Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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| Questions and Answers, Part 20 Q: I heard there’s a site on
the Web that shows old sites and how they evolved, such as Amazon. Where is it? A: You’re referring to the
Wayback Machine at archive.org. This is the World Wide Web’s semi-official
archive site and came on line at the start of November 2001.
The site has captured Web pages from the beginning of the Web era, from
the famous coffee-pot camera at Cambridge University through to the early days
of Amazon’s Web site. The site is
the brainchild of Brewster Kahle. For
those who don’t recognize the name (which most won’t unless you’re an
Internet historian), Kahle made his reputation and fortune as the computer
scientist responsible for the WAIS (Wide Area Information Service) system which
was the Web’s precursor, as well as the Alexa system, adopted by AOL and
Amazon. The archive site has used a set of spiders, software programs which are
unleashed over the Web to scour sites and capture their contents, storing 10
billion Web pages on the site. For
those who’ve been with the Web for a long time, a visit to the archive is a
trip down memory lane, and an interesting study of how the Web has evolved in
the last 10 years. Well worth a
visit, if only to see the early sites! Q: I read your reply to a
question about tape drives in a previous column. It made me think that in these
days of inexpensive high-capacity removable storage drives, the tape drive may
be dead. What’s the industry
doing about the threat? A: It is definitely true that
removable storage devices are getting cheaper, faster and higher in capacity.
The new USB standard has led to new drives from Quantum and others that
allow high-capacity hard drives to be attached and detached at will, without
system reboots or reconfiguration. Still,
the price per gigabyte of storage of these drives is much higher than that of
tape. Since much information that
is backed up is seldom needed again, tape will likely remain a popular option
for long-term backups. Why dedicate
hard drives to something that may never be pulled up again?
Also, the sheer volume of data backed up by some companies and
organizations makes it unlikely that hard drives will be a viable option for
long-term storage. You do have a
valid point, though, that the tape industry is getting worried, especially about
the smaller business and home markets. To
help develop a plan for the future, a consortium is being formed, led by Imation,
to look at the future technologies and marketing pushes for tapes. Tape is still very viable as a storage medium, but it will
get pushed out at the lower end of the market unless the industry does bring out
lower-cost, higher-capacity systems that don’t cost a fortune in initial
implementation costs. Q: I heard someone at a
conference talking about ultradense servers.
What are they? A: Really stupid servers?
Seriously, ultradense servers (also called “blade servers”) are a
buzz term from Intel for a new line of servers that pack many processors into a
single case. The Intel RLX series,
for example, is a rack device that packs 324 servers into the space normally
taken by 42 conventional servers (1U rack units).
Each of the ultradense server cases has a series of slots into which
processor, chipset, and memory all on a single card are inserted. By adding more
cards, the amount of processing possible in a case is increased, obviously. The
processors and support chips in the RLX series are not standard off-the-shelf
processors, but a new series. Q: I run Symantec’s PCAnywhere.
I upgraded several machines to Windows XP and am getting some problems
with the PCAnywhere software. Any
ideas? A: Download a patch from the
Symantec site if you already have PCAnywhere 10.0 or above (if not, you’ll
probably need to upgrade). PCAnywhere
works with Windows XP, but there were some reports of problems, mostly dealing
with video images from the host to the slave.
Symantec posted a patch for PCAnywhere 10.5 in mid-November, and it irons
out the problems. Q: What is a warez site? A: The term “warez” is a take-off of “wares” as in software, and refers to pirated software. There are lots of warez sites on the Web that offer pirated software, “cracked” software (such as Windows XP) that doesn’t need an activation key, keys to unlock software, and hacking information. These sites tend to be hidden behind innocuous looking web sites, and almost all require a password for access. Warez are also available through some Usenet newsgroups. The practice is highly illegal, of course, but is popular among students. A recent study showed over 5,400 sites in the US alone, offering the latest versions of almost every software package on the market. |
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