Thursday, January 10, 2008

Computer Games Controversy

A personal computer game (also known as a computer game or simply PC game) is a video game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine. Computer games have evolved from the simple graphics and gameplay of early titles like Spacewar, to a wide range of more visually advanced titles.

Computer games
have long been a source of controversy, particularly related to the violence that has become commonly associated with video gaming in general. The debate surrounds the influence of objectionable content on the social development of minors, with organizations such as the American Psychological Association concluding that video game violence increases children's aggression, a concern that prompted a further investigation by the Center for Disease Control in September 2006. Industry groups have responded by noting the responsibility of parents in governing their children's activities, while attempts in the United States to control the sale of objectionable games have generally been found unconstitutional. Video game addiction is another cultural aspect of gaming to draw criticism, as it can have a negative influence on health and on social relations and in the most extreme cases has led to death as a result of prolonged gameplay. The problem of addiction and its health risks seems to have grown with the rise of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs).

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, a business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. It is seen as a key performance indicator within business and is part of the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard. In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers; customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator and increasingly has become a key element of business strategy.

Organizations are increasingly interested in retaining existing customers while targeting non-customers; measuring customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing products and/or services to the marketplace.

Customer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables, which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary depending on other options the customer may have and other products against which the customer can compare the organization's products.

Because satisfaction is basically a psychological state, care should be taken in the effort of quantitative measurement, although a large quantity of research in this area has recently been developed. The ten domains of satisfaction include: Quality, Value, Timeliness, Efficiency, Ease of Access, Environment, Inter-departmental Teamwork, Front line Service Behaviors, Commitment to the Customer and Innovation. These factors are emphasized for continuous improvement and organizational change measurement and are most often utilized to develop the architecture for satisfaction measurement as an integrated model.

The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey with a set of statements using a Likert Technique or scale. The customer is asked to evaluate each statement and in term of their perception and expectation of the performance of the organization being measured.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Quality Of Life

The well being or quality of life of a population is an important concern in economics and political science. It is measured by many social and economic factors. A large part is standard of living, the amount of money and access to goods and services that a person has; these numbers are fairly easily measured. Others like freedom, happiness, art, environmental health, and innovation are far harder to measure. This has created an inevitable imbalance as programs and policies are created to fit the easily available economic numbers while ignoring the other measures that are very difficult to plan for or assess. Debate on quality of life is millennia-old, with Aristotle giving it much thought in his Nicomachean Ethics and eventually settling on the notion of eudemonia, a Greek term often translated as happiness, as central. The neologism liveability (or livability), from the adjective live able, is an abstract noun now often applied to the built environment or a town or city, meaning its contribution to the quality of life of inhabitants.

Understanding quality of life is today particularly important in health care, where monetary measures do not readily apply. Decisions on what research or treatments to invest the most in are closely related to their effect on a patient's quality of life. Organizational well-being looks at related factors from a corporate perspective, although this agenda is also informed by the employers' duty-of-care and external drivers. Organizational well-being looks at well-being issues that affect a company's staff and manages them to drive change and improve performance

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Security Measures Of Computer Insecurity

A state of computer "security" is the conceptual ideal, attained by the use of the three processes:
  • Prevention,
  • Detection, and
  • Response.
  • User account access controls and cryptography can protect systems files and data, respectively.
  • Firewalls are by far the most common prevention systems from a network security perspective as they can (if properly configured) shield access to internal network services, and block certain kinds of attacks through packet filtering.
  • Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS's) are designed to detect network attacks in progress and assist in post-attack forensics, while audit trails and logs serve a similar function for individual systems.
  • "Response" is necessarily defined by the assessed security requirements of an individual system and may cover the range from simple upgrade of protections to notification of legal authorities, counter-attacks, and the like. In some special cases, a complete destruction of the compromised system is favored.
Today, computer security comprises mainly "preventive" measures, like firewalls or an Exit Procedure. A firewall can be defined as a way of filtering network data between a host or a network and another network, such as the Internet, and is normally implemented as software running on the machine, hooking into the network stack (or, in the case of most UNIX-based operating systems such as Linux, built into the operating system kernel) to provide real-time filtering and blocking. Another implementation is a so-called physical firewall, which consists of a separate machine filtering network traffic. Firewalls are common amongst machines that are permanently connected to the Internet (though not universal, as demonstrated by the large numbers of machines "cracked" by worms like the Code Red worm which would have been protected by a properly-configured firewall). However, relatively few organizations maintain computer systems with effective detection systems, and fewer still have organized response mechanisms in place.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Tips to Choose the Right Roommate

Let me share some tips to choose a roommate for those who are living in Philadelphia Apartments. It is pleasures to see someone’s face that we wants to see every day in the morning and last at night. One can select such roommate using some of these tips I mention here:
  • Choose a roommate who is roughly as clean or as messy as you are. Because neat goes with neat, and messy goes with messy.
  • Do not choose a person for likeability but select for his/her compatibility. Friends may not always become the best roommates. You see your friends on a limited basis; so neither of you has to deal regularly with each other's habits. This would change once you became roommates, and your friendship could be strained as a result.
  • Choose the one who can discuss with you in financial matters. Because, the common aspects of splits between roommates arises by financial matters.
  • Have clear preferences on inviting friends over. If you don’t like having your roommate's friends over all the time or letting friends sleep on the couch, it will be a source of tension.
  • Discuss on how late or early you go to bed and how sound of a sleeper you are. Do you mind it if your roommate talking loudly late in the night? Do you mind having an early-to-bed roommate who always shouting to turn down lights, TV?
Make sure you're especially honest about your lifestyle preferences when discussing rooming with a friend.