Apple has made significant changes to Safari in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, introducing integration with Dashboard, smart drag and drop of tabbed windows, full text searching of your web history, and more. Here's a look at the birth and maturity of the online web browser, as well as a look at what's new in Safari 3.0.

This report goes to great lengths to explore the origins, history, and maturity of the web browser. For those readers with limited time or who are only interested in what's due in Leopard, you can skip to page 3 of this report.

 Source: AppleInsider

On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good.

The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)?

That's an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months. Granted, that is in offices around the world, but still, that's impressive. By comparison, Yahoo has 13,600 employees, after hiring 1,200 during the past quarter. (Actually, when you think about it, that's even more crazy given the need for Yahoo to retrench right now.)

Those numbers may seem surprising given the fact that Google attributed last quarter's 3-cent earnings miss to overspending on hiring, and promised to curb that impulse. However, during the conference call with analysts Thursday afternoon, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said many of the people hired during the quarter had been given offers before the previous quarter had closed."

Source: CNET 

See you guys on the torrents, Ubuntu 7.10 is out today. Codenamed "Gutsy Gibbon" -- in that alliterative fashion that never gets old (yet) -- 7.10 includes the brand new GNOME 2.20 desktop, Compiz Fusion for gee whiz 3D interface effects, desktop search (pictured), fast user switching, Firefox plug-in support, much improved monitor support and configuration (at last), and a whole bunch of other minor tweaks and major improvements. Time will tell if this release proves to be the true commercial OS killer a lot of people are banking on, but there's no denying that Ubuntu Linux provides an increasingly attractive and perpetually free alternative to traditional operating systems and even many Linux desktop distributions. Welcome to the OS war, Gutsy Gibbon!

 Source: Engadget

Not to be outdone by Murdoch and his slew of MySpace announcements, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made some pretty big announcements today at the Web 2.0 Conference, speaking on Microsoft’s plans to acquire 20 companies per year for the next five years, ranging from $50 million to $1 billion, reports Venturebeat.

That’s quite a statement, but not entirely surprising. I haven’t kept count of the number of companies Microsoft, or even Google, has snatched up this year alone, but this sure will garner a lot of attention from the entrepreneur and investor community, seemingly eager to feed the Microsoft beast. Will the wounds left from the ’90s still be open, from Microsoft courting startups and then launching its own competing version instead of completing an acquisition?

And will the heavy encouragement of open platforms for online networks with Facebook, MySpace and Google end up doing the same thing to the entrepreneur community, as amassing applications provide great hotbeds for innovative ideas that can be acquired or applied to these larger companies?

 Source: Mashable

Finally, after a long wait, the 5 and 5.5 Generation versions of the firmware for iPod Classic for iPod video is here. Thanks to all of the hardworking devs: xxDriveNxx , bounci.rabbit.123, vettefan, matthew98, supernatural, saXas, and myself (H3X).

Source: http://driven-design.net/ 

While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we've all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.

As we're more than aware, Vista Ultimate comes at a premium. For an additional $160 over the Premium SKU price, Ultimate gives you a complete backup and restore option, BitLocker Drive encryption, the ever so popular Windows Fax & Scan, and the "Ultimate Extras." But what started with a promise of "Extras" by summer, quickly turned into an apology from Microsoft and the eventual release of DreamScene and Windows Hold 'Em (among others) today. And while each of the "Extras" runs just fine, Microsoft's "Extras" blunder is just another reason why the company must abandon Vista before it's too late.

View: Full Article  

In June of 2006, while working to resolve some indexing issues for a client, I discovered a bug in Google's algorithm that allowed 3rd parties to literally hack a web page out of Google's index and search results. I notified a contact at Google soon after, once I managed to confirm that what we thought we were seeing was really happening.

The problem still exists today, so I am making this public in the hope that it will spur some action.

I have sat on this information for more than a year now. A good friend has allowed his reputation to suffer, rather than disclose what we knew. I continue to see web sites that are affected by this issue. After giving Google more than a year to resolve the issue, I have decided that the only way to spur them to action is to publish what I know.

Disclaimer: What you're about to read is as accurate as it can be, given the fact that I do not work at Google, and have no access to inside information. It's also potentially disruptive to the organic results at Google, until they fix the problem. I hope that publishing this information is for the greater good, but I can't control what others do with it, or how Google responds.

I am also not the only person who knows about this hack.

Read More 

The Skype outage last week has been explained, and it appears to have been triggered by a gazillion Windows boxes rebooting after a new system patch had been downloaded last week:

[from Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage | The Register]
[...] Skype has blamed last week's prolonged outage on the effects of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday.

The latest security update from Microsoft required a system reboot. The effect of so many machines rebooting and subsequently trying to log onto the Skype VoIP network triggered system instability and a prolonged outage of almost two days starting on Thursday

Source: Click Here 

This is a little strange but fun for a few minutes... Click on the link below to see these flash moving realistic portraits of both a dog and human.  Not really sure what the point of the site is maybe some of you know.

http://www.motionportrait.com.nyud.net:8080/about/TIdog.swf

http://www.motionportrait.com.nyud.net:8080/about/TIminoriHair.swf

 http://www.motionportrait.com

With user agent switcher plugin for Firefox you can now browse just as a googlebot and enter sites that are normally closed down to the public and require registration.  These sites are still open for google to spider them and if your a google bot then you can enter them just as easily for free. 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Descriptioon: Googlebot 

Enter the following as a user agent.

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

And now set it from the menu to use Googlebot then go to a forum that's usually restricted to browse freely.