Extract From Byte Magazine - July 23 - Technology That Chang

[Steve Bildermann]

As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

We have two system upgrades this month. First, I have the latest ATI RADEON 9800 Pro video board installed in Anastasia, our Intel D875 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 800 FSB speed, Hyper Threading Technology, and 2 channels each of 1 Gigabyte of DDR400 memory. Anastasia also has a new Hercules Digifire 7.1 sound card, which I recommend. We'll get to the details later, but this has to be the hottest desktop system in Los Angeles, and every bit of it works just wonderfully.

Lassie

Last month I told you about Lassie, an Intel D865 motherboard with integrated sound and video. Just to show I could do it I set that system up with a 2 GHz Celeron, which isn't a lot of chip for a system that good, but it worked. This month I first dropped in a 2 GHz 400 FSB Pentium 4, which worked fine; then a 2.4 GHz 533 FSB Pentium 4, which is what's running in there now. Changing chips is simple and the machine doesn't make any fuss about it: Drop in the new CPU and turn it on.

Frankly, for the general office tasks this system does, I can't really tell the difference between the Celeron, the slower Pentium 4, and the faster chip I have in there now. Moreover, the video is good enough for any of the games I tend to play, including online games. The text quality isn't bad, and I have no reason to change last month's conclusion: The Intel D865 is a good general purpose desktop board and probably the right choice for anything but the very hottest games machines.

The sound system is superb. The sound quality of the Analog Devices on board sound processing system sounds as good as the Hercules Digifire 7.1, at least to me. Of course I am not the best judge of sound systems, but it's certainly good enough for games and DVD movies, and the "jack sensing" software that installs from the Intel motherboard disk works superbly. There are three sound outlets on the motherboard, and while they can be used in the traditional "line in, line out, microphone" pattern, they can also be used as 3 channels of audio: front speakers, rear speakers, and synthesized front/woofer to generate "5.1" sound. If that latter confuses you we'll explain below. The important point is that the on board sound works better than the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, in that there's no problem with video/sound synchronization.

Get this board, a decent Antec 380 Watt superquiet case (I am very fond of their "Black Piano" finish Sonata, which is definitely the quietest machine in the house) and power supply, and either Seagate or Maxtor Serial ATA drive, and it will be a fine system no matter what CPU you put in. Be sure to buy quality memory: If money is tight start with less memory of better quality and add more later. If you think it's too slow with a cheap CPU you can always go to a faster one. It's just hard to beat the D865GBF as a general purpose system board. Recommended.

Cable Modem

When we closed last month, I had the Adelphia Cable Modem system installed with a Hawking FR24 Dual WAN Broadband 4 Port Firewall Router, and everything was fine until it suddenly stopped working. The Hawking has two WAN inputs, with the Adelphia Cable modem connected through WAN 1 and a Covad iDSL modem to Megapath iDSL connected through Wan 2. It all worked splendidly until, just before deadline, the Adelphia Cable Modem just stopped working.

The Hawking is supposed to do fail over from Wan 1 to WAN 2, and that sort of worked, but not very well. There was a lot of latency, because the Adelphia system didn't fail entirely. It would work for a few minutes then fade away, and that drove the Hawking router crazy, because it naturally preferred the much faster cable modem; but when a job started and then the cable modem timed out, it couldn't restart that job. Eventually I just pulled the Ethernet connection to the WAN 1 plug, and the Hawking and iDSL worked just fine after that.

Just after I filed that story, the Adelphia cable modem began to work again, and for the rest of the month it provided a reliable 1.8 megabits/second (or better) download speed and quite good upload performance, according to http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest. All was well for about 3 weeks, then once again it failed, again in the same way, with intermittent connectivity and random complete failure. This lasted about 12 hours.

My guess is that they're extending service through this area and that causes local failures, but I don't have any evidence for this hypothesis. Several readers tell me that it's actually the modem itself, and the remedy is to turn off the cable modem for a full minute; and moreover, to do that at weekly intervals as preventive maintenance. I have no idea whether that will work, but I'll try it. Meanwhile, I have to say that when Adelphia cable modem works (which is almost all the time) it works extremely well. I have had connection speeds of up to 2.1 megabits, and seldom below 1.8. Moreover, it fails seldom enough that I can live with it; so I am canceling the DirecPC satellite and the Megapath iDSL service. I liked Megapath service well enough that, when the telephone company gets a switch near enough to me that I can have full DSL (for about a third of the cost of this iDSL line), I will seriously consider signing up with Megapath again as a backup service—but in fact Adelphia Cable Modem is very likely all I will ever need.

On the other hand, I am keeping my Earthlink.net account, because it has proved useful with local POP (Point of Presence) in just about every city I have been to, and I have used Earthlink to access my account all over the US, in Brazil, France, Rome, and Finland north of the Arctic Circle. I know there are cheaper dialup services, but I have found Earthlink to be quite reliable. I am a little disturbed when they export technical support services to India, but then I am disturbed when any decent jobs are sent overseas.

But dialup is only a backup, and with luck I'll never use it here at Chaos Manor. If you can get cable modem service, it's worth it; at least it certainly has been for me.

D Link DI 604 4 Port Ethernet Broadband Router

Last month I reported that a tech support technician at D Link told me I could not address the DI 604 Ethernet Broadband Router to 192.168.1.1, which is what I needed to use that router with my current system setup.

It may be that I asked the question wrong, or that the technical support chap I spoke with just wasn't properly informed, but in any event that turns out not to be the case: You can address the router to any address you like. Now clearly if you are accessing it at its default address of 192.168.0.1, you will be doing so with a computer addressed to 192.168.0.x, and you must see to it that after you change the router's address to 192.168.1.1, then when next you try to access that router it is from a computer with an address of 192.168.1.x, and that may be what the technician was trying to explain to me.

In any event, the D Link DI 604 is plenty good enough for any normal home or small business connection to cable modem or DSL, and would have been good enough for me. In my own case I did want the dual WAN capability of the Hawking, but I could have used the D Link without difficulties.

Internet Security

I have said this before, but let me repeat: If you do get cable modem, or DSL, don't "run bare." Get a router that provides a firewall and Net Address Translation so that your computer is invisible to the Internet itself. Yes, I know; You can get firewall software for your system, and that is supposed to do the job, and often it does.

Often, but it's a lot easier to write worms and Trojans that tunnel through software running on the computer it is protecting than to penetrate a decent router. Understand, nothing is entirely safe; but a router, or a Linux box running firewall software upstream of your main installation (or both) will be a lot safer than any firewall software running on machines you are actually using for Internet connectivity.

Good enough routers don't cost a lot, although you can pay quite a bit for one if you're looking for better security. If you want more security and you are willing to pay for it, look into Cisco, or find a good security consultant. For most of us, D Link and Hawking routers will be enough. And once you have finished setting up your high speed connection, go to Steve Gibson's page and try the Shields Up test. Pay attention to the results, and think about the advice you get.

The consequences of running bare can be severe. Being infected with a virus or Trojan that corrupts your files isn't the worst thing that may happen. You may find that your system has been used by a spammer to send spam to a hundred thousand friends; or you may find that your system has been used to send hate mail, or threatening letters to government officials, or terrorist threats; and yes, that has happened to people whose machines were penetrated.

I have recorded as many as twenty attacks an hour against my system: that is, twenty "sniffer" programs out looking for high speed connections. What the owner of the sniffer wanted I don't know, but I don't think I want to find out the hard way.

If you get a high speed connection, get a router.

Joy and Rapture

If you don't have high speed network connectivity, get it. It may change your life.

It turns out there's a real difference between 144K service (which I had with iDSL) and real high speed connections. I didn't notice it so much at first, but after a couple of weeks I found I was routinely verifying references, looking at stories recommended by readers, downloading wonderful little film clips such as the Rube Goldberg car advertisement. The first time I looked at that it downloaded in spurts and starts, and wasn't very interesting. With cable modem it's wonderful.

Then I found that when I wanted a quote it was easier to go on the Web and find the virtual book than it was to walk out into the Great Hall and look for the actual book, find the quote, and copy it.

You can find anything on the web. I have found Cicero's speeches in both English and Latin. I have found obscure poetry by searching on a half remembered line from high school English classes. I have found star maps and Hubble telescope pictures. I routinely read articles from many of the world's great newspapers. It's all out there, and with a high speed connection you can find it, and yes, I know, everyone has been saying this for years, and I always believed it; but it's one thing to know it and another to experience 2 megabits a second. (It can also be addictive.

Now true, there can be too much of a good thing, as I find when I discover there are a dozen open windows on each of three separate machines, and I can't figure out which one has what I'm looking for just now; but that's pretty minor compared to not being able to find information in the first place. And of course I don't have every book ever written!

I'd still far rather buy and read a real book than try to do that online, but even that is changing: it's now very easy to download books onto Lisabetta, my wonderful little HP/Compaq Tablet PC, and I carry Lisabetta almost any place I might be going where I would want to read a book. Book formats are highly readable, and page turning with the "jog switch" makes that simple enough. In broad daylight a book is more convenient, but not a lot more; and when the light is bad there's not much choice.

Up to now we haven't worried much about Internet piracy of books, but as high speed connections coupled with neat little machines like the Compaq Tablet PC become more ubiquitous, that may change. Actually the high speed connections aren't that important. A big book is still small compared to audio and visual files, and downloads quickly even over dialup. What will change people's reading habits will be low cost, highly convenient reading devices that people actually carry around with them, particularly if those have wireless Internet connections. When Tablet PCs are as ubiquitous as laptops, the book business is likely to be in, perhaps not as much trouble as the CD industry, but trouble enough. More on this next week.