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Sep 01
2010
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15 Fun Facts: computer triviaPosted by Luke Zelleke in General Info |
It took the radio 38 years and the television only 13, but the internet reached 50 million users in only 4 years.- The computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in 1963. It was made out of wood.
- In 2009 the average number of transactions per second was $2,000. The total number of goods sold was worth $60 billion.

When speaking of computer viruses most people tend to think of the type that attacks a computer’s software system or its data. The damage that is incurred is usually determined in terms of the amount of data that is lost, the time that is wasted on repairing a damaged operating system, or application, and- worse comes to worst scenario - a full format-and-reinstall. Most people would never think it possible for a computer’s physical component(s) to be put out of commission by a software attack, which is what a computer virus basically is. But, can we be 100% sure that there isn’t a computer virus out there that can physically break a computer? And if so, why?
Frederick Forsyth the author of thriller books like 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Dogs of War' is in the news for what looks like a spy thriller. Only this time he and his wife are the stars of the tale. It seems while trying to report on the coup in Guinea-Bissau, he claims that the
Time was when an electronic virus was associated only with computers, but that’s not true anymore. Viruses have been created for almost every electronic device that can be thought of. But now there is a new target that is attracting the attention of an increasing number of hackers – the smartphone.

You can’t help but give it up for Research in Motion (RIM). The telecommunication, wireless technology and hardware company is the one behind the BlackBerry smartphone brand. As a company that is in the forefront of mobile telephony technology, the company’s name and its products are never far from the front page or headlines of major media outlets. And as usual, this week was one where the BlackBerry was mentioned in relation to two major incidents: the launch of the new BlackBerry Torch 9800 and the banning of the phones in a few Middle Eastern countries, specifically the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
This is one of the most famous rivalries known to man. Which is better, the PC or the Mac? Of course we are talking about the personal computer versus the Macintosh. The two rivals have been known to use advertisements that poke jibes at one another. The rivalry has even fuelled websites that deal with only the competition and the advances the two products are making.
Just as the furor over the iPhone 4 was passing over, Steve Job’s Apple has been caught in another maelstrom. This time it is with the iPad. There are claims, and even a lawsuit, that as hot as the iPad is, it is taking its hotness literally. Apparently, after a few minutes’ usage the gadget announces ‘Warning: iPad needs to cool down before you can use it’.
Today’s world forces us to sit in front of computers for longer and longer hours as we work to pay our bills. And as if that weren’t enough we sit in front of another computer to relax ourselves when we get home. The toll that these actions have brought on man’s health will remain to be seen, but for now suffice to say that sitting in front of a computer is just not healthy. People are suffering from computer abuse.
The world is facing a meltdown. The environment is in a crisis. Asia is being hit with typhoons and floods. Africa is facing droughts. Europe literally freezes over. North America has a little bit of it all. Planet earth is calling out for help. If you are the type of person that thinks your efforts, no matter how little, don’t or won’t help, you are very wrong. If you care about the future of our children and want to share in the effort to preserve it, read on to find out how you can help whenever you switch your computer on.
We have had Watergate, Irangate and more or less a Zippergate. And now, you can add a new affair - ‘Antennagate’ to the set thanks to the drama still being played around the iPhone 4. Because that is what the problem with the iPhone 4’s antenna has been dubbed – ‘Antennagate’. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs said at a press conference he hosted that his company’s main aim was to have happy customers. And towards that end he added that Apple would ship each and every iPhone 4 user a free bumper or case. This was intended to address the main issue that the fact that phone users tended to
Microsoft dominates the operating system domain. The software company’s annual revenues are counted not in millions but billions of dollars. Its operating systems like Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 are used on almost 90 percent of all desktops, laptops and palmtops. The Microsoft products are never far from our day to day activities. This creates a screen around us that makes us oblivious to the other software that are out there.
Internet censorship has been in the news for quite some time now. From Turkey to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to China every once in a while it pops up in the media that one site or another, if not the whole internet like in the case of North Korea, has been blocked. The debates on whether or not internet censorship should be applied have been coming and going for decades now, and the jury is still out . But what should really be debated, and highly doubted, is whether or not it can be applied.
It came like an anti-climax.
Computers were invented to make our lives simpler. For a while, way back when Microsoft was still on DOS and Windows 3.1, things looked bright. As Windows grew so did its illnesses. And like a pack of hyenas that follow the scent of carrion, and so came the hackers to Windows’ weak points - at least that’s when we started noticing them.
In the last part of this guide we looked at the reasons behind desiring greater anonymity on the web, and how installing a firewall is a first step. This part of the guide focuses on how you can increase your anonymity when browsing the web.
Anonymity on the Internet is one the principal reasons the World Wide Web became an overnight success. The ability to get your message out to millions of people with their being little chance of tracing it back to the author is one of the web’s true strengths. Couple this with its de-centralized network architecture, meaning governments and suppressors cannot simply shut down the source like they could with, say, a television channel, and the internet becomes the world’s main channel for free speech.
The Microsoft Office suite has been the de-facto word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email software since the dawn of time. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but the company has held the reigns of office productivity software for so long it is hard to think of these common operations separately from the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite. It has long been Microsoft’s cash cow, despite all the other problems the company has faced, the Microsoft Office suite has always brought them huge profits year after year.
In the last part of this guide we looked at how graphics cards will soon be integrating well with the CPUs of multi-core computers, and allowing the use of their processing power to be shared. There is a similar process in place already – you can use multiple graphics cards within one computer, and they will work together in parallel as one.
The ‘browser wars’ have traditionally been between Internet Explorer and Firefox (or Firefox’s earlier incarnations as Mozilla and Netscape), but the browser to watch has become Google Chrome. Whilst it still constitutes only 13.6% of the market at the moment, this has been a rapid rise from 0%, and each month the browser is continually taking around another 1% of a market share from Internet Explorer.
In the last part of this guide we talked about the various API libraries programmers use to access the powerful graphics processing of your GPUs.