Top Ten Internet Scams

Top Ten Internet Scams

View this list, it could save you a fortune!!

Kleptomania

This utility allows you to capture text from any Windows Application. Have you found yourself frustrated by the fact that you couldn't highlight and copy & paste text from a Windows Application, eg the dialup settings for your Internet Connection. Well Kleptomania allows you to capture this information into your paste buffer. Get a trial version from www.downloads.com

An Amusing Parody of the Daily Mail


www.dailynail.co.uk

BBC Radio on the Internet

Click http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/ to hear live BBC radio, and also selected archive programs. Try BBC 7 for Classics such as the Goons Show

Free Cup Holder

Free Cup Holder

USENET: The Internet's Hidden Treasure Trove

While the Web is a mass of information of varying degrees of usefulness, USENET is an extraordinary mass of knowledge and opinions of varying degrees of usefulness.

USENET is organised into over 20 thousand discussion groups. Each group contains lists of topics called threads. You can ask (post) questions in a relevant discussion group, and hope to receive answers in a few minutes ot a few hours. It is very widely used to solve computer-related problems such as "What driver do I need for this Network Card?", "Where can I find a program which will? etc etc.

If you've never used USENET you've got a great pleasure in front of you, you can access USENET via http://groups.google.com/ and type in any topic that interests you

CYGWIN: Linux on your PC in one hour

You've heard a lot about Linux, but don't want to lose your useful Windows Applications? Well you can experiment with a Linux emulation for Windows (from Red Hat) without having to do any worrying Disk Partitions, download from www.cygwin.com. This way you get the best of both Windows & Unix. Try it out you've nothing to lose, it you don't like it, you can uninstall.

WinZip & Backing up to CDROM

Winzip has always been one of my favorite programs www.winzip.com . But did you know that it's really useful for saving/backing up to CD-ROMs? There's a triple advantage, firstly it's quicker,denser and thirdly you avoid the horrible "Read Only" Problem.

Faster

You can zip up whole directories, with possibly hundreds of files into one compressed Zip file. Your CD Writing S/W will write one big file much quicker than hundreds of smaller files.

NO "Read Only" Problem

Files restored from a CDROM are copied onto your hard drive as "Read Only", this presents problems for many users. Files unzipped from the ZIP don't have this problem.

UK Broadband

The UK's broadband market is booming, with an estimated 34,000 new customers signing up for a high-speed internet connection each week. Just a month ago, reports put the rate at 20,000 new connections a week.

Latest figures from BT, NTL and Telewest show that, after the disappointment of previous years, broadband is one of the success stories of 2002.

According to its third-quarter financial results, released yesterday, NTL had 380,600 broadband customers at the end of September. It is understood to now have around 450,000 broadband customers.
BT announced last week that it has 451,000 wholesale ADSL customers.

These figures suggest that there are now over 1.1 million broadband users in the UK - a far cry from the start of 2002 when there were just over 300,000. Britain hit the one million broadband user mark at the start of October.

Internet Calendar

I use a free Internet Calendar Service for my work & social engagements. Everything about the service is so intuitive. And of couse now I can access/update my calendar from anywhere.

www.calendars.net

Legal Tracking

I'm remortgaging my house to get a better deal. I've just received the URL of a website where I can track the progress of the legal aspect of the remortgage. It's called www.trackmycase.com. Isn't that another sign of the maturity of the Internet when it's trusted and seen useful by the legal profession.

Technical Dr Suess

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

http://winn.com/bs/suess.html

2003 The Year of Convergence

2003 is the year that Broadband became King after a long gestation. Broadband users are not yet the majority, but they are the majority of the serious users. On the back of Broadband, multi-user gaming is becoming a big industry. This will be further fuelled by the consoles Xbox and PS2 create their own gaming networks. 2003 is also the year that Internet on the move finally begins to be practicable, this will come in two forms WiFi Hotspots and 3G mobile phones, they will not mature/standardise for several years however.

Bargain Finders

There are a number of useful websites which try and find the best price for a particular product. The one I use is

www.kelkoo.co.uk

You can rank the results by cheapest or best service. They certainly show that prices for the same item can vary remarkably.

3G

UK consumers will receive their first 3G Handsets this week from the company "3". Let's hope it goes well. 3G is one of those things that requires a whole set of technologies to mature simultaneously. It's all got to work technically, and at the same time it's got to capture the consumer's imagination; we've got to have a second "text messaging like" boom. The unspoken problem of course is that until most of your friends also have 3G sets you won't really be able to exploit 3G.

The Secret Guide to Computers

Beginners Guide to Computers in ordinary language

www.secretguide.net

Fishy Story

Sorry a bit off-topic but there's this story about a Carp which talked, I find it stangely unsettling, especially the bit where they kill the fish.
Search for it at news.google.com

Corporate Blogging

Weblogs, which enable multiple users to post text easily to a Web site, with the most recent post appearing on top, have been around for years but have gained rampant popularity only recently. This immense interest in Weblogs -- "blogs" for short -- now is carrying over to the corporate world.

A few companies already are deploying blogs for internal and external communications. Though the trend has been tentative so far -- only a handful of companies are putting out public blogs authored by their employees -- it seems likely that the number of corporate blogs will skyrocket in the near future. Are enterprises ready for this new technology ?

First Movers
Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a prolific blogger, said blogs are a marked improvement over static Web pages. "I believe blogs are what Web pages were supposed to be in the first place," he noted, adding that blogs "have changed the default understanding of what we do on the Web" -- from the old "real estate concept" of building a static site to a new, dynamic approach.

One of the first companies to embrace blogging was Macromedia. Tom Hale, senior vice president of business strategy, said blogs are part of the company's overall enterprise plan. "Macromedia is very customer-focused, and we have our collective corporate 'ear to the ground' in many different ways," he told NewsFactor. "Blogs seem like another channel for what we already do and for what our customers already value about us."

Kids Homework

A family-friendly all-in-one-place site with links to Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Translations etc

www.refdesk.com

Google Dance - The Index Update of the Google Search Engine

A behind-the-scenes look at how Google updates its popular search engine index once a month.

http://dance.efactory.de/

Microsoft Replacement S/W

• www.notetab.com Infinitely better than Notepad
  
• www.vim.org Programmers Editor
  
• www.opera.com Better than IE6 in many respects
  
• www.openoffice.org Open Source Office S/W (Star Office)
  
• www.eudora.com Alternative to Virus attracting Outlook
  
• www.pmail.com Pegasus (Another Emailer)
  

Map of your Area in 1883

Visit www.old-maps.co.uk created by the OS and view a map based on any UK address from 1883. Absolutely fascinating

Over USD1 billion spent on online content in 2002

Consumer spending on online content in the US totalled USD1.3 billion in 2002, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association and ComScore.

This marks an increase of 95 percent compared to 2001.

The Personals/Dating category surpassed both Business/Investments and Entertainment/Lifestyles to become the largest paid content category in 2002 with USD302 million in revenues, up from USD72 million in 2001.

People will pay for content that they really want, but it's still the toughest Internet Market

VLOGGING

VLOGGING is BLOGGING with Video Feeds rather than HTML. It's currently being discussed and experimented. Needs a lot of bandwidth & storage but with time that's always less of an issue. With VLOGGING your Web Diary/Log really starts to become like "And now here's Michael Burke reporting from Lebanon".

Death of the Floppy

Few will mourn the passing of the floppy disk after Dell announces that floppies will no longer be standard equipment. Their 1.4Mb capacity has been inadequate for a long time, even with zipped up files. Remember installing Windows 3.1 from 15 or so floppies (ghastly)? Email attachments, writeable CDs are largely used in their place, and my favourite floppy replacement the USB memory stick.

PETABITS

Internet Traffic must now be measured in Petabits rather than the current Terabits which are a 1000 times smaller. (A Petabit is ~125 Terabytes, or 1000 Terabits, where there are 8 bits in a byte)

IDC predicts that the volume of Internet traffic generated by end users worldwide will nearly double annually over the next five years.
According to the company’s latest research, Internet traffic will rise from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007.
By 2007, IDC expects Internet users will access, download and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times over, every day.
though growth in the number of Internet users worldwide will continue to be an important traffic driver over the next five years, IDC predicts that broadband adoption will be the main driver in Internet traffic. By 2007, IDC estimates that consumers will account for 60 percent of all Internet traffic generated, versus roughly 40 percent for business users.

A petabit is one quadrillion (10¹⁵) binary digits and is used in discussing possible volumes of data traffic per second in a large telecommunications network. A petabit is one thousand terabits. Petabits per second can be shortened to Pbps.

Introduction to RSS

RSS is a way of creating a broadcast version of a blog or news page. Anyone who has frequently updated content and is willing to let others republish it can create the RSS file. Typically called syndication, the RSS file is an XML formatted file that can be used at other sites or by other intermediary software such as news aggregators. The original incarnation was to use RSS to include several headlines on a personalized portal page. But an RSS feed can also be easily pulled into other functions, such as an aggregator."

Content developers make their RSS files available by placing them on their web server. In this way, RSS “aggregators” are able to read the RSS files and therefore to collect data about the website. These aggregators place the site information into a larger database and use this database to allow for structured searches of a large number of content providers.

Because the data is in XML, and not a display language like HTML, RSS information can be flowed into a large number of devices. In addition to being used to create news summary web pages, RSS can be fed into stand-alone news browsers or headline viewers, PDAs, cell phones, email ticklers and even voice updates.
The strength of RSS is its simplicity. It is exceptionally easy to syndicate website content using RSS. It is also very easy to use RSS headline feeds, either by viewing a news summary web page or by downloading one of many free headline viewers. Though most RSS feeds list web based resources, several feeds link to audio files, video files and other multimedia.

The Genius of Blogging

The traditional media may be baffled, and even alarmed, by the blogging phenemenon. But Google's latest acquisition will
make it even more difficult to ignore

by John Naughton The UK Guardian Sunday February 23, 2003

The news that Google has bought Pyra, the company which enabled the phenomenal growth of 'blogging' (the publishing of online diaries or weblogs) has had the mainstream media in a spin all week. One can see news editors all over the world summoning reporters shouting 'What the **** is going on? What is this blogging stuff anyway?' One can see why they are baffled, if not actually alarmed. Google, after all, is one of the wonders of the age. In little over two years it has built itself into a global brand which now surpasses even Coca Cola in consumer awareness tests. Unlike 99 per cent of dot-com start-ups it has been profitable almost from the beginning: last year it had estimated sales of around $300 million and made a profit of $100 million. It is accepted by hundreds of millions of Internet users as the search engine of choice. So (reasons the average news editor), it must know what it's doing. And if Google moves into the blogging arena (hitherto derided by
the established media) then, by the same token, it must know something that the established order does not. Correct. But first a word or two
of background. The keeping of online diaries is almost as old as the Web itself - in that it has always been possible for geeks to publish
their thoughts on the Net. But doing this in the early days required a good deal of technical expertise - simple for geeks, but rocket science
to ordinary human beings.

Enter Evan Williams, a geek who had the idea of creating a tool to make it easy to write for, and publish on, the Web. He conceived Blogger.com, a site which made it possible for non-techies to create and publish their own online diaries. His basic ambition was to create a system such that, if you could use a browser and do joined up writing, you could publish an online diary.

Blogger.com launched in 1999 and was almost immediately overwhelmed by the demand. Indeed, it's been overwhelmed ever since because Williams had no real revenue stream, even though he had lots of users - currently about 1.1 million of them, of whom about 200,000 are actively running weblogs. Blogger was thus a classic 'success disaster' - i.e. a service which proves so popular that it threatens to destroy its inventor.

Blogger.com is not the only provider of weblogging software, but all the other companies in this area have experienced comparable growth. There has been an explosion of blogging in the last two years, to the point where there are now somewhere between 750,000 and a million serious weblogs out there in which 'ordinary' people publish their thoughts, links to articles they have read - and increasingly their photographs and even audio clips - on the Web.

The response of the 'professional' media to this explosion has been interesting. First there was patronising incredulity that people would write without being paid for it. Then there was disdain. 'Where', asked the hacks, 'was the quality control?' Surely the whole thing was just an epidemic of vanity publishing? Then there was unease, fuelled by the realisation that (a) large numbers of bloggers were talking to one another behind the media's back, as it were, and (b) some of them knew more about many subjects than most journalists. Badly researched or ideologically skewed reporting was being instantly skewered by bloggers - as we saw recently when half-baked journalistic theories about the NASA shuttle disaster were effortlessly demolished by folks with serious aerospace expertise. Journalistic unease has been further reinforced by the way the blogging community refuses to accept the news 'agenda' as determined by mainstream media. This has been increasingly evident since 9/11 as the established US media have dumbed down their discussion of the issues surrounding security, civil liberties and the Bush policy towards Iraq. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that (with a few honourable exceptions) most of the serious discussion of these issues in the US at the moment is happening in weblogs and not in the 'official' mass media.

So something really serious is afoot: the Net has once again demonstrated its capacity to unleash disruptive innovation on a complacent establishment. The question then becomes: where does Google fit into this picture? My guess is that it's a re-run of Google's inspired acquisition of Deja News's Usenet archive in February 2001. That archive contained the only record of the global conversation which had been conducted through Internet discussion groups in the 1970s and 1980s - in other words, the most significant content available prior to the explosion of the Web in 1993. Since then, Google has made it accessible to everyone - turning it from a reserve into a resource in the terminology of the energy industries.

What's happening now is that Google has realised that the conversations being conducted by members of the weblogging community has become an important body of content. Acquiring Blogger moves the search engine into pole position for organising and exploiting this amazing resource. It's so simple that only geniuses could think of it. But that's Google for you.


john.naughton@observer.co.uk


More about Blogging

Blogging is a new way to surf the Web, a new kind of web really, where what you are reading may be just minutes old. Long before a company or organisation has made a press release somebody somewhere will have blogged the information.

Opera Browser

Opera 7.02 is in many ways superior to IE, try it once you get used to the slightly different look & feel of HTML pages you'll like it

Download it for free from www.opera.com