On The Net - Computing News

with Chris Goh

I drove into Wyong on a Sunday night at 9.30pm after a long drive from the north coast. I'd been looking for a place to live and I thought if I couldn't live in the north coast, the next best thing was the central coast, as it is still within commuting distance from Sydney. I had for the previous three months been trying to find a property.

Every time I phoned to enquire about something I spotted online, they were gone or had a deposit put on them. I thought that something was fishy.

I decided after I booked into a hotel to go down the main street and check out the real estate windows. I know it was a crazy thing to do and it was raining quite heavily. But I thought, why not? What came next surprised me. I visited six agents' windows, and everyone of them had at least one other person besides me checking out the property.

The following morning I checked with the real estate agents and found out that the central coast was in high demand for houses for sale. I found out that most of them put the house on the Internet on the same day they get it, which meant that the Internet listing was the more current one. Their success was so great that at one agent, they weren't willing to listen to offers and they wanted in most cases a contract ready to go.

Several weeks after that exploration, I found my new central coast property online, and it had been listed that day. I immediately bought it with deposit ready. Between that and the vendor signing the contract, there were two other buyers who tried to outbid me. But thank goodness for being the early bird on this occasion.

HotNews

A Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch had caused himself more ill than good this week after he told congress that anyone who pirated software from the Internet should have their computers destroyed.

Subsequently it was found that his website used a commercial menu system which wasn't registered, and even worse, a link on his website went to a pornographic site.

Ironically, LinuxWorld in San Francisco has been caught hosting their website on a Microsoft Server with Microsoft's Web server, IIS, which many Linux fans claim to be the most insecure Web server on earth.

A 34 year old doctor from Hanoi, Vietnam was sentenced to 13 years in prison due to espionage. His so called act of espionage, was translating a document that was published on the US State Department's web site. The document was titled 'What is Democracy?' It's obviously missing in this situation.

Amazon.com sold more than one million copies of the new Harry Potter book, breaking all records including the most successful Internet product sold online.

As part of the NSW budget it was great to see that educating our kids in technology has become a focus, with the government allocating $850 million.

HotSites

www.realestate.com.au

This website has the most comprehensive listings of property, land and rentals, and from reviewing the updates in real estate agent windows and their online houses, realestate.com.au was the most accurate and had the widest variety of areas with exceptional searching interface.

www.owner.com.au

If you want to sell your own home privately then this is probably one of the best in Australia. Their service is prompt and you can purchase for sale signs relatively cheaply.

www.domain.com.au

The majority of you who are looking to buy or sell property should already know this one. Like realestate.com.au, this site is used by many real estate agents as a search engine for their own site. Domain's search criterias are more fidgety and don't have the range of areas as realestate.com.au does.

www.raywhite.com.au

If there was an award for independent agent that had the best real estate search engine, Ray White would get top honours. Of some 30 separate online real estate agents, this had the best search functions. Whilst many of the real estate agents use the likes of domain and realestate.com, Ray White have their own that worked well.