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 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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