Have Laptop Will Travel

Happy Y2K

Originally posted on January 1, 2000 @ 12:01 am

Welcome to the year 2000!

It was speculated that computer programs would stop working or produce erroneous results today because they stored years with only two digits and that the year 2000 would be represented by 00 and would be interpreted by software as the year 1900.

This would cause date comparisons to produce incorrect results. It was also thought that embedded systems, making use of similar date logic, might fail and cause utilities and other crucial infrastructure to fail.

Well as you can see, it was just a big ploy to buy tons of bottled water, duct tape, and rolls of plastic to seal your house because everything is still working. Even the internet and power seem to be…

(power failure)

The technology behind Google’s great results

Originally posted on April 1, 2002 @ 3:20 am

As a Google user, you’re familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google’s search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

PigeonRank

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

Find out more…

Google Releases MentalPlex

Originally posted on April 1, 2000 @ 6:47 am

Unlike regular search engines that require you to type a query to conduct a search, MentalPlex search anticipates your request by evaluating over 1.3 billion variables including:

  • the last 5 sites you visited before coming to Google
  • current air pressure, humidity and ozone content
  • astrological configuration at the time of your visit
  • speed and vectors of your mouse movement
  • personal aura and brainwave activity

Using proprietary predictive search algorithms developed through 13 years of research by an international consortium of PhDs in the fields of artificial and pseudo-intelligence, parapsychology and improbability, MentalPlex is the only search engine that accurately returns results without requiring you enter a query. Google’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page calls MentalPlex “a quantum leap in finding what you are looking for on the Internet. Typing in queries is so 1999.”

Find out more…