Thinkers Fun Blog

If you haven’t heard of a technological innovation took place in Japan, you might never be able to figure out what these things are in the picture below. Many things are indeed unbelievable, including our future. We all are living in a magic time.

Take a close look at them – are they prestige pens with built-in digital camera?

Nope. The following picture will give you some clues. Yes, you are right, the desktop and notebook computers we are currently using will sonn be replaced with these goodies. Scientists in Japan are about ready to put full-function “pocket computers” in market.

In the technological revolution of micro computers, scientists have made great processes by adopting Bluetooth technology. We are soon be able to see ordinary computers in true pocket sizes. These pen-looking devices can provide the functions of keyboards and and monitors on any flat surfaces.

After seeing these things, I really feel the computers we are currently using are outdated.  Will it soon be the time for us to say “goodbye” to these traditional computers that have been with us for decades?

This beautiful lion picture was taken in Kenya recently.

It’s said that the ancestors of this lion knew father of President Obama. The lion never thought he would become someone destined somehow with a US president. His ancestors told him that older Obama often came to see them in this remote field. At that time, they didn’t realize that Kenyan gentleman could become the father of a US president many years later.

What’s in the eyes of this lion seemingly tells us: no one really knows for sure under which cloud there will be rains.

Material weight calculations in various shapes are very important in many areas such as building and construction, shipping and logistics, engineering and design, as well as sales and marketing.

Weight calculation actually uses rather simple math formulars. Based on my search for “weight caculation” over internet, however, there hadn’t been many calculator utilities available online. So, I decided to compile a systematic online material weight calculator for use by public. Here is the link to the utility: http://www.amlinkmarble.com/weigtcalculator/weightcalculator.htm .

The Weight Calculator covers over 50 different types of materials including marble, granite and other natural stones; aluminum, steel, cast iron and other metals; cement, GFRC and other concrete materials; and many more. Custom density inputs of unlisted materials are also available. The calculator can calculate the weight for 8 different shapes: slab shape, square column, round column, round tube, ball, hexagon and octagon.

The utility includes unit conversions, creating added conveniences for users. Overall, the Material Weight Calculator is user friendly.

Popularities of granite countertops change from time to time in consumer’s market. Discoveries of new granite quarries and closures of the old ones, shifting in architectural styles as well as the worldwide color trends largely contribute to such popularity changes. For instance, the classic Giallo Veneziano had been one of the most popular countertop granite colors for decades until its main quarry in Brazil dried out in recent years. As a result, a similar Brazilian granite, Giallo Cecillia, quickly became one of the most favored countertop colors in the North American market.

According to an informal industrial survey, the top 10 most popular granite countertop colors for year 2008-2009 in America are:

1. Brazil Black;  2. Chestnut or Tan Brown; 3. Dakota Mahogany; 4. Labrador Green, or Ubatuba; 5. Mahogany Blue  6. Oplescense, or Indian Black Pearl; 7, Cecilia Classic; 8. Tropical Brown; 9 Tropical Green; 10. Verde Butterfly.

Computers have gone through several revolutionary stages in terms of types and classifications. In this blog, I created a listing of each of the first Computers starting with the first programmable computer leading up to the shapes and configurations today. Please be advised that early computing device inventions such as the abacus, calculators, tablet machines and difference machine are not included in the list.

First Programmable Computer

Konrad Zuse from Germany created the original Z1 original in his parent’s living room in 1936 to 1938. Z1 was considered to be the first electrical binary programmable computer. 

The First Digital Computer

Abbreviated for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC was first developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937 and continued to be developed until 1942 at the Iowa State College, the current Iowa State University. On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by Eckert and Mauchly was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer.

The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. The computer occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. Although the Judge ruled that the ABC Computer was the first digital computer many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital Computer.

Because Judge’s ruling on the case was never appealed, the ABC should be the first digital computer. As the ABC was never fully functional, however, ENIAC should be considered as the first functional digital computer.

The First Stored Program Computer

The early British computer, known as the EDSAC is considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. The computer performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949 and was also the first computer that ran graphical computer game.

The First Personal Computer

In 1975, Ed Roberts used the term “personal computer” when he introduced the Altair 8800, although the first personal computer has been considered to be Kenback-1, which was introduced at a price of $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

The Micral is considered to be the first commercial non-assembly computer. That computer was installed with an Intel 8008 processor and sold for $1,750 in 1973.

The First Workstation

Although never been sold, the title of the first workstation should be awarded to Xerox Alto that was introduced in 1974. The computer was revolutionary at that time and included a fully functional computer, display, and even mouse. The computer operated like many computers we use today, utilizing windows, menus and icons as an interface to its operating system.

The First Laptop Portable Computer

The first laptop computer was Osborne I, a portable computer developed by Adam Osborne. The laptop weighed 24 pounds and came with a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4″ floppy drives, and a modem.

IBM PCD later released the first IBM portable in 1984. It weighed in at 30 pounds. IBM PCD then announced in 1986 its first real laptop computer, PC convertible, weighing 12 pounds. IBM ThinkPad 775CD was introduced in 1994. The ThinkPad was the first notebook with built-in CD-ROM.

The First IBM Compatible PC Computer

IBM shipped its first electric computer, the 701, in 1953. Later IBM introduced its first personal computer, namely “IBM PC”, in 1981. The computer was code named and still sometimes referred to as the “Acorn”. It had an 8088 processor, 16 KB of memory, expandable to 256, and ran on MS-DOS operating system.

The First PC Clone

The first PC clone was developed by Compaq. “Compaq Portable”, 100% compatible with IBM computers and there software, was released in March 1983.

The First Apple Computer

The first Apple computer, known as the Apple I computer, was designed by Steve Wozniak in 1976.

The First Computer Company

Founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly who helped creating ENIAC computer, Electronic Controls Company was the first formal computer company. The company was later renamed EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which released a series of mainframe computers under name “UNIVAC”.

The First Multimedia Computer

Tandy Radio Shack became one of the first companies to build computers based on MPC standard in 1992, with its introductions of M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX computers.

Keyword research is a fundamental and critical building block for your SEO campaign. This is the foundation of any SEO effort and done properly, it can lead to great prosperity. Ignore your keyword research and… well, best of luck to you out there, wherever you may go. Based on my experience with over a decade of keyword research, this is a
never-ending process interrupted by small breaks to see how things change. You never really finish this part.

Awesome keyword research tries to balance the volume of traffic, the level of competition, the value of each click, and relevancy. I will try to explain all of this and show you some tools to help you get started, as well as some methods of using those tools that will increase your effectiveness if you already do keyword research.

Effective keyword research starts with a small handful of very short phrases or a few single keywords, and then the list grows. After you refine your list and remove “less useful” terms, it is a process of casting a wide net with as many possibilities as you
think of, then refining that huge list down to some very useful keywords all over again. Repeat this until you don’t see any new, good words coming in.

Volume of traffic

It’s simple to say that the keywords with the most traffic are the best ones to use and this is true up to a point. Words with a very high volume of searches may be targeted by many others who have done keyword research and this typically means higher levels of
competition, but not always! Sometimes you find a gem with a lot of searches and relatively few people trying to get that traffic. Another issue with the mega-traffic keywords is they are usually very generic in nature and a lot of your traffic may not be
interested in what you have.

Level of competition

The easiest way to define competition is to look at the number of pages Google shows for a particular keyword: results 1-10 of about “x” amount. There are other methods of determining competition besides this that are more accurate, but they become more complex and involve a lot of extra data gathering.

One of the important competition factors is the number of backlinks to the top X sites for a given keyword. The sites will have a wide range in link volume vs. link quality. The sweet spot lies with the most links of any of the reasonable number of links, while the sites with mega links are usually huge and cover a lot of topics. This is a good thing if you see this pattern. The mega sites generally serve as filler when Google doesn’t have any better sites to show.

Value Of Clicks

At first, all you have is a gut feel on this. With proper testing and tracking, you can tell which keywords tend to convert into higher profits. There is a general rule about this that the more accurately targeted the keyword phrase is to your page, the better your conversion rates will be.

The Keyword Tools

Google has an awesome free tool to use for keyword research. You will have to open an AdWords account if you don’t already have one, but you don’t need to run an ad campaign and you won’t be charged unless you place ads. Here is the link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Using their ‘standard’ keyword tool, you can enter a simple keyword or several short phrases or even the URL for one of your competitors. Hit the send button and Google will return a monster-sized list of keywords. One important note to make is that they have several ways to filter your keywords: broad, phrase, and exact. These will determine how
closely your keywords are matched to their traffic. I would go with “exact matching” since it must match the term exactly. Broad: “blue shoe” matches “red shoe” since “shoe” matches – not very accurate. Phrase: “blue shoe” matches “old blue shoe” and “Mr. Shoe Blue” – better, but still contains results that don’t match the keywords. Exact: “blue shoe” means “blue shoe”, period.

Google keywords tool also shows you the relative search volume for any given term, helping you to spot terms that may be very important, if they fit your profile. These keywords can be added to a list and you can run new keyword searches to get new lists. Once you have built up a good list, export them into a text editor like notepad, WordPad or many others.

http://www.google.com/sktool This is Google’s Search-based keyword tool. The big difference between this tool and the one above is where it gets its results. This tool gets its results from actual Google searches being performed over time.

Google Wonderwheel. This tool helps you to see “related terms” in Google’s eyes. Use it to find key phrases that work well together – terms that help support your main keyword targets.

Each of the major search engines issue certain guidelines on how your website should be created. They aren’t telling you how to build your site, but for best results with them, it may be wise to follow their suggestions. The Webmaster Guidelines issued by the major search engines are generally very generic with some occasional specific info.
Many SEO problems can be traced back to Webmaster Guideline violations even if it seems like you are doing everything else in your SEO campaign right. Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts of Google have suggested to people that they should review the Webmaster
Guidelines when answering questions about poor ranking.

Some of the more common pitfalls include too many links on your pages or having an HTML file that is too large, so the search engines may skip it or may not place much value on it. What are the limits, you ask? While all of the search engines mention “keeping the number of links to a reasonable limit”, Google specifically indicates 100 links as that limit. This is something important to all of the search engines, but one of them actually mentioned a specific number.

Does this mean that Google will not handle a site with over 100 links? I believe this is not quite true since an older site of mine has many more than 100 links and rank well with the Google index.

The size of html document should be “kept reasonable” according to all of the search engines guidelines. MSN even mentioned a specific file length – 150KB. This does not include your external images and CSS files or scripts, but if you use dynamic pages, it is hard to measure just by scanning through your files. You will need to test every page on your site to be sure that none of them are showing up as “over the limit”.

Other tidbits released by search engines over the years include bad 404′s. Does your site return a 404 header when the page cannot be found? Many don’t do this properly. You may see something on the page, but in many cases, these return http Status codes that
spiders interpret as meaning your page is really there. Can you imagine the mess involved when the search engines become clogged with useless URL from your site that all say the samething…”Page Not Found”? There are many utility on the web that can test your site’s page headers.

Yahoo has a specific crawler that visits websites and looks for this specific issue. Don’t let them catch you sending the wrong info when they request a page that is obviously not on your website. Some quality checker tools are available to scan every folder that find on your website and run tests automatically. They can make sure that nothing is forgotten or slips through the cracks when testing your entire site for issues. Don’t let Yahoo catch you “lying” about the HTTP Status Codes on your site.

Another topic covered by the Webmaster Guidelines of various search engines is the use of “well-formed code”. What is well-formed code? Well, there’s W3C compliance, then there’s well-formed code just below that, then there is broken code. W3C loves to complain about alt tags on images. While using this may help your SEO, skipping it won’t hurt your SEO. If everything else is right on your site, then this page is not W3C valid, but it is still probably a “well-formed” document. If your html is at least “well-formed”, then Search engines can more than likely understand your entire webpage.

If your code is not at least ‘well-formed’, then it is because the structure of the html code is not correct. It becomes quite possible that any ranking issues you are having are happening because your code is broken to the point that it makes no sense. It may work in your browser, but your browser was only designed to load so many pages in time and isn’t as “stripped down” as a web spider. Spiders are designed to load billions of pages and keep them updated and current on a constant basis. I have seen many sites where the code was so broken that links below the worst spots were not viewed as links at all.

You may want to use some webpage quality checker tool to save your website. These tools will check the html structure of your pages and help to guide you into making your website very spider-friendly, which makes it so much easier to rank as you pursue the other aspects of SEO.