Entry IV : Online Shopping Tips

Online shopping or E-commerce seems to be very popular these days. You can sit at home, pick up couple stuffs, transfer money, wait for few days and then the stuffs you purchased will be delivered right in front of your house. But like other things, online shopping doesn't have only a good side but also a bad side. For example, you do not see a real stuff so you may not get the stuff that you really want or you might be cheated by do not get the stuff after you transfer the money. I am the one who love online shopping so I would to share "online shopping tips" to everyone.

• Trust your instincts. If you don’t feel comfortable buying or bidding on an item over the web, or if you feel pressured to place your order immediately, maybe you shouldn’t.
• Be knowledgeable about web-based auctions. Take special care to familiarize yourself not only with the rules and policies of the auction site itself but with the legal terms (warranties, refund policy, etc.) of the seller’s items that you wish to bid on.
• Double check pricing. Whether the product is being sold as new or used, be suspicious of prices that are too good to be true. Also consider carefully whether you may be paying too much for an item, particularly if you’re bidding through an auction site. You may want to comparison shop, online or offline, before you buy.
• Find and read the privacy policy. Read the privacy policy carefully to find out what information the seller is gathering from you, how the information will be used, and how you can stop the process. If a site does not have a privacy policy posted, you may not want to do business with that site. If it does have a privacy policy, there will probably be a link to it from the seller’s home page, or it could be included with the Legal Terms.
• Review the return, refund, and shipping and handling policies as well as the other legal terms. If you can’t find them, ask the seller through an e-mail or telephone call to indicate where they are on the site or to provide them to you in writing.
• Check that the Internet connections are secure. Before you give your payment information, there are various icons and software programs that indicate that security software is in place.
• Use the safest way to pay on the Internet. Pay for your order using a credit card.
• Print the terms. You should print out and date a copy of terms, conditions, warranties, item description, company information, even confirming e-mails, and save them with your records of your purchase.
• Insure the safe delivery of your item. If you’re concerned about the safety of your package if there’s no one home to receive it, ask whether you can specify that the shipper must receive a signature before leaving the package. Or, it may be safer to have the package delivered to your office.
• Inspect your purchase. Look at your purchase carefully as soon as you receive it. Contact the seller as soon as possible if you discover a problem with it. Tell the seller in writing about any problem that you are concerned with, ask for a repair or refund, and keep a copy of your correspondence.

After noticing these tips, then you can feel free and continue to shop ^^

Entry III : Can I live without IT?

Now days, IT takes part in most of our activities. Everyone must have at least one IT product whether it is a mobile phone or a laptop. For me, I owned several IT products for example, a Toshiba laptop and a Blackberry smart phone. So in my point of view, I would say "NO", I can't live without IT.

The reason to this answer is because IT makes my life much much more easier and faster. Although, I am not an ITaholic, I use them regularly. One product that I use regularly is my laptop. I use it everyday. I use the laptop to surf internet, chat with friends, shopping and play game. The website that visit frequently is Facebook. This website helps me to keep in touch with my friends and I also play games from this website. Another product that I regularly use is a smart phone, Blackberry Curve. Besides, its function like other mobile phone, I use Blackberry to check e-mail, surf the internet and chatting with friends via Blackberry Messenger.

Without these IT products I couldn't imagine how I can survive. They make my life to be so convenient that I never think how much I would suffer if I don't have them. 

Entry II : History of computer

Considered one of the most important inventions ever, the personal computer movement has touched all reaches of the world - surprising when considering that it really only began in the 1960's when the first computer mouse was invented, allowing an easier way to interact with the computer. Around the same time, other large innovations cropped up, like the ASCII character set, which builds the characters you are reading, the BASIC programming language, the grandfather of Visual Basic and other common languages, and computer companies Intel, which would become the world's leading computer chip maker, and Honeywell, which would sell the first personal computer called the "Kitchen Computer" for a whopping $10,000. During this same time, the US Government group ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) began working on a way to send data over phone lines between testing centers, called ARPANet, culminating in the first successful tests of data being sent in digital packets between four universities in 1969 at speeds from 4800 bps to 56 Kbps.

The 1970's brought Xerox's opening of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which pioneered a lot of the computer technology used in PCs (Personal Computers) today, as well as the Unix operating system, versions of which are still used today and considered the optimal operating system breed, and the C programming language, itself the grandfather to C++, Perl and PHP, all common script types used today throughout the Internet. Coincidentally, the TCP/IP protocols, which have become the foundations of the Internet and how data is still transmitted today, were developed to allow the small network of universities to expand to a global scale, which began the time where ARPANet became known as DARPANet, for its national defence applications as ARPA added Defence to its name.

Through the 1980's more home computers became available from makers like Osborne, Radio Shack, Atari and Commodore, which saw IBM become one of the largest and most dominant PC makers, and also saw Apple develop the Macintosh. That was a significant move that achieved two main milestones: it drew attention to a graphical user interface instead of text interfaces, leading to the development of Microsoft and it's Windows operating systems, and it also brought the price points of PCs down to the point where families could begin to consider a computer for their home as something other than a pure luxury. Internet development continued, with frame relay connections for T1s and T3s being tested and finally becoming more common by the end of the decade, and seeing speeds of 1.544 Mbps and 43.232 Mbps increase the amount of data that can be sent. Another major development was the growth of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) community, where small computer hubs grew with home users dialling in over phone lines to message each other, transfer files, and other peer-to-peer network possibilities.

Through the 1990's, the computer industry began to settle down, with IBM, Apple, Microsoft and Intel settling on the top, while the open source world began to truly grow around versions of Linux, a computer-community driven version of the proprietary Unix operating system which could be run on almost any type of hardware. The size of components began dropping and the first laptops were slowly rolling out of manufacturers warehouses, but were still heavy by today's standard. Also during this time, the development of the Internet expanded to become the World Wide Web as we understand it today, with top speed records being broken as optical fiber began it's development, allowing speeds of OC3 (155 Mbps) and OC12 (622 Mbps) to bring data much faster than before. Since the Internet began growing so fast and offered global networking, the BBS community began to shrink as the regional importance dropped.

Today has shown the continued growth and integration of computers into society, with a continued reduction in both the size of units and price, matched by increases in processing power and storage capacity, have led to a startling comparison: today's cell phones have more power and storage than the first computers four decades ago - startling, in part, because the size of the first computers were measured in feet, not inches. The proliferation of laptops and internet-enabled systems has made home computers and networks common enough to begin talking about them as home appliances alongside stoves, fridges and TVs, and the industry has come full circle and returned to its roots as more students in universities are taking notes on laptops and PDAs than using pen and paper, all while wirelessly browsing the web in their seats. Internet backbones have reached speeds of OC48 (2.5 Gbps) and OC192 (9.6 Gbps) allowing the entire contents of the US Library of Congress to be downloaded in seven seconds, and broadband connections like ADSL and cable, once the domain of corporations, are now very common in homes and throughout neighbourhoods. The only place to go from here is smaller, faster, and more powerful.

credit:http://homecomputer.tipcentral.net/history.html

Entry I : Advantage and Disadvantage of IT

Now days we cannot refuse that IT is important to our daily life. It takes part since we wake up each morning until we go to bed. In my point of view, there are several advantages of IT products. One is it makes our life become more comfortable or in the other word, it makes our life become more easier. For example, mobile phone these days contains all the programs that we need like calculator, dictionary, games and internet browser. We don't need to carry so many things because they are all in one device. Another advantage of IT product is it shortens the world. With IT product we will be able to contact people who live far far away from us within a minute. It makes people can keep in touch with their old friends easily.


Like a coin everything must have two sides, good and bad. IT also has some disadvantages. One is it can be harmful to our health. To illustrate, some computer user may face health problems like sore eyes, trigger finger or back pain. Another disadvantage is we may lose our relationship. Many people like to chat through an online chatting program like MSN, Facebook or Blackberry Messenger. These programs are useful but sometimes if we use them too much that we forget to talk with people in the real world, we may lose our close friends or even family.


To sum up, IT is good in the sense that it comforts our life but we should control ourself to use it appropriately to avoid any problems...