There is no doubt that a Master of Business Administration, or MBA, is more than a feather in your proverbial hat. An MBA opens up doors to greater success and tells employers that you are serious about your career and your own value. Of course, there are usually two rather substantial hurdles to achieving your dreams of an MBA – time and money.

Time
To complete an MBA program, you dedicate yourself to attending classes full-time, or nine to twelve semester hours, for two or three years. If you attend only part-time your program will take much longer. Naturally it would be ideal to attend classes full-time, but to do so, you will most likely have to take a leave of absence or resign your current position. This essentially eliminates your tuition funds.

Money
University tuition is going up. It’s moving faster than inflation and some quality MBA programs cost more than a standard bachelor’s degree. There are grant programs and student loans that can help bridge the gaps and some individuals are lucky enough to have their companies foot the bill. But to take advantage of that option, you must continue working while attending classes and sign a letter of commitment for a specific period of time in order to qualify for partial or full reimbursement. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has taken a very Web 2.0 approach to Halo. Not only is the popular game back for a third installment, it now records and can upload every game for instant replays and sharing. Heavily anticipated by the fans of the first two Halo games, this installment certainly did not disappoint. In fact, sales of the game topped $300 million in the first week.

Halo 3 Reviews
The reviews for the new game have been universally positive. Of course, it is a natural extension from the first and second Halo, but the basic first person shooting game hasn’t lost any of its bloody and action packed charm in this latest edition. The game was well hyped, and most feel that it lived up to its hype and then some.

The graphics in the first two were terrific, and the third installment on the XBox 360 gives the graphics another boost. The game is very heavy on the action, and as you move through the game you are submerged in heavily detailed environments and plotlines. Fortunately, these environments and storylines all are linear and make perfect sense. The story began in the first Halo, continued in the second and now finally has reached a conclusion in the third. Spin-offs are heavily anticipated, but nothing can replace the original action game. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the first individual music sharing case to go to trial ended well for music companies. It didn’t go too well for the defendant however. Jammie Thomas is thirty years old and now owes music companies $222,000 for sharing music. That’s $9250 for each of the 24 songs highlighted in the case. It could have been much worse for Thomas. The companies alleged that she had shared 1,702 songs illegally.

By downloading songs and then sharing them through a Kazaa file sharing account, Thomas broke major copyright laws. For years these laws have been bent and broken by music lovers who didn’t understand the laws or frankly didn’t care. There are currently almost eight million households in the United States that have music sharing programs, despite the illegalities.

Throughout the trial, Thomas claimed that she doesn’t have a Kazaa account and that she had nothing to do with sharing music. She spoke to the press and made points about fighting back against bullying and felt confident that she would win out. Apparently she was wrong.

Her hard drive was never brought to court, but it might not have done much good. According to Thomas she had trouble with the drive and replaced it after the alleged sharing took place. According to record companies, she was sent an instant message alerting her to the copyright laws she was breaking. The hard drive was conveniently replaced the following month. Read the rest of this entry »

Examinations and tests have shown that on average, Wikipedia now rivals Britannica or other “real” encyclopedias in validity. Of course that is a very broad sample of topics, and modern day events and pop culture are not found in Britannica. This means we must rely on the collective common knowledge to give us the information we need to be amused or informed about the most current events in the world around us.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a large wiki – hence the name. It is a large system that collects the knowledge of a large population working under the theory that the collective knowledge of enough people will be correct. To help solidify information, it requires references and annotations of entries.

If I were to add an entry in Wikipedia, you can easily come in behind me and edit that entry. You can change it to whatever you want, but in reality you’ll probably just add a few things I left out or change some wording to make it more concise and valid. Over time, hundreds, or maybe thousands, of visitors and editors will make small changes until the Wikipedia entry reflects a common consensus. If everyone agrees the entry is correct, it most likely is. Read the rest of this entry »

There is growing concern among industry watchdogs that the traffic on various traffic monitors is not completely legitimate. These groups claim that the various ways of measuring traffic not only conflict with each other, but can be flat out wrong.

The high end measurements of traffic patterns and usage are taken the same way as television statistics – through samples. And those samples just aren’t doing a very good job. When you watch television, there are only so many things and channels you can watch. With the internet, the opportunities and activities online are endless.

Traffic monitors such as Netratings and comScore rely on their own versions of sample data to determine traffic patterns and rankings. The websites monitored, often high end sites, often notice that the supposed traffic coming to the site, which determines rankings, does not match their own server records. In many cases the numbers are very different. Read the rest of this entry »

Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet. A site can be beautiful and packed with desirable content, but without visitors, it languishes. For this reason, webmasters monitor their website traffic very carefully. The search patterns and uses of the internet have become more difficult to track, however, so traffic monitoring is beginning to take a different approach.

What is Traffic Monitoring?
The owners of websites want to know who is coming to their websites. Companies monitor the visitors to sites through various methods and pull information from the computers of their visitors. With the right tracking tools, a webmaster can see:

• How a visitor found his site
• How long the visitor stayed on the site
• What pages of the site he viewed
• How long he stayed on the website total
• Where his computer is located
• How many times he’s been to the site. Read the rest of this entry »

For years Internet Explorer dominated other web browsers. It was available on every computer and worked well enough to satisfy the majority of users. Then, independent browsers began to make waves. First Netscape appears and disappeared. Then, after a long uninterrupted stretch, a new browser began to gain market share – Mozilla’s Firefox.

Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer may be the standard, but it had some flaws. Without competition to make it necessary for continuous improvements, the browser became stale. The features didn’t improve much and bugs didn’t get fixed. Windows would freeze and nothing new was announced - until there was a good reason to do so.

Introducing Firefox
Firefox is nothing new really; it’s been around for years. Its popularity has been steadily increasing through this time until it’s not only popular with techie geeks, but with casual internet users. Until the latest release of Internet Explorer, Firefox had a few features that really made it stand out. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging is becoming a major internet medium not only for those who enjoy sharing their personal thoughts and experiences, but for internet marketers seeking to establish additional internet presence. As the blogging becomes more prevalent, bloggers are faced with a decision: Should they be blogging on Wordpress or Blogger?

Blogger
Blogger is a blog setup and hosted by the website Blogger.com. It has somewhat limited options as far as plug-ins and designs, but is very easy to get up and running. It is also free to get started as all you need is internet access. There are no domains to purchase, no hosting fees to pay and no site to create. Open an account and get started blogging – it’s simple.

Of course using Blogger is more limiting than other choices, including Wordpress. There are tradeoffs for the simplicity and ease of use and the shortcomings are in design and professionalism. Blogger is great for casual users, but is lacking the professional feel many seek or need. Read the rest of this entry »

IT outsourcing became more widespread as more and more businesses began looking for ways to cut costs. Many businesses considered IT – internet technology – to be outside their core competency, which eased the decision to let someone else do it. What does the IT outsourcing landscape look like today?

According to News.com, the top three IT outsourcing companies in the world are IBM, EDS, and Computer Sciences Corp., all U.S. based companies with operations and service centers all over the world.

Leading Outsourcing Countries

India is still the country of choice for many businesses outsourcing their IT operations. CIO.com reports a tenfold growth in India’s IT outsourcing industry over the past 10 years. And even though its share of the industry is decreasing because of increased competition from countries like China and Russia, India’s outsourcing industry continues to grow.

Some of the same issues still linger, high turnover rates and culture barriers can make work difficult.

As wages increase in India, many companies are looking toward other less-expensive countries for software development and maintenance. Brazil is one of them. Another benefit of doing business in South America is location. It’s close to the U.S. both in terms of geography and in time. Even the larger outsourcing firms are moving to Brazil. IBM has its infrastructure hub in a city outside Sao Paolo. Read the rest of this entry »

Education is an integral part of the lives of people in the present age. It is responsible for making or breaking the careers of minds around the world. Compared to the fifties, there are diverse modes of education today. Technological advancements and other magnanimous inventions offer several comfortable techniques of learning. The latest issue raised amongst the masses is that of the distance learning education and online degrees.

Evolution of Online Degrees

Online degree education is soon prevailing over the conventional high school and secondary education. There are a lot of big companies that create online degrees and present them to all classes of learners. Normally, these companies will direct the courses and the materials required for them. Talking about the inception of online degrees, it has been legally acceptable since the early nineties and has become a well-admired way of teaching students of all ages and cultures. With the popularity and the ease of Internet availability, online degree education has also become well liked over the period of years. There are scores of unlimited sources on the Internet that facilitate online learning.

There are a lot of debates over online education and there are mixed views about the subject. Obviously, it has its own advantages and disadvantages. Read the rest of this entry »