Daily Internet Digest

Image source: www.egs-howto.com
The Intel 82801GBM SATA AHCI Controller (Mobile ICH7M) driver seems to be the one you’re looking for.  You desire to put that on a CD or floppy and when you start installing xp the blue screen with white text appears on the far end “Press F6 if you need to install a SCSI or RAID driver….” press F6 and put in your disk with the sata driver. I found plenty of sites with the driver download by just googling “Intel 82801GBM SATA AHCI Controller (Mobile ICH7M)”.

People with notebooks usually don’t have a USB Floppy to install SATA drivers from, so you will also have to use nLite to merge them with install CD, or search in BIOS Setup for an entry like “SATA Native mode” and set it to disabled - that will allocate legacy software to detect your HDD as a normal PATA drive.

You have to install the SATA driver earlier than turning the native support off.

Four of the top newspaper companies in the country have teamed-up and invested in ad network, quadrantONE. The New York Times Company, Gannett, Hearst Corp. and the Tribune Company will work on offering a more effective and more attractive package for advertisers that target a wider public audience. The four companies will launch a coordinated advertising sales network by pooling together their inventories to offer a more attractive package for advertisers looking to reach a national audience.

SOURCE: Internetnews

This is the second time that Facebook has made a booboo. Wasn’t it only last year that this particular social utility added a “news feeds” feature which only resulted to threatened protests from many of Facebook’s users. The company apologized, and I think it needs to do that again as there are reports of new complaints regarding a recently launched marketing program that apparently allows users and friends to see their online purchases. Facebook has been making steps to alleviate the situation but personally I think they need to hasten as a lot of users are getting pissed about how they put it as an invasion of their privacy.

Source: Yahoo! Internet News

The boom of Wikipedia as an online research tool has been proven by the number of times it has ranked first whenever you search for a certain subject or topic using the different search engines (it means that it has been deemed as relevant to your search by search engines).

Again, the problem with Wikipedia is almost always the same as any other website that offers “free membership”: anyone can log in and contribute an article or two. Hence, the issue of credibility in the part of the contributor arise. Another is that, some internet users have the tendency (and I say tendency!) to believe in everything they see on the internet. If the article on Wikipedia looks like it is properly referenced, then kids (and the elders too) might believe every single word written on the page.

However, some argue that Wikipedia has its own advantages compared to other encyclopedias: it is said to be “self-correcting”. Each page has a discussion page, thus, users who are knowledgeable about the topic, have the chance to “discuss” the article itself. Also, it can be updated almost every second if some new finding (in science for example) has been discovered.

Photo taken from http://www.fareastgizmos.com

The “cache” (pronounced as /cash/), is a technical term for the temporary storage of online files. A layman’s example would be this: If you search for a certain photo in Google, you will sometimes end up with an error page, saying that the photo does not exist. This means that the photo was already deleted in the main website server. Now you ask, “how come I was able to take a glimpse of the picture in thumbnail (small versions of the photo)?” That is because Google, and other search engines, take a “snapshot” at your website for faster access the next time you visit the site.

With this feature, Google has been accused of violating certain copyrights. The New York Times has a “members only” page but through Google’s cache, some non-members were able to infiltrate the paid section of the online broadsheet.

Photo taken from http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com

Consumersearch.com has released the top five anti-virus programs available on the internet as of January 2008. The list are as follows:

1. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 (estimated cost to buy around $40.00)
2. ESET NOD32 (estimated cost to buy around $40.00)
3. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 7.5 (free to download from their official website)
4. Panda Internet Security 2008 (estimated cost to buy around $40.00)
5. Norton Anti-Virus 2008 (estimated cost to buy around $40.00)

However, these sites also have online virus scanners (except for AVG) if you only wish to use the program once or you wouldn’t wish to buy their product (utilitarian purposes!). Their online scanners are as follows:

1. Kaspersky online lab
2. ESET NOD32 online scanner
3. NO AVG ONLINE SCANNER
4. Panda online scanner
5. Norton online scanner (Symantec’s online scanner, makers of Norton)

Photo taken from http://www.worldofstock.com

This was an excerpt from an interview of Jeff Zeleny of NYTimes with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. Obama’s campaign manager considered that the race for the Presidential Election Campaign is scheduled to open with the Iowans Caucuses, tentatively scheduled on January 14.
They are focusing considerably on the state. The Campaign Manager, Mr. Plouffe said that they are tracking the internet usage of the Democrats and they have found out a smaller number of Voters in the Iowan State are active with the use of internet in terms of checking information relative to the upcoming presidential election. Compared to New Hampshire, Iowa is not really into the internet, so the campaign is taking this situation seriously and will try to work out efforts to reach Iowans in a more organized effort.

Apart from blogging, social networking sites have gained popularity in today’s technological age. Users now have the ability to “connect” with their long lost friends and/or loved ones and, as an addition, some social networking sites give its users the option to choose the kind of relationship they have with another user (websites such as multiply.com have connection options such as “brother”, “classmate” etc.). Sounds neat, eh?

However, a new social networking website, Facebook.com, has received a lot of complaints from its members that they were unable to “completely” delete their personal information from the servers of Facebook. Yes, there is a delete option there if you wish to remove your account, but you need to write Facebook if you wish to “completely” delete your personal information from their servers.

Photo taken from http://libizblog.wordpress.com

According to an Armenian news agency, current developments in the IT arena can be compared as an “embryonic” with “vague” future prospects. IT development is described as one of the government’s priorities. There has been no legislation to control country’s internet usage.
Though there are no official stats, It is a known fact that there’s a huge increase on the use of internet and there are estimated 10,000 email and internet users some of whom who have been given email address through the UNDP project.

Several Private TCP/IP networks are now starting to avoid the public internet. America’s great universities such as Harvard who are the builders and first users of internet are preparing to join the abandonment of their sinking ship.
Privatizing the backbones has left universities with such a commodity that can’t be of good help in providing the needs for research and education. Universities are proposing new, next-level, government funded Internet. This proposal is backed by a treaty that 100 universities and research groups will commit $500,000 - $50 million total for a 3-5 year partnership.