It’s been official for a while now, but for anyone that hasn’t already heard, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved the .xxx TLD (Top Level Domain) for online porn sites. The problem is that it isn’t obligatory that such sites use only .xxx domains so the result will be that many of the sites will buy their xxx domain and keep their existing domains as well. The porn industry seems to rely to some degree or another on the “impulse buy” where people find them without meaning to and decide to have a closer look. If all porn was under a xxx domain the days of finding yourself at such a site by accident would be long behind us. Since that is likely to significantly hit the profit margins of such sites, they will fight tooth and nail, any move to make xxx the only domain porn sites are able to use. Since xxx is useless as a filter of un-requested porn unless it’s uniformly used and enforced, this raises the question: What good is it then?

On the upside, a certain movie series that initially starred Vin Diesel would be able to register xxx.xxx for their next release. 🙂

The Sunday Times have an article about the forthcoming new Office release from Microsoft and talk about the level of software bloat that plagues Office now. They also discuss alternative software like OpenOffice.org and Mellel and how Microsoft’s software loses with regards to startup speed by significant margins. Well worth the read.

According to the Seattlepi, a federal judge has cleared the way for Novell to go after Microsoft regarding anti-competitive claims that Microsoft unfairly blocked out sales for Novell’s Wordperfect Office suite.

One quoted email from Aug 1997 mentioned in the above article from Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes to investor Warren Buffett sums the reasoning behind the judges decision nicely.

“If we own the key franchises built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the ‘moat’ that protects the operating system business. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect Windows royalty per PC.”

Microsoft are not having much luck in the courtroom of late, they lost a patent infringement case worth 9 million in the last week and they just settled another case with Novell for half a billion dollars for “alleged” previous transgressions. Who can guess how much they will have to pay before they realise it’s cheaper to play nice with competitors.

Not exactly new news, but Searchengineworld’s article entitled “26 steps to 15k a Day” is well worth a read to anybody hoping to make a living from their web presence. Most of the advice is common sense but there are a few gems in there as well. The theme of the whole thing is “Content is king”, create tons of useful content and then create some more. Add new content every day and make sure your pages are valid and display correctly on every browser and designed with SEO in mind. Not exactly brain surgery but it’s surprising how many people don’t follow that path correctly or at all. Not only would site owners benefit from following this advice, but search engine results would be considerably more accurate were webmasters to follow the rules outlined in the article.

All the big names (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves etc) are trying to find ways to drive users to, and keep users at their search portals. Most of the stuff they are adding, while interesting and sometimes cool, isn’t really all that useful.

Then along comes a relative unknown who finds an easy way to do something that really does help you search and isn’t just eye candy. One of these new companies is Kartoo. The KartOO visual meta search engine gives a visual representation of search results which allow you to see how the different returned results related to each other and an easy method of narrowing the returned topics down till you find what you are looking for. This allows you to decide quickly and accurately which of the returned results best suit your needs and is more innovative then all the search engine interfaces I’ve seen thus far. But it isn’t without faults. The page uses Flash, which while it is pretty, it’s also slow for low speed connections, the pictorial results display could be more intuitive and due to the design of the site, you can’t link to specific searches on other sites. Still, this is the sort of innovation all the search engines should be concentrating on, (along with the actual search algorithms) because the display of search results is more or less uniform across the big three and in all cases usually requires multiple attempts to find the information you’re looking for. I still don’t understand the significance of the Genie at Kartoo though.

Interesting news from Sony has it that there will be many options for hard drives to be attached to the forthcoming Playstation 3 (PS3) and that those drives can run Linux (to enable people to consider the PS3 a “entertainment supercomputer”). It isn’t really a surprise that Linux will run on a PS3 because the Cell processor at it’s heart is an IBM chip and IBM is a big supporter of Linux and helps port it to all of their CPUs.
I guess this means that the default PS3 will be just a powerful games machine but with the addition of a add-on drive becomes a full multi use entertainment PC running Linux.

Apparently the reason the PS3 won’t have a hard disk by default is because no hard disk sold with the unit would be big enough in the long run. That makes sense really since the Xbox had a 10gig and the Xbox360 will apparently have a 20 gig drive, and yet the mainstream PC hard dives now are over 100gig. Any machine that can potentially be used to store video and other such tasks will fill a 10 or 20 gig hard drive very quickly.

There are some interesting factors to take into account here. PS3 will be a “connected” device, meaning that much of the entertainment value will be online. If it can run a full GUI OS like Linux then it will very likely have a web browser as well. Since the most popular Linux web browser is Firefox (by far), it may well boost Firefox’s overall market share depending on how many of the units are sold. The great thing is that if you are already coding to the W3C standards, you won’t need to do anything to take advantage of it.

Microsoft has released a beta of a program they originally bought when they acquired the Hong Kong based “Creature House” company. The new software covers both vector and pixel based graphics. The program was called Expression but under the Microsoft banner it’s called Acrylic and is a free 77 MB download from Microsoft’s site. The beta will cease to function in October so you get roughly six months of free use however it doesn’t save pixmaps in anything other then it’s default format.

The recommended hardware is also pretty significant, suggestions are Windows XP SP2, a Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of ram. They have also stated that the beta is not optimised at this stage and is fairly slow as a result. Looking though the forum posts for Acrylic shows people describing Acrylic as unpolished and a “glorified MS Paint” and others making note of it’s very good pedigree. One forum user even speculated that Acrylic might be Longhorns answer to MS Paint. Time will tell how it turns out I guess, but I doubt the competition is quaking in their boots just yet.