Category Archives: General

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.

So Devin Moore got the death penalty for killing three police officers in 2003, but his subsequent attempt to use GTA as an excuse isn’t faring well. With Rockstar off the hook, perhaps we can spend more time thinking about our society’s complete lack of personal responsibility the ways in which video games influence kids, newly important for this reason:

A study released by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which claims to be the first long-term study of this type, found that “robust exposure” to a violent game did not directly translate into real-world aggression. The key points:

Gamers played MMORPG Asheron’s Call 2 for an average of 56 hours over the course of a month, and researchers found “no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,” said lead author Dmitri Williams. Aggression was determined my measuring “argumentative behaviors” before and after gaming, which were then compared to a non-game playing control group.

Understandably, Williams is unwilling to make strong predictions based on the results of his study. Notably, the study did not look at teenagers, nor did its exposure of participants to fantasy-style violence mirror urban, GTA-style violence recently made famous by Moore. But Williams’ take-home message is noteworthy:

Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.

[Cheers to Science Blog.]

Oh, you silly Japanese. Ladies and gentlemen, you can now add a goldfish-catching robot to your wishlist. Face the facts: Aibos are so passé and that mecha on eBay is just too pricey.

Researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) have designed a robot they hope to enter into an annual goldfish catching competition for children, which takes place on August 20 in the nearby city of Yamatokoriyama.

Check out this page (in Japanese) with a link to the video. While the robot’s 3-minute haul of between 6 and 10 goldfish is paltry compared to kiddie experts, who can apparently hoist 60-plus fish, the mechanical arm/overhead camera/computer contraption is an interesting study on the ability of computers to potentially study moving cars or crowds.

Maybe I’m the only one who experienced this, but I can’t help but think of the time when my elementary school would stay open one night each year; teachers and kids would bring their families for food, prizes and games throughout the school, one of which involved goldfish. Now I’m picturing the event with a hulking robot, yards of cabling and a team of Japanese at the helm and, for some reason, it seems really weird.

[Courtesy New Scientist]

I’m a huge fan of blogging. I’ve been actively pro-blogs since the year 2000. When I hear about blogs in the news one eyebrow automatically goes up. The same thing happened when I heard about Mr. Trump’s blog. It’s not just his blog, though it’s named “The Trump Blog”. Don has an entourage of writers who help in his two-line-entry blogs. As I’m reading this blog I think to myself, “oh dear, Trump will be podcasting soon, and maybe vlogging.” Michael Gartenberg said it best: “If Donald Trump is blogging, then blogging is about as mainstream as it gets”, also my initial reaction.

Is this bad? Heck no. I look at this as a half step in the right direction. If we could only do something about fixing Trump’s hairdo, now that would be a step and a half in the right direction.

It just keeps getting better today. Wired news has a great article about aspiring interior decorator Jose Avila (including a great snap of his neon pink coiffure), a software developer who, apparently strapped for cash, decided to furnish his apartment in an ingenious way capable of making even the most earnest dumpster divers stand back and rethink their approaches: he’s making FedEx FurNiture.

He’s created a bed, a corner desk with shelves, a table, two chairs and a couch…and earned a cease-and-desist letter from the shipping giant, who claims his work violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They asked him to take his site down the day after he put it up, in June.

I love this part:

Avila distributed cards and T-shirts featuring the website’s URL (but not the FedEx logo) at the recent Black Hat conference in Las Vegas…Avila tried to have more cards and T-shirts made, but FedEx Kinko’s refused to do the job.

Bolstered by Lawyers from Stanford Law School, Avila put the site back up, and they’re apparently gearing up for a legal tussle. Man, I love the internet.

This is a trip. Anything beginning with the sentence “How far can you push a processor without setting your room on fire?” has to be good, I say.

With a Pentium 4 670 Prescott rated at 3.8 GHz, an ASUS motherboard, 1 GB of memory, Windows Server 2003 and, most importantly, some sort of industrial-strength cooling device that looks like it could be used to make ice cream, this Japanese blog includes pictures (thankfully) of the process, and a final processor speed of…7133.5 MHz!

[Kudos to Softpedia and Engadget]