Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

It is important for employers that employees should work efficiently and contribute to the success of the company. I do not think anyone is going to argue with that. One of the things that employees might potentially do is waste their time sending non-relevant email. Of course, this does not contribute to you company’s success, and is considered a time waster. The employer can always say that the computers belong to him, so that he has the right to see what his employees are writing, but recently employers also want access to any mobile text messages being sent. What about the privacy of people? It seems that privacy is not the biggest concern in the 21st century. However, these days people value their privacy a lot. I think that many might not mind their employers having access to their email account, but full access to their mobile phone might be an exaggeration. While sending irrelevant email messages might take workers some time, text messages are usually very short and take only a few seconds to send. Very often you might just want to tell your children to get something for lunch or tell them some other important things. I think that sending very short messages should be allowed, because after all we are human beings with families. Everybody should have the right to have a few minute break at work to talk to a family member, or send a short message if there is something important to say.

Surveillance is becoming more and more popular. While I cannot say that I approve of it, the facts are that it is going to be even more widespread in the future. Surveillance these days collects some much data that it is impossible to process it effectively. Basically, governments collect such data but they are unable to process it. There are thousands of cameras that are constantly recording video, but are they really fulfill their role besides spying on people? Can they be effective enough to apprehend criminals? I think that this question was already answered by the 9/11 attacks, as there was data pointing to an attack, but there was no way to properly analyze it on time. We must accept that we are not yet that technologically advanced to analyze all of the data we collect. While it may seem logical that it would be a good thing if we were able to instantly analyze surveillance data, the truth is more complicated. If computers were able to automatically analyze all data and keep records of it, then we would virtually have no privacy. That is because computers would know our shopping habits and interests. The situation would get even worse if there were more and more cameras everyone.

Pocket PC’s are very useful and many agree that they have even more features than smartphones. While buying a Pocket PC is a great idea, it might not be easy to decide which Pocket PC to purchase. Some people are undecided to the extend that eventually they do not buy any Pocket PC at all. Let me offer you a few words of advice that might help you in making the right choice.
First of all, you should decide what size you want your Pocket PC to be. This should depend on the things you want to do on your Pocket PC. For example, if you want to work in Excel you will need to have a relatively large screen. My second advice is to buy a Pocket PC that only has the features you really need. Do not pay a lot more only because it has a camera you will never use anyway. There are a lot of features of Pocket PCs that may sound useful; however, the question is whether you are going to use those features or not. You do not need a device that supports Bluetooth if you do not plan to use Bluetooth at all.

The technology has been moving forward really fast during the last couple of years. I think that one of the biggest changes there has been was with the Internet, and this includes blogs. When it comes to blogs, there are more and more plug-ins available that you can install, and I have seen many sites displaying how many visitors are currently online on the site. I would like to share with you some of my thoughts regarding displaying the number of visitors online. First of all, I think that it is a useful feature in some cases and has a certain “coolness factor”. If you often have many visitors online, it will definitely look great to display the number of visitors. What you need to take into consideration before you put such a plug-in on your site is why you want this plug-in in the first place. Personally, I would suggest that you only put such plug-ins on your websites if you really have traffic to brag about. On the other hand, if you usually have 0-2 visitors at a time, displaying the number of visitors will not present your site in a favorable manner. What I want to say is that you do not need to incorporate every clever plug-in there is, just because you know how to do it. First consider the advantages and disadvantages.

YouTube is a video sharing website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. It seems that YouTube is so popular like it was never before. Billions of clips are being viewed on a monthly basis by millions of unique visitors. Taking into account that Youtube is only a few years old, that is massive success. It seems that nothing can stop YouTube from dominating the market, which proves that Google’s decision to acquire YouTube was justified. When it comes to video streaming sites, on the second place comes MySpace with 85% less traffic compared to YouTube. On the third place comes Yahoo, and on the fourth position is Google Video. It is worthy of note that Google owns two of these websites: YouTube and Google Video. This makes other sites hard to compete with Google. It also proves that Google can achieve dominance not only when it comes to search engines, but also other aspects of the Web.

On the other hand, since this company achieved so much, it has also a lot to lose. One of the reasons Youtube achieved such a success is because it is innovative. Besides allowing people to watch over 100 million videos every day, to keep up with the competition YouTube launched a live channel during November, 2008. This channel allows viewing streaming videos all over the world. This is great news for anyone interested in streaming videos, and it will be also interesting to see in the upcoming years how easy accessibility of live video streaming will revolutionize the Internet.

Games are becoming more and more popular each year. If you take a look at games from the past and compare them to contemporary games, you can clearly see the difference in graphics quality. The exponential progress in technology allowed us to create games with very realistic graphics. I am even convinced that a lot of people play computer games, because they like how their in-game character looks like. They might feel insecure in real life; however, playing a game allows them to feel confident and this confidence might even affect their regular life. On the other hand, someone who tries to lose weight in real life is not going to like the idea of playing an overweight character. Games allow players to escape from reality, and that is why players often like to play a character that looks completely different from how they look like in reality. It is interesting to observe what looks a player’s avatar has. If you had a choice, what avatar would you create?

It is clear that more and more people create their virtual avatars and once more data will be collected, it will be interesting to analyze it and make some observations.

There are a lot of watches on the market that you can buy for a few hundred dollars that have a few features such as stopper, timer, compass, a few alarms etc. These days, when people spend a lot of time at their computer, I think that purchasing a very expensive watch might not be such a great idea. I am saying this, because a computer’s processing power is millions times faster compared to a watch, and whatever you may want your computer to do, you can just download a program for it. If you want an alarm at specific times of the day, you can use AlarmMaster that allows users to set up unlimited amount of alarms at whatever day of the week, month, or year. You can also set whatever intervals you choose. If you want a stopper you can download it as well, and copy it to a Pocket PC, which you can take with you anywhere.

Basically, what I am saying is that buying a computer is a great idea, because you can have anything you want on a PC. This is not the case with products like watches or phones, which lack useful features including processing power. If you get to think about it you will realize what a great investment a computer can be. Sometimes we can forget how much money a computer can save us. A computer can replace many devices and in turn can save us a lot of money. For example, you will not have to buy newspapers if you will be able to read all of the news you want just by visiting a website.

The console market is quite interesting to observe. Among the biggest players we have Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox360, and Sony Playstation 3. It can be clearly seen that all of the consoles are backed up by large corporations, which have years of experience in selling games and consoles. Both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have games with very good graphics thanks to the technical specification of the consoles, while Wii stays a bit behind. Remarkably, Nintendo Wii sales are growing and they outsell the other two more technologically advanced consoles. While it might seem that it is hard to know why the market is behaving in such a way, I think that it is quite clear to the trained eye. There are three main reasons behind this:

• Wii has very entertaining controls, which require people to move their hands and swing their arms like never before. Wii has even its own use in physical therapy. Because of the innovative controls, Wii games are very original. Gamers really feel like they are participating in the in-game activities thanks to the Wii controller.

• There are a lot of fun games on Wii. It might be due to Nintendo signing deals with many gaming studios. After all, Nintendo is a huge corporation and a lot of developers want to cooperate with it.
• Wii also appeals to a younger audience, which might explain its popularity. There are a lot of games designed especially for children or for younger gamers. Since children have usually a lot of time to play games, they often convince their parents to buy them a gaming console.

Of course, it does not mean that Nintendo Wii is vastly superior compared to other consoles. It may simply mean that it caters to a slightly different market.

Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites and has millions of files stored on its servers. While you can use the default free service to download or upload files, many people decide to purchase the premium Rapidshare account in order to benefit from Rapidshare even more. Unfortunately, those who bought a premium account are in danger of losing it due to phishing scams. I investigated how you can protect yourself from such deceptive actions and here are my conclusions:

• First of all, if you suspect that someone unauthorized may be using your account, or if you already are a victim of a phishing scam, then change your password as soon as possible and log out. I think this is quite straightforward.
• You can enable direct download from Rapidshare premium account option page. This will mean that each time you want to download something, but will get redirected to a login page, you will know it is fake. Logging on a phishing website can be very dangerous.
• The real link to download Rapidshare files looks like this: http://rapidshare.com/files/12345678/xxxxx.rar. Be careful if someone gives you a link that looks differently as it is most certainly a phishing scam.

Most importantly, be careful whatever you are doing with your Rapidshare account. Do not share your password with anybody, and make sure to make your password as complicated as possible. I always recommend people to have hard to guess passwords in order to avoid any potential hackers.

Most people do not upgrade their computers even up to a few years after the initial purchase. Unless something gets damaged, they do not have to deal with computer stores that sell computer components. However, if you become a gamer then you might need to start buying new components on a regular basis. If you want to play a game that was released four years ago, then everything will work fine. On the other hand, if you want to play a game that was just released a few weeks ago, then you might experience some problems with outdated hardware. In most cases, it is the graphic card that will not be able to render proper visual effects. Graphic cards can get very easily outdated. I know gamers who spend a lot of money on their PC, but now are having more and more problems running the newest computer games. Be prepared to spend a lot of money on the newest components, especially if you want to pay the newest games. That is unless you want to play video games on a console like, for example, Nintendo Wii or Playstation 3. In such a case, you will not need to upgrade it by buying newer components; however, every few years you will need to replace it with a newer generation console.