Are you thinking of getting into VoIP? Do you have trouble making sense of all the related terms? Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is being tipped as the technology that will rock the telecoms industry. Internet telephony digitises the sound of a human voice so that it can be routed through the Internet. You can now make VoIP phone calls that cost a tiny proportion of calls made through a standard line. It is revolutionizing the way that people communicate.

However, as often occurs with new technologies, it is sometimes hard to understand what all the new terms and jargon involved mean. As a result of this this article will try and explain the technical jargon that you will encounter. So let’s get started on deciphering some of the jargon

? Bit rate: This is the speed at which data moves across the Internet. The term can also be used as a measure of the speed of an Internet connection which is often quantified in kilobits or megabits per second.

? Broadband: This is a generic term for high speed Internet over cable or ADSL

? IP: This stands for Internet Protocol It is the standard that underpins all services on the Internet.

? Router: This is networking hardware device that “steers” data across a network or across the Internet. A router is needed to share an Internet connection between multiple devices
? Softphone: A softphone is a computer application that is used to provide telephony functions. It is often used in conjunction with a headset

We hope by explaining and simplifying some of the terminology that surrounds the VoIP services this article should help you understand what VoIP is about and the elements that are involved. Find the service that is right for you. Join the VoIP revolution and start enjoying cheap calls and other cool services!

Posted by admin as Better Technology, Telecommunication Center at 9:12 PM CDT

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Not so long a go it looked like laptops for gaming were only available from special resellers and they were normally custom made. The systems were sold in insignificant numbers but each laptops had a large profit margin. They were the style of laptop that everybody wanted, but the price did not fit in their budget. Obviously as they were so advanced they were the best laptops in terms of performance. They typically created a lot of excitement but I doubt loads of people would go out and buy laptops at steep prices. As bigger manufacturers see the opening in the gaming laptop sector, stuff appears to have altered.

Just think about how much money these companies could be generating particularly when employing mass production. It is definitely a good option to bigger gross profits. They can also use their gigantic marketing budgets to sway the public further into spending their money or getting out the charge cards to buy laptops like these ones. Littler retailers definitely have an uphill battle now. I’m fairly sure that the well known brands will seek to force the small ones out. I believe buying from a familiar brand additionally provides the perception of greater value for money.

The notebook computers are surprisingly very good as well. This contains the potential to be very promising for small manufacturers. Being able to buy exactly what components they desire is a huge bonus for the majority people who are considering buying a gaming laptop computer. These types of people generally are well educated in the technology and can compare part for part. In the majority of cases the speed is way more significant than the design for certain types of customers.

All the changes are extremely good from the potential purchasers position. A method that the smaller companies might employ is to lower markup in to sell greater numbers of units. I reckon even industry analysts would have a hard time seeing where the market is headed. New things are constantly being launched and that should hold prices relatively high. It is hard to tell what will happen now that the large brands have become involved in manufacturing gaming laptops.

http://www.rizeon.com look to be shifting their gaming laptops on the cheap to compete in a saturation market.

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 11:15 AM CDT

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Laptop computers have most likely been on the top of everybodies must have list lately. Taiwan, which is the foremost manufacturing country of laptop computers is having trouble with the demand at present. It seems like once there are pending orders those will only grow because demand for laptops is not diminishing at all. I think what makes it difficult is that the technology changes all the time.

One of the rising trends is gaming notebooks. The price points on new technology usually falls quick nowadays because everybody is always searching for the latest product to come out. Speed is also improving and gaming on notebook computers is becoming more acceptable for gaming by those who need to be mobile. Smaller parts that perform better and are more heat efficient also means that gone are the ages of the massive notebook computers for gaming. Regardless of the fact that power has greatly increased and the designs are streamline, honestly power will and should forever trail behind desktops. I do not give it too long before we see ultra light gaming notebooks on the market.

There are always those people that need a laptop custom built because they need to use it for a particular field of work. Ram and hard disks are normally high performance engineered parts in custom notebooks which power users like. In my mind being able to choose the processor, memory and storage is best catered for the more hardcore people out there. The computers found in shops are normally prebuilt based average, mass market users and well not everybody is mediocore now are they? For the power users, custom notebooks close the gap. Brands who build custom notebooks usually offer a more personal and local support as well. I really feel this is a main thing that goes in favour for purchasing a laptop thats made to .

Tons of cool devices are being released soon. Except from what has already been mentioned UMPC’s are an additional massive product witnessing a rise this year. Plenty of duplicate products have already been released at a rapid pace. In my view the market would adapt well to a 15 inch variant modelled on the identical principles. Manufacturers must be working on an answer to this as we speak. It wouldn’t surprise me to see ultra mobile gaming notebooks in the next 4 years time. All the manufacturers are vying to introduce the next major noteboo so it’ll be interesting to observe.

I’ve found what I believe to be best gaming laptops.

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 1:59 AM CDT

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Each month, there are countless Americans who are faced with phone bills that they simply cannot afford. In many cases, they are paying fees that they were never made aware of. Many are being charged far too much for long distance calls, as well. This is especially true for Americans who make international calls on a regular basis. .
Many people have turned to cell phones in the hope that their long distance costs will be reduced. However, this can quickly lead to overages and ridiculously high bills. Phone cards are another option, but they do not generally offer low long distance rates. Most phone card companies if not all uses cheap carriers to carry their calls. This can lead to consumers experiencing bad connections and with all the fees associated with phone cards such as connection fees and maintenance fees, leaves the consumer with only a few minutes left on a $5.00 phone card.
Is Cheap Long Distance Service Available?
People pay for their monthly phone plans whether they are placing 50 or 500 calls. There is a charge for each long distance call, but there is also a service charge that is tacked onto every bill. Due to these and other fees, most people are not getting their money’s worth when it comes to long distance.
Prepaid Long distance Service
Prepaid plans allow a person to spend money only when he is actually talking to someone. If a person prepays $100, he is going to make use of every dollar that he spends. The prepaid plan doesn’t expire, so For instance, most calling services charge $.18 or more for calls to countries that prepaid calling plans charge only $.10 per minute to call. Prepaid long distance allows a person to place calls from just about any phone. Whether using cellular phones, home phones or public telephones, you only pay for the actual usage or in other words “talk time”. Prepaid international calling can save people with family and friends in other countries a considerable amount of money. It is also beneficial for people who are traveling. Customers can connect to their accounts through an access number from almost anywhere using any of the 10 phones that they can register on their account. Prepaid phone accounts function in a similar way to calling cards. However, they do not require a pin number to make a call.

About the Author

http://www.MrLongdistance.com owner Bernard Pragides has been in the telecommunication business since 1997. Please feel free to contact us if you have any queries on phone cards or international call rates. You may email us at HelpMeSave@MrLongDistance.com

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 9:35 PM CDT

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WIRELESS NETWORKING FOR THE EDUCATOR - PART 1

“PRIOR PLANNING PREVENTS PISS POOR PERFORMANCE”

There are many things to think about when planning a wireless network for a school environment. Your wireless network must be secure, must be able to handle teachers and staff work loads, and finally provide wireless access for mobile laptop labs for students. Combining all the above could be seem very difficult considering most schools will have about 100 staff members and over 500 students.

The first stage of planning your network is to discuss with staff what a wireless network will and won’t do. Find out exactly the areas where the staff will and won’t need wireless access. Will the staff or students need access in the gym area? Will the students need wireless access outdoors? How many wireless laptops will be accessing the network? What applications do the staff intend to use while using the wireless network? What applications will the students be using on the wireless network? Keep asking questions until you feel everyone understands the capabilities of a wireless network. If you fail to ask many questions it could cost your district a lot of time and money on something that doesn’t fill the schools needs.

Wireless networks in schools will usually have to support the following missions. A common need is to provide access for mobile laptops labs for students. Students use the labs to surf the internet, access network servers and perform research. Your network will need to support over twenty students accessing your wireless network in one area at the same time.

Mission two,, outdoor wireless access. This can provide a great learning opportunity for students to take technology out of the class room and perform science experiments via wireless computers. Great for students, but a large potential headache to secure an outdoors wireless network.

Mission three, provide teachers and staff members wireless network access to move through out the schools with out having to reconfigure their laptop every time they switch rooms. Seamless wireless access is a must for educators who are usually strapped for time and have little technology training. Your network needs to flexible enough to handle staff training sessions and conference rooms.

Mission four, Security. Providing wireless access for schools is one thing, providing secure wireless access in a school environment can be very difficult. Security in schools is often the last concern so when planning for your network explain all the wireless security threats to your planning committee so they know you just can’t throw wireless access points around the network and expect things to go well. Students are very smart and often more computer savvy then teachers so if you have an open wireless network it will be exploited with in the first day.

Once you have performed your recon and asked every question you can think of, it’s now time to think about what hardware for your wireless network. In the next installment of this series we will talk about wireless adapters, wireless access points, different vendors and how to start your purchasing.

Eric R. Meyer is an expert in wireless networking. You can view other aricles like this at http://www.wirelessninja.com

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 1:26 PM CDT

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I see Danny Burke of PC Magic once a month to sort out any problems on my computer and to help me move ahead with an internet info product business.

Danny spends most of his week rescuing business owners who are having problems with their computers.

Last week I asked him for the advice he would give a business owner who was having trouble with his computer. This is the advice he gave me:

Keep things simple on your computer. Don’t use it for games etc. Just use it for business. Danny finds that half his customers have caused their own problems by the extras they have downloaded from the internet such as:

Additional toolbars for internet explorer.
Unnecessary utilities like internet speed boosters which seldom work.
Eye candy such as wall paper changers, animated cats etc

All most businesses need is

A base operating system
An email client
A web browser
An office suite
A firewall and anti-virus system

Don’t download any old stuff off the internet. The more stuff you put on your hard disk, the more likely it is that you will have problems. Microsoft cannot check all the different applications you might download for compatibility.

Your first graphics package and another graphics package might fight over the file extensions. Try to stick with one package. Similar problems occur with music and video players which should not be on a business system anyway unless you are in that field.

Don’t upgrade unless you could name three good reasons to upgrade. After Danny gave me this advice, I rather guiltily tried to upgrade my BT broadband service to the new combined BT Yahoo broadband service.

Sure enough as soon as I had installed the new service, things started to go wrong. Things that had worked before (like links in emails) no longer worked. I’m not blaming BT Yahoo. I just had too much stuff on my computer! When I uninstalled the new service everything started working again.

Danny comments: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” When you upgrade, the file formats are sometimes different from the earlier versions of the software. This means you cannot go back to the earlier versions because they don’t recognise the new file format.

Do not assume that newer versions are better than the earlier versions. All you have done is make the software producer richer!

Have a firewall and virus checker and keep them up to date

Back up your data. 90% of companies who have a catastrophic data loss go bankrupt within two years. You should have two copies of important data and three copies of critical data stored in three different locations.

One copy should be in a fire safe off site. This should be standard practice. You cannot trust computers. Sooner or later they will get you! If you don’t back up, you are an idiot and deserve all you get!

Today I received this message from an ezine owner:

A lot of you sent me an ad this week, which
I had saved on my hard drive and guess
what?

My computer crashed and I lost every one.

I have a backup computer, but no ads.

Please re-send your ads so I can get them in
the Friday edition.

Sorry for the trouble.

The ezine owner is obviously a nice person but he may lose customers who haven’t got the time to resend their ads. No one likes to repeat their efforts.

Maybe his computer crashed because he had broken not only the back up rule but some of the other rules.

As a general principle, use your machine and don’t tinker with it. Once it is working, leave it alone!

Leave it alone!!!

John Watson is an info publisher on the internet and a martial arts school owner. He taught Religious Studies and Life Skills to teenagers in London schools for about 33 years before retiring in 2000 A.D. His own e-books and those of the English multimillionaire and businessman, Stuart Goldsmith, can be found on his site at http://www.motivationtoday.com

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 4:09 AM CDT

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Policy routing is a major topic on your BSCI exam, and you’ll find quite a bit of policy routing going on in today’s production networks. But what exactly is policy routing?

Policy-based routing, generally referred to as “policy routing”, is the use of route maps to determine the path a packet will take to get to its final destination. As you progress through your CCNP studies and go on to the CCIE (or to a Cisco Quality Of Service certification), you’ll find that traffic can be “marked” by policy routing in order to give different levels of service to various classes of traffic. (This is done by marking the traffic and placing the different classes of traffic in different queues in the router, allowing the administrator to give some traffic higher priority for transmission.)

There are some basic policy routing rules you should know:

Policy routing doesn’t affect the destination of the packet, but does affect the path that is taken to get there.

Policy routing can forward traffic based on the source IP address or the destination IP address (with the use of an extended ACL).

Policy routing can be configured at the interface level, or globally.

Applying policy routing on an interface affects only packets arriving on that interface:

R2(config)#int s0

R2(config-if)#ip policy route-map CHANGE_NEXT_HOP

Applying the policy globally applies the route map to packets generated on the router, not on all packets received on all interfaces.

Whether you’re running policy routing at the interface level, on packets created locally, or both, always run the command show ip policy to make sure you’ve got the right route maps on the proper interfaces.

R2#show ip policy

Interface Route map

local CHANGE_NEXT_HOP

Serial0 CHANGE_NEXT_HOP

And here’s the big rule to remember….

If a packet doesn’t match any of the specific criteria in a route map, or does match a line that has an explicit deny statement, the data is sent to the routing process and will be processed normally. If you don’t want to route packets that do not meet any route map criteria, the set command must be used to send those packets to the null0 interface. This set command should be the final set command in the route map.

There are four possibilities for an incoming packet when route maps are in use. The following example illustrates all of them.

R2(config)#access-list 29 permit host 20.1.1.1

R2(config)#access-list 30 permit host 20.2.2.2

R2(config)#access-list 31 permit host 20.3.3.3

R2(config)#access-list 32 permit host 20.4.4.4

R2(config)#route-map EXAMPLE permit 10

R2(config-route-map)#match ip address 29

R2(config-route-map)#set ip next-hop 40.1.1.1

R2(config-route-map)#route-map EXAMPLE permit 20

R2(config-route-map)#match ip address 30

Assuming the route map has been applied to the router’s ethernet0 interface, a packet sourced from 20.1.1.1 would meet the first line of the route map and have its next-hop IP address set to 40.1.1.1.

A packet sourced from 20.2.2.2 would match the next permit statement (sequence number 20). Since there is no action listed, this packet would return to the routing engine to undergo the normal routing procedure. All traffic that did not match these two addresses would also be routed normally - there would be no action taken by the route map.

Perhaps we want to specifically block traffic sourced from 20.3.3.3 or 20.4.4.4. We can use multiple match statements in one single route map, and have packets matching those two addresses sent to the bit bucket - the interface null0.

R2(config)#route-map EXAMPLE permit 30

R2(config-route-map)#match ip address 31

R2(config-route-map)#match ip address 32

R2(config-route-map)#set ?

as-path Prepend string for a BGP AS-path attribute

automatic-tag Automatically compute TAG value

comm-list set BGP community list (for deletion)

community BGP community attribute

dampening Set BGP route flap dampening parameters

default Set default information

extcommunity BGP extended community attribute

interface Output interface

ip IP specific information

level Where to import route

local-preference BGP local preference path attribute

metric Metric value for destination routing protocol

metric-type Type of metric for destination routing protocol

origin BGP origin code

tag Tag value for destination routing protocol

weight BGP weight for routing table

R2(config-route-map)#set interface null0

Any traffic matching ACLs 31 or 32 will be sent to null0, resulting in its being discarded by the router. Any traffic that didn’t match any of the route map statements will be returned to the routing engine for normal processing.

Knowing policy routing and how to apply it are essential skills for passing the BSCI exam, earning your CCNP, and becoming more valuable in today’s job market. Get some hands-on practice in a CCNA / CCNP home lab or rack rental to go along with learning the theory, and you’ll be writing and applying policy routing in no time at all.

Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage, home of free CCNP and CCNA tutorials, The Ultimate CCNA Study Package, and Ultimate CCNP Study Packages.

For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, “How To Pass The CCNA” and “How To Pass The CCNP”, just visit the website! You can also get FREE CCNA and CCNP exam questions every day! Pass the CCNP exam with The Bryant Advantage!

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 5:56 PM CDT

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Ah… love! What a wonderful thing. The meaning of life itself, isn’t it? Artists, poets and play writers have made the greatest progress in humanity’s understanding of love. So what’s love doing in a science column? Well lately scientists have managed to get themselves included in the restricted group of love-explainers.

Scientists now think that love is nothing else but a series of chemical reactions in people.

If you are in love with someone then you are also in love with that person’s genes subconsciously. More surprising still-if there is anything more astonishing that this last ‘fact’-is that not only do your eyes work when you see a perfect partner but so does your nose-and of course heart. Smell apparently plays an important role in the attraction between two persons. You are in fact attracted to a person who is more like your own parents not only physically speaking but also olfactory speaking. This chosen person of your heart is also the chosen person of your nose!

Many external appearances will prove that you are well and truly in love. Flushed cheeks, racing heart beat and clammy hands are only a few examples. ‘Inside’ the body though, there are other definite signs that Cupid has passed by.

Helen Fisher of Rutgers University is one of the most respected researchers in the field. She proposed that people fall in love in 3 different stages.

Stage 1: Lust
Lust is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen. Testosterone, as many readers might have thought, is not only found in men. In fact it plays a major role in women’s sex drive.

Stage 2: Attraction
This second stage is the classic love part often featured in romantic comedies. When people are in stage 2, they lose their appetite and often need less sleep. They instead find it more interesting to daydream about you-know-who.

During this stage, the body secretes a number of hormones. One of these hormones is serotonin. It is one of love’s most important chemicals and it may actually make people temporarily insane.

Stage 3: Attachment
If you have the guts to talk to that person, then you may well have entered this stage. If a relationship is going to last, this attachment process is the last stage.

Attachment is a longer lasting commitment and is the bond that keeps couples together when they start having children.

But are all these stuff really important at all? Scientists think so. By understanding the paths that regulate social attachments, scientists might be able to deal with some people’s inability to form relationships. Some people even see love being guaranteed in the future generation because love will be chemically provided: in pills.

Well when we say that love is madness, it’s sort of true literally speaking. And if you still doubt this, that hormone serotonin is there, somewhere in your body, to prove it.

About the Author

K.A.Cassimally is the editor in chief of Astronomy Journal and Astronomy Journal Ezine. He is also the co-founder of the RCPL Astronomy Club.

He is also Senior Columnist at BackWash.com and Columnist for bbc.co.uk h2g2 The Post where he writes ‘Not Scientific Science’.

Posted by admin as Better Technology at 5:14 AM CDT

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