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Online auctions are more popular than ever, enabling users to find everything from collectibles to car parts. Most auction transactions go smoothly. Auction fraud, however, is also more prevalent. Shopping on the internet is growing every year as more people have discovered it. The sheer convenience of sitting at home, clicking your mouse and having …

I.T professionals often work contract jobs, essentially spending several months on a project with one organization and then moving on to a new assignment elsewhere. Sometimes this work arrangement is by choice; other times it’s a way for techies to earn a living between full-time jobs. Even if techies learn the ins and outs of contract employment over the course of their careers, they still have lots of questions about it. So if techies have questions, we’ve got answers. What’s the difference between being a contract employee and an independent consultant? Contract employees are hired by consulting or staffing agencies and then placed in assignments at businesses that need help on projects. Independent consultants typically market their own services to businesses and bill them for those services. The term “consultant” is often used to refer to both situations. This article refers to contract employees. Who pays me as a contractor …

If you have been planning to migrate your blog from WordPress to Self-Hosted domain but found the whole process of importing blogger posts with comments into WordPress too technical and complicated, here’s a very good news for you. Backup the Current WordPress Database Back up your WordPress database. WordPress has provided wonderful tutorial on how to backup wordpress database. Log into your wordpress admin page http://yourbloggeraddress.wordpress.com/wp-admin

People tend to trust their computers for some reason, and when the disk drives fail they feel betrayed, who preaches the gospel of frequent backups as the best way to avoid having to spend $500 or more recovering lost data. When looking for the best data recovery provider there are literally thousands of options. Doing a quick Google search of the term “hard drive recovery” yields over 500,000 results. With so many options, the toughest part of the process may involve the decision on where to send your drive. When you’ve lost your data, you only care about getting it back, right? In order to get your data back, you want the absolute best Data Recovery Resources for you at a price that fits within your budget. So how do you go about finding “The perfect hard drive repair” provider? Most consumers looking for data recovery will consider the company’s …

Green IT is all about moving forward, right? Well, not quite. Most companies need to take a step backward first, and perhaps a step sideways, too. Let me explain. We’re seeing rapid growth of computing resources within companies worldwide: server growth at 28% per year, storage growth at 45% per year, MIPS growth at 17% per year, and desktop growth at 1.3 times the rate of labor pool growth. What impact does this growth have on the climate? And what can IT managers do right now to reverse a negative trend? Take a step backward With technology continually expanding, most organizations follow conventional wisdom adding capacity to do more business. The word “adding” is key here. Few IT managers are looking for the “right” capacity.

Having been a non-employee for about 14 years now, I’ve made my share of stupid business mistakes. I’ve also coached a number of people to start their own businesses, and I’ve seen many of them make similar mistakes. This advice is geared towards small business owners, particularly people who are just starting (or about to start) their own business. Selling to the wrong people While sales are important to the survival of any business, you don’t need to push your business on everyone you meet, including friends and family. Furthermore, it’s a waste of time to try selling to people who simply don’t need what you’re offering. Selling to the wrong people includes trying to sell to everyone. Some customers are much easier to sell to than others. For example, my wife does web consulting for small businesses, and she’s learned that some clients are much harder to work with …

When it comes to information security, your biggest vulnerability is not necessarily your computers. It’s your users. Every day, employees make glaring errors such as posting their passwords where others can see them, downloading and opening e-mail attachments that contain viruses, and failing to shut down their computers at night. Human error, not system weaknesses, is the leading cause of serious security violations, according to the “Committing to Security Benchmark Study” sponsored by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). Because human actions greatly affect computer security, you must educate your employees, IT staff, and management to make security a priority and develop good security habits. If you don’t feel confident supplying that information, hire an outside consultant. Organizations such as the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute, the Computer Security Institute, and the MIS Training Institute specialize in such training and can help companies worldwide. General user training: Focus on …

Microsoft works to continually improve the performance, security, and stability of the Windows operating system. As part of this effort, Microsoft develops updates, fixes, and other improvements that address issues reported by the company’s customers and partners. To make it easier for customers to get these updates and enhancements, Microsoft periodically combines them into a single package, and makes that package available for all Windows customers. These packages are called service packs. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates and hotfixes. It also includes select out-of-band releases, and a small number of new enhancements, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system. Windows XP SP3 provides a new baseline for customers still deploying Windows XP. For customers with existing Windows XP installations, Windows XP SP3 fills gaps in the updates they might have missed—for example, by declining individual …

Looking for a career challenge? Here are new job titles cropping up in IT departments across corporate America, as well as a brief job description for each one.  Information steward Reporting to the CIO, the information steward is responsible for how information is handled and stored across the company. The information steward determines who has read, write and copy access to information. This person is also in charge of how information is secured, backed up and archived. The position involves compliance with industry-specific regulations, as well as the new e-discovery rules for litigation. In an era of stolen laptops and exposed credit card numbers, the information steward is responsible for keeping the CIO out of the headlines.