Well, now this is an interesting one.

Microsoft claim that they get more virus’s not because they are less secure, but because they have more market share. It appears they were at least partially wrong.
(Actually, they are totally wrong, they have nowhere near the market share of web servers as does the open source Apache (67.3% Apache, 21.3% MS IIS), and yet Microsoft IIS (The MS web server software) has had many more critical security flaws than has Apache.)

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In an effort to compete on a more even footing with Yahoo and Google, Microsoft is developing their own search engine, one that relies on their own search and spidering algorithms, (rather then using the results from other engines as MSN search does now.)

You can test the results now at MSN Tech preview.
The beta search is only using a database of about one billion documents, which is much much smaller then the other major search engines, but HTMLfixIT is already in there, so I guess that’s a good sign. 🙂

If Microsoft are going to use algorithms like Google in order to create their own “pagerank” type technology, that can only be seen as a good thing as my personal experience of the current MSN search has been pretty dismal, particularly when compared to Google.

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The world has millions of sight impaired people, Australia has at least 300,000, and other countries have an order of magnitude more.

Should they be discriminated against by web designers? Most countries have laws that give an emphatic NO! In fact, there have been court cases where companies have been sued for not providing for the disabled.

So, how does an ordinary “sighted” web designer discover if their proud works are suitable for those with vision impairments?
Up till now, you just had to follow disability guidelines and hope that was enough.

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Up until tonight, whenever I posted a new story on HTMLfixIT, I did so by typing it into my text editor and spell checking it there before pasting the lot into the submission form for articles.

Tonight I came across Spellbound which is a full spell checking extension for Firefox.
It installed flawlessly, I simply selected all the components by ticking the relevant boxes on the spellbound page, and then did the same for a dictionary (choosing Australian in my case.).

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It’s official,
PHP5 is now a stable release.

Changes include:
– Object Oriented approach to XML,
– SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is included for Web services.
– SQLite and a new MySQL (MySQLi) extension are included.
– New ZendII engine and some significant enhancements to PHPs Object Oriented behavior and methods.

And a heap of other stuff. Programs written using pre-existing PHP object orientation may need some minor touch ups to work on PHP5
(or they may not, depending on how program was coded.)

For info and downloads, head over to php.net.

Regards

Franki

While doing my daily rounds of the various tech news sites that provide the source for most of the articles you see here, I came across this blogging article on TheRegister.

The fact that 8000 new bloggers appear every day isn’t really news to my mind, neither is most of the other accompanying data. What struck me as the “real’ news in the story, is this quote: “while a staggering 12 per cent attract the attention of lawyers with their biting commentary”.

Twelve percent of bloggers get into legal trouble? Is it just me or is that an inordinately high percentage?

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Even if you’re not a Linux fan, you should have a look at this because it makes for fascinating reading.

People that know me, know that I am no fan of Microsoft, I make no secret of it.
I do admit however, that they played a significant part in making computers the commodity they are today (and have been paid handsomely for it), and that their software is often pretty good from a usability perspective.

The problem is that they have used some extremely questionable business practices in the last 20 years, crushing or buying the competition, getting busted for appropriating code and then settling out of court with a non-disclosure agreement as part of the deal (DR-DOS anyone?). There are literally dozens of cases of this and related issues. The United States government themselves found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, as did the European Union, the problem is that neither significantly punished them for it.

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