TechBait

Have you ever wanted to communicate somewhat securely over a public network, like the Internet, in order to exchange confidential or sensitive information, passwords, or other data?  You need a VPN to connect you from one point to another over the insecure public medium.  This secure connection is the VPN, or Virtual Private Network.  The VPN, whether purely software or by utilizing a VPN appliance device containing it’s own software, uses encryption software to construct a tunnel between the two points, thus allowing the user to exchange confidential information or sensitive login information between two points.  VPN’s can also be useful for simply contacting your private network remotely, since you don’t want unknown entities to see your internal network infrastructure, hosts, or to sniff out your passwords.

On a similarly related line of thought, if you use UNIX or Linux, a good way to access your home network over the Internet from a remote point is to set up an SSH tunnel, where the Secure Shell is used to contruct a tunnel.  You login to the remote UNIX or Linux host via SSH, and then you can launch graphical Xwindows applications using an SSH tunnel.  You can do this from a Windows client by using the Cygwin or other software which allows one to run POSIX, GNU, and UNIX/Linux utilities on a Windows machine.  You can do this from work if your network allows this sort of Internet access.  It is handy to be able to access your home UNIX/Linux server over an SSH tunnel.

$ ssh -X u...@server.homenetwork.com
$ ssh -X user@<public ip address of server>

You can requests compression of all data to improve up user experience (good for a low speed link such as wan link) using -c option:

$ ssh -c -X user@<public ip address of server>

You can then run any Xwindows application on the remote xterm by simply typing the program executable name followed by the ampersand to spin it off into it’s own process ID.  You can also run an entire desktop like KDE, Gnome, or the default Xwindows desktop with the startx command.

Last summer I purchased a fully loaded top of the line HP HDX 18 Premium Series notebook under the HP employee discount before being laid off by Hewlett Packard when they closed the New Jersey software development site at which I worked.  Windows 7 wasn’t released yet but the machine came with a free upgrade.  I eventually sent away for the upgrade and I have my disks, but I have been sitting on it since I rely on my machine for, like, everything and I am always wary of Windows OS upgrades.  I have yet to back the thing up and have an emergency plan should something go wrong.  I found this interesting upgrade article from PC Magazine.  The time draws close.  Wish me luck.

I guess that you never know, but I think that i4i is going after Microsoft because they are a deep pockets company, and frankly if I had a patent that I thought was being unfairly taken advantage of by a behemoth like Microsoft then I might sue as well.  Maybe the company founder(s) want to lure Microsoft into a lucrative acquisition deal and spend the rest of their days checking email via satellite wireless from some private island somewhere?   It would be a shame if they went after OpenOffice, especially since OpenOffice has a small market share and couldn’t possibly be threatening this i4i’s business.  I wonder how valid their patent claim really is?  There is not a great track record of for profit software companies suing open source software providers.  I recall the famous SCO vs Linux debacle.   Anyone even hear of SCO lately?

Windows 7 is going to be the first Windows OS to treat the GPU more as an equal to the CPU, according to Nvidia product manager Chris Daniel.  He also says that with Windows 7, Microsoft is “really opening up the immense parallel computing horsepower of the GPU natively right in the operating system.”

This is obviously great news for graphics ungry users like engineers and digital artists.  We already know that this will be great for gamers.

Windows 7 introduces a new API called DirectX Compute, which enables the system to fully use the parallel processing in modern graphics cards from Nvidia, ATI, and others.

In ye olden days of PC lore, when computer processors didn’t include the math coprocessor for cost purposes, anything requiring floating point math calculation took FOREVER to complete.  I know this because I had an old Packard Bell 486SX laptop with the old CPU which did not have the coprocessor built in.  A 486DX would have had the floating point instructions built into the main CPU.

I had a 3D architectural program that would let you build houses and rooms in 2D, then it would render them in 3D for a walkthrough.  The 3D rendering required floating point math, and it took a long time to render on the non floating point CPU.  This old laptop did, however, have a spot for a math coprocessor.  I purchased and installed it, and the 3D rendering phase of that program took off.   Not long after that, math coprocessing instructions were built into the main CPU as a standard feature.  This was before the days of these 3D graphics cards with their unreal floating point performance.  These cards’ instructions are utilized by many games’ routines which are specifically built for accessing these features.  In DOS and some older Windows versions like Windows 95, the games (like DOOM) would basically create their own operating environment which the OS would shell out to, in order to have access to 32 bit and graphics functions.  Later on, Microsoft introduced the DirectX API for direct access to the graphics features via the OS itself.  Now it seems that they are taking it one step further.  I am not totally clear on how the games, which are essentially Windows apps, could access the graphics features via regular DirectX, but regular apps require this new API?  I probably am missing a step somewhere in there.   I’m sure that there are new GPU features that they allow access to, or improve the access.  Maybe this new API merely makes it easier to access for regular (non games) applications programmers.  I really do not know at this time.  I have not studied the API.

Chris Daniel further claims that Directx Compute will “enable use of advanced technologies like SLI-based, multi-GPU gaming, 3D Vision, and PhysX real-time physics.”  So, this will bring parallel computing to the masses.

Well, that’s great news for graphics hungry Windows users who have top shelf graphics hardware.  I guess that that $6000 Alienware gaming laptop is again calling my name.