD Creator and wiped out his IDE card driver which reduced all his drives to half speed. AND he had to do some hoop-jumping to get everything back to normal. So he is not terribly happy with Roxio in general. In fact, he has gone out and bought Nero 6 which he plans to install as his CD burning software - SOON!. Bye bye Roxio!
But what worries Kevin are the 'fan-boyz.' The extremely rabid fans of particular companies or products. The type of folks that scream the praise of one item and dump tons of ridicule on another, usually competing, product. The Roxio/Nero debate has 'fan-boyz'. The Apple/PC debate has 'fan-boyz.' (It's beginning to sound like a football or baseball team debate!)
Richard Rollins did mention a photo CD feature that Roxio has that Nero doesn't. Which is followed by talk of Photo-CDs in general. As an aside, it was mentioned that after December 31st of 2003 Kodak will cease production of slide projectors. So if you want one, get one now, because they are going away. The fact that photochemical processing has fallen off dramatically was illustrated by the fact that one of the communities main photo-processor has stopped running it's developing equipment 8 hours a day 5 days a week, to one full day on Mondays only and half days the rest of the week. This leads to talk of the film industry and how digital technology is killing it.
George Krumins talked of lenses and new processes for optics. And talked about the hassles with the Hubble mirror and the backup mirror Kodak made for the the space telescope project. And how optics have been improved significantly since that time, which has brought down prices in general.
Talk of a new archival quality inks that don't fade. The ink technology has changed and the printers are spraying finer dots. Artist are trying it out - it is supposed to last 80 years. "You'll be dead long before anyone can complain about inks fading!" It's the Epson 2200 and, according to the speaker, it is taking over the market place. The combination of archival papers and inks are bringing new longevity to the market.
Richard wanted to know if anyone had tried to get a drive to read a 5.25' DOS 2 floppy disc. Someone wanted to know why you would want to? To recover old software and/or files. Some are still not convinced.
Richard asked if anyone had been able to use the new 64 bit Athelon chip. And someone mentioned he had a chance to operate a Dual Processor G5 which has a 64-bit processor. He went on to sing the glories of the new Apple. He has just got the hots for a new machine. Discussion of software for 64-bit chips, mainly oriented towards the AMD chip. But no one had used the AMD chip, but some had read stuff on the web related to comparisons between machines and some software.
Emil demonstrated a WiebeTech Drive Dock. It attaches to IDE drives and makes them appear on the desktop as a firewire drive. It is a cross-platform device. It requires a power source for the hard drive which is supplied with the drivedock. The mounted drive can be made bootable as well.
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/firewiredrivedock.html
Emil had a client that had a Titanium PowerBook that had liquid dumped on it. The machine was toasted but there was info on the drive that was needed. So, Emil turned to the Drive Dock to mount the drive on his iBook. He connected everything and had the PowerBook hard drive up and on the desktop in seconds. He had another drive that was being stubborn and refused to cooperate. Emil said he had it up and running earlier in the day and figured, with some stubborn persistence, he would get it running again. The computer had been written off for insurance purposes, but his client was able to use the PowerBook hard drive as a secondary drive after Emil finished working on it.
The set-up looks rather scattered when you have it set up. Everything is exposed, sort of like what an external hard drive would look like without a box to hold all of the components. Everything comes with the Dock, except the laptop to desktop adapter.
While this set-up might not be for everybody, it does offer a means of repair or recovery of hard drives and the info on them. The operation did not seem to be beyond the comprehension of the average user. (I think the cost was about $100? - ELH)
Emil also talked about a slim line external hd case that the Titanium drive now inhabits. But I can't remember or make out the name off the tape.
Emil related his adventures in wireless networking and how to convince your wife to allow you to buy the wireless as opposed to bashing up the house installing Ethernet cables through-out the house. Wireless beats carpentry every time!! And promotes marital bliss!
Discussion of wireless networks and security. Some cities are setting up area networks and some restaurants are setting up wireless nets in their establishments. Talked of 'war driving' - searching for wireless networks via laptops and cruising in cars.
Discussion regarding phones and connecting to the Internet with a Mac. Fellow had a Verison set up that allowed him to use the Internet to send pictures to an editor at the News-Gazette. His phone developed trouble and when he tried to get a new Verison set up, they said, 'If you had a PC, we could help you. We don't do Apples anymore.' Could he get a work around? A replacement for the old phone?
Discussion about installing upgrades of Mac OS, What can you skip, what you cannot. What systems you have to install before upgrading to the newest version.
Many members had drifted off towards home by now and the meeting became more and more nebulous. So I turned to gelatinous citizen and joined the migration.
The November meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, November 25, 2003, at 7PM, at Kevin Hisel's house. (For anyone wishing to attend - which is encouraged, by the way - the address and phone number are both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Richard Rollins, Emil Cobb, Kevin Hopkins, Kevin Hisel, Rich Hall, and Kris Klindworth.
Rich Hall: Rich reported that we had three membership renewals at the last meeting. Kevin Hisel said we need to stress the need to renew at the December meeting. Rich finish his Treasurer's report by stating we had crossed a significant financial marker this year - things are looking good.
Kris Klindworth: Kris announced to the Board that he would be resigning as Linux SIG Chairman effective at the end of this year. He informed us that John Ross was not interested in taking over the position. Last meeting, Kris said the scheduled presenter didn't show up and attendance was down. A discussion followed on how to revitalize the Linux SIG, which is viewed by the entire Board as a very valuable addition to CUCUG.
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin had no new business to report.
Kevin Hisel: Kevin noted that we had forgotten to take nominations for club officers at the last meeting. He polled the current officers to see if they would be willing to serve again next year if confirmed by the membership. Everyone agreed, so the slate of officers for the December election will be "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Write-ins are quite legitimate, as well.
Rich Hall and Kevin Hisel discussed Corporation Agent issues. Kevin said he has added "Windows Headlines" to our WinSIG web page via a link to WinNet Mag. Check it out.
Emil Cobb: Emil reported that 21 members were in attendance at the November meeting.
Richard Rollins: President Rollins reported that the third Thursday this December is on the 18th. This will be our Annual meeting. He would like to structure this traditionally "social" meeting as a swap meet session. We haven't had a swap meet in a while and it might be fun to bring in and swap/sell things before Christmas. So, if you have any old software or hardware you'd like to get rid of, you are invited to bring it to the December meeting and help fill another members stocking. Richard asked Kevin Hisel to send out an email announcement to that effect before the meeting.
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The FBC-CS is located at 1602 N. Prospect Avenue in Savoy, on the NE corner of Burwash and Prospect. To get to the the First Baptist Church from Champaign or Urbana, take Prospect Avenue south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the corner of Kirby/Florida and Prospect in Champaign (Marathon station on the SW corner), you only go 1.6 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. The Savoy village sign (on the right) will be at the 1.4 mile mark. Burwash is at the 1.6 mile mark. The Windsor of Savoy retirement community is just to the south; Burwash Park is to the east. Turn east (left) on Burwash. The FBC-CS parking lot entrance is on the north (left) side of Burwash. Enter by the double doors at the eastern end of the building's south side. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html. The First Baptist Church of Champaign is also on the web at http://www.fbc-cs.org .
Membership dues for individuals are $20 annually; prorated to $10 at mid year.
Our monthly newsletter, the Status Register, is delivered by email. All recent editions are available on our WWW site. To initiate a user group exchange, just send us your newsletter or contact our editor via email. As a matter of CUCUG policy, an exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers (all at area code 217):
President/WinSIG: Richard Rollins 469-2616 Vice-Pres/MacSIG: Emil Cobb 398-0149 e-cobb@uiuc.edu Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 kh2@uiuc.edu Treasurer: Richard Hall 344-8687 rjhall1@uiuc.edu Corp.Agent/Web: Kevin Hisel 406-948-1999 Linux SIG: Kris Klindworth 239-0097 kris.klindworth@Carle.com
Visit our web site at http://www.cucug.org/, or join in our online forums at http://www.cucug.org/starship/index.php .