Computer Support Blog

In the midst of the worldwide recession, as companies like Facebook prepare to make billions of dollars overnight, there are still some websites devoted to giving on the Internet.  The giving sites are attempts to remind people who have Internet access that they live in a land of (comparative) plenty and that no matter how bad your problems are, there is someone, somewhere in the world, who has it much worse than you do.  You have the ability to help others at minimal cost to you.  That is the philosophy behind Philanthroper.com, which is arguably the coolest giving site on the Internet!

Philanthroper.com is a website that challenges visitors to donate to worthy nonprofits – 501(c)3 groups – each and every day (if at all possible).  The site has a very simple design and exists, not to make money for itself, but to raise money for charities most people have never heard of.  In order to encourage donations on a regular basis, Philanthroper.com only allows donations from $1 – $10.  The site’s founder hope that by limiting the amount of the donations, you will be encouraged to come back each day because giving was not that difficult the day before!  On the other end of the equation, founder Mark Wilson hopes to conclusively illustrate that many people doing a little bit each day adds up to a lot.  By having many people pooling a fraction of their resources, they may still do a great deal of good.

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Corporate executives of major companies have a lot on their plates; that is the nature of the position.  Because of the burdens of the industry, technology companies have additional stresses and responsibilities that add to the CEO’s responsibilities.  As a result, the very best CEOs in the technology sector tend to hire a close cadre of people whom they can trust absolutely.  The CEO relies upon these close corporate officers to oversee the minutiae while they focus on the big picture for a company.  Usually, one of the key hires to make a tech sector CEO successful is the hiring of a head of human resources.  Mark Pincus of Zynga certainly qualifies as successful and part of his success comes from his reliance upon Colleen McCreary.

Colleen McCreary is the Chief People Officer of Zynga.  In that role, McCreary frees up CEO Mark Pincus to worry about things other than the staff of Zynga.  As Chief People Officer, Colleen McCreary is the woman to see about applying for jobs and all other human resource issues at Zynga.  McCreary has been with Zynga since 2009 and helped the company staff up as the Facebook games Zynga produces became more popular.

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Apple Computers, employs an elegantly simple strategy to dominate the mobile computing marketplace.  Apple’s strategy is built largely on a hope that you will buy their entire product line, not just one or two of their devices.  That is to say, products from Apple, more than any other company in the technology sector, are designed to interact easily with one another.  For example, Apple makes it very easy to connect an iPad to an iTV or a MacBook Pro.  But, as many people have discovered, there are more affordable high definition televisions with more options than the iTV.  But why should you be inconvenienced for wanting a great HDTV and an iPhone and wanting them to interact?  Scosche does not think you should be inconvenienced!  That is why Scosche made the sneakPEAK HD Cable!

Scosche’s sneakPEAK High Definition Audio/Video Cable for iPad, iPhone & iPod is a fairly simple cable that allows you to connect virtually any Apple i-product that has a screen on it to a high definition television.  By connecting your Apple products’ output port to the HDTV’s input ports, you are transforming your Apple product into a media player, like a DVD or Blu-Ray player.  This will allow you to play media from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad on your high definition television, even if you are streaming it from the Cloud!

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The Internet truly has made the world smaller in many ways.  With communications over the Internet happening virtually instantaneously, the people of the world are more interconnected than ever.  This interconnection between geographically and culturally different people is especially evident on Internet social networks.  Just because the connectivity between people exists in the Internet does not necessarily mean that it is well-understood.  To understand the real impact of online activity, one needs impressive analytical tools like those offered by Gnip.  Gnip needs Chris Moody.

Chris Moody joined Gnip in the middle of 2011.  Hired by CEO Jud Valeski, Moody assumed the dual roles of President of Gnip and Chief Operating Officer.  In the two executive positions, Moody essentially runs day-to-day operations of Gnip.  Chris Moody is directly responsible for the company’s development and while Valeski and the Board of Directors determine the overall direction of Gnip, it is Moody who is responsible for managing the company to get it there!

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If you check out the technical news sites regularly, you might well be baffled at the updates they frequently have about Legos.  Legos, for those not in the know, are small plastic building toys used to create buildings, vehicles and other structures and devices using standardized plugs and sockets.  Legos first hit the market in 1949 and have grown steadily over the decades since.  They are a children’s toy, one that many adults may not have considered for years.

Why, then, are Legos so prominently featured on so many of the technical sites?

In recent years, Legos have exploded with popularity again.  During the brand’s last major lull, the Lego Company expanded their influence by licensing Legos with major niche franchises.  As a result, Lego capitalized on the popularity of other brands, like Star Wars, Pirates Of The Caribbean, and Spider-man, by creating corresponding Lego sets of places, vehicles and characters from those franchises.  That gambit worked for the business model, but it also gave an entire subculture – the AFOLs – the opportunity to “come out.”  AFOLs are Adult Fans Of Legos and the largest AFOL site on the Internet has four thousand members!

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Puzzle games are exceptionally popular among casual computer game players.  The rise of smartphones has made video games accessible to a much larger audience. Puzzle games like Hexic and Angry Birds have effectively captivated smartphone users and opened entirely new markets up in the video game industry.  But while Angry Birds has remained comparatively static – Rovio has effectively merchandised Angry Birds beyond the popular game, but not released any new expansions for some time – a new game has come to dominate the puzzle game niche.  That game is Cut The Rope.

Cut The Rope is a physics-based puzzle game similar in several ways to Angry Birds, which might be why it so easily took over the same niche.  Developed by Chillingo, Cut The Rope features bright colors and simple animation that makes it ideal for playing on a smartphone or tablet computer, where one does not need the most advanced monitor to get the most out of the game.  When Chillingo released Cut The Rope to the Apple App Store during the fourth quarter of 2010, it sold three million downloads before the end of that year!  Since its initial release, Chillingo has continued to release Cut The Rope for different video game platforms, as well as a new expansion, Cut The Rope: Experiments.

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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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