High tech, along with the auto and home construction industries, has seen a significant impact from the economic downturn. PC orders plummeted, software sales tanked, and networks stopped expanding. It was sort of like 2001-02 all over again, with companies taking a serious breather from major capital expenditures. Lots of companies laid off staff, retooled in different directions, and generally kept their heads down.

Now, however, some light is appearing at the end of the tunnel. Stocks are rising slowly, some folks are spending money again, and various companies are reporting gains in sales. In a fairly major piece of news, Cisco Systems is seeing a rise in network gear sales for the first time in over a year. Cisco is one of the biggest players in networking, supplying routers and other gear to huge corporations and ISPs. Having them report an uptick in the market is very good news indeed.

The company’s CEO said that “it will start to hire more employees after laying off workers over the past year. Cisco’s work force has shrunk by about 3,500 over the past four quarters to about 63,800, mostly from layoffs but also from early retirement offers and attrition.” Now, some belt tightening was expected but 3500 out of 64000 is just under 5% of their total work force. That’s still a lot of people who lost jobs.

On the other side of the coin, Intel’s rosy forecasts may not be entirely honest. Some are suggesting the chip market itself could be in a “long, drawn out recovery” period. It’s entirely possible certain segments of the market will rebound before others. I suspect corporate networks will start expanding, for example, before everyone starts queuing up to buy new PCs. The former represents critical infrastructure, while the latter have become commodities. And PCs are easier to upgrade or refurbish.

Of course, the current uptick in the markets and job outlook may not last. We could easily have several false starts before the downturn is truly over, but at least the steady stream of bad news has largely ceased.

According to an announcement made on Tuesday, big-box retailer Best Buy is now entering the Internet-based entertainment business. They’ve decided that (shocking!) web-based video is here to stay. Therefore the company will start offering customers the option of purchasing videos for instant download, thus “making it easier for them to rent and buy movies over high-speed Internet connections.”

The field for this market has been growing for some time. Popular retailer Netflix has been offering a selection, albeit a somewhat lame one largely consisting of second-rate movies, to its existing customer base for several years. Amazon has its “unbox” video system. Blockbuster followed suit some time ago. It’s all very predictable. Offering videos online reduces space requirements at brick-and-mortar storefronts, eliminates the problem of missing or damaged DVD media, eases inventory management, and generally makes life easier for the retailers. For consumers, it means not having to run to a store in the hope the video you want is actually available.

Best Buy isn’t doing this alone — they’ve partnered with online retailer CinemaNow to provide the service. This also makes sense, since it means Best Buy doesn’t have to create its own Web presence and video library. They just profit-share with CinemaNow — which also gets a bigger share of the pie by leveraging Best Buy’s vast retail presence.

If you haven’t tried using online videos, it’s really quite nice. But of course, you need a fast and reliable Internet connection. Video files can be 1-2GB in size, and you’ll need a connection capable of streaming them without interruption. Or you’ll need to subscribe to a service like Amazon’s, which allows you to download the video files to your machine for later viewing. The latter also means you need enough free disk space to store all those video files. There’s nothing worse than waiting several hours to download a file, only to have a “disk full” message show up just before it completes.

Online viewing is fun, and it works. It’ll just keep getting better as network connections improve, since you’ll be able to get full HD and other high-quality formats streamed right into your home.

Over the last few years, “slim” has been “in.” Laptops, following in the steps of products like the Macbook Air, have tried to become as light and thin as possible. Netbooks, those $300 little jobbies everyone seems to want to own, are also driving this trend. One of the ways it is being accomplished is by removing components some people find indispensable, and others just don’t use: the CD/DVD drive, or “optical” unit. You can trim a lot of weight, and thickness, from a laptop just by removing those components.

PCs have had optical drives of some type installed since the last floppies went out of vogue. In the late 1990s. Manufacturers ramped up to optical storage since software vendors were shipping whole product sets on CD, and later on DVD, as “all on one disK” distributions. No more stacks of 50 Microsoft Office floppies…just one CD. Later it became “just one DVD” as software outpaced 600MB CD capacity, but the component sizes were the same and compatible with one another. Now, however, these are vanishing from cases and leaving us with few easy options when we want to watch a DVD or (heaven help me) install software from CD.

One of the biggest lessons from the craze for “netbooks” — inexpensive little laptops designed mainly for browsing the Web — is “that people were so excited about the small, easy-to-carry size that they didn’t miss having a CD or DVD drive. USB is an obvious choice. With a single port, the user can connect a single CD or DVD drive to their laptop at will, thus re-establishing the balance between input & output device.”

But let’s say you’re seriously into watching DVDs or listening to CDs. The obvious solution is that you should keep your existing unit. Folks like you “might want to think twice if you’re hooked on transferring CDs into MP3s — or if you spend a lot of time watching DVDs on airplanes and don’t want to squint at your iPod.” I’ll admit guilt to the latter, having watched whole movies on flights from Boston to London. But I carry my laptop for both business and writing, and am used to having it strapped across my back on a regular basis.

Maybe on future models the paradigm will involve a big memory stick sized to fit a whole movie. That would be the death knell for the laptop-based optical drive. And it’ll happen, too.

These days, the first rule of production computing of any type is security. Hackers, phishing schemes, identity theft, and other threats have forced companies to treat security preparedness and vulnerability assessment as “Job #1.”

Except, apparently, Time-Warner’s cable hardware division.

Today a colleague forwarded a note describing a major, and blindingly obvious vulnerability found to be present in over 65,000 routers shipped by Time-Warner to cable broadband customers. The worst thing about the vulnerability is that it’s so easy to discover and bypass. Nearly any hacker would happen across this (and probably already have) in fairly short order, and it’s hard to understand how this made it through quality control during the development process.

There’s no harm talking about the issue since a patch has already been shipped (hopefully users have actually installed it) and it’s therefore at least somewhat less critical. A software developer was helping a friend diagnose a problem, and accidentally discovered Time-Warner “had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router’s configuration file.”

The most egregious factor was that the router password was also embedded in this file. So by dumping the output to a browser, anyone could discover (and therefore change) the router’s password. This means they could take control over the router itself. The implications of this are pretty obvious.

As noted, a temporary patch has already been shipped. Time-Warner is (unsurprisingly) working on a more permanent fix. In the meantime, if you or a friend has one of these routers you should obtain and install the temporary fix. Until you do, your data’s not safe and neither are your systems.

Hopefully this little incident will raise awareness of the importance of hardware security in today’s highly networked world. And no matter what router you own, be sure to change the administrative password from its default. Use a lengthy, strong password containing a mix of alphanumeric characters and whatever else your router will support. Protect your network, or get hacked. It’s that simple.

Last year at about this time, I was writing a piece about how abysmal PC sales (and the technology market as a whole) were causing concern for the holidays. At that time, with the world economy heading down the spiral into the worst recession in decades, no one was buying new hardware. Everyone was taking a wait-and-see attitude, and it was hurting PC vendors badly.

Here, a full year later and with increasingly sunny predictions that the recession is behind us, I’m going to predict that the PC market this holiday season won’t be much brighter than in 2008. People are still holding onto their money while hunting for bargains, and while the economy has improved it still lacks one thing: jobs. Hiring is starting to pick up somewhat, but employers are apparently waiting for a few consecutive bright quarters before adding significantly to their workforces. So I suspect many people will continue to avoid upgrades or new machines through the 2009 holiday season.

Despite this somewhat gloomy situation, things seem to be improving. Q3 (3rd quarter, for non business types) PC sales improved somewhat, by around 2.3%, over last year’s numbers. Analysts have called this “a promising sign for the industry as it heads into the holiday shopping season.” And it is, but it doesn’t mean the industry is out of the woods yet.

The good news about this is that it bodes well for consumers who are searching for bargains or special deals (especially on financing) this holiday season. Suppliers would be less likely to offer such incentives if the market jumped suddenly.

My own expectation is that the market, as well as the unemployment figures overall, will start improving dramatically in the first two quarters of 2010…unless some other economic disaster causes things to slump yet again. Once the real recovery begins, I expect a dramatic increase in PC shipments. This is in line with the street, where “analysts expect to see more businesses replacing aging PCs in the middle of next year.” We’ll hit another wave of upgrade mania, and sales will jump accordingly for some period of time.

The object lesson is this: if you’re planning to upgrade, this holiday season is probably a good time to do it. This season may represent the last opportunity to buy cheap systems in a buyers’ market for some time to come.

Come back next year, and we’ll see how well my crystal ball was working.

The keyboard and mouse are almost certainly the most recognized I/O (Input/Output) devices ever made for computers. Type on the keyboard, move the mouse (or “rodent” as we used to call them). What could be easier? This model is certainly a lot more intuitive than punch cards, entering instructions via individual switches, or old-style paper terminals. But they’re both fairly old technologies. The keyboard, of course, is derived from (even older) typewriters and teletypes. The mouse has been infesting desktops since at least the 1960s, and tablet-style pointing devices may be even older.

Manufacturers and researchers have been looking for better, even more intuitive I/O devices since the first keyboard rolled off the assembly line. The whole problem involves what’s known in psychological and design circles as “mapping,” or the way humans interpret and use tools. For instance, look at a standard round doorknob. Its very appearance suggests one should grab and turn it. Its function is mapped into our brains, so it’s fairly intuitive. Likewise with a mouse. Move it up and down, or left and right. The pointer on screen mimics that motion, so the movement is natural. Good brain mapping translates to good design.

Given all this, one of the holy grails of computing design is the touchscreen monitor. If it works properly, it eliminates the need for the mouse. It also provides direct mapping. Touch the screen in the right place and an event occurs.

This is probably why HP has been developing what are arguably the best touchscreens on the market. A new one, the model 600-1055, has just shown up on the market. It looks pretty good overall, and has full integration with the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 OS.

Probably the only real reason touchscreens haven’t taken over the market is cost. They’re far more expensive than regular monitors, and have had reliability problems in the past. At $1600 (street) the new HP continues the cost trend, but reviews indicate it’s way better than earlier models. This may be just the boost the touch paradigm needs. But I’m not sure I’d give up my desktop mouse, since I don’t like the idea of reaching for the screen. It’d be less of an annoyance on a laptop!

Software upgrades often carry a cost in terms of hardware requirements. We all know that machines capable of running, for example, Windows 2000 or even 98 would bog down over XP or (gulp!) Vista. Feature additions require more CPU, memory, or disk space. Newer games often require high end video cards. Staying “appropriately ahead” (a new term…you saw it here first) of hardware requirements is a constant battle in the IT marketplace.

When someone asks my advice before buying a new machine, I tell them to buy ahead of the curve if possible. If the current Windows or MacOS version requires 1GB, buy 2GB. If you think you need 250GB of disk space, try to buy twice that. This is also known as “future-proofing” your purchase. It helps, but doesn’t guarantee, you’ll be able to use that machine successfully for more than a few years.

Now for the good news: it appears Windows 7 will be able to run on most desktop machines sold since roughly 2006…presuming they’re not low-end boxes with minimal RAM and processors faster than 1GHZ. Initial tests show that machines with a processor over this speed, plus at least 1GB of RAM and a paltry 16GB of disk can run the soon-to-be-released new Windows version. That should make people pretty happy.

The other good news is that, even if you have a machine with only 512MB (and there are few of those around, I suspect) you should be able to upgrade your existing system for short money. I just put 2GB of RAM into a 1-year old laptop….for $40. That’s pocket change.

This said, “able to run” doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily be a pleasant experience. A lot depends on the software you’re using on top of the OS. If you use only email and a browser, you’ll probably be perfectly happy with your system’s performance. But if you habitually use lots of memory-intensive applications, or run tasks that tax the CPU, you might need to upgrade. Or get used to waiting.

Recently a friend emailed me with an odd problem. His Windows XP (SP3) box had suddenly lost its ability to use USB devices, and he couldn’t figure out why. This guy has been in the field for a long time and has performed many troubleshooting tasks on all sorts of unusual hardware. If he was stumped, the problem was fundamentally obscure or just plain weird.

The basic symptoms were as follows: connect a mass storage device (external drive, point-and-shoot camera, etc.) to the PC, and either it would appear as an “unknown device” or the system would lock up. Occasionally a device would be recognized, then would just as suddenly become inaccessible again. Deleting and rebuilding the USB device database by removing devices from Device Manager had no effect, nor did other suggestions like disconnecting the machine from power for half an hour or resetting the system BIOS.

He finally decided that maybe the built-in USB device hardware was defective, so we found a PCI-based replacement card and he gave it a go. Same result. But this experiment actually uncovered the root cause and resolved the issue.

He’d noticed his Webcam worked just fine if it was connected by itself, and thought maybe the problem involved mass storage drivers in Windows (he’d also just upgraded to SP3). Then, he unplugged the cable he was using to connect his disks…and suddenly the Webcam came back to life. On a hunch, he threw that cable aside and grabbed a spare. Suddenly all devices were working just fine.

A $5.00 USB cable had gone bad for unknown reasons, throwing his whole system into an unstable state. This exercise probably cost him a full day in terms of troubleshooting time, plus the cost of a new USB card and the hair he’d pulled while diagnosing it.

The oral of the story is simple. Don’t discount any piece of hardware, no matter how inconsequential it might seem, when your system starts acting up. A terminator, a cable, or a duff connector can ruin your whole day.

I’ve never been one for big, flashy office spaces. And despite being a long-term geek, I don’t have an office filled to the brim with tech. I suffice quite nicely with a single monitor, three office machines (laptop, Linux development server, Windows general-use box) and a general home network. I don’t have the time, or the energy, to devote to designing a huge office filled with toys. Plus, I’d have to dust around all that hardware. That’s just not worth the effort.

That said, I must admit to a major case of geek envy when I saw Stefan Didak’s new office. Wow. Just wow. Heck, I’d take his old setup off his hands, just to get all those great monitors. This place looks like something you’d find at NASA or in a relatively recent Star Trek movie. And it’s all functional, which is even better. He actually uses all this equipment. It manages his various websites, provides a development environment for his distributed programming team, and (shocking!) is almost never used for gaming.

As he notes on his site, he uses all the monitors pretty much simultaneously. Unlike some of us, he hates minimizing windows or having one application obstructed by another, so he buys enough screen real estate to make sure that never happens. I can understand how he feels, and have sometimes considered adding a second monitor to my current environment. Screen real estate is a major consideration, especially when you’re writing, testing, and debugging code in certain environments.

This type of setup would also be useful for network monitoring offices (and I’ve seen several that look very similar). Such offices often need to display statistical and availability information for multiple networks, systems, and other resources.

It should be emphasized that all of the systems Mr. Didak has in his office aren’t used as workstations. He has hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, probably set up in a RAID array for safety and redundancy purposes, that are used for large code development offices. Effectively, he has a small server room in his house.

Do you have a room like this, or (scarier still) one that’s even more elaborate? Post a URL of yours in the Comments section, and we can all have a geekfest.

Anyone who hasn’t been living under a (technical) rock knows that Intel has announced its latest series of processors, code named “Lynnfield.” I always find technical-project code names interesting, but have no idea where some teams come up with theirs. This one promises to be interesting.

As evidenced by PC World’s recently published tests, the new release appears to be pretty typical in terms of features…but is at least somewhat faster than the current crop of CPUs, as one would expect. Over the last few years, processors have tended toward “multi core” architectures, in which one chip holds several actual CPU layouts. Even the fastest single CPU can only perform one instruction at a time, so the multi core design allows them to work like dual, or even quad processor systems.

In general terms, old-style programs were basically linear. They expected to request execution of an instruction, then waited for the CPU to deliver the result. Newer programs designed for multi-core or multi-CPU systems (especially things like games, transaction processing software, search engines, and some webservers) can detect the presence of more than one processor. They’ll then fire off multiple independent processes that each perform a certain task; or they’ll use “threads” to do the same thing. A thread is a task that runs under a single process (they’re also referred to as “lightweight processes”), executing a task and terminating when it’s done.

Thread-aware programs can fire off multiple threads simultaneously, increasing overall speed by having each processor perform a separate task. But since they don’t start and stop separate processes to do so, lots of time and memory is saved.

The new Intel processors expand on the multi-core offerings of previous releases. You probably won’t see them in cheaper (low end) systems, but they’ll start appearing in mid- and upper-range systems soon. Hey, just in time for the holidays! What a coincidence.