Feb 18

Malware, computer viruses, a fire at home, or a glass of water all of the capability of wiping out all your important personal data. Some of our most valued possessions exist in digital form on our hard drives, and most of us don’t do anything to keep them safe.

Imagine how you’d feel if your house caught fire and you lost every photo album that you own?Or maybe a robbery occurred at your home and they took all of your personal income tax information from the last twenty years from your office filing cabinet.

Guess what — unless you use a secure data back-up service, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to those exact things every day.

What is an online data backup service?

An online data backup service is a private, secure, and offsite location where you can store your important files and folders online.The service connects with your PC via the Internet and allows you to upload files and folders via their secure connection to a storage area on a computer that is only available to you and is protected by high tech PC security 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It’s the online equivalent of keeping your sensitive documents or invaluable family heirlooms in a safe guarded by police.

A couple of the more popular online data backup services are Mozy Backup and Carbonite.A Standard Mozy or Carbonite review will let you know that their services are well worth the money. Either will protect your data from dangerous software or hackers, as well as potential break downs or natural disasters.

Why bother using an Online backup Service

For starters you value your privacy.So that you can rest assured a professional service is watching over your data and important files.So you won’t be taking any chances that your personal information on your computer could be compromised.

Recovering data after a crash is very expensive, and usually isn’t successful.Of course the question has to be why would you wait until something is gone to try and restore it. Being responsible means being proactive about protecting yourself from catastrophic data loss, and the only way to do that is to ensure that your data is backed up and protected with an online data backup service.

written by Newshound \\ tags: , , , ,

Dec 13

Look at some of the websites that are on the internet today. There are so many that have amazing layout designs with tasteful animation. With competition high to get and keep customers on their website, companies will no doubt continue to demand user friendly websites with a bit of “eye candy.”

Perhaps you can create animation banners with great graphics that will make people really notice your site and hopefully keep them coming back and generating sales.

create animation
Early animations started appearing around 1910 and were normally drawings that were photographed one at a time. It was a very intensive and long process, as there were literally hundreds of drawings for each minute of film. Of course, improvements were constantly being made with Walt Disney leading the pack.

He was the first to add sound to his cartoon animations and produced the first, full-length movie animations film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Then, with the introduction of computers, animation began to take on a whole new meaning.

For any type of graphic work, the quicker your computer processor is, the better. Extra memory is also a huge help with computer animations and graphics. You may also want to consider a larger hard drive.

images animations
These types of files will build up quickly and the file size for a graphic or animated movie is much greater than that of a simple text file, for example. A computer generated vector image used to create animation can be 2D or 3D animations.

Of course, if you plan to work on a computer it is also advantageous to learn about photography, lighting and movement. You will need to visualize how the pictures animations, 2D animations or 3D animations will look and then have the know-how to make that inanimate object move.

There are many different create animation software programs that offer both tutorials and downloadable programs. The tutorials are very important, yet each software program will likely have a different interface, different menus, palettes and toolbars etc.

cartoon animations
Depending on the type of images animations desired, some can be wholly computer generated, while others, such as many of the 2D animations cartoons, still need to be penciled by hand before scanning to a computer to generate graphics animations.

Using a computer to create animation often eliminates the need for many of the extra tools that are normally needed for the more traditional animation process. Basically, the tools needed in order to produce graphics computer animation is a computer with enough system requirements to run one of the 2D or 3D animations software programs, as well as the ability to use the software you choose.

written by DavePF \\ tags:

Oct 22

The diagnostics that are associated with computers can help to identify any problem or failure that computers show when they are having problems. Diagnostics are used to test out the computer system, which includes both the BIOS and memory, software, and even the hardware that is attached to the computer.

The most common types of problems will occur when your computer is down to very low resources, which can either be a low amount of RAM, or a low disk space. These conditions are very common, and generally result in your computer running very slow. This can easily be fixed, all you have to do is defrag your hard drive, and get rid of some programs and files that you no longer use or need.

Almost all types of computer diagnostic software can find and fix just about any problem that you are having. It normally starts off with a BIOS examination, and goes on from there. PC diagnostics software can determine a lot from the BIOS, from the common settings to those that have a major impact on both boot up and performance.

No matter what you do, you should never modify or tamper with the BIOS settings, as it can lead to serious problems. If you do plan to modify or mess with your BIOS, you should always create a backup first, just in case something goes wrong. The BIOS settings can be very tricky, although they are responsible for a lot to do with your computer. If you have never been in the BIOS before, you really shouldn’t be modifying anything inside of it.

Depending on the diagnostics program that you are using, there will be several different features available. Right now, two of the most popular are Norton Systemworks and PC Doctor. Both of these programs offer full diagnostics software, good for fixing just about any software related computer program you can imagine.  

Once you run the program, you’ll be able to select the diagnostic test that you are planning to run. Some offer you a full system scan, which will scan your entire computer and then display any problems that you having. After displaying any problems, the software will normally give you an option to go ahead and fix it. As long as the problem is nothing serious, the diagnostic software can generally fix it.

The more complicated problems, such as hardware failures or hard drive crashes, are a totally different story. They will require a technician who is very experienced, that can rebuild the hardware. Diagnostic software can report hardware problems to you, although most of the time it is unable to fix it.

There are other computer diagnostic software that you run after starting the computer or rebooting, that will check everything from BIOS. These types are great, although the types such as Norton and PC Doctor are by far superior. They offer far more features, including defragment, cache cleaner, and the option to delete your temporary Internet files. These features are great to have, especially if you aren’t the technical type.

For more reasons than one, computer diagnostic software is the ideal way to find and prevent problems with your computer. Norton Systemworks offers you Ghost as well, which is the perfect way to back up your data. You can back up certain files, or just go ahead and back up your entire hard drive. Systemworks and Ghost are very easy to use, even if you are completely new to computers. For everything they offer you - computer diagnostic programs are the ideal way to prevent problems before they happen.

written by Newshound \\ tags: , , , , , ,

Oct 14

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software testing is an important stage within the software development cycle (SDCL). A variety of testing methods are used beginning with the application’s development until it gets the marketing stage. The testing spans over all the stages in the SDLC. Moreover there are different varieties of the software that needs to be tested before it is released to the costumer.

There are many different classes of software and software for web applications is one of them. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web software has achieved high importance in software industry and our daily lives.  Because of the high impact Internet has on our daily lives any web software is carefully tested before launching in order to reduce the associated security risks that originate from the use of the Internet.

While web software testing is important, there’s always a rush in developing and testing it. The different types of tests can be grouped in code testing, [load testing], compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The standanrd pattern for the realease of web software consists of two main stages, alpha and beta testing.Alpha testing is a replicated or real ready testing by would-be users/customers or a separate testing team on the developers’ location. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. When of-the-self software is employed, alpha testing is often used as an internal acceptance test. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.

After the alpha testing is completed the software is permitted to undergo the beta phase of testing. In beta testing the web software I completely built. The software is made available for use to a restricted number of customers intended for software testing previous to the official release. In case of website design it is easy to put together the various pages as the website design uses HTML. So the alpha/beta technique is generally not used for website development. This means they can build and test one page at a time. After completion they can move onto the next one, with each page independent of each other.

Code testing refers to the process where the testing or development engineer verifies the code and make sure that there are no software bugs. Because the time involved in web development is small it is important that the software is free of bugs. Paired-programming is one of the popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding .

Paired programming is a software development method in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. The driver types in the code while the observer or navigator reviews each line. This strategy is appealing because fewer bugs are produced. According to The Economist, “Laurie Williams of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that paired programmers are only 15% slower than two independent individual programmers, but produce 15% fewer bugs.”

The fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is performed against heavy loads or inputs such as multiple user log-ins and mail servers to determine the point at which the web-site/application fails or the point when performance degrades. The testing documents the number of users the site will support simultaneously, the number of transactions it can handle and its response time under various conditions or traffic flows.

The testing done to estimate the compatibility of the application with the different interacting hardware of software is the Compatibility testing. This method tests how good the software is in interactions with operating system, peripherals, database, browser etc. It also tests the computing capacity of the hardware platform and the peripherals.

Functional testing asses the alignment between the application and its specifications checking that it provides all the required functions. To do that an extense range of both normal and erronous data will be imput to validate the behaviour caused by each of the software features Regression testing is performed to ensure that enhancements, defect repairs or other changes to the software have not disrupted any existing functionality.

Regression testing is an important testing method when the software development method is iterative. Iterative software development is a method in which new functionality is added to existing software. In this case one should make sure that the new addition has not affected any of the existing functionality. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.

written by Newshound \\ tags: , , , , , , ,