Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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| Questions and Answers, Part 24 Q:
You have mentioned distributed computing several times over the years.
I read a small newspaper article that said a Canadian had set the record
for the largest prime number. Was this done using distributed computing?
How can we get in the game? A:
As a quick recap for those who've forgotten, distributed computing is where
people download a small utility that performs calculations on their PC when they
are not busy, and uses the Internet to communicate results (and get more data)
with a server. The famous seti@home
project is an example of distributed computing.
The web site www.distributed.net specializes in breaking encryption
schemes using distributed computing. Another
popular distributed application is the hunt for Mersenne prime numbers. Mersenne
primes are named after a 17th Century French monk who was trying to find primes,
and prove that a simple equation could yield more primes.
For more details on the project, see http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm. The record Mersenne prime was indeed found by a Canadian,
Michael Cameron, a 20-year old running the search program. There's some money at
stake for finders of the largest primes, thanks to the Electronic Frontiers
Foundation. All the details are at
the Mersenne web site, so get hunting! Q:
I had a customer ask me about Trio or Treo (he wasn't sure of the spelling).
What is it? A:
The Treo is the latest project from Handspring, the PDA manufacturer.
The Treo is a sequel to the current PDAs and offers corporate e-mail
services, cell-phone, pager, and other features all in one device that also acts
like a standard PDA. The release of
the Treo was delayed and is now expected in March or April.
The Treo will compete against the Blackberry, from Research in Motion.
There's a considerable difference between the way the two devices obtain
e-mail, and for my money, the Blackberry still looks like a better unit. Q:
I know we're all worried about threats from outside a company's intranet, but
isn't there just as much threat from inside?
Are there any breakdowns of the types of security threats from inside a
network (i.e. not external hackers)? A:
You're quite correct that external hacking is a major threat to networks,
and we've got elaborate firewalls and filters to take care of those threats.
More damage is done internally than externally these days, mostly due to
lax system administration. There are some generally accepted figures for the
types of security threats from inside a LAN. About sixty percent of all threats
are from users accessing resources they are not entitled to (usually because
permissions are incorrectly set). Twenty
percent of threats are from employees who are trying to cause damage to the
system or other people's accounts (quaintly called "angry employees"
in the surveys). Forty percent of companies polled recently said they had
accounts left open after people have left the company, which could be used to
gain now-unauthorized access to the network. This is also a common problem with
contractors who are given accounts while working for a company, and those
accounts are not closed when the contractor leaves.
The major expense of inside hacking is theft of proprietary information,
which the FBI estimates to be worth $4 million a year. Q:
When is KDE 3.0 available for Linux? Can I get a copy of the current build from
the Web? A:
KDE 3.0 is in beta testing as I write this, and should be available this summer
in general release. The beta I've
worked with was stable and had many improvements over the current KDE 2.2
version. You can get the beta (or
later) releases from www.kde.org. GNOME is supposed to have their next release,
GNOME 2, out this year too. It's in
alpha testing currently. Q:
I want to project a continually changing screen of data from a Web page onto a
wall in our office. The lights are
on all the time. How can I best do
this? A:
Standard front projectors for data are getting very bright in the latest
incarnations. In Focus and others
offer 2,000 lumen models which show up in bright office lights, although a
little washy. You could use video
walls, which are a set of stacked TV screens that give you very large video
displays controlled by a dedicated device, but these are expensive.
Failing that, why not look at some of the flat-panel displays?
There are 60-inch models available now.
If that's not big enough, you're stuck with either video walls or
projectors. |
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