Archive for: August 29, 2007

Accuweather [edited] has turned its attention to forecasts beyond the Earth's atmosphere with its new Astronomy Center, which includes data on space weather, astronomy news, nightly viewing conditions for different celestial objects, and more. The service also includes a number of interactive tools to help stargazers of all ages and experience groups.

The Accuweather Astronomy Center is a little barren at first glance, aside from the ads, but once you type in your zip code or your location, the page changes. You get a custom weather report that includes temperature, humidity, visibility, the moon phase, and the expected viewing conditions for that evening in your location. The Astronomy Center home page also includes links to the different sections of the center, including the hobbyist's corner, the Accuweather astronomy blog, and the astronomy photo of the day.

The star chart section includes a widget from Starry Night, makers of academic and commercial astronomy software, that will display your sky in real time and show you what constellations you're not seeing if you check the service in the daytime, and what objects you should be able to see when the sun goes down. You can play with the the widget to see more or less of the sky and change the viewing angle. If you're looking for something specific, type in the right angle and declination of the object you want to see, and the Starry Night widget will take you there.

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There are a number of sites that offer free e-books, but not many make getting them easy. Some sites make you download a special reader, while others lock their books down with DRM. WOWIO offers all of their books for free in PDF format, so they're easy to download, easy to read, and very portable.

I stumbled on WOWIO after discovering that the author of one of my favorite Webcomics was publishing his book on the site for free. When I visited WOWIO, the first thing I noticed was that the site was laid out like a store; top books are listed on the right side, and the book of the month is a free download from the front page. Some other featured texts in different categories are listed on the front page as well, and you can easily search titles either by name, ISBN, or keyword. If you're in the mood for a specific type of book, you can select a category and surf through what's available.

Signing up for the service is free, but there's a catch. In order to make sure that only humans are signing up for the service, you have to provide independent information to verify your identity before you can get an account. The service allows you to sign up either by using a non-anonymous e-mail address (an address from a domain that you own or are registered with-- the service will not accept Hotmail, Gmail, of Yahoo! accounts), a credit card number (just for identity verification, no charges will be applied), or a ...

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Google is cozying up to Time Warner's CNN.com news Web site to provide targeted ads that will appear alongside CNN news content.

The multi-year advertising deal will allow Google's AdSense program to scan CNN news stories in order to produce related advertisements. AdSense participants can earn money based on the number of clicks per ad, though advertisers can also pay a higher cost-per-thousand impressions in exchange for more prominent space on a site.

Earlier this year, PC Mag staffers reported their more bizarre Google AdSense results within Gmail, so I'll be interested to see what type of returns AdSense will produce for CNN. Looking at some of the top stories on the site right now, I wonder what type of ads would accompany stories like "Stabbed twin: 'Pappy, I'm dying'", "Keep your man healthy" or "When bosses attack". Stay tuned.

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Microsoft issued some information about Vista SP1 this morning, the first major upgrade to the OS since it was released back in January. The company will be issuing the update in three forms: express, stand-alone, and slipstream. The express download is 50MB. Stand-alone is a larger download, but can be applied to any version of Vista. Slipstream refers to Vista bundles containing SP1.

SP1 includes a slew of security updates, performance enhancements, and improved hardware and software compatibility. On the security end, Microsoft is upgrading to the BitLocker Drive Encryption for improved user authentication. The upgrade also adds an API for added threat detection.

On the hardware side, the OS has added support for emerging technologies like extended file allocation table (exFAT), as well as support for SD, DMA, the 3D gaming technology, Direct3D 10.1, and remote access protocols.

SP1 will also contain all past software updates. The update will be available to the general public in Spring of next year. More info is available over at PCMag.com.

Sometimes it doesn't even occur to you ask a question until its been posed by someone else. Once asked, it occurs to you that it's something you really should have been pondering all along. Take, for example, one Wikipedia writer's query: how many pages would it take to print out a hard copy of the online dictionary? I don't feel particularly bad having not posed the question, though, seeing as how it would have been completely lost by my utter lack of anything remotely resembling math skills.

Nikola Smolenski, however, did ask the question. In calculating the answer, he used the following parameters [courtesy of Boing Boing], "Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 leaves), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume." Subtracting the History and Discuss pages and images (which would apparently have taken up more printing real estate that the text), the result is 4.4GB worth of text for the English version of the site.

That comes out to about 750 encyclopedia volumes, according to his estimates. One wonders how dramatically this number be reduced if one subtracted all of the information that wasn't you know, true...