I'm hoping the good professor was simply misquoted, shouldn't that read "high waste-heat generation"?
And could they perhaps check that SRC isn't called SCR when quoting him? /pedant

You have to look past the numbers, it isn't a matter of being "dead", it's a matter of weighing the cost of supporting IE6 specific code against an increasingly small number of users.

Even though your stats indicate Opera and Safari are in the same percentile for your site, they'll render standards compliant content without HTML/CSS/JS specifically written for either one.

If any of my sites had less than 10% of IE6 traffic, I'd stop supporting it officially for them. In reality, most of our B2B sites have > 50% of users on IE6 -- we'll be stuck with it for some time. Hopefully Google's impetus to kill support for IE6 can help sway corporate decisions more than Microsoft's own declaration of obsolescence.

The funny thing about that Onion piece, is the a couple years later Gillette really went and made a five-blade razor.

Score one for the onion!

My point about Google was that GMail and then Google Maps were the products that truly alerted the world, in a big way, to the potential of AJAX. Shortly thereafter, tons of people started using AJAX to build sites, MySpace included.

As for start.com: this is a very new Microsoft effort and it isn't an official product. (Live.com is the official product, but that only happened like a week ago.) The important point is that Microsoft had the technology in its hands long ago but failed to capitalize on it in obvious places (again, let me point my finger at MSN's many products.)

Agreed that the press enjoys jumping on all-things-Google these days, but I think it is fair to say that Google was the first company to fully understand the value of AJAX and captilize on it in a way that the general public was aware of.

Let's say i wanted to encrypt a jpeg

As I understand it, encryption works through software using a given algorithm to convert a given (readable) set of data to an unreadable form. The person encrypting has a key they could use to decrypt the data into a readable form.

Could software be written with the following functionality? I specify the jpeg I want to encrypt (say a picture of me in leather with a rose between my teeth which I use as my profile on a sadomasochism site), specify the encryption algoritm to use, specify the key, and lastly specify a decoy jpeg (say a pic of a rose).

The software then provides me with an encryped file which can be decoded to the original using the key I specified, and it also provides a key which, if used, will convert the encrypted file to the decoy jpeg.