Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

This is just a quick note to all of our readers to let you know that today and tomorrow will be a little bit different in terms of a writing schedule. We’re heading off this morning to Delaware to attend Ryan’s sister’s wedding. As you noticed, a CyberNotes did post today and will post tomorrow as usual. Other writing will be light and there won’t be a Daily Downloads.

We’ll be back on Saturday, and our normal writing schedule will continue on Monday. See ya then…

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This article was written on December 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

We all know that the FCC prohibits the use of cellular phones and other wireless devices on aircraft while they’re in the air – it’s been that way forever.  Around 2004 though, they were asked to lift the ban so that passengers could talk on their phones while flying.  The FCC said no to that but what they have said yes to is high-speed Internet access for laptop computers because they operate on frequencies different from those used for wireless services on the ground. With the green light from the FCC, it appears as though airlines like jetBlue and American Airlines are slowly making Wi-Fi available to their passengers.

If by chance you’ll be riding the “BetaBlue” Airbus A320 operated by JetBlue anytime soon, you will have free in-flight access to Yahoo Instant Messaging and Yahoo Mail. How it works is once the aircraft reaches 10,000 feet, the Wi-Fi will be enabled and passengers with a flash-enabled browser will be able to use the aforementioned Yahoo services.  My first thought was “what good is this?” because only a certain percentage of people use Yahoo, so this won’t benefit everybody.  My second thought though, was that this is a start and it can only mean the offering will get better in the future. Hopefully, eventually, they’ll offer unlimited Wi-Fi access on all flights.

And while we’re on the topic of Wi-Fi coming to the sky, here’s a quick reminder of the announcement that American Airlines made several months ago explaining they’ll soon be offering Wi-Fi service in 2008. Certain planes will essentially become Wi-Fi hotspots where passengers will be required to pay $10 per flight to gain Internet access. Rumor has it that planes will be equipped by the time Spring rolls around. The only downside we could face is simply space! If you’re a passenger in coach, there’s really not a whole lot of room for a laptop. It fits, but it’s a tight squeeze, especially when the passenger in front of you unexpectedly and quickly reclines their seat all the way back!

Regardless of any downsides there may be, Wi-Fi is slowly making its way to the sky which could make long flights (assuming you’ve got a great battery with a long life) a bit more enjoyable, especially if you’re an Internet junkie like I assume you are.

Source: AppScout

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This article was written on April 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

We already know about the RIAA’s list of shame for top piracy schools, but it looks like the MPAA is following right along with their own list, naming the top 25 schools where students are violating copyright laws. The RIAA is trying to earn quick money by telling the students they can pay $3,000 to settle,  but whether or not the MPAA follows along and goes after the students is another question.

The top five schools and the number of students identified as violating copyrighted material are:

1. Columbia University – 1,198
2. University of Pennsylvania – 934
3. Boston University – 891
4. University of California at Los Angeles – 889
5. Purdue University – 873

And as Ars Technica points out, there are 10 schools that have the honor of appearing on both the RIAA, and the MPAA’s list with Purdue having the highest ranking for both schools at #2 for the RIAA, and #5 with the MPAA. Nice work.

What’s interesting to me is that my alma mater, Iowa State is on that list (not surprising), ranked at number 15 with 586 students identified. This number is extremely surprising, only because I know many, many people who are probably guilty of this. With 25,000+ students attending, I thought for sure that number would be much higher than 2% of the student population.

So far the MPAA hasn’t been too aggressive going after piraters, so my guess is that they won’t make a public spectacle of this either by sending college students options to settle, or face a lawsuit like the RIAA has done.

Thanks for the tip Curtiss!

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This article was written on June 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

We know that many of you are programmers, and so when we saw an article over at The Wall Street Journal suggesting that Men and Women code very differently from one another, we thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss.

The gist of the article is that women tend to write code that’s more helpful to people who want to tinker with it later on while men tend to write code to “show-off.” They say, “women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later. They’ll intersperse their code – those strings of instructions that results in nifty applications and programs – with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the liens the way they did and exactly how they did it.”

So then what do men do? They say, “men on the other hand, have no such pretense. Often they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code. They try to obfuscate things in the code and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later.”

They also mentioned the fact that women programmers are a pretty rare thing which suggests that a majority of the code out there is “cryptic.” To all of you programmers out there, do you tend to comment and explain why you code the way you do or do you find yourself writing “cryptic code.”

As someone who’s never written an ounce of code, I can’t comment on this. However, Ryan codes pretty regularly and says this is a pretty bad stereotype of men. He said he tends to comment well, at least for his own sake, because when he goes back months from when he started a project and wants to change something, he wouldn’t be able to remember why he wrote something the way he did. Often times these days there are groups of people working on coding the same project, so documentation is 100% necessary, and required. Good coders tend to document properly.

Any thoughts?

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This article was written on July 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

This was just too funny not to share with you. Matt Cutts who works for Google, offers this tip on his blog today: Avoid Keyword Stuffing. You know what keyword stuffing is, don’t you? It’s when a web designer overloads a page with keywords so that search engines will rank the page higher for those keywords.  It’s essentially spam, and usually it’s hidden in some way so that a typical site visitor wouldn’t know that the excessive list of keywords is there.

So on to the funny part. There’s a website out there, www.alexchiu.com which claims to have the key to immortality. That’s right, you can stay physically young forever through the use of “Eternal Life Rings” and “Eternal Life Foot Braces” which you’d wear to stay physically young forever! Oh, and if you have a heart problem, consult your doctor first before using. Are you done laughing yet? Wait, it gets better!

To prove his point, he says that some very important people (Google) don’t want you to know about Chiu. From his website it says:

Close to 50% of people use Google search engine.  And for some reason, AlexChiu.com is banned by Google. They don’t want you to know about Alex Chiu because Alex Chiu’s stuff is no joke.  I mean if Alex Chiu’s technology is just a scam, why would a big guy like Google ban a domain like AlexChiu.com? Surely some very important people, mainly the ones that control the pharmaceutical industry, do not want you to learn about Alex Chiu.  They fear that Alex Chiu’s technology will one day put them out of business.

Right, like Google really cares to hide this magnificent discovery from their users. Instead they care about all of the irrelevant keywords, which there are a ton of on the site. Google specifically mentions to avoid using irrelevant words in their webmaster guidelines. I’ve seen sites do the whole keyword thing before, but I’ve never seen quite the list that this guy’s got on his site (and this is just a portion of them!):

As Matt says, “Internal vaginal aphrodisia doping hardware?” Huh? And what does a “plasma tv advanced chart” have to do with immortality? It looks like about 50KB of keywords are stuffed into that tiny text area, from celebrity names to complete nonsense like “tupac kazaa hospital” and “alien cemetery.”

So there you have it, the lesson of the day is to avoid keyword stuffing on your own website and using “Google Power” to prove that your immortality product is legit.

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