5 tips to easier life!

5 tips to easier life!

Internet has truly revolutionized our lives. From bill paying to finding the next mate, it has made the world accessible. It is amazing how internet has touched so many aspects of our life. Things that took hours, are handled now in minutes seamlessly. If you are not handling things efficiently in the following areas, then you may want to reconsider:

BILL PAYING: Used to be a major chore. Checking past history on each bill to see if you were not over billed. Writing each check. Making sure you had the right postage. And after all that exercise, making it to the mail drop and hoping it gets there on time (that is where the old adage 'check is in the mail' came from). Internet bill paying has truly revolutionized all that. If you are not paying on the internet then please look into it. It saves countless hours of checking and writing checks. Best of all no postage and no worrying if it will get there on time.

First time when you set up the people who bill you, it takes a little time but subsequent months you just click and pay. Your transaction history is all there at your finger tips and you don't even have to worry about payment not getting there. It is almost like child's play.

SHOPPING: If you are in the market for a car or paper clips, you can get price comparisons across the city, state or country right there with a few clicks. No more having to feel like a dumb consumer. Information is power. Now you can feel powerful to know what you should pay for the product.

RESEARCH: How often you have been taken advantage because you did not know enough about a product? Internet is a great research tool. Anything and everything you want to know is on the internet. You can also get opinions from other people. Sometimes there is so much information that you get 'information overload'.

To avoid getting lost on the internet, I always set the amount of time I will spend on research on the internet. Say like 30 minutes or one hour. Because I know it is very easy to get side tracked on the internet. You go to one site and you see 10 other links. One of them catches your curiosity and you click there and next thing you know you have been all around the world but forgot what you originally came for.

This is why I set a time frame. For example, say I am going to research for a 'car' for 1 hour. I will not click away to sites unrelated. And after 1 hour is up I will stop. If I feel I need more time, I will schedule it again at some other time. This way I stay focused and not end up staying at my computer till the 'cows come home'.

EMAIL: is a great way to communicate. Short, sweet and quick. No more taking out a piece of paper, making sure all your salutations are right and fighting the writer's block. If you somehow struggle through and happen to get your thoughts down, then you mail and wonder if it will get there. If it does get there, you have to wait patiently for a response. Days or weeks was usual and if you were dealing across the globe then it was more like months.

All that is now history. You can communicate in real time. I talk to my programmers who are sitting half way across the globe everyday. The emails fly back and forth in a matter of nanoseconds (at least it seems like it).

Best of all, email communication is self-documenting. Two months down the road, if you forget what was said, you can refresh your memory by reading the emails in chronological order.

If you get a bounced email just forward it to 'find at switch email dot com' and they find you the new email address. So you can locate a person quickly when they move.

FIND A MATE: The 'mate' could be a life partner or someone to help you with a problem. Internet allows you to get a lot of upfront information on the person, so you can make an intelligent decision. If it suits you then you can go further. Without the internet just finding information was difficult. For example: say your dryer broke. You can find the manual online and try to fix it yourself. Or find out repair people in your area. Yellow pages used to do it before, but Yellow pages have an inherent problem. They are only ads and there is hardly any information about their repair habits, testimonials etc. Now online you can find in depth information on the person before picking up the phone to call them. Same goes for romantic match. There is already so much information available upfront on the person that in the old days would take months to find out. Sometimes you never found out because it was too embarrassing to ask. On the internet asking questions is the norm and not at all seen offensive because you have not yet met the person. I am not professing you don't need to meet the person. All I am saying is that a lot of the preliminary checking can be done quickly and easily.

Use the tools of the internet for the benefit of your daily life. If you don't use the tools then you may be burning your time and energy doing the old fashioned way.

By : Bob Young
Keyword : easier life

Microsoft and Sun forge an alliance

Microsoft and Sun forge an alliance

Sun co-founder, longtime CEO and current chairman of the supervisory board Scott McNealy had never found anything good to say about Microsoft. Now under the company's knew CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who last April took over the position from McNealy , things have changed. The archrivals Microsoft and Sun Microsystems intent of corporate a lot more closely in future. The opponents are moving closer together -- and this shortly before the Court of First Instance of the European Communities is to give its ruling on the anti-trust decision of the EU Commission against Microsoft; a decision that came about in response to, among other factors, a complaint filed by Sun.

Sun Microsystems would in future for the first time also market its 64-bit server systems featuring Intel or AMD processors (x64 systems) with Microsoft's Windows Server, it was said. To improve the interoperability of their products the two companies intend to found a joint development center on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. According to statements made by Sun and Microsoft the partners will also work to ensure that Microsoft's Windows software runs smoothly on or interacts flawlessly with all servers and storage products made by Sun. The alliance moreover includes plans to improve the way Sun's and Microsoft's virtualization software works together with Windows Server and Solaris respectively. Steps would be taken to ensure that Solaris functioned flawlessly as a guest under Microsoft's virtualization technologies and that Windows Server ran without a hitch under Sun's virtualization solution, it was said. Into the bargain the two companies intend to give a boost to IPTV. Carriers throughout the world are to be induced to introduce Microsoft's IPTV solution on the basis of Sun servers.

By paying a total of 1.6 billion US dollars to Sun, Microsoft had in April 2004, to the surprise of many members of the industry, settled all legal disputes it had with the Unix and server specialist; at the time preliminary exploratory talks about a possible cooperation between the two companies had also taken place. Even so, a short while ago Sun managers could still be heard accusing Microsoft of engaging in "patent terrorism." However, the first tender shoots of a cooperative effort had already emerged in 2005 -- back then the companies had stated that they had agreed to boost interoperability with regard to Web services, identity and systems management. Once a beaming Scott McNealy and a merry Steve Ballmer had shaken hands, though, not much more was heard about this cooperation. This time around the cooperation between the two companies will in their opinion be of a different caliber. "Today's announcement is another example of Microsoft's commitment to 64-bit computing," Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, said. While John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, added: "Sun is now a single source for today's leading operating systems -- Solaris and Windows -- on the industry's most innovative x64 systems and storage products."

By : http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/95931
Keyword : Microsoft and Sun forge an alliance