The brain doesn't fear authority online, and neither does it feel anybody's displeasure. Specialists call this the "online disinhibition effect".

Maria Bakardjieva, a Professor of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary and author of the 2005 book Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life, says that people just feel free to overlook social rules which would hold in other circumstances.

The disinhibition effect is why you may feel enticed, or give in to the bait, to say offensive, unkind or otherwise horrible things online, which you would never say in person.

According to a 2004 article by Rider University Psychologist, John Suler, anonymity coalesced with invisibility are two major constituents of online disinhibition. He wrote in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, "When people have the opportunity to separate their actions from their real world and identity, they feel less vulnerable about opening up".

"As part of Office 2010 software that will be pre-loaded by the PC manufacturers on their PCs, we're introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010. Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010, available exclusively on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box."

What's your thinking? Could you live with, and use, an ad-supported limited version of Office? And by the way, I had to LOL at this graphic when I saw it.

By my quoting you a flat rate on these type of projects, which are often very complex and can stretch over days or weeks, you will know up front what the final cost to you will be and can plan your budget accordingly. It also frees me from the pressure of trying to conform to a fixed number of hours to complete a project, and allows me to focus on delivering an outstanding product to you.

Computer repair, troubleshooting, and related services will continue to be billed at my usual rate of $30 per hour.

If all you know are Google, Yahoo and Bing you might be surprised to learn there are many, many more search engines on the Web. Check out the list!

Altavista was the first well known search engine for the Web and that's about the only thing it's known for. Today it's mentioned mainly for it's role in history. The search results are from Yahoo so don't expect anything original here, still it can bring a nice dose of nostalgia to those of us who remember the time when Yahoo was just a free directory and Google didn't exist. Altavista

Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is one of the small but big search engines with a 3.9% market shart as of November 2009. Ask was one of the first search engines to mix it's search results with other sources like encyclopedias, images and maps. A simple query test indicates that Ask has billions of pages, or 1/8th of those in Google, at least for Enlish language results. Ask.com

Bing is Microsoft's latest facelift on the search engine that was first named MSN Search, then Live Search and now Bing. Bing is considered by most to take the third spot after Google and Yahoo in terms of search quality. It's also third in search as far as market share is concerned. Bing

Blekko is a brand new Google killer as they like to call themselves. It's run by Rich Skrenta, previously on Topix and Netscape's Open Directory. It's not live yet but is supposed to launch in the end of 2009, let's see if it does… Blekko

Clusty calls itself a clustering search engine. This basically means that in addition to the traditional list of search results it gives you a list of alternative topics that your search phrase could be related to. I don't like the quality of search results, though, there's a fair bit of low relevancy results returned. Clusty

Cuil is a new search engine that markets itself as the world's biggest search engine with three times the pages indexed as Google. It made a big bang when it launched in 2008 by crashing on launch day (LOL), but gives fairly good results and presents them in a new, somewhat strange, way. Cuil

Dogpile is a meta search engine that combines the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask to let you search from all the big search engines in one place. Despite a minimal market share Dogpile has still managed to get several J.D. Power & Associates awards for best customer satisfaction, this according to Businessweek. Dogpile

DuckDuckGo, founded by Gabriel Weinberg, is a search engine with it's own bot and index, but it also uses data from other sources, like Yahoo BOSS. Despite it's funny name, DuckDuckGo provides compelling search results that is a combination of facts, disambiguations and links. DuckDuckGo

Entireweb is a search engine founded in 2000 by the Swedish company WorldLight.com AB. Currently they index several hundred million webpages and serve over 100 million searches per month. Entireweb

Excite was founded in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, all students at Stanford. Over the years it has been through the dot-com bubble, mergers, aquisitions and bankruptcy. Today it's a meta search engine and portal with search results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask through an arrangement with InfoSpace. Excite

Gigablast was founded in 2000 by Matt Wells. It has a large, frequently updated index and gets to play with the big boys though it doesn't have much of a market share in search. The search results in a quick test is not up to the same standard as Google and Yahoo. Gigablast

Google is the world's most popular search engine. Cuil said they have a bigger index but it's going to take years before anyone can knock big G down from the position as market leader. Google

Hakia is a semantic search engine that organizes the results into categories looking at the search term from different angles. It uses a database of sites recommended by librarians to provide credible results, it then adds web results where the credible sources do not have enough info. It blends all this with news, photos and social media feeds to make it a different search experience. Hakia

ImHalal is a search engine mainly for Muslims and includes web, image and Quran search. It returns highly relevant results quickly and looks nice so I included it here with the others. ImHalal

Leapfish combines the results from Google, Wikipedia, Digg, wikiHow, Answers, Amazon and Twitter to make an information page about your search term combining the media from many services. It looks neat enough to include on the search engine list even if they don't have their own index. Leapfish

Lycos, which began as a research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, grew to become the most visited online destination in the world in 1999. After several years of decline the search market share of Lycos was at 0.01% by the end of 2008, but if you visit them you'll see that they still deliver relevant results with thumbnails attached. Lycos

Omgili is a forum search engine that only returns forum threads in the results. I tried a couple of searches and it's really useful. I get to see what people are talking about, which sometimes is just what I want. Omgili

Secret Search Engine Labs was started in 2007 as a hobby project by Simon Byholm and is aiming at providing highly relevant search results with a really small index size.  Secret Search Engine Labs

Spezify is a totally cool new search engine that, instead of the normal search result listings, provides a flash based view that looks like you had pinned newspaper clips and photos to a board. You can see and read a whole paragraph of text from the website which makes it a lot more easy, at least for me, to decide which page I want to visit to learn more. Spezify

WayBackMachine lets you search old versions of webpages, sometimes all the way back to 1996. It's fun to look up old versions of popular websites to see how they've changed through the years. WayBackMachine

Yahoo! Search is the eternal runner up, always trailing big G with good search results and a significantly smaller share of the search market. Yahoo has a lot of portal features in addition to search, which sets it apart from Google in many ways. Yahoo Search

Some Search Engines that traditionally appear in many search engine lists have been left out as I feel they provide little value. Usually this is because they use the data from another engine, the're not Enlish language or they simply return low quality results.

These search engines use the Entireweb datafeed: ExactSeek, WebFerret, ixquick, mamma, slingpage, searchmirror, findtarget, Zoeken, Search66, Findelio, AtomicSeek, aesop, Kart00, eTools, ZUULA, Citosearch, Atnio, unabet, iZito, zapmeta, InfoGrid, VINDEN.NL and FlexFinder

These are the others: All The Web, AOL, Baidu, Comcast, HotBot, Mamma, MetaCrawler, mywebsearch, WebCrawler, WebFetch, Yandex

Blog Search Engines

Blog search engines finds blog posts and usually favor recent posts as blogs are often about news and you want to get the latest news. Blog search engines are also often real-time as the pinging system and RSS feed of a blog makes it a lot easier for the search engine to fetch content as it is created.

Bloglines is a blog search engine and news aggregator that was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist. In addition to searching through millions of blog posts you can also combine news (RSS) feeds to have all your online information collected in one place. Bloglines

Google Blog Search is the blog search engine by Google. It finds a lot of relevant answers to a query and feels comfortable to use. Google Blog Search

Social Search Engines and Other Weird Stuff

Hunch is a decision enging that asks you fun questions to learn what type of person you are. With some questions answered it will use it's knowledge of your interests and social associations to give you answers tailored to your personality. I think it's quite fun, but I'm not sure if it's useful.. Hunch

Mahalo is a questions and answers type portal much like Yahoo Answers, you can type in any question and other users can answer them. You can earn Mahalo dollars if you provide the best answer to a question. Mahalo

Powerset is a natural language search engine that tries to understand the question asked instead of just looking for keywords. Powerset was founded by Barney Pell, a graduate of Stanford with a Ph.D in computer science from Cambridge, aquired by Microsoft in 2008, and it currently searches and organizes articles from the Wikipedia. Powerset

Aardvark is a social engine where users can ask their friends and contacts for advice. The software automatically directs the question to the persons best eqipped to answer based on the personal profile they have entered into the system. Sounds like a good idea and they have an offer from Google to buy them for $30 million. Aardvark

Installing "watchdog" type software on individual workstations is time-consuming and expensive. How about an approach that would encompass every machine on your office LAN and also be extremely easy to administer? I can show you how.

My web content filtering solution will protect your LAN from phishing attacks, and also block access to adult-related sites, sites offering or condoning illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters. All this is done without installing any software on your local machines.

If one of your users attempts to access a blocked site they receive a brief onscreen message telling them that access to that site has been disabled (and the message can be customized with your company logo and your own text, too).

Contact me for more information on web content filtering for your office (or home!) My usual hourly rate applies to install this service… actual setup time is only a few minutes but I do have a one-hour minimum charge. So, for only $30 you can enjoy greater peace of mind when it comes to Internet security, and also have the assurance your network's resources are not being misused.!

Let me just say that any shop that pushes a full reinstall of the operating system as a fix to ordinary problems should not be in business. Sure, it’s an ideal means to restore a computer to pristine running condition, but unless the shop is also going to back up your existing data, and then reinstall it along with all your needed extra applications, don’t fall for this scheme.

Any decent computer technician should be able to clean viruses and spyware off your machine, or replace any essential Windows system files that are damaged or missing, without having to wipe your disc drive clean and start from scratch.

Shame on any computer shop that advertises a full operating system reinstall as an easy fix to what ails your PC.

Three years later I’m rather well acquainted with the concept of virtualization and the deployment of virtual machines, so it’s time for you non-geeks to learn what a VM is all about, and why they’re so useful.

In technobabble, a virtual machine is a computer application which presents simulated hardware to an operating system running as a process on a host system. To put it more simply, a special computer program that you run on your desktop or laptop “impersonates” a separate physical computer. In other words, a computer inside a computer!

So, what’s the purpose in this? In the IT world, there are purposes aplenty. Since different types of operating systems can be run at the same time, including legacy and bleeding-edge systems, compatibility issues can be easily investigated and data migration can be performed in a simple copy operation. Operating systems running in virtual machines are also very simple to back up and restore to any given state. Malware (viruses and spyware) that affects a guest operating system running in a VM cannot affect the host system, and a process that crashes a guest OS will not crash the host.

Additionally, an operating system stored as a virtual machine can be copied and run on completely different hardware within seconds, reducing system downtime in critical applications where hardware failure could be catastrophic. Although it is common to run the same type of operating system in a virtual machine as that of the host machine, often VMs are used to test or deploy different types of systems in parallel.

So, what does all this mumbo-jumbo mean to you, the home user? Scenario: you own a computer that runs Windows Vista. You have some applications you need that worked fine under Windows XP but absolutely refuse to run under Vista (even using Vista’s “compatibility” mode). Or perhaps you have some older computer games that ran under MS-DOS but do not play nice with any versions of Windows, period.

A virtual machine is the answer to both these not-really-hypothetical situations. You create a new VM, then install XP or MS-DOS into it, and voila! You’re able to install and use those older appplications and games as if you were using a separate physical computer.

Virtualization is not the only solution available to the home user in these types of cases – you could elect to perform a “real” installation of the operating system you need onto a second hard drive or new partition on your existing drive and set up a dual boot. But you would then need to reboot your computer every time you needed access to one operating system or the other. With a virtual machine, setup is fast and easy with no need to buy another drive, partition your existing drive, modifying your master boot record to allow a dual boot – the other OS is always just a few mouse clicks away.

Virtual machines are expecially useful to home users who choose to run something other than Microsoft Windows on their computer. (Yes, Virginia, there *is* choice other than Microsoft) For an example, I have been running Linux as my main operating system for some years now. Once in a while, I need to run Windows for a few legacy applications that have no equivalents in Linux world. Instead of dual-booting or keeping a Windows desktop around, I simply launch my Windows XP virtual machine, which has those applications installed, do my work, then exit back to my Linux environment.

As should be obvious, the possibilities are many for home use: the XP user can keep virtual machines on hand with earlier (or even later) versions of Windows installed. The person devoted to Macintosh machines can now run a Windows operating system in addition to their Mac OS. Linux users are able to run Windows for those applications that as yet have no counterparts written for them under Linux.

And for us techno-geeks, virtual machines are also a great tool when it comes to learning about, and troubleshooting, various operating systems. Nothing beats hands-on experience, and now you can get it without having to have 3-4 computers laying around.

XP Virtual Machine

The computer I’m typing this on has four operating systems installed: Linux as my main or primary OS, then three virtual machines running Windows Vista, Windows XP and FreeBSD. Attached is a shot of XP running inside a window on my Linux desktop. At any time I can hit a special hot key and switch the XP VM to full-screen mode, and it’s like running Windows directly – Linux “disappears” until I hit the hot key again.

Now, where do you get the software to create and run virtual machines? There are several choices, but the two most popular are VMWare and Virtualbox. The former is a commercial product, the latter is “open source” or free for most use. Check the links for more information and downloads.

And of course, you should be the registered owner of a copy of the operating system you wish to run in a virtual machine!

Your hard drive (or hard disk) can be thought of as the filing cabinet of your computer.  Even when your computer is turned off, the hard drive is still storing all of your files (such as your email or a recipe you save with MS Word), your programs (such as MS Word itself) and everything else the computer needs to be useful for you.

When you turn your computer on, some of the data that is on the hard drive is pulled into memory – it is what your computer is “thinking” about.  As you need to the computer to think about more things, those things are brought into memory.

For example, if you decide to surf the web, your web browser (such as Internet Explorer) is pulled into memory so the computer can “think” about it.  It is also left on the hard drive, so it is really in both places.

If you ask your computer to think about too much, sometimes the computer has to, in essence, take notes on what it is thinking about to make room for the new stuff.  Hey, we all have to do that, right?  The computer does that by putting some of what is in its memory back onto the hard drive using what is called “virtual memory.”   This allows the computer to work with those notes faster than it would if it had not noted the data at all, but it still slows things down.  You can often tell if your computer is doing this a lot of you hear the hard drive “grinding” as you move from program to program. Memory is completely released when you shut your computer down.

The most common item to upgrade when you want to increase the speed of your computer is its memory.  Most people do not have to increase the size of their hard drive – modern ones hold massive amounts of data.  It is not uncommon to have 300 or 500 or more Gigabytes of hard drive space on a new computer, where 1 or 2 Gigabytes of memory is typical  on a modern computer (if you do not know what a Gigabyte is, just suffice it to say 1 or 2 units is a lot smaller than 300 to 500!)

If the above is confusing to you, know this: for most people, the best way to extend the life of an aging computer is to add more memory.

For a small investment of $200 or so (depending on the software you choose), plus an inexpensive account with a web host that specializes in streaming audio, you can be “on the air” in not days, but HOURS.

Convey your message and/or music to an audience of millions around the globe. Any computer user with Internet access, a web browser and a media player such as Windows Media Player installed will be able to hear you!

Whether you’re interested in Intenet radio purely as a hobby, or as a means to promote your product or service, contact me today for information on how Internet radio works, and how you can go “live” with minimal expense.

In 1980 I was 22 years old and a heck of a lot thinner than I am today. My main interest back then was rock and roll… I was pretty proficient on the guitar and loved to play along with my favorite bands when I dropped one of their records on the turntable. I also thought Carl Sagan was one of the coolest guys in the world. Sagan hosted a new series on PBS titled Cosmos and from the first episode I was hooked. As a youngster I had been fascinated with astronomy. I had several telescopes and devoured any books I could find on the subject.

Over time my interest waned as I moved on to other things. But now here was Sagan, suave in his red turtleneck and buff jacket, surrounded by special effects and Vangelis music and telling everyone (but especially me) about how the cosmos is everything that ever was, everything that is, and everything that ever will be. Heady stuff. I'm still a great admirer of Carl Sagan, primarily because he did something I see as immensely important: he popularized science and with patience and good humor brought into people's homes. He did it through Cosmos, most obviously, but he also did it every time he popped up on The Tonight Show and talked with celebrity fluidity about what was going on in the universe.

He was the people's scientist. Getting science in front of people in a way they can understand — without speaking down to them — is the way to get people to support science, and to understand that science is neither beyond their comprehension nor hostile to their beliefs. There need to be scientists and popularizers of good science who are of good will, who have patience and humor, and who are willing to sit with those who are skeptical or unknowing of science and show how science is already speaking their language.

Sagan knew how to do this; he was uncommonly good at it. I have an idealized version of Carl Sagan in my head, of course, one that is notably absent any number of flaws that the real Carl Sagan had to have had simply because he was human. My connection to Sagan comes from some limited number of hours of television and a finite number of books, and in both cases the man was edited for my consumption. What I do know is that I like his ideas. I like his love of science. I like his faith in humanity. I like how he saw us reaching for things greater than ourselves, because it was in our nature and because it was a fulfillment of our nature. I like how he shared his enthusiasm for the entire universe with everyone, and believed that everyone could share in that enthusiasm.

Dr. Sagan left us much too soon – he was only 62 when he died of bone marrow cancer in 1996. However, he did leave behind some great printed works, and his television series can still be found on DVD. Even if astronomy or astrophysics are subjects that doesn't interest you, Sagan wrote on topics as diverse as the evolution of the human brain to morality and the abortion debate. Reading the above, it seems like a tribute to be given at a funeral, written 12 years too late. But for some reason tonight, I had the urge to write about a great scientist, author and human being, and to share it with whoever might happen to stumble upon it in their web travels. Thank you, Carl, for making me wonder again after I thought I had grown too jaded to do so.