One of the more recent crazes on the Internet is online auctions, where people can offer junk, antiques, or collector’s items for sale to anyone who wants to bid on them. But be careful! Besides having to deal with fraudulent bids from people who have no money or intention of buying an item up for auction, consumers have to watch out for con artists selling their own fraudulent items. The simplest con game is to offer an item for auction that does....

Sometimes stealing an entire computer may be too obvious or difficult, but stealing the components inside may be a lot easier. After all, anyone can tell when a computer suddenly disappears from a desk, but who will notice when a computer suddenly loses a hard drive, a video card, an external Zip drive, a trackball, or a memory chip? To stop someone from walking off with an external device, such as an external hard drive or computer speakers, you can glue a ....

In 1994, an incredibly forward-thinking man named Rasmus Lerdorf developed a set of tools that used a parsing engine to interpret a few macros here and there. They were not extravagant: a guest book, a counter, and some other "home page" elements that were cool when the Web was in its infancy. He eventually combined these tools with a form interpretation (FI) package he had written, added some database support, and released what was known as PHP/FI.Then, in the spiri....

Unlock your phone so that it works with all network operators when you travel or switch plans. It is your phone. Take control of it!. If you bought your phone from a mobile operator, chances are very good that it’s locked to the operator’s network. While the phone itself might be compatible with all GSM networks (i.e., a triband phone), it rejects SIM cards from other GSM operators. Locking imposes some ....

Your users might not know that they can use Excel to analyze data from the various databases in your organization. They can use the powerful analytical tools of Excel on data they previously only viewed or edited within the database user interface. Using these features, they can pull data from your customer database, sales tracking database, product catalog, and HR systems into various sheets in a workbook and perform complex pivot table analysis not possible using the separat....