Computer Spot

Here’s an interesting concept – attend university for free – on a computer, through iTunes. If you’ve been hearing a little bit about something called iTunes U and have been meaning to look it up, this is what it is.

The answer to the question of what is iTunes U is simple – it’s a feature on iTunes that universities pipe their free courses to you through. But it isn’t just university courses that you get, of course. K-12 education is available on a separate channel, as well. There are 800 universities around the world that participate.

Now that you know what is iTunes U, you’re probably anxious to get started. And you probably have lots of questions. Let’s get right to it. Let’s see how it works.

If you have iTunes on your computer, you’re already halfway there. There is an iTunes U button on the toolbar on the front page.

It takes you straight to where you’re going. Right away, you get your full selection of subjects, schools, the top 10 and so on.

Click on it, and you get a full series of lectures or books or anything else. Once you have the course content on your computer, you can port it to your iDevice (which is an easy way to say iPhone, iPod or iPad), or you could read on your computer.

There’s no homework and there’s no one pushing you to go faster. It’s completely user-determined, how fast you go.

If you’re wondering about what is iTunes U good for if there’s no one pushing you, this is probably not the application for you.

You don’t get any university degrees or credits at all. This is just for those who pursue knowledge for the sake of it.

If you find that this is a great concept, to get great lectures and books and study material to take you step-by-step right from the basics to the most advanced levels, if you really want to have the benefit of the kind of education the ivyleaguers get, then this certainly is for you.

So is this a great idea or not? It depends on what you’re looking for. Of course, if you’re looking to your iPhone to substitute a college degree, you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.

But if what you’re looking for is education in something new for a practical purpose – you are in luck. And just think about all those people all around the world who just don’t have access to reasonable education.

Or else, think of all those young people in this country who would like to give a college course a dry run before they actually commit.

It’s a winner of a concept, and it’s the promise that the Internet came with, all along.

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Fake antivirus designers can get their work done in some ingenious ways. Around the time the British royal wedding spectacle was going on, one particular malware designer thought of a pretty clever way of exploiting the Royal wedding craze to his advantage.

He put up very a popular portrait of Princess Diana on a website (because he knew people would be searching for Princess Diana).

When people clicked on the website, they got redirected time and again until they suddenly found themselves on a website that came up with a very Microsoft-ey-looking dialog box – that said that their computer was infected, and they needed to pay $60 then and there to get rid of it.

This was fake antivirus, of course. And if nothing else, people can always tell a fake antivirus pitch by how they demand money right away. Reputable companies always offer you a free one month trial.

Anyway, reputable companies never pop up a warning like that. Fake antivirus isn’t some kind of fringe business. The FBI believes that they make will that’s the one billion-dollar industry every year.

They steal money, they take control of computers, they steal information, and they turn your computer into a kind of remote-controlled robot to make it send out lots of spam to everyone else.

The problem with fake antivirus is so bad, the normally immune Macintosh operating system has just had its first fake antivirus announced. [Score for Macintosh: 01, and Microsoft 10,000].

Fake antivirus makers use every trick in the book to get through. Sometimes, they use simple spam and online advertising.

At other times, they do it through actually calling you at home and asking you to visit their website for something or the other. Once you get there, you’ll find familiar fake antivirus running putting up.

Most of these attacks come from countries in Eastern Europe and China. There are set on stealing from the West. When fake software detects that your computer uses Chinese or Russian something, it just won’t try to steal from you.

Some of these businesses make such a great living from what they do. They try pushing fake software with convincing-sounding names like Win Drive Cleaner or XP Internet Security Organization and just get past a lot of people’s defenses.

And since they actually ask you for permission and get you to pay, your antivirus software is often a little unsure whether it needs to stop this thing that you paid money for.

Some of these organizations actually have 1000 employees and proper offices in Eastern Europe. Just imagine – some of these companies make $200 million a year. That’s more money than Twitter makes.

When these fake antivirus companies are so big, they can afford to constantly rewrite their malware code so that your antivirus software has a very hard time indeed detecting anything. As usual, personal vigilance is all that will protect you.

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Starting a new small business is never easy. As you indulge yourself in the initial responsibilities to do with putting everything together, you shouldn’t be surprised to find that the costs of equipping your new office are kind of on the high side.

A new business basically can have a healthy appetite for investment. Luckily, there are all kinds of options around that can help take the sting out of how much it costs.

Take for instance how expensive equipping your office with computers can be. The good part is that you don’t even have to buy anything these days. Computer equipment leasing businesses can juice you right up at practically no charge at all.

For those who’ve never actually been formally introduced to computer equipment leasing, it’s pretty much like a car lease or like leasing office space.

A leasing company that specializes in the kind of equipment you’re looking for makes the investment and they let it out to you under contract.

You just make regular payments towards the equipment that you lease for the duration of the contract. At the end, you can either drop the equipment off and walk away or you can simply pay something more and own the equipment outright.

Come to think of it, when it comes to computer equipment, leasing is an excellent option. These are things that go out of style really quickly.

At the end of the year or two that your contract keeps you tied to the equipment for, you’ll find that the equipment isn’t really as good as the newest stuff. If you owned the equipment, you’d probably be worried about how much you’ve invested in it to throw it away or to sell it.

When your lease runs out, you’ll probably the able to get much better equipment for much less. Computer equipment leasing businesses don’t just lease out the hardware either. They deal in software to.

And once every couple of years, any software brand is going to come out with a software upgrade or two. Basically, leasing makes a lot of sense when it comes to computer equipment for the small business.

But the good news doesn’t end there. Consider how the IRS allows you to completely claim deductions for any payment to make on computer equipment.

The 10% that they allow could be a spectacular reprieve. And even if you do decide midway that you would like to keep the equipment for yourself, you can just prepay right away with no penalty.

And you’d save on all the interest.

It’s like there’s always something on the horizon trying to wipe established laptops and computers out. At first, when Asus came out with its EeePC mini laptop four years ago, people couldn’t stop wondering if a small portable laptop that did most things well was all you needed and how a full-fledged laptop was overkill.

These days, iPad-like tablets have all but left netbooks in the dust and there’s talk of how the big computer manufacturers are scared of how the tablet is going to put everything out of the running.

If you’re looking to jump on the handheld computer bandwagon, should you go with the iPad or should you go with one of the alternatives? Which is the best tablet PC on the market for your money?

The thing is, choosing among the different tablets doesn’t work the way it does when you’re trying to choose from among different kinds of laptop. There are different kinds of things you need to compare – not just power and screen size.

For instance, when you buy a laptop, you get just one of two different operating systems to choose from – Windows or MacOS.

Go over to tablets, and you have iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS and Windows 7. Since all of these have comparable feature sets, and you can’t really go by those to make a distinction.

And of course, there is HP’s sad WebOS – an option you could choose if you wanted a tablet just for the fun of it. HP’s WebOS-powered TouchPad came out to much fanfare just a few months ago, and then sold so poorly that the company just abandoned tablet computers altogether.

If you’re not worried about buying a dead-end product, you can get one at Best Buy on firesale for $99.

If you’re looking for the best tablet PC out there, there are two kinds of ways you can judge a product for its OS. You can either look at how beautiful, elegant and easy-to-use it is, or you can look at how many downloadable apps there are available for it that will help you do all kinds of things with your purchase.

When it comes to OS elegance, Apple’s iOS is certainly the winner. But HP’s a WebOS is widely recognized to be extremely beautiful too. But HP’s product, when you buy it, is a dead end. There are no programs or applications for it.

You only have more or less what this product comes with. Apple’s App Store on the other hand is insanely well-stocked – with hundreds of thousands of apps.

Android is certainly not as slickly designed or is visually pleasing as Apple’s iOS. But it does have a very complete App Market.

So basically, picking the best tablet PC on the market comes down in one measure, to the kind of applications that are available for its OS.

You can also pick a tablet for the kind of specifications you look for in a laptop. Apples iPad happens to be about the lightest for the kind of performance you get. If you want something even lighter than the iPad, you could look at 7 inch tablets such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab or even smaller ones by Dell.

In the beginning, about 20 years ago, people would say that if you wanted to pick the best computer for your needs, you’d first pick the kind of software you planned to use on it, and then just look at the kind of computer you needed to get to run it properly.

The same would apply today to tablet PCs. Pick the apps that are the most attractive, and then pick the tablet that would run that app.

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It’s actually an ingenious way to attack someone – pretend to be a cop, a security guard, a watchdog.  people take one look at your badge and trust you – while you rob them blind.

It’s trick, whose efficacy is not lost on those who make viruses and other unworthy software – pretend to be antivirus software, and people actually pay you to have your infect their computers and rob them blind.

Google finds that this message is increasingly popular among makers of scammy software. So how do these people actually get people to believe in fake antivirus software?

They seek the good old trusted route of going with spam, ads all over the place and clever search engine manipulation to place their fake antivirus software websites on top so that people will click on them.

But they adopt all kinds of creative new ways from time to time. For instance, in spring this year, people using Firefox on Windows found themselves the target of a fake antivirus software attack.

These users would be minding their own business when they would find a pop-up sitting in the middle of their screen that looked exactly like a Microsoft update dialog box.

It would say that it was the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool and that there was an update due. Anyone who believed that and accepted the update would end up installing a virus.

The remarkable thing about this particular example of fake antivirus is that they’ve done a spot on impersonation of a Windows Update dialog box.

In general, you can be sure that you’ve downloaded fake antivirus software when you find that it asks you to pay right away without offering you a trial.

Basically, you don’t even need to go that far to know that you’re dealing with fake antivirus. Real antivirus will never just pop up when you’re minding your own business, and tell you that you’ve been infected.

The reputable software makers just wait for you to come looking for them. So if you are actually infected, how do you get rid of the infection?

Sometimes, they just won’t let you even run your antivirus. They keep nagging you and telling you that something isn’t right.

Usually, if you dismiss the message enough times, you can actually go and fire up your antivirus and get rid of the problem. If that doesn’t work, you could try renaming your antivirus software explorer.exe. That usually works.

In general, if you have trouble using your computer in any way after fake antivirus software infects it, try to boot into Safe Mode to try regaining control over the computer. You can do that by pressing the F8 key when your computer is starting up.

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In a time when people use their cellphones so much, they might as well surgically attach them to their ears, it’s a pain that after all these years, we still shouldn’t know for certain if pressing a powerful radio transmitter to your ear causes cancer.

There are times when scientists seem to believe that it doesn’t do any harm; and then again, there are scientists who believe it definitely does. So where exactly do we stand? What are the cell phone radiation facts that really matter?

For now, new cell phone radiation facts state that radiation from a phone could actually change the way your brain works. And it’s pretty credible stuff – published in the Journal of the American Medical Association as it is.

How exactly does it change the way the brain works? Well, as far as research at the National Institutes of Health goes, they’ve found that using a cellphone for an hour makes your brain metabolize glucose differently – more quickly.

Is this actually bad for you? Well, no one’s sure just yet. But just to know that using a cell phone makes your brain do things differently is spooking people.

The scientists behind the study aren’t really asking anyone to throw away their iPhones just yet. But they’re asking them to use them far less for conversations.

And if you do need to be on your phone a lot, you don’t have to give the cell phone up and switch to a landline just yet.

Using something like a wired hands-free headset would be a great way around the problem. If that’s just too cumbersome for you, you could go with a Bluetooth headset.

The Bluetooth headset isn’t completely radiation-free of course; but its transmitter is so weak, it is close enough.

When people look up cell phone radiation facts, they just think about how there is this “radiation” that they need to run away from.

Not all radiation is the same. For instance, radiation that’s even slightly less powerful – as from a Bluetooth headset – is far less risky.

And every single hair’s breadth that you manage to put between your ear and your cellphone, the less harmful the radiation becomes.

A good way to stay safe if you don’t have a headset handy, would be to try turning the speaker on and holding the phone an inch away from your ear.

Basically, it would be a good idea to never press your phone tightly to your ear to be able to hear better in a noisy room. A far better idea would be to get outside for the duration of such a call.

But it isn’t by any means just your head that’s sensitive to cell phone radiation. Facts points to how carrying your phone anywhere on your person could be risky.

In your shirt or pants pocket, it could still be quite risky. Basically, you want use any means available to you to put at least an inch between your body and any part of your phone.

The sad part in all of this is that the radiation problem is only getting worse. As phones become more complex, they need to put out stronger signals than ever before to make sure that all the information they try to communicate gets through. Smartphones do that a lot.

But there things you can do to minimize your exposure to radiation. Make sure that you don’t ever put the phone to your ear until the call actually goes through and it starts ringing. It’s that period of time that every phone emits the strongest signal.

And once you do start talking, you could hold the phone away from your ear when you do some actual talking and put it close to your ear when you listen. This kind of back-and-forth motion does a lot to protect you.

You could also stop moving when you talk. Walking and talking, your cell phone has to work harder to keep up. And that means a stronger signal.

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Ever wondered about who thought of the term “con artist” to describe someone who is obviously just a thief? Well, they also call them social engineers.

It’s for reason of course – it’s quite an art how they use their understanding of human nature to manipulate people and get them to do exactly as they wish.

This kind of social engineering in pursuit of fraud is particularly useful in the era of social networking. It helps hackers really get a Facebook virus in and about.

A very popular thing for makers of Facebook virus and malware examples to do to spread their evil, often, is to hack into a person’s account, gain control of it, and then to chat over Facebook to his closest friends with some dishonest plan in mind.

They think of some kind of sob story about how they are far from home, have been robbed and need some money. The person who receives this message will believe that since it comes from his friend’s Facebook account, it has to be genuine.

Here’s the perfect example for why they call this “social engineering”. Facebook has thousands and thousands of Facebook applications. They are made for all kinds of interests. People download them to add to the fun of it all.

Facebook doesn’t scrutinize or approve most of those apps that are on offer. Facebook’s app list is more like the Google Apps Marketplace than like the iTunes App Store in this way.

So when you download and install a Facebook app, you have no idea what it is – it could be a Facebook virus, for all you know. In many cases, it actually is.

And even if you don’t download an actual Facebook virus posing as an app, you could be downloading something programmed by some school kid who won’t be careful with the access he has to your personal information. You can get robbed that way.

What do you do when you find an app that says something irresistible like, “Find out about which of your friends is about to break up in the next 20 min”? Can you really resist? That’s social engineering for you.

There are many more tricks they have up their sleeve. For instance, how about a message you might get that says, “Here’s a great new video about you”.

Who could resist this?  Even if you receive this from a friend, there is no way you could know if your friend really sent this – or if a hacker gained access to your friend’s account. Almost always, this is a virus.

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Yes, you should buy into the whole 4G technology hype; but that’s not what this article is about. It’s about whether you should do so today.

If you believe everything that the phone industry tells you, 4G technology will be to the cell phone in your pocket today what the iPhone is to their huge shoebox-like cell phone that people use to carry around in the early 90s.

You’re probably familiar with the kind of hype that 3G came with about 10 years ago. It’s actually taken reality this long to catch up with all the hype that 3G came with 10 years ago.

3G certainly was worth the trouble – it has brought us better call quality, high-speed Internet and the App Store. The iPhone would not have been possible without all this.

But how funny would it have been if you had bought the 3G phone in the year 2001 when the whole 3G circus began?

4G technology isn’t in the kind of sad shape today that 3G was in when it was first hyped a decade ago. 4G is in way better shape; the only problem is, that the industry really hasn’t sorted itself out. Read the rest of this entry →

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We have certainly been working on lopping off the wires that get our gadgets speaking to one another. The remote control takes care of one, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth take care of some, and the cell phone takes care of one important wire.

Somehow, it’s hard to get tired of the magic of going wireless, no matter how many times we get to experience it. Samsung has come up with a new wireless connection to lop off a few more wires now that happens to be particularly exciting.

The device looks no different from any particularly trendy looking 27” high-def computer monitor. It costs about $500 to buy.

So why would you pay that much money for a 27 inch monitor when you could probably get it for $350? You’d pay that because this is more than just a monitor. It’s a monitor with a wireless docking station built in.

Have you ever had the misfortune to use a laptop docking station? A docking station is a device that works with certain laptops; the docking station connects to a proper keyboard and mouse, a full-sized monitor, external hard drives and every peripheral you need for a proper desktop experience. Read the rest of this entry →

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As we know today, almost every business depends on the computer. As you see even for easy task most people using their personal computer or laptop.

Perhaps in some office many people prefer using a personal computer or laptop to write or noting the details of something rather than using a normal pen and paper.

There are many benefits of using a personal computer. Managing work on computer has become much easier than doing it manually.

Don’t forget that your computer is an electronic device which mean it may get some trouble which need troubleshooting. The trouble of the computer is really out of consideration. If you know which part of your computer need to be repaired then you can fix it.

But most people who use the computer don’t know how to repair the computer. That’s mean that we need a good and efficient computer repair company in our area to get our computers repaired immediately.

Judging the reputation of computer repair company can be done in several ways, including looking at the services they offer. Not all computer repair companies have the same reputations.

Here are the several ways for your guide to find good computer repair company :

1. Ask your friends where they usually fix their computer. If your friends don’t know, you can search on the internet or on your local computer magazine.
2. Read some feedback of their service. You can ask your friend how good the company is. or you can search the feedback on the internet.
3. It’s better to find company that has repair technician that can communicate well with you.
4. One of the sign of good computer repair company is the company can exist for years or even a decade. People still trust that company to repair their company for years, it’s a good sign.
5. What is their guarantee? Usually the computer repair company will offer a guarantee. Look for  a company that offers at least 30 days or more.

There are many computer repair company out there, such as computer repair austin tx. Those tips help you to find which company is the best for you.