Showing 41 - 50 of 98
Connected to the grid for life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2016
» I had an unsettling experience recently where all of my Yahoo emails seemed to vanish and I mean everything. When I logged into my account it was completely bare. While it was all there a couple of hours later it made me realise just how dependent I was on my email account. Thinking a bit more I realised that I also depend on Skype and to a smaller extent Yahoo. Then I thought about the people who have a much larger online presence. For some who are always sending electronic messages it could be a terrifying experience to be suddenly cut off from all regular communication. This kind of effect is a very modern one and I suspect that it has not been investigated very thoroughly in the journals as yet but I suspect it will be a newly defined psychology condition sometime in the near future.
Exhausted all lifelines? Call a friend
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/07/2016
» People who use computers range in skill levels from absolute novices to advanced, but they all have one thing in common -- eventually they need to ask someone for help. Take the recent case of my Skype not working. I had exhausted my knowledge base, checked a few web searches for solutions and in the end had to call a friend who knows a lot more about networking than I do.
LAN cable connectivity fails me
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/06/2016
» If you are an Android user then you will have heard the saying "there is an app for that". More accurately the saying should be "there are lots of apps for that", and for the most part this is accurate. With the recent purchases of some Android-based media players, I've found the app that seems to have the least variants are those that can connect to a Windows shared drive. In particular if you want an app that can connect to a shared drive and make it visible to other apps.
Size counts in the world of IT
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/05/2016
» When it comes to implementing systems, it is all about scale. If you have ever been a system tester you will know that what works one at a time may not work well if a whole bunch of them are processed all at once. Those who have ever used an old fashioned typewriter will understand this. Volume testing and scalability of system is one of the biggest problems a development testing team faces.
Not so hot off the press
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/04/2016
» For some time now I have been mildly excited by the concept of 3D printing. For the most part people only see the technology in movies where the bad guy prints up a plastic gun to bypass the security scans. We read of amazing future possibilities with printing of human organs from hearts to more complex structures. Back in the wider real world the sales figures are not matching the hype. Yes, there has been some increase sales, primarily under the US$5,000 (175,700 baht) mark, but the higher end devices saw a drop in sales over the same period. For the time being at least it looks like the focus is on the fun, toy level of the marketplace.
MS Windows' new OS nota perfect 10
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/04/2016
» Outlook users wanting to upgrade to Windows 10, beware -- you could be facing some trials ahead. One error commonly seen is send/receive error 0x800CCC13, warning of an inability to connect to the network. If you see this or something similar try the following. Right click on the Start button and choose the Admin Command Prompt or PowerShell. At the command prompt, enter sfc/scannow which runs the Windows File Checker Tool. When this is complete -- and it can take some time -- restart your computer. Try Outlook again. While this works for some, others have reported that the only way they could get Outlook working again was to revert to the previous Windows version.
The WiGig revolution slowly gains traction
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/02/2016
» Some time back I wrote that we would soon be seeing 100Gbps on our wireless data connections. The Japanese have claimed this speed using a new transmitter operating in the 275-305GHz range. This is close to standard fibre speeds using Wi-Fi and uses a multichannel technology to achieve it. Current Wi-Fi technology operates around the 5GHz band and at 60GHz for the so-called WiGig system. The higher the operating frequency the faster the data transmission and the expectation here is for terabits per second, or to put it another way, very fast. To do this they will need to extend the technology to an even higher frequency range.
Coining it in
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/02/2016
» So the People's Bank of China (PBOC) is planning to set up a virtual currency for China. The stated purpose sounds reasonable, reduce the cost of paper currency and allow the country to have greater control over the currency supply. Apparently this would also help with money laundering, tax cheats and allow for greater transparency.
There are two sides to malware
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/01/2016
» Why do people write malware? Some people do it for fun and these people typically do so only on their own computers to see how this kind of thing works. I admit that when I was younger I tried the same thing but never let anything loose into the wild. Since then the software has become far more sophisticated. Others are just nasty and want to cause as much mayhem and damage as possible. Some do it for a cause or to highlight a perceived injustice. The group Anonymous for example are considered to be in this category. In another category are those groups paid by a Nation State to spy on other counties or disrupt a specific activity, as was revealed by the Stuxnet malware.
Are PCs as good as humans?
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/12/2015
» If you are a Dell laptop user, have Microsoft Windows installed and your Windows Defender is up to date then the root kit that is part of the Dell machines will be killed by Defender. As explained before the problem is a self-signed certificate and private key on new laptops, which allows attackers on public Wi-Fi to steal otherwise encrypted usernames, passwords and other sensitive data. Not a very good reveal for Dell but some good security news for Microsoft and Windows for a change.