Posts Tagged ‘Help’

Passenger Rights Chief Says That Delta Hacked My Email

October 24th, 2009

An airline passenger rights advocate is accusing Delta Air Lines of hacking into her computer and e-mail accounts to sabotage her organization’s attempts to mandate basic services during flight delays.

Kate Hanni, a resident of California, is the founder of the Coalition for an Airline Passengers Bill of Rights, an organization lobbying for federal laws that require airlines to provide bathroom access, clean air, and access to medical treatment when passengers are held up for hours on the tarmac. The legislation would also give passengers an option to exit the plane if they have been delayed on the tarmac for over three hours. Four versions of a “Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights of 2009″ are currently pending before Congress.

In a lawsuit filed in Houston, Texas on Tuesday, Hanni accuses the world’s largest airline carrier and an aviation consulting firm of conspiring to breach her computer and email in order to derail her lobbying efforts. She seeks a minimum of $11m in damages.

According to court documents, Hanni claims earlier this year she began exchanging emails with Frederick Foreman, an analyst with Virginia-based Metron Aviation who was researching US government airline surface delay data. During their correspondence, both swapped data and information about surface delays without explicit permission from Metron, of which Delta is a client.

Hanni said her PC and American Online email account were both accessed illegally this summer, with AOL confirming the email breach. Some of her data was copied to an unknown location, and other files were corrupted and rendered useless.

The plot thickens in Foreman’s affidavit. He claims that on September 25, 2009, Metron executives confronted him with “what appeared to be hacked and stolen email communications” between Hanni and himself, as well as two media contacts. The emails were sent from his private accounts on MSN and AOL and not sent through Metron’s internal email system, he claims.

Foreman states in his sworn affidavit that the executive informed him the emails were sent to the Metron from Delta and that the airline was “mad and upset” Hanni had been provided with the flight delay information. Foreman claims he tried to explain that the data was publicly available online from US government statistics, but was still fired and escorted off the premises.

When reached for comment, Delta flatly stated, “the allegation that we would hack an individual’s e-mail is absurd.”

Hanni claims Delta has a motive for seeking and destroying her data because if passenger rights bills are passed, airlines stand to lose over $40m in revenues in addition to millions more in accommodations for customers exiting planes during long delays. Currently, airlines are not restricted by law on how long planes can hold passengers on the tarmac.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his practical blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

Ways For Extending Your Laptop’s Life

September 14th, 2009

If you want to extend your laptop’s life, there are some specific things you can do. You definitely want to make your laptop last as long as possible, and not have to buy a new machine every year or two. No matter what price your laptop cost you, you’d do well to learn the following tips to extend its life. Read on to find out some great tips on this topic …

1. Keep It Cool The first thing I every time do to extend my laptop’s life? Well, it’s simple. Keep it cool. The more heat your laptop accumulates, the more probable it is to suffer from element failure. Note that whether you like to slump into a couch to type on your laptop, you will most probable block the machine’s air vents and prevent air from circulating. This spells heat for the machine – which is not a fine thing. To cool a laptop, one fine way is to get a cooling pad. These things draw heat away from the system and normally cost about tell $30. You will, at the same time prevent your laptop’s internal fans from spinning overly much, saving your battery life as well.

2. Carry The Laptop Carefully I’ve seen some folks treat and carry their laptops like junk. If you throw your laptop onto the bed and it lands on the floor, or you leave it in the hot sun in the back seat of you car – well, good luck. No laptop is gonna survive long in those circumstances. You need to make sure you carry the laptop with care. In addition, get a good bag that offers maximum protection. Targus makes great laptop bags and they have padded sidewalls with air-protection technology.

3. Choose a SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a next generation kind of hard drive. There are no moving parts, no platters or read/write heads (hard drive jargon). Everything is stored in non-volatile flash memory, like in your pen drive. This does wonders for your laptop. You will have longer lifespan because you don’t have a moving hard drive that breaks down. You also generate less heat since there’s no hard drive whirring in the background. Now, the prices of SSDs are still quite high and cost about $15 per GB – these are however coming down. I think the maximum size now is about 128 GB. Remember to look out for them if you’re trying to get a new laptop.

4. Protect The Battery Your laptop’s battery is also really sensitive. Don’t charge and discharge it all the time. Whenever you plug your laptop into an outlet, make it a habit to unplug the battery. If you leave it in, the AC force could cause the battery to overheat and overcharge. Then, when running on battery power, utilize the laptop until you get a low-battery warning, then plug in the charger and let it recharge fully. That’ll extend the life of that battery.

5. Reformat the Hard Drive If you find your laptop running truly slow, one option is to reformat the tough drive. Remember, we all let all sorts of rubbish software clog up our operating systems. Windows tends to get bogged down by the orphaned files, comic Registry entries and spyware. Reformat the tough drive and instal everything clean (get a friend or a shop to do it whether you’re not confident how). I assure you will get your laptop functioning and running faster. One trick I like to utilize is to instal all my fundamental software (Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, etc.) then take a backup using imaging software (e.g. Acronis True Image). When you feel the laptop going sluggish, easily backup your information files and do a image restore. Your system will be refreshed with all the original clean, intact programs and it will run faster.

6. Avoid The Standby Mode One final thing is regarding the Standby mode. Standby mode is good but it consumes battery power. So you risk reducing the life of your battery. Next time, utilize the Hibernate mode instead of Standby, it preserves your laptop’s current declare by writing it to the tough drive as a file. And it does not demand no power. It takes a few additional seconds to utilize Hibernate, but it will extend your laptop battery life.

Conclusion I hope this article has shown you some good tips for extending your laptop’s life. Note that a laptop is a pricey investment – do your best to keep it safe and working for a long, long time. By the way, if you’re interested in laptops or want to learn more about them, feel free to check out my free guide.

Francua Smith is a experienced Computer specialist who has a lot of experience on laptop computers. He will help you to choose your own experienced laptop computer.

Lets Find Good Laptop Deals

September 13th, 2009

Whether we shop for bread and milk at the neighborhood grocery store; or for shirts, ties and shoes at a downtown department store or for cars or for homes – we all want fine deals. It’s no different with laptops – most of us want excellent deals. This article helps you locate fine deals for laptops.

Why Look For Good Laptop Deals? Many of us are willing to take time to cut out coupons, to settle into lines winding around the block at the crack of down to be among the lucky shoppers who will get to take advantage of a one-day sale, to drive across town to save twenty five cents on a box of cereal while spending a dollar on gas and to fill out countless rebate forms that will ultimately get us refunds that will barely cover the postage it took to mail them in.

Have you ever wondered why we do that? Why are we willing to go through so much trouble just to save some money, at times a few cents while at other time hundreds of dollars? Is it all about economics? I think that economics has something to do with it, of course, but the bigger and more motivating factor is quite a bit more psychological and much less obvious.

What I am talking about is empowerment. When we get to pay less for something that we know, or we assume we know, is worth more we feel that we have legitimately beat the system, whatever we define the system to be. And beating the system, any system, is empowering. Now let’s see at some ways to find fine laptop deals.

1. Build Your Own Laptop When it comes to desktop computers, you can save money and gain that euphoric feeling of empowerment by finding sales offered by their manufacturers or retailers, by using discount coupons or rebates. There is yet another way of saving your hard earned money on a desktop computer and that is by actually building one yourself. And remember that there is nothing more empowering than a job well done. The same goes for laptops – you can actuall build one yourself. Hunt for cheap components and you can build a decent machine that meets your needs. Learn more about custom built laptops in this article.

2. Make Use of Manufacturer Sales Unfortunately I have to fill you in on some bad news – building your own laptop is really not an option if you’re not tech savvy. Or perhaps you just want something out-of-the-box and don’t have the time to build one from scratch.

Well, you can still save money on laptops by making the most of existing sales (manufacturer sales, blow-out sales, clearance sales, after holiday sales and so on), you can find discount coupons in newspapers and on the Internet, and you can take advantage of rebate programs offered by manufacturers.

Much like the build-it-yourself option accessible for desktop computers, laptop computers have a distinctive savings option of their own and this option is as follows: take your set of needs, match them up to the list of specifications featured in the laptop you are considering and stick to the results.

3. Buy Only What You Need In other words, buy just what you need and that which you will really utilize or else you will be throwing away fine money. Do not get sucked into the most recent hype and be courageous enough to be out of vogue. There is definitely no sensible reason why you ought to “keep up with the Jones.” Let me give you an example. If your current computer, if a desktop or a laptop, has a 5GB tough drive and you have not managed to fill it up even after the three years of ownership, do not be tempted to buy a fresh laptop with a 20 or 40GB tough drive only because your friend has one. That would be a total and utter waste!

Conclusion A good deal on a laptop would be the one for which you have taken advantage of a clearance sale; the one which accepts the discount coupon you found in your local newspaper; the one that honors a rebate program and the one that offers what you need, no more and no less. Any one of these would make for a good deal while a combination of several would make a great deal.

Francua Smith is a good Computer specialist who has a lot of experience on laptop computers. He will help you to choose your own nice laptop computer.

5 Tips To Choose The Best Laptop To Buy

September 12th, 2009

Are you paralyzed by indecision when it comes to buying laptops? The truth is, deciding on the best laptop to buy is a difficult decision. It stumps the best of us – even my more technically inclined friends can’t decide on a model that will best suit their needs. To help you out, I’ve decided to list down 5 ways to help you choose the best laptop to buy. Make sure you run through this list the next time you’re out purchasing a laptop.

1. What Speed Do You Need? One of the most important decisions you need to make before buying a laptop is to decide the speed required. If you’re using the laptop mainly for word processing or emailing, you don’t need as much computing horsepower. In that case, you might want to settle for an AMD Turion or a standard Intel Centrino CPU. If you need to use the laptop for graphics or heavy gaming, then you will certainly want a powerful CPU chip one like the Intel Core 2 Duo.

2. The Display Screen The next thing you should do when deciding on the finest laptop to buy is to assume about the show screen. These days, big 17-inch, glossy show screens are becoming more and more common. But request yourself, do you truly need all that glossy eye candy? If you only want a functional, business-based laptop, then assume about getting a smaller screen with a matte display.

3. The Laptop Weight Another approach I utilize to eliminate laptops in my purchase is to assume about the weight. Most people I know want to buy lightweight laptops. Which is perfectly understandable – who wants to lug a 6 pound machine all over city or all over campus? So it is necessary for you to assume about whether weight is an issue for you. If it is, then eliminate those desktop replacement or heavy laptops from your list and concentrate on ultraportables.

4. The Keyboard Surprising, a lot of folks put a lot of emphasis on laptop keyboards. You may think that a laptop keyboard is pretty standard fare, i.e. there is not much difference between one laptop and the next. Well, I can tell you that the keyboard is the one laptop component that your hands will be touching 90% of the time. So comfort in typing is extremely important. When choosing the best laptop to buy, pay attention to the comfort of the keyboard when you type. Some folks prefer a ‘click’ sound on the keys (I do), while others prefer a more silent typing experience.

5. The Battery Life And the final way to check if a laptop is for you? Simple – its the laptop’s battery life. Remember, a laptop is useless if it is flat out of juice. Some laptops I know run out of power after 10 minutes of unplugging them from the wall socket. Be very careful and do your research on battery life – choose a laptop that will last at least 3 to 4 hours is possible.

Conclusion Hopefully, the above 5 ways of choosing the best laptop will help you out. Remember, the most important thing in buying a laptop is that it must suit your needs. So always bear that in mind – don’t bother too much about what models others are using, just decide on one model that suits your requirements best. If you’re interested in learning more about laptops, you may want to check out my free PDF guide to laptops – download it here.

Francua Smith is a good Computer specialist who has a lot of experience on laptop computers. He will help you to choose your own best laptop computer.

How Important Are Meta tags?

August 22nd, 2009

Search engines and people (indirectly) use meta tags.

Are meta tags necessary? Each search engine places its own importance on meta tags. Google never discloses how it utilizes them. There are a good many sites that achieve page one ranking on Google that use no keyword or description tags at all, so take it with a grain of salt when someone tells you they are really essential for Search Engine Optimization. Each search engine has its own method for indexing — some assign meta tags considerable importance, thus it is best not to omit them.

Meta tags are lines of codes that are built into Internet pages. These code lines can’t be seen on the web browser (but look at what is said about the description tag, below), however, the search engine uses them to group your web pages accurately. They can have either descriptions, titles, or keywords. You don’t have to use descriptions and keywords, however your website will appear strange if you don’t use a “title” tag, because people will have “Untitled web page” in their browsers.

In the past, people would insert useless or repetitive information in their meta tags, trying to receive more traffic. So to stop people from cheating, not a lot of weight is assigned to a meta tag’s keywords these days; however, they are still checked for relevance. You will not be ranked well at all if you stuff them with keywords that do not pertain to your page.

The “head” section of the web page is where meta tags are located. Some say don’t use any capitalization for keywords, and to stay away from repeating terms in the keyword tag.

Mostly, the real meta tag contents are not visible, but the “description” meta tag’s information will be shown on nearly all of the search engine results as well as the title page when the results are revealed. Avoid repetition of keywords in the description tag, and keep the description text relevant.

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