The domain ScientificPsychic.com has been active since February 15, 2001.  The web site has continued its original goal of providing educational material and entertainment.  Some of the most popular pages are the optical illusions, games, diet calculator, verb conjugation, and hygiene.

ScientificPsychic.com averages approximately 6000 visitors and over 16,000 page views per day.  Most of the traffic originates from English-speaking countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India, but there are visitors from many parts of the world where English is spoken such as Singapore and the Philippines.  This is an example of the country of origin of the visitors.

Some of the web pages have been translated to other languages and it is not unusual to have Google refer French queries to the French version of the verb conjugation page.  The recent translation to Spanish of the diet calculator, and the pages about carbohydrates and hygiene already is attracting visitors from Latin America who search the web in Spanish.

Scientific Psychic^® is registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office with registration number 3,088,970.

English is the most common language in international trade, but there are many people in the world who do not understand English. Over 313 billion web pages have been published on the World Wide Web, and approximately 70% of them are written in English. Here are some global internet statistics of web content by language:

Language	Percent of web content
English	68.4%
Japanese	5.9%
German	5.8%
Chinese	3.9%
French	3.0%
Spanish	2.4%
Russian	1.9%

It is important to consider that the native language of people using the internet is not always English. About 30% of the web surfers are English speakers, but 15% speak Chinese, and 9% speak Spanish. Here are some statistics of the percent of users who surf the internet.

Language	Percent users	Number of users
English	30.1%	379M
Chinese	14.7%	185M
Spanish	9.0%	113M
Japanese	6.9%	88M
French	5.1%	64M
German	4.9%	62M
Portuguese	4.0%	51M

From these statistics, it is evident that Chinese and Spanish readers are being underserved. Web sites seeking to expand their global audience should consider translating some of their pages to make them accessible to speakers of other languages.

ScientificPsychic.com uses the following national flags to indicate the availability of web pages in other languages:

	English
	Spanish
	French
	German
	Russian

To see an example of an internationalized web page see:

English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology

Last year, I had to get a new laptop computer because my old IBM Thinkpad with Windows 95 was basically obsolete. The computer had only one USB port and it needed an Ethernet card to connect with my desktop computer through my local area network hub. With Windows 95, the system would sometimes pause as I was typing a document, and it would stay in a state of limbo for about 30 to 40 seconds before resuming. This would interrupt the flow of ideas that I was trying to type, and during this time I could think of nothing but the top row of keyboard: #$%%*!, %$&^%$!, and @$%*!

I started using the old Thinkpad as a perch for my new laptop because I hated the idea of using it as doorstop, as a mean-spirited geek had suggested. At the time that I bought my new laptop, I also bought a copy of Linspire, a Linux-based operating system, with the idea that one day I would convert the IBM Thinkpad to Linux. Several months later, when I finally installed the new operating system, I found out that the old Thinkpad had regained some of its spark. Linux had fixed the intermittent pausing problem.

You can buy Linux systems very inexpensively, but you can also download them free from the Internet if you have a broadband connection and you can create a 700 megabyte CD. The three most common Linux versions are Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Freespire, a free version of Linspire. Ubuntu has gained wide popularity because it provides online support through a large community of users. All three operating systems come with free web browsers (Mozilla Firefox), e-mail, and a free office suite (OpenOffice) compatible with Microsoft Office to handle spreadsheets, documents, and slide presentations. A wide array of Linux applications can be downloaded from the Internet.

I downloaded GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, and now, I use my old IBM Thinkpad as a platform for testing the Linux 32-bit versions of my linguistic programs. This has become important now that many of the systems that I previously used for development have been replaced with machines that use 64-bit architecture.

The moral of this story is that you can recycle your old computer and make it useful again with a minimal investment.

The Briefcase feature in Windows helps you keep your files updated by automatically synchronizing multiple copies of individual files. If you use a desktop computer at the office, and you use a portable laptop computer when you are on the road, Briefcase synchronizes and updates the files on your desktop computer to the modified versions when you reconnect your portable computer to the desktop computer.[1]

The added security layers in Windows Vista create a peculiar problem for synchronizing .ZIP files, .PDF files, .DOC files created by MS Word, and .PCH files created by the C compiler of the MS Development Studio.  The problem with the .PDF and .DOC files seems limited to cases when the files are downloaded from an e-mail attachment and stored in a folder that needs to be synchronized.

The problem becomes evident when you try to synchronize a Briefcase and a message appears saying that the file cannot be accessed for copying.  Some files such as the .PCH files that can be regenerated by a compiler may simply be deleted from the source folder before the Briefcase is synchronized.  However, for other files, the solution is to create a copy of the file, delete the original, and rename the copy to the original name.  The reason for the problem seems to be that the files that cannot be copied do not have the “Authenticated Users” security attribute which is required to access a shared resource from another computer in the network.  The following images show the attributes of the original which cannot be synchronized and the copy.

Attributes of a file that cannot be synchronized:

The copy of the file has the “Authenticated Users” security attribute:

[1] How To Use the Briefcase Feature in Windows XP