November 10th, 2008 by HaFiZ
One of the ideas behind the Windows XP installation CD was that it was supposed to make installing Windows a whole lot easier. Less errors, simpler choices, and removing installation confusion sound pretty good to most of us, right? Microsoft had hoped for XP to be as pain-free and easy to install as possible. Unfortunately, reality had other plans for some XP users. While it is extremely rare to have major issues installing a fresh copy of XP on a computer, reinstallations can frequently be troublesome even when doing things by the book. Lucky for us Microsoft has provided us with specific tools to help us deal with these situations.
While this may seem like very little comfort when compared to XP’s many shortcomings, these tips can often keep a bad day from getting a lot worse, if you know what I mean.
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October 24th, 2008 by HaFiZ
SanDisk’s already launched Micro SD cards with pre-loaded tunes on. So Dell’s decided to get in on the music scene too and has launched a service to pre-install music on your new machine.
The PC giant, together with Universal Music Group, will offer musical bundles of 50 and 100 tracks. Then, once your new PC arrives, you’ll find your chosen bundles neatly arranged in a Music folder on the hard drive.
All tracks are DRM free, so you’ll also be able to move the music between applications and onto portable players.
There are lots of bundles to pick from, including one called “Number Ones Playlist” that includes tracks from the Jackson Five, Diana Ross and The Temptations. Dell said it will update the bundles on a “regular basis” though, so don’t worry if those bands aren’t to your liking.
Dell will install your chosen bundles on a laptop or desktop, but has said that it won’t do so on the XPS One or Inspiron Mini 9. It’s also refused to touch machines running Windows XP, Vista 64-bit or Linux - so it’s 32-bit Vista only.
The service expands Dell’s movies service, which it launched last month and allows users to have films pre-installed onto a new PC.
Dell’s music service is available online in the US now, with bundle prices starting at $25 (£14/€18). UK prices haven’t been announced yet.

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October 2nd, 2008 by HaFiZ
There are different ways and strategies when it comes to search engine optimizations (SEOs). As more and more people are starting to realize that creating blogs can generate money easily, finding for effective marketing strategies is essential.
One approach is to create e-books. In creating e-books, the first thing that should come into your mind is to determine the format to use. The ever reliable PDF format is what most people find easy to deal with. However, these are considered to have the lowest perceive value, not unless of course you wish to charge for it.
But still, they are great ways to enhance your SEO strategies. In general, e-books are the most powerful tools that you can consider for your business to grow. Below are some of the reasons why they are still the best approaches for your SEO strategies.
E-Books are Easy to Create
Creating e-books does not necessarily require you to hold a master’s degree in the field of journalism. Basically, anyone can start creating e-books. What is required is your passion to right and the rights thoughts to gather to create an effective e-book. If you create e-books, you can do so by choosing any of the two formats, namely .pdf and .exe. E-books with an .exe format is read by Window Users and not in Macintosh computers while the .pdf format is readable by both.
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October 1st, 2008 by HaFiZ
Spam - What exactly is it?
In order to combat spam effectively it is necessary to define exactly what spam is.
Most people believe that spam is unsolicitied email. However, this definition is not entirely correct and confuses some types of legitimate business correspondence with true spam.
Spam is anonymous, unsolicited bulk email.
This is the description that is being used today in the USA and Europe as a basis for the creation of anti-spam legislation. Let’s take a closer look at each component of the definition:
- Anonymous: real spam is sent with spoofed or harvested sender addresses to conceal the actual sender.
- Mass mailing: real spam is sent in mass quantities. Spammers make money from the small percentage of recipients that actually respond, so for spam to be cost-effective, the initial mails have to be high-volume.
- Unsolicited: mailing lists, newsletters and other advertising materials that end users have opted to receive may resemble spam but are actually legitimate mail. In other words, the same piece of mail can be classed as both spam and legitimate mail depending on whether or not the user elected to receive it.
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September 28th, 2008 by HaFiZ
1. Maintain at least two email addresses. You should use your private address only for personal correspondence. The public address should be the one you use to register on public forums, in chat rooms, to subscribe to mailing lists etc.
2. Never publish your private address on publicly accessible resources.
3. Your private address should be difficult to spoof. Spammers use combinations of obvious names, words and numbers to build possible addresses. Your private address should not simply be your first and last name. Be creative and personalize your email address.
4. If you have to publish your private address electronically, mask it to avoid having it harvested by spammers. Joe.Smith@yahoo.com is easy to harvest, as is Joe.Smith at yahoo.com. Try writing Joe-dot-Smith-at-yahoo-dot-com instead. If you need to publish your private address on a web-site, do this as a graphics file rather than as a link.
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September 27th, 2008 by HaFiZ
How do you fix this?
It’s really not that complicated. For example purposes, let’s say your company is an Internet Marketing Company. Let’s update our Title Tag to say . Now this has value! To the search engine this truly defines what your company is all about and what content is on your web page. If someone now does a search for “Internet Marketing and SEO Company” you have a better chance of being displayed in the search engine for that search.
One thing to remember is that when you are updating your Title Tags, it’s important to update the Title Tag for every single website to ensure that they all relate to that content that’s on that particular page. If all of your web page’s Title Tags are the same, then the search engines will basically see this as one page. But if you have different Title Tags for every page, then the search engines will index your pages accordingly.
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September 23rd, 2008 by HaFiZ
Given that computer hacking is at least three decades old, there has been plenty of time for governments to develop and approve cybercrime laws. At the moment, almost all developed countries have some form of anti-hacking law or legislation on data theft or corruption which can be used to prosecute cyber criminals. There are efforts to make these laws even more stringent, which sometimes raise protests from groups which support the right to freedom of information.
Over the past few years, there have been lots of convictions for hacking and unauthorized data access. Here are a few of them:
- Kevin Mitnick is probably the one of the most famous hacker takedown cases. Mitnick was arrested by the FBI in Raleigh, North Carolina, on February 15th, 1995, after the computer expert Tsutomu Shimomura managed to track him to his hideout. After pleading guilty to most of the charges brought against him, Mitnick was sentenced to 46 months in prison and three years probation. He was additionally sentenced to another twenty-two months for probation violation and additional charges. He was eventually released from prison on January 21, 2000.
- Pierre-Guy Lavoie, a 22-year-old Canadian hacker, was sentenced to 12 months of community service and placed on probation for 12 months for fraudulently using computer passwords to perpetrate computer crimes. He was sentenced under Canadian law.
- Thomas Michael Whitehead, 38, of Boca Raton, Florida, was the first person to be found guilty under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). He was prosecuted as part of the Attorney General’s Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property program and charged with selling hardware which could be used to illegally receive DirecTV satellite broadcasts.
- Serge Humpich, a 36 year-old engineer, was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence of 10 months by a ruling issued by the 13th correctional chamber. He also had to pay 12,000 francs (approx. €1,200) in fines, and symbolic damages of one franc to the ‘Groupement des Cartes Bancaires’.
- On October 10, 2001, Vasiliy Gorshkov, age 26, of Chelyabinsk, Russia, was found guilty of 20 counts of conspiracy, computer crime, and fraud committed against the Speakeasy Network of Seattle, Washington, Nara Bank of Los Angeles, California, Central National Bank of Waco, Texas; and the online payment company PayPal of Palo Alto, California.
- On July 1, 2003, Oleg Zezev, aka “Alex,” a Kazakhstan citizen, was sentenced in a Manhattan federal court to over four years (51 months) in prison following his conviction on extortion and computer hacking charges.
- Mateias Calin, a Romanian hacker, along with five American citizens, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that they conspired to steal more than $10 million in computer equipment from Ingram Micro in Santa Ana, California, the largest technology distributor in the world. Mateias and his network are yet to be convicted for these crimes and face up to 90 years in prison.
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September 20th, 2008 by HaFiZ
Most computer vulnerabilities can be exploited in a variety of ways. Hacker attacks may use a single specific exploit, several exploits at the same time, a misconfiguration in one of the system components or even a backdoor from an earlier attack.
Due to this, detecting hacker attacks is not an easy task, especially for an inexperienced user. This article gives a few basic guidelines to help you figure out either if your machine is under attack or if the security of your system has been compromised. Keep in mind just like with viruses, there is no 100% guarantee you will detect a hacker attack this way. However, there’s a good chance that if your system has been hacked, it will display one or more of the following behaviors.
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September 16th, 2008 by HaFiZ
Four year jail sentence for webcam hacker
A 47 year old computer technician has been sentenced to four years in jail after being found guilty of using malware to gain control of webcams and to take pictures of the webcam’s owners without their knowledge or consent.
The Cypriot man, who has not been named, used a Trojan program to control a 17 year old’s webcam and take illicit pictures of her. He then attempted to blackmail the victim, saying he would make the pictures public unless she posed naked for him in front of her webcam. The victim, whose machine became infected after she opened an email attachment, responded to the blackmail demands by going to the local police.
The man was initially arrested in 2005, the same year in which two Spanish men were arrested in separate incidents for similar crimes. One of them, a computer science student, was ordered to pay 3,000 euros compensation to his victim, and a 1,000 euro fine.

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September 15th, 2008 by HaFiZ
It really seems as if children have become obsessed with all the video games they have been playing. Each day children are engulfed with the excitement that these video games bring to their lives, but parents are becoming truly concerned.
Many children are becoming obsessed with video games. They spend all the money they get for an allowance or birthday gifts on video games, accessories, and video game magazines. They play hours of these video games every day while at night they dream about ways to get through the next level of their favorite video game.
It seems as if these children are turning into robots as their little fingers turn into tiny machines as they become quick and precise with each touch of the controller. Often times, you can see their little palms sweating when ever they are playing really difficult levels. They can get anxiety from their hearts racing and the knots that develop within their stomach as playing some video games are as suspenseful as watching an extremely scary movie.
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September 12th, 2008 by HaFiZ
In the realm of mortals, life may seem to be closing in on black and white. We lead our lives with the orientation that only the quantifiable, observable and overt are deemed to be true. However, in the realm of the endless, human beings are mere mortal creatures and truth is not a matter of great importance. It is a world where scary creatures lurk, ghosts and mummies cause mayhem, and humans are at the mercy of unfathomable paranormal events.
Many ghost stories and urban legends about scary creatures have been circulating throughout the years. Despite these, people are still skeptical as to the veracity of the ghostly figures in these stories. Stories can’t seem to stand against the strong mantra “to see is to believe”.
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September 5th, 2008 by HaFiZ
As a Website Development and Internet Marketing Company, a major focus of ours when developing our client’s websites is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the website’s web pages. The first and foremost important thing for SEO is your website’s Title Tags.
If a website does not have Title Tags that properly define its pages then it will be extremely difficult to receive a good ranking in the search engines. There are many reasons why Title Tags are so important - the following will define Title Tags and outline the importance of their use for Search Engine Optimization.
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August 2nd, 2008 by HaFiZ
Popular culture has made video games and computer games a significant part of people’s lives. While we think of these games as a popular hobby for kids, more adults are actually hooked up on playing these virtual games. Since these form of game provides individuals with the perfect opportunity to relax, isolating themselves from the actual concerns that they may be facing in their lives. However, what’s disturbing about this game is that it is becoming one of the leading causes of modern-day addiction. The compulsive use of computer and video games has become prevalent, affecting a significant portion of the world’s children as well as adult population. This emphasized the importance of promoting awareness on video game addiction or computer game addiction. Aside from promoting a condition of social isolation, this form of addiction also leads an addict to focus on in-game achievements rather than their own real life.
Video and computer games have built-in reward system features, making them more appealing and engaging to play. Aside from simply passing time, these games can satisfy many of an individual’s psychological needs. Therefore, these games intentionally or innocently connect with the player and that player to other players, creating a bond that makes them difficult to resist. This way, these games allow its players to escape reality, allowing them to create a different online persona bringing their fantasy to life. In a way, playing these games delivers a feeling of satisfaction in escaping the realities of life while immersing into the fun, thrill and excitement of the game. Unfortunately, the good feeling that these games bring is often abused, and leads to addiction.
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August 1st, 2008 by HaFiZ
Ghost Town is a wonderfully funny ghost movie starring Ricky Gervais and Tea Leoni.
After having encountered thousands of ghosts (so far) in my lifetime, I couldn’t help watching it with a little bit of a critical eye. It’s always interesting to see what creative license Hollywood will do with reality, and this movie is no different. (Though it’s still REALLY enjoyable, I highly recommend it.)
In the movie, all of the dis incarnates stay behind because they have unfinished business on the earth plane.
So, do people stay behind after their death solely because of unfinished business?
Myth or Reality?
Well, a little of both actually.
First, people choose to stay behind for numerous reasons, not just because they have unfinished business.
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Oh, the no-no’s of healthy living. It seems as if everywhere I look, I’m faced with the same suggestions on how to lose weight, be healthier, and have more energy. But, when I read the behaviors to avoid, I think: I do that, what’s so wrong with that?
I consider myself a fairly healthy person, I have my fair share of energy, I’ve lost weight. I should get a gold star from the diet gods. But alas, we’re just not meant to be; we differ on too many things.
Top ten so-called diet faux pas that I remain completely unapologetic about:
10. Drinking my calories.
Something tells me that the smoothies I’ve come to depend on during the summer months for cool portable meals are not contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle.
9. Eating dinner in front of the television.
I was considering spending a nice evening at home, eating dinner and talking to the imaginary family of five I have, but they were watching TV too and asked that I please shut up.
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