Entries Tagged 'Miscellanea' ↓

I think I read somewhere something about Google being able to recognize mouse clicking patterns of individuals (don’t know how true it was. Combine that with an emotionally aware computer and you might have the beginning of a techno-thriller.

“Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you something, a future where mobile phones, cars and Web sites could read our mind and react to our moods,” he added.

Coming soon — mind-reading computers

Author: Jaime steward

I don’t know about you. But I’m getting sick of people that don’t clean forwarded email before they send them.

I get all kind of forwarded email from friends and family that has been forwarded. Everybody’s email is prone to spam because it’s right there in the to: line. Then when you open the email in the body of the message there is other people’s email from the previous person and so on.

So Congress enacted the Can-spam act. It says that the senders address and a way to contact them to remove you from the list somewhere in the email. It’s absurd when they enacted something like this when people email’s are open to be spamed.

Here are some ways to curb Spam or at lease be able to complain about spam. Otherwise don’t complain and have congress enact absurd law like the can spam act.

When you forward email go into the email body and copy the email and paste it in a new email minus the people’s email’s Instead of just hitting the forward button on your email program.

Go into your address book and make a new contact as Undisclosed recipient and then associated your email address with that contact name. Save that entry to your address book.

So next time you want to send one email to numerous people in your address book. Do this

Go into your address book. Select Undisclosed recipient from the list. Put that in your To: field. With that done, go back into your address book and select people from your list and put them in the Bcc: field of your email. When people receive email it will show this.

To:Undisclosed recipient or your email address depending again on your email program. Subject: whatever you want Bcc: Nothing It won’t show up. Even when the full header is viewed

It serves two purposes. One people’s email address are out in the open and two. The recipient doesn’t know who you sent the email nor should it be their business.

About the author: Involved in Isp+income builder program $14.90/month Http://www.bestispperiod.com

Author: Ieuan Dolby

The World Wide Web was an enormous step for mankind, a step not seen since Neil Armstrong sullied the surface of the moon. The idea behind the WWW came across as a veritable information highway where documents, data and info could be rapidly sent and accessed by millions the world over. The potential behind the web is enormous and even now the scope is not fully utilized. The possibilities for growth, for extended usage, are available and enormous yet the system is stagnating and it is very possible that people will soon turn away. The average person seeking information may well return to old-fashioned libraries and the good old book to find the information that they require if the face and image of the WWW is not altered very soon and in-line with customer demand.

The ability of any user to gain information from the Internet is enormous, simple and with positive results. But the information received is increasingly becoming that which a paying body prescribes and thus is advertisement biased or pointed towards the end purchase of a product. Hotels advertise a city or holiday resort with the point of view of potential tourists coming to stay. A detailed description of moon cakes in Taiwan although complete and detailed would certainly be with aim to make people buy some from the store hosting the website involved.

Initially the Internet was heralded as a one-stop point for gaining any type or form of information with the click of the mouse. This is certainly true except with regard to loose information that has no affiliation towards an end purchase or a users change of heart. Certainly this type of information is available and millions of websites exist but unless a user has prior information on how to access this site then the chance of it being found amongst the masses is minimal. Most web users find or locate information by using a search engine. Most web users input their request and wait for results to come up as prescribed and ordered by the search engine system. If for example a request was entered for “travel tales on the sea” many, possibly thousands of choices will appear in return. Number one in the pole position will probably be Amazon.com who feels certain that anybody looking for a story would probably find it amongst their collection – naturally obtainable at a price. The next on the list might be Ebay who feel that certain travel products might appease the searcher or it might be goarticles.com an articles selling service who would assume that travel tales of the sea would be somebody looking to buy such from them and for their own use.

Certainly each and every result that is produced on the first page would point the user towards large companies who are selling an item of one sort or another. The user though may in fact just want to read some Travel Tales of the Sea without having to fork out cash or to issue his/her credit card information over the Internet.

In the bowels of the search results in pages that are covered in dust will reside some very comprehensive and useful websites, eg: http://www.seadolby.com a website that is filled with free and in-depth Travel Tales of the Sea. The possibility of any user keeping interest long enough to get to this web site listing is minimal and long before it is reached the user has either fallen asleep or entered another search on a different note. In short the average user does not get past the first page of a search engines results and probably not past the first three that come up: e.g. amazon.com, ebay.com and goarticles.com

Although not-for-profit informational web sites are many and filled with amazing and detailed info these sites ability to gain attention on the world stage is difficult unless money is poured in to boost their ratings and rank positions on the search engine results. Nowadays many search engines have entered the pay-per-click arena with companies putting forward money to buy keywords that will most likely be used to boost their website. Some company buys the word “Travel” and this word is then basically lost forever to the lone free-for-all info site who cannot afford to pay money to boost their popularity.

The art of advertising and paying for positions on search engines is only available to the sites that can afford the exorbitant fees. Should a lone site owner who has built his site-up decide to fork out of his own pocket the money to boost his ratings this will only be achieved on one or two search engines or directories and the amount required to compete with the mega-sites is far beyond any hobbyist can afford. Naturally the ability to submit ones site on free inclusion pages and directories is available but as the webmaster and author behind Seamania found out, so much energy and time is spent on advancing the ratings of his site that not enough time is given to the writing of travel tales of the sea, which of course is the basis and sole point behind the website in the first place.

Large for profit websites can afford to hire web-orientated staff to control, advertise and spend time on boosting the rankings of their particular website. Single owner for profit websites can afford to pay marketing specialists and to buy keywords at exorbitant rates. The lone not-for-profit website owner can either spend all day and all week controlling and submitting his site to the thousands of ever changing search engines and directories and suffer from a serious loss of updated content on his/her website or place emphasis on building up content and never have a visitor to his portal.

Many other factors go towards reducing the effectiveness of the individual website than just search result rankings. Many single website owners operate outdated and very slow computers, use old or outdated software and only perform on odd occasions when not playing with their children or busy at work. Many other free info sites have found that subscribing to some lists to boost their rankings has in-fact reduced them to near invisibility. Google and now other search engines condemn sites for using link pages that they themselves do not agree with, so by simply subscribing or joining one of these sites Google may drop a future crawl of the website involved. It is also impossible for the lone not-for-profit website to keep up with ever changing trends and policies. Where payment is made for a lifetimes inclusion in a search engine, the next year may see the demise of this particular engine or its partnering up with another – thus the lifetimes inclusion becomes null and void and to prevent being dropped from the listings another fee is required – read the small print!

Other means to increase visibility is often initiated by offering advertising space to companies like Google, Barnes and Noble or other directories or affiliates. This can result in a slight income for websites (The Seamania website made 40US dollars over the last three months) but never enough to afford placement on search engine results or to purchase keywords. It is also against the grain for many free-info website owners to have to place advertising on their websites as not only is it taking up valuable space it detracts and reduces the free effect the content within. Furthermore should a website choose one companies advertising it may boost their rankings within one search engine but equally so reduce it in another’s e.g. allowing Google advertising space on an index page may increase the page rank in Google but seriously reduce it in Yahoos search results and possible exclusion from their Yahoo Directory.

From the point of view of an Internet User in search of free and not-for-profit biased information he/she does not want to see endless sites where a visa card is required to proceed further. It would be very nice to see the advancement of such directories like Zeal.com who divide their listings into those for profit and those who generally provide valuable and non-profit orientated formation. Naturally the question arises as to how such a search engine would manage to cover the costs of these listings but generally with the amount of people available who regard the Internet as a toy and a hobby projects such as Editor of a category volunteers should not be hard to recruit. The other way would be to have search engines run and operated by governments like public libraries are or built and operated by universities as part of study programs – something practical for students to involve themselves with.

Directories abound whose content is managed by volunteers, the Open Directory Project being the most famous. But sites such as Seamania have found to their detriment that trying to get noticed in amongst the debris found in these directories is not easy. Seamania was originally listed as a Personal website in the boating category but over time the emphasis and content of the website has evolved to become a general travel website. It has though proved impossible to change the location of the site in the Dmoz directory to a travel listing rather than a boating listing.

If at all possible and to prevent users who are sick of being asked for their credit card information or being given 30 different porn sites upon entering Travel Tales of the Sea into a search engine, it would be nice to see a shift in emphasis in the way that the search engines operate their listings.

Certainly the idea of switching on a computer and being faced with two choices, one for sites that are-for-profit and one that points towards not-for-profit sites would be a dream come true. To enter in a search request and to not find amazon.com or ebay.com in the first few results would put cheer to any searchers hopes of finding what he wants. And maybe in this way a true exchange of information may be facilitated and the mass exodus of searchers back to the public library for information may be halted.

About the author: Ieuan Dolby is the Author and Webmaster of Seamania . As a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy he has sailed the world for fifteen years. Now living in Taiwan he writes about cultures across the globe and life as he sees it.

Author: Daniel Punch

The Internet has opened up whole new avenues of freedom for people: freedom of information, thoughts and the ability to achieve anonymity while still being active in a community. This freedom has been latched onto by a large proportion of the Internet user base and has fuelled a desire for even more liberties. This in turn has given rise to the ‘Internet Grey Areas’, those little things that ‘everyone’ does but which aren’t quite legally correct. A few examples are Abandonware, MP3 downloads, warez and their kind.

Abandonware is the label applied to games that have been ‘abandoned’ by their original developers. The standard rule has become that if the games are more than four years old and no longer freely available for purchase, or if the developer has closed and hence the game is no longer supported, then it can be called Abandonware and distributed freely. Some developers willingly release their older software titles into the public domain making them legally Abandonware but a large number of titles labelled as such are not technically free for public access. The licences are still owned by someone and the distribution of their software titles could be harming their licence validity.

Abandonware justifies itself by preserving gaming history in a ‘living’ way. It allows people to play the games they used to love long after they’re available to purchase. In many cases the only hope for finding older games is to trawl second hand shops and online stores such as Ebay in the slim hopes of coming across a particular title. Sometimes when you finally get hold of the old software it simply won’t run on your PC leaving you with a pretty box but no closer to actually playing the game. Several times I’ve purchased an old game and then downloaded a copy off the Internet so that I can actually play it due to the fact that old disks are either damaged or the wrong type (I don’t have a 5 1/4″ floppy drive on my PC any more…).

MP3 downloads have a less honourable ideology. Simply put, people want free music so they download it. It is said that the activities harm no one and that the downloading process doesn’t adversely affect artists’ profits. Who can say for sure? At the time of writing this article the RIAA’s site is down and I’m not able to find any accurate figures that estimate the amount of revenue lost due to music piracy. I believe that it was estimated at around $5 billion in 1997 and that’s sure to have increased with the advent of broadband. However, these figures are said to be highly inaccurate. A standard argument against them is “I wasn’t planning on buying the CD anyway so they haven’t lost any money out of me downloading it”, an argument that is ridiculous at best. The Movie downloading scene is almost identical. I’m not going to swing one way or another here, but I will say that I can think of several films that didn’t receive the box office takings from a number of associates of mine after they had gotten to experience the film before its release date. The quality of the films almost justifies the stealing, but that’s a whole different issue!

The Internet community gets riled up over companies asserting their rights on the Internet (which is odd… companies asserting their legal rights being seen as evil while individuals illegally attempting to assert what they believe should be their rights are forces for good…) but the simple fact is that it is damaging for a company to allow the theft of their licences to go unnoticed. In the case of Abandonware, if it can be proven that a company knew their products were being illegally distributed but did nothing about it then the copyright over that particular licence can be lost. The revenues lost due to piracy in its many forms are surprisingly enough, damaging to companies.

I think that it’s unfortunate that the freedom provided by the Internet has lead to such abuse but I can see the validity of both sides of the arguments. Companies want and deserve their revenue for the services they provide. Abandonware infringes on a company’s copyright and can lead to them losing their licences if they don’t hunt down offenders. The consumers on the other hand have to pay increasingly steeper and steeper prices for the products, something that is often blamed on the increasing rate of piracy, which is blamed on the continuous increase in prices and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. CDs are very expensive if you only want one or two songs off the CD, which is where online music stores can come into play. There you can purchase the licence to a song relatively cheaply without having to pay a lot for an entire CD you that don’t particularly want (and they have the added upside of having more of the money make it back to the artists who created the music as opposed to the corporations that distribute it).

I guess in the end everyone has to make their own decision about where they stand between the concepts of ‘Morally Correct’ and ‘Legally Correct’. Me personally, I like to stand a little closer to ‘Legally Correct’ than most. It’s been my experience that ‘morals’ tend to change and warp a lot sooner than the law does, and not always for the better. If we restrain ourselves on the Internet then maybe authorities won’t see the need to attempt to restrain us. The freedom that is relished so much on the Internet may in fact be increased with just a little self-control.

About the author: Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net

Via Atom Smasher’s Error Message Generator

Illegal because there is no equivalent in Mandarin Chinese.

A father in central China has been refused permission to name his son ‘@’.

Father wanted to name son ‘@’

National Science Foundation’s Approaches to Combat Terrorism has award over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the development of automated analysis of internet chat room activity. The stated goal is to spot al-Qaida and other terrorists chatting online.

But if you develop technology to ferret out one pattern you can put it to scanning for others. And the best software in the world will be deaf to nuances. Who knows you may find themselves innocently caught in a tangle of government surveillance.

Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.

Is Bush Planning To Listen In On Gay Chat Rooms?

You’ve been sitting at your PC too long when you wake up in the middle of the night to wonder why that javascript isn’t keeping the cat on your chest in position.

And you keep trying to save your last dream by pressing Ctrl S

Suppose there were a computer user tests similar to those you have to pass before being awarded a driver’s license, requiring a demonstration minimal competency before being allowed to turn on a PC. Or at least a web browsing permit.

Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the visitors who hope I can guide them in wife swapping, repair their computers, make them Calvin Klein models and even give them spiritual advice.

But none of them have seen quite as funny as the frantic clueless folks who want Simon Willison to find their Hotmail inbox for them.

Back when playing with PCs was one of my hobbies I helped keep the computer press, Ziff-Davis in particular, afloat.

It started with PC Magazine. I have no idea whether PC Magazine had the best writers because it was the wealthiest magazine or if its success stemmed from an editor’s choice of contributors. Edward Mendelson and Neil J. Rubenking are still there. PC Mag’s articles were usually the most clearly written and – back then anyway – often aimed at people who wanted to know something about how things were but didn’t have a background in electronic engineering or programming. There were plenty of stodgy suit-and-tie types as well. I see some of them are still around as well.

And there was and probably always be John Dvorak. Most people who were made angry by Dvorak’s columns didn’t seem to understand that was much of the idea. His snippets were meant to provoke and annoy. It guarantees attention. Yellow journalism. It wasn’t by accident that “Inside Track” had a yellow background. Dvorak’s flaw has always been that he’s funny at best half the time. But he was always more run to read than, say, Bill Howard.

The real star was the PC Mag utilities. First day I had my 1200 bps modem I dialed into their BBS and downloaded the bundle. Later I bought a big fat book containing a passel of them to have the documentation handy. The utilities were focused, tightly written and mostly useful. In recent years I’ve probably downloaded maybe two.

From Ziff-Davis I also bought PC Computing and Computer Shopper. PC Computing was – or does it still exist – was sort of PC Mag Lite. The magazine hasn’t left any impression: another thick collection of clay coated paper that I skimmed negligently and tossed away.

Ads were the stars of Computer Shopper. To be fair advertising sometimes was the most interesting part of any of the magazines (when the articles were ads in themselves). Much of the prose in Computer Shopper was homespun when it wasn’t downright fannish. I thought it was kind of nice they had columns for people who’d yet to abandon their old Timex-Sinclair or Texas Instruments machines. Mostly the articles left me feeling slight embarrassed for the authors. But I did avidly read the the hundreds of pages of ads for motherboards and hard drives I couldn’t afford.

PC World was a stuffy PC Mag. Mostly the same stories, though the software reviews were sometimes better. While I did find it sometimes useful I never learned the name of a single PC World writer.

More techie was Byte. I suspect I wasn’t the only reader who liked it as much for Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” as the rest of the contents combined. Pournelle sometimes attracted as much venom as Dvorak. People would complain that unlike Pournelle they couldn’t get the head technician of a computer maker on the phone. Pournelle’s columns were (I’m sure still are but am not willing to give Byte online money) entertaining tales of fighting with hardware and software. While I liked some of his science fiction novels I got more laughs out of “Chaos Manor.” That his Byte column gave him the ears of key people at software and hardware companies let his stories have something they needed: a quick resolution.

Recently I spent time going to the website equivalents or incarnation of the computer magazines.