Technology

The term Internet fraud refers to any type of fraud scheme that uses email, web sites, chat rooms or message boards to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions or to transmit the proceeds of fraud ... to financial institutions or to other connected with the scheme. Identity theft schemes Most Internet fraud is done through the use of stolen credit card information which is obtained in many ways, the simplest being copying information from retailers, either (online or offline). There have been many cases of hackers obtaining huge quantities of ... (view more)

Packet writing is a technique used to allow writeable CD-ROM and DVD-ROM media to be used in a similar manner to a floppy disk. Packet writing can be used both with write-once read-many (WORM media) such as CD-R, DVD+R and DVD-R, and also with ... rewriteable media such as CD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RW. WORM media, however, cannot recover space once it is written to the disc; furthermore, a deleted file does not free space on the disk, and a modified or overwritten file occupies additional space even if the file size has not increased. When the free space on a once-writeable disk is exhausted, no ... (view more)

In computing, JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) is a commonly used standard method of lossy compression for photographic images. The file format which employs this compression is commonly also called JPEG; the most common file extensions for this format are ... .jpeg, .jfif, .jpg, .JPG, or .JPE although .jpg is the most common on all platforms. JPEG/JFIF is the most common format used for storing and transmitting photographs on the World Wide Web. It is not as well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics because its compression method performs badly on these types of images (the PNG ... (view more)

Electronic mail, abbreviated e-mail or email , is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term email applies both to the Internet email system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ... (SMTP) and to workgroup collaboration systems allowing users within one company or organization to send messages to each other. Often workgroup collaboration systems natively use non-standard protocols but have some form of gateway to allow them to send and receive internet email. Some organizations may use the internet protocols for internal email ... (view more)

Protected mode (sometimes abbreviated pmode) is an operational mode of x86-compatible CPUs of the 80286 series or later. Protected mode has a number of new features designed to enhance multitasking and system stability, such as memory protection, a ... paging system, and hardware support for virtual memory. Most modern x86 operating systems run in protected mode, including Linux, FreeBSD, and versions of Microsoft Windows 2.0 and later. The other operational mode of 386 and later CPUs is real mode, a backwards compatibility mode that disables these features, designed to allow old software to run ... (view more)

Windows Media Player is a free software media player used for playing audio and video on personal computers running Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has also made available versions for other operating systems including Pocket PC, Mac OS, and Solaris. ... These tend to lag behind the Windows versions in features, software update frequency, and the number of file formats supported. The basic file formats are WMV (Windows Media Video & Audio), WMA (Windows Media Audio), and ASF (Advanced Streaming Format). Windows Media Player replaced an earlier piece of software simply called Media Player, adding ... (view more)

DEFRAG or ' Disk Defragmenter ' is a program included with most versions of the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems since MS-DOS 5.0, ca 1989. Defrag.exe defragments a file system such as a hard drive. Disk optimization is, briefly, a ... method of optimizing the efficiency of disk caching to minimize head travel and maximize effective speed: Move all the index or directory information to one spot. Move this spot into the center of the data, e.g. one third of the way in, so that head travel to data is halved compared to having directory information at the front. Cluster files around ... (view more)

In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation (or defragging) is a process that eliminates fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk in order to store the pieces of each file ... close together and in order (contiguously). It also attempts to create large regions of free space using compaction, to impede the return of fragmentation. Aims of defragmentation Reading and writing data on a heavily fragmented hard drive is slowed down as the time for the heads to move between fragments on the disk surface can be substantial. The ... (view more)

In computing, a reboot refers to restarting a device. A reboot can be a soft reboot or a hard reboot. Soft Reboot A soft reboot (also known as a warm reboot, in contrast to a cold reboot) is restarting a computer under software control, without ... removing power or (directly) triggering a reset line. It usually, though not always, refers to an orderly shut-down, rather than a "reboot". The Control-Alt-Delete key combination on the original IBM PC was designed to allow a soft reboot for a quicker and more convenient (and, some argue, less stressful on system components) restart than ... (view more)

Stereophonic sound , commonly called stereo, is the reproduction of sound, using two independent audio channels, through a pair of widely separated speaker systems, in such a way as to create a pleasant and natural impression of sound heard from ... various directions as in natural hearing. The word "stereophonic", from Greek stereos = "solid" and phone = "sound", was coined by Western Electric, by analogy with the word "stereoscopic". Western Electric first demonstrated it at an SMPTE meeting in 1937, then to the general public at Carnegie Hall in 1940. In popular usage, stereo usually means 2- ... (view more)