Computer Support Blog

There are very few companies in the technology sector that invest heavily in research and development anymore.  Ironically, for an industry that has seen the greatest growth come from spontaneous invention, the computer and consumer electronics markets have stopped investing as much time, money, and resources on pure discovery.  While most big businesses in the technology sector work to refine already-existing technologies, Intel continues to innovate.  Leading the software development efforts of Intel is Renee J. James.

Renee J. James serves Intel as one of the company’s Senior Vice Presidents.  James acts as the General Manager of the Software and Services Group, which is a key division of Intel.  Intel, which develops advanced computer hardware, relies upon the Software and Services Group to ensure that the hardware they create in the laboratories functions with the dominant software platforms on the market.  In some ways, Renee J. James works as a corporate ambassador between Intel and every major OS and software provider in the world!

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Over the past few years, online social networking sites have caused more and more of our social interactions to happen online. They have also changed the way we interact with our friends, even changing the definition of the word ‘friend’, but they have not changed basic human nature.

There have always been people who do not understand that their friends and acquaintances have no interest in all the tiny things they do in a day. There have also always been people who never share huge life events with their friends. Both of these types of people are still present on the Internet. Look at your Facebook feed sometime and you will notice exactly that – some people over-share and others never share. Thankfully, there are also plenty of people in the middle range who know what and how much their friends really want to know.

Soon, Facebook will allow those over-sharing people to post everything they do on other websites onto their profiles. This new release is not as widely supported as Facebook might wish. Pandora, the hugely popular Internet radio website, is one of the sites that are hesitating to allow Facebook to automatically publish every song a user listens to, onto the user’s profile. Pandora is reacting the same way that the majority of people would react: “My friends do not need to know every song I hear.” Pandora does publish on Facebook already, but the site does not want to publish everything automatically.

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Have you ever watched a television show and thought an actor or actress looked familiar, but could not quite place them?  Have you ever watched an amazing movie and instantly wanted to watch everything else that director had ever filmed?  Have you ever needed to settle a bet involving the identity of an obscure character actor?  On the Internet, there is a single source for answers to all questions involving television and movies and that is the Internet Movie Database.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is the world’s most comprehensive site for all things pertaining to film, television and (increasingly) video games, at least as it pertains to work done by legitimate actors, directors, producers and writers.  The IMDb is a powerful tool that contains both the latest legitimate news about all things in the filmed arts as well as massive archives of the body of work of everyone who has ever worked in film in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.  The IMDb has extensive reservoirs of information for Japanese, Chinese and Indian works as well.

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As the Internet has evolved, one of the ongoing challenges users have had is with the speed at which they are able to send and receive data.  Internet transfer speeds have increased, usually to keep up with the growing file sizes of new programs and applications.  Just as the first modems would take days to transmit and receive over the phone lines the complicated files you use today, greater bandwidth for data transfers provided by fiber optic cabling will someday be entirely obsolete.  Many scientists and engineers are deep at work on creating faster, more efficient means of data transfers.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Florida International University, CERN, and the Universities of Michigan and Victoria, among other partners, have set the newest record in data transfer speeds.  In a controlled experiment, the researchers have effectively achieved a data transfer speed of 186 gigabits per second.

While this news is setting the geek world ablaze, you may wonder what it means to you.  The most prominent example the scientists are using to express what this transfer rate means is that a network with a 186 Gbps transfer rate would be able to exchange the equivalent amount of data as one hundred thousand Blu-Ray discs.  Still not impressed?  Consider the 4G networks for smartphones that have been highly-touted this year.  To be considered a 4G network, the network must run at 100Mbps to 1 Gbps.  That means that the experiment performed at the Seattle conference was 186 times as fast as the standard 4G smartphone network.  The service you get at peak times on your 4G network . . . the technology developed by the research team is 1860 times as fast as that!

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Let’s face it, lawyers are expensive and you don’t have the resources of a major corporation to take on companies or people who may have wronged you.  The Internet, as a wealth of information, has all of the tools you might need to determine what the law says and even what major rulings mean.  However, anyone who has ever tried to sue a corporation knows: there is a big difference between what the law says and an actionable case.  But because fishing to find out if you have a case might well cost you hundreds of dollars in lawyer fees, it helps to be able to go to a lawyer with a case that you know is actionable.  For that, there is JustAnswer Legal.

JustAnswer Legal is a website where lawyers are standing by prepared to answer any legal question you pose to them.  If you have a legal theory, there are literally dozens of lawyers – specializing in different branches of law from criminal to real estate law – standing by at any moment prepared to answer any question you might ask.

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For Rescuecom’s dedicated Blog readers: An Exclusive first look at this year’s Computer Reliability Report! The results are in for RESCUECOM’s Annual 2012 Computer Reliability Report; Lenovo/IBM returns to dominance while Samsung grows significantly!

“Entering 2012, Lenovo/IBM’s rise in reliability will be an important boost for the company.  Although Apple’s market share has risen over the last 12 months, its reliability has declined. The comparatively smaller Toshiba and Samsung are illustrating interesting reliability trends worth watching over the coming year,” stated David Milman, CEO of RESCUECOM.  For 2012, Rescuecom now includes all manufacturers with a market share of at least above one percent in this report.

The Computer Reliability Report scores for 2012 are:

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With technologies changing very fast, popular companies absolutely need the best possible advertising to survive.  In fact, the corporate strategy that a company devises to survive changes or remain dominant in a given field may be useless if they are not able to properly express that strategy to their customer base.  With the move toward digital media (downloads) over physical media (DVD, Blu-Ray discs), companies like Netflix have been struggling to adapt.  Or, rather, Netflix would be struggling were it not for the effective efforts of Leslie Kilgore!

Leslie Kilgore is the Chief Marketing Officer of Netflix and she has served the company since 2000.  Kilgore is credited with much of the success of Netflix in terms of winning over the American people on the concept of a mail-delivery DVD service.  As Chief Marketing Officer, Kilgore was responsible for the advertising campaigns that launched Netflix into the collective consciousness and made Netflix into a serious competitor to traditional video rental chains, like Blockbuster Video.  Through her tireless efforts, Netflix surpassed Blockbuster as the primary video rental service in the United States!

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Other than flying, what is one aspect of a ‘future car’ that most people would want? Self-driving, of course! In this hypothetical future, we would only have to tell the car where to go, sit back, and enjoy the ride. But is that really just a hypothetical far-off future?

Not if Google gets its way. According to the New York Times, Google is looking to have the first driverless vans or taxis available in 2013 or 2014. The search engine company has been working with car manufacturers for a few years now on autonomous, driverless cars. Several working prototypes have even been test-driving around on some California roads.

When this technology gets the bugs worked out and becomes available on the open market, there will be some major changes in the way driving works. There will not be as many accidents since most accidents occur because of human error. Speed limits and traffic laws will no longer be the ‘suggestions’ most people perceive them to be because the car will be a law-abiding driver.

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With so many people investing heavily in better and better high definition television sets, it is getting hard to recommend new computer monitors.  For sure, if you keep your PC segregated from your HDTV, a new computer monitor is necessary.  But, if you are spending a lot of money on a fancy high definition television, many of your peripherals will interact with it.  In other words, you can get the most for your money out of both your computer and electronic devices and your high definition television by connecting your gadgets to your HDTV.  For those who have a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera, that means getting a VMC-MHC1 High Definition Output Cable.

The VMC-MHC1 High Definition Output Cable serves as an adapter for the Cyber-shot digital camera.  Designed for high definition video signals, the Sony VMC-MHC1 converts the images on your Cyber-shot digital camera into a format that your high definition television may recognize.  Because of its simple configuration, the VMC-MHC1 cable is exceptionally easy to use and requires no software to reconfigure your images.  This is a true plug and play device and it allows you to see all of your photographs on a giant, high definition screen!

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Regardless of what one may think of 3-D movies, 3-D technology is undeniably cool.  Visual effects may only be one component of popular movies and television works, but it is an increasingly important component.  Visual effects are also created more and more through the use of computers.  A significant number of the computers used to create special effects for blockbuster movies and popular television shows run Autodesk.  Carl Bass is the CEO of Autodesk.

As CEO of Autodesk, Carl Bass is responsible for developing and marketing the Autodesk tools to keep them the industry standard for special effects.  Infatuated by 3-D effects, Bass recently made many Autodesk 3-D applications free to Autodesk users.  By increasing the availability of the 3-D tools, Bass hopes to keep Autodesk dominant in the market.  So far, his plan is working quite well.

Bass came to Autodesk when Autodesk bought his first company, Ithaca Software, in 1993.  Having marketed HOOPS, an important 3-D software, for Ithaca Software, Carl Bass was a great asset to Autodesk and was part of their interest in the smaller software company.  Carl Bass ascended from Executive Vice President of product development to Chief Technology Officer of Autodesk.  When Autodesk promoted Carl Bass to Chief Operating Officer, Bass developed his abilities at worldwide marketing and marketing.  From there, he was the natural choice when the Board started looking for a new CEO.

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