Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

It seems that there is a very large group of Internet users who are downloading music without paying for it. They are not only downloading a few mp3 files, but around half of them are claiming that they are actually copying whole hard drives full of music. On average, it is reported that people download approximately 50 tracks without paying for them. Is there any way to force people to pay for music? It is hard to say, but I am quite sure that the best way to do it is to offer the consumers what they want. Why not give them access to the whole library of music for, let us say, 10 dollars per month, or allow them to download 50 tracks per month for some reasonable fee? There are many ways to do so. In the United States the legal system becomes more hostile against those who download music that is copyrighted. In fact, it becomes more and more difficult for people in the US to download any music at all, as they might be afraid of the consequences. If this is the case, they are left with the option of purchasing music, which they might not be able to afford. Why not offer them a more reasonable price? Why not sell music at a lower price? This solution that would allow people to buy more CDs at a reasonable price and would probably reduce music piracy.

Benefiting from various technological advancements can give a lot of satisfaction. However, what we need to remember is that being obsessed with some aspects of technology is not always good. I am talking about excessive email checking. It is quite possible that in the future there will be meetings of people called “email checkers anonymous”. Let us discuss our this topic for a while. First of all, there are people who are addicted to checking email so often that it ruins their personal life and well-being. Very often the problem is that instead of spending quality time with their family, people often work too much. However, in case of excessively checking emails, you are not even going to get paid by anybody. One might say that it does not take that much time to read emails. However, you have to remember, that checking email is often associated with not only reading the message, but also responding or taking other actions. There is also no point checking email if you know that it might contain a message about some potentials problems at work, which you cannot solve until next Monday anyway. If you are tempted to check your email too often, talk to somebody about it. Ask this person to help you in some way.

Would you like to hear some email tips? You have probably seen BCC before many times, and were wondering what this abbreviation stands for. By using BCC, you can send your email to many people without them knowing who the other recipients are. Whereas CC stands for Carbon Copy, BCC is a abbreviation for Blind Carbon Copy. As using CC enables other people to see who else received a message, there are many advantages of using BCC over CC:

Overall, Blind Carbon Copy ensures privacy of your recipients, so in many situations this will be the biggest advantage of using it.

Keeping the files and documents on your PC in order is as important as keeping your apartment or home tidy. Some people who spend a lot of their time in front of their PC say that it is even more important to take care of your PC. One of the ways you can keep your desktop tidy is by arranging your icons in a better way. Many icons on our desktops are colorful and look appealing. Many of them will also remind you of something enjoyable, like your favorite music track which you love to listen to.
Anyway, when it comes to arranging icons, some users do it either manually. However, it usually takes them a lot of time. Others prefer to automatically arrange their icons. You can change the location of your icons, their position, as well as spacing between them. You can have plenty of satisfaction keeping your desktop tidy. To do it, you just need to right click anywhere on your desktop, and from the menu choose Properties->Appearance tab->Advanced Options->Item->Icon. From there you can adjust their size and font.

You can also experiment with other items that you can change. I am sure that experimenting with ways to keep your desktop tidy will give you plenty of satisfaction. I definitely had a lot of fun while I was arranging various icons on my desktop.

One of the things that make our computers quite noisy are fans and mouses. There are at least a few types of computer fans. I am talking here about their size, but I would also like to distinguish ball bearing fans from fluid or sleeve fans. Generally, you might prefer fluid or sleeve fans, as they generally produce less noise, but on the other hand, it is only ball bearing fans that will get louder and louder when they are about to stop working. Fluid or sleeve fans will simply stop working without any warning, and thus pose a risk to some components of your computer. Additionally, ball bearing fans tend to work longer that their sleeve or fluid counterparts. Computer mouses are being used in millions of workplaces and households, to the degree that it would be difficult to imagine working at the computer without them. I am sometimes wondering how mouses will look like in the future and whether we will use them at all. It is clear, in my opinion, that at some point we will abandon them and use some other way to communicate with computers. Some suggest that it will be simply by talking to them, but would it not be too loud in many circumstances? Can you imagine 20 people in an Internet cafe talking to their computer? It might be hard to imagine that mouses will once be gone, but I am sure it will happen sooner or later.

Most shows available on the Internet were usually hosted illegally. This is changing now, and an example of this trend is Hulu. Hulu is one of the best ways to watch any of your favorite TV shows that you might have missed. It is indeed very convenient. No one wants to miss their favorite TV shows, and waiting for a rerun is not always as convenient as it might sound to some people. At this point you might be wondering about the price of watching the shows. I am pleased to tell you that the site is free to use. The quality of videos is also excellent and even allows full screen. It appears that Hulu makes profit by integrating ads in their streaming videos. This allows them to host TV shows and movies from NBC, FOX, and other networks and studios. While currently it is only offered to users in United States, I am sure that more sites like this will be created, which will be aimed at an international audience. All I have to say is that I hope that even more websites like this will be created. I think that sites of this type will become very popular in the upcoming years, because Internet users are going to appreciate them.

There has been a big progress in developing Artificial Intelligence, but one of the fundamental questions that we should ask ourselves is whether we want to design AI based on humans. There are a lot of sci-fi movies that depict machines to be almost on equal terms as humans. Is this what we want? Artificial Intelligence should be designed from scratch to serve humans, as what would be the purpose to create AI with free will? We want machines to help us in our tasks, but we do not want to create a whole new race of beings. I think that many scientists who work on AI might try too hard to design it based on humans. Like I said, the reason why we would want intelligent machines is to help us with our tasks, not replace us. Of course, if we want to be realistic, we have to admit that AI with free will sounds a bit far-fetched. Possibly, machines could try to imitate free will, but they will never actually possess it. That being said, I do not even see the reason to create machines that would be imitating free will, so that is something that we as a society should think about. We should focus our efforts on creating AI that will be able to help us with many tasks that usually require humans.

Handheld devices have become increasingly popular in the last few years. This includes iPods and PDAs, which are very useful devices. PDA stands for Personal Digital Assistant, or Personal Data Assistant. As its name suggests, it was designed to assist you in storing and analyzing your personal data. In the past nobody even thought that there would be technology to develop such small computers capable of running similar software that our PCs are running. In the beginning they were only created to serve as simple calculators and data storage devices with limited capacities. PDAs are usually small, but it does not mean they do not have a lot of features. There are a lot of features that these handheld devices have, thanks to the technology progressing so fast. Today, there are many PDAs to choose from, as they are gaining more and more on popularity. These days not only very rich businessmen use them, but are also used by regular consumers in their everyday lives. Pocket PCs have many features: you can use Excel to make complicated calculations, Word to make notes, calendar to keep track of appointments, pdf file readers to open ebooks, voice recorder to record some thoughts, and many other applications.

AutoComplete is a quite useful tool in Firefox that allows your browser to remember what you enter in forms. For example, you may want Firefox to remember your personal details such as name, address and email, so that you do not have to type it each time. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you fill out various forms on a daily basis. This feature is great and I use it a lot, but there are also some potential problems. One of them is when you misspell some important information such as email. Next time when you will try to enter your email, Firefox will suggest this misspelled email. That is why when you make such a mistake it is important to erase the saved form data. You can do that by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and clicking Clear Now. Just make sure you indicate what you want to clear. Of course, if you had any other information stored, it will also be deleted. That is why you should only use this feature when you are absolutely certain you want to do it. You should be especially careful if you have been using Firefox for many months, and possibly have a lot of personal details stored. Once you press Clear Now, all of them will be lost. Anyway, I believe that AutoComplete is a very useful feature, and I recommend that you take advantage out of it.

Many people decide to use Firefox as their preferred Internet browser due to many features not found in other browsers like Internet Explorer. One of the really useful things in Firefox is the built-in spell checker. It is a great tool that will help you spot any mistakes you make while you type in Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox only checks the spelling on large text fields, not all of them. In order to enable spell checking for all fields, you will have to do some small modification. To do so, you should first type “about:config” in the address bar. Later type “layout.spellcheckdefault” in the filter box, and double click on preference to change value from 1 to 2.

After restarting Firefox your new settings should be applied. You will see that it works, if typos are going to be underlined in red. You can even try to misspell some words on purpose to see if it works.
This tweak will allow you to spot any mistakes you make, even if you are typing in small fields, such as when you fill out forms. From my personal experience I can say that spell checking can be very useful. However, if you really want to avoid making mistakes, you should only be writing when you feel rested, because being tired can greatly reduce your concentration.