We are delighted to announce the creation of the MapServer Foundation (mapserverfoundation.org). The foundation is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide a supportive framework for open, collaborative development of geospatial software. Several groups and individuals are collaborating to help launch and sponsor the new foundation. Financial support from Autodesk will allow us to get the foundation up and running. In this letter, we present some ideas of how we think the foundation can help the community, but these ideas need broader discussion and debate within the community.

Read the full letter

I think it’s great to see Autodesk releasing a product of this calaber to the open source community. The original version of this product has been around since the 1997 and sees about 10,000 downloads a month.

Stay tuned for more news…

Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft’s Information Worker Strategy, has said, though, that “the new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers.”

We will be watching this closely.

Keylogging programs are the epitome of online stealth, and they’re also a mushrooming problem on the Internet, where identity and intellectual property thefts are fueling an explosion of key-capture tools.

ADVERTISEMENT Reports of new keylogging programs soared higher this year, as part of a wave of multifunction malware with integrated keylogging features, according to VeriSign Inc.’s security information company iDefense Inc. The programs often evade detection by anti-virus tools and can be difficult to detect once installed, experts warn. However, at least one anti-spyware company believes that reports about the danger posed by keyloggers are overstated.

More than 6,000 keylogging programs will be released by the end of this year, according to projections by iDefense. That’s an increase of 2,000 percent over the last five years, company officials said.

Read full story

Chip makers are aggressively moving forward with plans to add more cores to their processors as a way of improving performance without having to bump up the frequency.

Sun Microsystems Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., next month will roll out the first of its servers based on its new UltraSPARC T1—formerly code-named Niagara—which holds as many as eight cores. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. this month unveiled road map details for its Opteron server processors as it tries to maintain what officials say is a technological advantage over rival Intel Corp.

The road map includes releasing a quad-core version based on AMD’s current Opteron chip design in 2007, with the cores connected together via an upgraded version of AMD’s HyperTransport interconnect technology, and supporting a new Level 3 cache. Soon after that, another four-core chip based on a new architecture will be released, officials said.

Read full story

Back up your PC to USB
Memeo lets you choose the files you’d like to back up, plus tracks how much you’ve stored and the drive space left.USB flash drives are great for backup copies, but there’s no need to stop there–you can turn your drive into a complete backup solution

The data equipment maker also will add a disclaimer to its packaging that says the speed of data delivery through its wireless products may vary because of different factors, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

Plaintiffs sued the company in state superior court in 2004, claiming that its wireless products did not transfer data as quickly as the company advertised.

NetGear said it admits no liability.

A similar lawsuit filed in February 2005 was dismissed last August.

Information storage media company Maxell has said it will launch its first holographic storage products in September 2006. The first removable drive will have a capacity of 300GB and a throughput of 160mbps.

Holographic storage works by storing information using light-sensitive crystals. Because it uses the whole volume of the drive–whose prototype looks somewhat like a floppy disk–not just the surface, it’s possible to store much more information than is possible on a DVD.

With a single holographic removable drive, or disk, able to store 1.6 million high-resolution color photos or more than 240 hours of TV broadcast, holographic storage is starting to draw the attention of many in the IT industry.

“Holographic media makes it possible for millions of pages of information and high-definition images to be held on one small, relatively inexpensive disk,” said Steven Pofcher, senior marketing manager at Maxell.

“Imagine having a person’s entire medical history, complete with MRI images, or storing a broadcast network’s entire HD library on a single disk,” Pofcher said. “These are both possible with holographic technology, which has such large capacity that approximately half a million 300-page books can be stored on a single disk.”

Holographic recording technology uses intersecting signal and reference laser beams to store data in a number of 3D holographic images.

According to Maxell, one 13-centimeter optical disk can store up to 150 million pages–more than 63 times the capacity of a DVD.

“That’s pretty inexpensive,” Tarasoff said. “Even the first versions can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160mbps data throughput rates. That’s burning. Then combine it with random access, and it’s the best of all worlds.”

The technology also has an impressive lineage. Hitachi-owned Maxell is working with InPhase Technologies, a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, which has led development of holographic media.

Most of my students are Internet novices and ask many apprehensive questïons about how to design a website. They worry about their ability to design an attractive site and are anxiously seeking the quickest and best alternative.
After years on the Net, I believe you need to learn how to design your sites yourself, and here’s why …

The Internet is made up of two elements:

1. Text 2. Pictures

Yes, audio and video technologies are growing fast. But if you hope to sell on the Net, it’s critical to appeal to your audience, those folks who are willing to pull out their credït cards and buy your products. A huge percentage of these are still on dialup and certainly aren’t very sophisticated and fancy techniques will isolate you from many of them.

So what are your choices if you want to build a website?

1. Buy a Template:

This can work sometimes. I’ve bought them myself and they do look great. But there are some real problems with templates:

• They can be expensive - especially if you want multiple websites. Good templates aren’t cheap. The few I’ve bought are in the $60-$70 range.

• If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste your monëy on templates that won’t work for you. For instance, you will often see templates with icons, pictures, company logos, “Buy Nöw” buttons and more. Yes, they look great. But when you download the images they are not editable because if they are in jpg or gif format, you can’t make changes. The most common ‘editable’ images are in ‘psd’ format. If you own image editing software, like Photoshop (which usually sells for about $600), you can make the changes you wish. But if you don’t own this kind of software then forget it - your images can’t be changed.

• Editing templates isn’t easy. You might unwittingly purchase a template that allows 8″ of space - and your copy needs 10″ of space. Nöw what? Cheaper templates require the purchaser to “slice” them. This is tedious and time consuming and requires editing knowledge that most people don’t have. Higher quality templates allow the owner to edit them without slicing, but they are more expensive.

• Even if you can edit your new template, do you really think that you should allow a designer to dictate the placement of your salës copy? Beautiful design does not equal salës. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s a good salës site. Many novices are impressed with the good looks of a template, but Madison Avenue beauty doesn’t equal profits on the Net. Earning monëy comes from effective direct response marketing which means testing the elements on your salës page and changing them until you have a winnër. If your design is forced on you, you are limited in the changes you can make.

2. Pay a Website Designer to Build a Site for You:

• Hiring a professional can be expensive. I currently have a goal of building two websites each week for a year. Let’s assume I pay someone $500 to build a website (which is quite a reasonable amount for a well done site - it often costs much more.) That means I will be paying $1,000/week, every week, for a year. My monëy is better spent on marketing than design.

• Every time you want to make a change on your site, you must wait on a designer to make the changes. This is expensive and can be time consuming, if the designer is busy with multiple clients.

• Just like a purchased template, most web designers are focused on looks and appearance, rather than functionality or salës. All the best marketers acknowledge that plainer sites are more lucrative because the focus is on the copy, the words, rather than fancy graphics or beautiful colors. Take a look at the top money-making sites on the net. They rarely are flashy or dramatically impressive.

• Relying on a web designer creates dependency. Generally the motivation of entrepreneurs is freedom so waiting for another person to make even the smallest changes to your site isn’t taking you in the direction you want to go.

3. Buy Site-Making Software:

Every program I have seen involves a learning curve. One popular site builder, for example, has a 500 page manual, is expensive and a lot of the learning doesn’t transfer to other site systems. I looked at another one recently with a 300 page manual. The time that you spend learning these methodologies could be spent learning an HTML editor that will make you fully capable of building your own sites, whenever you choose, for almost zero cost.

Spend the time and learn do it yourself websites. I personally spent two weeks in ‘Dreamweaver Hell’ several years ago. All reviews indicated that Dreamweaver is the best HTML editor, so I bought a book and determined to learn the software on my own. The first book wasn’t long enough so I returned it for a second - and longer - book, which eventually was exchanged for an almost-1200 page manual. There were moments of frustration, tears, triumph, cursing and the thrill of success, and I emerged able to put together websites whenever I chose.

Saying “I want to be an Internet marketer” and not learning how to build websites for yourself is like wanting to be a dentist - and refusing to learn about teeth; like being a star athlete - and refusing to practice your sport. So what if your first sites won’t win a design award? You’ll get better. And you will be independent. Isn’t that the entire point of working on the Internet?

About The Author
Article by Sydney Johnston. Starting an eBay business is easier with mentoring from an eBay expert. Learn from our offers with an 11 Day Course that teaches how to sell on ebay: http://www.auction-genius-course.com/11days.shtml.

For that reason, some webmasters use cloaking to get their websites listed on search engines.

What is cloaking?

A website that uses cloaking recognizes search engine spiders by their IP address. It returns web pages to search engine spiders that are different from the web pages that web surfers see. Usually, the cloaking software creates hundreds of web pages that are optimized for a special search term so that search engine spiders get the impression that the website contains a lot of relevant information about a special topic.

If you often search on Google then you probably can confirm that you can get good results with cloaking. You can often find web pages on Google that have little to do with the description on the result page.

Does this mean that cloaking is the holy grail of SEO?

Cloaking obviously works. Does this mean that you should use it for your web pages? That would be very risky. Very few web pages that use cloaking can keep their search engine rankings for a long time.

Google has a clear statement about cloaking on its webmaster pages: “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.”

In general, most websites that use cloaking are getting banned from Google and other search engines sooner or later. It’s only a question of time. In countries such as Germany it can even be illegal to use cloaking. If you want to get long term results with your website, you should avoid cloaking at all costs.

What do search engines want from you?

Search engines want to return high quality websites to their searchers. That means that you must make sure that your website is such a high quality site. There are three main factors that make a website a high quality website:

• Your website should have a lot of content. If your website consists of one or two pages or just a few pictures then it will be very difficult to get high search engine rankings. Search engines also aren’t interested in the 825th eBay affiliate page. It’s important that your web page has great content. If that content can only be found on your website then that is even better.
• You must make sure that search engines can parse your web pages. Make sure that your HTML code is clean and that search engines can easily find out what your web pages are about. Cluttered HTML code and web pages that have been ‘optimized’ for dozens of keywords often prevent high rankings. Focus on one or two keywords per web page. It’s better that a web page is highly relevant to one or two keywords than somewhat relevant to a lot of keywords.
• Your website must have good incoming links. Links from centralized link farms and link exchange systems don’t work. You should make sure that the web sites that link to you are at least loosely related to your web site. The more related websites link to your site, the better.

All of this requires work and efforts on your part. Your web site is an important part of your business that requires the same attention as other parts of your business. The sooner you treat search engine optimization as an important investment for your web site success the sooner you’ll get great results.