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Computer Website Reviews | The reviews on this page were designed to give website visitors across the country the chance to see the best of what the Internet has to offer the computer community. ComputerBuzz.com knows that you don't have time to surf the Internet looking for the best computer related websites that focus on your information needs. That is why Computerbuzz.com has provided this Reviews Page to the public, to give our website visitors access to critiques of computer related websites. |
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Old Computers.com | website review
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One of our very favorite web sites is a nostalgic place called Old-Computers.com. It contains great photos and info on a thousand models of historic personal computers that are now only junk and antiques. These archives go back at least to the 1950s. The details provided about every one of these venerable old machines is fairly impressive. The computers are arranged alphabetically by model/name, so you can quickly find the poop on whichever one you're interested in.
Come with ComputerBuzz on a quick trip down Memory Lane and let's take a look at some PCs from the past in a very approximate chronological order. |
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| | Times Browsed: 213 | | Items Within: 29 | | Last Updated: 1/29/2008 |
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Apple.com | website review
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The personal computer revolution is just now getting to be three decades old. If it were a person, it would still be in the younger half of the US population.
Hands down, and without a shadow of a doubt, the one single most innovative, forward-looking, futuristic hardware and/or software company on this planet to date has been Apple Computer (recently renamed Apple, Inc.). The company has had its well publicized ups and downs, but ever since it introduced the very first functional personal computer for public consumption (the Apple II running Apple DOS) it has never been anything other than the technological and intellectual leader of the worldwide personal computer movement.
To be convinced of this, you only have to visit Apple's web site. Almost all of the techno-wonders you'll find there were conceived and invented in Apple's own labs. Come with us to the company's web site at its main campus in Cupertino, California.
Official Website: Apple.com |
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| | Times Browsed: 411 | | Items Within: 8 | | Last Updated: 9/16/2007 |
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Search Engines | website reviews
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The World Wide Web is easily the largest collection of data in the Solar System. However, it's nothing but useless trivia unless you have some way to search through it and sift it to find the URL that has what you're looking for. That will be a piece of software on a web site that is known as a search engine.
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the Web. The resulting list of places for you to consult is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Some search engines also mine data available in newsgroups, databases, or open directories.
The first Web search engine was Wandex, a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, and it became the standard for all major search engines since.
Soon after that, a number of search engines appeared, including Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. They competed with popular directories such as Yahoo. Before long, the directories integrated or added search engine technology for competitive functionality. |
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| | Times Browsed: 287 | | Items Within: 8 | | Last Updated: 8/24/2007 |
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Wiki website reviews
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The meteoric rise of the Internet since 1990 has ushered in a whole new vocabulary of strange sounding words. One of those strange words is “wiki,” and it has been compounded into any number of other new words with which we would all do well to become familiar. The word "wiki" is a shorter form of “wiki wiki,” a Hawaiian word meaning quick or fast. A wiki is a collaborative website which can be quickly and directly edited by anyone with access to it.
The very first web site to be called a wiki was WikiWikiWeb. A fellow by the name of Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on Internet domain c2.com the following year. Cunningham remembered a Honolulu Airport employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose 'wiki wiki' as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Let's take a look at it and its associated web sites.
Official Website: www.Wikipedia.org |
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| | Times Browsed: 219 | | Items Within: 7 | | Last Updated: 9/11/2007 |
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DistroWatch.com | website review
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Linux isn't just an alternative operating system for web servers and propeller-heads anymore. The secret is out: it's quickly getting to be a mainstream OS that rivals Windows in power, ease, and features, and it's far ahead of Windows in terms of security. To be more accurate, Linux is not really an operating system; it is a low level software kernel upon which an operating system can be based.
At last count there were more than 600 differently named operating systems based upon this kernel, all of which fall under the broad, nominal umbrella of “Linux.”
Without a doubt, the big number one Linux web site on planet Earth is DistroWatch.com, a one-man show published by Ladislav Bodnar. Whether you're a Linux newbie or an old pro, DistroWatch is where you'll want to check out and download (mostly for free) the newest Linux OS versions first thing every morning.
We've been watching this site for you for some time now, and it only seems to get better and better. This is one of our all-time favorite examples of how a major league web site should be run. Google gives it a PageRank rating of 9 (out of 10).
Official Website:www.DistroWatch.com |
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| | Times Browsed: 377 | | Items Within: 6 | | Last Updated: 9/11/2007 |
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Softpedia.com | website review
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Without a doubt, the world's largest repository of free software has got to be at Softpedia.com, one of our favorite web sites. The site claims to have almost 300,000 software items, all of which are completely free (as in beer) just for the downloading. To be sure, many of them are amateur efforts that only appeal to niche markets and/or propeller-heads, but many more of these applications and utilities are genuine quality products that enjoy broad recognition and popularity.
The software at Softpedia includes versions that run under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Although Softpedia doesn't make a special effort to cater to other operating systems, many of the downloads for Mac and Linux also have versions for BSD, UNIX, and Darwin.
The shear volume of quality software that this site purveys on an almost daily basis is enormously impressive, and we can not help but admire the people who make it happen.
Official Website:www.Softpedia.com |
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| | Times Browsed: 333 | | Items Within: 7 | | Last Updated: 9/11/2007 |
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Linux/BSD | general websites reviewed
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Computer Buzz has sifted through most of the significant Linux-oriented websites and come up with a list of same for your consideration. The following list does not contain any proprietary or single-flavor sites (e.g., Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, etc.). All of these sites are general interest sites that have information and/or downloads for dozens, if not hundreds, of different Linux distributions.
Most websites that feature Linux also include at least a few major distros of BSD, the branch of Unix that lends itself to free and open experimentation. While there are approximately 600 active Linux distros now, there are only a couple of dozen BSDs. |
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| | Times Browsed: 153 | | Items Within: 9 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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Online Map Services | website reviews
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Here at Computer Buzz, we like maps. Maybe we're strange―or maybe it has something to do with our previous involvement with the oil and gas business―but we've got maps hanging on all the walls in our computer labs and corner offices. And we know where to go to find more maps on the Internet too.
When we say “maps,” we're also talking about aerial photographs of the Earth. In many ways, the photos are even better than the maps. The Internet is a fabulous source of free maps and aerial photographs. Come with us and let us show you some of our favorite map service web sites.
And as we do, please try to remember the venerable credo that has been passed down through the centuries from one generation of cartographers to another:
“North is at the top.” |
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| | Times Browsed: 334 | | Items Within: 10 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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Stock Photography/Image Search | website reviews
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Stock photography (also called a photo archive, picture library, image bank or photo bank) consists of existing photographs which can be licensed for specific uses. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, filmmakers, web designers, graphic artists, corporate creative groups, and others use stock photography frequently.
Images are commonly filed at an agency that negotiates licensing fees on the photographer's behalf in exchange for a percentage of the sales. Then the images are presented in searchable web site databases, purchased online, and delivered to the end user via download or email.
Pricing is determined by the size of the audience or readership, how long the image is to be used, country or region where the images will be used, and whether royalties are due to the image creator or owner. Often, an image can be licensed for less than $200, or in the case of the microstock photography websites as little as $1.
With rights-managed stock photography, an individual licensing agreement is negotiated for each use. Royalty-free stock photography offers a photo buyer the ability to use an image in an unlimited number of ways for a single license fee. The client may, however, request "exclusive" rights, preventing other customers from using the same image for a specified length of time or in the same industry. Such sales can command thousands of dollars. However, with royalty free licensing there is no option for getting exclusive usage rights.
Some stock photography sites offer low-resolution photography free for the purpose of preparing advertising mock-ups to demonstrate a proposed design. If the advertiser decides to use the design, the rights to use the high-resolution image then can be negotiated.
Royalty-free (a misnomer; this does not mean the image is totally and perfectly “free”)
1. Purchasers pay a one-time fee to use the image multiple times for multiple purposes (subject to some limits).
2. No time limit on when you can use an image.
3. No one can have exclusive rights of a royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he wants).
4. A royalty-free image usually has a limit as to how many times you can reproduce it. For example, a license might allow you to print 500,000 brochures with the purchased image. Beyond that print run number, you are required to pay a fee per brochure, usually 1 to 3 cents. Magazines with a large print run cannot use a standard royalty-free license and therefore they usually either purchase images with a rights-managed license or have their own photographers.
Rights-managed (sometimes called “licensed images”)
1. Purchaser pays each time the image is used.
2. There is a time limit on how long a buyer has exclusive use of an image (usually one year). This allows the photographer to sell exclusive rights to the image again when the first buyer's time limit expires.
3. You must choose a rights-managed license if you wish to negotiate exclusive use of an image. Not all rights-managed licenses are exclusive; that must be stipulated in the agreement.
4. The fee is based on such things as exclusivity, distribution, length of time used, and geographic location of use.
5. A rights-managed image usually allows a much larger print run per image than does a royalty-free license.
6. “Editorial” license is a form of rights-managed license in which there are no releases for the subjects. Since there are no releases the images cannot be used for advertising or to depict controversial subjects, only for news or educational purposes.
Computer Buzz has assembled a list of some of the premier web sites for finding images, mostly photographs. Our list is far from complete, as there are a great many such photo repositories in cyberspace. We think that these are some of the better ones. |
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| | Times Browsed: 317 | | Items Within: 13 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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Weather | website reviews
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Weather reporting is one thing the Internet does extremely well. There are any number of excellent sites that you can search for local conditions and forecasts. And that, of course, includes hazardous weather advisories as well. The kicker, rather obviously, involves the accuracy of the forecasts at their source, and there have been precious few breakthroughs in that regard in the last half century, Internet or no Internet. Meteorology is one of the least exact of all the natural sciences, and very few weather forecasts come with a money-back guarantee.
Computer Buzz has assembled a list of some of the most prominent weather web sites for your consideration. We suggest that you look them over and then bookmark one or two of them. We also suggest that you take their forecasts for what they are worth and then pack an umbrella anyway. |
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| | Times Browsed: 244 | | Items Within: 10 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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BeBits.com | website review
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The Be operating system (BeOS) which flourished ever-so-briefly around the turn of the millenium is almost, but not quite, dead. If you think Mac users are fanatics, you should rub shoulders with these BeOS true-believers sometime. Computer Buzz is currently experimenting with a couple of Be-powered machines in our computer lab in Dallas and a couple more in our satellite office, and we have come to believe that the Be-heads are not as far off base as you might think.
In addition to being way out in front in the '90s on such OS features as multi-tasking, protected memory, and multi-threading, BeOS also offered things that even Apple hadn't yet thought of, like multiple virtual desktops and sophisticated support for at least eight or sixteen CPU chips (nowadays called “cores”) all in one box. Unlike other alternative OSs such as Linux and UNIX, BeOS doesn't remind us nearly as much of Windows as it does of Mac OS 9. It was heady stuff, that BeOS.
Be, Inc is now long-defunct, and BeOS is just a warm fuzzy memory that is somehow maintained on life support on one of our favorite web sites: BeBits. Compared to most of the other web sites that Computer Buzz monitors, BeBits is pretty much a bare bones operation that eschews most of the bells and whistles that we have come to take for granted.
You can't really download a copy of BeOS at BeBits (or anywhere) because its present-day copyright owners have never released it under a GPL license, and it is not remotely old enough to pass into the public domain. But you can download just about every other piece of Be-related freeware and shareware (i.e., application packages, games, utilities, patches and upgrades for same, etc.) from BeBits, and the site offers Be-heads one of the desperately few dedicated BeOS message boards still left on planet Earth. Quality apps such as Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Abiword have been ported to BeOS, so it is not by any means a useless platform.
Installation copies of BeOS can still be occasionally found on eBay for about twenty bucks. Check out the official web site and see if you might be interested. We are.
Official Website: www.BeBits.com |
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| | Times Browsed: 274 | | Items Within: 3 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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DropShare.net | website review
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Let's face it, there are occasionally times when we need to send somebody a fairly large file, but our email client chokes on it because it's bigger than a certain size. Or, maybe our email program can handle it, but it's too big for the intended recipient's mailbox. Or, maybe there's no problem with email limits, but the file is so incredibly large that the upload takes forever.
Not to worry. DropShare is here.
Hey, why didn't somebody think of this earlier?
Official Website: www.DropShare.net |
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| | Times Browsed: 310 | | Items Within: 7 | | Last Updated: 1/25/2008 |
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