Do you like to travel? Are you on the road constantly for business? Then the Apple iPhone may be the phone of choice for you. The reason for this is that the iPhone has a GPS navigator built into it. If you are always on the go, a navigator is what you need. Fussing with maps and asking for directions is a thing of the past. Nowadays, tech savvy people have a navigation system in their cars. With an iPhone, you always have your navigator with you, no matter who is driving. Travel and your iPhone; it’s a match made in heaven (sort of).

Why would you need a navigator on your cell phone? Anytime you need directions, to a new club perhaps, just tell it where you want to go an viola’ directions are there. Even those of us who are no longer part of the club scene will benefit from having a navigation system with us at all times. You can use this to quickly find directions to the field your kid should be playing on. Perhaps the directions given to a friends party were vague. These are all situations where having a navigations system like the one included with the iPhone comes in very handy. Lost in the desert? (yes it happens) Then you really need the navigation system on your iPhone.

In addition to the navigation system there are other reasons to make sure you have your iPhone with you when you travel. Aside from the fact that you will always have a cell phone with you, another advantage is that all of your entertainment is with you as well. If you are taking a long drive and there is nothing to see but cornfields for the next 400 miles, having movies, eBooks and music to entertain you can be a godsend. With the iPhone, you can take your movies and television shows with you wherever you go. This is another reason for pairing up travel and your iPhone.

Are travel and your iPhone really a good match? Let’s take a look and see. For example, instead of stopping to ask directions, you can get the information that you need right there on your iPhone. The Apple iPhone is right there to help you find your way with the ability to view satellite images of major street names. The iPhone can help you find landmarks and other things that you might be interested in along the way on your trip. It’s like having a navigator right there with you in your car, letting you know what you need to know and getting you where you need to go.

Now that you know why travel and your iPhone make such a good pair, remember to keep this in mind for your next trip. Be sure to load up on plenty of movies, eBooks, TV shows and music. Use your Apple iPhone to plan your travel route. Check the navigation system for points of interest along the way and make sure that you visit some of them. You can even mark the gas station along or near your route so you can plan a fill-up before it becomes an issue. If Apple keeps making features like this built into their cells phone AAA Travel services may get put out of business.

We live in a world where music is our constant companion. We take it with us to the beach, to work, to exercise, even while riding bikes or talking on our cell phones. It only makes sense that in our cars we would like to have the best possible auto sound systems our hard earned dollars can buy. The problem is that new technology is being introduced to the market each and every day and many of us feel as though if we hold our breath just a little bit longer something even better and more spectacular will come along. We know that we will absolutely want to kick ourselves if we buy in to “this or that” company’s auto sound system that was phenomenal yesterday, just before the next great thing hits the market.

The truth is that superior auto sound system technology exists already and the question isn’t if it will hit the market but rather when. And when seems to be a pretty big question when it comes to emerging technologies. There are always so many things that control when the actual product will hit the shelves in stores or even how much supply will be available at that point in time. The really good news for consumers is that if you wait until that point, chances are the prices on the system you like now will probably lower significantly almost overnight.

While the geek in me would love to have the latest and greatest of gadgets at all times, the mom in me knows that the kids will need braces, new shoes for soccer, and (eventually) college tuition. For those reasons, I will continue typing on my sadly outdated eMachine and secretly long for the brand new Dell notebook while listening to the latest tunes on my iPod Shuffle while secretly longing for one of the new iPods, which is capable of playing video. I will live however, and will enjoy watching others play with their new gadget goodies while I learn about them and wait for the prices to drop (just like DVD players a few years back).

I am at least intelligent enough to realize that most of the time it is best not to be the first to buy a new product or an emerging technology. Let someone else take the risks associated with buying an essentially untried product while I sit back and listen to what they have to say. This way I can make an informed decision without bearing the scars associated with testing an untried product.

There are many things I’m willing to sacrifice and many more things I give to my children as guinea pigs. The thing I have noticed quite often with them is that if it can survive a few weeks in their care, it is a pretty safe bet and might even be worth purchasing stock in the company. We all have some things that are more important to us than others and while I love technology there are other things I love more.

Music, however, is a very important part of my life and I do try to keep current with the latest and greatest when it comes to auto sound systems. My favorite at the moment is the Bose. Every piece of this equipment is designed with the idea of making music sound, as it should. You can get the biggest and greatest sound quality from this system without giving up half your trunk or your entire back seat. Bose is one of the more expensive products on the market when it comes to auto sound systems but it is well worth every penny.

When checking out your options for an auto sound system be sure to keep in mind that the most expensive product is not necessarily the best product-no matter what the salesman tells you. By learning as much as possible about all choices you may find that one of the less expensive systems is actually better suited for your auto sound system needs.

If you are one of the many people around the world who happens to be into cars and the new pastime called ‘modding’ I’m sure you have considered the implications of modding your auto sound system. For many the idea of modifying an automobile is very exciting. It’s a way to take the standard canvas purchased from the dealer and turn it into a work of art that you drive to work and play each and every day. The same theory holds for your sound system as well. You can take the basic pieces and parts and turn them into something so much more than they were to begin with.

If that isn’t enough you can purchase all kinds of LED lights and other nifty gadgets that glow and go along with your car while dancing to the beat. If you want to make a splash driving down any boulevard, this is definitely one way to not only be seen but also leave a lasting impression. Your creative genius with your auto sound system will cause quite a stir and give plenty of people much to discuss the next morning and plenty of people a great deal of inspiration to try to mimic or at the very least incorporate into their units somehow.

There are all kinds of sound systems for automobiles. Many of these systems are sold as part of a package and readily available to multiple consumers. You have the option as a creative modding genius, to take the plane Jane package and turn it into something so much better than it is or to even go off on a tangent and invent a total package of your own by mixing and matching pieces and parts from several different packages or pieces of packages.

It doesn’t matter where your creativity ends and begins there is never a challenge too great for a true modder at heart. From cars, trucks, boats, and computers to car stereos there is no task too demanding or too complicated for a true modding mind to tackle and transform. Perhaps it’s the blinking lights or all the wonderful possibilities that abound but auto sound system mods are among my favorite to see in action. It’s amazing the things that can be thought up by a wicked imagination and accomplished with a little time and a lot of effort.

Seriously though, if you are going to go to all the trouble of dressing up your vehicle shouldn’t you also take the time to dress up your auto sound system? There are all kinds of gadgets and gizmos you can buy that will work with the music your speakers are pumping in order to create a fabulous overall affect of music and light that is sure to get some great reactions from those you cruise on by. These are perfect accessories for summer time beach driving if you know what I mean. Growing up on the coast, I found a great section of people who were constantly modifying their cars and sound systems. I think it is incredibly amazing what can be done with metal, glass, color, light, and sound and really enjoy seeing all of the amazing creations that are made.

Even if you haven’t really given much thought to modifying your auto sound system before, I hope that you will consider it now if you are a serious modder. I honestly believe you might amaze yourself at some of the fabulous tricks of sound and light that you can come up with when properly challenged and inspired.

Take the time to check out the interesting things that have been done, and then formulate a hypothesis on what can be done. It is truly amazing the wonderful things that have been created as the result of a glove being thrown so to speak. Jump in and create a fabulously modified sound system that will be the absolute envy of everyone you pass along the way.

Finding auto sound systems that can keep up with the constantly evolving technology of today is a real challenge for many car and sound enthusiasts not only around the nation but also around the world. There was a time in the not so distant past when car stereos that had CD players or CD disc changers where the cutting edge of technology. New technology however has nearly rendered the CD players in cars as obsolete as long forgotten 8-track players. The sad news is that many carmakers are clinging to the old days and only offer something as modern as cassette players as standard equipment for auto sound systems.

I think those days will soon be forgotten, as cassettes are no longer even in mainstream production. You should also find that as CDs are rapidly becoming replaced by MP3s that take up very little space in our cars and homes, one day very soon we may see that music companies have decided it is no longer cost effective to produce CDs and render all music to digital formats. So, what does this mean for auto sound systems? It’s actually good news for savvy manufacturers are well as savvy consumers who have their eyes on the future and the growing role technology is playing in our lives and as well as our commute to work.

We’ve seen a recent introduction of satellite radio to our selection of auto sound systems. These stations offer the allure of no commercial interruptions to your music play in exchange for the price of a monthly subscription. At the moment there are two major companies that offer this service to consumers and each have rather proprietary equipment for their use and installation into your car. They are actually offering some rather tempting offers in order to encourage subscribers. Among those wonderful offers are auto sound systems for your vehicle at less than $100 with a prepaid year of subscription services.

For the satellite radio companies this indicates a constantly growing pool of prospective subscribers and the cost of the equipment is a drop in the bucket when compared to customer loyalty and being on the cutting edge of sound technology. The drawback is that you must decide which service you wish to go with before making the purchase. Also while they offer a very nice auto sound system (bare bones kind of kit that only allows for the radio reception in most cases) at a very sweet price, if you want upgrades such as MP3 compatibility, CD players, CD changers, DVD players, GPS, or any number of other new and advanced technology you will still have to purchase those for your sound system at an upgraded price. There are a few packages that come with these things, but the price is a little on the hefty side. Oh the sacrifices we will make for a more enjoyable daily commute.

Know what your expectations are before you decide to purchase the auto sound system of your dream or you could find that it is more the stuff that nightmares are made of than sweet dreams. Do not live in constant fear that if you buy today you will find something you like better 6 months from now, that is a reality. Technology is growing and evolving at a frightening pace. Find the auto sound system that you like best today and make that your purchase. This is a much better option than waiting around indefinitely and purchasing one just as your warranty expires on your car and it’s time for a trade in and another auto sound system.

BandWidth Explained

Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet.

Network Connectivity

The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet.

If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54).

Traffic

A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.

Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).

If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example, the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person’s file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously, it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to upgrading equipment).

Hosting Bandwidth

In the example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file).

A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo’s home page is about 70KB.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?

It depends (don’t you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis

If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:

[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Let us examine each item in the formula:

Average Daily Visitors – The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views – On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average Page Size – The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.

Average Daily File Downloads – The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.

Average File Size – Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Fudge Factor – A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Summary

Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.