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There are probably several down sides to building  a Flash site, out of which I can list those for now:

1- Download Size: Flash sites are normally larger, take longer time to load.

2- Invisible: Search engines can’t index Flash content, making it unsearchable and invisible, thus killing big amount of targeted traffic.

3- Permalinks: With Flash, you get a url to the main Flash page and have to browse from there. Perhaps there are work arounds for this, but normally, you cannot send a permalink or bookmark it.

4- Copy/Paste: Whether that’s good or bad for the publisher, I usually hate the fact I can’t copy any text. Turns out I was wrong (shows how intelligent I am in Flash). You can chose to make text selectable or not.

Bandwidth is getting faster and faster, so point #1 is becoming less of an issue. And now, with the new deal, Google & Yahoo are working closely with Adobe to make Flash sites indexable and visible from search engines, the biggest downside of invisibility is gone!. Somehow, they plan to do this “they’ll use web crawlers to play through all of a Flash website’s possible “states,” and make that content available through their search results”. And by doing that, Flash sites will become even much closer to normal HTML sites, only much richer.

Why are Google & Yahoo doing this?

1- Expansion: The amount of invisible web is very large, and Flash forms a big percentage of it. By doing so they will be adding much greater amount of content to their search results.

2- Silverlight: Thik about. Why Google & Yahoo together? Why now? Why Flash only? Microsoft have just broke Yahoo’s heart by not matching their requested price, and Google were there to hold them. From an enemy, Google all of a sudden became Yahoo’s best friend. I still remember the days Yahoo! were returning a message saying “Search using Yahoo!” if you search for the word Google. Now, they are both working closely on ad revenue sharing model, and want to send a knock out for Silverlight.

In their official blog, Google announced they have already launched a spider for indexing Flash sites, and you can soon expect to see Flash site results soon. Question is, where will the result link take me though. If it’s to the main Flash page and I have to browse my way through, it’s still annoying and users may not find eventually what they want and leave. I’m sure they’ll get to the permalink stage at the end somehow though.

I wonder if  the future of the web is all Flash. Some people claimed AJAX as a temporarily shifting phase, and I am wondering if Flash is really going to dominate, and AJAX sites are gonna look like static HTML sites today. I personally hope dynamic XHTML sites will last, and don’t really see them going anytime soon. I persoanlly like them more, and I am much more better and comfortable building them than graphics Flash ones.

So what do you think? What do you prefer?

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“Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:

   * Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
   * AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

   * Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
   * Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term.  For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional
questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team”

Adsense referrals did not seem to work very well anyways. Even though the concept is great. I believe the overhead of manually selecting referral ads to post, and then waiting for few days for a conversion to happen, most of the time it doesn’t convert, and you have to try another new ad. This has made the normal PPC for publishers much easier and guaranteed, rather than having to keep monitoring and updating. A good thing about it was however you get the exact ads you need, if they exist!

So now, start exploring DoubleClick for possible good offers.

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Today, the 27th June 08 will mark the end of a revolutionary career for the man who had a dream of putting a PC in every home. Perhaps he didn’t expect it would be 4 PCs for each person in some occasions. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft back in 1975, will be retiring as an executive officer today. The 52 years old genius has announced his departure plan two years back, was shocking news for many, but I guess is something good for Microsoft on the long run. First of all, Bill Gates is not what he was 3 decades back. Fresh blood and new ideas need to take place, and Microsoft have fallen behind in the online era. Second, that way Mr. Gates can absorb how Microsoft performs without him from a bit far, and he can still interfere if it needs, as he will be the non-executive chairman of the company even after his departure.

Bill Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen at the time, when Allen showed him an issue of Popular Mechanics, featuring the first microcomputer, The Altair 8800. Gates did his contact with the manufacturer to offer him a BASIC interpreter for the new machine, which he didn’t really have ready! Against all odds, and despite technical expert advise that it’s not possible, the two young geeks made it a reality, with the contribution of a third person, Monte Davidoff!

Altair 8800

 Bill Gates has also been attributed for coming up with the concept of buying software as a product, with his harsh open letter to hobbyist who were stealing his code for FREE. It seems people enjoyed stealing Bill’s code from the start :). The letter created a big mix of supporting and attacking reactions. The fact that Bill was using Harford University labs, inviting Allen along, when he was not even a student in the University, made some people think he has already used public property for commercial use, and thus, they have indirectly paid their debt through taxes. One thing to note is,Gates claimed “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” The answer is, Open Source folks like Linux :). And it’s not really nothing, it many times pay back. Open Source developers are known to be paid highers salaries for their solid online reputation, and the great experience they have.

So is Bill Gates gonna have so much FREE time on his own, plays all Xbox 360 games start to end? I doubt this guy can hold it this quite. Gates is retiring to pursue full time job with his wife in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Some people may be wondering why I’m writing this article, when I have attacked Bill Gates so much in the past. It’s true, I very much hate Bill Gates’ anti-trust and monopoly practices, I hate Microsoft way of doing things, however I cannot deny also what a genius this guy is, and what changes he made to the industry.

I am looking forward to some photos of the small farewell party they might do to him :).

My only question now is, are we gonna get finally an updated version of this?

The book is what now, 15 years old? He is retiring, and this book definitely needs a successor or updated version.

I also recommend watching this amazing video, that I’m sure mos geeks already did.

UPDATE: I also naively forgo to mention. It’s WALL-E release day. My kid is going crazy about it already. However the movie is not hitting large screens before next week in Kuwait!

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Few months back I had to look for a region hack for the LG RH299H. The solution was pretty simply. Go to Menu -> Settings -> Lock icon -> “00000000″ That’s it. Things aren’t always the case however. This time I was faced with LG RH399H. The Zeros hacks didn’t work, no known hack for this model. At least none I was able to find. This site however made my day. The first two hacks didn’t work. I hesitated a bit, and then decided to trust the site with my DVD Recorder. The CD Hack worked perfectly as it should.

Bookmark the site. You never know when it might come in handy.

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Below are some useful links relating to the new Firefox 3 browser that I found interesting, and I think Firefox users should go through, non-Firefox users may want to take a look at, and see what they’ve been missing of their web life.

• Top 10 Features of Firefox 3
• Power User Guide to Firefox 3: Trust me, there is something useful to learn from here about how to make your experience better. If you don’t like something, Firefox is flexible. Don’t complain, fix it.
• Firefox History in Pictures
• Web Browser Speed Testing: Firefox according to this article is the best in memory usage, and not bad in speed as well.
• Tweak Firefox 3 AwesomeBar: The new Firefox smart bar is pretty amazing, and one of the best things in the new release. It searches your site history, bookmarks, and bookmark tags as well.  But it doesn’t stop there. Through customization and plugins, you can actually do more. I will have to give it a better look after I familiarize more with current status of the setup.

Hope you find them useful. Share any others you have here.

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The following is an interesting article from LifeHacker speed testing all major latest browsers, namely Firefox 3 RC 3(Releasse candidate 3), Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.1 (win), and IE 7.0.6.  All tests have been carried out on Windows Vista OS. So it’s not Safari’s best place, and it definitely is what IE7 can best hope for, unless they admit Win XP is better ;).

What’s interesting is how Opera was the fastest in startup, followed by Firefox 3 and Safari was the last. A batch of 8 tabs opening at same time put Safari in the lead however, neck to neck with Opera, Firefox 2 seconds slower, and IE7 falling behind.  So Safari is best with concurrent tasking, however not very often you would want to do this in real life. Personally, I do it when opening multiple search results at once, but do you?

In terms of Javascript & CSS (important for AJAX), Safari was the best, Opera 2nd, Firefox 3rd and IE7 as always the last. (I didn’t do those test I swear!).

Memory use, what’s all Firefox fans been calling for. Firefox was #1 overall, IE7 only best at startup, when there is nothing more than MSN page probably.

A point to make however is that, Firefox was tested with their latest and greatest so far, while IE8 is still coming back and the older version was put under the test instead.

My opinion:  I am pretty much loving the Firefox 3 speed so far, no issues at all. It does fall behind Safari and Opera, OK! But doesn’t fall that bad to make me switch. Memory use as the benchmarks show are great, actually the best. The security of Firefox compared to Safari, which lacks anti-phishing is so much higher, and it has the richest plugins library amongs all. Firefox 3 has made it for me, more than Firefox 2 did to it’s successor. In the words of today’s generation I tell you “MAHALO!”

Please visit the original link for graphs and more details regarding the test.

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I had 3 downloads so far (Windows @ Home, MacBook Pro, and Linux @ work). Windows went perfect, Linux needed a bit of a small hack to get it replacing the old installation, Mac download broke first time and then went on.

I was thinking of crashing over parents house and doing a by-force upgrade to all their browsers. Unfortunately, things got in the way.

How much did you get? And what’s the favorite feature you found in Firefox 3 so far. I so much like the search of bookmarks and history all together, despite how it could crash on your privacy to some extent by chance. Also, the Firefox remember password now is a bar at the top that doesn’t hold back page loading. MUCH BETTER!

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