Archive for December, 2009
New Year’s resolutions for the PC user
I suspect that most people soon fall by the wayside when it comes to keeping those resolutions made for the New Year. After all, if things were easy, we wouldn’t have to be making declarations of good intentions in the first place. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth looking at some practices that all PC users [...]
Weekend reading
Here’s some interesting posts and articles to look at over the holiday weekend:
Google Is About To Get Caffeinated With A Faster Search IndexTechCrunch says Google is getting ready to push out an entirely new way called “Caffeine” for indexing the Web.
What Exactly is a Personal Computer?At Maximum PC, Will Smith talks about how [...]
Making Web pages more readable
As they cram more and more advertising onto Web pages, the clutter can make it hard to read the actual content. I have noticed several references to a little browser add-on that aims to cut the clutter. I had been trying it out and today David Pogue listed it as the year’s best tech idea [...]
Advances in nano-computing
The march to computing on a nano-scale continues. Recent announcements have been made of using single atoms and individual molecules as transistors. R&D mag reports on a single atom transistor:
Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose [...]
Parental Internet controls
The Internet can be a dangerous place with scams and malware to waylay the unwary. Also, there are plenty of seamy sites with porn of every imaginable type. Nonetheless, millions of young children are using the Internet every day. To protect them, various types of parental controls are available in Windows and in other software. [...]
Internet sales taxes
Although many Internet transactions currently enjoy exemption from state sales taxes, that immunity has been under attack for some time. In the past couple of years I have made a number of posts about the battle between the states and online vendors. Because of its size, Amazon has been a favorite target and a recent [...]
System repair and backup in Windows 7
Did you get a nice new PC for Christmas? If you have a Windows 7 system, there’s two essential maintenance jobs to do. Material from this post is now at my Windows site.
A different comparison- netbooks with smartphones
In the previous post, I point out that comparing netbooks to notebooks makes little sense. The two kinds of PC are intended for different types of use. A post at CNET make a related point. It notes that many young people are used to smartphones as their Internet platform and they think a netbook is [...]
Comparing apples and oranges- netbooks and notebooks
A recurrent theme on the Internet consists of articles and blogs comparing netbooks to larger notebooks and pushing the thesis that netbooks are inadequate systems. These complaints about netbooks are from groups who have an ax to grind or have special applications and ignore the fact that netbooks satisfy a real consumer need.
For example, a [...]
The (virtual) doctor is in
It’s inevitable that computers will continue to play an increasing role in health care. Anything that helps reduce the spiraling costs is going to have to be utilized. Doctors don’t make house calls anymore but one possible future use of computers in medicine is the virtual visit from the doctor. The New York Times reports: [...]
How fake sites trick search engines
In several posts (for example, here and also here) I have discussed how search results contain a lot of spam these days. Seattle PI has an article, How fake sites trick search engines to hit the top, which explains how scammers are gaming the search engine algorithms to get top ranking in search results:
[...]
