According to the GoogleGuy, the best way you can ensure that search engine spiders get your sites content as expected, you should use absolute links rather then relative (meaning to use the full web address, including your domain name instead of just the pages file name and relative position) in your site menus. The downside of absolute links rather then relative is that your site is then less portable, but if that portability comes at the expense of search engine ranking then it’s probably not worth it.

Also of interest is the suggestion that if your site resolves with both www.example.com and just example.com you should choose one or the other and use a 301 (permanent) redirect to direct all requests to the chosen one. The main reason for that is probably to ensure your site is not penalised for duplicate content but it’s a good idea anyway, particularly if you use cookies on your site.

Former Microsoft PR man Sean Sundwall has stopped defending Microsoft’s actions and started defending 180solutions, the company that was behind the break-up of the anti-spyware consortium COAST (The other members where not happy that an alleged SpyWare company were allowed to join an anti-spyware group and as a result the group broke up.) 180solutions have been involved in some decidedly questionable tactics in the past and although they claim to be clean now, not everyone is in agreeance with them. Sean Sundwall has been instrumental in many of Microsoft’s PR efforts, so by putting Mr Sundwall on the payroll 180solutions are no doubt hoping will give them some creditability. Ironically not so long ago, Sean was making anti spyware press statements on behalf of Microsoft. Goes to show how much you can believe PR, their opinions appear to be directly related to their pay packet. Not a particulary surprising fact, but one that should definately be remembered when reading such PR material.

Google have announced their “Summer of Code” program, the purpose of which is to introduce students to the Open Source development process. Google will pay $4500 to each student that completes an OSS project by the end of summer.

The list of Open Source organizations supporting the program is a who’s who of the OSS community including such big names as Apache, Wine, Mono, KDE, Gnome, Net and Free BSD and OpenOffice.org among many others. Read more at Google’s Summer of code page.

Projects like this are of great benefit to the OSS community, they bring fresh ideas and new developers and they also raise the awareness of Open Source with the next generations. Google built most of their system using Open Source software like Linux so it is nice to see them giving something back. Other corporations should be encouraged to start similar projects. They get something back also, the chance to evaluate and hire new and emerging talents before they are snapped up by the usual suspects.

PC World has joined the rather large list of awarding companies for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. They awarded Firefox the “Product of the year” award and summarized it thus:

This open-source program is streamlined, customizable, and just plain better. No wonder it has attracted millions of users in just a few months. Is it merely a coincidence that Microsoft finally plans to give the aging Internet Explorer the major overhaul it has needed for years?

PC Worlds review of Firefox is fairly basic compared to some, but the conclusion is much like all the others. In short, other browsers may be better at a particular task then Firefox, but overall Firefox is the best general purpose web browser.

With over 60 million downloads, literally dozens of awards, growing market share statistics, and a soon to be released improved 1.1 version (currently in Alpha release) Firefox doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon.

AMD has announced the release of their X2 dual core Athlon64 CPU’s. If the early reports are any indication, they significantly outperform the equivalent Intel CPU’s. Even better, motherboards designed for 90nm CPU’s can handle the new CPU’s meaning you may not need to change your motherboard to adopt one of these new babies. For people that don’t multi-task much, you won’t notice that much difference after the change. If however, you are a multi-tasker (and let’s face it, who of us isn’t) you will notice a significant improvement in multi-tasking performance and hopefully you’ll see much less of the dreaded hour glass telling you to wait while the CPU catches up with you. Don’t rush out and grab one yet though, Intel has currently undercut the pricing of the X2 CPU’s meaning that we can expect rapid price cuts from AMD shortly. Right now though, it appears that AMD holds the cards for both Performance and power consumption.

The American Board of Surgery gives a written test to surgeons seeking to be board certified in their specialty. They give an all day test in written form. A recent taker reviewed his test and made a list of the questions and answers to over 100 of the questions. He then sold them on eBay.

Now, getting the skinny on tests is nothing new. I found out my junior year in college that most fraternities and sororities at a school I attended kept exam files by professor. What a huge advantage. I was a bit bothered to learn this as I felt it was unfair to those not associated with the organizations who didn’t have access. By the time I was in graduate school, the institution I attended actually made prior tests available in the library so all could have a chance to review them. What makes this situation different is that the gentleman decided to profit from the questions and answers. He sold a few sets on eBay, and now faces over $35,000 in penalties and decertification as a surgeon because of ethics issues.

Is it wrong to have a group of people who took a test mentally make “notes” and then record their information so others can benefit from it? Is it the fact that this guy wrote down the answers? If something is important one year, it will be important the next year. Is the quest for these guys to know the answers to these questions … giving out the answers certainly does that. Or was the goal to make the takers life miserable, that can only be achieved if they have to struggle their way through it.

If having the examinees know the answers (ie the knowledge of the exam topics) is actually the goal, maybe the organization itself should release the questions and answers to the 5000 most likely questions.

This article comes to you direct from Israel and is about the use of spyware being used by big companies to track their competitors. Loads of executives from big companies like Volvo Israel and Cellcom have been arrested or are under investigation for corporate espionage. Is this a sign of the future? Read the article and decide for yourself. The article goes into detail that sounds like stuff that a Tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist would come up with. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible though.