PHS Tech Bulletins

2006


Advisory on the Release of Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft has announced that they will release Internet Explorer 7 (their latest Web Browser) as a regular “security” upgrade that will be installed onto your computer automatically during one of their monthly security releases, probably in November, but perhaps in October or December. (2nd Tuesday of the month, or shortly thereafter). There are 2 implications.

  1. Though it will be well tested, it might not work perfectly, or the same as IE6, on all of our computers. It might be wise to download a copy of Mozilla’s Firefox 1.5 beforehand. Firefox is a free, widely-used alternate to Microsoft’s IE6 that meets all ANSI standards for internet browsing. Some webpages do in fact look slightly different from Firefox than from IE6, but not much. When installing Firefox it will import your current bookmarks from IE6. You will also be presented with a choice as to whether Firefox should be your primary (default) web browser or not. That means it is asking whether Firefox or IE should be automatically opened when you click on a URL or HTML document. Your choice.

  2. The second implication is that the World Wide Web really will slow down radically for a few days. It slows down some with normal monthly security releases, that typically are 2 to 10 megabytes in size. IE7 will probably be 50 to 150 megabytes in size and will potentially swamp the internet infrastructure. There are 2 reasons to download Firefox and install it soon.

    • Firefox may be more immune to virus and hacker attacks, and
    • On the date that IE7 is mass installed on the world, the web will slow to a crawl for days, and we may have a peak load problem fixing lots of computers and we will have little information as to how to fix them for days.

Advisory on NIH Grant Submission Requirements

The National Institutes of Health is requiring mandatory electronic submission of grant proposals in the February 1 regular grant cycle. Special submissions may already be there or will require electronic submission shortly.

We are informed that the UVA procedure will require us to write a CD with the final copy of the proposal on it for submission to the UVA dean/financial review office. This will need to be a copy with financial information that Susan has reviewed and approved.

Many people have a CD writer in their computer, but many do NOT. For sure, we will have one in Susan’s computer shortly, and several others. Most statisticians have one in their computer, as does Bill Woolfolk.

Regarding writing CD’s, it is a process that almost requires single tasking on your computer to write the CD. Once written to the CD, NO CHANGES can be made. Since money matters, it is advisable to ALWAYS test to see whether the CD written electronic copy can be read. 10 to 30% of the CD’s that Doug creates can NOT be read afterwards. To write a CD, windows XP has some write capacities built into it, but there is also 3rd party software that works pretty well, made by ROXIO. We have copies of Roxio.