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Computer Viruses? What really is it?

Friday, August 27, 2010 7:25 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
One might think of a computer virus as a tiny computer program designed to perform mischief. Most computer users have heard about computer viruses. A computer virus is the result of a destructive program that someone has written and placed inside a computer program, which unsuspecting people then place in their computer system.
Some viruses can erase all the information from the place where it's stored on the computer's hard disk. But each virus is different. Some display strange messages on your computer screen; others make small changes in your computer programs.
Where do these viruses come from? They certainly don't float around in the air like some human viruses. Instead, like any other computer program, a human must create them.
Why do people create them? It's hard to say. Some people create these programs out of meanness to get even. While others create them just as a challenge. Why do you thing people create these very destructive programs? How does your computer get a virus? Almost exactly the way humans do. The computer gets exposed to one. Well, its not quiet that easy.
Many people get contaminated computer programs by trading programs with other people. Others get contaminated computer programs through the use of modems, which allow computers to communicate over telephone lines (ie. The Internet)
Most of the time, programs that arrive by modem or a trade are perfectly safe to use. However, you do stand a chance of getting a program that has been tampered with. Here a computer program virus is hiding inside the normal program. Many computer programs that are traded were copied illegally.
When this program enters your computer through your input device, it hides in your computer's memory and starts to duplicate itself like a disease. When you save your data, you also save the virus. Slowly but surely, the virus crowds out your data and causes major system problems.
The virus can't affect the computer's ROM (Read Only Memory), but it can affect RAM (Random Access Memory) and your computer disks. When your shut off your computer a virus that has been picked up will be lost, just like any other memory that is held in RAM.
If the virus is on your disk or hard drive, it will return to the computer when you use the program again. If you switch from one program to another without shutting down the machine, the virus will attach itself to the new program. In this way, it can slowly infect all your programs before you know that it exists. Today millions of dollars are being spent to rid and protect computer systems from these virus programs.
Commercial and shareware programs have been created with the sole purpose of detecting and fixing suspect programs that might be viruses infected. These detection programs should be ran when any disk is put into your disk drive or every time your computer is first started up each day to scan the computer's hard drive.

What's all the fuss?

7:24 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
Introduction:
nless you never watch TV, listen to a radio, or read, you almost certainly have heard about the Internet or know something about it.  Very few people have never heard of the Internet; however most people have either used the Internet occasionally or frequently.  It doesn't take much to know that the Internet has attracted an enormous amount of attention the past few years.
 
hat would cause thousands of companies, millions of people and virtually every major country in the world to invest millions of dollars into the Internet?  An even better question is what would caused something that operated for nearly 20 years without much public interest to grow to such overwhelming popularity in 6 short years?  What truly is all this fuss about?
ome believe it's the speed and wide variety of information found on the net that has made it so popular.  Others say it's the ease one can access and publish information on the Internet while others just believe it is a fad.  No matter what people say, they can't deny the Internet's tremendous growth rate and current level of popularity in this and other countries.




Who uses it? n fact, if you have not heard or browsed the Internet, it is not the fault of the Internet.  It just isn't that complicated or isolated.  Furthermore, anyone with a computer, phone line, modem , and an ISP can connect and even publish on the Internet.  However to publish you will have to get to know some Basic Terms such as HTML, HTTP, URL, and others.  From young to old, millions of companies, organization, and individuals have published with great success.
ust look around. As my mom says, "Everything has gone www.com crazy."  Don't get me wrong the Internet has its complex side.  It is a well thought out network with lots of technical languages and protocols that make it work.  But that complexity has simply made it easier for the average person to use.  From doctors, lawyers, professors, scientist to hobbyist, housewives and elementary students all have found something of value on the Internet .




Its Benefits: he Internet's speed, vast resources, and its ability to directly communicate with others are its greatest benefits.  Because the Internet uses the quickness of computers to transmit its data, information can travel at tremendous speeds. Speed is not the only benefit.  The Internet uses hundreds of thousands of computers all connected to each other to store vast amounts of information.  And finally, because the Internet allows for individuals to have specific electronic mail addresses, people can easily communicate with one another.
he Internet is considered by many to be superior to the best and biggest libraries in the county.  This superiority exists primarily due to the thousands of organizations, companies and individuals publishing on the Internet.  With such ease of publishing and the wide variety of publishers, there is almost no subject left off the Internet.  The Internet's ability to deliver this vast amount of information has drawn even more users.  Not having to wait for a book, newspaper, or magazine publisher to review and send an author's manuscript to a printing press to be bound or printed eliminates the time it would normally take to publish something.  Instead of reading a medical breakthrough in next month's journal, it can be published on the Internet instantly.  A breaking news event can be published almost immediately after the event occurs.  People don't have to wait until the morning paper to read about an event.  This part of the Internet alone has helped make the Internet a technological breakthrough.
ven finding not so current information can be a breeze using the Internet. Driving to a library and searching for possibly hours just to find some specific information is a task many of us have experienced.  With the Internet you can sit in the convenience of your home and search (surf) to find information faster than going to a library.
heoretically, the information on the Internet can travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles/sec.).  Realistically, we know that this speed is nearly impossible due mainly to the large number of people using the Internet, and the limitation of the phone system.  However the Internet's speed is much faster than traditional means of gathering news and reporting information.
ommunication is a huge benefit of the Internet.  Many people use the Internet to simple send messages and nothing else.  Whether it be by news groups, chat rooms, or the most popular method E-mail, communicating over the Internet has developed vast appeal and usage.  Millions of people around the globe use E-mail to communicate everyday.  They all place great value on the convenience of sending and receiving E-mail.  I am one of its biggest fans.  E-mail can be sent and retrieved by its recipient almost instantly.  The message never has to be printed or physically mailed to get to it's destination.  Furthermore, the cost is considerably less than a thirty-two cent stamp and is delivered a lot faster.
ith the invention of the Internet phone, some people can now even talk across the Internet just like on a voice phone but without paying long distance charges.  It is just a fact; the time it takes to send a letter or reply to a phone message is no match for E-mail's speed and convenience.




How did the Internet begin? he Internet's history is not very complicated nor that long.  It may surprise you to know that the Internet began 25 years ago as an experiment of the U.S. Defense Department.  In fact, it was not originally designed for the public's personal use.  The original goal of the Internet was to establish a system to safeguard the exchange of information among different government agencies in the event of war.  With no one computer or person controlling the Internet, the enemy could not destroy our means of communication with just one military strike.  Today this unique feature of the Internet remains constant and part of its success. No one person or organization controls or heads the Internet.  It is basically hosted by thousands of individual computers that have registered with the NSF (National Science Foundation) for an Internet address.
n 1991 there were only 100 host computers or sites.  Today this number exceeds half a million and is constantly growing.  The Internet has certainly seen tremendous growth in just the past 3 to 6 years.
hat really caused the Internet's tremendous growth spurt was the invention of something that made the Internet both easy to use and easy to transmit multimedia (graphics, sound, and video).  The invention was a software product now known as a browser .  In 1991 in an European physics lab, an invention was made that enabled words in a sentence to be clicked on and an action then performed.  This invention today is know as hypertext .  Hypertext is when words or pictures are clicked on that takes the place of typing commands into the computer.  This single feature made the Internet easier to use.  With this invention came new users from small kids to senior adults who felt comfortable riding the information super highway.  This has forever changed the way average people use the Internet.  Today we find people reading magazines, buying products, listening to radio stations, talking to friends, writing messages, playing games, even watching video all through the use of the Internet.




Conclusion ith almost each passing day, a new product or tool is invented or improved upon to help people use the Internet.  However millions of people still are not using the Internet.  This is due mainly to the lack of either a computer or an Internet service provider.  Nevertheless the Internet continues to surprise even the experts with its tremendous growth and popularity.  Its tremendous influence on today's society is certain to be felt for many years to come.

Google Books – Online Literature Library

7:23 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
The idea of Google Books was first conceived in 2002 when a small group of Google programmers started pondering the question of how many man hours it would take to scan every single book ever written.    We still don’t know the true answer to this question although just eight years from the idea conception there are now over 10 million books catalogued in their database.
While the first scan was done manually on a 300 page book and took 40 minutes to process, Google now use cameras capable of scanning at a rate of 1,000 pages an hour and also work with 20,000 publisher partners who provide content directly.  They have also been able to provide over 1 million books that can be read in full from cover to cover; these unrestricted works are either books that have fallen out of copyright or have been provided with publishers express permission.
As well as simply scanning the books, Google performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the pages, thereby turning them in to pure text which can be entered in to their database.  As a result when you do a Google Search you are now not only returned results from relevant websites but also your search terms are checked against a library encompassing millions of books and appropriate matches are suggested for further reading.
The integration in to the Google Search engine means you may have already inadvertently stumbled across Google Books but if you haven’t and are eager to explore then the Google Books can be found by visiting the site http://books.google.co.uk/ directly.   Being a Google service, it almost goes without saying that the service is completely free of charge and is instead paid for via a minimal number of sponsored links which are in no way intrusive or detrimental to the service.
From the Google Books site you can perform searches, add books to your virtual library or organise your collection in a logical manner.  Searching for a book and then subsequently clicking on it opens an interface which allows you to either view the directly scanned pages from the book or in some instances a ‘plain text’ version.  This plain text can then be copied and passed to another application or simply printed out for reading offline.
Books still under copyright enjoy the protection of a variety of access limitations and security measures which limit the number of viewable pages making the experience somewhat akin to being able to flick through the first couple of pages in a library or bookshop.   Despite this protection there have rather predictably been a number of fairly major lawsuits issued by individuals and publishers alike; some with legitimate grievances and others just seeking money or publicity.
Possibly the most notable case was between The Authors Guild, the publishing industry and Google which resulted in Google agreeing to a settlement on October 28, 2008.  This would see them pay a total $125 million not only to pay the court costs of the plaintiffs but also create a Book Rights Registry which will collect and disburse revenue generated by all third party sites such as Google which provide content based on the content of books covered by the agreement.
These issues aside, on the whole I am amazed that again this relatively new company have been able to offer such an incredible gift to the world.  With Google Books we have the potential to preserve centuries of human literacy work for generations to come as well as promoting the spread and availability of knowledge amongst all groups and all classes of people.
                             

The World of Computers

7:21 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
Have you used a computer recently? Chances are you have. If you have made a phone call, ridden in a car, watched a TV, played a video game you have used a computer. Even as you read this paper, keep in mind the words you are reading were put into type by a computer.
Here is a list of statements about computers. Decide whether each statement is true or false .
  1. Computers are smarter than humans.
  2. Computers have brains.
  3. Some computers have feelings.
  4. Computers can solve any problems.
  5. You need to know a lot of science and math to use a computer.
If you decided that each statement is false, you are correct. Then what is a computer? What can it do? It is a machine that can handle large amounts of information and work with amazing speed. A computer is built to do these four jobs:
Computers are conformed to follow instructions from humans. They can solve only the problems that people tell them to solve. Since people cannot solve every problem, neither can computers. To tell a computer what to do, you have to know what problem you want to solve and have a plan for solving it.
Since computers can't do anything without instructions from a human, what makes them so special? They can do some things better than humans. Computers calculate faster than humans. They are more accurate than humans. Computer can also store vast amounts of information, and they do not "forget" what they store. These kinds of qualities make computer wonderful tools to help people solve complex problems.
Computers have become important and valuable tools in today's world. Since they affect so many parts of our lives, it is important to be aware of how they are used and how they work.

Microsoft Office 2010

7:09 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
Despite it being the second most used application on my work computer (behind the Mozilla Firefox browser), it’s still impossible for me to get excited about a new edition of the Microsoft Office suite.
With the final release due in a couple of months, Microsoft have provided a beta test version of Office 2010 that’s free for members of the public to download.  The beta test version will run unhindered until October 2010 at which point users must decide whether they wish to purchase the final release or have it removed from their hard drive.
For the costs involved the majority of home users may still be better off with the free OpenOffice Suite (www.openoffice.org) as it should provide all the features you are likely to need at no cost.  This having been said, the Office Suite has remained a popular flagship product over the years due to business users often requiring a specific function or application only present in the Microsoft offering.  I, for example, use Outlook on a regular basis and haven’t yet found an alternative that suits my needs.
Having not been the biggest fan of Office 2007 (especially the ‘ribbon’ interface discussed in the past) I wasted no time downloading the 64-bit professional version of the beta to put it through its paces.  I have now been using it for a couple of days it does appear notably faster than Office 2007 and certainty incredibly stable.  The speed increase could easily be attributed to the fact that a 64-bit version of the application is now available to run on modern 64-bit computers.
Office Professional 2010 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.  The home edition (also currently available in beta) includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.  After the official release, computer manufacturers may choose to bundle new machines with a starter edition of Office which includes just Excel and Word; this version of Office will replace the aging Microsoft Works Suite.
Although the ribbon interface remains, it is certainly a lot clearer than that provided with Office 2007; the confusing Office orb has been replaced with the familiar file menu, there are fewer distracting borders, a neutral colour scheme and most importantly it is customisable to the users individual tastes.  The applications look and behave like a ‘family’ now and have become more intuitive to use as a result of the more refined user interface.
An important new feature due for release in the final version but missing from the beta is the ‘Web Apps’ which will extend the Office functionality to a compatible web browser.  Very similar in form to Google Docs, Office Web Apps allows users to collaborate, edit and share Office documents online.  This is an incredibly important new feature that has no doubt come about due to the success of Google Docs and one that I would like to field test when complete.
This article isn’t long enough to go in to details about minor new features so I will summarise by observing that the changes made from Office 2007 to Office 2010 are evolutionary rather than revolutionary; very much in the same way that Windows 7 was an evolutionary change compared with Vista.  Excluding the Web Apps there is nothing substantially new however the minor improvements are certainly welcome as is the chance to road test a new piece of software completely free of charge for a year.

3D computer graphics

7:05 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
3D computer graphics (in contrast to 2D computer graphics) are graphics that utilize a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images.
Such images may be for later display or for real-time viewing.
Despite these differences, 3D computer graphics rely on many of the same algorithms as 2D computer vector graphics in the wire frame model and 2D computer raster graphics in the final rendered display.
In computer graphics software, the distinction between 2D and 3D is occasionally blurred; 2D applications may use 3D techniques to achieve effects such as lighting, and primarily 3D may use 2D rendering techniques.
3D computer graphics are often referred to as 3D models.
Apart from the rendered graphic, the model is contained within the graphical data file.
However, there are differences.
A 3D model is the mathematical representation of any three-dimensional object (either inanimate or living).
A model is not technically a graphic until it is visually displayed.
Due to 3D printing, 3D models are not confined to virtual space.
A model can be displayed visually as a two-dimensional image through a process called 3D rendering, or used in non-graphical computer simulations and calculations..

Pidgin - Multiple Instant Messenger Service

6:58 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
If like me, you find yourself juggling multiple messenger applications to keep your friends, family and colleagues happy you will be glad to hear about Pidgin.  Formally known as Gaim, Pidgin is an open-source messaging program that allows the simultaneous use of multiple instant messenger services through one application.
Available as a free of charge download from www.pidgin.im, this small program supports 17 networks including favourites AOL, MSN and Yahoo as well some lesser known ones such as Jabber and Gadu-Gadu.  Additional chat clients such as Skype and the Facebook Chat tool can be added through the use of freely available third party plugins which are easily located on the Pidgin site.
Once installed, simply select the type of account you want to add (for example a Google Talk account) along with your user name and password.  Any of your contacts from that account that are currently online will automatically appear in the buddies list and you can begin chatting straight away.  Not only does this offer the distinct advantage that you don’t need to switch between several applications if you have contact with friends on multiple networks but it also cuts down on the resource requirements of having multiple chat services running on one machine.
Along with being cross compatible with different networks, the Pidgin application is also available for many different Operating Systems; as well as the obvious Windows version, the developers have provided support for Solaris, SkyOS, Qtopia, UNIX, Linux and even the AmigaOS.
All the standard features you would come to expect such as contact organiser, custom smileys, file transfers and group chats are present.  The only slight criticism that I would have is that it doesn’t support video and voice chat however my assumption is that these protocols are difficult to integrate in to an application that has been designed to be compatible with dozens of networks and half a dozen different Operating Systems.  Hopefully this lack of functionality will be addressed in future releases.
Pidgin is completely customisable; the preferences dialog box provides an area where you can define every conceivable option including the interface, sounds, network connection, chat logging and your default availability status.  In terms of appearance you can also change the font type, size and colour, formatting along with installing new themes which change the appearance of smileys and status icons.  An additional option to install themes in order to change the actual user interface would be welcome as the default interface may be a little dull and unintuitive for some users.

Information technology (IT)

6:53 AM Posted by ALI RAZA AAMIR
Information technology (IT) is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware", according to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA).[1] IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to securely convert, store, protect, process, transmit, input, output, and retrieve information.
Today, the term information has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems. Information technology is starting to spread farther than the conventional personal computer and network technology, and more into integrations of other technologies such as the use of cell phones, televisions, automobiles, and more, which is increasing the demand for such jobs.
When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology, sometimes called "infotech." Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information.
In recent days, ABET and the ACM have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards[2] for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study separate from both Computer Science and Information Systems. SIGITE[3] is the ACM working group for defining these standards. The Worldwide IT services revenue totalled $763 billion in 2009.[4]
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