Social Networking Safety Tips

Social networking web sites such as Myspace, Facebook and many others are a popular and fun way to communicate with relatives and friends, and to renew old friendships. There’s a dark side of social networking that has been well documented by the media. Popular newsmagazine shows are full stories of young people stalked by people they met on social networking web sites. While most of the negative attention comes from the illicit relationships that started from social networks.  Many of the various scams that are still getting sent around by e-mail are now spreading through social networking web sites.

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Patent Trolling and the Tech Industry

For every new technology that sets the world on its ear, there is somebody out there who thinks they can cash in on a questionably relevant patent.  Beating successful technology companies with patent infringement lawsuits already has a pejorative term associated to it. Patent trolling the term used to refer to the milking successful companies by those claiming patent infringement.

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Sony MZ-NF610 MiniDisc Player

In my search for a portable music player with the features that I wanted, I was coming up short of getting what I wanted so I had to take a sort of leap backwards. I went onto e-bay and got a portable minidisk player/recorder. I wanted an AM/FM radio so that I could listen to my favorite news/talk station while on the bus ride to work and during lunch break I could listen to my tunes from my computer. I ended up getting a Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-NF 610. Net MD is Sony’s method of taking audio files from computers and loading them onto MiniDiscs.

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Marc Andreessen

Way back in 1992 when anybody but hard core geeks knew what going even meant, Marc Andreessen started to to the Internet what Graphical User Interface did for computer operating systems.  Up to that point information on the Internet was shrouded in arcane Unix commands and everything was text.  Andreessen was developing Mosaic at the Nation Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.  The World Wide Web was just three years old at the time.  There were pages that were hyperlinked together but it was just text.  There wasn't even anything even called a web browser, in order to go to a web page it required telnetting into web server.  Even following links wasn't a matter of pointing and clicking.  To go to another page the number of the hyperlink had to be keyed into the computer and pressing the enter key. 

In early 1994, Andreessen's Mosaic changed all that.  Links became clickable and pictures became a permanent fixtures on web pages.  By making the web easy to use Mosaic helped fuel the Internet revolution of the mid 1990's.  By late 1994 Andreessen was recruited by financier Jim Clark to turn Mosaic into a new company.  In 1995 the newly formed Netscape Communications released the Navigator browser which was based on Mosaic.  Meanwhile Microsoft hired many of Andreessen's cohorts from NCSA to develop Internet Explorer.  By late 1996 Internet Explorer had finally become a viable competitor to Netscape Navigator.  The Browser Wars would last another couple of years with Internet Explorer winning due mostly to being bundled with Windows 98.  Internet Explorer would then have a market share of over 95 percent until Mozilla Firefox was based on programming code from Netscape would reclaim 15 percent market share from Internet Explorer.

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