petersaville.net

Its an interesting point but even in Port Macquarie, if you go around in your car with an open laptop and you will probably notice your machine automatically attempting to connecting to various wireless Internet routers that local residents have set up but have not protected from other users.

An American technical researcher believes that people are not protecting themselves adequately from hackers or free loaders and by having an unprotected network that anyone can jump on leaves the persons computers prone to hacker attack or remote controlling.

According to the expert, few people who operate wide-open wireless networks actually have protection using even the simplest encryption technology and thoses that do employ the technology tend to leave the routers default user name and password needed to reconfigure the router as factory default for the life of the router..

Its possible that consumers aren't terribly worried about their neighbours "sniffing" the ambient wireless airwaves for passwords and other sensitive data.

In all reality, its probably a mwebsite running malicious code that would be more of a threat than neighbours as Symantec Corp. have discovered a series exploits that show how an Internet user running any one of several name-brand routers under the default factory settings could be in a real mess in a very quickly by browsing to a malicious Web site.

When buying a server its not only the capital cost of actually perchasing the item that has to be taken into account but a series of other criteria is calculated to see which server will have the best total cost of ownership outcome. A recent American report says that costs power to run them, and power to cool them is significant. Te report concludes that in 2005, the total power consumption of US servers was 0.6 percent of overall US electricity consumption. When cooling equipment is added, that number doubles to 1.2 percent—the same amount used by color televisions.

IBM has announced that is has developed a new technology for putting memory on a processing chip (such as CPU’s) that the company believes will increase overall performance of the Personal and Business computers of the future.
The process will include using DRAM (dynamic RAM) in place of SRAM (static RAM) as the embedded memory cache built onto each of its chips.
IBM will include this new technology in its 45-nanometer processors due to be released in 2008. Each processor will store its data in one-third the area and use one-fifth the electricity for standby power. This will not only improve processing performance for multi-core processors and for applications that require large amounts of graphic data, but also have environment positive consequences.
In most processors available on the retail market presently the cache memory is integrated directly onto the chip. This is so that frequently used data can be accessed faster rather than going looking for it in the system ram which can take a few milliseconds.
IBM says it plans on putting anywhere from 24MB to 48MB of on-chip cache memory into its new processors next year.

Insurer Suncorp Metway has completed the migration of 10,000 desktops and 350 applications from Windows NT to XP after eight months.
Suncorp and services partner Infosys migrated over 100 desktops per day during the eight months to December, according to a statement by Infosys.
The migration was run over 277 Suncorp locations, with Microsoft's Active Directory a key part of the rollout. Active Directory would reduce the support costs of managing multiple NT domains, said the statement.
The companies also deployed Microsoft's Systems Management Server 2003 which will allow the desktops to be managed remotely. In addition, Suncorp will be able to deploy packaged software in four hours. Previously the deployment cycle took three days.
Suncorp general manager for IT infrastructure, Paul Cameron, said there was little interruption to staff during the rollout.
"They would simply go home one night running NT and when they came to work the next day they had XP on their machines and access to the new supporting infrastructure and business applications," he said.

Sales of consumer PCs around the world are spiking solidly during the initial release Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, and PC sales were well up on the corresponding period of previous year. Individual hardware sales are also spiking as it appears people buy Windows Vista end up then needing buy hardware to get features of Vista working. Hot items seem to be new video cards, DDR RAM and tv tuner cards in both analogue and digital formats.

In the USA new machine sales with Vista preinstalled could be broken down as Vista Home Premium PCs 59% of desktops and 76% of notebooks, Home Basic 33% and 16% respectively. Vista Ultimate, the top of the range product 1% of sales.

Sales of consumer PCs around the world are spiking solidly during the initial release Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, and PC sales were well up on the corresponding period of previous year. Individual hardware sales are also spiking as it appears people buy Windows Vista end up then needing buy hardware to get features of Vista working. Hot items seem to be new video cards, DDR RAM and tv tuner cards in both analogue and digital formats.

In the USA new machine sales with Vista preinstalled could be broken down as Vista Home Premium PCs 59% of desktops and 76% of notebooks, Home Basic 33% and 16% respectively. Vista Ultimate, the top of the range product 1% of sales. Australian figures when they are released are predicted to be simular to the US figures.

Well Windows XP had bugs in it and its successor seems buggier than a cockroach farm. It seems that Vista its best installed a on fresh machine, if we go of my experience of upgrading windows vista on my existing hardware it would appear many people would be having extreme frustrations when upgrading.

The first thing we need to do is download the vista upgrade adviser program, this program scans your hardware looks over it and identifies the programs and pieces of hardware that may not work with vista. I downloaded this program and ran it, it came up and said that I was ok to install vista with a clean install. This is where the vista set up program moves all your own programs and windows files into a directory on your hard drive and then installs a clean copy of itself.

I did that and vista installed ok, but I found it didn’t support the hardware that the advisor said that it would and also the company gigabyte, who manufacture my main board didn’t have drivers for the vista operating system. So I went back to xp.

I was talking to a number of chain stores and they say they are bombarded with grumpy customers who have been tempted by all the hype to upgrade their machine. Basically my advice to everyone is if it isn’t broke don’t try and fix it as it might complicate things.

Do people have way to much time on their hands or what? But Ebay have been forced to imposed bans on auctions of virtual items from online games such as EverQuest. For years, players have sold virtual items that can give an edge. Ebay has decided to ban non tangable products like these because of the possible legal ramifications and disputes caused. Apparently the virtual game items, which can be swapped between players technically under the software licence for such games would still be the property of game manufacturer so making money from the sale of a virtual component of a game may well in breach of the end user agreement or software licence.

As Vissta hit the shelves last week with a big lot of Microsoft hype, bugs are starting to appear. Security issues, driver problems and some multimedia programs are having issues with the new operating system. Beta users of Vista have long reported problems running version 7.02 of iTunes, the most recent release. Apple, since the same problem has occurred in the full retail releases have issued the following recommendation: "iTunes 7.0.2 may work with Windows Vista on many typical PCs. Apple recommends, however, that customers wait to upgrade Windows until after the next release of iTunes which will be available in the next few weeks."

However, in what seems to be the worse security flaw ever in an operating system Windows Vista is too smart for its own good. Security researchers found that Vista's speech recognition system is good enough for hackers to issue security breaching commands using malicious sound files on rogue websites.

My currently feeling is to wait a few months before looking at upgrading till at least a number of roll up security packages have been released.

Apparently, female gamers are quickly becoming commonplace in Australia and will soon overtake men as the most common gender playing games down under. The report predicts that the number of female gamers will be the same as male gamers by 2012 and iuts believed the number of female gamers will over take males soon after that.

In a survey of 1,606 Australians, results showed that female gamers preferred to play puzzles, board games, cards, and family titles. Male gamers prefer racing and first-person shooters. Although, trends were reversing a little, females tend to go for thinking games. The average age of a gamer is 28 but by 2014 it is believed the average age will be 42.

Statistics show that 79 percent of Australian households having a device for playing games. Of these households, 34 percent have one gaming device, 28 percent have two or three, and 17 percent have four or more devices. The computer is by far the most popular piece of gaming technology, with 94.6 percent of gaming households having a computer. Even though gaming is believed to be antisocial with many people playing games do so in the same room or in groups. LAN parties are still a lot of fun. The number of computers are on the rise in Australia but what is of more concern is that 18 percent saying they have played pirated games many times. Of those who have played pirated games, 56 percent accessed it from a friend or family member, while 22 percent downloaded it from the Internet.