My Magic Computer

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Posted on October 3rd, 2008 by Dimas Prasetyo, and has been read for 10 times No comments

In this article, I just want to tell you how I can use the computer. Perhaps for ordinary people, computer is just a simple thing to be operated, but for me, it is something difficult from sight of them. Commonly, people just need to see the screen, and follow all instructions which are displayed. They use mouse to click here and there, and then when typing a text, they can see the signs on the keyboard. In contrast, it is very different for me as extraordinary person: D. Actually, I have visual impairment, and I’ll tell you how I can operate an ordinary computer.

As person who has visual impairment problem, I can not rely on my visual ability. Alternatively, I train and use my sense or hearing. If ordinary people use visual ability when operating a computer, I use my sense or hearing when operating the same device.

First thing that have to be included in my computer is software which is called Screen-reader. This software basically will change the visual signs to the hearing mode. By this software, all instruction that is known just can be accessed by visual method; will be available with hearing method. For example when I press the A Letter button on the keyboard, immediately the screen-reader will say A as well.

The screen-reader software can also to read a text from word processor program, such as Microsoft word and WordPad. By using the navigation arrow keys, I can read a text each letter, word, sentence, and whole the text in one time. For example when I press the up- arrow, it will read the line above the pointer. In addition, if I press the combination keys both of control button and right-arrow, it will read the word next to pointer.

These screen-reader programs usually use English pronouncement on its voice. When reading a text, it will read the text with English pronouncing no matter weather the text in English language or not. In instance, when I want to read an Indonesian text, the screen-reader will read the Indonesian text in English pronouncing, so the text will be heard quite funny.

The recent work that I can do with the support screen-reader program, I can build a website on the internet by myself. Screen-reader can also be used on the internet. On that media, I can search much information, so I can learn web programming lesson either. The coding process can be done in a text program like such notepad, so the screen-reader can work perfectly here. The codes and formulas just need to be typed on there, and compile the web code in to web page format. For last step, the web pages have to be uploaded to the server, so netters can visit my website every time. For example is www.kartunet.com. The website is created without interfere of ordinary people.

So far, I’m sure that my magic computer which is completed with screen-reader is very useful. I can do many things on it. Furthermore, I will explore all potential in my computer, and do more things great.

Commentary…
Etik : This article is good. Dimas already explained his point of view of using his own computer which has already added with screen-reader for his extraordinary. I think Dimas’ computer is an interesting computer. I like how he tells the readers about his computer. He tells it very clearly.

KINDS OF COMPUTER

"desktop computer" is a small machine which is usually accompanied by a screen (which is not part of the computer) and used at a household. "Laptop computers" are portable computers that are commonly used for work or personal media purposes. Both laptops and desktops are considered personal computers. "Mainframes" are large computers used for managing businesses or hosting servers. "Embedded computers" are computer systems that cannot be programmed by the user because they are preprogrammed for a specific task and are buried within the equipment they serve. For example, in mobile phones, automatic teller machines, microwave ovens, CD players and cars.

[change] Common uses of home computers

• Playing computer games
• Writing
• Solving mathematics
• Looking for things on the Internet
• Watching TV and movies
• Listening to music
• Communicating with other people

[change] How computers work

Computers store data and the instructions telling them what to do with the data as numbers, because computers can do things with numbers very quickly. These data are stored as binarysymbols (1s and 0s). A 1 or a 0 symbol stored by a computer is called a bit, which comes from the words binary digit. Computers can use many bits together to represent instructions and the data that these instructions use. A list of these instructions is called a program and stored on the computer's hard disk. Computers use memory called "RAM" as a space to carry out the instructions and store data while it is doing these instructions. When the computer wants to store the results of the instructions for later, it uses the hard disk.

An operating system tells the computer how to understand what jobs it has to do, how to do these jobs, and how to tell people the results. It tells the electronics inside the computer, or "hardware", how to work to get the results it needs. This lets most computers have the same operating system, or list of orders to tell it how to talk to the user, while each computer can have its own computer programs or list of jobs to do what its user needs. Having different programs and operating systems makes it easy to learn how to use computers for new things. When a user needs to use a computer for something different, the user can learn how to use a new program.

[change] Computers and the Internet

One of the most important jobs that computers do for people is helping with communication. Communication is how people share information. Computers have helped people move forward in science, medicine, business, and learning, because they let experts from anywhere in the world work with each other and share information. They also let other people communicate with each other, do their jobs almost anywhere, learn about almost anything, or share their opinions with each other. The Internet is the thing that lets people communicate between their computers.

[change] Computers and waste

A computer is now almost always an electronic device. It usually contains materials that will become toxic waste when disposed of. When a new computer is bought in some places, laws require that the cost of its waste management must also be paid for. This is called product stewardship.

Computers can become obsolete quickly, depending on what programs the user runs. Very often, they are thrown away within two or three years, because newer programs require a more powerful computer. This makes the problem worse, so computer recycling happens a lot. Many projects try to send working computers to developing nations so they can be re-used and will not become waste as quickly, as most people do not need to run new programs.

[change] The main hardware in a computer

Computers come in different forms, but most of them have a common architecture.

• All computers have a CPU
• All computers have some kind of data bus which lets them get inputs or output things to the environment.
• All computers have some form of memory. These are usually chips (integrated circuits) which can hold information.
• Many computers have some kind of sensors, which lets them get input from their environment.
• Many computers have some kind of display device, which lets them show output. They may also have other peripheral devices connected.

A computer has several main parts. When comparing a computer to a human body, the CPU is like a brain. It does most of the 'thinking' and tells the rest of the computer how to work. The CPU is on the Motherboard, which is like the skeleton. It provides the basis for where the other parts go, and carries the nerves that connect them to each other and the CPU. The motherboard is connected to a power supply, which provides electricity to the entire computer. The various drives (CD drive, floppy drive, and on many newer computers, USB drive) act like eyes, ears, and fingers, and allow the computer to read different types of storage, in the same way that a human can read different types of books. The hard drive is like a human's memory, and keeps track of all the data stored on the computer. Most computers have a sound card or another method of making sound, which is like vocal cords, or a voice box. Connected to the sound card are speakers, which are like a mouth, and are where the sound comes out. Computers might also have a graphics card, which helps the computer to create visual effects, such as 3D environments, or more realistic colors, and more powerful graphics cards can make more realistic or more advanced images, in the same way a well trained artist can.

[change] References

1. ↑ Heron of Alexandria. Retrieved on 15 January 2008.
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} Ancient Discoveries, Episode 11: Ancient Robots, History Channel. Retrieved on 2008-09-06
3. ↑ Howard R. Turner (1997), Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction, p. 184, University of Texas Press, ISBN 0-292-78149-0
4. ↑ Donald Routledge Hill, "Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East", Scientific American, May 1991, pp. 64-9 (cf. Donald Routledge Hill, Mechanical Engineering)
5. ↑ Don't confuse the Analytical Engine with Babbage's difference engine which was a non-programmable mechanical calculator.
6. ↑ B. Jack Copeland, ed., Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford University Press, 2006

• ^a Kempf, Karl (1961). "Historical Monograph: Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps". Aberdeen Proving Ground (United States Army).
• ^a Phillips, Tony (2000). The Antikythera Mechanism I. American Mathematical Society. Retrieved on 5 April 2006.
• ^a Shannon, Claude Elwood (1940). "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits". Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• ^a Digital Equipment Corporation (1972). PDP-11/40 Processor Handbook (PDF), Maynard, MA: Digital Equipment Corporation.
• ^a Verma, G.; Mielke, N. (1988). "Reliability performance of ETOX based flash memories". IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium.
• ^a Meuer, Hans; Strohmaier, Erich; Simon, Horst; Dongarra, Jack (2006-11-13). Architectures Share Over Time. TOP500. Retrieved on 27 November 2006.
• Stokes, Jon (2007). Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-104-6.

Retrieved from "http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer"

Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since December 2008 | Computers | Tools

COMPUTER FORENSICS WORLD

A Community of Computer Forensics Professionals

Computer Forensics World is a growing community of professionals involved in the digital forensics industry. It is an open resource, free for all to access and to use. It strongly encourages the sharing of information and peer to peer assistance.

To support this initiative, a range of interactive facilities are available, including surveys, forums and posting areas for information and papers. Please feel free to use all these features.

As with all user groups and communities, its success ultimately depends upon its members. Greater involvement by larger numbers will always create a more vibrant and useful experience. Please join us...

Forum and Directory Now Open Our on-board Discussion Forums are now open, and embrace all aspects of digital and computer forensics. Please do contribute and participate. Equally, we have also added a directory of resources and information for your reference and use.

Posted by Monica on Friday, August 27 @ 11:20:58 EDT (15732 reads) (Read More... | Score: 4.25)

Computer Forensics Basics: Frequently Asked Questions Our latest digital forensics FAQ has now been published: 1. What is Computer Forensics? There a number of slightly varying definitions around. However, generally, computer forensics is considered to be the use of analytical and investigative techniques to identify, collect, examine and preserve evidence/information which is magnetically stored or encoded. 2. What is the objective of this? Usually to provide digital evidence of a specific or general activity. 3. To what ends? A forensic investigation can be initiated for a variety of reasons. The most high profile are usually with respect to criminal investigation, or civil litigation, but digital forensic techniques can be of value in a wide variety of situations, including perhaps, simply re-tracking steps taken when data has been lost. 4. What are the common scenarios? Wide and varied! Examples include: - Employee internet abuse (common, but decreasing) - Unauthorized disclosure of corporate information and data (accidental and intentional) - Industrial espionage - Damage assessment (following an incident) - Criminal fraud and deception cases - More general criminal cases (many criminals simply store information on computers, intentionally or unwittingly) - and countless others! 5. How is a computer forensic investigation approached? It's a detailed science. However, very broadly, the main phases are sometimes considered to be: secure the subject system (from tampering during the operation); take a copy of hard drive (if applicable); identify and recovery all files (including those deleted); access/copy hidden, protected and temporary files; study 'special' areas on the drive (eg: residue from previously deleted files); investigate data/settings from installed applications/programs; assess the system as a whole, including its structure; consider general factors relating to the users activity; create detailed report. Throughout the investigation, it is important to stress that a full audit log of your activities should be maintained. 6. Is there anything that should NOT be done during an investigation? Definitely. However, these tend to be related to the nature of the computer system being investigated. Typically though, it is important to avoid changing date/time stamps (of files for example) or changing data itself. The same applies to the overwriting of unallocated space (which can happen on re-boot for example). 'Study don't change' is a useful catch-phrase. 7. I am interested in a career in this field. Where do I start? This is a common question, with many answers. Perhaps a good starting point however is to read the specific section of our Forum: "Digital Forensics: Getting Started". This includes hundreds of posts on this issue. 8. What about training? Again, there is a specific area of the Forum dedicated to education and training. In addition, we are currently building an entire section comprising first party reviews of formal courses (see left hand panel). Finally, although designed largely for practitioners, the Computer Forensics Toolkit is increasingly being used as a training resource (see top right).

Posted by Monica on Thursday, August 26 @ 13:28:04 EDT (35839 reads) (Read More... | Score: 4.00)

History of Computers

The Computer Emerges!
Computer Breakthrough has caught many by surprise. Many ask what is next?
by Roderick Hames

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Early Start
Computers have been around for quite a few years. Some of your parents were probably around in 1951 when the first computer was bought by a business firm. Computers have changed so rapidly many people can not keep up with changes.

One newspaper tried to relate how the fast changes in computer technology would look to a similar pace in the auto industry:

"Had the automobile developed at a pace (equal) to that of the computer during the past twenty years, today a Rolls Royce would cost less than $3.00, get 3 million miles to the gallon, deliver enough power to drive (the ship) the Queen Elizabeth II, and six of them would fit on the head of a pin!"

These changes have occurred so rapidly that many people do not know how our modern computer got its start.

The First Computing Machines "Computers"
Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers. Early people tied knots in rope and carved marks on clay tablets to keep track of livestock and trade. Some people considered the 5000 year old ABACUS-- a frame with beads strung on wires to be the first true computing aid.

As trade and tax system grew in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records.

In the mid-1600's, Blaise Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working on taxes for the French government in Paris. The two spent hours figuring and refiguring taxes that each citizen owed. Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process. The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage. His machine encountered many of problems. For one, it was always breaking down. Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly. And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs. Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remember for his role in computer technology. In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal.

The next big step for computers arrived in the 1830's when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables. Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England. He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine. The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today. It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper. Babbage died before he could complete the machine. However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is know as the Father of Computers.

The next huge step for computers came when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster. Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards. The holes punched in the cards matched each person's answers to questions. For example, married, single, and divorces were answers on the cards. The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes. Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit. This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer.

Thanks to Hollerith's machine, instead of taking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census. Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. The company later was sold in 1911. And in 1912 his company became the International Business Machines Corporation, better know today as IBM.

The First Electric Powered Computer
What is considered to be the first computer was made in 1944 by Harvard's Professor Howard Aiken. The Mark I computer was very much like the design of Charles Babbage's having mainly mechanical parts, but with some electronic parts. His machine was designed to be programmed to do many computer jobs. This all-purpose machine is what we now know as the PC or personal computer. The Mark I was the first computer financed by IBM and was about 50 feet long and 8 feet tall. It used mechanical switches to open and close its electric circuits. It contained over 500 miles of wire and 750,000 parts.

The First All Electronic Computer
The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper EckertJohn Mauchly. The ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes (used instead of the mechanical switches of the Mark I) and was 1000 times faster than the Mark I. In twenty seconds, ENIAC could do a math problem that would have taken 40 hours for one person to finish. The ENIAC was built the time of World War II had as its first job to calculate the feasibility of a design for the hydrogen bomb. The ENIAC was 100 feet long and 10 feet tall. and

M ore Modern Computers
A more modern type computer began with John von Neumann's development of software written in binary code. It was von Neumann who began the practice of storing data and instructions in binary code and initiated the use of memory to store data, as well as programs. A computer called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer) was built using binary code in 1950. Before the EDVAC, computers like the ENIAC could do only one task then they had to be rewired to perform a different task or program. The EDVAC's concept of storing different programs on punched cards instead of rewiring computers led to the computers that we know today.

While the modern computer is far better and faster than the EDVAC of its time, computers of today would not have been possible with the knowledge and work of many great inventors and pioneers.

THE COMPUTER IN MY LIFE

You remember the nursery rhyme about the little girl, "When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid." Well, that describes the home computer for those of us who do not understand the mechanics of the thing. Fortunately the computer is like the good little girl almost all the time, but when it's not, it's a major pain. It's really very simple, so they tell me. I'm sailing along doing whatever needs to be done today, and suddenly without warning something goes wrong and I have a crisis on my hands. I have no idea how to fix it. I am lost until I can get one of my computer gurus out here to solve the problem.
Computers are magical machines that have practically taken over the world. But I stick pretty much to the Internet, Word and Quicken. Quicken is the accounting program that lets me keep track of my finances, such as they are. The latest crisis occurred as I was getting my papers and figures together to take to the accountant who does my taxes when -- WOW -- the floppy disk that I keep my backup on had a convulsion or something. Anyway, it died. I yelled for help, but the time I got help and a new floppy drive ,and we got everything "fixed" -- the last half of the 2003 financial entries were missing. I mean they just weren't there. There are various grades of non-life-threatening crises, and that one is close to the top.
The story does have a happy ending. Fortunately, a Mac guru came out and retrieved the missing entries. Quicken has lots of backups if you know where to find them. I didn't, but I do now. I was able to take an honest, accurate batch of figures and receipts to the tax man.
But crises like that don't happen very often and nothing can spoil the miracle of the program I use most, the word processor. It's hard to imagine the time before writers had computers. We hear that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address in pencil on the back of an envelope on his way to the battlefield. It must have been a fairly large envelope and the story is probably fictitious But it does remind us that pencils or pens have been the tools of the writer for centuries.
And now we have this wonderful, versatile machine and a word processor that keeps writers sane, more or less. Certainly for a writer it is -- to borrow from the younger generation -- awesome! I go merrily along, typing thoughts, having occasional inspirations, throwing them out, retyping them, being sure there are no split infinitives, counting the words, adding some more, moving them around. In fact, I have moved this paragraph three times and may decide yet that it belongs someplace else. And when I need to know a date, I switch over to the Web and ask Google. When I need to know the history of pencils, I ask Google. When I need to know who said what in Congress, I ask Google. Google knows everything. Google is at the moment, the leading search engine.
E-mail is a gem. It keeps scattered families in touch. I check my e-mail in the morning before I have my coffee to see what my kids are doing. E-mail connects the whole world. For a little while I was corresponding with a person in Scotland. I had no idea whether it was a man or woman, but he/she was quite surprised to learn that Colorado was part desert.
Nothing is perfect, including computers. But I find myself agreeing with Marshall McLuhan that, "The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of the technological clothing ever devised by man. Beside it the wheel is a mere hula hoop."