Monthly Archives: August 2005

A little departure from the normal news of the day, albeit somewhat tech related: check out today’s episode of NPR’s Fresh Air (I confess, I’m a big fan), during which Terry interviews Dr. Neil Clark Warren, the founder of the online matchmaking site eHarmony.com

Despite the fact that Warren seems to be all over TV these days, pitching his site’s unique “personality profile,” I found the interview particularly interesting because it spends some time talking about the site’s history. I had no idea that much of its current popularity can be traced to time spent on conservative Christian programming run by Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

Warren tells Terry about the methodology behind the site’s questionnaires, which are apparently based on the interactions of some 2,000 couples he studied. She also asks him about his history with Dobson, the separation from Focus on the Family, the subject of homosexual relationships and some other stuff. Ultimately, I always find it interesting to hear from the people behind popular web sites and what they’re thinking.

I was eating dinner with a lady friend of mine (a rarity if you know what I mean), when my mobile phone started singing. I pulled it out, hit silent, and stuffed the phone back into my pocket. The girl was impressed. “I can’t believe you didn’t answer that! Thank you so much”. I figured that I can talk on the phone almost anywhere and any time. Why then, would I talk on the phone while in the presence of an attractive girl that knew my name? –easy answer!

The ability to talk on phones anywhere and at anytime is very new to our society. The person who usually sits in wait for you to finish your jabber most often does so in your presence. The tables have now turned. The people in my presence are not the ones I talk to anymore. The people on my buddy list, address book, and mobile phone contact list are the ones I communicate on a daily basis. Not answering the phone is an easy, not so easy, thing to do.

Woot! With OSX for x86 torrents in the wild (legally? bah!) and blogs and tech news sites posting screenshots of some flavor of OSX running on all manner of boxes, it’s about time for someone to post a guide to building your own Mac. According to the guys at the OSx86 project, you can do it for much less than you might initially think.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Case – $9.95
Motherboard – $52.99
Processor – $60.77
2x 256 RAM – $38.00
20 Gigabyte HD – $25.95
DVD Drive – $12.00
Grand total: $199.66

[props to TUAW and Make:Blog]

So the internet’s been abuzz since last week’s announcement by Yahoo! of an expansion to its web search index, and, more importantly (at least when it comes to gossip), the number of objects therein. Here are the numbers that got everyone talking, courtesy ZDNet:

•Yahoo! – 20.5 billion objects indexed (19B documents, 1.5B images)
•Google – 10.3 billion objects (8.2B documents, 2.1B images)
•In June 2005 Google held a 36.9% share of the US search engine market with Yahoo! at 30.4%, according to comScore Networks.

So people start talking, Google fires back (saying it was “baffled” by Yahoo!’s claims), and some other big boys stepped in, in this case the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). After performing their own study, they came to the following conclusions:

Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results.

It is the opinion of this study that Yahoo!’s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google’s index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!’s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.

Ouch. There is no way this one’s over yet.

[kudos to BoingBoing]

More people keep joining up.

According to this article in Public CIO magazine, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm started sending out her weekly radio address via Podcast earlier this month. Released each friday at 10 a.m., the Governer hopes, in typical government-ese, “to talk directly to the citizens of Michigan about what their government is doing to improve their state for them.” Seems straighforward enough, albeit rather broad.

Nonetheless, props to the administration’s bold attempt at embracing a new technology favored among those ever-present “young people.” Now if they could only get the aformentioned whippersnappers to actually listen to an audio file likely chock-full of budgetary, legal and other administrative news.

“Hey man, what are you listening to?”
“Oh, just the Governor’s weekly podcast.”
< silence >
“Um…cool…”

Given this past week’s lack of positive publicity surrounding the FedExFurniture/Jose Avila fracas [see this post], here’s some love for the shipping giant:

Last week FedEx became the proud owner of California’s largest corporate solar-power installation to date when they activated the photovoltaic cells covering the roof of their package processing hub at Oakland Int’l Airport. The 904 kW array covers nearly all of the building’s 81,000 square-foot roof and can meet roughly 80 percent of the facility’s energy needs. It was designed and built by California-based PowerLight Corp., using 300,000 solar cells from Japan’s Sharp Corp.