How to Configure Network Printers

Network printers offer many practical benefits for business offices and homes as well. They allow you to share a high-speed Internet connection with your family and co-workers, edit your documents, view your photos, and listen to your favorite music from any room that has a computer. Purchasing a network printer will also save you valuable money and space, since you won’t need to buy a device for every PC. Basically, any person, home or office that has more than one computer has good reason to consider buying a network printer.



So how do you set up a network printer? It’s easy. Below you’ll find a brief checklist to go over before you begin:

• Make sure all the printer, network, and power cables are plugged in.
• Check to see if the network is working properly (you should be able to see other systems in Network Neighborhood).
• Verify that the printer is installed on the computer you want to share it from.
• Make sure you have the drivers for the printer on a CD or disk (if you don’t have the drivers on disk, you can visit the Driver Download Page in the Links section).

Most operating systems don’t automatically share printers, which is good for security reasons. After you’ve gone over that check list, there are only a few more things you need to do before you can start printing. The following steps are for single PCs that use a single account only.

1.) Start on the PC that’s connected to the printer. Go to My Computerà Printers and right-click on the printer you want to share.
2.) Click “Shared As,” and give the printer a name. Press “OK.”
3.) Then go to the computer you want to print from. Click on My Computer--> Printers--> Add Printer--> Next--> Add Network Printer.

From there, you just select the computer name and then the name of the printer on the network. For computers that use multiple accounts, such as schools, the process is a bit different. First, you must log on with administrative privileges to the PC you’ll be printing from. Next, you’ll need to install the device as a local printer. Once you’re finished, right click the new printer and go to Properties--> Details--> Add New Port. Then type the name of the share, and you should be all set.

These days, all network printers come with their own built-in network interface, referred to as a network interface card (NIC). The NIC typically supplies an Ethernet connection, but you should also make sure the printer is compatible with your operating system. If you have ten or more printers, you may want to create groups—for instance, color printers—so you can find what you’re looking for faster.

So there you have it. Setting up and configuring a new network printer is a fairly simple process. All in all, network printers are a great investment. They help you conserve space, share resources, and save money. Plus, they give you the freedom to work in any room that has a PC.

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Kindle Ebook Reader Wireless Device

To be sure, the Kindle eBook Reader leaves little doubt by now that a reading revolution is in the making. It has evidently become a current vogue in the white-collared circles. Everyone who has any reason at all to carry one will. For certain groups even, it's an attire to impress or status to flaunt. Whether it's for the pomp or purpose, or both, this gadget is hot.



From one Kindle review to another, the device is generally described as a state-of-the-art mobile eBook reader which is on live connection with Amazon online bookstores and other amenities all across the US. Kindles form the major junction for all of Amazon e-reading business. The remarkable part is that they still retain the natural feel and display of the conventional print on paper.

The original Kindle wasn't much in appearance to many and if you didn't like the jarring look, well, Amazon listened. Check out the sleek and trim Kindle 2, complete with superb ergonomics this time around for good measure. Now, there's really some resemblance to what people like to refer it as - the iPod of books. Now, let not the good looks overshadow its functional prowess.

If the Kindle looks great and grab the limelight, that's a bonus, not the original idea. But seriously, it's supposed to just disappear into the reading. Like a good paper-filled book, it's the proverbial judging the content and not the cover but what the heck! It's that lucky star again for Amazon. Having that said, the technology packed into the Kindle is surely worth a mention.

The main distinction of the Kindle Electronic Book Reader from its peers, or rivals if you may, lies in its Whispernet - a wireless service by which contents are transacted and also where Whispersync operates for smart cross-device synchronization. The connectivity is through 3G network and is included when you buy Buy Kindle 2 so there's no bill on your part and unlike WiFi, you never have to hunt for a hotspot.

Most Kindle review sites will not fail to mention 2 things: the price and the size of the library. At a cost of the better part of $ 400, it could be steep for some but if you're into reading, the 275,000 books available will beckon at a discounted price. Whether it's worth the money or not is an individual thing and if Amazon has its way, any book that's ever printed will have an e-version for the Kindle in future. That's a lot of books!

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The Economics Of Enterprise Data Protection

In November 2008, SEPATON, Inc., a provider of virtual tape library and data deduplication solutions, conducted a survey of US-based corporations to define and quantify current data protection challenges, business objectives, and technology requirements for enterprise data centers.



The analysis shows that in 2009, enterprise data managers are looking to implement technologies that help them meet the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, dealing with exponential data growth, delivering higher levels of service and meeting more stringent regulatory requirements than ever before. As a result, they are moving away from traditional physical tape and adopting technologies such as deduplication and VTLs that deliver faster performance, higher capacity reduction, enable longer online retention, and provide modular scalability of performance and capacity.

The following bullet points provide summarized results of the survey:
1. Despite current economic pressures, nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or increase in 2009. Enterprises consider the need to protect data assets and keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities.

2. A key focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for data protection. Enterprises are investing in technologies that reduce total cost of ownership by providing higher levels of data protection, control data growth, and scale capacity and performance.

3. Fifty-two percent of users who rated their data protection as insufficient cited lack of budget to keep pace with technology as the cause. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.

4. Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-eight percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Thirty percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at a compounded rate of more than thirty percent per year.

5. While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, fewer than fifty percent expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies disk-to-disk, virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, or VTL gateways.

6. Data deduplication ranks highest as the technology planned for deployment in the enterprise data center. More than ninety percent of respondents are either currently using deduplication or want to use it. Of those who do not have deduplication, fifty-five percent are allocating budget towards this technology in 2009.

7. Server virtualization (VMware) is putting significant strain on data protection environments. Seventy-four percent of respondents report that VMware virtual environments significantly increased their data storage and/or the complexity of their data protection environment.

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Our new Smart Networked World

Many are aware of the tremendous waste of energy in our environment, but fail to take advantage of straightforward opportunities to conserve that energy. For example, everyone knows that lights should be switched off when no one is in an office. Similarly, when employees are not using a meeting room, there is no need to regulate temperature.



Fortunately, one need not rely on human intervention to conserve energy. With the help of smart sensing and network technology, energy conservation processes such as turning off lights and adjusting temperature can be readily automated. Ultimately, this technology will enable consumers and plant managers to better identify wasteful energy use and institute procedures that lead to smarter and more efficient homes, buildings and industrial plants.

Until now, wires and cables for power and connectivity have limited the widespread adoption of sensor networks by making them difficult and expensive to install and maintain. Battery powered wireless networks can simplify installation and reduce cost. But their high power consumption and the corresponding need for regular battery replacement has made wireless networks difficult and costly to maintain. Nobody wants to replace hundreds or thousands of window sensor batteries in a large building on a regular basis.

The promise of wireless sensor networks can only be fully realized when the wiring for both the data communication and the power supply is eliminated. Doing so requires a true battery-free wireless solution, one that can utilize energy harvested directly from the environment.

To facilitate the widespread deployment of wireless sensor networks, GreenPeak has developed an ultra-low-power ZigBee-based communication technology that can utilize environmental energy sources such as light, motion and vibration. This technology, employing on-board power management circuits and software to monitor energy harvesters and optimize the use of harvested energy, enables sensors to operate reliably in a battery-free environment.

Eliminating the need for batteries does more than just cut cost and maintenance requirements. It also minimizes exposure to the toxic substances within batteries and eliminates the waste and headaches associated with disposing of and recycling batteries.

Ultimately, battery-free operation is a key step in paving the way for truly green appliances and systems that do not adversely impact the environment. This environmentally-friendly approach also extends the reach of sensing technology to distant and inhospitable climates and regions.

Consider, for example, a network of sensors for leak detection in a remote oil pipeline. Retrofitting a cable to accommodate thousands of standard wired sensors spread out over hundreds of miles of pipeline is very financially challenging even given the enormous environmental risk associated with oil leaks. However, a wireless sensor network equipped with energy harvesters is fairly inexpensive and straightforward to install. No batteries, no power lines, no network cables.

According to market experts, two of the most significant requirements for widespread adoption of wireless sense and control products are ease of use and reliability. Battery-free technology is essential for meeting these requirements. So too is the ease of use and reliability of the communications chain that interconnects the wireless sensors.

To enhance network reliability and ease of use, GreenPeak has developed a mesh technology that enables each wireless sensor and actuator device, utilizing integrated mesh software, to act as a repeater for other wireless devices in the network. The sensor nodes form a mesh network by sending messages through intermediate nodes from source to destination. This approach enables the network to span larger distances (even when individual nodes can only see a local area of the network), allowing site-wide wireless coverage throughout a facility without the need for dedicated base stations or routers.

To streamline installation and day-to-day operation, GreenPeak has created a self-organizing network that is self-forming and self-healing. Once a sensor node is powered, it automatically links to the wireless network. This 'plug and play' approach enables every technician to execute a 100% correct installation without the need for the sophisticated training and real world experience often required to set up wireless networks utilizing routers and base stations. The self-healing nature of this technology also makes it easier to adapt the network to changing office layouts and designs, enabling nodes to automatically find alternative communication routes when the signal quality decreases or building infrastructure changes.

The Human Powered, Portable Network for Health Care

Once very interesting possible application is by using a variety of energy harvesting devices, incorporated into clothing, that could power a mobile network of health sensors. Energy harvesting devices that can convert the temperature differential between the skin and the outside environment are already in development as are energy harvesting technologies that convert vibration and movement into power as you stroll around the home or office. These devices could provide enough energy to power wireless sensors that could sense and report changes in heartbeat, in blood pressure, as well as other vital signs. If someone falls and could not get up, the sensor network could report that as well.

Ultra low power wireless sensor networks can help "to build a smarter world".

As wireless sensor networks are deployed in our offices and homes, they will have an enormous impact on our daily lives, helping to build a smarter world in which energy is recycled and fully utilized. These wireless platforms, equipped with advanced sensing capability, will enable us to better control our lives, homes and environment, creating a truly connected world that enables people worldwide to live in a more comfortable, safer, and cleaner environment.
GreenPeak Technologies

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Author – Cees Links, CEO of GreenPeak

Cees Links is a pioneer of the wireless LAN industry, a visionary leader bringing the world of mobile computing and continuous networking together. Under his responsibility, the first wireless LANs were developed which ultimately became house-hold technology integrated into the PC’s and notebooks we all use today. His group also pioneered the development of access points, home networking routers and hotspot base stations, all widely used today.

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The Internet: yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Wikipedia says that the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. What you see in the title image taken from The Opte Project, is just a fragment of a much larger internet map. Obviously, it is impossible to map all computers connected to the internet. Thousands of them go down every day while new ones replace them. The fact remains -- internet is growing.



It is also virtually impossible to determine the "birthday" of the internet. A simple search on Google will give you plenty of different opinions: some say that it is over thirty years old while others argue it is more like twenty. And yet, for the purposes of this article, let's just say the internet was born on 6th of August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee has introduced his idea of the World Wide Web at CERN laboratories in Switzerland. After all, to many casual users the whole complex structure of the internet is reduced to daily typing-in those three magic letters into their browsers -- WWW.

Let's go back and see what people thought of the internet before it was born. Interestingly enough, it seems that people cared about e-commerce more than they did about information sharing. The first video is from 1969 and it rather accurately describes the idea of e-commerce. Of course, the way it is visualized looks funny to us, but the concepts are accurate:

Article with videos you can find in blog (resource box)

The second video is a bit more recent -- it's a news report from 1981 talking about this great new (still pre-internet) invention of reading the newspapers on your computer screen. This one is not a concept but rather a report on existing technology. Still, it serves as a great example of how fast everything evolved:

So what does the internet look like today? Well, you can take a look at the visualization again, but that doesn't help much, does it? How about some numbers then?

Asa Dotzler, the founder of Mozilla's Quality Assurance and Testing Program, did some very simplified calculations. He says:

The chart is a mash up of about 40 different data sources from usage, to market share, to installed base, for browsers, internet connected computers, and operating systems. Working through all that data, I was able to come up with something that I think approximates the Web's user growth and browser changes over the last 13 years.

Probably most "real" statisticians would dismiss these kind of calculations right away, but this chart does not become any less interesting because of that. So here it is for your judgment:

What does this chart tell us? Well, first of all, there are around 1.2 billion (almost 1.4 based on Wolfram|Alpha) internet users world-wide. This is around 20% of the whole world's population. Also, it is rather interesting to note that while Firefox and other browsers were gaining popularity, it wasn't really at the expense of Internet Explorer. IE's usage simply slowed down, meaning that new internet users chose alternative browsers such as Firefox more often. However that's not what this article is about, so let's just leave it here.

In just under fifteen years the internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. As we have said before, nowadays the internet is (re)defining every aspect of our daily lives: form economy, to social life; from the way we do business, to the way we have fun. Most of us probably do not imagine going a day or whole week without internet access. To some of us it has become an

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Business Week’s Big Cloud Computing Article

The June 15th, 2009 issue of Business Week published a rather robust article on the emergence of cloud computing and what it means for the future of business and the IT industry. This article, written by Steve Hamm, does an exceptional job highlighting the application of cloud platform technology in the marketplace as seen in the examples listed below:



1. Avon - Will equip 150,000 sales leaders with cloud-based computing systems accessible via smartphone and PC. Platform will keep sales leaders informed on performance of sales representatives, order quantities and overdue payments. “The idea is to increase the sales and efficiency of Avon’s distribution system.”
2. Virtual Personal Assistants - Siri, a Silicon Valley based start up is using cloud technology and artificial intelligence to create applications that help people with travel arrangements and entertainment. The company plans to soon move into developing applications that are tailored for business solutions. The article gives the following as an example: A sales person asks the application to put together the best sales pitch she can make for a prospective client. The Virtual assistant then draws on information from a variety of sources to formulate the pitch.
3. OptumHealth - Utilizing eSync, the company’s cloud driven system, can improve service quality and reduce costs by identifying gaps in care and helping people to respond to minor issues before they become emergency problems.

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