How to master your Windows 7 desktop – Tech – ibnlive

Window 7 comes with dozens of keyboard shortcuts that let you take control of your desktop quickly. Many of these keyboard shortcuts use the Windows key – which has a Windows logo on it along with the word Start on some keyboards. …

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How to master your Windows 7 desktop – Tech – ibnlive

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Firefox 3.6.2 Coming March 30th – Where is 3.6.1? – InternetNews …

The Mozilla platform wiki provides some indication as to why Mozilla is skipping the 3.6 .1 release. The Firefox 3.6 .2 release is based on the Gecko 1.9.2.2 platform and the wiki notes that Mozilla may potentially be skipping the version …

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IP Addresses 101

Introduction

Every machine on the the Internet has a unique number assigned to it, called an IP address. Without a unique IP address on your machine, you will not be able to communicate with other devices, users, and computers on the Internet. You can look at your IP address as if it were a telephone number, each one being unique and used to identify a way to reach you and only you.

The Address Itself

An IP address always consists of 4 numbers seperated by periods, with the numbers having a possible range of 0 through 255. An example of how an ip address appears is: 192.168.1.10

This representation of an IP address is called decimal notation and is what is generally used by humans to refer to an IP address for readability purposes. With the ranges for each number being between 0 and 255 there are a total 4,294,967,296 possible IP addreses.

Out of these addresses there are 3 special ranged that are reserved for special purposes. The first is the 0.0.0.0 address and refers to the default network and the 255.255.255.255 address which is called the broadcast address. These addresses are used for routing, which will not be covered in this tutorial. The third address, 127.0.0.1, is the loopback address, and refers to your machine. Whenever you see, 127.0.0.1, you are actually referring to your own machine. That means if you clicked on this link, http://127.0.0.1, you are actually trying to connect to your own computer, and unless you have a webserver running, you will get a connection error.

There are some guidelines to to how IP address can appear, though. The four numbers must be between 0 and 255, and the IP address of 0.0.0.0 and 255.255.255.255 are reserved, and are not considered usable IP addresses. IP addresses must be unique for each computer connected to a network. That means that if you have two computers on your network, each must have a different IP address to be able to communicate with each other. If by accident the same IP address is assigned to two computers, then those computers would have what is called an “IP Conflict” and not be able to communicate with each other.

IP address classes

These IP addresses can further be broken down into classes. These classes are A, B, C, D, E and their possible ranges can be seen in Figure 2 below.

If you look at the table you may notice something strange. The range of IP address from Class A to Class B skips the 127.0.0.0-127.255.255.255 range. That is because this range is reserved for the special addresses called Loopback addresses that have already been discussed above.

The rest of classes are allocated to companies and organizations based upon the amount of IP addresses that they may need. Listed below are descriptions of the IP classes and the organizations that will typically receive that type of allocation.

Default Network: The special network 0.0.0.0 is generally used for routing.

Class A: From the table above you see that there are 126 class A networks. These networks consist of 16,777,214 possible IP addresses that can be assigned to devices and computers. This type of allocation is generally given to very large networks such as multi-national companies.

Loopback: This is the special 127.0.0.0 network that is reserved as a loopback to your own computer. These addresses are used for testing and debugging of your programs or hardware.

Class B: This class consists of 16,384 individual networks, each allocation consisting of 65,534 possible IP addresses. These blocks are generally allocated to Internet Service Providers and large networks, like a college or major hospital.

Class C: There is a total of 2,097,152 Class C networks available, with each network consisting of 255 individual IP addresses. This type of class is generally given to small to mid-sized companies.

Class D: The IP addresses in this class are reserved for a service called Multicast.

Class E: The IP addresses in this class are reserved for experimental use.

Broadcast: This is the special network of 255.255.255.255, and is used for broadcasting messages to the entire network that your computer resides on.

Private Addresses

There are also blocks of IP addresses that are set aside for internal private use for computers not directly connected to the Internet. These IP addresses are not supposed to be routed through the Internet, and most service providers will block the attempt to do so. These IP addresses are used for internal use by company or home networks that need to use TCP/IP but do not want to be directly visible on the Internet. These IP ranges are:

If you are on a home/office private network and want to use TCP/IP, you should assign your computers/devices IP addresses from one of these three ranges. That way your router/firewall would be the only device with a true IP address which makes your network more secure.

Common Problems and Resolutions

The most common problem people have is by accident assigning an IP address to a device on your network that is already assigned to another device. When this happens, the other computers will not know which device should get the information, and you can experience erratic behavior. On most operating systems and devices, if there are two devices on the local network that have the same IP address, it will generally give you a “IP Conflict” warning. If you see this warning, that means that the device giving the warning, detected another device on the network using the same address.

The best solution to avoid a problem like this is to use a service called DHCP that almost all home routers provide. DHCP, or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, is a service that assigns addresses to devices and computers. You tell the DHCP server what range of IP addresses you would like it to assign, and then the DHCP server takes the responsibility of assigning those IP addresses to the various devices and keeping track so those IP addresses are assigned only once.

Conclusion

IP addresses and their function on the Internet is an important concept to understand. Hopefully with this tutorial you will have a firmer grasp on this concept, which should help you troubleshoot problems and bring a better understanding of how the Internet works.

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What is bandwidth?

Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet.

Network Connectivity

The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet.

If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54).

Traffic

A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.

Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).

If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example, the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person’s file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously, it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to upgrading equipment).

Hosting Bandwidth

In the example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file).

A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo’s home page is about 70KB.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?

It depends (don’t you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis

If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:

[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Let us examine each item in the formula:

Average Daily Visitors – The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views – On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average Page Size – The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.

Average Daily File Downloads – The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.

Average File Size – Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Fudge Factor – A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Summary

Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.

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Aimersoft DVD Backup for Mac 2.0.2.7 – Free Aimersoft DVD Backup …

Three Different Copy Options to Burn DVD on Mac Support Main Movie to copy main movie only, Full Copy to copy DVD whole information and Customized Copy as selective copy. 4.

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Aimersoft DVD Backup for Mac 2.0.2.7 – Free Aimersoft DVD Backup …

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DVD Ripping and Mac—a Must for Music Lovers | Quick Fix For Windows 98

The Mac DVD Ripper is a free DVD extractor that can extract commercial DVD movies to the hard drive of the personal computer.

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DVD Ripping and Mac—a Must for Music Lovers | Quick Fix For Windows 98

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Creative Blogs » Blog Archive » DVD Backup for Mac, Mac DVD Backup …

Click DVD Disc output options burn DVD blank disc. If you insert D9 disc, you can choose D9 D5 compression option burn D9 disc D5 disc

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How to Burn iTunes Videos/Movies/TV Shows to DVD on Mac(Snow …

Are you still helpless with the Drm protected iTunes videos(.m4v, .mp4, .m4p),movies,or TV shows even though you have purchaesed them? Here is a solution to edit and burn iTunes videos/movies/TV shows to DVD playable on home DVD player …

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Importing email from Outlook Express to Apple

I just recently purchased a MAC and with more and more people switching to Apple, importing your email is an important consideration.

Here’s how to do it with an open source utility named DbxConv.

1. Download DbxConv, unzip it into a new folder on your Windows desktop.

2. Find all your Outlook Express mailboxes which are *.dbx files and copy them into the same folder you created in the step above.

3. Then, Start Menu > Run, type in “cmd” (no quotes), navigate to the folder you created in Step 1 and type DbxConv.exe *.dbx

4. All your .dbx files will be in a mbx format. Ensure that the file extensions are .mbox

5. If not, type rename *.mbx *.mbox

6. Now go to your MAC computer and open Mail. Go to File > Import Mailboxes > Other > Continue and navigate to the folder created in Step 1.

You now have successfully transferred your Outlook Express emails from Windows to your Apple computer.

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Windows 7 Review – My Digital Life Forums

The Windows experience occurs mainly in its Taskbar–especially in the Start menu and System Tray . Vista gave the Start menu a welcome redesign; in Windows 7 , the Taskbar and the System Tray get a thorough makeover.

The article I’m about to show you is taken straight from PC World magazine. I just read it a few weeks back and here it is for those of you who are interested in re-reading it or for those of you who do not subscribe to the magazine.

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Windows 7 Review – My Digital Life Forums

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