By William Welsh
NASA plans to hold an industry day July 23 in Washington to brief the private sector on the acquisition strategy for its Information Technology Infrastructure Improvement program (I3P).
The I3P solicitation will support several agency components and encompass network communications, data center, desktop and Web services, according to an announcement on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.
In addition to communicating its acquisition strategy, NASA will describe its IT infrastructure requirements across the components, get input from industry on its IT strategy and establish a list of companies interested in the procurement.
Registration, which closes July 21, is limited to two representatives per company, NASA said.
The event will be held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
We don't use E-gold very often since most of our online business and customer sales are conducted through our online merchant account. However, we occasionally have someone who will request paying by E-gold so we keep an account there for this reason. Once a month or so we withdraw the funds and decided to do so yesterday. Imagine our dismay when we logged into our E-gold account yesterday and found our balance to be a big fat ZERO!
We had checked the balance just a few days ago so we knew this was not correct. After investigating the history of the account, we found that a spend had been made to another e-gold account user WITHOUT our knowledge or authorization. We had been hacked!
Since we have up to date anti-virus and firewall software on our computer, we assumed we were safe. Not so! It seems this is not enough to keep away the hackers as the software does not prevent "Spyware" from being installed on your computer.
"Spyware" is software that gets onto your computer and literally "spies" on your activities. The spying can range from relatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites... to extremely dangerous "keystroke loggers" which record passwords, credit cards, and other personal data. That data then gets relayed to the person who put the software on your computer.
Spyware gets on your computer in one of several different ways.
First, it rides along with software you download from the 'Net and install on your system.
Second, they come as email attachments (much like viruses) and automatically install themselves on your computer when you open the email message.
Third, hackers find an open port on your computer and use the "back door" to install basically anything they want.
And fourth, the more malicious types, like keystroke loggers, can even get installed by someone with direct physical access to your computer such as an employer, suspicious spouse, business competitor, or someone who wants to know exactly what you're doing.
So how do you protect yourself against these malicious hackers? You need a program that specifically scans your system for the tens-of-thousands of existing spyware programs along with the new ones appearing daily.
Below are two programs which specifically check for and remove spyware from your system:
"Spybot Search & Destroy" - www.safer-networking.org
"Ad Aware" - www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
You may have spyware lurking on your computer right now so protect yourself today by downloading one of the above programs!
As a point of reference, we contacted E-gold and informed them that we had been hacked. We provided them with the account number of the person who received the funds and asked for a contact e-mail address on the person. E-gold informed us that they could not provide that information without a "court order" and that basically there was no way of getting the money back!
Take action today to protect yourself from this growing threat! The bottom line is: - Keep your anti-virus program current
- Install a firewall
- Carefully screen software before installing it
- Scan specifically for spyware weekly
- Stay current on this growing threat.
Oct.08, 2008 in Informatiom Technology.
Computer benchmarking is an effective way of measuring your PC’s performance. Benchmarking is often used when overclocking, upgrading your PC, optimizing Windows XP, customizing Windows, and even speeding up your Windows XP startup. There are many different methods for measuring your computer’s performance, whether it be using a stopwatch to measure the startup time to shutdown time, or comparing how many FPS a game runs depending on what performance options you have selected on your graphics card. Some of the more common solutions to measuring your PC’s performance is to use specific benchmarking software that does just that. Why sit there at your computer with a stopwatch when you can have a program test that for you? Why perform only one test you have the ability to do yourself when you can use a program that has multiple tests to measure varying degrees of performance?
PCMark05
PCMark05 is a computer benchmarking application developed by Futuremark. PCMark05 will help you reliably test and measure your PC’s performances to determine it’s strengths and weaknesses. It’ll also help you decide on optimal upgrades, or choosing the right new PC that fits your needs.
PCMark05 comes with the ability to benchmark the entire system as well as each individual component. There are 5 different testing suites that come with PCMark05: System Test Suite, CPU Test Suite, Memory Test suite, Graphics Test Suite, and the HDD Test Suite.
PCMark05-Benchmark-Results
PCMark05 comes in three different flavors: Basic, Advanced, and Professional. Basic is free, and is the most limited in terms of benchmarking, allowing you to do only perform the System Test Suite. Advanced will cost you $19.95, and offers the best bang for your buck. Professional ($199.95) adds the ability to run a custom suite, export to MS Excel, use command line options, running PCMark05 with batch files, and it also gives a license for commercial use too.
3DMark06
3DMark06 is also developed by Futuremark, but focuses more heavily on the graphics card side of benchmarking and PC performance, though it does include CPU tests as well. 3DMark06 uses “advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.”
3DMark06-PC-Benchmarking
3DMark06 also comes in Basic (Free), Advanced ($19.95), and Professional Editions ($490.00). Basic lets you perform 2 SM2.0 graphics benchmarks, 2 HDR/SM3.0 graphics benchmarks, and 2 CPU benchmarks as well. Advanced copies of 3DMark06 enables the rest of the benchmarking features, while the Professional version has batch testing, commercial use allowed, and full demo looping.
Aquamark3
Aquamark3 is a free benchmarking program that allows you easily measure and compare your PC performance. It has a reliable benchmark that helps you configure your system for the best gaming performance.
Aquamark3-Benchmarking-Performance-App
Aquamark3 uses DirectX 9 as well as being backwards compatible with DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 graphics hardware. It allows benchmarking in a real-world scenario so you can get the most accurate benchmark results as possible.
SiSoftware Sandra
(System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) Sandra will measure, test, and benchmark your PC to give you the most accurate information about your hardware, software, and other devices that use either.
CPU-Benchmark-Performance-Results
“It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.”
Sandra also has the ability to test computer stability with its burn-in wizard, the ability to give you performance recommends on how you can tune-up your computer, as well as testing for an overall PC performance score, and last, but not least Sandra has a full-on environment monitor wizard that allows you to measure temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, CPU power and even cooling solution thermal resistance.
SiSoftware Sandra comes in several different versions, but they have a really good free version called Sandra Lite, that doesn’t include any timers, serial keys or anything.
HDTach
HDTach is a reliable benchmarking software that allows you test your hard drives, removable drives, flash devices, and RAID arrays. It attempts to get as close to real-world performance as possible by bypassing software layers with low-level drivers, so you get real results, not inflated results.
HDTach-Benchmark-Screen
The trial version measures sequential read speed, random access speed, interface burst speed, and CPU utilization, while the registered version adds sequential write testing.
CPUBench
CPUBench is a free benchmarking utility that helps you make comparisons between different CPUs by measuring the MFLOPs (mega floating-point operations per second) and MIPS (million instructions per seconds) of your CPU.
CPUBench-Benchmark-Results
CineBench
CineBench is another free benchmarking utility that is made with amazing quality. It runs several tests on your PC to benchmark the performance of the processor and graphics cards under real world performance. CineBench also has support for up to 16 CPUs on Macintosh and Windows. The values between the two operating systems are 100% comparable and can aid in purchasing decisions as well.
Performance-Benchmark-Cinebench
COSBI OpenSourceMark
COSBI OpenSourceMark is described as “the definite, comprehensive open source benchmark”. That means it’s free and is damn good for benchmarking.
COSBI-Benchmarking-Results
It’s tests consist of file compression, audio encoding, spreadsheet calculations, and image-editing activites. It detects multiple cores and automatically reconfigures itself to use the benchmarks to take full advantage of your PC’s hardware. You can also do custom test suites if you don’t want to do the full on test.
Which Benchmark Application Is The Best?
There is no best benchmark solution. This list features the best in computer benchmarking available. You’ll just have to decide for yourself which one you like the best, they all measure different types of performances for different components. I’ve used these programs several times when doing maintenance, upgrading, and optimizing, and they have never failed when giving me real-world performance values. PCMark and 3DMark may be $20 but that $20 is well worth it.
If you have any benchmarking applications that you use that aren’t listed here, leave a comment and tell me about it, I’d like to know what else is out there.
Whilst it is usually possible to get a rough idea of how well a computer will operate by simply looking at the system specification sheet, this doesn't always give a true reflection of the machines performance. For that reason, those that want to get an accurate idea of the speed of their computer will often run a piece of benchmarking software.Benchmark programs work by testing performance characteristics of individual sections of your computer; for example the number of calculations per second of your processor, the access time of your memory and the number of polygons per second that your graphics card can draw.
The results can then be used to produce an individual score for each component along with an overall score for the entire system; such results can be helpful for those who want to identify weak spots in their computer and work on improving them. Fortunately this week I learned of a piece of software called PC Wizard which allows you to do just that.The software itself can be downloaded free of charge from www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php –
Fortunately it is only a couple of megabytes in size and so should only take a few minutes to download an install. The program is classified as freeware so isn't in any way restricted and they don't generate any revenue by exposing you to advertising.The primary function of PC Wizard is simply to identify system components – this is surprisingly useful if you're looking to update a particular driver or gain support for a particular building block within your computer. On a conventional PC the only truly accurate other way has been simply to take the side off and have a look however this technique falls flat on its face when we are dealing with laptops.
Whilst Windows Device manager will give me a limited amount of information regarding the hardware inside my laptop I'd much prefer a piece of software rather than a screwdriver to find out specifics.Our main interest with this software is the benchmark section so if you click on this icon you will be given the options to test every conceivable area of your system including the processor, main memory, hard drive and video card.
By comparing these readings against the benchmark systems already provided by the software you should be able to get a good idea of what areas of your system are letting you down. For your own peace of mind, if you are considering a system upgrade then try running a test like this before and after the upgrade takes place so that you can see how much of a difference you've made. Likewise, if you want to experiment with playing around with things like BIOS settings and your Operating System then run these tests at all stages so you can see whether your alterations have had a positive or detrimental effect.
I have in the past talked about removing software nasties from your computer such as wasteful applications that stay resident in memory and for your own interest it would have been appropriate to use PC Wizard before and after to ensure that my tips had indeed been beneficial.Any of the data you collect can be easily exported to a universal file format so should ever need the support of a PC helpdesk then sending the file along to them will provide an immediate and accurate impression of your machine without you having to do any legwork.
For those that need it, PC Wizard is a small, free and easy to use piece of software which can be extremely beneficial. Of course, not all software I recommend in Click is useful to everybody so if you have no intentions of tweaking your machine or performing any upgrades you're probably best skipping this particular recommendation.
more about benchmarking? click here.
There is a lot being said about Windows Vista at the moment along with the normal paranoia keeping users away that usually occurs when Microsoft release a new Operating System. I’m surprised by the number of people I know who have bought a new computer in the last couple of months and paid more to have Windows XP installed on it because of the horror stories they have heard
, usually through a chain of half a dozen people.If I can just clarify to my readership that Windows Vista is a good Operating System and in terms of bugs and security vulnerabilities it’s light years ahead of how Windows XP was this far into its distribution cycle. I’m not saying that you should rush out and buy it tomorrow if you’re happy with XP, but all I am saying is that if buying a new machine and you’re given the choice then definitely go the Vista route.
Other than which edition you’re going to get (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business or Ultimate) there is an equally important consideration in whether you’re going to go for the 64 bit or 32 bit version of Windows and unfortunately this is a consideration that’s often overlooked.Ultimately your choice may have already been made for you by the system manufacturer; if your system only has a 32-bit processor then you can only use the 32-bit version of Windows.
Those lucky enough to be buying a 64-bit processor will have the choice of going for either the 64 or 32-bit version of Windows and as such this article will be focusing on these users. If you’re not sure what on earth I’m talking about here I should probably explain a little more about what a processor is and how it works.The processor could be considered the most central part of your computer and is responsible for performing the billions of calculations that are performed every time you use your machine. There are a number of measures that can be applied to a processor to determine how powerful it is but one of the primary considerations is how many bits of information it can handle at any one time.
My old Commodore 64 could handle 8 bits of data at once, most current PC processors can handle 32 bits and the newer, more powerful models can often handle 64 bits.I feel that this oversimplification could be misleading as there are of course a million other factors that play a part in the performance of the processor; another important consideration for example is how many thousands of times a second the processor can move these bits of information around. Suffice to say, a 64 bit processor should perform better than a 32-bit processor of similar specification as long as it’s using software written to take advantage of the additional data handling capability.As these processors are backwards compatible, you can install a 32-bit version of Windows on your 64-bit processor but as a result your machine will not be able to take advantage of this additional data bandwidth and you will be essentially handicapping your new processor; this is where the 64-bit version of Vista comes in to play.
Whilst it is true that Microsoft did release a 64-bit version of Windows XP it unfortunately never gained any real support and as such was never developed in to a viable platform. With 64-bit processors becoming commonplace and with a large wave of support for these new, more powerful versions of Vista it looks like 64-bit computing has finally arrived so now there are important decisions to be made. I think I have explained the primary speed advantage however there are also a number of other benefits from making the switch and rather predictably a large number of disadvantages. As this decision is an important one I plan next week to go over both sides of the argument so that you can decide which version is right for you.
