That, of course, is what happened during the first browser war of the 1990s and beyond, on personal computers. Today, Mozilla’s top lawyer warned that Microsoft’s behavior threatens a repeat of history, because it’s telling Mozilla that it’s barring Firefox from forthcoming Windows 8 machines that use ARM processors.

“They’re trying to make a new version of their operating system which denies their users choice, competition, and innovation,” said Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s general counsel. “Making IE the only browser on that platform is a complete return to the digital dark ages when there was only one browser on the Windows platform.”

Anderson has been discussing the matter with his counterparts at Microsoft, but the company hasn’t budged, he said. Anderson also detailed concerns in a blog post.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Microsoft’s position raises the prospect not only of refighting the browser wars of more than a decade ago, but also of reviving the grindingly slow antitrust litigation from the U.S. Justice Department, 20 U.S. states, and the European Commission. The U.S. case is closer to today’s situation: the accusation that Microsoft abused its monopoly power in Windows to crush browser pioneer Netscape.

“Microsoft used its monopoly power to develop a chokehold on the browser software needed to access the Internet,” then-U.S. attorney general Janet Reno said upon suing Microsoft.

Although Microsoft didn’t prevail in those cases, its, uh, competitive spirit appears to be unquenched.

Mozilla isn’t considering legal action at this time, and Anderson said going to court would be “a solution of last resort.” But it’s an option if nothing changes.

“First I want to really see if Microsoft is intent on pursuing this path. They could have a subsequent release that allows third-party browsers,” Anderson said. “Sometimes they need some pressure. If it turns out to be legal pressure, that could be the thing.”

Technically, Mozilla could release a version of Firefox for Windows 8′s new Metro interface — it’s indeed building one for more traditional Windows 8 PCs that use x86 chips. But that browser would be crippled on Windows RT, said Asa Dotzler, a Mozilla spokesman.

“First, Microsoft has a browser that runs in Classic mode on Windows ARM. They are not allowing us that same access to run our browser on Classic. Second, Microsoft has a browser that runs in Metro mode on Windows ARM that has access to rich APIs that they are denying to third-party Metro browsers on Windows ARM,” Dotzler told CNET. “So, we are denied the ability to deliver any browser on Classic, and we are denied the ability to build a competitive browser on Metro.” Dotzler also elaborated on the issue in a first and second blog post.
In terms of worldwide personal computer browser usage, Microsoft’s IE is on the rebound after years of declines.

In terms of worldwide personal computer browser usage, Microsoft’s IE is on the rebound after years of declines.
(Credit: Net Applications)

Why bar Firefox?
Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Heiner told Mozilla it won’t permit other browsers for two reasons, Anderson said:

ARM processors, which power virtually all iOS, Android, and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets today, are different from the x86 chips that power PCs. The chips have new requirements for security and power management, and Microsoft is the only one who can meet those needs.
Windows RT — the version of Windows 8 geared for ARM devices — “isn’t Windows anymore.”

Anderson scoffs at the arguments. “I’m not aware that Microsoft is the exclusive and sole proprietor of technology capable of working in the ARM environment…. It’s a different architecture, but it’s not the first time we’ve had an OS that works on a different architecture,” he said of the first point.

Of the second, he says Windows RT uses the same user experience, programming interfaces and Windows Update system. “The idea that it’s not Windows it doesn’t make sense.”

Browsers, of course, aren’t just any old software. They’re essentially becoming miniature operating systems unto themselves able not just to show Web pages but to run Web applications. Browsers nowadays have multitasking, hardware-accelerated graphics, pop-up notifications, and built-in videoconferencing. It’s no coincidence that IE10 will provide the display engine for some native apps, not just Web apps, running on Windows 8.
IE9 logo

Not coincidentally, given their steadily more sophisticated processing capabilities, browsers are also a prime vector for attack. So Microsoft could perhaps be forgiven thinking that running multiple browsers on Windows would mean a bigger attack surface for those trying to compromise computers.

Pshaw, Anderson said. “I trust Firefox before I trust IE. That’s one of the key reasons Firefox took off.”

Overall, it looks like Microsoft is taking pages from the Apple playbook. On iOS, Apple permits only its WebKit browser engine to be used for Web apps and Web pages. That can simplify life for Web developers racing to adapt to mobile browsing — but other browsers suffer.

And like iOS, Windows RT also only will be available preinstalled — something that simplifies hardware combinations that can become a support nightmare. Windows RT also only will run software delivered through Windows Update or the Windows Store.

Clearly, Microsoft is concerned about keeping the best possible experience, and it’s willing to clamp down on old-style Windows programming methods from the x86 era to do so. In a blog post about programming for Windows 8 on ARM, Microsoft’s Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has this to say about moving Windows apps written for x86 chips to the ARM world:

If we enabled the broad porting of existing code we would fail to deliver on our commitment to longer battery life, predictable performance, and especially a reliable experience over time. The conventions used by today’s Windows apps do not necessarily provide this, whether it is background processes, polling loops, timers, system hooks, startup programs, registry changes, kernel mode code, admin rights, unsigned drivers, add-ins, or a host of other common techniques.

Broken promises?
Mozilla also suggests Microsoft has gone back on 12 principles for promoting choice and competition on Windows that General Counsel Brad Smith announced in 2006.

The Web page about the principles is no longer obviously available on Microsoft’s site, but a press release and Smith speech about it remain.

In that speech, Smith extolled the virtues of openness to others’ applications.

We recognize that for users, an operating system is important solely because of what it allows other people to do on top of it. People don’t buy a PC simply to run an operating system. They buy a PC to use all the applications and Internet services that they can access on top of that operating system.

The first principle comes directly out of the U.S. antitrust ruling and ensures that Microsoft will design Windows in ways that make it easy for computer manufacturers and users to install non-Microsoft applications and to configure Windows-based PCs to use non-Microsoft programs instead of or in addition to Windows features.

Smith cited iTunes as one example of software that Microsoft graciously accommodated even though it competed directly with its own Media Player product.

However, Smith indicated that not all decisions are final:

We’ll review these principles from time to time, and at least once every three years, we’ll sit down in a more formal way and we’ll determine whether we should adopt additional principles to take account of new technologies or legal trends or business practices, and whether we should modify any of the existing principles to take account of these factors as well.

Reliving history
Internet Explorer’s dominance, traces of which remain today especially in China, was indeed a grim period for Web developers in many ways.

The browser’s dominance did simplify programming by letting many code for that single browser, which bucked some Web standards. But then Microsoft left IE6 largely untouched for years. A lot of online application innovation took place instead with Flash Player from Macromedia, later acquired by Adobe Systems.

Mozilla’s release of Firefox in 2004 rallied allies who wanted something better. Mozilla and Opera, another browser rival, also began a project called the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group to advance HTML standards when the World Wide Web Consortium decided it didn’t want to. Apple later joined, too, and eventually the W3C picked up the baton again.

By the time Google arrived with Chrome in 2008, Microsoft was well on its way to re-engaging with Web standards work and to producing the vastly more competitive IE9. Now its competitive juices in the browser market are clearly flowing again.

But this is the kind of challenge that could rally Mozilla, too. The non-profit organization rose from the ashes of Netscape, and for years, much of its identity was defined in opposition to Microsoft. Mozilla embraced open-source software and touted the Web standards Microsoft ignored.

Now Anderson generally considers Mozilla’s relationship with Microsoft as healthy.

There’s one huge difference from the last-generation browser battles: Apple.
April 2012 mobile device browser statistics

Apple’s Safari dominates mobile browsing.
(Credit: Net Applications)

Safari is the dominant mobile browser by far, and on phones and tablets, Microsoft is very much the underdog. On ARM devices today, IE isn’t even close to second-place Android.

So a complacent IE team seems improbable at this stage.

Anderson is still dissatisfied. Sure, people can switch to another mobile operating system by switching devices, but that’s not easy.

“If that’s your version of choice, I think that’s a sad world, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.

He remains optimistic that an amicable solution can be found. Microsoft altered course to let other browsers run in Windows 8′s Metro interface on x86 machines, and Firefox and Chrome are headed for Windows 8 now. So the company can budge.

And for practical reasons, Mozilla hopes it will.

“I’m not inclined to look to judicial solutions as the No. 1 way to protect users,” Anderson said. “I was at Netscape in the 1996 era. I watched the slow wheels of justice turn.”

By that time it was over, Netscape was long gone as an independent company.

Looking for a definition of each of these various web components, they can be defined like below;

Website Application - A web application is an application that’s accessed through a web browser.

Website - A website is a series of web pages that can embed variousmedia (images, video, widgets, etc) that’s accessed through a web browser over the internet.

If you need to offer an online service such as customer account management, and/or a customer portal that helps users access your services world wide, you may be in need of a web application. If you only need to provide information on your business and the services you offer, then you may only need a website.

In becoming the 35th person to win the prestigious $250,000 award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the 75-year-old Pearl was honored with what is considered to be the highest prize that the computing industry has to offer.

“Of course, I’m delighted that people in your field and outside appreciate what you did, that recognize the work that I do in my little niche,” Pearl said in an interview. “It’s very rewarding.”

List of published papers by Judah Pearl

A professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, Pearl is recognized as a leading thinker in the study of machine reasoning. Pearl has often been cited for his work in the relationship between cause and effect. Among other things, he’s credited with coming up with a way to use Bayesian networks to research machine learning. This modeling tool, named after a famous 18th century English mathematician, was cited as offering a “critical step toward achieving human-level AI that can interact with the physical world. Pearl was also recognized for earlier work in a method of problem-solving known as heuristic search as well as for his contributions in the field of causality.

Vint Cerf, who chairs ACM’s Turing centenary celebration, lauded Pearl’s impact, saying his research had had influences in related realms including natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics. “His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term ‘thinking machine,’” according to Cerf.

A couple of side footnotes to the award. Pearl is the father of former Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and slain in 2002 by al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan.

Also, Alan M. Turing’s 100th anniversary is slated be celebrated this June. Turing was one of the seminal thinkers in the history of modern computing.

Pearl, who said he first got interested in how to handle uncertainty in computer systems early in his college days, offered a guardedly optimistic prediction of where current research is likely pointing.

“I don’t see any basic impediments to intelligence on machines,” he said. “I think eventually we will have automatic systems that can put together experimental data from thousands of different sources conclusions and come up with recommendations and justifications.” “Anything that that had something to do with uncertainly, if you frame it, you get a plausible answer,” Pearl added. “You don’t have surprises. The only question has been computation, how to implement it correctly on a computer.”

Pearl will receive the Turing Award on June 16 in San Francisco during the annual ACM banquet.

More information from Parallels on this incident is on their website at kb.parallels.com/en/113321

Our engineers are working diligently with Parallels to patch all affected versions of Plesk in a systematic manner.  As we progressively take actions recommended by Parallels, it will be necessary to reboot and test the server repeatedly.  As this occurs, your website may be offline for approximately 6-8 minutes, and then may appear to run slower than normal as the server restarts its processes.

We are working closely with our vendors to expedite these patches as quickly as possible with least impact to you.  Rest assured, no data has been compromised or lost in this incident.  This incident may only adversely affect the uptime and speed of your website until the patches are complete.

Thank you for your patience as we work with Parallels to implement their fixes.

This is the fourth consecutive year for Web Services’ inclusion on the list, and the third year in the Top 10.

Web Services specializes in open source mobile and application development. They offer traditional e-commerce, content management systems (CMS), customized graphic design, programming, and social networking management. Their portfolio ranges from single landing pages to track marketing efforts, to full e-commerce sites and applications selling on varying price points.

Additionally, Web Services has developed strategic alliances with several other companies on the list, furthering a value price point offering for Web Services open source programming services. Web Services specializes in mobile & application development in PHP and open source technologies, while looking to other industry leaders for ASP.net and some legacy software projects.

Source: bizjournals.com

Ever wonder how clean the restaurants your eating at actually are? Local 10 just recently launched restaurant inspections which will show you exactly which places are clean and which places have racked up the health inspection violations. The top violators each week are also interviewed by channel 10 to get the answers as to why their restaurants are the top violators. Easily search and find if your local restaurants have current health violations. Restaurant Inspections

Website-Monitoring compiled the data, which included a sample of almost 44 million G+ users and revealed the gender gap that gives men 67 percent of about 90 million members (though one G+ tracker predicts it’ll hit 100 million by Feb. 25). In contrast, about 58 percent of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users are women (according to a Pew report that came out last summer).

A sample of about 7 million users showed that 42 percent were single, while 27 percent were married. But if you add in those who said they were in a relationship, couples outnumbered singles 46 percent to 42.

Students dominate the occupation category, with 20 percent of 2.4 million users identifying themselves as such. Way, way down in second and third places are software engineers at 2.6 percent and consultants at almost 2 percent.

The top 10 cities of G+ users are in two countries, the U.S. and India, with Bangalore in first place with 3.8 percent of a 2.6 million sample, followed close behind by New York at 3.6 percent.

But the U.S. still pulls ahead overall, with almost 32 percent of 11.4 million users in this sample.

Since its debut in June 2011, G+ has broken user rates left and right, growing fast and furious, especially after its buzz-building, invitation-only status led to open sign-ups — but has also experienced significant dips in activity, too.

Some predict it’ll hit 200 million by the fall, while others think it may go as high as 400 million. Some things G+recently did may help it reach those lofty goals: Opening up to teens, hangouts with POTUS and allowing aliases.

Here is the complete infographic Website-Monitoring put together:

Developers have a love-hate relationship with CSS vendor prefixes. They allow us to use bleeding-edge technologies at the expense of long-winded declarations:
view plainprint?

background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(#fff, #000);
background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(#fff, #000);
background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(#fff, #000);
background-image: -o-linear-gradient(#fff, #000);
background-image: linear-gradient(#fff, #000);

It works well in theory but consider what happens in the wild:

Experimental properties are often implemented in the webkit engine first and there’s no guarantee they’ll be replicated in other browsers.
It’s often difficult to determine whether a vendor-prefixed property is part of the CSS specification. Some vendors don’t submit properties for standardization.
Even if the standard property changes, the incorrect vendor-prefixed version continues to be supported. Your old code still works; you won’t revisit it to correct the implementation.

You’ll often find sites using the -webkit prefixes alone — even if other browsers support the property or it has widespread availability without a prefix (such as border-radius). Chrome and Safari therefore look better than competing browsers — and the other vendors aren’t happy.

The issue was raised and discussed in the W3C meeting on February 7, 2012:

Web standards activists are teaching people to use webkit. You will see presentations from all the web standards advocates advocating people to use webkit prefixes.

Our job is to solve interoperability.

At this point we’re trying to figure out which and how many webkit prefix properties to actually implement support for in Mozilla.

If we don’t support webkit prefixes, we are locking ourselves out of parts of the mobile web.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Non-webkit browsers will support the -webkit prefix. That is the solution being considered by the W3C.

The idea is likely fail miserably. Two or more implementations of the same webkit property won’t be compatible so developers won’t be able to use it anywhere. No one wins — including Apple and Google.

But I’m more concerned about the irreparable damage it’ll cause if the solution is successful. Once developers discover webkit prefixes working in Firefox, IE and Opera, they’ll expect them to work on all properties. Webkit-only adoption will rise exponentially and the vendors will be forced to implement the prefixes throughout. At that point, webkit properties will become the de facto standard regardless of any W3C specification. Game over: the open web is closed.

The implications also go further than CSS: many of the new JavaScript APIs have vendor prefixes.

Google last week held a forum, co-hosted by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, with some of the world’s prominent researchers to discuss ways in which they could make “breakthrough technology” a reality. The participants discussed so-called “moonshots” that Google says, “live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction.”

The Solve For X site includes some of the ideas brought before the forum last week, and others that Google will be launching over time. One of the more interesting videos on the site comes from Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, in which she discusses the eventual possibility of taking pictures of the “mind’s eye.”

To get everyone else involved, Google’s Solve for X Google+ page lets users discuss some of the ideas floated for the program and offer up some of their own ideas.

What’s unclear right now, however, is what Solve for X will eventually become. Google is currently only calling the service a “forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork,” and has not said if anything will actually come out of it. Still, it’s worth checking out the site if you want to hear about some of the really neat ideas that, while currently impossible, might not be coming sooner than you think.

Your smartphone always knows where you are. And thanks to the Life360.com service, powered by technology from a company called Loc-Aid, a parent can locate a child by her phone number or even an elderly parent who has wandered away from home.

Indeed, network location services can save lives, protect children, and enable business services — and they’re available to anyone.

Thanks to a free online demo at Loc-Aid.com, you can type in the cellphone number of anyone in the U.S. and find their precise location in just a few seconds.

Agreements with wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint let Loc-Aid triangulate position using cellular towers and the GPS signal on your phone. In urban areas, the results are more precise than rural areas where there are fewer cell towers.

Locaid adds security measures to keep the site safe: You have to type in your own birthday (to prevent minors from using the service) and the person you are trying to locate must agree to the location search by replying to a text message.

But after validating a phone, Locaid doesn’t require the user to be involved. Banks and marketers can search for the location of someone who opts-in to the service at any time.

“App developers can use mobile network location for things like validating legitimate credit card purchases and detecting fraud … or tracking assets like laptops or street-cleaners or dumpsters,” explained Carolyn Hodge, a spokeswoman for the Loc-Aid service.

Cybersecurity expert Jeanine Swatton says location tracking apps are extremely common. There is a “social-discovery” app called Banjo that helps you find friends based on their GPS coordinates. And Google Latitude provides a similar function. Each of these services are “opt-in” so you have to agree to share your location.

But is there a potential downside? Swatton says location tracking tools are used mostly for legitimate purposes, but warns that apps powered by Loc-Aid could be used for criminal activity — if a hacker figured out how to bypass security precautions. For example, a hacker could set up a server that captures your location information after Locaid is disabled.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with Enderle Group, said new location-finding services can be abused (like any other service), but that does not mean they should be outlawed. Enderle advises people to be careful about how they use the tools and to disable features you do not need.

Locaid adds several safeguards to make sure its tools are tamper resistant. For example, once you find someone, the service turns off after 15 minutes to prevent someone from tracking you all day.

Dawn Benton, a spokesperson for AT&T, said it is impossible to use location finding services from cell tower triangulation or GPS unless the smartphone user specifically agrees to the search. And FoxNews.com found the text message that asks for consent to be clearly labeled and obvious.

Hodge says Locaid is not that different from other services like Twitter that allow you to share your location with every tweet. (Swatton says she advises people to disable these location features.) And Hodge says Locaid is staunchly in favor of individual privacy protections.

In the end, technology is agnostic, Enderle said, and a company that makes a new technology is rarely liable for how it is used.

Locaid offers only a demo of its location service, but it proves that technology is always advancing — and so is our definition of privacy.