Tech-Seeker

Why should I get a document shredder? How much should I spend on a document shredder? What features are available and what is the best document shredder for my type of business? These are some of the questions I will answer for you in this article.

First, why should I have a document shredder for my business or for my own personal use? The answer is easy. Every day more crime relating to stolen or found documents is occurring. Fraud, Identity Theft, Corporate Espionage, Con Games, and Forgery are some of the examples of crime that can happen to anyone, any time.

The information contained in your documents may not seem like the stuff in spy movies, but the threat to you individually as well as to your business exists. Your documents contain a lot of things you take for granted. Sensitive information about upcoming plans, stock options, and other business related material can be a bonus to thieves. Thieves, to steal your identity, can use your personal information like mother’s maiden name, social security number, credit card and pin numbers, birth date and more.

There are many reasons why document security is important. There are other aspects to document security that are important as well, but in this article we will remain on the topic of document shredding.

How much you should spend on a document shredder depends on your business. How many documents you need to shred daily, the size of the documents your business uses, how sensitive the information in the documents is, and more are factors to consider when choosing a document shredder. That little desk model document shredder that you saw at the office supply store might not be adequate to your needs.

The DOD, (Department of Defense), has standards for the destruction of sensitive documents. This is the top of line for document shredders and probably a bit much for your business. I include this information to show you the wide range of document shredders that are available for your own document security.

The largest of these that shreds a high volume of documents into very tiny pieces can run upwards of $20,000. The small ones you see at your office supply store can run as low as $30.

One of the features that create this disparity in cost is durability. How many documents can it shred before needing maintenance or a replacement. One made of plastic parts will not last under heavy use, while one made of durable metal will. Obviously, if your company does not shred but a couple of documents per day, a cheaper document shredder might work for you.

How secure are the documents you will be shredding. Some document shredders only cut the document into strips of varying width, depending on the document shredder you choose. High-tech thieves can piece together uniformly shredded documents. If the information is worthwhile to them, they can retrieve it. If your company really wants to destroy sensitive documents, you need to consider a document shredder that cuts the paper up into bits, rather than just strips. These document shredders are more expensive, but a lot more secure.

Also, some of the better shredders not only shred paper documents, but also CDs, Plastic Film, Key Tape, ID Cards, Video Tapes, Floppy Discs, Microfiche and other classified media. If your company also has sensitive material stored on these other forms of media, you may want to purchase a document shredder that does more.

Dust creation is another factor, especially for those who are shredding a high volume of documents and other material. Some document shredders have an internal vacuum to dispose of dust, so if your business does a high volume of document shredding, you may want to ask about this feature.

Noise is another factor to consider with any size shredder that you plan to purchase. Try before you buy is a good thing to keep in mind. If it is noisy, you will be happy you tried it out before you started using it in your office.

How difficult is it to clear paper jams? How safe is it? Is it easy to put your fingers into the area where the blades are? How easy is it to take apart and clean? These and more are questions you should consider when choosing the document shredder your business will be using.

First multimedia, is mostly referring to software programs that incorporate written info with pictures and sounds to create a very appealing and stimulating “production” if you will. The idea of multimedia production is that the more stimulating something is (i.e. the more senses that you involve) the better the message will get across to the receiver and will “stick.”

There then obvious areas where multimedia production would be very useful including School, job training, fundraising, political campaigns, marketing of any type, museums, art, etc. Basically anyplace that there is any sort of message that the bearer thinks is not only worthwhile pondering but also valuable to remember.

Until now this type of thing was only for the technologically savvy “children of the computer age.” Just like with most other things today however this form of enhanced communication is available via automated tools to the general public. In other words the “children” that understand the technology have created ways for the rest of us to get in on multimedia production without having to go through the pain of learning the intricacies of computer programming of the various media types or the complicated science that goes on behind effective communication.

You might think, wow these are great guys! They are doing something to advance society without expecting to be rewarded with anything but a pat on the back. And…I guess this could be true, but the vast majority of these guys who have developed these multimedia production tools are getting very rich from there sale.

This brings up another useful caution: because people see how popular and profitable it is to develop a multimedia production tool they too want to get in on it. So there are several options too many out there on the market. I say too many because probably half of these products are not worth the couple hundred dollars. On the other hand, if you get a good tool, the investment of 200 to 300 dollars is nothing compared to the amount of money you will be able to generate from the sale of your multimedia product.

So how do you decide? Well, just like anything, go about this important purchase with a touch of cautious and a lot of common sense. Do a lot of research online, in technology magazines, on forums for multimedia production. Look at product ratings on review websites. Talk to friends and other trusted advisors. Look only on pages (or in stores) that are well known and respectable in order to take advantage of the fact that they would not want to tarnish their name by selling an awful product. Lastly take advantage of the common guarantees that allow you to try the product with full refund if not satisfied. Now start looking and have fun!

You might not think about it on the pages of your books, or newspapers, but without the ink, there wouldn’t be anything but blank sheets of paper. Ink can be taken for granted, but its value is beyond question, and sometimes very evident.

The original inks in the dawn of what we know as ‘printing’ were composed of simple elements. Natural products like nut shell oils and the defensive liquid of the squid made useful dyes that were funneled into the old ‘nib’ tips of pens long before the ball-point and felt tip revolutionized handwriting. These days, inks have chemical additives meant to protect the ink from smearing or fading away, as technology aids the printing process. From the gigantic volume of glossy advertising reaching your mailbox, it seems that ink is being poured onto reams of paper each day in vivid, eye-catching combinations, and in recent times people have begun to see ink prices climb.

Did the ancient traders of the natural inks and dyes charge an arm and a leg for those useful fluids? In any case, the problem of affordable ink is growing, particularly since household printers became common. It seems like every house has a printer, but everyone complains of shelling out the money to refill this amazing machine with the simple stuff that it needs to print on paper. The fine machinery of the modern printer is useless without ink.

Owners of these dormant machines have several options. They can buy the new refills, which are sometimes exorbitantly expensive, or they can buy another printer. In a surprising number of cases, people have found new printers at prices below those of ink refill cartridges. This has a lot to do with the complexity of marketing, but it also underscores how important and valuable ink is in printing.

Now some companies have come up with another choice; users can refill the ink cartridge itself at a discounted rate. Dealers apparently buy ink in bulk and dispense it efficiently. New problems of consumer demand necessitate such complexities. Cartridges, for example, are made with built-in sensors that can indicate an empty cartridge before all of the available ink has run out.

Another innovation is soy ink, which is a more natural alternative to petroleum-based inks that aids in the recycling of the printed material. Alternative inks like soy can make the pricing of ink more flexible and give the consumer more choices in a market that has become considerably complex. Gone are the days of standard refill containers and easy office stocking. These days, it pays to consider your choices very carefully when it comes to that crucial liquid packed into a vial, bottle or cartridge. Ink has definitely become a valuable commodity.

Just an innocent question and one that I don’t have any for sure answers to but one that deserves at least some thought. I am thinking them number one because my lovely brother-in-law has me writing these joyous articles for him as his employee and also because electronic parts are one of the most frustrating parts for me of the technology boom that has happened in the last 100 (but way more quickly in the last 30) years.

What frustrates me so much about electronic parts? Well for one thing I don’t understand them and don’t have the power therefore to fix them or to at least know what needs to be fixed, what kind of effort it will be, and maybe most importantly how much it should cost to fix it. It is this way with any system that you don’t understand and it frustrates me to no end because people who do understand can’t be trusted oftentimes and we end up paying for being ignorant.

Electronic parts also have a habit of breaking at the worst times, and the more we rely on them the worse it is when they unreliably quit working properly. They are so unexpected because often they go from working fine to not working at all. There is no way to do preventative maintenance as a result and so you are always blindsided and left stranded especially if it doesn’t happen during convenient business hours.

Another aspect of these frustrating little tools we call electronic parts is that they make the products that we buy that contain them very unreliable from one product to the next. What I am referring to I will try to explain by example. You see right now I am trying to make a wise purchase of a PDA phone and am having trouble as I am getting mixed messages over all on the reviews of the different phones. The problem is that people have such different experiences from one phone to the next in the exact same line and model. This I attribute mainly to the unreliability of the electronic components.

So what are we to do? Well maybe technology should be developed that does give us warning before a part actually fails. Some sort of easy to read meter that gives you a chance to get your car in for a change of the electronic parts are failing. This would make all the difference I believe. The other part of it would be to have more regulation over the parts makers so that they would be forced to produce parts more reliably so that you could be more confident when you buy.

The chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab recently launched the $100 laptop to the world’s media. Is it necessary?

MIT rolled out a non-profit association, called One Laptop Per Child, to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that will be provided to various governments at cost price and issued to children by participating schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based and so energy-efficient that hand cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation.

The internet connectivity question is addressed in a few different ways, including the use of Wi-Fi, WiMax, 3G and satellites, as well as fibre, coaxial cable and plain old telephony. Competition, deregulation and the fact that the developing world is now the only new telecommunications market, will all perhaps contribute to wider reaching availability, greater bandwidth and, most importantly in these countries, lower connectivity costs.

The solution offered is a $100 laptop: a durable, versatile machine at a price the developing world can afford. The fact that this has been achieved is actually a remarkable achievement, the very notion of which until very recently was shunned by industry leaders as impossible.

The strongest argument in favour of this cheap laptop idea rests on the laurel that the greatest assets of a people are its children, and so the highest social priority is on the education of these children. Throughout disease, natural disasters, war and poverty, education features as the primary solution to the problem.

Most educators would argue that effective learning stems from a fundamental level of personal curiosity about a subject, and in a sense the ability to self-teach. The key point here is not so much what each child knows so far, it is rather the perspective that they can bring to bear on a problem. It is well known from case studies that network learning, augmented by technology, computers and Internet connectivity, bears heavy fruit in academic terms.

The economics of a $100 laptop base around the following: Around half the purchase price of a new laptop is taken up by the cost of sales, marketing, distribution, and of course the ever shameless profit-margin. By sidestepping the entire retail market and distributing directly to governments in the absence of profit-driven aims a huge chunk of the price per model is evaporated.

Physically the most expensive aspect would be the display. The use of an MIT technology called E-Ink that offers the potential to be as low as 10 cents per square inch and offer daylight readable clear resolution is promising. The processor, memory and power can be stripped down, as the functionality of the machine need not be so advanced beyond surfing, email and word processing all as open-source, slimmed down software that takes up little computing resources.

It’s now without doubt that the $100 laptop will happen. As to whether it’s a good idea? Everything about says yes, although the sociologists have yet to gather their argument on this one it seems.