Posts Tagged ‘computer deals’
April 26th, 2009 | 
Author: Throughout the year you will always find a company that is selling laptops on sale at a ridiculous price. Many of them are legit with their claim of actually selling them for the stated price, but for every four that are legitimate places there is at least one that is doing one of many different shady practices that will screw you out of your hard earned money.
The single most common scam that has make victims out of alot of people is the old bait and switch number. I bet you’re heard of this and if you haven’t be alert. This scam is still being done years after laws have been put into place and quite a few have paid hefty penalties for taking people for a ride.
Don’t think for a minute that if you see an advertised price in the newspaper or a sign hanging in the window of the place, that it’s not a scam. It may not be one, but you won’t know until you walk in the place to find out. Want to know the best advice to fine legit laptops on sale though?
It goes without saying that you can simply avoid spending money with these kinds of companies. But let’s be honest – a skilled salesperson who’s good at getting people to buy stuff can likely convince you to buy a computer make or model number that you had no intention of buying!
There are consumer related regulations in place to avoid unrealistic or dishonest claims in advertizing. But often times, the seasoned used car salesman types know how to side step the law. You open up your cellphone to inquire about a deal you may have heard about on your way to work while listening to the radio. A salesman picks up who’s smooth talking and enthusiastic and before you know it you decide to drive to the mall after work to get in on all those last minute computer deals he talks about.
When you get there, they start talking to you about all the wonderful laptops. Sometime midway in the conversation, they start suggesting you take a peak at there other (higher priced) models that you weren’t originally interested in but guess what? They just happen to be beside the laptops for sale and hey, what’s it cost for you to check it out?
So when you’re not convinced to buying the pricier model, often they try something else. When insist you don’t want that, they’ll use the one you originally came to the store for to try to trick you again. Often times, the line goes “oh we looked in the back and sorry, we sold the last one a few hours ago” – yeah, right.
The sad line you’ll probably be given is that what was advertised was actually for a limited number. You know, maybe 10 or 20 laptops when really they know thousands of people are interested. In the end, the average customer will leave feeling upset, used and dissatisfied. But fortunately, you don’t have to be one of them. There’s a super intelligent way to find Toshiba, Dell, Asus, Compaq, Apple, HP, Gateway, Sony and all the top brand laptops on sale right where you are. You don’t have to waste your time or worry about getting angry and someone who promised you something and had no plans of delivering.
Discover Deals. Find gateway laptops on sale and notebooks on sale reviews now.
Article Source: Sony Laptops On Sale – What To Watch Out For
The way a computer deals with time is totally different to the ways humans perceive it. We arrange time into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, while computers on the other hand arrange time as a single number representing the seconds that have passed from a single point in time, known as the prime epoch.
Most computers use NTP (Network Time Protocol) to deal with time and on networks many are synchronised using a dedicated NTP time server. NTP knows nothing about days, years or centuries, only the seconds from the prime epoch. This prime epoch is set (for most systems) at midnight at the turn of the century twentieth century that for a human would be recorded as something like: 00:00 – 01,01,1900.
Computers, however, count time as the number of seconds past this point. If a computer was around in 1900 its timestamp on midnight January 1 would be 0 while in 1972 at the same date the timestamp would be 2,272,060,800, which represents the number of seconds since 1900.
The timestamps restart every 136 years with the next wrap around due in 2036, this has caused uneasiness amongst some who fear a Millennium Bug type scenario, although most doubt such events would occur, however, when a wrap-around of the timestamp does happen an era integer will be added (+1), to allow computers to deal with time spans that cover more than one wrap-around. If computers and NTP need to deal with time that spans before the prime epoch a negative integer is used (for the year 1500 a -3 will be used to represent three cycles of 136 years).
Timestamps are used in virtually every transaction that modern computers are tasked to do such as sending emails, debugging and programming. Because time is linear, a computer knows that each timestamp is always greater than the previous one and therefore computers and NTP find it difficult to deal with inaccuracies in time, particularly when time suddenly appears to go backwards.
This can happen if computers are not synchronised to the same time. If an email is sent to a machine with a slower clock, it appears to the computer to have been received before it has been sent. Lack of synchronisation can serious problems and can even leave a system vulnerable to malicious attacks and even fraud.
Because of this, most computer networks are synchronised to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). UTC is a global timescale and the same for everybody worldwide it is based on the time told by atomic clocks which are highly accurate, neither gaining nor losing a second in millions of years.
Most computer networks use a dedicated NTP time server to receive a UTC time to synchronise their computers too. UTC is available from across the Internet (although unsecured), via the GPS network (Global Positioning System), or by receiving national time and frequency broadcasts via long wave.
NTP synchronises a computer by checking the received UTC time and adding to or holding a computer’s timestamp until it perfectly matches UTC. By using a dedicated NTP time server UTC can be maintained on a network to a few milliseconds of UTC time.
Richard N Williams is a technical author and specialist in atomic clocks, telecommunications, NTP and network time synchronisation helping to develop dedicated NTP clocks. Please visit us for more information about a network time server or other NTP server solutions.
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Article Source: NTP – Understanding Computer Timestamps