Computer World Magazine

Blogging after a long time to inform you guys about a nice promo. ITW0rld Canada is currently giving away free subscriptions to Computer W0rld, Network W0rld, CDN and CIO Magazine. They also have one french magazine. There is no catch really. They just want to increase some Canadian readership. If you sign up now then you are up for free subscription forever.

I think in terms of my visitors, computer world would be the most attractive of all. The reason is because this magazine talks about overall industry news. I have gone through these magazines and I find them to be an excellent read.

Sometimes internet has too much information and you are not sure where to begin if you are looking for some ideas on current industry. These magazines are great read for that purpose. Anyways, check them out. They are currently free only for Canadians. This promo will last until the end up April.

Click on the following links to sign up

Computer World
Network World
CDN
Direction Informatique (French Language)
CIO Magazine

During the time of economic crisis, people don’t really go for those nice looking MACs. People look for cheap alternatives and something that work. PCs seem to be the best option for everyone. Apple really needs to learn pursue cheaper MACs for the people. 

In the notebook sector, however, MACs are doing better than PCs in terms of growth. I think it has to do with university kids jumping into apple market as everyone else doing it. Giving up to the fads is a very dumb thing to do, especially for us, the university students.

Anyways, I have nothing against MAC. I find them pretty cool but as a student my priority is getting things done as fast as possible with as little hassle as possible. PCs work the best for me on that sector.

Read More

Chrome
Firefox
IE
K-Meleon
Safari
Opera

I would say in terms of the “startup” speed, Chrome is the best. After that K-Meleon/Opera, then IE, Firefox and then Safari

Chrome is a cool looking browser with a high speed. I really like the incognito feature. However, I think in terms of stability Chrome definitely sucks. It freezes a lot. I found firefox, K-Meleon and Opera to be really stable. Safari, IE and Chrome crashes and freezes a lot for me.

I am coming across a bunch of articles analyzing Chrome as Google was able to create a huge buzz around Chrome. Here’s an article that tries to remind IT on certain things regarding Chrome.

Therefore, a lot of people in IT should also keep open source in mind for their career choice. I came accross this small quiz that asks you a series of question to see how much you know about Open Source.

I got a 85%. Check how much you can get….

It’s not living up to my expectations to tell you the truth. I do have the 30 days money back guarantee. Should I return in? Well, I decided not to return this because as I said in my previous post I got what I paid for. I cannot expect a smooth connection with 20 bucks/year. I will leave this. I am also currently doing some research to figure out if there is any way I would be able to use this device with skype. This VOIP service from canada is really good as I have heard and I will try this out in the future.

Also, I am thinking that MagicJack will improve their services along the road. If that happens then that would be great. Until then I am not sure how much I would be using this.

Figure: Picture of MagicJack

Voice Over IP is becoming an interesting topic to discuss overtime. We see so many VOIP services popping up every where. People are becoming more open to using Skype and other services for their long distance rather than expensive landline phones.

Since there are so many services it’s becoming increasingly hard to choose the service that would be the most reliable of all. MagicJack is relatively a new player in the market. This device has been endorsed by various media for being very simple and also cheap. Basically, you get a small USB device that you plugin to your USB port and then you connect your phone jack to that device. After that you will be able to use MagicJack immediately. The device costs only $20 so far and the subscription cost is $20 per year. As part of your package you get a local phone number that other people would be able to call even from their landphones. For skype, it costs $60/year but with monthly subscription it’s $30/year.

After reading so many reviews against and in favour of this device I have finally decided to give this a shot.

I bought mine from the MagicJack Canada website. With shipping costs it came down to approximately $60. Apparently, we do not get to choose a local Canadian number yet. Still, we can get an American number and then switch to a Canadian local number as soon as it becomes available. I decided to switch to a cheaper cellphone plan and get this. Looked like a good deal.

It was very easy to install. My first problem was that I was not able to make any calls to toronto cellphones that had Rogers/Fido as the carrier. I could make calls to Rogers cellphones outside of Toronto but not in Toronto. It worked fine with bell and telus. It was a bit of problem for me since most of my friends use Rogers phones. It seemed to have been defeating the whole purpose of my purchase. I tried so many workaround for this. I talked to a bunch of people in the livechat and they couldn’t help me. After searching a lot I finally came accross a workaround for this.

Basically purpose of this post of mine is to help out those Toronto users of magicjack, who are having problems calling Rogers cellphones in Toronto. Basically, if you have a number let’s say, “416-123-4567″ you dial it like, “*67+4+*+16-123-4567. This seemed to have eliminated my problem.

MagicJack is very new and it has lots of bugs. However, I believe you get what you pay for. I paid 40 bucks for the first year and 20 bucks per year after that. I do not expect a landline experience out of this. On the other hand, the cellphone carriers charge us a way more than they should. I don’t get enough out of my money from them. Therefore, with magicjack, be patience and think about the money you are saving. Also, you are becoming known to a new technology that not a lot of people are familiar with.

So, goodluck with MagicJack. If you are from Toronto and a magicjack user, give me a shout and I will give you my number and we can have a chat in our magicjack . Even if you are not a Torontonian but just wants to talk to me shout anyways and we can talk.

According to the an ItBusiness article, “Search and you often don’t find…and here’s the reason why“  a new survey shows that the employees have been struggling in this sector. Searching and not being able to find a very crucial data seems to be really slowing down these employees. In my opinion, this shouldn’t be happenning. I am very organized with my computer files atleast both at work and home. I divide everything into simple little folders with date in the file names making it extremely easy for me. I never had to use the desktop search feature at my work because of my approach. I do have to use it at home somtimes especially when I am trying to find an mp3 song. Other than that, I am very organized.

How good are you? Are you organized with your files or are you extremely messy saving everything in the desktop?

Stop Safari NOW!

Microsoft created Windows in a way so that IE works the best with Windows and hence forcing people to stick with IE. A lot of programs required in IE actually starts up at the beginning when you boot up your computer. Therefore, they are scamming us. Now that Safari started to take over the market they are spreading propaganda wars against Safari asking people to stop using this browser. This is absolutely ridiculous. I really hate these types of propaganda that Microsoft runs. We do not see Apple doing such a thing ever.

Let’s beat Microsoft in their own propaganda game. Diggity diggity diggity NOW!

Computer Vision Syndrome and How to Avoid it written by Physician Entrepreneur.

What’s Love Got To Do With Social Media? written by The Engaging Brand.

How to Get Free Music and Video Downloads from iTunes – Satellite TV Guru written by Satellite TV Guru.

The Problem With WordPress – An Uncategorical Failure written by The Ominous Comma

Cisco TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing written by Bachelor Design

Do You Test? Yes! Why? written by The Kaizen Business.

Forced Continuity: A Different Perspective written by The Michel Fortin Blog

If you have an interesting post that you want me to post here please let me know.

Anyways, my point is that more and more this is going to become an issue. Since internet so nicely connect us to everywhere porn is becoming easily accessible. How do you think a woman should respond if she finds porn in her husband’s computer? I personally have no idea. I have seen that many of my friends watch porn when they are stressed out or something. They watch to take their minds off stress through immediate pleasure. For instance, when we are stressed out a lot of us tend to eat a lot. It’s just your brain trying to decrease the load through alternative ways. However, excessive pornography by anyone would mean that he is suffering from some kind of disability and should be treated.

Do you think a woman should be more considerate when they find porn or should they be angry. What do you think? I am not a woman so I don’t know. If I find porn in my GF or wife’s computer I wouldn’t mind. Is it the same for you? Would you mind if you find porn in your girlfriend’s computer?

Now, Google Docs is a major step towards that situation. It provides you a very basic Office suite. This must be the most convenient one as well. The reason is because you don’t have to carry around USB sticks and worry about losing that piece of material. You do type up or work on whatever you need to do online and then go to your office and turn on your computer and there you go. All your information is saved just the way you left it at home. I find this really good. I save my work information in Google docs and reports in the spreadsheet. After I get home I don’t have to open up my MSWord or Excel. I just sign in to Google Docs. It is also great when I have classes in my university. It’s very simple and fast.

There are some issues still exist in Google Docs. I still cannot use this as my primary Word Processing software. There are many reasons. One of them is that I don’t find the spell check of Google docs that good especially if they involve the medical terms. They totally suck at it. Most of my university papers involve medical terms. I like MS word much better in that instance. The printing output is also not satisfactory and many others. I am pretty sure however Google is working on this to make it as good as MS Word or other office software.

Google is taking this initial leap. Hmmm. it makes me wonder if Google wants to be the “Microsoft” of the future. They could be. They are much smarter than Microsoft on the internet. They obviously have a much better business strategy. Even with fewer resources Google is the champion in whatever they have touched. Google believes in simplicity as you could see in all their products. Maybe in near future you will see something like Google OS. You never know.

What do you think about this? Is it a big leap or you think Google docs is just a bogus approach by Google? Or are you one of those people who think Google Operating System is a joke?

Initially when vista came out it was absolutely a horrible experience as a lot of drivers didn’t work in Vista at all. It looked like a total new operating system. Many people I was talking to was considering to move to MAC rather than trying to play around with Vista. The condition however I find dramatically improved with SP1. Still a lot of people have beef with vista.

This post is about XP but I had to give my 2 cents on Vista. Their newest SP of XP is a plain joke. It looked like as if they promised a SP and so they had to provide one. Microsoft admits that this SP will not dramatically change the XP experience. However they are wrong. It might absolutely screw up your current experience. I don’t think they invested enough resource in researching and troubleshooting. Therefore, we saw them at the beginning delaying it and now we are seeing them really screwing it up.

ItBusiness.ca, one of the sites of the company that I work for ran a story today about how Symantec is blaming the Service Pack for a lot of issues.

“We finally got to the bottom of this last night,” said Dave Cole, Symantec’s senior director for product management of its consumer software. “All of these problems are related to the same thing, a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry].”

He also said that some of the same symptoms had been acknowledged by Microsoft when users updated to Windows XP SP2 several years ago; Cole referenced a pair of Microsoft support documents to back up his claim.

Two weeks ago, after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, users started reporting that their network cards and previously crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating with the service pack. The Device Manager had been emptied, they said, and Windows’ registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information, had been packed with large numbers of bogus entries.

The lesson would be to wait before taking the step. I haven’t updated to SP3 yet. I really hate to get into useless issues as I believe in getting things done. If SP3 delays me then I so don’t want it anywhere around my computer. I might just stick to XP and upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out in 2009 as planned. Unless I really need I don’t want to move to a new operating system that might well be discontinued in less than 3 years.