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Computers
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Computer shopping
So maybe it's time to buy that new computer. What do you look for? Laptop? Desktop? Netbook? What brands are most reliable? What makes one more reliable than another?
Like any other purchase, we start out with what our needs are. If we're buying a car to bounce down gravel roads, it's unlikely we'd look at sports cars. If our interest was making a style statement, we'd probably not be looking at station wagons, right?
The laptop's greatest advantage over the desktop is obvious. It's portable. It's mobile within a home as long as you're not out of range of your wireless router. Plus you can take it with you on vacation or to the local coffee shop and connect. On the other hand, because they are made to conserve battery power, they're slower than most desktops, they're less expandable and are often built with non-standard components, so repairs are likely to cost more. For those with a nomadic lifestyle though, a laptop is likely the best choice.
The desktop or tower system is your station wagon, your SUV, your pickup truck. It's your basic workhorse. It expands easily and gracefully. It is generally made with highly standardized parts, and is usually faster and more powerful than the laptop or netbook. That said, they can be on the clunky side. As the family's sole computer or as a server for the home network, the desktop is a logical choice.
The netbook is a fairly recent alternative which has taken some criticism as a pokey, underpowered jitney compared to both laptop and desktop. However, because of their small size and weight, they're ultra-portable devices, sized between a smart phone and a laptop. Also, netbooks have taken considerable market share from laptops due to their lower cost and their ability to do many things their bigger cousins can, though not as fast. For people needing a cheap, lightweight and small traveling computer, it's hard to beat a netbook.
So, who makes the best PC? A tough question, and one that can be very subjective. When looking at major suppliers, we might try to sift through the marketing hoo-rah by looking at large scale consumer surveys. It happens that PCWorld magazine published the results of a 45,000 user survey on mechanical soundness, reliability, and service regarding laptops and desktops (also HDTVs, digital cameras and printers) in their March, 2010 edition.
The winners?
Laptops: Apple (5 of 9 Better than Average) and Toshiba (4 of 9 Better than Avg.)
Desktops: Apple (9 of 9 Better than Average) and Acer (1 of 9 Better than Avg.)
The losers?
Laptops: HP (6 of 9 Worse than Average) and Dell (4 of 9 Worse than Avg., 1 Better than Avg.)
Desktops: HP (4 of 9 Worse than Average) and Gateway (3 of 9 Worse than Avg.)
Of course, this survey couldn't take the measure of customer satisfaction for the tons of machines built by small to mid-sized outlets. In a national survey, the responses of “Dan's Dandy Computers” customers would be too insignificant to measure. Yet, many of his customers might prefer Dan's Computers to the major brands.
Why?
As companies grow, they're pressured to added to their valuation by “making their numbers” each quarter by their stockholders. To do this, there's pressure to lower cost by buying cheaper components. Some areas a cheaper component is less likely to be noticed are: motherboard, power supply, fans, and memory. Yet, all of these are critical to the quality of the final product. The motherboard contains the circuitry that connects the whole machine together. Intel, Asus, and Gigabyte have built solid reputations on the quality of their motherboards. With power supplies, the retail cost of a 500 watt unit can vary from $18 for a no-name generic to $75 for one built by highly regarded Antec or Thermaltake. The fans that keep your computer cool, so as not to fail early, have a wide cost difference between no-name and top quality brands. Memories are subject to a “binning” process. Memories that test well beyond specification go into bin 1. Those that thoroughly meet spec go into bin 2 or 3. Those that barely meet spec go into another lower bin.
As you plan and shop for your new machine, these are some things to think about and some questions to ask. As always, it pays to plan and have the right questions ready to ask. It's an “ex caveat emptor” world out there. |
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by Kent McNaughton
George Jetson invited us into Junior's “Batcave” and here we are.
Junior's sitting in front of three large computer monitors. There's just one scene stretched across all three monitors! Looks like he's flying a plane. The sound in the room is loud, fully surrounding me as I walk toward his chair. Suddenly it's louder from the back! Omigod! Everything’s rolling to the left! The ground is up and the sky is down! I'm getting vertigo just standing here! Junior lets go with a rocket! Missed! Uh-oh, alarms are going off! Junior pushes his control stick forward and goes into a steep dive! The screens fill with twirling landscape. A loud buzzing sound fills the room.
“Mayday! Mayday!” Junior yells into his mike.
“Cheerio, Boydog! Tough luck that! You didn't see the bad-guy at eight o'clock?”
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Virtualize your desktop!
by Kent McNaughton
Some computer industry buzzwords—like virtualization—cast an aura of science fiction. “Beam me up Scotty,” and William Shatner's body becomes virtualized—kinda—as he leaves another world to be un-virtualized (thankfully) as he re-enters the Enterprise Command Deck.
Both Intel and AMD have added virtual machine (VM) capability to their hardware. So, what is a virtual machine? Maybe more to the point: why the heck should we care?
What it is: a VM is an isolated duplicate of a real machine. It is isolated from the hardware and from other applications and VMs running on the same machine. The duplication takes place in software.
Why should we care? While there could be several reasons for implementing a virtual machine on a home machine, one strikes a particularly strong chord with me: security. No machine is completely secure, but using a VM can give the underlying hardware and base operating system (OS) some strong protection. Let's see how.
One common type of VM is created on top of a running operating system, whether it's Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Both 32-bit and 64-bit hosts, as well as clients are supported, although a 32-bit host won't support a 64-bit client. I should also mention that while Mac OS X can be used as a host for Windows or Linux clients, due to Mac OS's registration with the hardware, Mac OS clients aren't supported on Linux or Windows hosts.
Think of the system we are about to build as a layered pizza. First, we have the pizza dough: the crust. This is the hardware. On top of the crust, we put the pizza sauce. This represents the operating system. These two items in particular we want to keep pristine. The cheese, which comes next, can represent the virtualization layer. The virtualization layer is responsible for protecting the hardware and the host operating system underneath. On top of the cheese come the tasty bits, representing the different client operating systems that can be run concurrently on the system. Now add crushed red pepper, salt, Parmesan, oregano, whatever. These are the applications.
And I'm getting hungry!
To our hardware/base operating system host, we'll add one of several virtualization software packages available to us. One I like, which is suitable for home use by virtue of its user-friendliness and cross-platform capability is VirtualBox. When this is loaded, it will ask us to define the boundaries for any client operating system we then wish to load. We can tell it we want to load Windows XP (we must have the CD/DVD handy, along with the CD Key), or Vista or Win 7 or some flavor of Linux. If the host operating system is Mac OS X, we can load a version of Mac OS as a guest.
Then we'll want to give it some number of gigabytes of memory to use, some amount of disk space, and one or more cores of the available processors (saving at least one of the processors for the underlying system and other VMs we might want to load).
The virtual machine software layer acts as an intelligent gatekeeper between underlying hardware and host operating system and the client. The client OS is limited by the boundaries we set for it. It can't violate either its memory or disk boundaries. Nor is it allowed access to the protected instructions of the host operating system or to the hardware. The VM even is on the alert for sneaky tricks that hackers might use to gain access and has tricks of its own for allowing legitimate needs, while still protecting the base system.
After the VM is configured, the guest operating system can be loaded. Put in the (retail) DVD. Type in the Windows CD-KEY—if it's a Windows VM you're after, and you're off! You've now got a full-fledged Windows operating system to play with.
If Junior is off in his own VM playing shoot-em-up with the bad boys across cyberspace and brings home a bad case of the virus, he can't infect the same machine that Sis or Mom or Dad also use. His infected Windows VM can be destroyed like a Klingon, without due process or regret. Though there may be some whining. |
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Myths of Digital Security
By Kent McNaughton
In his 2009 book, “The Myths of Security: What the Computer Security Industry Doesn't Want You to Know,” John Viega—former Chief Security Architect at McAfee—laments that “... the (computer security) industry as a whole is broken.” He explains why—from the advertising conflict-of-interest at Google, to the truck-sized hole in Microsoft's “Patch Tuesday,” to Skype's key logger, to the Antivirus (AV) industry's ineffectiveness. “AV industry inertia has everyone running crapware ... to stop less than half of all potential infections.”
One “Duh!” moment for me, was Viega's assertion, “Malware likes to stay hidden.” Viega points out that it isn't the “script kiddies” we should be concerned with. It's organized crime (including some corporations and some governments). Some facts are clear: information is valuable. Communication vehicles are also.
“Script kiddies” are annoying and disruptive. They mess with your files, post obscene or childish messages. The nasty ones try to bork your disk drive.
The real black hats, though, can affect your financial well-being and cause months of headaches as you attempt to repair the damage. There's enough money in it that criminals organize. They employ PhD mathematicians, cryptographers and computer scientists, staffing laboratories to crack software and figure out how to avoid detection by the newest anti-malware releases. Maybe they want to gather your machine as one of hundreds or thousands that—just now and then—will send out spam or scam or report with your address book of prospective (and unknowing) recruits.
Or maybe they want your banking information for a one-time fat wire transfer to themselves, as happened to a good friend here in Boquete recently.
With appropriate information, new account openings are another nice opportunity for them. The US Federal Trade Commission reports these frauds are worth 170% more to the crook than a fraudulently obtained credit card.
Though it's more likely you'll have your MasterCard number surreptitiously taken at a restaurant than from your computer, the fact is a blackhat operating from a kiosk in Nigeria, or a cafe in Moscow, can have easy access to your unprotected computer.
One fact on our side is that criminals are lazy.
We try to make the criminal's effort not worth his gain.
You do have your computer's firewall turned on, don't you? And it's set to drop uninvited traffic? You have automatic update set for security patches. Your password contains letters, numbers, and special characters and is at least 10 characters long, right? You don't open email attachments from folks you don't know, or click on emails with subject lines like, “(close friend's name) Wants You to See This Video?” No one at your home visits sketchy sites? Or downloads “freebies” like smileys, greeting cards and such?
That's a good start.
It's useful to regard ourselves as a blackhat would: a target. To a large extent, our defensive effort depends on our value as a target. Certainly, consider financial worth and balance of accounts. Consider also that someone might not see a $30 credit card charge that occurs only now and then.
Some systems are so ubiquitous that just their number makes writing specific programs to compromise them attractive to the bad guy. Some facts from a late-2009 Linux Journal survey: 93% of home computers run some form of Windows; 5% run Mac OSX; 1% run Linux. If my goal was to infect a maximum number of machines, which operating system would I target?
Mac and Linux users, don't be too smug. Widely read technical authors, among them Viega, Gordon Lyon and Jon Erickson, agree on this: all computers are hackable. Windows more than Mac OSX or Linux, but all, nevertheless. Lyon and Erickson even show us how.
Many of us wouldn't be here if it weren't for the Internet. Many wouldn't stay without its capability to allow us to “stay in touch,” to buy, sell and trade.
There's something of the “wild west” in western Panama. But even more so is the “wild west” of the 2010 Internet.
Bio: Kent McNaughton spent his career in the computer and semiconductor industries. He has a Masters in Computer Science from the Univ. of Colorado and has taught computer hardware, software, architecture, and networks courses in industry and at the Univ. of Phoenix.
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Las formas de enviar mis fotos por correo electrónico.
 Hola Amigos, les saluda El Experto de la Computadora (The Computer Expert), Willy Edwards.
Las fotos de nuestras familias, de nuestros hijos o de algún viaje realizado el fin de semana, en fin todas las fotos que tomamos, hoy por hoy se almacenan cada vez más en nuestras computadoras.
Con el avance tan vertiginoso de las cámaras digitales que cada vez tienen mayor nitidez en las fotos, y mejor aun con unos precios y opciones cada vez más formidables, hace casi imposible no tener una para guardar los recuerdos de todo. Todos tenemos toneladas de fotos en nuestras computadoras y si las tenemos pues las vamos a querer compartir nuestros momentos felices con familiares y amigos.
Bueno esto suena sencillo, pero existen ciertos detallitos que debemos considerar para poder enviar nuestras fotos por correo y que sean recibidas de buena forma.
Las cámaras fueron de una calidad bastante regular y han ido mejorando al punto que hoy podemos tomar con una cámara digital sencilla, una foto que se puede imprimir del tamaño de una pared de 4 pies por 4 pies, y esto es bastante detalle cuando lo vemos ya impreso, pero para esto la foto tiene que ser bien pero bien pesada, y cuando digo pesada me refiero a bastantes kilobytes. Este es un punto muy importante a la hora de enviar nuestras fotos por correo, ya que si la foto es muy grande no se puede enviar ya que los correos tiene limitaciones de espacio, para enviar y recibir y por lo general queremos enviar varias fotos al mismo tiempo, y si son muy grandes en tamaño o pesadas en bytes, no podremos enviar mas que una por correo.
Explicado de otra manera se ve así.
Una cámara de 2mega píxeles graba fotos en tamaño 600x800 como máximo y su peso no va a pasar los 800kb.
Una cámara de 5 mega píxeles graba fotos en tamaño 1024x768 y sus fotos serán tan pesadas como 1.5mb
Y así sucesivamente en calidad y tamaño, hoy en nuestras memorias SD para las cámaras en una memoria de 1Gb caben aproximadamente 450 fotos y pues nuestras fotos tomadas en resoluciones de 3.2mega píxeles serán tan pesadas como 450kb.
Hoy por hoy los correos no envían información por más de 1Gb, por lo que debemos seleccionar las fotos que vamos a enviar y verificar su peso para saber cuantas podemos enviar por correo.
Bueno hacerlo es bien sencillo solo debemos dar con el botón derecho sobre el archivo y seleccionar la opción del menú que dice “propiedades” y ahí veremos el tamaño del archivo en kilobites.
Para achicarlos hay varios programas de edición de fotos donde podemos bajar el tamaño del archivo de la foto, y su resolución para poder enviarlas.
Este es un mundo bien extenso con respecto a esto, y realmente seria muy complicado y tedioso explicarlo todo aquí, pero si tiene dudas o preguntas o sugerencias, estoy para servirles.
Si usted necesita mas información sobre este tema o está interesado en un computador nuevo pase por Services World y converse con Willy Edwards que cuenta con mas de 15 años de experiencia como Técnico, y obtendrá toda la información que necesita, y al comprar el computador podré darles todo el servicio y apoyo que necesiten. |
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