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(About 1,164 words)

The New, the Best, and the Worst
Collected by Pim Borman, Website Editor, SW Indiana PC Users Group, Inc.
http://swipcug.apcug.org/
swipcug( at )sigecom.net

Talking Turk-ey.
If you’ve ever earned some pocket money stuffing envelopes, the advent of e-mail may have put you out of business. But the Internet giveth what it taketh away.

Much of the unanticipated success of the Internet is due to the contributions made by selfless volunteers. Businesses then realized the importance of the Internet to advertise themselves, and Wile E. Coyote would now be able to order his Road Runner catchers from www.acme.com (there actually is such a Web site). Nevertheless, volunteers expect to derive some form of satisfaction from their efforts, and the equivalent of envelope stuffing for free does not draw many aficionados.

The Internet would not be more than a large flea market were it not for the powerful search engines capable of retrieving information almost instantly. The retrieval algorithms depend on vast indexes maintained by constantly culling millions of Web sites world wide. Only computer-readable text is indexable. Yet, there are many other types of valuable information on the Web that are not computer-readable, such as hand-written documents and graphical images. It is almost impossible for a computer to distinguish a picture of Picabo Street in her ski outfit from Mother Teresa in her nun’s habit. A human can distinguish them at a glance. Hand-written documents must be retyped, as many genealogy indexers know. Thus there is a great need for indexing graphics and hand-written information that requires human input. There are many other instances where human input is required, such as rating the validity of computer-generated keywords describing search targets, or retrieving numbers from scanned documents, such as transfer deeds.

Amazon, with its interest in computer searching with its A9.com search engine, has established a program that enlists human help for such tasks. The program is called Mechanical Turk, after a mechanical chess-playing automaton in 1769 that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. It featured a life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, seated behind a cabinet. It confounded such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Amazon has set up a Web site () as a link between programmers looking for artificial, artificial intelligence, and paid volunteers providing human inputs to perform the requested tasks, referred to as HITs. These are typically of a simple, repetitive nature and pay a minimal amount, a penny or so, for each input. For instance, I saw a HIT listed to look up deed records on a Web site and find the transfer taxes. The volunteers that complete such tasks are rated on their proficiency and accuracy and build up a reputation that qualifies them for somewhat more challenging and higher-paying HITS.

It is an interesting concept that may catch on as it is further refined. (Mentioned in Bill Machrone’s column in PC Magazine, February 17, 2006).

Oldie Tribulations
I own a 6-year old former dream machine, once briefly the envy of friends and relatives, a Dell desktop with a 600MHz Pentium III processor and a 20GB hard drive. Over the years I added another 20GB hard drive, upped the RAM to 256 MB, and upgraded from Windows 98SE2 to Windows ME. Lately I have been using this computer to evaluate a variety of Linux distributions that I installed on the second drive in separate partitions.

Recently I took advantage of a special offer to update my version of Xandros (Linux) Desktop Open Circulation to the DeLuxe Edition. I wanted to install it in a clean 10 GB partition, but as a result of the many installations of different operating systems, the second hard drive could not be repartitioned any longer because of a faulty partition table. I could read and write to the disk, but neither Partition Magic nor any other disk software was able to repartition the drive, or even to reformat it. It was time for drastic measures.

I discarded the faulty slave drive, bought a new Western Digital 80GB hard drive, installed it as the master, and relegated the original 20GB master drive to slave status. All I needed to do was reinstall Windows ME and then repartition the disk to make room for Xandros and Linspire, my favorite Linux distributions. Easier said than done, as it turned out. I’ll try to summarize the lessons I (re-)learned.

·        Windows ME only upgrades from Windows 98, not from DOS.
·        Read the manual about the proper location of the itty-bitty jumpers that determine if a drive is the master or the slave. Don’t just go by the markings on the drives. Apparently all drives are different.
·        Re-use the old IDE cable if the new cable doesn’t reach both drives.
·        Even the most recent BIOS version for this computer available from Dell (dated 2000) is not able to recognize more than 32 GB of the 80 GB drive.
·        Believe it when it says on the box that the drive requires Windows XP or better.
·        The special software, provided by Western Digital, to reach and repartition all 80 GB on an old computer must be used before installing the operating system.
·        After using the special WD software to set up the hard drive, don’t use Partition Magic 8.0 to further repartition the drive. You won’t be able to reboot and will have to start all over again.
·        The computer won’t boot any longer from the old hard drive, reinstalled as the master. In computing too, you can’t go home again.
·        After protecting the system with a ZoneAlarm firewall and F-prot antivirus you think it is safe to go online to update Windows ME and install Internet Explorer 6.0. You’ll still receive half a dozen instances of a spy program called Alexa, courtesy of Microsoft. AdAware will identify and remove it for you.
·        All’s well that ends well. The computer now has 20GB of Windows ME, 30 GB of Linspire 5.0, and 30 GB of Xandros DeLuxe Edition, complete with boot manager.

Maybe I should just have bought one of those cheapy Dell computers. But removing all the junk programs they come with might have been just as frustrating. I’ll hold out for a system using the 64-bit AMD chip. That excludes Dell, which uses Intel only. Linux has long since run on 64-bit processors, and Windows Vista is just getting around to it. Now is not the time; later this year, maybe. I might have a local dealer built one to order.

There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member, brings this article to you.