So yesterday we said goodbye to Bill Gates and it looks like starting on today Microsoft is going to stop selling XP to retailers and computer manufacturers. (We mentioned before in a previous post back in May about users making a petition so that Microsoft won’t take XP off of the shelves.)

Microsoft realizes that many users aren’t going to be happy with their decision, but again users weren’t happy when they took Windows 98, 95 and Me taken off of the shelves. Wait, Ha, did we say ME? Yeah right, huge cow pattie of an OS right there in our opinion.

Anyway, now just because XP is going off of the shelves for some thing, like retailers and manufacturers, doesn’t mean we have seen the last of it yet. (WHOOT! )

Now the plan, until June 2010, is to have manufacturers of limited, low-cost computers still have the chance to put XP HOME on their machine. That’s right, just home. Plus, if you are a small business and you build your own computer, well you’ll be able to install XP on it…only until Jaunary 31^st 2009.

Oh and If you have bought a new PC that has either Vista Business or Vista Ultimate on it, well then you still do have the option to downgrade your OS to XP Pro, again, only until January 31^st 2009.

What we like about this is that it looks like Microsoft has been taking a look into what their users want and even though their are restrictions, we can still obtain XP, even for a little while.

And for all of you faithful XP Users, well Microsoft is still going to allow for mainstream support on the operating system until next April.

Oh and remember in our previous post about XP and the petition… Have you all been keeping your eyes on that petition?

Maybe not and that’s okay.

The ‘Save Windows XP’ petition garnered over 209,000 signatures. Not too shabby right? No wonder Microsoft acknowledged the petition and their efforts.

Nicely done

PS - We will be going through the poll from Friday and post about that a little later today to map out our post plan for the next month.

Click Here if You Want to WIN an iPhone 3G! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

Jefferson Graham didn’t just write an article of free SEO tips — he also brought his video camera along. The result is a five minute video interview with more easy, free search engine optimization tips. Again, this is targeted at beginner SEO and small business SEO instead of advanced marketers. You can watch the video below:

Fun trivia: This video was taped in the lobby of building 43 on the Googleplex campus. Also, I made sure to wear my “We ♥ webmasters” shirt from our webmaster portal team up in Kirkland.

We’re sure by now that pretty much all of you know that Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. That’s right, the man who is worth around $60 billion dollars has “officially” stepped down from Microsoft as of June 27th 2008 so that he can spend more of his time dedicated to philanthropy…. which is pretty cool considering all his money we are sure he can help a lot of people.

We figured here at the JC pastures we should take a look at some of the good things that have come out of Microsoft and some of the bad.

One of the biggest and newest things that have come out of Microsoft lately, is obviously, Vista. Many users have been extremely disappointed from it. Whether it was due to Vista being such a resource hog, or to have it crash or to upgrade only to find out that your business software isn’t compatible…

Well let’s just say that it was a huge disappointment.

Personally we have it on a few computers and for the majority of tasks we are ok with it. Huge pains when trying to get drivers for certain things but that has improved as of late. We are truly MAC fans but we run Windows Vista on our main laptop and also on our virtial pc within our iMAC…. which is very handy.

Last year the Vista kind of reminded us of Microsoft ME, another operating system that maybe could have been good if it wasn’t rushed, actually who are we kidding… it was a huge cow pattie!

You know what else we want to put on the ‘bad’ list…Internet Explorer. Now wait before you come out to the pasture at night and do some cow tipping, hear us out first. Years ago we were HUGE fans of IE… basically because we didn’t know better, just joking. No for real, we remember using Netscape back in the day and then finding out about IE. We used IE for years and loved it, however then we found out about Firefox we loved that more. Then, IE7 came out and what initially sounded good turned right into a cow pattie. Just like Microsoft’s new OS, it had a hard time doing anything and crashed all of the time.

OK so VIsta… IE7, oh ya now let’s take a look at Office 2007.

We first opened Word when we got this application, and after a half an hour of searching for little known things that we loved about Office 2003, like ‘File’ we gave up and got rid of the stupid application and went back to Office 2003. Another annoying feature with Office 2007 was the fact that if somebody was using an older version like 2003 and somebody was using a newer version like 2007, well guess what…

They were NOT compatible!

We had to go in and manually change the format of the file so that the new one could open 2003 version…

Where’s the backwards compatibility that was promised?

OK, now let’s take a look at some of Microsoft’s good features.

Well of course, being a little into gaming, first thing right off the bat is the Xbox and Xbox 360. Sure both had some issues when they were first released, especially the 360 with the red rings of death but overall the console is great. Microsoft knows it’s their fault that the system overheats and has taken it into their hands and spent $1 billion to extend warranty’s from 1 year to 3 years to replace the console when it’s sent in to be serviced.

Of course to go along with the gaming aspect of Microsoft, there’s Halo. A great science fiction first person shooter which has set many different records in the gaming industry from sales and is for sure one of the largest games in gaming history and it was also one reason why the Xbox is as big as it is today.

Oh and also we like the fact that the Windows Vista music FINALLY CHANGED! (hmmm think somebody was annoyed with the XP Music?)

We do use Microsoft Office 2003 for a lot of stuff and we have tried Open Office but find that we pretty much do not want anything but Excel and PowerPoint… nothing so far has worked in place of these two. Now Word is good too but we hate that they always put the extra formatting crap in there when you try to copy and paste into a blog post or anything like that. They really need to create an option for a clean copy and paste feature.

Actually, even though we like to crap on Microsoft a little, we do use a heck a lot of their products and we can’t deny the fact that Mr. Gates has paved the way for a lot of new things that are happening. He obviously has done a lot of things right and because of their market position it is such an obvious target for getting some heat thrown at them (Yes they have deserved a lot of it but not all of it).

Now don’t think Billy is going to run away and out of the public eye… that’s not the case as he plans to spend more time to philanthropy (Philanthropy is an act over an extended period of time of donating money, time, effort and goods to help support charitable causes) and we are pretty sure we will be seeing his face in the news a lot.

Thank you Mr. Gates for some of your hits and some of your misses. Have fun and have a nice glass of cold milk, on us.

What farewell message do you have about Bill and Microsoft (cant wait to read some linux and mac lovers responses)?

Click Here if You Want to WIN an iPhone 3G! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

We are almost done putting the “COWpetition” eBook together for all our mailing list subscribers and it made us think about how great it was to get such awesome feedback on how we were helping so many of you. This also brought to light how it was so much easier to plan the daily posts because we had almost a full 30 days of material mapped out for us.

Well we are selfish and we LOVE getting positive feedback from our readers, it makes us happy and we want MORE…. LOTS MORE!

So all we need is you to vote on what you most want us to post about…. we will then do our best to post in order of preference.

If there is something not in the poll that you want us to post about… then select “other” and comment about it below.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

PS –> Once you vote and/or leave a comment (and made sure you registered for the iPhone contest - Click Here for that), then do yourself a favor and check out a great post at Big Ben Patton’s Place called “3 Questions… 7 Bloggers… A Short Glimpse Into Successful Mindsets“. He asked a few of us some questions about blogging and it is interesting to read the different view points.

Click Here if You Want to WIN an iPhone 3G! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

For the past few months we have been very skeptical of Alexa’s traffic trends data… and now thanks to Google and their updated Google Trends for Websites, there seems to be a bit of a justification for our skepticism.

In the below graph we compared JohnCow.com against three other blogs…

• JohnChow
• Entrepreneurs-journey
• Garry Conn

According to Google Trends results we see that we are pretty much neck and neck with entrepreneurs-journey, we are lower than JohnChow (not for long though.. bwahahahaha) and GarryConn is not even registering on the map… which is because it appears that Google has certain traffic criteria you have to meet before it will trend your site.

OK now lets compare this to what Alexa is saying…

According to Alexa the entrepreneurs-journey had a major traffic bump that Google does not show…. now this is something we are actually a little confused about because we know Yaro had some promo on his Blogging Mastermind Course (which is a fantastic course by the way) but that is on a different domain and not sure if such a spike would result on his blog. This also shows Garry Conn doing not too bad and JohnChow looks pretty close to the Google Trends data…. also, Alexa’s last little section is always whacked out.

Summary…

1. Google has more tool bars installed then Alexa (this is how the data is collected) and therefore it makes sense that their data would be more accurate (obviously we can not prove this)

2. Google’s data is up to date and Alexa’s always seems to be a week behind.

So what can you do with this info?

If you are into this kind of data, you could spend hours cross referencing your site against others… but is it worth your time?

We love Google trends for keywords because it is an excellent research tool for traffic potential and you could look at traffic potential of sites that you know are ranking well in certain markets… actually there are a few things we are going to play around and test.

So which is better?

Personally we would put our money on Google.

If you want to learn more about this you can check out what Matt Cutts (the Google Spam Czar) had to say about it, what the official Google Webmaster Blog had to say about it, what Search Engine Land had to say about it and well even Shoemoney did a little mention on it

So, what are your thoughts on Google trends… do you see potential for good use or do you feel it is just another confusing element to an already confusing system?

Click Here if You Want to WIN an iPhone 3G! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

I bet not too many of my readers know that I just bought a Domain and Hosting for one year. If only I would have known of these free web hosting reviews I could have made a better choice! Today we will be looking at http://webhostinggeeks.com and commenting on their total effect of their web-host reviews. If you are currently trying to buy a domain and hosting, this post may be for you!

Web Hosting Geeks is a site that takes all of the “Big-Time” web hosting companies such as Godaddy, Doteasy, Bluehost, etc… And reviews them so their consumers know which one they like the best. They have many different types of reviews available such as: Best Budget Hosting, Hosting that comes with free domain names, and more. Aside from webhosting reviews, they also have articles on the best Pay-Per-Click program to use and site promotion tips.

Perhaps their best category is the one that talks about Multiple Domain hosting as people with more than one domain name would be allowed to host it on their single account. This would save money and benefit their plan because in all reality, who is going to use 3000GB of traffic per month? (Except Google….Maybe)

Whatever you need to start a website or a blog whether it be questions, concerns, or other issues are probably answer on this website. I would definitely recommend it before buying a web host.

Tags: web hosting guide

Related posts

• No related posts.

I love this video/film by John Dkar. A very interesting life time experience on laboring a female cat. I have attended a lot of this kind of thing before and now. It was great to see the labor process and the beauty of god creation. So guys, if you want to see, the process of Cat Labor, check out this video!

Tags: cat, Cat At Labor, Pets, video

Related posts

• K-Lite Codec Pack 3.85 (Latest Update) (0)
• My Cat Stamps Collection. (13)
• I’ve Found Sky! (6)
• Sky Is Missing :( (4)
• [Single] Maroon 5 feat. Rihanna - If I Never See Your Face Again (1)

ClustrMaps.com brings a widget that shows the location of your site visitors on a tiny map that could be easily put on your blog. They provide the HTML that gives you a tiny map. The location of each visit is based on the IP address of the computer used.

When it loads, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all visitors to your page. Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents, as in the example below

[ Not the original size here ]

For the live demo of this widget in action please visit http://clustrmaps.com

This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like

Starting up …
Loading, please wait…
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b) = sda5(8,5)
kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot…

Then it hangs forever. Any Ubuntu/Linux gurus have suggestions on how to repair my system so it will boot?

So have we all heard the news?

Long could be the day’s of just simply using .com, .net, .org, .ca, etc.

Soon our internet day’s may consists of new domains like: .hotel, .sex…

Wait?… JC are you sure you just said .sex?

We certainly did!

If ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers) approves, well much like the song we are listening too ‘Everything will change’.

What’s currently happening is that ICANN is having meetings in Paris and they are going to vote on two key proposals:

• 1^st: Allow domains that do not use Latin Characters, Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic letters.

• 2^nd: Allow domains that use any type of letter or number combo up to 64 characters.

So let’s say they approve this, well it just opens our options up completely. It is believed however that the most popular one that users will go after will be .sex. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see about that.

Hmm we wonder if we should change our domain name, you know what about something like:

• johncow.cowpattie

• johncow.pasture

• johncow.moo

Actually you know what, we think we’ll just stick to johncow.com.

ICANN is expected to make a decision today June 26^th 2008, so who knows maybe we will begin seeing an entire new generation of URLS. We guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

You can read more about it at: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/25/domain.names/index.html

So what does everybody think?

UPDATE!

Well the ICANN group has decided to ‘relax’ the web naming rules.

Now we won’t be able to just choose a new style of domain, what ICANN wants users to do is too register for the new extension and provide a viable reason for it as well.

There are also a few more hurdles that have to be finished, but by the first quarter of 2009, individuals and companies should be able to begin registering for new domains.

If you want to read more about ICANN’s decision, you can here.

Click Here if You Want to WIN an iPhone 3G! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved