Your computer will keep getting smaller

Itsy bitsy teeny weeny.

Moore's Law, named for Gordon Moore, who ran Intel for a time, states that the number of transistors that can be jammed on a microchip will double every two years.

We've been waiting since his pronouncement in 1965 for this to come to an end. We'll have to wait a bit longer. Intel has launched a new line of processors, named Ivy Bridge, the first  available from any company with features as small as 22 nanometers (the finest details on today's chips are 32 nanometers).

This allows transistors to be smaller and packed more densely. Ivy Bridge chips offer 37 percent more processing speed than the previous generation of chips, and can match their performance while using just half the energy.

Transistors on an Ivy Bridge processor are packed roughly twice as densely as in the most recent line of Intel chips, with 1.4 billion on a 160 square millimeter die instead of 1.16 billion on a 212 square millimeter die. Upholding Moore's Law like that required a significant redesign of the transistor, the tiny electronic switches that make up digital computer chips. Existing transistor designs—little changed in decades—could not simply be made smaller, with 22-nanometer features. That would cause them to become leaky, so that a transistor would allow some current to flow even when set to off. Intel got around that by adding an extra dimension to transistors, which for decades have been made as a stack of flat layers of material on top of one another.

Versions of the new technology for laptops are due in the summer, but more important to Intel may be the potential for Ivy Bridge chips to help it break into the market for energy-efficient processors needed for tablets and smart phones.

Are you smarter than your laptop?

Smarter than me!

Imagine a world in which millions of farmers in China can access most of human knowledge with devices they carry in their pockets.

Oops! That's true today.

Imagine a world in which your laptop has the power of Watson, the IBM super computer that emerged the victor against human competitors on "Jeopardy!".

Not far away, says Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist.

The ratio of computer price to performance is now doubling in less than a year, so 90 servers would become the equivalent of one server in about seven years, and the equivalent of one personal computer within a decade. However, with the growth in cloud computing—in which supercomputer capability is increasingly available to anyone via the Internet—Watson-like capability will actually be available to you much sooner. 

Given this, I expect Watson-like "natural language processing" (the ability to "understand" ordinary English) to show up in Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years.

"Jeopardy!", Kurzweil writes, involves understanding complexities of humor, puns, metaphors, analogies, ironies and other subtleties.

That's something I can't do today.

Some facts about passwords

Most-used passwords: 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, abc123

Time it takes a hacker's computer to randomly guess your password:
 
Length: 6 characters
Lowercase: 10 minutes
+ Uppercase: 10 hours
+ Nos. & Symbols: 18 days

Length: 7 characters
Lowercase: 4 hours
+ Uppercase: 23 days
+ Nos. & Symbols: 4 years

Length: 8 characters
Lowercase: 4 days
+ Uppercase: 3 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 463 years

Length: 9 characters
Lowercase: 4 months
+ Uppercase: 178 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 44,530 years

-- Bloomberg Businessweek

Time to get serious about backing up

The New York Times lists online backups for your computers as a must if you want to get the most out of technology:

Why: Because photos are not the only important things on your computer. With online backup services, you do not have to buy any equipment; you just install software, which sits on secure servers and runs in the background, regularly updating a mirror image of all your files.

How: Go to sosonlinebackup.com. Pay $80 a year. Install the software. Sleep easy.

I don't know why they selected SOS Online, but that's the choice as well at PC Magazine.

$9.95 a month for five PCs and up to 50GB SOS still offers more than other online backup providers: multiple PC coverage, external and network drive backup, a local backup app, and an excellent iPhone app. Its Live Protect that watches folders for file changes and backs up immediately. In sum, SOS delivers more than any other online backup service.

The Times seems to have the $80 price right, according to SOS. The company says that's enough for
75,000 documents, 15,000 photos and 15,000 songs.

Whew! I've got 14,999 songs.

PC Magazine compares all the services and tells you what to look for here.

About those "slow script" messages

I've gotten a couple of those lately and wondered what they were -- assuming the worst. They happen when you're browsing and a page is taking a long time to load. The New York Times explains:

Web developers typically use scripts for working with ActiveX controls, performing database queries, running Adobe Flash animations, displaying menus or serving up advertisements on the page you just landed on. Most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari, have a built-in alter timer that goes off whenever a script running on a Web page exceeds the amount of time the browser has given it to perform — usually from 5 to 10 seconds.

Web pages that need to download a lot of data like video and animated graphics often trip the script alarm. The browser alert box gives you the option to stop running that script so that the browser doesn’t get hung up waiting for it to finish. Some scripts are just complex and slow, but some are badly written and slip into an endless loop.


Stopping the script shouldn’t cause any problems, but the page may not work properly. If you want to try some troubleshooting, press Control+F5 to refresh the page and see if the error message reappears. If you have a lot of browser tabs open to pages that may also be running scripts to refresh mailboxes or automatically update themselves, try closing those as well before reloading the page to see if the error message goes away.

Security software my be slowing things down as well, especially if you have it set to investigate JavaScript and other Web-page code for malicious activity. If you do, try disabling that setting temporarily to see if the slow-script error goes sway. If it does, you may just have ignore the warning and wait a little longer for the software to scan.

Microsoft has more information on the error, along with a workaround that simply lengthens the amount of time before the error message appears here.

Are your passwords long enough?

Size matters.

Georgia Institute of Technology scientists used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours. But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

It's hard to say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist who also worked on the project. The researchers recommend 12-character passwords -- as opposed to those with 11 or, say, 13 characters -- because that number strikes a balance between "convenience and security."

They assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to try 1 trillion password combinations per second. In that scenario, it takes 180 years to crack an 11-character password, but there's a big jump when you add just one more character -- 17,134 years.

Security experts are already recommending that people use full sentences as passwords. Here's one suggested password-sentence from Carnegie Mellon University:

"No, the capital of Wisconsin isn't Cheeseopolis!"
Or maybe something that's easier to remember, like this:
"I have two kids: Jack and Jill."

Some tips:

• If a website will let you create a password with non-letter characters -- like "@y;}v%W$\5\" -- then you should do so. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, but there are 95 letters and symbols on a standard keyboard. More characters means more permutations, and it soon becomes more difficult for a computer to generate the correct password just by guessing.
• On a Microsoft website devoted to password security, the tech giant tells the password-creating public not to use real words or logical combinations of letters. That keeps you safer from a "dictionary attack," which uses a database of words and common character sequences to try to guess the code.
• A website called Password Safe will store a list of passwords for you, but Boyd and Davis said it may still be possible for a hacker to obtain that list.ionary attack," which uses a database of words and common character sequences to try to guess the code.
• Some sites -- Facebook for example -- are marketing their log-ins and user names as a way to access sites all over the Web. That's potentially dangerous because if hackers figure out a single password, they can access multiple banks of information, the researchers said. 

I like the idea of using a sentence, or perhaps the first line of a favorite song.