Netscape has released a patch that fixes 44 vulnerabilities in the just-released Netscape 8. And we’re talking just released.
» Read a previous ZDNet story in which Mozilla reps mock the Netscape developers for launching NS8 with known vulnerabilities, for which patches already existed.
In my job I interview client-side developers on a fairly regular basis. As some of you may know, it’s quite hard to find qualified applicants. A lot of the resumes I read are from folks who started web development in ’99, taught themselves this new thing called web development, but failed to keep up with the times — I’m always shocked at how many resumes I see that don’t list CSS as a skill.
These people aren’t my problem. If you aren’t interested in continuing education, fine, see you later.
My problem is with the people who just got out of school, actually studied web development (very recently), and still have no CSS, DOM or XHTML skills. Heck, I’m glad if they’ve heard of them!
And, to be precise, my problem isn’t with the people — it’s with the schools who are teaching them legacy crap, and aren’t teaching the skills needed to be competitive, or even competent in today’s market.
This is something that really should be looked into, and I think I will.
Students are paying to learn legacy crap!
Over the past few days I’ve been documenting the construction of the Sony PSP billboard outside my office. (Well, I didn’t start documenting it until it was 95% done, but oh well.)
It started functioning some time last weekend, and today (Tuesday) there’s a lovely Remote Desktop error message in the display. You know, they’re no longer funny, these Windows errors, they’re starting to become depressing.
UPDATE: Thanks to AdJab for picking up the story. 
There seems to be a little trouble brewing for Google over their brand new web accelerator.
Inside Google lists a number of reasons the new tool is a Bad Idea, some of which are tinfoil hat-ish, but only slightly.
One example is that Something Awful users started seeing the site as if they were logged in as someone else, since the accelerator was feeding them pre-cached versions of the pages without regard for the user’s actual relationship to the site.
The guys at 37 Signals also noticed a disturbing event — users of one of their web applications started seeing content disappear in front of their eyes. Why? Because Google’s tool spiders the sites you visit, without regard for the action of the links it’s following. So, while users were browsing the application, Google’s accelerator was activating all the “delete” links on the page.
There’s a way for webmasters to block the tool — check this post on Search Engine Journal.
But there’s a potential downside to blocking the tool; this is from Inside Google:
So, what’s the big upside, the one reason so tempting that Google can assure it will not see a mass banning of its product?
PageRank.
The hidden benefit is that sites which allow usage of the Accelerator will likely get a boost in Google rankings relative to sites that do not. Google will have deeper usage data for those sites, data which can be used to determine that site’s rankings. Given the highly competitive search engine optimization field, and Google’s lofty place within it, that may be a temptation that proves too juicy to resist.