Wikipedia focussing on Search Engines

The creator of the Wikipedia encyclopedia is turning his attention to search engines.

Jimmy Wales, the man behind the collaborative online reference work, is planning to create a “people-powered” search site. The Search Wikia project will not rely on computer algorithms to determine how relevant webpages are to keywords. Instead the results generated by the search engine will be decided and edited by humans. The project will stand apart from the Wikipedia encyclopedia but will be overseen by the Wikimedia Foundation – which is headed by Mr Wales.

Like the Wikipedia, the search site will rely on a large community of members to create and run it. Announcing the project Mr Wales said it was needed because the existing search systems for the net were “broken”. They were broken, he said, because they lacked freedom, community, accountability and transparency. The Search Wikia project would aim to change this and he said it would draw on the work of sites such as Nutch and Lucene which have taken a more open approach to search engines. At the moment the results returned to those using keywords on sites such as Google are generated by computers which analyse webpages to work out what they are about and how useful they are. Webpage owners use all kinds of tricks to outsmart the computer indexing systems and ensure their pages appear high up in results – even if they are not relevant to particular keywords. By contrast the relevance of results returned by the Search Wikia will be decided by the site’s community of users. Those searching will also be able to edit the list of results they get.

Mr Wales announced his plans for the search project before Christmas and was now recruiting people and buying hardware to get it up and running. There is no indication when it will be launched.

Source bbc.co.uk

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Creating an Windows XP Automatic installation CD…

You can create a CD that can install Windows XP automatically, putting in all the details and answering all the dialog boxes.

The secret behind this is the answer file, which tells Windows what to do while it’s installing. The answer file can be created using Windows setup manager.

Using this tool, you can make the answer file so powerful that you can even tell Windows to include or exclude individual components, set the display resolution, and more.

Here’s the Steps involved in creating XP Automated Installation Disc :

Step 1: Put the installation CD into the drive and copy the entire contents of the CD to a new folder on your hard disk.

Step 2: Navigate to the Support > Tools folder on the CD and double-click the Deploy.cab file. Copy all the files to a new folder on your hard disk.

Step 3: The crucial part begins now, creating the answer file. To execute the windows setup manager, double click the Setupmgr.exe file from the contents of the Deploy.cab, which you just copied onto the hard drive.

Step 4: The first few steps of the wizard are self explanatory. Select the following options from the successive dialog boxes. Create a new answer file; Windows unattended installation (Select the appropriate Windows version); “Fully automated”; “No this answer file will be used to install from CD”; and finally, accept the license agreement.

Step 5: Under the General Settings, you can customize the installation of Windows by providing the default name and organization, display settings, time zone and the product key. Fill in the fields using the drop-down list or by keying in the details. If you don’t select an option from the drop-down list, the default values will be used.

Step 6: After you are done click Finish and save the answer file as “winnt.sif” when you are prompted. Advanced users can further tweak the answer file by referring to the Help file called Ref.chm in the same folder.

Step 7: Finally copy the answer file to i386 folder in the Windows XP installation folder you created in the beginning.

Step 8: To burn a bootable installation disc, you need the boot sector of the Windows XP CD. Download it from here bootfiles.zip

Step 9: Launch Nero and select CD-ROM (Boot) from the New Compilation dialog box. Under the Boot tab, specify the boot sector file you downloaded and extracted. Set the emulation as “No emulation”, and keep the boot message blank. Most importantly, remember to set the “Number of loaded sectors” as 4.

Step 10: Under the Burn tab, set the write method to disc at-once. Click the New button to to begin adding files and folders to the compilation. Drag all the contents of the Windows XP installation disc that you copied to your hard drive (with the answer file in the i386 folder) into the left pane. Insert a blank CD into the optical drive and hit burn button. Your windows automated installation Disc is ready!

Extracted from Systemhelp4u