Tek Tips Whitepaper Library

Energy Star for Software Again!!

Zen Kishimoto — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:47:36 +0000

After I posted a blog on software energy efficiency recently, I realized from some of the comments from readers that most people did not get it. When I talk about software energy efficiency, most people think I am talking about using software to make other things greener. Yes, software can be used to automate and to scale in making other things greener. But I am talking about a particular piece of software being greener.

Here are a few examples to make my point.

Take a sorting program. We can implement such a program with half a dozen algorithms. This is Data Structure/Algorithm 101: the resultant program behaves differently depending on the algorithm used. Some programs take more time than others. Some consume more CPU time and memory than others. Obviously, the version of the sorting program that consumes the least CPU time and memory is the greenest. We can make this discussion more interesting by adding other factors like data structures, the implementation language, and so on.

We can implement such a program using arrays or linked lists. When we use arrays, we can allocate a large area for the arrays or the smallest area to accommodate the input space. We also can select a language for implementation, such as C, C++, scripts, or web languages. There may be more factors involved. I hope this trivial example illustrates my point of making software more energy efficient.

Another example is SMTP server software. SMTP is the de facto standard and is available on Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, and other platforms for sending email. SMTP is big. It is designed to be implemented as a monolithic chunk, executable rather than modularized. Running such a big executable requires a lot of swapping because not all of it is stored in memory. If it is modularized, each module may fit in memory, reducing swapping. So if software is well designed with modularization in mind, its performance will increase with less computing resources. Everyone knows SMTP needs a rewrite, but it is widely used, and it will take a long time to have a thoroughly quality-assured new version of it.

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		Reducing Storage Complexity
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The third example is parallel programming. Scientific application programs tend to be broken into pieces that can be computed in parallel. They save more computing resources that way. In the days of single-core CPUs, this did not make any sense. With the advent of multicore CPUs, we can exploit this computer architecture.

So, again, my point is that each piece of software, without considering its relationship with other things, can be made greener, requiring less computing resources (CPU time and memory) and power. And of course, greener software can also make other things, including other software, greener. I hope I made my point clearer. What do you think?

Hot Tech Companies

Tek-Tips — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Today’s Wall Street Journal lists the top 50 Venture-backed companies as The Next Big Thing. After hearing about and reading about how bad things are here in California, “worse fiscal shape than Greece,” and how “unfriendly” California is to business, it makes you wonder how 60% of the 50 companies listed are based in California. Have the Sand Hill crowd lost their minds, or is technology’s home still “the” center for investment and where the economy depends for our future?

We have voiced our concern here often over the last year on why the Obama administration didn’t jump on top of Silicon Valley, and its diaspora, to kick this economy into high gear and grow our country’s well being with the one thing we will always be respected for: our leadership in innovation and our super furlong lead in technology and productivity. Not to mention we have the jobs of the future, not the past.

Yet our state’s brilliance aside, the Sacramento set seems more inclined to chirp about lifestyle issues, rather than grab the gold ring, while the state coffers are in a shambles. It makes you wonder that if some banks, and pampered industries, are too big to fail, is California simply too big to govern? If jobs are to grow and life is to prosper, we need leadership that recognizes opportunities and learns how to work with the technology leadership instead of backing initiatives that set us back into the dark ages.

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		Nemertes Research White Paper: Application Awareness for Service Providers
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Our goal here is to focus on those companies that have the chops to lead the way and on their leadership. Here are some of our favorites and our number #1 pick because we know these folks and we know they have the bodies in place to deliver.

Our pick for the one to watch is Groundwork Open Source:

"GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition is the most scalable open source system and network management software for companies with heterogeneous operating systems, application and hardware environments who want to reduce ongoing monitoring costs, consolidate views and reports and improve staff productivity."

The reason is not just because they have garnered the blessing of the Gods of Wall Street, but because they have done this before and they know what needs to get done. We are looking forward to an in depth interview with these folks to give us a rundown on the space they’re in, the stakes and the competition. Let us know whom you like and why and maybe we can all learn something about where this will take us.

Shavlik Technologies’ Statement on March 9 Patch Tuesday releases

Jason Miller — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:58:04 +0000

"After a busy February with 13 security bulletins, Microsoft is easing off the patching throttle a bit this month. Microsoft released two new security bulletins addressing 8 vulnerabilities, all not publically known at this time. It is not uncommon for Microsoft to have a large patch month followed by a relatively light patch month.

As the bulletins affect client Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office, your servers should be spared from this month’s patching cycle unless you have SharePoint Server 2007 installed. As expected, Microsoft is not planning to release a bulletin for their recently released security advisory (981169). Microsoft will need time to investigate, implement and test the fix for this known vulnerability.

It is important to note that MS10-016 affects Microsoft Producer 2003. However, Microsoft is not providing a patch for this product. They are suggesting administrators remove the affected component on their machines. Microsoft not providing patches for known software vulnerabilities has become more common over the past 12 months. This is a great example of why administrators should take time each month and research the information associated with each bulletin. Simply blindly pushing out patches does not necessarily make your network secure.

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		The Top 10 Reports for Managing Vulnerabilities
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MS10-017 should be addressed first on your network. Microsoft Excel attachments are as common as Meryl Streep nominations at the Oscars. Opening a malicious Excel document could lead to remote code execution.

Last month, there were issues identified with security bulletin MS10-015. This bulletin caused blue screen on systems that were recently patched. Microsoft researched the issue and found a rootkit was the cause of the blue screen. This is a perfect example of why companies should have a solid patching process that includes testing each bulletin before deploying it to their network.

Microsoft also announced a new security advisory in 981374. This security advisory affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Microsoft has been receiving limited reports of targeted attacks on the browser. Although there is not a patch available for this issue, administrators should keep an eye on this advisory for more information."

Internet Economics: Traffic Trumps Ethics And Content Quality

Tek-Tips — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:08:35 +0000

Six years ago, NetHawk began dipping its toes into the social networking waters with a CEO blog and a site called ITFeedstore. The goal was to aggregate relevant Information Technology content and syndicate it to our existing communities. The process was automated picking up RSS and other feeds and notifying our audience when stuff they liked was updated. The business model was to place ads in the feeds between the different posts and fit the niches we serviced. Investors didn’t get it and the model was replaced with the new blog site here.

In spite of the fact that print was proclaimed dead and blog sites multiplied like out-of-work reporters. The advent of tools like Word Press fueled more growth and soon everyone had their own web site and hopes of becoming the next giant publisher. There have been successes and it surely seems as if there will be many more. But what of the cost to journalism and what of institutions that were noted for producing the sort of quality one was used to in periodicals that had been around for years and claimed to be hurt so much by this incursion of the public into the domain of the publisher that they wanted taxpayer bailouts.

In a letter published by Harper’s Washington editor Ken Silverstein, he proclaimed "content-free" journalism and attempted to render the word content a four-letter epithet. This is nothing new for Internet pioneers who have listened to the whining of those hard-copy stalwarts who have pimped the idea that only a printed copy of the word was trustworthy. After all, how could anyone trust what you read on the [Internets]?

Since then, we’ve heard rumors about how even the NY Times, evidently in an effort to save the bottom line, have been in secret meetings with politicians crafting and framing a way to scare the public into buying into the fact that we must cut down old growth trees - which the NYTimes owns - in order to preserve the integrity of the published word, and that the public should accept spending tax dollars to bale out another set of billionaire scumbags. Even Rupert Murdoch is claiming he will one day, soon,bv try to charge people for his web site content, yet he won’t take my name off his endless stream of SPAM trying to get me to go to his site.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: PRINT PUBLISHERS AND CORRUPT POLITICIANS

Additionally, "real" writers, like Stephen L. Carter, proclaimed the need for help: "Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, publicity at subsistence levels, entire imprints vanished into thin air." In spite of the fact that approval ratings for print media rank right up there with the likes of our stellar lawmakers, out-of-work, putative, journalists had plenty of time on their hands to nag their way into our wallets, and most had few other skills to bring home the bacon.

Words, being words, it is not surprising that the public has not taken this too seriously. What is surprising though is that so many online blog sites, including those claiming to serve the public interest are willing to allow the sort of comments you find everywhere. Just this morning, in an attempt to cover the ongoing saga on Facebooks’ Mark Zuckerberg, with 400 million allegedly interested members, the notable FastCompany, apparently also covering the story, and once a favorite four-color print magazine, that went bankrupt, contained one flacid comment by James F. of Fenzda proclaiming:

"Ideas are only 5% of success. Facebook succeeded because of Mark putting in the hard work and drive behind trying to make it a huge success. He had gathered funding, etc. ConnectU had every opportunity and the same ones Mark had in the beginning, would they not? I’m sure Chevy or Nissan wasn’t the first ones to invent the car?"

Flacid I say because James also added three links to his own articles totally unrelated to the story. So the game here is, write a couple of seemingly relevant comments, then you get to place your link inside their site and get yourself some traffic. Beyond Fenzda’s self serving and gratuitous comments, there were four other identical comments adding up to the sort of rubbish that is far too common. Like the so-called old line press, objectivity is not important, only getting your pimps out there is and Google sees it all as a positive in the fight for rankings.

If the public has ignored the old line print publishers in lieu of the instant gratification of typos and ephemeral objectivity, what then will rise to the top of the heap? Will the title Community Manager replace the likes of the Menchen’s, Stone’s and Dillard’s of the world? Will journalism schools go the way of law schools producing writers that are paid by the words they can cut and paste and appropriate from other sources, and will the public buy into the same way they aren’t fussy about where pop music actually originated?

When Does Idea Theft Rise To Level Of Crime?

Tek-Tips — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:19:42 +0000

In a stack of new articles published yesterday, Silicon Valley Insider claims and documents a trail of deception and greed around how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg appropriated the technology for Facebook. The stack lists emails and IM’s from Zuckerberg to his earliest confidants and paints a picture not unlike other famous entrepreneurs who have gone on to financial fame and fortune but have left many of us scratching our head about how they got away with their misdeeds. By hacking into email accounts from accusers - Harvard Crimson journalists - Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra - and using the data from TheFacebook.com’s logs and adapting it for the greater Internet, Zuckerberg appears to have pulled off one of the great all time heists since Bill Gates bought DOS for a song and a fast dance. The "Thefacebook.com" title being the name of the site used back in 2004 when Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard. Now with 400 million members, the site has been through legal meanderings and the charges seem muddled at best. The first judge - in 2007- called the so-called "agreement" between the parties "dorm chit-chat" until another judge, in 2008, looked into examining Zuckerberg’s hard drive.

According to the string of articles, the Harvard accusers claim Zuckerberg hacked into the site called ConnectU at the time and stole the "idea" though it is not clear what if any of the technology was stolen. Their charges also state that, in addition to hacking their private information, he deliberately changed some code to make their site less effective and also made some users appear invisible and thus make the site less effective for members.

The investigation, apparently still ongoing, dragged out old instant messages and emails and uncovered a fake account, purportedly, created by Zuckerberg. It state that he "appears to have exploited a flaw in ConnectU’s account verification process to create a fake Cameron Winklevoss account with a fake Harvard.edu email address. In this new, fake profile, he listed Cameron’s height as 7′4", his hair color as "Ayran Blond," and his eye color as "Sky Blue." He listed Cameron’s "language" as ‘WASP-y.’"

Zuckerberg had gained some infamy prior to this by scraping Harvard student images off the school site and pasting them onto a site he named, "Facemash" which insipidly asked folks to vote on which ones were the most attractive and listed them accordingly. It was a clone of the equally tasteless "Hot or not" and "he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy"

The SVI articles, by Nicholas Carlson, states, "We’re certainly not questioning the latter fact: Facebook’s success — and Mark’s role in it — have been awe-inspiring" but does not specify if they mean awful, or awesome, regarding the inspiring part. The article goes on to say, "A source close to the company suggests that it was the fallout from early behavior like this — fallout that has included reputational damage to Mark Zuckerberg and expensive and prolonged litigation with ConnectU — that has shaped Facebook’s current privacy policies. We imagine — or at least hope — that these searing early mistakes have also a profound influence on the now 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg."

Since the first time I saw Facebook, and for that matter LinkedIn, I was reminded how I had seen the technology before, but could not recall where. As far back as the mid nineties, techology for the purpose of Intranets has used similar formats and API’s for companies wanting to build solid human resources for their employees. The ones I recall also had forums for them to share and bulletin boards to post their private wares and make friends. I don’t want to fling any names out there, but the infrastructure for thes sites is not anything new, though adapting it for the masses on the Internet was a coup and the timing was impeccable. Lots of fallow software sits around eating up investor capital until someone applies the proper skin to make it appealling. If anyone can enhance my memory of these things, I’d love to hear from you. Who knows, maybe we’ll find some other technology sitting around gathering dust that we can put to better use.

Official claims sex diary on Net is invasion of privacy

Tek-Tips — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:50:12 +0000

Source: Global Times
[03:11 March 05 2010]

By Fu Wen

The former senior tobacco official whose purported sex diary was posted on the Internet has asked local police to arrest whoever was responsible for the leak and charge the hackers with invasion of privacy.

Han Feng, a former official in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, claimed that someone with malicious motives hacked into his computer diary and changed the content to embarrass him.

The purported diary, written in graphic detail, includes boasts that Han was enjoying sex romps with different women while taking bribes and attending banquets.

An angry husband who sought revenge after learning that his wife was one of Han’s sexual conquests reportedly leaked the steamy confessions to the Internet.

Han was immediately suspended as director of sales in the Guangxi Tobacco Monopoly Administration.

The Sichuan-based Chengdu Business Daily Thursday quoted the administration general office director, surnamed Liao, as saying that Han asked the police to track down the person who released the diary to the Internet and charge the hacker with legal liabilities.

Preliminary investigation showed that the diary was leaked through Han’s computer, Beijing Times reported Thursday.

An unnamed staff officer at the Laibin public security bureau told the Global Times Thursday that the bureau has not received a report from Han.

The Nanning public security bureau has not received a report from Han either, according to one of its officers, speaking with the Global Times.

An insider told Chengdu Business Daily that no substantial progress has been made in the investigation.

The insider said the first excerpt from Han’s diary was published on the Internet in early November, 2009, when there was a potential promotion opportunity in the tobacco administration.

Han Feng was promoted as director of sales in 2009. Rumors are rampant on the Internet that Han’s rival for the same job hired hackers to break into Han’s computer and leak his diary out of vengeance.

In additional to raw sexual encounters, Han allegedly confessed to taking bribes of more than 162,000 yuan ($23,700), and attending 56 banquets.

None of the women named in the diary has stepped forward to confirm or deny the reported sexual relationships.

The women are suffering immense pain after their photos, background and even home addresses were revealed by Internet users, Liao said.

Some Internet users posted other pictures of girls and claimed they were the women mentioned in the diary. But Liao said none of the additional pictures are genuine.

The discipline inspection commission of the tobacco administration began an investigation Monday. Han has been suspended from duty since last Monday.

China to accelerate development of Internet: Wen

Tek-Tips — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:47:31 +0000

China to accelerate development of Internet: Wen

Source: Xinhua

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao set forth an ambitious plan Friday for the country to mount the commanding height of science and technological innovation, such as in the field of Internet of Things and new energy-powered vehicles.

"The global financial crisis is hastening a new round of technological and industrial revolution," Wen said in his government work report to the annual parliament session. "We must seize the opportunity, identify the priority and make progress."

China will "accelerate the research and development as well as application of of the Internet of Things," Wen said.

Wen said China will also push for substantial progress in the development of new energy-powered vehicles and integration of telecom, broadcasting and Internet networks.

He said the country should promote the development of industries such as new energy, new materials, energy conservation and environmental protection, biomedicine, information networks and high-end manufacturing.

Buying a Phone System? Compare the Top 94 Business Phone Systems via our Latest Spring 2010 chart

Tek-Tips — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:10:48 +0000

Quickly see differences between brands like Avaya, Mitel, Cisco, ShoreTel, 8×8, Panasonic, etc and compare over 94 phone systems by 52 brands for small to big business. Our latest Spring 2010 edition of the chart also compares PBX and Business VoIP systems side by side so you can make an educated comparison of your options. This analysis is prepared in an easy to use Excel spreadsheet so you can edit and add information to suit your analysis and presentation needs.

Download spreadsheet

Energy Star for Software?

Zen Kishimoto — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:41:25 +0000

Green IT means two different things. One is to make IT itself greener, and the other is to make other things greener. Let’s focus on the former. As everyone knows, IT consists of hardware—such as servers, storage equipment, and network gear—and software. Up until now, energy efficiency has been focused on hardware but not on software.

I tried to cover this issue in the Green Software Unconference last August. See here and here.

In those posts, I listed several factors to consider in making software energy efficient:

Parallel programming—hard to program, nondeterministic (such as race condition)
Design/architecture—modularized structure vs. big monolithic chunk (e.g., SMTP server)
Interpretive vs. compiled—web languages vs. C, C++, and Java
Performance vs. ease of use—heavy on the ease of use, and the heavy lifting left to hardware
Optimization—of compilers and other utilities
Selection of algorithms

Although my session drew some audience, interest in software energy efficiency was limited. Why is this the case? First and foremost, most software engineers want to make their programs function correctly according to the specification. And then the programs will be optimized to run faster. Although optimized software tends to consume fewer computing resources and is likely to be greener, there is no guarantee that it is energy efficient.

What is energy efficiency for software? A more energy efficient server hardware box would produce the same results (like MIPS, million instructions per second) with less wattage. In other words, with the same amount of wattage, it produces more. MIPS is a standard metric for any server hardware box. If we use the same idea, then an energy efficient software piece would produce more results with the same wattage. In other words, an energy efficient software piece requires less wattage to produce the same results. The problem here is how we define the results. Software has no universal metric like MIPS for hardware.

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		Energy Impact of Increased Server Inlet Temperature
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Two pieces of software could be compared for their energy efficiency if:

They are run on the same hardware platform (same CPU, memory, and so forth).
They produce exactly the same results.

There may be other conditions, but I cannot think of any at this point. This subject has been on my mind. Recently, I attended FountainBlue’s Clean Energy Entrepreneurs Forum on the topic "Leveraging Software for Clean Green Solutions” March 1 (5:30–7:30 p.m. at Applied Materials in Santa Clara.)

The focus of this meeting was on how to make other things greener with software. Software energy efficiency was too early to discuss because it is far more important to make other things greener at this stage. I will keep this topic in mind and try to make a point from time to time.

China: Everyone’s Favorite Whipping Boy?

Tek-Tips — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:20:44 +0000

Okay, we wrote yesterday about Congressman and Senate Republican candidate Tom Campbell’s strong response to how he would respond to the attacks on Google, even though we tried to qualify the facts as we know them. Tom is a great guy and a great supporter of the Internet, privacy and Silicon Valley. And he has been for many years. It’s not surprising Tom took a strong stance given the attacks he is under from Carly Fiorino, former HP CEO and now running second to Tom.

Our Favorite Whipping Cream Boy

Yet, I just read the post by Fast Company’s Kit Eaton whom we read regularly and quote here often. I’m a little flummoxed on this one by Kit as he says, "That Chinese cyberattack late in 2009, targeting Google and other big names, was enabled by U.S. warrantless search legislation," and, "The crack through which Chinese cyberattacks broke into Google last year, causing no end of ongoing trouble, was actually put into the security system on purpose to comply with legislation."

So now where are we? We do not know for sure if "China" was responsible and when someone says, "China," it is usually inferred that they mean the government, though I haven’t heard back from Kit yet. In fact, we don’t really know for sure if it was even somebody in China, which very well may be but may also be somebody trying to make it look like it came from there or it could be someone in China from East Godknowswhereistan.

Kit details the fact that it was our government, the U.S. of A., that was "hell-bent at trampling over citizen’s rights in order to protect those self-same rights, required Google to install back doors in its security system so that it could, at will, snoop on the online goings-on of suspect Gmail users." Pretty strong words from Kit and he is right. But here is where I think he loses us, "then clever Chinese hackers, hell-bent on discovering intelligence on Gmail users who are suspected to be anti-establishment, used that same back door system to neatly dodge past the complex, expensive security systems Google has in place to protect its own data, and the petabytes of deeply personal information it stores about its billions of users."

Well fact is, we just don’t know that for a fact. What we know is that Chinese hackers are not necessarily China. Certainly not the government, for sure, to which he, in my opinion, contradicts himself by saying, "Security researchers are still trying to pin-point the source of the hacks, and believe they may have found some key players and institutions that may be responsible, some with government links." There are more holes in his assertions than in Google.

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		Solve Five Key IT Security Challenges with Cloud-Based Authentication
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In the end, Kit seems to be saying what we’ve been saying all along, "Tech-savvy people around the U.S. are left to wonder how many other government-required back doors exist in the Net, ready for nefarious types from organized criminals to foreign spies to exploit, in a similar way Google was attacked." Exactamundo.

Fortunately, we still love Kit and Fast money as he closes with a fabulous Latin quote: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes," which means, who shall keep the keepers themselves and to which we say, satis verborum.