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Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas

30 Mar

As part of our overall goal to make the web better for users, last year we announced a new project: to provide a community with Internet access more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today. The response was overwhelming—nearly 1,100 cities felt the need for speed—and we were thrilled by the enthusiasm we saw across the country for better and faster web connections. Thank you to every community and individual that submitted a response, joined a rally, starred in a YouTube video or otherwise participated.

After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.

Later this morning we’ll join Mayor Reardon at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, for an event we’ll carry live on the Google YouTube channel—be sure to tune in at 10am PDT to watch.

In selecting a city, our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations. We’ve found this in Kansas City. We’ll be working closely with local organizations including the Kauffman Foundation, KCNext and the University of Kansas Medical Center to help develop the gigabit applications of the future.

Pending approval from the city’s Board of Commissioners, we plan to offer service beginning in 2012. We’ll also be looking closely at ways to bring ultra high-speed Internet to other cities across the country.

Over the past decade, the jump from dial-up to broadband has led to streaming online video, digital music sales, video conferencing over the web and countless other innovations that have transformed communication and commerce. We can’t wait to see what new products and services will emerge as Kansas City moves from traditional broadband to ultra high-speed fiber optic connections.

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http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/ultra-high-speed-broadband-is-coming-to.html

 

Unusual/Strange chess boards and pieces

19 Mar

The game of Chess is made up of two sets of 16 pieces, including one king, one queen, two bishops, two knights, two rooks, and eight pawns. All of the 16 pieces have specific positions on the chess board. The chess pieces themselves come in a variety of different styles and designs and the names of each piece did not traditionally start out as the names we use today. Chess pieces come in a variety of different materials and of course vary in prices. Often choosing the chess pieces for yourself when setting up your own board can be a very difficult task with so many options being on offer.

There are traditional offerings as well as novelty pieces all of which are incredible to look at but the choice comes down to a personal one. The game of chess itself is well known throughout the world and most people who see a chess board have an idea what it is and in many cases they will be able to tell you the names of some of the chess pieces. Usually easily established chess pieces by most are The King, Queen and Pawn. However there are many who are not always sure on the names of the Bishop, Knight and Rook. Many will also not be aware of the special rules and moves of each individual chess piece. What is more unusual is that avid chess players often have no idea why those pieces are named the way they have. The game of chess is said to have been conceived in India and all the chess pieces were all based on elements of war. Those elements being infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots all represented by the pieces such as with the Pawns, Knights, Bishops, and Rooks. Originally The King was referred to as the General and it was not until the game made its way to Europe that the pieces were redesigned with a more court like design rather than that of a military one and The General changed his name to The King.

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vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold Released!

14 Mar

Hello vBSEO Friends and Customers, we are happy to announce that vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold is now Gold and is available to all licensed users for installation on production servers with full support. You may download vBSEO 3.6 now from the downloads area for any active license.

Featuring the Likes Tree, updated Social Bookmarking System, Universal CDN Integration + MaxCDN Promo!

NOTE: Please read this announcement completely and carefully, as there are certain restrictions, changes to rules, and other important items that you should know about before jumping into 3.6. Pay special attention to the *Important* flag.

vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold Highlights


1. A full featured “Likes” system: A “Social Graph” for your community

The long-awaited Likes Tree integration is now available! Made popular by Facebook, and now making its way to forums and social web applications everywhere, the “Likes” system allows your users to effortlessly provide feedback to one another on the content they find most useful. Most importantly, this activity creates an underlying layer of data that works as a “Social Graph” for your community, opening the doors to a myriad of USEFUL features that have the potential to alter the way we interact with forums in different ways. One of them is enabling people to find the site’s most useful content more efficiently (see our “Likes Tree” feature below). Another powerful use for this data is the ability to surface the most popular and/or relevant content for search engines, be it via Search Engine Friendly pages that list this content, or by using it as priority multipliers for your Search Engine XML sitemaps (coming in vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemaps 3.1).

2. The vBSEO “Likes Tree”: Redefining the way people interact with forums
It gives you (and your users) an instant “birds-eye-view” of the “Likes” distribution in a thread, allowing you to *quickly* identify the most useful/important content, no matter how long the conversation is. This new feature represents a new paradigm as it allows people to extract more value out of forums in less time.

3. Updated Social Bookmarking and Sharing system
The vBSEO Bookmarks system has been highly improved. It now appears as a pop-out link in the post bit to save space and better fit the postbit layout.

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