CZ Imaging Group - News & Tips Section!
Welcome CZ Imaging Group, South Florida's premium document management company. We convert your paper documents into electronic documents.
Insourcing?
Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan in an interview: Only a small share of Infosys employees are outside India, but that will change. We are recruiting in the U.S. and U.K., even at entry level, and bringing those people to train in India for six months and then deploying them globally.
What happened to privacy?
So you probably know by now that when accessing your Google or Yahoo emails, these two companies present you with advertisements relating to emails that you read. They're looking at your emails! You can probably justify to yourself with a simple line - as I have done - they do use machines to do it, not a real human beings.
What will you say to this though? Pudding Media announced that they are pioneering technology that will listen to your online voice conversation so that they can display ads related to the topic that you discuss. US government spied on conversation by reprogramming phone over the air to act as remote microphone even when phone appeared to be off - You should always remove battery from your cellphone if you don't want anyone to eavesdrop on you. British government uses technology to detect lies from voice quality changes when their citizens apply for government benefits - this technology is usually known as lie detector.
A little too Orwellian for my taste.
HELP! LandTech does not send emails, Office does not work
Word and Excel won't load
I hear this all the time. In many cases the culprit is either Smiley Central or My Web Search. Despite their claims they do not improve your browsing experience. As a matter of fact, these products are well established as adware/malware. What does that mean and how do I fix the problems?
First things first. You do not need another toolbar to spy on you. You do not need your company secrets revealed to someone you do not know. You do not need bad quality harmful software on your computer. This goes for all the "add-in" that are supposedly making your life better. DO NOT download them ever again. They only harm your computer. These companies are after making money, they do not have your interest at heart. That is why, unlike reputable software companies, they do not test their product. They do not test different set ups and they do not bother fixing issues unless it prevents them from making money.
Sometimes, you can find software from such company that actually will destroy your computer upon installation. Bottom line - if you can do your work without it then do not ever download it.
So what do you do now that your machine does not work? On XP and 2000, go to start menu, select control panel and start "Add or Remove Programs." Locate your smiley central and/or my search bar and uninstall them. On vista, you need to go to start menu, then select Control Panel. Under "Programs" is link for "Uninstall a program", click on it and locate the toolbar uninstall files. After reboot your LandTech and your Word & Excel and other Microsoft Office programs should work properly once again.
USB 3.0 - Cannot Wait?
The new standard for USB 3.0 calls for speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second. More than 10 times the USB 2.0 and faster than the new, second generation SATA (3 gigabits) or FireWire 800 (with 800 megabits, or 0.8 gigabit.) You'll have to wait for USB 3.0 to finalize specs so it won't be available any time soon.
Printing to PDF
There are many programs available today that allow you to print any document into PDF format. Do you want to save a document, print it to read it later? Need to keep records of your online bill payments? Or just want to have a copy for the record? That's when PDF printing is the answer, you will be saving paper and still have the information you need at your disposal for whenever you are ready. I recommend CutePDF, a small application that creates a virtual printer on your system, and it will output every print job to a PDF document, a "Save as" screen will appear for you to name the file and choose it's location. It can be used as your default printer and it is free!
Solid State Disk
You may have seen the adverts for Samsung notebooks with Samsung FlashSSD solid state disk drive. The ads boast extreme speed, very high resiliency, long lifetime and very low power consumption. Ads claim your laptop may run 20% longer on same battery as it does today with your current hard drive. You may be wondering if these claims are true and you may want to know what solid state disk is. The ads do not explain it.
Solid state disk is just like your thumb drive. Flash drives were used in embedded systems for many years and we have used them for fast booting servers. Solid state disk is just a more conveniently packaged flash drive. Think of it as your memory card from your camera that was adapted to plug in directly inside your computer.
All flash drives are using less power than traditional drives because traditional harddrive has moving parts. Thanks to these moving parts the spin and movement of reading heads requires additional power consumption. Moving parts also make the traditional hard drive much less reliable. Until just a decade ago, hard drives were directly mounted. For last about 10 years you can find gel suspended hard drives in ruggedized notebooks. Evenso, the drive breaks very easily if it is turned on while the notebook is hit. You may have already dropped your thumb drive many times and it still works. No moving parts mean less headaches.
Thumb drive supports random access to your data without having to wait for cylinder to spin to proper position and without having to wait for reading or writing head to move. That's why you see very low access speed which translates into quick boot times and faster computer experience.
To sum it all up, there are times when product that sounds too good to be true is actually that good. There's only one drawback and that is the high price of this solid state disk, which is soon to drop. If you can wait another few months you will be able to purchase this amazing technology possibly few hundreds of dollars cheaper.
AMD's New Tripple Core Phenom due in 2008
It's official now. AMD's line on it is - there are very few applications that can fully utilize dual core. There's much less that could even utilize quad core - so our tripple core is the best price to performance choice. This news comes at the same time as release of quad core Phenom. This may give AMD some fighting chance once again.
Few years back, Intel was sleeping on their laurels while AMD quietly mounted full speed attack on its much larger counterpart. Intel was stomped. They did not see it coming. They lost a lot of market and they did not like it. They invested hundred of millions in research & development and they finally beat AMD on performance. They were the first to introduce PC compatible quad core (there's the 16 core from Sun with 4 hyperthreads each - but that's for another entry.) By end of last year, AMD was supposed to have unveiled their 8 core but they're having problems with it, obviously. They could not produce quad core for very long time and now it seems their focus is towards middle path between dual and quad rather than pushing the envelope with octal. My guess is that they still want to go that way, but with the technical difficulties for the time being they're calling the tripple idea a clever market analysis and an interesting value proposition. Just my 2 cents.
Upgrade to Vista or not!
First and foremost make sure your most important programs will run properly in Vista. Many businesses have proprietary or customized software that may not run well in Vista. Second, verify your system capabilities, you may need more memory, hard drive and a better processor than what you have today, I recommend at least 1GB of memory, 40GB of hard drive and a 1.8GHz processor for a Vista Basic PC to be used for simple word processing, spreadsheet, email and web browsing applications. Many times you'll be better off buying a new PC with Vista already installed to avoid hardware compatibility issues. Don't forget to recycle your old PC, erase it and give it to an employee, friend or a kid that doesn't have one, or even your local church.
HDVMD - Not Another One!
So there's this Blu-Ray technology that seems to beat down HD DVD. To me it looks like battle already won. But I guess that's not the way it looks for New Medium Enterprises, which came up with HD VMD technology. It uses red laser rather than more expensive blue laser but supposedly does provide comparable storage on multiple layers of DVD while allowing for cheaper production. Personally, I think they waste their money - the battle is squarely between the big two technologies now, possibly with Blu-Ray winning.
Thank you for your business.