Slashdot | Redmondmag on Dumping IE has a pointer to an article from RedmondMag which describes itself as "The Independent voice of the Microsoft IT community", entitled "Time to Dump IE? Internet Explorer is a hacker's dream. Can you (and should you) drop it right now?" The same article is in "Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine"

It's a well written exploration of the issues with switching from IE to an alternative.

The Slashdot comments included this.

Being more serious. How to migrate a clueless n00b from IE to with minimal future support:

1. Download/Install Firefox itself
2. Download/Install Sun Java Runtime, do necessary fiddling to get Firefox to use it
3. Download/Install Flash plugin
4. Download/Install Shockwave plugin
5. Download/Install all necessary streaming media plugins
6. Download/Install Googlebar plugin. This is optional but probably a Good Thing. Configure until said clueless n00b offers free coffee.
7. Add 'obvious' trusted sites like mozilla.org to trusted sites list (I can't believe mozilla forgot this!) Be very careful here.
8. Turn on all automatic updates (remember, we are talking about clueless n00bs here)
9. Make sure all bookmarks, cookies etc have been correctly migrated by checking with, yes, you guessed it, the clueless n00b... (I've never had a problem).
10. Delete all unnecessary IE icons (or if they are really clueless then just redirect them to Firefox)
11. While you're at it remove PDF from MIME associations, Acrobat takes zonks to load up, make sure it doesn't load in a tab but downloads as necessary. [While you're at it why not clean Acrobar of the unused plugins? It'll make it load an order of magnitude faster]
12. Set default download directory to something more sensible than the desktop (optional). Go through the options (possibly consulting your n00b), configure.
13. Teach n00b how to use tabbed browsing, integrated searching, pressing '/' to find something etc etc. Teach common keyboard shortcuts. RSS bookmarks if not THAT much of a n00b. Watch n00b face light up with unrestrained glee! Relish free food, foot massage etc by n00b.
14. Explain your undying hero worship for Charles Babbage, why Darl McBride is Satan, the contents of Bruce Schneier's latest cryptogram, and why Eberlin's Slashbot rhyme r0xxors. Attempt explanation of the concept of bash.org. Get kicked out by increasingly freaked out n00b, safe in the knowledge that you are battling Evil.

WARNING: above not to be used in ALL situations, only for the 'I want my IntarWeb' types. [from: JB Ecademy]

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Mark Pesce on Emigrating from the USA and other topics.

Time to Dump IE?
Internet Explorer is a hacker's dream. Can you (and should you) drop it right now? [from: del.icio.us]

Summary: Audio content on the internet is in chaos. To reign in the chaos, and to capitalize on internet audio file assets, Google will launch an audio search engine or audio file search tool by 2006, but probably sooner. [from: del.icio.us]

Chocolate and Vodka :: iTunes, MusicBrainz and metadata : I detest the arrogance of software developers who create a default preference of 'Please Mess With My Stuff'. I know how I want things organised, and I don't appreciate software that comes along and screws up my filing system.

Quite so. Microsoft, Real and quite a few others please note.

BushCo keeping America scared [from: del.icio.us]

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Anyone with a Slashdot account, especially if you are a moderator, could you mod this comment up? [from: JB Ecademy]

Woot! My first mention on Slashdot!

Slashdot | The
Google News Dilemma

Ooo-Err! It looks like I've just got a mention in Wired.

Wired News: Google News: Beta Not Make Money : It's hard to feel sorry for Google, though. In April, lawyers for the billion-dollar search engine company that Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded sent their own cease-and-desist letter to Julian Bond, a British programmer who had created customized RSS feeds from Google News.

Ironically, the letter informed Bond that Google does not permit "webmasters to display Google News headlines on their sites."

For those who don't know I have some source code on my own site that scrapes Google News and turns it into RSS. Strictly for personal use of course. Google doesn't like people using it to re-publish their results on other people's websites. The source code is now running all over the place so trying to stamp it out completely is probably impossible.

The article asks how Google will ever make money out of Google News and you'll note that there's no advertising on the news pages.

So if there's no money in it, then there should be no issue with producing advert free RSS from it either. And then I can retire my scraper program. [from: JB Ecademy]

Can anyone point out the missing countries in the following list? It's the list of countries that Ecademy members claim to belong to.

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Channel Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Columbia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cote D, Croatia, Croatia (Hrvatska), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, England, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, France, Metropolitan, French Guiana, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, ivory coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea, Korea (South), Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, LT, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, New Zealand (Aotearoa), Niger, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Norway, Oman, Other, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Reunion, Romania, Russia, Russian Federation, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, scotland, u.k., Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Sudan, Sultanate of Oman, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Trinidad. West Indies., Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, UK, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, US Minor Outlying Islands, USA, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe [from: JB Ecademy]

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the "Semantic Web" are finally paying off. [from: del.icio.us]

Links: Locative Media [from: del.icio.us]

The Times has an amusing column where people post questions and others email in the answers. Today there's a tricky one.

What limits the speed of light? Why isn't it either faster or slower?

Can anyone provide some pointers? [from: JB Ecademy]

Times Online - Digital Networks : When blogs first started appearing, they were largely the domain of tech-savvy diarists. They used the classic blog format of regular, dated entries to share the daily details of their personal lives alongside links to cool sites that they had just found online.

Today, they are slowly being joined by a much smarter set of corporate "bloggers" - CEOs, consultants, venture capitalists, analysts, other senior executives - many of whom, like Mr Hammock, discovered the power of blogging almost by accident. [from: JB Ecademy]

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Way cool extension to del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Scripting News: 9/25/2004

Strong sense of Deja Vu here. I first got into Blogs, RSS and (arguing with Dave) round about the time of Super Open Directory (2000?). At the time I wanted to do Super Open Ratings and Super Open Categories. And Dave is pointing back to something he wrote in early 2002 when the Google SOAP API was young.

And here we are again in 2004. But at least now we've got del.icio.us, flikr, blogdex, technorati and all sorts of other experiments going on. And Marc Canter is busy ranting at anyone who'll listen about microcontent and Open XXXX where XXXX is events, listings, reviews.

All this raises a nagging question in my mind. "What should search engines, and in particular Google, do with XML that they find". There's really massive quantities now of XML structured data in reasonably standardised layouts and it's all reasonably easy to parse. So why don't the search engines (and in particular Google) do anything with it?

And then there's the second question. The original Google API is now 2 1/2 years old. It's still in beta. It hasn't changed. There have been no new Google APIs since. Why?

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