Children and Computer Games, Is it really a bad combination?

There is no dearth of articles proclaiming computer games have all sorts of negative impacts on children from turning them into couch potatoes, inducing violence, hampering their mental growth to downright addiction. What seems to be missing in this analysis is the fact that games are just an addition to the activities a child can indulged in. And like any other activity say outdoor sports, watching TV, chatting on internet, it can neither be bad or good, but it is the usage and frequency that  matters.

So parents need to reassess the impact of computer games before making any perception or judgment on the topic.The biggest advantage of playing games is that it is often the first activity that introduces computers to children. It not only builds reflexes as games require high accuracy of visual and hand coordination but also makes children think beyond trivial passive offline pass times. The challengers that a child gamer has to overcome builds spatial capacity, develops ability to follow directions, maps, way-points and may even contain learning opportunities. Think of world conquering games that makes geography fun by immersing the world map in players mind as they go on claiming region after region. Some games have historical angle incorporated in them, such as upgrading technologies to jump to next age of advancement or playing different nations of teh world exploring their unique strengths. This means that the children are active part of game role and characters, and their decisions influence the outcome of the game. 

Be it commanding a military force or playing a mayor of city that is being built right from scratch, there is plenty of knowledge in games available today. What else than a game can teach children so effectively about basics of managing a city infrastructure such as real estate valuation according to neighborhood, raising funds, taxing various civic activities, effects of increased or decreased funding for road maintenance, mass transit, police, health care, education etc, monitoring of pollution and crime levels, energy requirements, availability of water through underground pipe networks and distillation plants, water disposal and also trade with neighbours. Similarly, there are simulations specifically for transportation, hospital, hotel, park, university etc that go deeper into each fielf in a completely entertaining and non-classroom way.

Another advantage of games is that children can be pitched against each other or can play with their parents something that is not always easy in case of outdoor activities. Though sports and board games also constitute a major part of what children may like to do in their spare time, computer games are something that brings in variety in terms of themes and complexity both. Take for example Chess. It is now possible to play the wonderful game without a human partner and can even be learned using specific lessons and quizzes built into the games itself. Similarly, children can learn rules of many sport games that may not otherwise play at that age like golf, tennis etc.

As parents, the most important thing is not to ridicule games as a practice that should be abandoned. Rather, regularizing the timings and contents are more than enough just as it is the case with other entertainment modes. Keeping the computer in drawing room is a good idea as it reinforces openness and easier control over defined times. Next, taking a look at games ratings before letting children play them is also important. These are typically E (Everyone), EC (Early Childhood), T (Teens), M (Mature) and AO (Adults Only). Introducing children to games other than the popular genre of First Person Shooter (e.g. Counterstrike, Call of Duty) is essential if it is seen that all a child is doing is mindless shooting all the time. There are a lot of games that develop team work, logic and problem solving skills along with hours of entertainment.

What needs to be realized is that computer games are not bad themselves, it is the usage that can have negative or positive impacts. There are parents who in fact feel proud that their very young children can use computers to play simple pattern matching or mouse games well before they can understand cartoons or play any sport. Proper and controlled exposure to technology from an early age provides an opportunity for accelerated learning that mus not be missed due to misunderstandings about computer games.

Google Chrome Blocks Major Torrent Websites from July 10, 2015

From today Google Chrome is blocking direct access to many torrent websites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz, ExtraTorent and RARBG. According to Google, these websites contain "harmful programs" but the website owners are clueless as to what they have done wrong.

There is a slight panic breaking out among Google Chrome users. Over the past few hours the browser has started to block access to several of the most popular torrent websites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz, ExtraTorrent and RARBG.

Instead of a page filled with the latest torrents, visitors are presented with an ominous red warning banner.

“The site ahead contains harmful programs,” Google Chrome informs its users.

Google Chrome Bloks Torrent Websites

Google doesn’t specify what the issue is with the websites in question. The “Safe Browsing” diagnostics pages only list the sites as “suspicious” and note that “third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites.” in some cases.

The owners of the websites in question are clueless about the source of the problem.

Interestingly, several proxy sites, such as torrentz-proxy.com, still work fine and don’t show the warning screen in Google Chrome.

Since Google doesn’t mention “malicious software” as the reason for the warning, it was most likely triggered by the “unsafe” ads many torrent sites run. These are typically linked to toolbar software or other unwanted programs.

Chrome users who want to bypass the warning can do so by clicking the details link, or disable Chrome’s malware warnings altogether.


Update:

The issue is resolved. The alert was false positive. Google removed Chrome alert.

Improve Your Storage

Storage is constant concern with any system. If you are not worried about the amount of space you have, you might be worried about the speed it runs at or the gradual effects of aging not to mention the ever-present, unpredictable threat of a catastrophic drive failure.

For those reasons, improving your system’s storage should never be too far from your mind. And in case you’re not sure how much thought to give it, here we have some tips and expert advice for making storage upgrades.

Replacing Your Hard Drive

Replacing your hard drive with a new one is one of the simplest upgrades you can make to a system, assuming you have space to hook an additional drive up. And if you haven’t, it’s probably because you’ve done it before.

Assuming you don’t want to do a fresh installation of your operating system, all you have to do is open your PC, connect the new hard drive’s SATA data and power connectors up, boot your PC, copy the data from the old drive to the new drive, shut down your PC, disconnect and remove the original drive an then install and reconnect the new one in its place. If you’re a newbie, the only truly difficult part is making sure all the data is copied over, so use a transfer utility such a ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ to ensure that it’s been done properly.

Mounting the new operational drive doesn’t require a huge amount of thought. It’s good to leave a fair amount of space around the drive to minimize heat retention, but it’s incredibly rare to hard drives to be negatively affected by heat buildup, so take that advice without too much urgency. Most of the real problems are only likely to occur when you first connect the new drive up, if you make it past that point, the hard part is done.

If you’re unlucky and the new drive doesn’t appear in Windows, the first time you connect it up, you’ll need to check in your BIOS whether the hardware is actually being detected by your motherboard. When you boot your system, enter your BIOS menu (usually you have to press F2 or Del key when you hear the post beep to get to that point) and find the STA settings. Usually, this may be something more straightforward, like ‘storage’.

In the BIOS, you should be able to see the new drive listed. If you can’t, check that your drive controllers are all enabled. If they are, switch off the PC and double check that data and power connectors. Unless something is faulty, it should be visible in the BIOS. You want to try using different STA posts and cables to check. As a last resort, swap the STA power and data cables out of your working drive and into the new one. If it still doesn’t work, it’s likely something serous is wrong with drive.

If the drive appears in BIOS but not in Windows, you’ll have to look at the Windows device manager. Find the drive under the ‘Disk Drives’ section. If there are any problems affecting detection (such as a driver issue), then you should be able to find a notification and resolve it here. Try removing the drive, rebooting the allowing it to auto-detect again. If that doesn’t work, it’s likely some serious problem is affecting it, and it might be worth finding a replacement.

It’s worth noting, that if your old hard drive is still in a usable condition, it doesn’t make and sense to throw it out completely. Instead, you’ll have to make a few more decisions about how to use it.

Adding a Second Drive

If you add a second drive to your system, it often makes more sense to replace your primary drive with the new one rather than use the newer drive as a secondary storage unit. There are circumstances in which this doesn’t apply, but it’s easy to work out whether you should keep an old drive or not by following these simple rules:

1.         Make Your Primary Drive the Biggest SSD You Can Afford

SSDs have super quick access times, which make them ideal for running software form. Given the speed of modern CPUs, hard drive access times create a surprisingly large bottleneck for system performance, and Windows feels that particularly keenly. Run your operating system off a SSD, and your computer will boot faster and run more smoothly. I wouldn’t recommend trying to run Windows off an SSD that was less than 100GB in size for any long period of time.

If you’re adding your first SSD to a system, it should absolutely be the primary drive. If you’re adding a second SSD to your system, then unless one is significantly smaller than the other, you’ll have to go to rule 2.

2.         Use the Newer Drive as the Primary One

Not all of us can afford (or particularly want) and SSD, but if you have two mechanical drives to pick between, then you have to consider your options.

For the most part, mechanical drive performance is fairly flat across all brands, with similar access times and drive speeds. Unless you have one drive that is significantly slower (perhaps it’s a low-noise or energy-efficient drive, for example), then you’re certain to get better performance out of whichever drive is newer.

This is partly because the newer drive won’t have a cluttered, fragmented file system and partly because bad sectors become more likely to appear on drives as they age. The older your primary drive is, the greater the chance something catastrophic can happen to your data.

In practical terms, any recent mechanical drive will have a good enough capacity to run Windows and applications without space becoming an issue, so there’s no need to take the size of a drive into consideration. Use age as a rule of thumb, which speed as your secondary concern: a five year old drive is probably too old to truck with a fresh Windows installation, regardless of size. If the drives are close in age, then a 500GB drive isn’t any more likely to run Windows better than a 1TB drive, but a 7200rpm 3.5” drive will give better performance than a 5400rpm 3.5” drive.

3.         Don’t Forget to Recondition Your Old Drive

Most systems support at least two 3.5” drives, and as many as four isn’t common, which means that if a hard drive isn’t in good condition and not nearing the end of its operational life, you can easily reuse it.

For various reasons it’s not a good idea to leave Windows intact on your secondary drive. Some applications might get confused by the presence of two Windows systems, and there’s always the chance your boot loader will have similar trouble making the distinction. Even if you’ve done a fresh installation on your new primary drive, you’ll have to do a bit of spring-cleaning before you can consider it ready to put to work.

At its easiest, all you need to do is open the drive in Windows Explorer and delete the contents you don’t want. If you cloned the drive to your new primary storage, you can simply quick format the drive to leave it empty. If you didn’t clone the drive but want to keep some of your data, you’ll need to manually sort through the files and delete the ones don’t want.

If you’re keeping files on there, it might be a good idea to take advantage of the additional space and defragment the drive, which will consolidate the files and free space, speeding up access times. If you’re wiping the drive completely, there’s no need to do this. In both cases, run a full scandisk just to evaluate the condition of the drive. If you see bad sectors, it’s starting to die and probably ready to be junked. If it doesn’t have any major errors, you can continue using it as normal.

Using a Second Drive in RAID

If you have two mechanical hard drives with the same capacity, the simply thing to do is to run them alongside one another. But the smart thing to do is set them up in a RAID array. RAID stands for ‘Redundant Array of Independent Disks’ and means that multiple drive units are being run together as a single unit. Depending on the type of RAID array you run, you can either vastly increase access speeds or vastly improve data integrity.

Before you embark on a RAID setup, it’s worth bearing in mind that RAID isn’t necessarily intended as a home-user technology. While you will benefit from having a RAID array in your desktop system, its strengths are amplified in the context of multiple users accessing a single disk array and in situations where data integrity is critical. That doesn’t stop you setting one up for your own use, of course, but it does mean that it’s more of a fun project than a practical necessity.

There are multiple ways to implement a RAID array, using varying amounts of drives for varying purposes, but most are either deprecated or aimed purely at high-end enterprise use. Instead, you will probably set up either a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array.

RAID-0 uses disk striping to share the read/ write load over multiple drives. Unlike most versions of RAID, it has no built-in redundancy, but it does allow you to access the combined capacity of the arrayed drives (so two 1TB drives would give you 2TB of usable space, rather than 1TB) while still receiving the speed benefits of RAID’s simultaneous read/ write capabilities.

The flip side of this is that there is no built-in fault tolerance, so your data is no safer than on one individual hard drive, and indeed, much less safe. If one drive spontaneously fails you will lose half of all of your data, leaving the other half unusable. It would be like ripping half of the pages out of a book. The remaining half would also be unusable. Keep this in mind if you are thinking of running an old and new drive together. RAID-0 reliability is only as good as the worst drive, so it is best done with pairs of new drives.

The alternative and better option if you are running an old drive with a new drive is RAID.1. Also called ‘disk mirroring’, it has no striping and simply duplicates read/ write actions across drives. The redundancy can sometimes speed up reading data if the controller supports duplex read, but writing data doesn’t have the same advantage, disk write performance for RAID-1 is the same as for single-disk setups. This type of RAID is best for situations where multiple users are accessing the same data, and it is known for providing the best fault tolerance of any RAID setup. If one drive fails, you can simply continue as normal using the mirrored copy until the broken unit is replaced.

It is also possible to combine RAID-0 and RAID-1 into RAID-10 (sometimes called RAID 1+0). This form required four drives and stripes data across two pairs of mirrored drives, ensuring maximum speed and robust redundancy, although at quadruple the cost of single drive, it is often too expensive to be worth using, particularly in home environment!

It is worth noting that running SSDs (Solid State Drive) in RAID is not really worth doing. One of the main reasons RAID configurations increase access times is because mechanical hard drives are, quite simply, slower at shifting data than almost every other component in a computer. When it comes to SSD drives, the principle may be the same, but SSD drives are already so fast that the benefit is much lower. Indeed, if you try to stripe more than four SSDs, you will probably end up slowing access times down!

One of the downsides of stripping SSDs is that SSD drives are still comparatively expensive, especially at the lower end of the market where the initial manufacturing cost makes up a large part of the price. RAID was originally created to avoid the premium on larger hard drives, but buying two small SSDs is invariably more expensive than buying a single unit of equal capacity, regardless of what level of the market you look at. And while paying more for two SSDs will give you extra speed over a single drive, it also halves reliability, so the economics are not particularly smart.

European Commission Recommended Citizens to Leave Facebook

EU citizens were recommended to close their Facebook accounts to keep information private from US security services. It turned out that current Safe Harbor legislation does not protect their information.

Such recommendations were given by EC attorney in a case brought by an Austrian law student Maximilian Schrems, which investigated whether the data of European citizens can be considered safe if sent to the United States. Indeed, when asked directly, the Commission failed to confirm to the court that the Safe Harbor rules could ensure adequate protection of information of EU citizens.

The case launched by Schrems collects complaints against Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo, claiming that companies operating inside the European Union should not be allowed to pass information over to the United States under Safe Harbor protections. Maximilian Schrems claimed that the PRISM data collection program breached the European standards for privacy protection.

The Austrian student was joined by a few other EU member states and the advocacy group Digital Rights Ireland. The campaigners argued that the Safe Harbor framework couldn’t ensure the protection of information. In response, the European Commission argued that Safe Harbor is still a work in progress, subject to a reform with a 13-point plan in order to ensure the privacy of EU citizens’ information.

The law firm Eversheds pointed out that there have been a spate of cases from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and other courts on data privacy. It also says that bringing down the safe harbor mechanism might seem ill-conceived, but “as the decision of the court in the “right to be forgotten” case seems to reinforce that isn’t a fetter which the European Court of Justice is restrained by”.

Source theguardian 

RapidShare Closing Down

RapidShare, once the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet, has announced that it will shut on 31^st March 2015. The company doesn't cite a reason for the surprising shutdown, but losing the majority of its users in recent years after the implementation of tough anti-piracy measures is likely to be connected.

Founded in 2002, Swiss-based RapidShare was one of the first and most popular one-click file-hosting services on the Internet.

Like most sites of this nature, RapidShare was frequently used by people to share copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that got the company into trouble on various occasions.

RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, and to top it off the site was called out by the U.S. Government as a “notorious market.”

Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things, the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while (re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage service.

The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs.

Today marks the beginning of the final chapter in RapidShare’s controversial history. The company just announced that it will shut down at the end of March and is recommending that users store their files elsewhere.

The demise of RapidShare marks the end of an era. Half a decade ago RapidShare was listed among the 50 most visited sites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of page views per month, but in a just a few weeks it will be gone.

How to unlock android phone or tablet if you forgot the pattern or mobile is stuck due to too many wrong pattern entries.

If you don't remember your google account or password then the following are the steps on how to unlock any android tablet or mobile:


1. Charge the battery minimum 25%


2. Turn off the device for about 1 minute


3. Turn on the device by pressing and holding the Volume Up key and the Power key together until the phone shortly vibrates


4. Wait for the Android system recovery menu to appear


5. Release the Volume Up key as the Android system recovery menu appears


6. Highlight Wipe Data/Factory Reset using volume key


7. Confirm with the Power key


8. Wait for the hard reset to finish


9. Highlight Reboot System Now


10. Confirm selection To be able to unlock tablet or mobile


You should do the above steps which is known as the hard reset procedure. This hard reset procedure will definitely unlock and remove the pattern lock of the tablet or mobile handset. However, you need to keep in mind that this hard reset procedure will also wipe everything on the tablet and mobile handset. This is due to the fact that the hard reset will restore the device to its factory state. Thus, it is highly recommended that you should first back up all the necessary data on the tablet and handset before doing the steps above. The good thing here is that there is no need to back up the data on the SIM card and/or external memory card because it will not be affected by the procedure.