Internet Popular Posts

When Apple chose the KHTML engine for its Safari Browser in in 2003 over the more popular Gecko engine that powers Firefox, a lot of people were surprised. Firefox was way more popular than the Konquerer browser and had a lot more open source developers on line. Well now that decision is starting to pay some dividends - in amazing speed.

At this county agency, one pilot fish serves as the point of contact between a trio of Web developers and the users who need to make changes to the agency's Web site.

"My job is to keep them from being overwhelmed by all the requests," says fish. "Users give me the information by e-mail, and I usually enhance the request with the Web page address and some direction on where on the page we want the information to appear."

So when one user wants a Web form to be updated, fish is the one who gets the request. In this case, it's a form that lets citizens volunteer for particular projects; after the citizen fills in the online form, it generates an e-mail to the proper person at the agency.

The user's request: The form must have one phone number.

Wondering what you'll love (or hate) about IE8? I've put the beta through its paces, and I've got the goods for you. I've found some nifty new features, and one that spells annoyance. And, of course, I've got screenshots as well.

Cool! It's IT Blogwatch: in which a new search engine, Cuil, tries to usurp Google's dominance. Not to mention hip hip hooray for DNA...

Dan Nystedt reports:

Here's the newest from Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who described the Internet as a series of tubes: It's time for the federal government to ban access to Wikipedia, MySpace, and social networking sites from schools and libraries.

Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators. It would certainly ban MySpace.

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- IMOVIO launched today a smaller alternative to a subnotebook -- much smaller. The new iKIT is about the size of a PDA from ten years ago, but has a QWERTY keyboard and connects to the Internet at 3G speeds via your cell phone or Wi-Fi.

Fearing political fallout, senior Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Kennedy (D-MA) retreated from the H-1B and Immigration Reform bill battlefield last week.  The McCain/Kennedy coalition split and opted not to release the immigration reform bill they've been working on. 

McCain seemed frustrated with the endeavor and is also concerned about losing support from his conservative base in his bid for the Republican presidential candidacy.  Conservative voters are strongly against guest worker programs which, many feel, leads to amnesty for illegal aliens.  The H-1B program is not related to illegal immigration but it is growing into an equally controversal guest worker program with heavyweight opponents such as IEEE-USA, the AFL-CIO, the CWA and many others who are joining in as the immigration battle progresses.

She was the new girl in town for a while, but Google Chrome has lost her shine. Sorry Chrome: You've been swell, but I'm going back to my old flame, Firefox.

Here's a very interesting idea for fighting phishing. Why not create a .bank top-level domain, limit it to "bona fide financial organizations", and make the registration cost of the domain high (suggested at $50,000 or more)?  This is what Mikko Hypponen is suggesting here.

Mikko says:

Why do banks and other financial institutions operate under the public top-level domains, like .com? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that creates new top-level domains, should create a new, secure domain just for this reason—something like “.bank,” for example.

Registering new domains under such a top-level domain could then be restricted to bona fide financial organizations. And the price for the domain wouldn’t be just a few dollars: It could be something like $50,000—making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this. They would move their existing online banks under a more secure domain in no time.

...Read more

You don't start a company at age 21 and spend 33 years at it without making a few bonehead mistakes along the way. Here are my top 5.

The Google Chrome beta is a powerful new browser that loads Web pages quickly and accurately. As some bloggers have noted, it's not perfect and can break sites (for example, by using alt tags). CNET says Chrome is faster than all other browsers, and my experience matches these claims. It reveals that Google intends to break a Microsoft stranglehold on the desktop, but the user experience on Chrome feels a bit like walking on a sheet of ice in your slippers: a bit temporal and shaky.

If you use desktop Linux chances are you've used Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora or SUSE Linux/openSUSE, but there are others that are worthy of your attention.

Facebook might be taking on MySpace in the music game.

Ars Technica posted about a possible forthcoming Facebook music service, by way of rumors from the New York Post. MySpace has been known as a music portal for some time - just about any band with a following has a MySpace page. But Facebook has quickly become a photo storage site, with 10 billions images uploaded so far, although a vast majority of them are pictures of teenagers making funny faces.

According to a news story by Computerworld's Heather Havenstein, Google's shiny new Chrome browser isn't part of an attempt to kill off Firefox or IE. It's an attempt to kill off Windows. While I initially took that statement with enough salt to alarm my doctor, after an initial tryout of Google's new browser, I ain't so sure.

Six hours. Yes, six hours to install FiOS in my home, but the service opened up my Internet bandwidth significantly, and I liked the cable television features.