Technology

Disk Cloning or Disk Imaging is a category of software which copies the contents of one computer hard disk to another, or onto a secondary medium such as a DVD or CD Recordable. A disk cloning program is most commonly used by large companies to ... provision new computers to install the initial package of the operating system and applications for sale, or by home computer users who wish to backup their operating systems in a healthy state. An individual user may also use disk cloning to upgrade to a new hard disk or backup an existing operating system. To provision the hard disk of a computer ... (view more)

You know, we all make fun of those "Computer Help Desk" emails that get passed around? Well -- try working at a real Computer Help Desk for a living! But, seriously. It is a real problem trying to help someone over the phone (especially having them ... type in a DOS command)! Remember the old "cup holder" email joke that got passed around where the guy on the other line thought that the CD ROM tray was a cup holder? Well -- have you ever tried to give good advice? Good advice always starts with the typical "beginning steps." Why? Because the person asking may or may not understand what is meant ... (view more)

Data recovery is the process of recovering data from primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the ... host operating system. Data Recovery: Physical damage A wide variety of failures can cause physical damage to storage media. CD-ROMs can have their metallic substrate or dye layer scratched off; hard disks can suffer any of several mechanical failures, such as head crashes and failed motors; and tapes can simply break. Physical damage always causes ... (view more)

Blogosphere (alternate: BlogSphere or BloggingSphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in ... their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture. The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community. Many ... (view more)

A checksum is a form of redundancy check, a very simple measure for protecting the integrity of data by detecting errors in data that is sent through space (telecommunications) or time (storage). It works by adding up the basic components of a ... message, typically the bytes, and storing the resulting value. Later, anyone can perform the same operation on the data, compare the result to the authentic checksum, and (assuming that the sums match) conclude that the message was probably not corrupted. The simplest form of checksum, which simply adds up the bytes in the data, cannot detect a number ... (view more)

A mouse is a handheld pointing device for computers, involving a small object fitted with one or more buttons and shaped to sit naturally under the hand. The underside of the mouse houses a device that detects the mouse's motion relative to the flat ... surface on which it sits. The mouse's 2D motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on the display. A mouse is called a 'mouse' primarily because the cord on early models resembled the rodent's tail, and also because the motion of the pointer on the screen can be mouse-like. In popular usage, the plural can be either mice or ' ... (view more)

The term Internet fraud refers to any type of fraud scheme that uses email, web sites, chat rooms or message boards to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions or to transmit the proceeds of fraud ... to financial institutions or to other connected with the scheme. Identity theft schemes Most Internet fraud is done through the use of stolen credit card information which is obtained in many ways, the simplest being copying information from retailers, either (online or offline). There have been many cases of hackers obtaining huge quantities of ... (view more)

Packet writing is a technique used to allow writeable CD-ROM and DVD-ROM media to be used in a similar manner to a floppy disk. Packet writing can be used both with write-once read-many (WORM media) such as CD-R, DVD+R and DVD-R, and also with ... rewriteable media such as CD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RW. WORM media, however, cannot recover space once it is written to the disc; furthermore, a deleted file does not free space on the disk, and a modified or overwritten file occupies additional space even if the file size has not increased. When the free space on a once-writeable disk is exhausted, no ... (view more)

In computing, JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) is a commonly used standard method of lossy compression for photographic images. The file format which employs this compression is commonly also called JPEG; the most common file extensions for this format are ... .jpeg, .jfif, .jpg, .JPG, or .JPE although .jpg is the most common on all platforms. JPEG/JFIF is the most common format used for storing and transmitting photographs on the World Wide Web. It is not as well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics because its compression method performs badly on these types of images (the PNG ... (view more)

Electronic mail, abbreviated e-mail or email , is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term email applies both to the Internet email system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ... (SMTP) and to workgroup collaboration systems allowing users within one company or organization to send messages to each other. Often workgroup collaboration systems natively use non-standard protocols but have some form of gateway to allow them to send and receive internet email. Some organizations may use the internet protocols for internal email ... (view more)