Search Google by time

Google has finally filled one of its search engine’s most glaring omissions with a new option that lets you filter results by time. It's one of a number of enhancements to Google's capabilities which allow you to drill more effectively into search results.
The search innovations include viewing only reviews and forums; video-only searches which show video thumbnails as part of the results; date restricts which can limit searchers to the past day, week or year; and Timeline, a histogram-style representation of results by year and month.
A quirky addition is 'Wonder Wheel', an interactive graphic representation - think tag cloud - of related searches. Not sure of it's value yet, though.
To access the new capabilities, after you have performed a search, click on the link "Show options" underneath the Google logo at top left of your screen. (Beware, the Timeline is an addictive plaything.)
Here's a quick video overview of the changes:

Computer rage

If you have ever been driven to verbally or physically assault your computer for its ill-timed crashes and its unaccountable go-slows, don’t worry; you are not alone. Researchers have discovered that over half a sample of British users had shouted or sworn at their computer equipment and 40 per cent had resorted to physical violence, whacking keyboards and smashing mice to vent their anger. The majority experienced “computer rage” three of four times a month, and more than 10 per cent exploded at least 10 times, owing to unsatisfactory work progress and time pressure. Other research has shown that an increasing number of people suffer from “read rage” -- where they lose their temper with unclear instruction books for gadgets. About half have yelled in frustration, while a quarter have thrown the offending booklet across the room.

Lifespan of CDs and DVDs

How long do CDs and DVDs last? The short answer is that no-one knows, largely because the technology has not been around long enough to test longevity. Some say that cheap CDs burnt on your home computer will last only 2 years - others say that better quality disks commercially pressed will last 50-100 years. There likely is a difference between home-burnt and commercially pressed, because the process is different, but all I can report is that so far I have not had a disk die of natural causes (and my oldest are getting on for 10 years).
One thing that can cause a disk to crash quickly (and I have been guilty of this) is to write on it with a felt pen. The ink can degrade the media underneath, and bingo! your disk is unreadable. While you can buy pens which are supposed to be non-degrading, a simpler solution is to write only in the central area around the disk hole (where there is no recording media underneath). One big no-no: don't stick small labels on the disk. Apart from the fact they can catch in the mechanism, they unbalance the disk, and this can wreck a drive spinning at several thousand revolutions a minute.
It is more likely that the problem with electronic media will not be wear-out, but the changing technology of data storage. Long before the disc itself becomes unreadable, it is likely that the CD-ROM will be replaced by a new medium and that it will not be possible to find a CD-ROM reader, except perhaps in a museum. To illustrate, how many of you still have a 5 1/4in floppy disk drive, which was still quite common only 25 years ago? Librarians and archivists are quite worried about how we will preserve today's data for the future. Books can last for thousands of years, but technology has a very fleeting lifespan - who is going to keep re-archiving on new media forms as the old ones become obsolete?

Dealing with pop-ups

Pop-ups are one of the curses of the internet. You visit a rogue site (often accidentally) and are suddenly besieged by a never-ending stream of pop-up windows that you cannot get rid of. You are often forced to reboot your computer to exit the loop they lock you into. They are the particular stock-in-trade of crooks who run sites that trade on you accidentally mistyping a website address. (For instance, you input YouTub.com instead of YouTube.com – this one’s fairly harmless, but many turn out to be malicious.) The crooks who run these sites will occasionally get domain names very similar to common Web destinations just to catch people making such common mistakes.
Actually, there is often a simpler solution than rebooting. Hit the Ctrl-Alt-Delete combination of keys and you get the option to close down just your browser, and that often solves the problem.
Firefox and Internet Explorer both come with built-in pop-up blocker, which really do work. In Firefox, 1) click on the Tools option in the menu bar; 2) click “options”; 3) click on the “Content” icon; 4) make sure the box next to 'Block Pop-up Windows' is checked. Pop-up Blocker is turned on in Internet Explorer by default. To turn it off or to turn it on again if you've already turned it off click the ‘Tools’ button, and then click ‘Pop-up Blocker’. The rest is fairly self-explanatory.
If you are the victims of pop-ups, the big question is: Did the site do something worse than bombard you with advertising? If the problem persists, even after you've closed down your browser and rebooted your computer, then it most certainly left something malicious on your computer.
On the other hand, if rebooting appears to have fixed the problem, you still can't be sure that it didn't leave something malicious on your computer. See Remove a Virus or Other Malicious Infection for suggestions of where to go from there.

Let the internet solve all your problems

According to an article in the NZ Herald, a new website is designed to help its users make difficult decisions - from 'Should I believe in God?' to 'Should I sleep with my boss?'.

In the Seventies, according to Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man, the favoured method to absolve responsibility was the dice - all you had to do was roll a double six and you'd be heading to Rio on the back of a moped. Times have changed and today, if we want to let to fate determine our actions, we can let technology decide. "Thanks to an array of evolving websites and internet-based communities, we are able to let the internet take the sting out of decision making. In a few months, a new decision-making site, Hunch.com, will launch (although you can sign up for a preview now).
"In a nutshell, Hunch aims to provide answers to problems, concerns or dilemmas, on hundreds of topics. Hunch's responses are based on the collective knowledge of the Hunch community. Users input information and the site software uses that content to make decisions. Content is narrowed down by a specially created algorithm to cater specifically for the likes and preferences of the user, based on a profile of that the user provides. The site is designed so that every time it's used, it learns something new. It aims to save its users 'strenuous cognitive labour'."

It strikes me that the appearance of a website like this shows just how far modern (ie, Western) man has drifted from his roots.

"One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything." - Malcolm Muggeridge