For just $30 a year for a consumer, or $600 a year for commercial users, you can use Keyhole, an interactive mapping solution that gives you zoomable high definition images of the earth. I can see where a realtor for example, may benefit from being able to show a site to a prospective buyer. I can see an attorney using it to research the scene of an incident, etc. I think it may be a bit pricey for most, but it does have a free seven day trial. Many cities are in very high resolution, such as Boston in this example.

This is funny, have a read. I question the fact that he was so attached to his browser that he had to write it a letter 🙂 but I agree with his conclusions.

On the same note, the Washington post has also favourably reviewed Firefox. Their article is entitled: “Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer” however you will need to register or go to bugmenot, or use the Firefox extension of the same name, to login and read anonymously. For those of you that just want the info, here is a telling paragraph from the article:

I think anybody using Internet Explorer should switch to Firefox today. Seriously. Even if you’ve loaded every IE security update, Firefox will give you a faster, more useful view of the Web. If you haven’t — or if you use a pre-XP version of Windows ineligible for Service Pack 2’s security fixes — it would be lunacy to stick with IE.

Franki

The recording industry, encouraged by favorable treatment from the most liberal federal bench in the US Appeals system, has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court, seeking to hold file sharing software companies responsible for the sharing done by clients of the company.

Among Monday’s petitioners siding with the entertainment companies were the Association of American Publishers, Screen Actors Guild, Recording Artists Coalition, National Basketball Association and the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Marks said. Now those are some strange bedfellows. One wonders how else they may be entertwined.

Tired of being blog spammed (or blammed as it is known), we have decided to work on a new method to stop the automatic submission of comments. While we are working on it I have disabled our comment feature. We are getting hammered one per ten seconds at the moment. At least this way I waste some of their bandwidth as well.

I’ve been saying it for ages, but sometimes it’s good to get a second, or third, or forth opinion. That said, here is Wired.com’s review of the latest Firefox release.

For those of you that just want the facts, here are a couple of quotes from the article:

Once you try Firefox, you’ll wonder why anyone uses any other web browser.

The only reason I keep IE active on my Windows computer is to access Microsoft’s auto-update service.

Firefox also clearly indicates when you are on a secure web page, suitable for transmitting credit card data for example, by highlighting the page’s URL in yellow. The browser also indicated when I was viewing bogus sites set up specifically to steal credit card information and passwords — an attempt at online fraud commonly known as phishing.

There you have it, cool features, cool looks and great security, and it is not just me saying it.

Franki

After seeing this article at TheInquirer, I was intrigued enough to go looking for some examples of this new advertising method. My first Google search turned up this explanation of the system at TMF. Scroll down that page until you see the double underlined Green link called “credit” and move your mouse over it. It is bascially a way of advertising via popup tooltips.

The new advertising method is apparently called “IntelliTXT” and for some reason it seemed very familiar to me. Then it hit me, this is very similar to the Smart Tags system that Microsoft tried to introduce a couple of years back. They were not successful because Microsoft were going to roll it out via Internet Explorer onto sites that they had nothing to do with. IntelliTXT appears to be similar to Google adwords in that you sign up for an account with them and they manipulate any text they want in the site to create ad links. The information from the horses mouth can be found here.

I’m not sold on this idea, but I guess advertising is always going to be part of the Internet experience and they have to come up with ways to reach their target markets without being blocked. These green text links are still less annoying then popup or popunder ads.

Franki

Motorola and Trolltech have announced they are working together to bring embedded Linux to a series of new phones. The Trolltech system allows a fully theme-able interface, full support for MMS, touch screens, handwriting input and full Java compatibility. So Motorola will be able to theme the whole OS to suit the phone. Apparently the new system has lower memory requirements as well. The first two Motorola phones to benefit from the new system are the E680 and A780.

NEC have also announced the intention of working with MontaVisa Linux to bring Linux to their embedded OS devices. You can read the full article here.

Franki