The annual events we’ve commemorated and celebrated over the past couple of weeks -beginning with Passover and extending through Holocaust Memorial Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day – all bring to mind the question of who we are, and where we come from. If you’ve thought about the idea of putting together a family tree or just wanted to know more about your roots, the Internet can be a great friend. Here are some tips on where to look for information, and how to peel away the layers of the …
If you’ve got a phone these days, you’ve got a music player. Why shlep an iPod or other MP3 player if you want to listen to music on the go?
Because you can get more music on an MP3 player than on a phone, of course. Unless you’ve got a really fancy phone with a big memory card, you’re limited to only a couple dozen songs on your device, and you’re constantly tethering your phone to your computer in order to get music on it. Ah, the hassles of modern life!
But …
Once, girls were girls and men were men; you knew who you were then. And you knew who the bad guys and the good guys were; the viruses the former, and the virus-fighting programs the latter. No more, though. Nowadays, the very programs you were counting on to fight viruses might be nothing more than viruses themselves!
Time to learn a new word. You’ve heard of malware, spyware, and virusware? Now welcome to the world of “scareware,” the fastest-growing segment of the rogue software population out there. Disguising itself as a …
Click. Whirr. Click again. Uh-oh. That’s one too many clicks. Sounds like you’ve just heard the “Click of Death.” Hope you backed everything up!
You’d be surprised how many people don’t, unfortunately. But sudden disk drive death syndrome (SDDDS, an acronym I just made up) is an unfortunate fact of life. Would you believe that in the U.S., over 170,000 hard drives are “lost” every year? Of course, it’s not the disk we’re worried about – it’s the data on the disk, consisting of vital and probably almost irreplaceable information.
Data backups …
Not too long ago, “sending someone a short message” entailed writing a note and sticking it on the refrigerator door – and all it cost you to send was the time to jot down a couple of sentences on a piece of scrap paper. Nowadays, of course, no respectable note-writer would bother with pen and paper; instead, they would send an e-mail, or, better, a short phone message, using their cellphone’s SMS feature. SMS, of course, has a great advantage over the old system, in that you don’t have to …
