Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

First of all, I apologise for neglecting my blog recently. College has been particularly busy recently; I’ve been trying to get fitter (weight lifting, walking etc.) and I’ve been working on several projects recently too. Consequently, I haven’t been able to post very much on here at all or surf the forums as much as I’d like to - hopefully, I’ll be able to find a bit more time soon to start again.

On to the main topic of the post - the 1-laptop-per-child project has announced that it will be running Windows XP on it’s laptops side-by-side with Linux. The project was set up to give children in developing countries the chance to learn I.T. and enhance their skills and knowledge. Previously, a special light weight version of Linux was planned to be the only OS (Operating System) as it is free and open source, making it ideal for educational purposes on a budget laptop. (more…)

Student governor results

I’m sure you’ve all been eagerly anticipating the announcements of the results of the student governor elections that I stood for at my college - if you haven’t, then I’ll announce them anyway. The waiting is over!

The result: victory!

Yep I won the student governor elections for the college so now comes the real part - actually doing the hard work.

Open Source search

I’m sure you’ve at least heard of this, if not been bombarded with it already. Wikia Search, currently in Alpha, is the hot news right now. It’s attracted a lot of criticism by bloggers and the tech industry however. The concept of the site is that it is open source, meaning that the code and algorithms behind the search engine can be viewed by anyone. This is a clear contrast to Google which keeps a lot of the information regarding it’s algorithms secret.

The idea does seem to be jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon a bit and I’m unsure whether it will catch on among the non-techie crowd who make up the majority of web users. However, if the site can prove that it’s search results are of a better quality to Google (which is asking a lot), then it may be able to compete successfully with the giants (Yahoo, Ask, MSN as well as Google).

Before today, I knew that Google gave Mozilla, the corporation behind the Firefox browser, a reasonable amount of it’s money. However, I had no idea it was as high as 85% - this begs the question that if there was a conflict of interest between Google and Firefox, would Google use it’s power to manipulate the browser to it’s own gains? According to Christopher Soghoian’s article, Google has already been playing with Fire.

You’re probably wondering why Google is even interested in promoting Firefox.

Here’s a couple of quick facts regarding the browser and the search engine: (more…)