Windows 8.1 continues the evolution of the most radical redesign in Microsoft's history. It combines the familiar Windows desktop with a new, touchscreen-friendly world of tiles and full-screen apps. Luckily, David Pogue is back to help you make sense of it?with humor, authority, and 500 illustrations. The important stuff you need to know: What's new in 8.1. The update to 8.1 offers new apps, a universal Search, the return of the Start menu, and several zillion other nips and tucks. New features. Storage Spaces, Windows To Go, File Histories?if Microsoft wrote it, this book covers it. Security. Protect your PC from viruses, spyware, spam, sick hard drives, and out-of-control kids. The network. HomeGroups, connecting from the road, mail, Web, music streaming among PCs?this book has your network covered. The software. Media Center, Photo Gallery, Internet Explorer, speech recognition?this one authoritative, witty guide makes it all crystal clear. It's the book that should have been in the box.

Schwartz explores spam--unwanted e-mail messages and inappropriate news articles--and what users can do to prevent it, stop it, or even outlaw it. "Stopping Spam" provides information of use to individual users (who don't want to be bothered by spam) and to system, news, mail, and network administrators (who are responsible for minimizing spam problems within their organizations or service providers).

Everything that makes Will Self's fiction so arresting and original is in evidence here in this collection of his best articles, book reviews and interviews from the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent, the Evening Standard and many more. Whether describing penis operations, narcotics or merely pondering the nature of slacking, these pieces are as witty and acerbic as one would expect from one of our foremost contemporary satirists.

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

It all started with a sexy selfie. Texted to the wrong number. Oops. Not my finest moment—but I have nothing to be ashamed of. She thought I was no better, and I quote, than the knuckle-dragging douche-bags she was never dating again. It was a stupid dare from a girl I’d met online, but since she’d given me a fake number, I didn’t feel bad that my interests were suddenly focused elsewhere—on the fiery and sharp-tongued, Peyton that I found myself sparring with over text for the rest of the evening. The following day, my case of mistaken identity came back to bite me in the banana. When I strolled into the office, I was introduced to Peyton as the new client I needed to win over. The Peyton , in case you're not tracking. And let’s just say she had my full attention. Brains? Check. Beauty? Oh yeah. And the best part? She hated me on sight. Dear God, do I love a challenge. Let the games begin.

In the computer science industry, high levels of performance remain the focal point in software engineering. This quest has made current systems exceedingly complex, as practitioners strive to discover novel approaches to increase the capabilities of modern computer structures. A prevalent area of research in recent years is scalable transaction processing and its usage in large databases and cloud computing. Despite its popularity, there remains a need for significant research in the understanding of scalability and its performance within distributed databases. Handling Priority Inversion in Time-Constrained Distributed Databases provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of database transaction processing frameworks and improving their performance using modern technologies and algorithms. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as consistency mechanisms, real-time systems, and replica management, this book is ideally designed for IT professionals, computing specialists, developers, researchers, data engineers, executives, academics, and students seeking research on current trends and developments in distributed computing and databases.

Educate readers about the risks that go hand-in-hand with having an email account. Tips on making up secure passwords, recognizing spam, and more abound. Learn what steps people can take to protect themselves from phishing, hackers, and other email threats. An indispensible resource for today’s world.