Interesting Computer News!!

Can games be Olympic sports?

Recently, E-Sports (Electric Sports) are focused on as sports. China designated them as 99th official athletic contest and is considering to adopt them as matches of Beijing Olympic. E-Sports are the games which can compete in the online, and they are certified as kinds of sports. There are some countries that hold the big competitions of E-Sports.

You Can Watch 1Seg in Macs!!

Icube Marketing Japan published to sell “ON TIME TV for Mac” in February 8 2007, and it was begun to sell in February 23. It has a simple form of USB connection, and what you must do to watch TV is only to insert “ONTIME TV for Mac” to USB port, so you can watch terrestrial digital broadcast easily. Now the price is about ¥12,000〜15,000.

Interesting Web Sithes!!

Here are the web sites that I recommend you!!

NBA <http://www.nba.com/>
This is the official web site of NBA. I love basketball, so I often watch and check it to get new information. Yesterday the NBA All Star Game was held at University of Nevada, Las Vegas; therefore, now it is the hottest topic in this site. You can know about teams, players, the results of games, and so on.

The California State University <http://www.calstate.edu/>
If you consider to go to the United States from other countries and to study there, California must be one of the good places for international students. This is the official web page of the California State University. You can go to each campus’ web page, and you can look for useful information about the university.

Illusion Forum <http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/IllusionForum/index2.html>
This is the web site of visual and auditory illusion. You can know the possible theories explaining why such illusions happen, and you can see or hear many interesting illusions. This site has both English and Japanese explanations.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is to catch people off logical guard and get secret information. It is also called “social work.” As a computer term, social engineering means to get a password of a computer and then to invade the computer unfairly without mischief to the computer.
There are some ways to get such information: to watch a screen of input of the password when a person keys it, to watch a piece of paper a password is written and to note it, or to guess passwords from the records with unfair software which memorizes the input of the keyboards.
Nowadays social engineering is used not only for passwords but for the numbers of credit cards or fraud. For example, a fraud pretends to be a police officer and asks a person his numbers of credit card to identify whether the card which is stolen is him or not. Another example is that a fraud pretends to be a family member and to force to pay the money into his account.
Therefore, to pay attention such fraud and to keep the secret of credit cards are important to duck it.

What I Know about Apple Computers (Macintosh)!!

Macs (Macintoshes) were the first computers which used GUI (Graphic User Interface) and made by Apple Computer Inc. in 1984. Through Macs and Apple Computer Inc., people became to use computer easily. It’s because before the Macs were sold, people had to memorize computer words and type them to use past computers; however, when people used the Macs with GUI and a mice, icons appeared on the scene, and if an user clicked them, the user could use the programs.
Although Macs were the first computers with GUI, today about or less than five percent of people use Macs due to distribution of Windows. On the other hand, there are advantages to use the Mac. First, Macs are more stylish and easy to use, especially for graphics and making movies. Second, because the share is only several percentages, there are few viruses. Third, the supports for Macs are better. In addition, recently, Mactel computers are produced. Before 2006, Macs used IBM CPUs ad their platforms, but they changed to Intel which has been used in Windows. As a result, nowadays we can run Windows in Macs.