We love Mashable, but we think we can go them one better. They just posted 10 Fun Microsoft Facts You Might Not Know. But hey, who says you can’t dig up more facts about the world’s favorite software company?

1. Microsoft once licensed a Unix-based operating system. It was called “Xenix” and was licensed from AT&T for Microsoft to redistribute. They eventually changed their minds and sold it to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This is ironic given that every competitor to Windows today is based on a Unix core.

2. Bill Gates’ parents originally didn’t plan on his going into computers. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem, and his grandfather was a national bank president. So the family plan was for him to become a lawyer, too. Probably good he didn’t listen to them, huh?
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Even though we’re very progressive about web design, sometimes we do look back and have to admit that we kind of miss some of those outdated bits of online culture. Here’s a little list for those of you who want to wallow in nostalgia with us:

Gopher – Gopher was one of the old Internet protocols before the WWW. It imposed a much stricter hierarchy on content, which had to be placed in folders and indexed with a text menu. It only lasted from 1991 to 1993. here is a list of still-functioning Gopher servers – amongst others, Firefox has a Gopher protocol. And here is an Ars Technica writeup on what the Gopher-heads are up to now.

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More funding is being thrown at research to try to make computers have common sense. You’ve seen this story before, and you’ll see it again – just the players change. Related to this is the concept of the semantic web – the Holy Grail of Internet information retrieval where you will someday be able to type “Abbey Road” into a search engine and it will know that you mean the street, not the album or the studio. Or something like that!

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Talk about reinforcing a cliche! As this post demonstrates, our biggest web businesses all got their beginnings in garages, basements, and bedrooms. With the exception of some offices.

Not pictured: Yahoo! was started in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University! Certainly, they deserve some more juice than some teenager who draws MySpace backgrounds, don’t they?

One notable mention is PopCap games. If we may be so bold as to speculate, PopCap basically owes its success to being the first link you find on Sun Microsystem’s Java.com site after you’ve successfully downloaded and installed Java. Now trace the

psychology: you just installed Java, got it set up, and now need to test it. Hey, there’s a handy site right here! So you go there and it’s games! What a fun reward after the hard work of installing Java. Hey, this site is fun, think I’ll bookmark this!

Read-Write Web has a characteristically well-thought-out post about the new world of thinking digitally instead of physically. You can particularly appreciate the part about computer-phobia.

Who among us, working in a tech-related field, has not had an acquaintance who waved away our computer-jargon with the retort “I don’t understand computers!” Or gotten a phone call from a relative late at night, who needed help with their home computer?

At the same time, software engineers, web designers, and graphics artists seem to be at a loss when it comes to dealing with the physical world. A great programmer is stumped when their car stalls, a brilliant web designer will have their website in perfect order while their desk is buried under three feet of junk, and many IT professionals tend to let their health go, developing the expanding waistline and fluorescent-lighting complexion that goes with spending all your time in a cubicle or a server room. Continue reading →

I know, many of you in web design have been saying “If I hear ‘Web 2.0′ again, I’m going to barf!” We’re all sick of it, but if you work in web design, you have clients coming to you asking to make their sites “web 2.0″. You might as well have one agreed-upon standard for getting it right.

That’s just what this guide does. Very complete and yet easy to scan, it touches on every aspect from layout to logos, setting down once and for all what exactly Web 2.0 is and what it is not. It uses lots of examples and spots trends you probably didn’t even notice. Continue reading →

RFI stands for Remote File Inclusion. We’ve seen some captured demos here and there, but this one is one of the most impressive yet. The example shown in the post Bots Galore! is worth reading – in fact, studying! Look how it ends, with a simple GUI for controlling your site. Chances are, there’s eight or nine of these scripts floating around on underground file sharing networks right now.

Wikipedia gives an excellent description of the RFI attack. Briefly, you used PHP’s “include” function to include whatever file was specified after the ‘?’ prompt in the URL. Guess what? We’ll just include our own file from some other server there and look at your web page that way! No password cracking, no muss, no fuss, and not even any trace left.

Guard against this! Turn off “register_global” on your server if it isn’t off already, and just plain don’t allow URL-include in the first place. If you have several pages of code that have to link together, include the file specifically by name in the code itself.

Peter Brittain

This little study conducted by Google and Amazon re-confirms what many of us have known for years: Web page visits drop even if the page took a half-second longer to load.

This makes sense when you combine a couple of factors of human nature. One is habit. We people are getting more and more used to instant gratification. Have thought, text message, post to Twitter. Get sudden urge to hear old 80s song again, search YouTube, listen to it. You get the picture. We’re surrounding ourselves by mobile devices of every shape, and it’s just training us to be less and less patient with lag.

The other factor is uncertainty. If you knew, every time, that no matter how long it takes, the page you want will eventually come up, you’d probably wait longer. But there’s so many things that could go wrong. Is it a bad connection? Server failed? Account suspended? Bad link? Too much Javascript slowing the page down? A Flash load? Webmaster mistake? We don’t know, but if it doesn’t come up in a few seconds, we know that we’ll get what we’re lookign for somewhere else.

Just one more reason to only host your site on a server running Linux (the fastest, most efficient system), and with a local web host so you cut out all the lag you can.

Peter Brittain

Just in case you needed a reminder that the good times never last, there’s a Twitter spammer tool out there now. Like so many of these cases, it’s one person making the software, then dozens of gullible fools buy the software and believe that they can make money by spamming the world.

People always ask, “How do these idiots make money?” There’s your answer: they don’t. They pay money. At the end of the chain, perhaps all of the spam that has ever been sent in the history of mankind has only made one, single person any profit: the guy who made the spamming tools and sold them to a few suckers.

Anyway, look for trouble on the Twitter front. Which means more interoperability for malware and worms, which should be all over this like ants on a sugar cube soon. Bots – even the ones who infect PCs – have traditionally used IRC to communicate in a network and collect orders, but now they might have Twitter available, too.

Peter Brittain