Archive for May, 2008

If You Lose Data You Lose Business

I’m sure that we have all lost data to some extent in the past. Perhaps it was only a small amount of data, a Word document or something that we were working on. This can be very frustrating and it is a simple matter of saving your work on a regular basis. There is another type of data loss, however, that goes beyond only being frustrating. It can be a devastating thing if you end up losing important files in a computer crash or some other hardware malfunction. In fact, they cannot only be frustrating, they can put you out of business.

Most businesses are in the habit of backing up their data on a regular basis. They may spend a lot as far as hardware is concerned in order to keep data in a separate location. In the evenings, or overnight they run the backup tape drives, unload the tapes or other media and then carry them to a safe location. They feel secure because if something should happen they have the backup drives to save them. Unfortunately, backup drives such as this may just not be enough.

One of the best things that you can do in order to make sure that your data is secure is to run regular, off-site backups. This isn’t just a matter of keeping your data at another location locally, it is a matter of making sure that it is safely stored, far away from your computer data that resides in your office. The reason why this is the case is because many times, people may lose both the data and the backup as a result of an unexpected natural disaster or other problem. Although it is unusual, it can happen and can be a deathstroke to any business.

One of the reasons why many businesses are now using remote data backup is because it is a very convenient and safe way to store your files. First of all, the files are uploaded on a regular basis through automatic means. What this means to you is that you no longer have to run the manual backups in order to store the tapes locally. From now on, you can backup your computer while you are away from the office and the data will be stored somewhere else. Not only is it away from your computer, it is generally stored in more than one location in order to make sure that nothing happens to the data.

Many business owners have very sophisticated computer systems but that does not mean that they are technically minded. It cost money to buy, install and run these backup servers on a regular basis. This is another reason why many individuals have switched their business over to remote data backup. There is no hardware to run, technicians to call or upgrades to do. Simply set the time that you want the backup to happen, close and lock the door and leave while it takes place.

One problem with your computer can put your business on hold, or worse. Make sure you are covered in case of hardware failure or a computer crash. For more information on what our remote backup services can do for you, visit our website at http://www.databackupcentral.com/backup


Using the Internet to Save Your Data

For many years, people have been storing their computer data locally in order to make sure that it is safe. The Internet, however, is changing a lot of different things. One change that seems to be happening is that many individuals are switching over to a remote data storage backup. There are many different reasons why they may do this but ultimately, it comes down to just a few, convenience, price and options. Let’s take a look at each of these three and see why backing your data on the Internet really does beat backing it up locally.

Convenience – Many people would argue that backing up your data locally is very convenient. When you really think about it, however, how convenient is it? If you’re going to back your data properly, you need to make sure that you run the backup every night. This typically means that you must be there while the backup is running. While the data is being accessed, your computer typically slows down as a result of the additional activity. It almost becomes a drudgery, backing up your data in order to make sure that it is safe. After that, you need to take the data to a secure location that is away from the computer should a tragedy strike. By backing your data on a remote server, over the Internet, you can schedule it to happen after you have already left for the night. The data is safely Off-site and all of your days work as well as the rest of your data is secure at another location.

Price – Depending on your backup needs, you might spend hundreds of dollars on a backup system, multiple tapes or backup media and a technician to make sure that it is all installed properly. If something should go wrong with the system, you can plan on spending it all again, not to mention upgrades that need to take place periodically. On a remote backup system, the only thing that you have is a small monthly fee which is flexible, depending on the amount of server space that you actually need. Any upgrades that need to take place will not affect your price at all.

Options – You do have several different options when it comes to a backup drive. These options, however, typically come in the form of the type of media that you plan on using. A local backup drive cannot really stack up to the options that are offered via remote backup service. Things such as automatic backups, redundant storage sites and multiple servers are just some of the features which you might find beneficial.

The Internet certainly is changing things. Fortunately, it is also changing the way that we store our backup files for the better. Take advantage of the new technology and keep your data safe in a remote location. Not only is it convenient, it is the better choice.

Not only is saving your data over the internet convenient, it is also secure and reliable. For more information on what our remote backup services can do for you, visit our website at http://www.databackupcentral.com/backup


What Kind of Experience do I Need to Manage a Dedicated Server?

A dedicated server is a powerful server that is just for your website or business and no one else. This means that your server is not shared with others like shared hosting is. It is ideal for those who need reliability, high performance, better security, and the websites that are being operated are at an enterprise-level. In other words, a dedicated server is for those who need a lot of power and have the money to spend.

There are several advantages to operating a dedicated server. These advantages are:

The website performs better
You dont have to purchase equipment
If other websites that share the same server have problems, your website is unaffected because you are not sharing.

The server is also owned by the web host, so you are more or less renting it from them. You do have the ability to customize your server based on whatever your needs are, but what it comes down to is the fact that the host owns it. This can be a good thing, though, especially if your business does not have the administration capabilities to take care of various tasks that you need performed.

Experience

Some companies may have the experience and others may not. If a business has the experience in-house, then that individual or individuals can take care of any changes that need to be made to the website. Some go to college to be able to do this and have no problem at all managing the server. Depending on the type of changes that must be implemented depends on what type of experience and individual should have.

Then again, there are some who just know how to manage servers without any schooling in the area and can do it. It is important to gage what type of tasks must be performed on the website, especially if it is a high performance website that requires a lot of maintenance and manipulations.

On the other hand, there may be no experience required at all. This is where you can choose managed web hosting through your provider. This is where they can maintain and monitor your operating system, dedicated servers, and applications. This way you can still have everything that you need without the experience to go along with it. Unmanaged dedicated hosting may be a cheaper solution for some businesses, but if the experience and knowledge is not there, then managed dedicated hosting is the way to go.

Is it the right decision?

Whether or not your business has the experience to manage a dedicated server, it is important to make sure the business needs it. If you are prepared to take on the cost that is associated with using the hosts equipment and you know that they can provide you with the necessary technical support, then it may be the right decision. It is just important to make sure that your website or potential website is large and powerful enough to require such a server. However, many business websites are and using a dedicated server allows them to make their website even more powerful. If that is you, then dedicated hosting could be the right decision whether you have the right experience or not. Dont let the lack of experience deter you because there are solutions to that problem.

In the day and age where the website defines the company, choosing a dedicated server and using unmanaged or managed hosting can be a large decision. If you dont know where to start, simply ask the various companies offering dedicated hosting and see who is more willing to help you understand. That can be a good indicator that you may be starting a nice business relationship.

Fully Managed Hosting with complete end-to-end management of your mission-critical data will help your business achieve more up time culminating in greater revenues and success. http://www.fusepoint.com


How Does PCI DSS Help Organizations?

Being PCI DSS compliant is extremely important when a business or organization accepts credit cards for their products or services. In fact, being able to accept credit cards makes an organization more profitable in a world where credit cards and debit cards are the way to pay. Credit cards allow an organization to accept payments in many different ways. A consumer can make a payment via credit card over the internet and even over the phone. This gives organizations more ways to bring in money and PCI DSS makes accepting payments even more secure.

Being PCI DSS compliant helps organizations by:

Protecting the customers personal information in order to avoid disputes that could be costly to an organization.

- Increases customer confidence in your payment methods allowing clients to feel secure when purchasing items from you.

Protecting the organization from remediation costs and other financial losses.
The organization is provided a check on their system every so often to make sure that the system they use to store and transmit their customers data is not compromised in any way.

Increases payment security which in turn makes sharing personal information such as credit card numbers less strenuous for customers.

Another thing to point out is the fact that PCI DSS continues to evolve as credit card fraud becomes more sophisticated. It is fair to say that any business that must store or transmit credit card data is a target of those wishing to access the personal information of customers for their own benefit. Thieves then use the customer information in order to use their credit and commit fraud. However, PCI DSS stays up-to-date on the latest threats in order to keep the consumer information secure. This minimizes the risk involved with the organization accepting credit card payments and minimizes the risk to customers.

Business regulation

As stated before, PCI DSS keeps businesses up-to-date with the latest security updates and threats in order to prevent security breaches from occurring. However, different organizations may have different requirements when it comes to PCI DSS. Lets take a grocery store, for instance. A grocery store is a point-of-sale transaction where credit card information does not have to be stored. The protection that PCI DSS offers is in the transmission of the data and not in data being stored since a grocery store has no reason to store credit card data.

An online store or organization, on the other hand, may store consumer data so that the consumer does not have to enter their payment information every single time they do a transaction. What this does is allow the customer to complete the transaction with a few clicks of the mouse instead of getting in their wallet and having to enter all of the information all over again. This is where PCI DSS can become especially important. If the system were to be breached, which is very rare, there could be millions of credit card numbers accessed. However, PCI DSS stays up on the most sophisticated methods that thieves use to access these credit card numbers in order to protect both the business and the consumer.

PCI DSS for better business

When a person knows that their information is secure with your organization, they are more likely to spend their money with you. PCI DSS compliance is mandatory for any business or organization that record credit card data, however, not all consumers know this. It is especially important for those consumers who give online organizations their personal information and permission to store their credit card data for future transactions. It is very important that they know their information will not be accessed or mishandled in any way.

Fully Managed Hosting with complete end-to-end management of your mission-critical data will help your business achieve more up time culminating in greater revenues and success. http://www.fusepoint.com


Grand Theft Auto 4: A Step Into Greatness Or One Step To Far?

It’s been four years since the eagerly awaited new installation of the GTA series has come into succession, but is it worth the wait?

The Singleplayer

This new installation hasn’t deterred as much from the last series in the features of story mode and its missions, the majority of the time you find a contact, he/she sends you on a mission and you carry out that mission. This may seem dull at first but Rockstar, the company who makes the Grand Theft Auto video game, have taken this genre of free roaming games and developed a detailed city map to enhance gameplay. The graphics have lifelike settings, scenery and character models that you can interact with although this can distract you from the story.

The new addition of the euphoria game engine helps to enhance the gameplay. The developers have scrapped the ragdoll engine and used the more realistic euphoria engine to bring its audience into the new era of gaming. Characters no longer flop about and bounce when hit or shot; they react to their environments around them and act accordingly to their situation. An example of this can be seen in the gameplay, originally if a character was run over, they would bounce off and fly around aimlessly, with the euphoria engine they bend around the car and dint it in the exact place they collided.

This new type of gaming brings in a whole new realism and looks in many places like you are watching a movie, with each area of scenery having a unique character. The story is gripping, with Nico Bellic – a fresh immigrant from a war-torn Eastern European country – having a real personality which you grow fond of, this is one story you actually want to see to the conclusion. The missions are broken up with side missions and many extra games such as bowling, pool and darts which are quite addictive in themselves.

Nico can now use a mobile phone to call his contacts, take girls on dates and find jobs and activities, this system adds to the overall fun factor and adult theme of the game.

The Multiplayer

As an addition to the single player the Rockstar team has bought us online and offline multiplayer. There are 14 game modes which can be played by up to 16 people, these include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Car Jack City, Cops n Crooks and a favourite of many Free Mode where players can explore the whole island of Liberty City.

A plethora of customisable options allows each game to be unique from the rest. This can make the game almost impossible to get bored of.

Overall it can be seen, Grand Theft Auto IV is a strong rival to other games of its genre and other video games in general. Both single player and multiplayer modes can give the player many hours of enjoyment.

Bryan has a keen interest in playing video games. For more information on GTA 4 check out http://www.gta4.eztips.info


Your Info Guide about Data Recovery

Data recovery is defined as the process by which lost data is retrieved from a damaged or infected hard drive or any other piece of computer or electronic equipment. Computer users today use a special software for data recovery to get back the lost information from their personal computers, business computer systems, cellular phones, Blackberries, and any other electronic systems that store vital information.

Data recovery is possible because of the way the Microsoft Windows operating system is designed. Historically Windows has been developed to maximize the speed of computer use. It is something most computer users are familiar with, as a majority of us have had to turn to data recovery at some point in time. Even though hard drives are becoming better and better, they are still mechanical and will always encounter problems.

Data recovery is actually just around us for decades, unnoticed. Nowadays, it emerges a new branch of IT industry. It is useful for a number of things. Perhaps you lost your passphrase. Data recovery is salvaging data stored on damaged media, such as hard drives or disks or recovering deleted files. When you delete a file Windows only removes the file from the file system table which keeps track of all the files on your hard drive.

Data recovery is defined as the process of extracting or obtaining data from failed, damaged, inaccessible, or corrupted primary storage media that could not be normally accessed. It is also a process that is used to retrieve and secure deleted information for forensic purposes or spying.

Data recovery is a complimentary, but not identical, skill set to computer forensics. Kroll Ontrack is the leader in data recovery bringing back data from media that have suffered all kinds of abuse. It is a software that allows you to easily recover lost and accidentally deleted files. It can even recover files that have been deleted from the recycle bin.

Data recovery is possible because a file and information about a file are two different things, stored in two different places. The Windows operating system uses a file allocation table (FAT) to keep track of which files are on the hard drive and where those files are stored. Data recovery is a process by which individual data elements such as files or folders are encrypted for more than one person or entity.

By encrypting for more than one person or escrow entity, An escrow entity may be a designated administrator within an organization to perform a data recovery role. It is a process of rescuing data from damaged, failed, sabotaged or inaccessible storage media when it cannot be used to access data normally. Often data is being rescued from storage media’s such as hard disk drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other storage media.

Jaison Jacob is an expert article writer. You can read a lot of data recovery info articles at http://www.datarecoverylive.com


Video Game Jobs – How To Become A Game Programmer

The video game industry is a wide open field, complete with dozens of possible options for those that want to craft the next great video game. For those that are good with numbers, find themselves incredibly adept at picking out small details and more than anything like seeing how things work on a basic level, video game programming might be the job for you.

As a game programmer, you must remember that you are not a game designer. It’s not your job to craft the how or what of the game. You are instead tasked with taking a set of specific instructions and making them come to life in your code. The video game industry is filled with roles, but the role of game programmer is probably the most important. You lay the foundation for the entire project.

Over the years the role of a game programmer has become more and more specific, changing from a catch all designer, programmer, artist role in the 1970s to a very specific job now. There are more than a dozen different positions you might hold as a game programmer, ranging from game physics to sound to graphics, and artificial intelligence. Every facet you can imagine in a video game has a specific engine operating it. As a game programmer your responsibility will likely be working directly with one of these engines to help complete a very specific portion of the game.

You should expect to spend a decent amount of time in school preparing for this job, learning multiple programming languages and getting your degree in Computer Science. There’s a lot of math and you’d better have a keen eye for detail, but for those that do, video game programming is among the most interesting and exciting jobs you can get as a programmer.

The video game industry is as varied as any and you might find yourself in a series of different roles, working on different projects every six months or so. Once you’ve mastered the details of your craft, it’s a matter of specializing and video game design. That means getting to know certain engines, programs and concepts.

For example, a simple role playing game might require a single physics engine programmer, a job that leaves you with a lot of responsibility and duties. Your next project might be a shooting game though, or an action RPG, the kinds of games that require massive teams of physics engine programmers, putting you on a very specific detail, like gun mechanics.

Or you could very well find yourself on an entirely different team, programming artificial intelligence for alien enemies. The possibilities are endless and the variance in the programming you’ll do immense. But, if you find that you want more than anything to work in the video game industry but aren’t a math wizard or want to get involved in the visual aspects of game design, there are still plenty of options open for you in the game industry.

BONUS TIP: If you’d like to get your foot in the game industry door, why not start as a video game tester? For more information, grab your FREE REPORT right now at: http://www.BeAGameTester.com



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