Spalding Computer Services

Facebook Testing “Delete Account” Option.: “”

It appears Facebook is rolling out a “Delete Account” option in addition to the “Deactivate Account” option already available. Previous to this deleting a Facebook account was a convoluted affair not for the faint hearted.

According to some reports, this new option, currently only showing for some users, will permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Although Facebook’s TOC’s allow the site to keep that information once acquired.

By: John C Arkin

We should all do our part in conserving electricity and practicing energy efficiency in our everyday lives. We can do this through simple things that won’t disrupt our lives, such as turning off appliances when no one is using them, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs in your home and office and choosing appliances and equipment that have good energy efficiency ratings.

You can also practice energy efficiency by aiming to decrease the power consumption of your inkjet printers or laser printers. This is one small step that you can easily take to lower your electricity bills, save energy and help Mother Earth. Let’s take a deeper look at the energy consumption of these printers and several tips on how to decrease their electricity usage.

The Power Consumption of Laser and Inkjet Printers

The advent of the computer age has caused us to increase our energy consumption (and our carbon footprint) exponentially through the years. While monitors and CPUs are still at the top of the energy charts when it comes to consumption, inkjet and laser printers also contribute to operating and energy costs.

Laser printers can consume as much as 100 watts (or more) when in use, while inkjet printers use much less energy, at about 12 watts when printing. This fact has sparked some debate over which printer is more eco-friendly. Since the laser printer can give your more pages per printer ink cartridge, it sounds like the greener option over an inkjet, which can only give you a few hundred pages.

But laser printers consume much more energy than inkjet printers, even when idle. Tests done by the website Techlogg.com report that a Lexmark E230 laser printer ate up about 5.9 watts when idle, but this number quickly rose to 700 watts per printed page. The test revealed that a Canon S800 inkjet printer, on the other hand, only consumed between 13 to 19 watts when printing. When idle, inkjet printers used only 5 watts of power. But just because they use up less energy when idle doesn’t mean that it’s okay to leave your printers on standby mode all the time. Imagine how much this seemingly insignificant amount of power would add up to if you leave your printers on idle most of the day, 7 days a week for a whole year.

How to Conserve Energy with Your Printers

You can still, however, minimize your use of power and practice energy efficiency while using your laser or inkjet printers by following these simple tips.

1. Choose a printer with an Energy Star stamp. Energy Star is a program created by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy. They give approval or special seals for appliances and equipment that have been proven to be energy efficient. Inkjet and laser printers with this seal either consume a low energy level per week or automatically go into sleep or low power mode during idle mode, among other criteria.

2. Use the power saving mode of your printers. According to Energy Star, you should set your printer’s low power mode depending on the print speeds of your inkjet or laser printer. Those with speeds of 0 to 10 ipm, should be set to turn off automatically after 30 minutes, while this time should be set to 60 minutes for printers with 11 to 20ipm. Laser and inkjet printers with speeds of 55ipm and above should be set to turn off after 90 minutes.

3. Make sure to turn off your printer when no one is using it. It’s advisable to appoint someone in your office to turn off your printer at the end of the day. At home, make sure that you switch off your printer after using it.

4. Use the Duplex feature of your printer. This is one easy way to practice energy efficiency in the office or at home. Duplex copying uses up less energy than single-sided copying; so it’s strongly suggested that you set your printer to duplex mode, so that you save on energy and paper as well.

Reduce waste and energy consumption by making sure that all your appliances and equipment at the home and in your office have an Energy Star seal. You can also practice energy efficiency by following the four tips above.

About the Author

This Article is written by John C Arkin from news.printcountry.com the contributor of Printer & Printer Ink Cartridges News. More information on the subject is at 4 Tips to Decrease the Power Consumption of Inkjet and Laser Printers, and related resources can be found at Brother Ink Cartridges.

(ArticlesBase SC #2776856)

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ – 4 Tips to Decrease the Power Consumption of Inkjet and Laser Printers

Google’s recent announcement of it’s, typically beta for now, encrypted search facility could have some undesirable implications for web site owners.

Initially available as an option to the normal un-encrypted search, you can opt in by simply replacing http://www.google com with https://www.google.com. Note the additional ’s’. By doing this your web browser does not pass on any referral data to an un-encrypted web site.

The webmaster of that site will not know you came from Google, or any of the search terms used to find his site. He won’t even know if you came from a search engine or just typed the site url into your browser address bar.

This does not play nice with web analytics used by webmasters to fine tune site text and keywords to improve visibility in search engine results. Including Google’s own web analytics, used by the majority of webmasters to keep an eye on who finds their site and how. Without this information webmasters will have little idea what people were searching for to get to their site. A reasonable guess can be made from the landing page, but that is all.

Google of course will still have access to the search terms, and it’s not entirely clear how this protects the privacy of the web user.

All of this just makes the webmasters job that little bit more difficult.
It’s hoped Google do not make encrypted search the default option on the worlds most used search engine.

This post has been deleted.

Looking for a bargain from the Sainsburys website? What are you going to do, try www.sainsburys.co.uk which is the sensible option, or go to Google and search for sainsburys?
Google has published its most recent trending search topics for the USA and they’re topped by searches for an internationally unknown socialite closely followed at number 3 by Tiger Woods. The pair are supposedly involved but deny it.

After searches for the Spanish version of Big Brother come a series of searches linked to the recent Black Friday annual American online retail sales bonanza.
What’s not surprising is the number of searches that are still made for what you would consider to be blindingly obvious domains.
Wal Mart for instance is cast iron guaranteed to own wallmart.com. I don’t need Google to tell me that. The same goes for Kohls and Best Buy.

This shows nothing much changes. I recall writing something similar to this at least 5 years ago.

Number 10 is paranormal activity, up 50% over the last 7 days. I’m not sure what triggered that, possibly the impending mid season finale of Flash Forward.

I was struck by what I thought was just plain over indulgence and quite barmy thinking when I first visited Dubai a couple of years ago. That didn’t change much when we went back there last year.
I just could not figure out where they expected all the people to come from that would fill all the hotel rooms, apartment blocks, villas and offices that were being built with, it must be said, impressive speed.

The crazyness of the traffic jams on Sheik Zaeed Road, a multi lane super highway that runs the length of Dubai from the old city up to and beyond the Marina complex to the site of the new, under construction, airport. It’s actually one of the few roads in Dubai that has a name.
The Burj Dubai, the worlds tallest building. Why bother?
The Atlantis Hotel sitting out on a man made sandbank which, according to some reports, is already sinking, and so expensive to even walk into for a cup of coffee. What were they thinking?
The taxi drivers who generally speaking don’t speak much English and have no idea where you want to go anyway if it’s not a famous landmark.
And the sewage system. Well actually more the lack of a proper sewage system for all the new buildings that have shot up in last few years.
Dubai trucks it’s sewage out of the city to the one and only sewage farm on the outskirts of town in a huge fleet of tankers.
When we were there last year there was a huge stink over the tanker drivers, fed up with up 15 hours queuing in the boiling desert heat to dump their loads, driving out to a deserted beach and off loading it there. Beaches were closed as a result.

These are just a few of the examples of why in my opinion they got it all arse about face.
The banking system is a farce even against western standards, the telephone system is creaking at the seams and very expensive. The internet is ADSL, very expensive and slow even by UK standards. Mobile coverage is all there but overloaded. Calls generally drop within a few seconds.
And all this in a place that has expectations of becoming not only the major tourist destination in the Middle East, but also the economic and business hub of the region.

There is much work to do if they wish to achieve this.

When you see it in the flesh it’s like a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland, but both those places are built better and actually work.

On the plus side the food is good and relatively cheap.

So what’s all this got to do with us? Quite a lot actually. Dubai has no real money of its own, most of what you see there is financed by debt, much of it from Abu Dhabi.
Both of these Emirates own considerable portfolios of property overseas. Abu Dhabi owns a considerable amount of Jolly Old England for a start.
The worry is that in order to save Dubai they will have “bring the money home” by offloading these investments.

What that will do to an already depressed world market is what makes these ‘Interesting Times’.

Prompted by an odd noise from the front end of my car and short on
time I cruised into the local KwikFit and asked them to check over the
brakes etc. Luckily they were not busy and looked at it there and then.
I went for a stroll while they did. Came back to find that all four
brake discs are “Totally shot mate” and all the pads will need replacing
too.
OK so how much is that?
“Blimey” he says, “they’re a bit expensive. £1250.00.”

I’m not paying that put it back together and I’ll think about it. To
their credit there was no charge for the inspection.

Slightly bothered by this I contacted my usual garage, although short on
time I made the effort to drive over to Moulton Chapel so they could have a look.

Yes the discs and pads all need replacing but the car is safe to drive,
which is good news as I need it this week.

OK how much.
£350.00.
Booked in for the job later this month.

I’m not suggesting KwikFit are ripoff merchants, I think he just made a
mistake. But mistakes like that don’t inspire confidence, do they.

I had a brief online discussion with an acquaintance yesterday in which he said he was ignoring Microsoft’s nags to upgrade his browser to Internet Explorer 8.
When I suggested this was wrong, IE8 is probably the best version of Internet Explorer so far, his excuse was as per the headline above.

Apparently he designed his personal website “in IE6″, and while IE7 rendered it ok, IE8 breaks it.

So based on this he took what he described as the reasonable decision not to upgrade, while acknowledging that the latest browser does in fact work fine on most other websites.

Suggestions that he ‘upgrade’ his website to embrace web standards that IE8 would accept went unheeded.

IE8 is not perfect, it is still way behind all the other browsers in many respects, but it is better than IE7 and most definitely superior to IE6, which no-one should still be using. Even Microsoft would implore you to stop using IE6.

The big chiefs of the old school news organisations, in particular Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp and Tom Curley of AP, have been making a lot of noise lately accusing the search engines of stealing their content.

This is of course nonsense and it’s hard to imagine that these apparently intelligent men don’t actually realise that.

At a meeting of media moguls in Beijing this week both men gave speeches in which they warned the likes of Google and Yahoo that they had better start paying up for their content or else.

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,” Murdoch said. “But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators—the people in this hall—who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”

This is all nonsense and here is why. Go to Google News or type a news topic into Google’s search box and you’ll get a list of URL’s and headlines with a brief teaser. Click the URL and you’ll be taken to the news site where you can read the story.

Google didn’t steal anything. It provided a free link to the news organisations website, where the story is surrounded by that site’s ads.
This free service on the part of Google and the other search engines actually feeds valuable traffic to the websites. Without it those websites wouldn’t get anywhere near as much traffic as they currently do. What does that do for the revenue model built on advertising.

If these media moguls really don’t want Google to list their stories it’s a very simple job to stop them. In fact Google publishes a step by step guide to doing so. It’s a simple addition to the websites robots text file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

and bingo, the site becomes invisible to Google and the stories will no longer show in Google searches.

But I don’t think they’ll be doing that any time soon, as their website traffic would almost dry up overnight.
They’ll carry on accepting all the traffic Google and the other search engines send them for free, and probably carry on accusing them of theft.