Your neighborhood or school bully just got its cyber equivalent – the cyber bully. Cyber bullying is using things like the Internet or a cell phone to intentionally embarrass, humiliate or to make one person or a group of persons look bad to others or feel bad about themselves. When done directly, it usually takes the form of someone sending a negative message to another person. Indirect cyber bullying happens when someone sends a harmful message or photograph about someone else to others.

Cyber bullies typically use cell phone text and photo messages, websites, blogs, chat-rooms, social networking sites, instant messaging services and e-mail to facilitate their dirty work. In as much as most bullies need an audience to complete their satisfaction, cyber bullies look for ways to involve their peers in a cyber fight or other cruel behavior on the Internet.

There is not one factor more damaging to a hard disc drive than rough handling. Even the act of dropping a drive onto a hard surface from a height of a mere inch can induce damaging forces. An anti-static padding is best provided when the drive is rested on any hard surface. Adequate grounding devices should likewise be provided when handling the unit.

When a hard disc drive needs to be shipped, it can be sent in its original box and packing materials. However, if it came only in an anti-static bag or was part of a desktop system, the best packing material is foam rubber or bubble wrap which is the next best choice.

A technical definition of a virus is a segment of program code that implants itself to one of the executable files and spreads systematically from one file to another. In layman’s term, a virus is a piece of software designed and written to adversely affect a computer by altering how it works without the owner’s knowledge or permission. Computer viruses are written and have a specific purpose and never spontaneously generate.

A virus may self-replicate and propagate as it spreads itself from one file to another without the user’s input or knowledge. It can also implement the symptom or damage planned by the perpetrator which could include erasing a disk, corrupting programs or simply creating havoc on a computer. Computer viruses can either be benign or malignant. A benign virus does not do any real damage to a computer except to display some sort of unsolicited message. A malignant virus, on the other hand, seeks to inflict malicious damage.

In this technology-driven age, our reliance on computers is constantly increasing. Today, computers are practically a necessity of everyday life. For a lot of people, not having access to it gives them a feeling of being powerless.

And since more and more people are having a second or even a third computer in the home, whether the combination is a desktop and a laptop, how do they deal with the software situation where the license explicitly says “only one copy must be running at a time”? They can either buy 3 licenses of the same software, or they could shift to open source.

Open source is a worldwide initiative to develop, test, and distribute software programs and applications with the intention of pushing information technology as a shared resource. Open source is also a lifestyle concept where people share knowledge for the good of the world instead of simply treating it as a business transaction.

Users delete files in order to free up disk space to allow for newer files to be accommodated but what if the unexpected happens? You suddenly find yourself requiring the information from the very files that was deleted. Is there no hope for this case?

Data recovery specialists believe that there is. A file that disappears or at least doesn’t appear visible anywhere can be most likely found in the hard drive. The deleted data cannot be seen because the computer’s pointer that indicates the location of a particular page has been erased but not the page itself. It will eventually be lost once the hard drive writes new data over the area where the old file was located. That is why some users who attempt data recovery themselves face the risk of doing more damage in trying when they unknowingly overwrite the old file.

I love this time of year. It’s such a festive time and after the whole shopping rush which can be a bit hectic there’s usually plenty of time to relax and enjoy your favorite pastimes and hobbies. Besides spending time with my family I even have time for my little indulgences which includes a couple of hours with my favorite computer games. Although I can’t play any games while I’m at the office, I’ll admit, I have been spending some time searching for new free games and game download sites. I am especially a fan of Hidden Object Games and found some great looking games at crackerjack-games.com. The Scruffs looks like a good choice for me, I haven’t tried it out yet but they do offer a free trial which I hope to take advantage of.

Portable Applications featuring various computer programs are getting more and more popular everyday. Based on the open source concept where sharing is part of the method of propagation, here are some of the most popular applications available. For internet browsing, two of the best browser applications, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, are now available as a portable app. Both are widely preferred and are very user friendly.

Should you need to carry office applications software, then Abiword Portable is an excellent choice. It is light, and very capable. Open Office portable is also another good alternative, especially if you need a full-featured Office application. Where to go to get portable apps? Just point your browsers to www.portableapps.com and choose from an ever widening range of applications.

I finally upgraded my main system which has been running Windows XP on a Pentium 4 processor. The system has been fairly stable and I was hesitant to upgrade, especially given the history of vista compantability and the its reported laggish performance. But even I couldn’t resist temptation that long and figured I’d make the move to Vista but do it in style. I configured what I consider one of the strongest PC configurations available today. I’m currently running a Quad Core processor with 4 Gigs of Ram (windows only recognizes 3.2 Gigs but the system is said to actually take advantage of the entire 4 Gigs). I installed 2 320 Giga hard drives (SATA) which are running as one drive via Raid 0. If you are unfamiliar with RAID technology, it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives and essencially means you use multiple physical hard drives which operate as a single drive in your system.

There are a number of RAID configurations otherwise known as RAID levels which depend on what your goals are by using this technology. Some use what’s known as RAID 1 which essencially maintains a mirror hard drive of the main disk for backup purposes. Every operation performed on one disk will be seemlesly performed on the second disk. If one disk should fail, you have the second as backup. But I chose to run the system with what’s called a stipe set (known as RAID 0 performance). The idea behind this configuration is to combine the two drives into one drive for performance purposes. In my case, instead of two 320GB hard drives, I have one 640GB drive that basically runs at double speed. The reason for this is that every file is split up among the two physical drive allowing the computer to access portions of the file on both disks simoultaniously, essencially reading and writing at double speed.

I’ve seen fairly strong systems run Vista before and most displayed average performances at best. I can tell you this – mine simply rocks and takes on vista like a pro. But I was warned that running a RAID 0 configoration can be quite dangerous. The reason for this is that should one drive fail you lose all your data. You see files are split among the two drives and you can’t reconstruct the data from a faulty drive since it only contains part of the file. To be honest, I don’t have the most critical information on my computer and the loss of data is not a huge risk by me but it is definitly something I would like to avoid if possible.

I did come across one company that boasts quite impressive capabilities when it comes to data recovery, specifiacaly with RAID drives. DTI Data Recovery which is available at dtidata.com operates a class 100 clean room and has expert staff that specialize in RAID Data Recovery. They report an increase in the use of RAID 0 configorations among new computer owners (like me…) and explain the dangers that come along with the improved performance. DTI is able to reconstruct data from RAID 0 to RAID 5 data drives and almost no task is too difficult for them. They charge a flat rate and you pay only for results (if your data was restored). As the leaders in RAID recovery, it’s no longer they have become to be known as the RAID Busters!

Authors of the bestselling book, Wikinomics, explain how mass collaboration has changed the business scene and pretty much everything else today. The word WIkinomics is obviously a combination of very popular Wikipedia and the bestselling book Freakonomics.

In Wikinomics you will read about Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life and other successful online communities and how they are more than just a social network but ended up a successful example of how mass collaboration can revolutionize the world. And true to what it preaches the printed book is only the start. The Wikinomics Playbook is past beta stage and is waiting for people who wish to join the authors in writing the still-in-progress chapter of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.