A little over two months ago a company called GuruNet launched a unique website called Answers.com that is quietly, calmly taking the Internet by storm.
It’s kind of like a search engine, but rather than include everything and anything in its responses, Answers.com refines its searches to focus on a few hundred authoritative sites such as online encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs and dedicated search engines.
There’s just a few million pages of information to access, a fraction of Google’s more than eight billion pages, but that’s why it’s such a valuable resource – no clutter.
For example, completely at random, I typed "Spider Monkeys" into the Google search window, and got a long list of zoo sites, tourism sites, university research sites, and random news reports featuring spider monkeys. All useful information, but I’d have to sift through a few dozen pages to get the same information that came up on the first page at Answers.com.
If I was doing a school report on spider monkeys, Answers.com results were a lot more relevant with dictionary definitions, encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia entries, family-genus charts, and a list of spider monkey sites on the web – a similar list to what I found on the first three pages of the Google search.
The Answers.com search engine is powerful, concise and extremely fast. It won’t replace Google as your default page, but it’s a powerful tool to add to your collection.
The homepage is also pretty neat with a word-of-the-day vocabulary builder, links to interesting stories, a list of celebrity birthdays, top news items, "Today’s History" and more.
Buying a better CD
The most recent edition of Wired.com has a story that may be of interest to anyone who has ever tried to burn a CD or DVD, only to have to throw yet another corrupted disc into the trash.
In the early days of CD writers some of this was the fault of the burners themselves as it was a new technology that had its slight imperfections. Disc burning software also left something to be desired.
These days most of those bugs have been ironed out, which means that errors are usually the result of flaws in the discs themselves, and problems are becoming increasingly common as production runs grow and prices drop.
According to the article, very few companies selling the discs actually produce the discs themselves. That task is farmed out to a handful of companies that have different manufacturing processes and standards. These differences are usually reflected in the purchase price, but not always – it’s still possible to find fantastic deals on the most high-quality discs out there, if you know what to look for.
The problem is that manufacturer information is secret – you need special programs to read the embedded data on a disc that says who it was made by.
Luckily an online community, Club CD Freaks (http://club.cdrfeaks.com) is on top of the situation. The Taiyo Yuden brand is apparently the gold standard, and although you can order discs directly from the manufacturer, sometimes it pays to shop around and look for deals from another company.
All of the different disc manufacturers are watched closely, and disc burners and software are also scrutinized for quality and cost. It’s not a site you’ll visit daily, but if you have a line on 50 cheap discs, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out what you’re getting to ensure that at least 49 of those discs will be usable.
Parents monitoring teens’ web use
Like parents who monitored television time and blocked channels before them, a new poll has found that more than half of U.S. parents are taking the same approach with their teens’ Internet use.
The study by Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 54 per cent of parents are using some kind of filtering software, 13 per cent more than the last study in 2000. Two-thirds of parents also have rules regarding how much time their teens can spend online, and three-fifths keep the computers in an open area where they can monitor activity. The study also discovered that 13 per cent of children do not use the Internet at all, either because they have no access, little access, no interest, or are concerned for their safety.
PSP living up to the hype
Few technological gizmos have been as hyped up as the Playstation Portable, which is due in Canadian stores today (Thursday, March 24). Part of the reason is the hype itself, which has been considerable. Every delay in launch, a result of the huge number of backorders for the player, has only increased expectations.
Sometimes that means a big letdown, but amazingly nobody seems to be able to stop raving about the PSP. With a large, brilliant colour screen (11 cm wide), the ability to connect wirelessly to other PSPs, Sony’s huge library of software titles to draw from, and multimedia features that let you play mini DVD movies and MP3 files, it’s the real deal. The price is kind of steep at $399 with two multiplayer games (Gretzky NHL and Twisted Metal Head-On at Future Shop), but won’t be an obstacle for most techno-geeks. Expect the prices to drop as Nintendo and Sony go to war over the portable gaming market.
