The Conficker Worm

The book I read to research this post was Worm by Mark Bowden which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. This book describes the mass computer infestation by the Conficker Worm as the First Digital World War. In the Ukraine which is where this worm was released it's legal to release a worm or virus to infect the worldwide computer community as long as it doesn't infect any computers belonging to Ukrainian citizens. This worm checked the location of the computer & checked the type of keyboard & if either was Ukrainian it moved on. America & much of the rest of the world was unprepared for an attack on this scale. At its peak it infected 8 million computers & if there was a denial of service attack it threatened to bring down the whole internet. It infected computers belonging to the British Parliament as well as French & German military computers. The people who write worms & viruses often do it to order. Someone will say something like I want to bring down 1,000 googles computers or I want to break into a certain banks computers & steal credit card information. In the case of the Conficker Worm it was spread in a program distributed by a web site called trafficconverter.biz which was in the form of a download. From there it spread rapidly from one computer to another. At that time there was a weakness in Windows connected to port 445 which was exploited. It's thought the Chinese Secret Service were at the back of it. Nobody knows how many black hat crackers are in China but it's thought the government sponsor a lot of them. A lot of the experts connected with dealing with the Conficker Worm were unpaid experts who studied computer security as a hobby. As a result of all this an FBI department was set up & a lot of these experts were employed by the department although a lot of them are on a consultant basis.

Windows 7

The book I read to research this post was My Microsoft Windows 7 PC by Katherine Murray which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. If you remember I did a post on My Windows 7 Phone & this book is similiar in that there are lots of pictures of screenshots to show you what to do. Windows 7 comes in several versions which are starter, home premium, professional & ultimate.
Starter is for netbooks although some come with home premium.
Home Premium is for home pcs & primarily features media center in addition to media player. Really it contains everything a home user could want from an operating system.
Professional is a business operating system & contains many security features. It also includes media player but not media center which was a similiar case with vista business. Microsoft has streamlined the versions, I think many people were confused by all the different versions with vista.
Ultimate contains the best of both worlds & is the operating system I use on my home desktop pc.
There is an assortment of different backgrounds with windows 7 & something that started with vista is the aero background. It's a background that's optimized for a reasonable graphics card upwards. In other words if you have a netbook it probably won't work but if you have a pc made in the last few years it will. I think you need at least 128 MB on your graphics card. If you have a netbook or low end pc there's an option for a normal background.

Ebay

The book I read to research this post was Ebay.co.uk for Dummies by Marsha Collier et al which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. In this post I'm going to write about dutch auctions, escrow sales & having a shop on ebay. Ebay if you take it's combined income because it has sites for quite a lot of different countries makes more than the GDP for some developed countries. A dutch sale is say if you auction 5 identical items you can incorporate it into one listing & say one item is sold at £10 but the bids on the other items are £12 all the items are sold at the lowest accepted bid of £10.
An escrow sale is often used to get people to buy an expensive & a listing with this kind of sale costs a bit more. Basically when the buyer gets the item they can examine it & if they don't like it they can return it within 2 days & get their money back. The buyer normally foots the bill of returning it though.
A lot of traders often called power users on Ebay have virtual shops. The basic package is good value, a featured shop & anchor shop are more expensive but are more prominent on the Ebay website. Finally if you are a trader it's a good idea to get a paypal account as a lot of buyers will only use paypal. Also consider signing up to squaretrade which gives you a seal you can use & if there is a problem between you and a buyer they will arbitrate although they charge a fee for this.

Freefall

The book I read to research this post was Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. If I had a complaint about this book it is that it's more about the USA although a lot of it applies to the UK. This author who is also an economist won the nobel prize. This book is about what happened to the economy around 2009 & how it rocked peoples confidence in the global market. Many people thought there was no way a big bank would go bankrupt which of course happened to Lehman Brothers. It does say the US government wouldn't have averted the recession had they bailed them out. They were a result rather than a cause as it puts it. A lot of the problem was George W Bush & his policies, he made tax cuts which only partially helped the economy. Apparently a lot of economists predicted there would be a crash. One of the main causes of the crash was banks were offering cheap inflation linked mortgages. Of course they were only cheap while interest rates were low. A lot of the trouble could have been averted by the banks demanding higher downpayments & selling more fixed rate mortgages. One potential solution to the problem is the government offering low interest loans to people who default mortgages in effect buying the mortgage. The government can get low interest loans easily & can make low interest loans to the banks so why not do it to the consumers. A final comment I want to make is in Europe including Britain we have seen the government bailing out banks. In a lot of cases we have seen the banks still failing to make a profit & the bosses have big payouts which lets face it if they are such good bosses why are the government bailing them out. In the book he describes this as biting the hand that feeds them.

The 7 Mental Money Secrets

The book I read to research this post was The 7 Mental Money Secrets of Millionaire Entrepreneurs by David Neagle which is an excellent ebook which is free from Kindle. David was a dock worker who was on a boat that got sucked under a dam & he suffered horrendous injuries. In the time he was convalescing he did plenty of reading & his life changing moment came when he read The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles which I have read as well. It's probably free on kindle as it's a very old book which is probably out of copyright. Wallace also does a book called The Science of Health which believe me was way ahead of its time. In them days they thought all you needed for a healthy diet was meat & didn't bother much with vegetables. I'll mention some other books David Neagle has written.
1 The Mental Money Game
2 The Neagle Code
3 Mastering the Massive Cash Injection
4 First Steps to Cash.
He talks about 7 secrets which I'll mention briefly although the book goes into them in more detail. Incidentally I think some of them books by Neagle are free on kindle as well so I may review them at a later stage. Anyway here are the rules.
1 Acknowledging your desires.
2 Making decisions to follow your desires. When you have desires there's a subconsconscious for them particular desires.
3 Belief in a higher power, you don't necessarily have to believe in god & primarily have to believe he wants the best for you.
4 Love, you should love your job is one issue in this.
5 Be responsible.
6 Have the will to succeed.
7 Environment & action.
Anyway that rounds up this post.

Pinterest

The booklet I read to research this post was 10,000,000 Re-Pins by Barrett Niehus which is very good & which I downloaded from Kindle. This ebooklet was free incidently. This is about marketing your blog or business on the Pinterest social network. Pinterest is the fastest growing social network in the world & while it does appeal more to women than men that's rapidly changing. The website owners discourage blatant advertising so you have to be more subtle. Membership is by invitation only although I think if you request an invite it's quite straightforward. The idea behind this site is you are given a virtual pinboard & what you put on it is primarily pictures from the internet, your digital camera & also re-pins from other peoples boards. The idea is to get as many re-pins for as many pictures as possible. Also you try and get as many of your friends on more established social media like facebook & twitter to visit your pinboard & join Pinterest as possible. Some companies like South-West Airlines have made a real success of marketing on Pinterest in conjunction with other sites. The whole point to Pinterest is if you are selling a product for example you don't just have pictures of your product. You try to get people to send in any stories of how your product has helped them & any anecdotes or problems. You can run competitions but need to check the rules on this site. Another you now like with twitter you tweet interesting information that people find interesting not just about your product, it's the same on this site. One company featured pictures of peoples pets called furry friends. A lot of companies that use this site have several virtual pinboards & have a slightly different theme for each one. It's also often a good idea to give your friends the option of uploading their photos onto your pinboard themselves. You do have the option of following or friending people like on twitter & facebook. Also incorporate linkedin & google+ into your strategy as they are upcoming social media sites.

Starting an Etsy Business

The book I read to research this post was Starting an Etsy Business for Dummies by Kate Shoup which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. I think a lot of the advice could apply to running an online business with Amazon or Ebay as well. A lot of the people who sell on Etsy sell craft products which they often make themselves or sell collectibles which are defined by Etsy as anything older than 20 years. You can sell almost anything on Etsy although certain things like drugs & live animals are banned. When you join there site it's worth reading their rules & also worth reading there blog which features a featured seller I think every couple of days. This can get you inspired as well as advising you about some of the pitfalls. If you choose to sell collectibles you can often get stock at garden fetes or car boot sales often at good prices. They advise if you are selling something especially if it's something you have made that you take the price it cost you to produce it & as a rule of thumb double it to get your retail price. This book is american & a lot of your customers will be to so you may have to pay state tax on their order although some states like Alaska don't charge this. If you are selling something that will probably be a gift for someones partner consider charging a higher price because a lot of people will have a price in mind & will look for something that's that price. If your item is cheaper you will lose the sale. A lot of people sell things on this site you can't get in the shops which gives people a reason to buy from you. Also it might be an idea to expand onto sites like Ebay to get more orders.

Windows 8: A Preview

The booklet I read to research this post was Windows 8: What to Expect by Michel Martin which is excellent & which was free on Kindle. It's only a short but I think it's well worth downloading. There's a website where you can download a beta version of Windows 8 as an ISO image. If you do a search on google you should find it. It works on any machine that currently runs Vista or Windows 7. I think Microsoft have learnt that if they enable it to run on as many machines as possible they will sell more. In addition it runs on tablet pc's with an ARM processor. The 32 bit version requires a 16GB hard drive & the 64 bit version requires a minimum of 20GB. You can run from an USB drive of the same values as the hard drives but you may find you need to go into the BIOS & enable boot from USB device. If you choose to install it on a hard drive you need the Windows 7 Installation Tool. Alternatively you can convert the ISO image & copy it onto a DVD. Note it needs 8GB of space.
In Windows 8 they have done away with the start button & instead you have the metro which is quite a few big buttons in the centre of the screen that you click according to what you want to do. Among them is an XBox Live button & it's rumoured that the retail version of Windows 8 will play XBox games. There's also improved integration with the major social networking sites. The idea being that you almost use it like email & regularly stay in touch with your friends. To start a program you type the 1st couple of letters of its name & the corresponding ones appear so you can select one. You will be able to connect 3G devices without a driver to your PC. It will have support for USB 3.0. If you have several hard drives it will automatically merge them into 1 volume like Home Servers but if you prefer you can use your hard drives as if you have RAID which means it will do mirror copies. y Finally you will be able to install software straight from an ISO image.

Google

The book I read to research this post was The Google Story by David A Vise which is an excellent book which I bought from a car boot sale. In 1996 Sergey Brin & Larry Page developed a piece of software called Pagerank which as a bit of a joke they named after Larry. It was a much more intelligent search engine than what companies like Yahoo were using at that time. It's algorithms are a closely guarded secret but what we do know is it looks at the context of words on a webpage & if a word is used as a tag it checks to see if that word appears on the page. Believe me the world was crying out for something like this as some of the tricks webmasters were doing like repeatedly using a word on a page were getting them top position on search results. Anyway Larry & Sergey approached Yahoo & Altavista with their creation but their attitude was if it ain't broke why fix it. So Larry & Sergey got some venture capital & started their own company called Google. They apparently wanted to call it Googol which is the unit name of a 1 followed by 100 zero's. That again was their sense of humour because pagerank indexes loads of pages. Anyway they settled on Google. It's interesting that they don't allow adverts on their homepage depriving themselves of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. Google has over 200,000 computers many of them daisy chained into multiple units. That makes Googles computer network the biggest of any company in the world. They concentrate on making their search engine the fastest to respond. Also Google builds its own servers. As well as being a search engine Google has its fingers in many pies. Among them it's a software company & among its products is Google Docs which is free to use for home users. They give you your own website to store your work. There is also an online book repository at
http://print.google.com
There are many scanned books at this site.
There is also a site where you can explore the moon at
http://moon.google.com
Finally their advertising programme which takes the form of adwords & adsense is particularly accessible to small businesses because you can limit how much you spend per day on it. You can pay them per customer or per visitor to your site.

DJing

The book I read to research this post was DJing for Dummies by John Steventon which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. I think the main reason most DJ's become DJ's is their enhanced ability to pull women. It's also quite nice to see the crowds reaction when you play a great record though. If you are interested in becoming a DJ you should have a go with someone else's equipment initially to see if you like it. One thing a lot of budding DJ's don't realise is you need good quality equipment that's specifically for that job. If you use cheap record decks or cd decks the vibration from the bass is liable to make it skip. Also at high volume it's liable to have feedback & distortion. Also with record decks you need a good motor after all you are going to be using them quite a lot. You should certainly test them thoroughly before buying them especially at high volume. Some DJ's skimp on the mixer which if you buy a decent one you can get special effects rather than just fading from one song to another. You should never use noise cancelling headphones in a DJ environment because you need to be able to hear any interference or distortion. These days a lot of DJ's use an ipod or laptop to store their music which is much more portable than lugging around a load of records or cds. Also some DJ's store their music on some blank cds in the form of mp3s. If you are burning cds or copying music onto a hard drive for music performance you need a special which at the time this book was written was £200. You should make sure any equipment isn't liable to tip over after most of the people dancing will probably be drunk & if there's any chance it can tip over it probably will. Established DJ's can often demand something like a case of budweiser beer when they perform. If you are performing somewhere you need to clear up whether you will get free drink. Especially if you are starting out it will probably be each time the manager visits the booth.

Digital Forensic Evidence

The book I read to research this post was Digital & Multimedia Forensic Evidence edited by John J Barbara which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. If you are preparing digital forensic evidence for a court case you need to prepare a nontechnical report for people like the judge & jury & a technical report for if the defence team wants to bring in an expert to examine your work. It's important you state what you were looking for on the device, what you found, what laws may or may not have been contravened & why, the methods used & software & hardware used. It's important if the defence bring in an expert to replicate your methods that he finds the same results. To achieve this you should do the test several times & make sure none of the data changes on the device. You use things like write blockers to do that.
One issue that forensic examiners are increasingly asked to examine is child porn & there is a lot of this on peer2peer like the now closed down limewire. Money obviously does change hands when people are acquiring stuff like that & it's worth noting a percentage goes to terrorist & other dubious organisations like the russian mafia.
There is a case in this book where someone murdered his wife & then forged a suicide note which they were able to work out had been written since her death. He did get found guilty but it's a good example of digital forensics. I don't know what they do if someone says they altered the clock on the computer. I suspect if they planned there story out they could get away with it. In there example the letter was produced later on in the case & he claimed he had no memory of writing it & then made out he was working out grief. He also gave the computer to someone else & when it was seized tried to have it declared invalid on the grounds that the new owners had used it.

Job Searching With Social Media

The book I read to research this post was Job Searching With Social Media for Dummies by Joshua Waldman which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. I only read this book because I thought it would make an interesting blog. There are primarily 3 major social network sites which are Twitter, Facebook  & Linkedin. If you are interested in working abroad you should look at websites which are based in that country. Also sometimes there are social media sites which are based around your profession ie if you are a digital artist. Apparently on Twitter specific professions have discussions on a certain day during the week. An example was that Human Resources have a discussion on a thursday. Anybody can join in on these discussions although they use a special hash tag which you have to find out about. You should check your online history via a search engine like google or a free site which is specifically for that purpose is http://www.pipl.com/ You can often tell them what parts of their data belong to you. Sometimes you have to enter whether you have letters after your name, or your town, or your middle name. If you have a bad history you can enter new data in the form of either blogs or social media & just hope it gets driven down the rankings. If a company is researching you they will seldom look beyond the 3rd page. One beauty of Twitter is you can talk to anybody via the @ symbol. Linkedin is probably the social media site that is most respected by google so you want your cv on there. A lot of people use a free website like Weebly on which they have their cv & link to it via their social media sites. Especially on Linkedin if you are approaching someone for a job, obviously read that persons page but also join some of the Linkedin Groups that person is a member of. Also contribute an article to one of those groups. If you are just after an entry level job try craigslist.com on this site the jobs are often taken very quickly though. A final note particularly if you are after a high level job try & find something almost unique about yourself that makes you more suitable for that job than the other candidates & make sure you stress it.

Google Sketchup

The book I read to research this post was Google Sketchup 7 for Dummies by Aidan Chopra which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. This book dates from 2009 so there has probably been a couple of versions since. Google purchased the company that makes Sketchup in 2006 & at that time it was an expensive program, since then they offer the standard version as a free download & there's a pro version you can buy. The pro version is aimed at people like architects. In addition there's a website called 3d Warehouse where if you do an interesting 3d drawing in Sketchup you can upload it to this website which is hosted by Google & other users can download it free of charge. Also Sketchup is compatible with Google Earth. This is a project where Google has mapped all the Earth. Each location varies from 4 years to 2 months since it was mapped. In addition Google hopes to eventually map all the major cities buildings in 3d in Sketchup. In some locations the resolution in Google Earth is so fine you could potentially see a coffee cup. Sketchup is more intuitive & easier to use than for example AutoCAD. For example to select a line you click it once with the mouse, to select a face you double click it, & to select a whole object you triple click it. To copy something you merely press the control key & use the push/pull tool. In addition to the version for Windows there's a version for the Mac with OSX.

Starting an iPhone App Business

The book I read to research this post was Starting an iPhone App Business for Dummies by Joel Elad et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. An Apple iPhone App Developer subscription costs $99 per year which you need if you are going to do an iphone app. In addition you need the iPhone App SDK or software development kit which is a free download. It's relatively easy to learn to write an iPhone App compared to for example learning Visual Basic. If you already know Java you have a headstart because iPhones can understand that. Stanford University has written a course in writing iPhones which can be found on iTunes. Many Apps are free, often because someone is new to programming & wants a good job so does it to show how skilled he is. Some people give Apps away because they sell advertising space on it. Others do a limited version free & offer a premium version for a fee. Yet other Apps are free but charge a subscription for a service which is a part of it. The vast majority of Apps are either free or only charge a small fee. Interestingly the ones that are expensive tend to be ones aimed at medical professionals, who if they had to buy special equipment to do the same job it would be quite expensive. If you can get a software developer interested in your App, you can make money without the hassle of promoting it. If you've an idea for an App but don't want to write the code you can get a programmer at a site like
http://guru.com/
They might do a simple App for around $500. A more complex one could cost from $1,000 to $5,000. You might be able to get it done a bit cheaper if you agree the programmer can reuse the code. This book also tells you all about how to promote your App but I think it would make this post too long if I went into all that.

Digital Wars

The book I read to research this post was Digital Wars by Charles Arthur which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is about the war for market share & control of the internet by Microsoft, Google & Apple. Bill Gates the owner of Microsoft was once asked what company he feared the most & said what he feared the most was someone building something in a garage in Silicon Valley & selling it much like how Apple started because a small firm like that could respond to market forces much more readily than Microsoft ever could. Apparently out of the established companies he fears Google the most because they are a software company as well as a search engine & are run along similiar lines to Microsoft. He fears if he doesn't watch Google very carefully they could put Microsoft out of business. Nowadays Bill has handed over much of the running of his company & concentrates on his charity work, stopping preventable illnesses in developing countries. When Apple brought back Steve Jobs to run the company they were almost out of business. Apple had filed a lawsuit against Microsoft because the Windows interface of using the mouse was quite similiar to the Apple Lisa which I think used a touch screen. Bill bought $150 million of non voting shares in Apple & agreed that he would continue to support an AppleMac version of Microsoft Office. Without all that Apple would have gone out of business. Nowadays Apple makes more revenue from iPods than from computers aside from the iPad. In 2011 Apple overtook Exxon to become the highest valued company on the stock exchange. Apparently Toshiba came up with a very tiny hard drive which was incorporated into the 1st generation iPod. Also they originally only worked with iMac computers & were seen as a way to increase Apples share of the computer market. It was inspired of Jobs to see that if they made iTunes compatible with Windows they could sell a lot more iPods. A lot of Apple fans saw it as sacrilege. A lot of the iPods competitors were much bulkier than the iPod & Jobs was instrumental in insisting it be as tiny as possible. Microsoft brought out the Zune which was a capable machine but was inferior to the iPod. It shared features with the Xbox & Xbox Live. I think if you had the wireless adaptor you could stream music from the Xbox to your Zune which was quite nifty.

iPhone 4 S

The book I read to research this post was iPhone 4 S for Dummies by Bob le Vitus et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This is the smartphone I have & this book covers pretty much covers all you could possibly want to know about the iPhone 4 S. You can do video calls with it using Facetime & that also supports more than 2 callers at the same time or conference calls. It has a bigger screen than any of the previous iPods. It's essentially an iPod with phone capability. You should take it out of its case to recharge it as it can get quite hot which can damage the battery. If you install Skype on an iPod Touch you can make phone calls via a computer network. One of the best features of the 4S is the maps which work like a GPS & show you your location in relation to everything else. A lot of people want to use iCloud which is the current version of Mobile Me mainly instant messaging. To use that if you have a pc you need a minimum of Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 installed. You sometimes need to download updates or reset your iPhone via computer ie if it's malfunctioning. To do that if you have a pc you need a minimum of Windows XP with Service Pack 3. Apple will continue providing updates for the iPhone & one thing it said in the book is that might include support for video & audio formats that aren't currently supported. Certainly most of the major formats are supported. iTunes is quite nifty & you can download television shows, films, podcasts, music & apps for your iPhone from this. It supports the playback of video files in a HD format but these take up extra space on the hard drive. I think the podcasts are particularly good value as practically all of them are free.

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango

The book I read to research this post was My Windows Phone 7 by Brian Posey which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. This book is particularly if you have one of these smartphones as there are lots of pictures showing how to operate it. I have an iPhone but I thought this book would be interesting. Actually on the subject of Apple Computers I have noticed they have got a website at
http://safaribooksonline.com/
At that site you pay them £30 per month by direct debit & they let you read any of thousands of books online on computers & technology & they also give you free vouchers that you can save up to get free downloads of their computer ebooks. When you consider the prices of computer books I think that is a good deal.
Anyway I'm going to write what the new features of the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Release are.
They have support for multiple email accounts.
YouTube & Facebook integrate with it.
It includes a version of Internet Explorer 9.
Their version of Office supports comments with in documents & charts.
You can download & install patches for the operating system.
These phones use a faster processor than previous Windows phones.

Google+ for Business

The book I read to research this post was Google+ for Business by Chris Brogan which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. According to this author Google+ is the next big thing. When Google ran a trial with Google+ twenty million signed up in the space of a few weeks. Facebook has 750 million members & that works out at 1 in 11 of the planets population but what Google+ has done is very impressive. With social network they seem to have a lifespan & if you look at MySpace & Friendster which were very popular & although they still have a lot of members they are only a shadow of their former selves. Even sites like Facebook & Google+ won't last forever. Google+ is about giving useful information. I think it's a shame you can't do blogs on their site. You have circles on their site so for example if you were a photographer you might have a circle for customers, one for friends & one for family etc. You can send information that's relevant to a particular circle to all the members of a circle. Also a lot it is about if you find a useful website you tell people about it. They have business pages which you have to pay a subscription for one feature is you can't join a hangout but you can start one. Hangouts are like groups on other social media sites. If you all share a common interest it lets you discuss it. Some celebrities like Wil Wheaton of Star Trek Next Generation fame are major users of Google+. If you are selling a product you are probably better off concentrating on members of the public as they are more likely to converse with you & buy. Many celebrities have PR people who run their page.

Stem Cells

The book I read to research this post was Stem Cells for Dummies by Meg Scheinder et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Stem Cells are cells that help you reproduce cells. In humans they are found in quite a lot of places including the brain & heart. Humans are incapable of growing limbs but some animals like crayfish can. Stem Cells connected with reproduction are called Embrionic Stem Cells & these are particularly controversial because some people think we will be cloning people in the near future. In fact it might be possible to clone sheep & dogs but humans are much more complicated. In fact any kind of cloning weakens the DNA & the clone is liable to have disabilities or at the very least weakened DNA. Dolly the sheep which was a clone only lived 6 years which is half what you would expect a sheep to live to. In the 60's they did an experiment with mice where there irradiated there blood & bones & then transplanted bone marrow into some of them. The ones who had the transplants mostly survived. It was from this that the standard treatment for leukemia was born. With this they give chemotherapy to the bones which destroys the marrow & then transplant new marrow which will hopefully grow & replace the infected marrow. A little while ago a religious cult called the Raelists which believes that aliens produced us by cloning 25,000 years ago, claimed to be cloning. It's thought this was just a publicity stunt & they haven't got access to this kind of technology. In America a lot of Stem Cell research is funded by the government & the various state governments. Industry in general won't fund it because much of it is experimental by nature & getting any profits is in the long term. Stem Cell research offers hope to people with illnesses like parkinson's & alheimzers which currently are largely incurable. They can't even alleviate a lot of the symptoms.

Cloud Computing

The book I read to research this post was Cloud Computing by The Chartered Institute for IT which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is only 75 pages but it only cost £1.75 for the ebook so I think it's good value & it does contain quite a lot of information. Cloud Computing has been around in one form or another since the mid 90's. A lot of people worry about Cloud Computing especially the reliability & security issues but it's worth mentioning a lot of people including businesses use sites like GoogleMail for their email which is a form of Cloud Computing & a lot of the issues people worry about have been resolved. Obviously volatile information is best kept on a company server but every company has a lot of information that potentially can be kept on a cloud server. It represents a very exciting time for businesses when they haven't got to invest so much in computer hardware. Also a lot of company servers only run much of the time maybe at 5% capacity because they have to allow for spikes in demand, cloud servers aren't as susceptible to these spikes, so it's more efficient which is better for the environment. A lot of cloud service providers are installing things like solar panels & using renewable materials something which is bound to become more of an issue as time goes on. One thing which a lot of companies are using in connection with Cloud Computing is cryptography which can be used over the network, on the cloud server, in the application, or when being used by an end user.

Photoshop Lightroom 4

The book I read to research this post was Lightroom 4 by Jordan ferris which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This ebook is on a special offer of about £2 for this week only. Much of this book consists of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows & Mac. I own Lightroom 3 & very well may get Lightroom 4. Photoshop & Photoshop Elements are photo editing programs & are primarily intended for artists. Lightroom on the other hand is a photo archiving program with only basic photo editing features although it's intended for the serious photographer. One thing I noticed with Lightroom 3 is that it will even import from an iPod & I think has a much wider range of digital cameras it will import from than the traditional Photoshop programs. If you enjoy this post I did a post on Lightroom 3 on my computing blog at
http://scratbag.me/
It might be worth a look. In Lightroom 4 it's still quite simple to import stuff. You merely check your settings & then click import. They recommend importing as a DNG file which is compatible with all Adobe programs. If you have stuff imported into another program it might be necessary to reimport it into Lightroom to use it in that program. A final point I bought Lightroom 3 off an Amazon Affiliate & got quite a good deal. It might be worth considering that if you want to get Lightroom 4 cheap.