AOpen has announced its new "Pandora" mini PC. This ultra-small-form-factor PC should look very familiar to anyone who recognizes Apple's Mac Mini:

Separated at Birth? AOpen's Pandora (left) and Apple's Mac Mini
(right)
AOpen has announced its new "Pandora" mini PC. This ultra-small-form-factor PC should look very familiar to anyone who recognizes Apple's Mac Mini:

Separated at Birth? AOpen's Pandora (left) and Apple's Mac Mini
(right)
I've been a fan of Gwen Stefani's and No Doubt's for some time.
I have a weakness for women whose voices sound sort of sweet and
innocent but who are willing to sing strong lyrics with a bit of an edge
to them. Juliana Hatfield (of solo and Blake Babies fame) is
another such artist. Thus, when I saw that
"Love.Angel.Music.Baby." had come out, I was immediately
interested in it. After listening to it a few times, I've come to
a couple of conclusions about it.
As I suspected when I reported it
yesterday, Apple's iPod Nano indeed has a quality problem.
Earlier today, Apple admitted that a "vendor
quality issue" caused the cracked screens that many iPod Nano
customers are seeing. As a result, they've agreed to replace
broken units. What I wonder is whether they'd have done this
without the bad press they've gotten over it.
Undaunted by my lack of success in getting a free iPod (so far), I've decided to pursue getting a free Sony PlayStation Portable from the http://www.internetopiniongroup.com/ site. I'll keep a running log here of what transpires along the the way in this article. If you're not interested in a free PSP, the same site also offers the Motorola i833 phone, Nintendo DS, Apple iBook, Motorola Razr V3 phone, and Philips 20" LCD TV. (No, I don't get any referral bonuses if you sign up.)






























(There are updates for 9/21 and 9/22/05 that appear after the graphs and charts on this page. Don't miss them, because they help wrap this little project up...)
Last Thursday I was
running a compile of an open source package on a 933 MHz Macintosh G4
running Mac OS X 10.4.2 with all of Apple's latest patches and
updates. The compilation seemed to be going more slowly than I
expected, so I wondered if it was really using all of the available
CPU. I brought up the Activity Monitor and saw THIS:
World Clock was consuming over 46% of my CPU?! That seemed very wrong
to me, since World Clock does nothing more than display the current time
somewhere on Earth. Why would it need 46% of my CPU to do
that? I figured maybe the process had been corrupted by a power
outage or some other problem. I used Activity Monitor to stop the
process, which restarted itself automatically.
These days, "content protection" is all the rage in the music and movie industries. It's understandable that they want to prevent consumers from illegally duplicating products that they've spent millions of dollars to produce. I respect their reasons for doing it, but I don't like Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies in general. Most have significant limitations that make the content far less desirable than it would be without the DRM protection on it.
Case in point, music CDs. Most days I walk around with a Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 player attached to my belt. I use it to listen to audiobooks, the Bob and Tom radio show, a gaming podcast from the Columbus Dispatch, and various other audio content. That player doesn't play CDs. So if I buy a music CD, I'm more likely to be playing it on the MP3 player or the PC than anywhere else. For those uses, an MP3 file is the perfect format for my music to be in. My car has an MP3 player in it, I carry the Nomad around with me to play music outside the car, and MP3 is an efficient format for storing audio on the computer (yes, I know there are others and some are better than MP3). If I can't "rip" my music CDs to MP3s, they're next-to-useless for me because I can't put them on the MP3 player and I often have other uses for the optical drive on my computer (e.g., game CDs).
The band Switchfoot recently released an album
through Sony. Sony, by default, uses a DRM product to prevent
casual copying of its music CDs. This DRM system prevents the disc
from being ripped into MP3 files. The band didn't like that, and
their fans had a real problem with it, too. So, unlike much of the
media industry, they actually gave their fans some solutions for ripping
the DRM-protected discs to MP3s. (See http://forums1.sonymusic.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/716102313/m/5201067064 for
Switchfoot's write-up.)
As part of the research I've been doing into how easy it could be for a Mac OS X user to switch to Linux, I decided to load one of the more popular UNIX distributions and familiarize myself with it. I didn't want to dedicate an entire PC to Linux, so setting up a virtual machine in which to test Linux seemed the right approach.
What is virtual machine software? That's hard to explain, but I'll give it a shot. Virtual machine software "pretends" to be a complete computer, only it's software rather than hardware. A good virtual machine program will allow an entire operating system to run inside it, with that operating system completely unaware that it isn't running inside its own PC. There are many uses for virtual machine software, including testing and debugging operating systems, performing security testing ("honeypots" to attract viruses/worms, for example), and testing software with multiple operating systems without having to devote an entire PC to one OS. In this case, having virtual machine software will allow me to run Linux on a Windows XP Pro system without disturbing my Windows installation. Linux will be there when I want it or need it. All I have to do is launch the virtual machine.
If you're not familiar with ReactOS and you are involved in the use or support of Microsoft Windows, you should take a moment to learn about it. ReactOS is a serious competitor to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as a desktop OS. Or rather, it will be someday.
As part of my ongoing research into how easy it would be for an artist to move from the Mac OS X platform to Linux, I decided to take a look at the open source Inkscape application and compare it to a popular Macintosh drawing program, Macromedia FreeHand. In a prior job, and as a side business some years ago, I used FreeHand pretty regularly to create graphics. With FreeHand as my standard (I had tried Adobe Illustrator back in those days and found it very non-intuitive to use), I determined to find out if I could find any serious deficiencies in Inkscape that would make it unsuitable for a former FreeHand user to work with.
In the last article in this series, we took a closer look at search engines. We saw how they find sites to spider, saw how our web site looks to a search engine spider, and talked about how search engines classify pages using keywords and keyphrases. This installment will talk about how search engines decide which pages should be listed first in their results, why others get listed later, and why some get banned or blocked altogether.
In the first
article in this series, we saw how search engines work. They have
'spiders? which crawl the web looking for pages to store in a database,
a 'search page? that people use to find web pages of interest, and a
'search engine? that helps translate what people ask for into a list of
pages that seem to be most relevant. The process looks like this:

But there is a lot more to the 'search engine? block in this diagram than there is to any other part of the overall search engine system. As a webmaster, you should be asking yourself several questions about the search engine at this point:
How does the search engine find a site to spider? (?How do I get my site listed??)
What does my web site look like to a spider? (?Is the design of my site preventing spiders from finding my content??)
Once the search engine has found a site, how does it know what the pages on that site are about? (?How can I help the search engine figure out what my site is all about??)
How does the search engine determine which pages to place at the top of the list and why? (?How can I move my site farther up the list??)
What is 'search Engine Spam?? (?How do I avoid looking like Search Engine Spam to a spider??)
We'll be discussing the answers to some of these questions in this article. The rest will be covered in future articles in this series.
This article is intended to be the first in a
series of articles on this web site about search engines, optimizing
your site for search engines, improving your site ranking, etc. It
explains at a high level what a search engine is, what it does, and how
it does it. This provides the basis for future
discussions.
The World Wide Web contains many millions of web sites. Those web
sites contain tens or hundreds of individual pages of content
(information). If there was no such thing as a search engine, finding
the page or pages you want out of the millions available would be at
best a difficult and problematic exercise, and at worst, frustrating and
impossible. This is the void that search engines fill in the Internet.
You can tell a search engine that you?re interested in ?Ancient burial
masks? and it will try to find pages from the millions available that
talk about that subject. It will then give you a list of what it found
and let you decide which ones might be helpful to you.