Supergeekblog

Lee at Music you (possibly) won’t hear anyplace else made the discovery recently of a old LP from 1961 whit a few synthesized computer language tracks on it. The significance of this is that it could possibly be one of the earliest recordings of the technology that we use so often today. The other significance is that in the recording, the computer sings the song “Daisy” which is the same song that H.A.L. sings in the movie 2001: A space odyssey. And since the movie was made after 1961, it is altogether possible that the producer of 2001 got his inspiration from a copy of this LP. Very interesting. A truly SuperGeek find, and a great piece of history.

Technorati Tags: HAL, Daisy, 2001:A space odyssey, 2001, H.A.L.

Tags: SGB News by Thatedeguy
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Palm Addicts is putting on a contest of sorts. A user will be picked at random from the people who post onto the palm addicts forums between today and the end date. What’s the end date you ask?

we will keep this little contest open for a few weeks

Awfully cryptic isn’t it. Well, if you aren’t already a user, go sign up and make some posts to the forums. It does seem to be weighted by how many posts a user makes, so the more you make the better your chances.

Sounds like an invitation for a lot of unnecessary post on the forums to me. If I were a normal user of the forums, I’d be a little mad about that, but obviously they feel the response from outside the community won’t be that great. We’ll see.

Technorati Tags: contest, compaq tablet, tc1100, compaq tc1100, win, palm addicts

Tags: SGB Gadgets, SGB News by Thatedeguy
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David at VentureBlog pointed out(and relisted a portion) a list of Web 2.0 businesses. It’s no secret that I’m a believer in there being another bubble thats getting ready to burst. This list only seems to have reinforced that feeling. The list was posted on March 17. Now think about how many were probably missed at the time and how many have been “introduced” since then. Feel overwhelmed by the numbers yet. Take a look that the Search heading. I’m not going to count them, but thats a lot of search companies. I call it market saturation. A few shining stars from that list will survive, but most of their founders will end up pretty well off from all the VC funding floating around now.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, funding, Venture Capital, VC funding, lists

Tags: SGB News by Thatedeguy
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Front Page Gangs?  Digg Police? Banned URL’s?  Not in a social Web 2.0 site right?  Wrong.  Along with a fair amount of corroborating evidence, forever geek’s post “Digg Corrupted: Editor’s Playground, not User driven Website” exposes what has become one of the largest examples of anti-social social network sites. Digg  has become an excellent example of why social software is doomed.   Sure, it’s a wonderful idea.  Your ideas out on the internet, floating about as other people read and “digg” it until it is either a popular idea or it bombs.  Sounds great, and in theory, it is.  The problem comes when you get groups of people who reciprocate “diggs” between each other.  Not a problem if the group is one or two people, but if said group grows to 50?  An instant 50 diggs to any story you publish on digg makes for a pretty quick trip to the front page, and to traffic, and recognition.

To digress for a second, we all know that people who Digg a lot have friends who use Digg. So often times friends digg articles for each other, and often times you may see the same people digging stories, and what not. The buddy-buddy system in effect. That’s fine (in a way) - it’s a shortcoming of all social networks - the more popular people gain more influence.

I submit that digg and the other social software sites like it are no longer social network sites, but social caste sites.  If you aren’t somebody, you’re nobody.  You see, as much as we want to hold ourselves to ideals here in the Cyber world, we can’t do it.  The real world keeps on sneaking in.  We’ve never been able to have truly non-caste societies, so why do we expect to be able to have one here on the net?  We can’t.

So, que taps.  There’s a funeral procession heading by.  The web 2.0 bubble is reaching it’s breaking point.

Technorati Tags: digg, social corruption, social software, web 2.0, digging

Tags: SGB News by Thatedeguy
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The BBC(via Slashdot) reported on a study that says that not only do people generally stop after page 3 of the results, but that 62% click on a result from the first page.

I guess I didn’t see the results of the study as anything groundbreaking. I personally will very rarely go to the second or third page of a search. If I don’t find what I’m looking for within the first page or two, I usually revise the search terms and try again.

So what does that mean for businesses? Bloggers? Anyone with a webpage? Time to brush up on your SEO. That’s Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated. It’s the method by which you optimize your website for best search engine rankings. Have you ever done a search where the first page was completely unrelated to the topic that you searched for? It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Each search engine has it’s own algorithm for search results, but it basically boils down to two things.

Content and Authority.

Content is exactly that. The content of the site. It is based on the proliferation of the searched keywords in the articles, titles, and links of a given site. Say you run a website on computer hardware and repair. Say you also specialize in corporate computers. Obviously, you aren’t going to write articles on the breeding habits of the greater American Snipe. Your articles and article titles are likely to contain certain keywords that relate to corporate or enterprise computer hardware and repair. The quantity and quality of those keywords will affect how highly a search engine ranks you for a given search on “corporate computer repair”.

So what is Authority? Authority is a search engine determined quantity. Again, each search engine determines it a little differently, but it basically boils down to a determination on how authoritive the rest of the world sees your work. A majority of the search engines weigh the number of inbound links to your URL heavily. The longer your site exists, the more links it will amass. The more informative your articles are, the more links it will amass. Doing a search for something like Apple, Microsoft, or something product specific where the product is generally only supplied by one maker will result in the maker for that product being the number one result in the search. A perfect example is Microsoft Windows. Doing a search with any of the Windows versions in the search terms will generally give Microsoft.com as the top result.

So how do you go about making your site appear in the first 3 pages of search engine results? It won’t be easy and there are other things that are taken into effect besides content and authority. But those are the best places to start. Add as much content to your site as possible on your topic. As your content volume expands, so too will your search ranking. Gain authority. Write informative content and links will start coming in. Ask for links from other sites that are in the same field but in a different specialization.

Take as many steps as possible. Do as much as you can without breaking rules. Hiding text(text the same color as your background) and keyword flooding(repeating the same keyword 13 times in a 15 word sentence) are no-no’s. Time is usually on your side. The longer your site has existed, the more likely your ranking will increase.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Search Engine Ranking, Ranking, search ranking, search, optimization

Tags: SGB Info by Thatedeguy
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Carphone Warehouse, a UK telephony company, announced the pricing for it’s newest bundled package.  The package, which is 9.99 a month includes free broadband forever, or for as long as you have the service.  Here’s the rundown from the press release:

For a monthly fee of £9.99, TalkTalk customers will receive:

• Unlimited local and national landline calls, 24 hours a day
• Unlimited international landline calls to 28 countries, 24 hours a day
• Up to 8 Mbps broadband access

Of course there are catches, like the 40 gig download limit, 18 month contract, 29.99 hookup fee, and 11.00 line rental fee.  But try and find something comparable in the U.S.  My service isn’t even close and I pay nearly $100 for the same services and I live in a town with fibre to nearly every house.  How long before we can expect something like this here?  It’ll be awhile I think.

Technorati Tags: talktalk, broadband, free broadband forever

Tags: SGB News by Thatedeguy
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Daktronics of local(to us) Brookings, South Dakota created and installed the world’s largest high definition video display.  The display, installed in Miami Dolphins stadium, measures 50 feet high and 137 feet across.  Gizmag has more details and techeblog has a video of the display in action.  Good to see some upper midwest companies get a little love from the gadget front.

Technorati Tags: HD video, dolphin stadium, daktronics, largest HD video display

Tags: SGB News, SGB Tech by Thatedeguy
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Aside from the fact that this looks like something out of a milk bar in “A Clockwork Orange”, why is it that everyone insists on imitating the iMac and iPod designs? Is it because they are so popular? And why white? Seems like I’d spend most of my days cleaning the damn thing instead of using it.

Seriously folks, here’s a review of the Compaq B2800, which is only available in Asia and Australia. Any Aussies wanna send us one to toy with? Didn’t think so.

With a super slim profile, a 14″ screen, and weighing in at only 4.8 lbs, the B2800 sounds like a pretty serious traveling laptop.

That doesn’t seem to mean that it is a cheapo machine either. Sturdy case design, a 1.7 or 2 ghz Pentium M 740, up to 1.5 gigs of DDR2/533 Ram, and a dedicated graphics card mean this could become a favorite for all around usage. Fan Specs and screen size may limit it from ever being a gamers machine, but for a multi purpose, portable, this one may take a few cakes. Here’s a few snippets from the review to whet your appetite:

The screen is one of the week points of this notebook. For some reason it isn’t a widescreen, but it is true that widescreen have taken a bit longer to be adopted in Asian notebook models, except by Sony. But still, at this day in age they should offer this notebook with a widescreen.

The results are what you would expect from a Pentium M 740 machine. It is much faster than my old Pentium 4 HP notebook and is also a bit more responsive than my AMD Athlon XP 2000+ desktop. It is more than fast enough for nearly anything you would ask of it. If you want further speed you could also buy a faster CPU model like the Pentium M 760.

Technorati Tags: compaq b2800, compaq, b2800, ipod, imac, notebook, pentium

Tags: SGB Gadgets, SGB Reviews, SGB Tech by Thatedeguy
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In another bold and somewhat obvious statement a spokesman for Microsoft suggested that business’ should consider investing in an automated system to wipe and reinstall Windows on machines as much of the malware coming out is considered incurable by MS.

Perhaps Microsoft should invest some money in better securing its operating system and spend less time sending users off to buy another piece of software. However I would imagine many business’ already use automated ghost image systems for setting up machines when they change owners anyways.

Or perhaps they could buy up a company like the one that makes DeepFreeze and integrate it into their workstation version of Vista? Thats probably the route I would take if I were making decisions for MS on these issues.

Technorati Tags: malware, spyware, microsoft, windows, deepfreeze, ghost, image

Tags: SGB News by Irrision
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