Computers and computing related posts

Despite the media attention given to the security issues of passwords, people still seem to be uneducated about staying safe online. This is particularly true for choosing and keeping passwords. When online users pick a password, they don't think of the risks if their account is accessed by others. In general, people feel safe if a website accepts their new password. This is not always the case.

When you install new programs, they are automatically added to your programs list, accessible from the Start menu. Just because this is an automatically updated list does not mean you can not change menu choices. Desirably, the menu choices should be organized to support your personal accessible needs. Read on to see how.

The My Computer option on your computer shows you the contents of disks and other hard drives connected to your computer. So if your computer has a floppy disk, hard disk, CD-ROM drive, and network drives, you will see all this in the My Computer window. The hard disk on Windows machine is the C drive. It is a local disk.

Compressing is about saving amount of storage space on your computer's hard drive or other removable storage devices. The amount space that is saved with file compression depends on the type and size of the files being compressed. In general, compressing of text and graphics files yields a high compression ratio than compressing other types of files (such as executable program files).

Windows comes with standard program package that suits your basic needs for using a computer. Now days not many buy a computer to just visits a website, write a word document, create an Excel file, and so on. People expect computers to do more. They, for instance, want to chat with friends, use Apple's iTunes, get automatic weather or stock updates from the internet, run animation files, use a browser other than Internet Explorer from Windows, and so on.

Although computer viruses come in variety of formats, they perform a function (or action) that is often destructive and unexpected. Like biological viruses, computer viruses are potentially dangerous to their host. Just as biological viruses can harm human health and transfer one human to another, computer viruses affect the performance of the computer and potentially can move from one computer host to another.

Finding visitors to your blog or website does not have to be difficult or an impossible task if you follow Google's webmaster tools. I decided to write about Google's webmaster tools because they are the key to anyone's success online. Without Google, most websites won't get much traffic and if there is no traffic, there will no sales or viewing of a website. Don't underestimate the power of the Google. If you agree, read on to learn how to make your website or blog more Google-friendly using Google's webmaster tools.

If you don't do your images right, you easily end up with images that take too long to download or worse be in wrong formats. Make sure images you post on your blog or website are in JPEG, Gif, or PNG format. As you probably may know, text loads faster than other web media such as graphics, flash or media. Why is this significant? This suggests if you use text more often than other web media, your website visitors will get the message quickly.

If you are thinking of starting your own blog or website, make sure you know how to make your online presence successful. Now days, it is so easy to put up a professional looking web-page or website online in minutes using existing templates or menu-driven choices. But that alone is not going to do the trick if no one comes to the website. For brining-in or retaining website visitors, you will need to do more. Whether you have big or small ideas for your first online presence endeavors, a focus on best practices, as discussed here, will help you succeed.

If you were trying to read an encrypted message such as a line

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You would not understand what it says unless you also knew how to decipher it. This is the whole idea behind encryption: prevent others from reading or viewing your encrypted files and messages if they don't have the means of decoding it. With encryption, in theory only those to whom you provide means of decoding the files can read the content of the files.

If you have an email account, chances are you have received one or spam message(s). With the advances in technology, it is easier and cheaper than ever before to send email scams. Email account providers have complex computing resources devoted for just detecting spam messages. Their goal is to detect a spam message before it reaches your Inbox. However, they are not always successful thus your Inbox ends up with a spam message now and then. In this post, I will discuss number of ways you can protect yourself against such email scam threats.

Computers today handle data in digital format (this is why they are called digital computers). Digital computers handle data characters as group of binary digits. The term digital refers to a signal such as binary. Binary is identified by two specific states, values, or outcomes. Consider the following examples:

Whether you have sensitive files or ordinary files, you are not limited to just storing them on your computer's hard drive. You have many more options when it comes to off-system storage. Such options include storing on: external hard drives, flash/portable disk, and more.

Presently, information sharing is an essential part of our economy. Whether you make a purchase from your home or office computer, information about your transaction is shared and stored. Information sharing and storage also applies to most of other financial and non-financial online transactions.

As it implies, electronic mail (or email or just email) is a way of sending mail electronically. In early days, e-mail was sent in plain-text (ASCII) format in academic settings. However, e-mail now has risen to include other types of communications such as commercial, political, and social. In terms of the format, email can be created and sent in HTML that can have embedded pictures, sound, and videos, subject to the constraints of the file-size limitations imposed by the sender's and receiver's account.

A successful delivery of an email requires having a valid email address for both the sender and receiver. Think of an email address as any other kind of address because an email address consists of a person and place. In an email address, the person part is the userid (or username) and the place is the domain name of the remote computer.

An email message consists of these three basic distinct parts: header, message body, and, signatures.

The roots of internet go back to the late 1960s, when mainframe computers were networked together to share data. Advances in communications infrastructure and affordable computing power have yielded an increase at an exponential rate in internet use. Internet serves variety of purposes including entertainment, discussions, shopping, research, and more. Today any data that can be put on a computer can be found on the internet.

A Domain Name Server (DNS) is a standardized system that relates an internet name (such as google.com, yahoo.com, GiantPile.com, and so on) to an IP address. When you type google.com in your browser's address bar and hit enter, the DNS will translate your request to the corresponding IP address.

Navigating through the World Wide Web requires the use of a web browser. A decade ago or in the distant past the way computing field advances, seeing a web page in one web browser did not necessarily look the same in another browser. This was because the developers of the web browsers pushed their way of showing the web content was better than other browsers in the market. This led to what is now referred to as the Browser Wars.

In a Windows PC (personal computer), the Recycle Bin (the trash icon) holds your recently deleted files. Just like a trash bin in your kitchen, the Recycle Bin holds your unwanted stuff (computer files). When the trash bin is full, it is emptied to hold new unwanted stuff. This also applies to Recycle Bin. If you through something in the trash bin by mistake, you want to take out for further use. This is also true with the Recycle Bin.

Your web browser does more than just showing you the text on a web page. It, for example, can also show you videos or animations. If your browser is not capable of handling a particular type of data (perhaps a flash or QuickTime video clip), the browser will simply ignore that data and show you other items (if any) on the page. Installing of the necessary plug-ins or software can fix this problem.

What is a computer? It is a super-fast machine (or gadget) that performs routine calculations. A computer is responsible for performing calculations with great speed and reliability. For the computer performing these calculations are easy while for us they are not. Beside the basic function of making calculations, the advance of technology has enabled computers to provide many services for many people.