"Factoids," "Kirt's Cogitations," and
"Tech Topics Smorgasbord"
are all manifestations of my rantings on various subjects relevant (usually) to
the overall RF Cafe theme. All may be accessed on these pages:
IBM is betting $100 million that it can whoop
Google in the search engine realm. Its new project, dubbed WebFoundation, is an
intelligent database that can separate the wheat from the chaff on the Internet.
Its algorithms check for accuracy and truthfulness, popularity, translates languages,
compares prices, tracks chat rooms and more, using a cluster of 30 dual Xenon processors
and 160 TBytes of disk storage. IBM plans to sell data like what your company's
public reputation is, as gleaned from newspapers, TV, radio transcripts, magazines,
etc., for around $150k. A commercial service, Factavia, will launch WebFoundation's
capabilities in mid-2004. What has it learned so far? 30% of the web is porn, and
30% is duplicated data. There are 50 M new or changed pages every day, and 65% of
web pages are now written in English, but by 2010, English will be a minority.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed
formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
while typing up your telephone line, and a nice lady's voice announced "You've Got
Mail" when a new message arrived...
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and text used on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowledged.