The laptop, after all, was designed to be moved around. That’s the point of something small, which folds up into a tough case and can be carried lightly. Your home internet connection isn’t going to cut it when you’re on a train 200 miles away from your house!

There are plenty of mobile broadband options to choose from. I use AT&T internet but they’re not the only provider – all the major mobile phone companies deliver similar packages, so it’s as much about finding someone who has the right coverage in your area as it is about remaining loyal to a particular brand.

Coverage is all important for the speed of your mobile Internet device. I work in a variety of locations in my local area, which is unhelpfully surrounded by hills and is around 90 miles from the nearest population centre (idyllic, but annoying for internet speeds!). My At&T internet connection is useful (as a mobile device that is) because the AT&T coverage in the area is strong enough to pick up a good speed. There are some communications providers whose transmitters hardly reach my village at all, so buying ne of their mobile internet devices would have been a very good way to spend useless money on a piece of plastic that doesn’t do anything.

The mobile internet device works in exactly the same way as your home devices – just using mobile signals instead of the landline signal that is piped into your modem. Even wireless home internet uses a modem – the wireless router is plugged into the landline infrastructure by way of a cable modem. The mobile device plugs into your chosen mobile network using a SIM card – exactly the same kind as the one in your ‘phone, only this one is specifically registered to give you Internet access.

Like all connectivity packages, whether you use AT&T internet or the provider whose signal is best in your area, what you pay equals what you get in terms of monthly downloads and uploads. The more you pay, the more data you can deal with on a daily basis.

Choosing the mobile connector that is right for you, then, is about finding the right deal as well as the right supplier. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with good coverage from all the mobile networks, you’ll be able to shop around to find the best deal for your budget. You should be able to specify a 4G device if you are buying a new contract right now – certainly the latest AT&T internet mobile device is set up to receive at 4G speeds where available already.

The way in which you consume the Internet ultimately dictates whether or not you actually need a mobile device. If you don’t work on the go, you don’t really need one – your phone probably does all the surfing you need when you’re out and about. Unless you have a yen to download movies wherever you end up of course!

Online backup is great because it automates the old-fashioned manual daily process of having to transfer data over to DVDs, tapes or portable hard drives before trucking them off-site. This automation not only frees up time for IT workers, but it also eliminates many of the leading causes of data disasters such as human error or mechanical defects.

But even online backup wasn’t perfect.

For years, 2 of the biggest problems plaguing the backup industry had been “Data Loss Windows” and “Recovery Speeds”. And although online backup offered the convenience and productivity benefits of automation, it was a long time before this industry actually began to actively address these more serious business problems.

Data Loss Windows

Data loss windows have always been a challenge because scheduled end-of-day backups, although fairly comprehensive, always placed about 24 hours worth of data at risk. This is further compounded by the fact that recent data is usually much more critical than older data. (A Word document from this morning will probably be more important than a PowerPoint file from 3 weeks ago.)

As a way of minimizing the amount of data that could be lost in an emergency, online backup providers began increasing the frequency of their incremental uploads thought the day. Today, it’s not uncommon to find solutions that offer “Continuous Data Protection” where file changes are uploaded to the backup server every time someone hits the Save button.

This continuous backup methodology is now fairly standard amongst online backup providers, since it reduces the potential data loss window down to just a few minutes.

Recovery Speeds

The other big challenge has always been the time required in order to resume operations after a crash. According to a recent study, the average time to get back up and running after an outage is about 4 hours.

If this outage takes place within business hours, 4 hours of downtime can be very expensive. And for companies that operate in a 24-hour business environment, this downtime can also have more serious consequences.

One obvious solution would be to set up multiple redundant systems. That way, if one server goes down, the other units can take over without interruption. This is the logic behind “high availability” systems that instantly switch over to a temporary failover facility in the event of a disaster.

Although this is an excellent solution to the problem, it does have one major downside: cost

For smaller companies with limited budgets, these temporary failover facilities might not be economically feasible. One of the leading proposed solutions to this problem is “Rapid Recovery” technology.

Rapid Recovery is different from traditional online backup in the same way that music CDs are different from cassette tapes. Instead of downloading your recovery data in sequential batches, Rapid Recovery allows for fully-automated random access to your data while the recovery download is taking place.

This means you can begin using your server again within minutes of starting your recovery download. If an application requests data that hasn’t yet been transferred, those packets get prioritized and moved to the front of the line.

Although this technology is still fairly new, it’s quickly gaining in popularity and should be much more common in years to come.

Where to from here?

Now that online backup has solved 2 of the biggest data protection challenges for business (Data Loss Windows and Recovery Speeds), the next logical step would be to tackle other strategic business problems such as application integration, granularity and regulatory compliance.

Although a lot of our data is stored as simple “flat files”, it’s easy to forget how much critical business information is kept on databases like SQL, email systems like Exchange, or enterprise systems like SharePoint.

And this isn’t just restricted to businesses. New consumer applications such as social media, mobile technology and the growing popularity of desktop Linux will certainly push advancement in the development of new niche online backup services.

Online backup has changed a lot over the years, and it’s now reaching an exciting point in its evolution where we should begin to see this technology being applied in many new ways. The best is yet to come.

About The Author:

Storagepipe Solutions is a provider of online backup services that also helps other companies develop and launch their own backup software.

Recently a wave of new browsers appeared on the scene, and now that some time has passed for the dust to settle it’s time to see where we stand. At a glance, we break down the pros and cons of each browser and help you choose the best one.

Google Chrome

Pros:

It’s been called minimalist, and it’s not hard to see why. Chrome features a very clean design and works to maximize your screen real estate. The OmniBar acts as both an address bar and a search bar, potentially saving you precious clicks. Chrome uses independent tab management, meaning that each tab is its own process, and the result is that if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down. In what might be the most important stat, it’s also the fastest of the three at loading webpages.

Cons:

The only stat that kept us from calling the last one the most important hands down happens to be the one Chrome fares worst in – extensions. There are, oh, just about NONE, although in theory some will be developed eventually. One example of how the lack of extensions hurts Chrome is that its native rss handling leaves something to be desired, but unlike the other two browsers there’s no easy plug-in, add-on or extension to solve the problem. Yet. (If you’re looking for something else to complain about, don’t forget that Chrome’s data collection sends your info into the deep, dark depths of Google’s datavault.

Mozilla Firefox 3

Pros: Here, extensions are king. There are probably more extras for Firefox than you can count, and they’ve been developed and refined over the course of many years. Really, seriously, the browser was designed for this, and along with tabbed browsing, extensions are Firefox’s gift to the browsing world. Firefox also loads up webpages at a good clip, but if it’s not quite as fast as Chrome we’ll still call load time a pro since starting with version 3.1 they’ll be using a new JavaScript engine (Tracemonkey) that is actually much faster than Chrome’s (V8), which should help balance things.

Cons: The address bar and search bar are separate with Firefox, potentially adding clicks, as Firefox’s address bar has only a word-wheeling history searcher (Chrome and IE present internet search options as well). Firefox also eats up more of your memory and takes longer to load than Chrome, although it still beats IE by a good margin. As far as stability, Firefox uses group tab handling, which means if one tab goes down they all go down. There is also no way to browse privately, which Chrome (Incognito) and IE (InPrivate) both can do easily.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (Beta)

Pros: It seems like ever since Firefox emerged as a legitimate challenger to Internet Explorer, the browser has been playing catchup. One way in which it has caught up quite a bit is with extensions, and there is now a large gallery of choices for IE users to pick from. The address bar is like Chrome’s, but there is still a separate search bar too if that’s somehow easier for you. Unfortunately it defeats the purpose of saving real estate for other things, but maybe it’ll still save you a click and at least it won’t frighten you with change. As always, the biggest pro with IE is that the vast majority of web users browse with it, which means designers and developers will cater heavily to it.

Cons: IE absolutely devours your memory compared to Firefox or Chrome, and is slower to load pages too. On a fast machine the difference is small, but in particular on older machines the contrast shows. We mentioned the address bar as a loose pro, and to balance it out we’ll mention the tab architecture as a loose con. IE uses a degree of individual tab handling, but manages to retain enough overlap that if there is a crash on one tab the whole browser could still be threatened.

Conclusion: On a fast machine in ideal conditions all three browsers work well, but there is a clear divide between these browsers in terms of focus. Chrome is ideal for light tasks, with a clean and simple interface and a better speed for booting up and loading webpages. Firefox is ideal for more complex tasks, sacrificing a little speed to be able to handle extensions and working better with JavaScript. Internet Explorer, although much improved, is still just for the multitudes either not savvy enough or unable to change their browser, as it is equal in the best circumstances and inferior in all the others. In the end, you just need to decide which pros are best for you.

I recently logged into my Orkut account and accepted a friend request that I had received. Upon accepting the request I gave that person’s profile a visit but there was something unusual about that profile.

The profile had a totally different look which contrasted the default Orkut look. The above screenshot is what the profile looked like. While I explored the profile a bit, I came across a ‘get this theme‘ link on the top. Upon clicking that link, I got directed to a themes page which had some themes displayed. There were 12 themes on that page and among those, 7 were ready to be chosen and others had the coming soon tag. Beach, Country side, Spring time, Winter, JR – the friendly giant were some of the themes available. All of these carried a good design and were a nice replacement for the default interface.

But I couldn’t understand this theme-thing completely. While these worked perfectly with one profile, I couldn’t get them to change another profile’s look. When I visited my skinned profile from another account, I couldn’t see any change and neither could I find any ‘get this theme’ link. Contrary to this, my skinned profile showed everything correctly and was carrying the theme pretty well.

Maybe the Orkut team is upto adding this feature to user profiles but it’s not ready yet. I don’t know wether this feature is available to some users or users of any specific country like happened in the case of ‘Orkut Applications’, which were initially available to people residing in Estonia. Some people might have experienced this thing but it’s surely not available publicly. Did you encounter something of this sort ?