I'm personally glad I don't have to run my own mail server anymore. Having to fight the constant battle against spam can seem like an uphill battle. I'm happy enough with Google Apps, very little spam gets through the filters and it's very rare to get a false positive.

Despite the fact that my mail email address is not published online anywhere and I'm very careful who I give it to (I use different addresses for completing forms online) the amount of spam that Google filters out is still amazing.

There must be a lot of stupid people out there that respond to this stuff, it wouldn't exist if it wasn't profitable.

Most of the slashdot April fool posts are totally unbelievable anyway. As for other times I know that slashdot is more for killing time than using as a reliable news source.

Now as there's still 2 hours to go before April 1st here I almost believed the headline. As I mentioned in another post plugins (e.g. Flash) are not extensions (e.g. Flashblock). All browsers except IE support the same plugin API, so if IE wanted to be seen to make developers lives easier they'd support it (they used to back when IE was the underdog). The API is the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) as it was first implemented in the Netscape browsers.

Extensions on the other hand are browser specific and serve a different purpose to plugins. Plugins are for displaying content that would otherwise be unsupported, whereas extensions add extra functionality to the browser.

Extensions are not plugins. Take a look in your Firefox addons menu if you don't believe me. Plugins are things like Flash, they're written to a specification (NPAPI) that originates in the Netscape days, it is supported by all major browser makers EXCEPT Microsoft. That's why on Windows there's two versions of Flash (not talking 32/64 bit issues here) one for IE and one for everyone else.

IE used to support the Netscape plugins API, but removed it around about IE5.5 if I remember, the idea was to force developers to write an IE version (ActiveX) if they wanted to support IE. They were probably hoping that plugin developers would have just developed for the more popular IE and ignore Netscape, finally killing browser competition off for good.

Fortunately the increase in popularity of alternative vouchers has kept the NPAPI alive, meaning that plugins written for one browser will work on them all.

Now the problem with plugins is they're written in compiled code and therefore a version needs to be written for each OS. Extensions on the other hand are usually written in XUL and JavaScript and so extensions will normally work on any platform, but extensions are specific to a particular browser. So plugins are OS specific, extensions are browser specific.

So when I read that IE8.1 supports Firefox plugins, my first thought was that IE was bringing back support for the NPAPI that they removed in IE5.5 making it easier for plugin developers. I knew that it was not possible that IE could support Firefox extensions. That would be almost impossible to implement for anything more than the most trivial extension.

At least it looks like they're happy to delay the 'release candidate' presumably to allow some more time for bugfixes, etc. Although calling it a release candidate is really innacurate. A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.

When I was at school in the UK on of the important aspects of history class was not just what happened in the past but we were supposed to think about the various sources of historical evidence and consider their reliability as a source.

The idea was to promote the fact that all sources would have some bias. You should look at evidence from all sources and consider what possible bias exists in each. e.g. look at both English and German newspaper articles published during the war, etc.

I think the critical thinking aspect of our history classes was more important than just teaching the events of the past.

The internet is probably the last place you'd want to use to teach someone the importance of good writing. The amount of people who think it's cool to type in text speak, deliberately spell certain words incorrectly and various forms of leet speak mean that kids will think that a good writing style doesn't matter.

Add to that the differences between US and UK English, also entries posted by non-native English speakers it's certainly possible that relying too much on the internet will affect a students writing skills.

Back in my GCSE days I got an A in English. I really do believe since then my English skills have suffered immensely from reading a lot of online forums. Of course, the many benefits of having Internet access outweigh this I can't imagine what my job would be without the internet being successful.

I guess Twitter the service and Twitter the Slashdot user have something in common. They're both pretty pointless.

There's a few people who can use Twitter well, but mostly it's just an overload of useless information. But some people seem lost without it.

Microsoft do the same with IE8 on their main download page.

iTouch is the name of a UK company that provides mobile content. They were around a long time before the iPod touch but lost top spot in Google to Apple despite the fact they don't make a product of that name.

Or perhaps we just start drinking by the litre. Well it works in Oktoberfest :)