I just read that Adobe provide a free service converting PDF files into HTML or plain text. Obviously you don't need that if your site is hosted on a Unix server [or Linux, BSD, OS X or anything else except Windows], where you will find tools such as pdftohtml and also pdftotext among other conversion routines.
Seth Schoen warns that Adobe will use encryption as part of its DRM in its latest versions of applications for the creation, distribution and playing of Flash content, now that sites such as Youtube have made Flash the de facto standard for online video. Intentions by the big content owners such as the BBC to provide video as long as it's protected are probably part of the equation, as the price for the server software sold by Adobe takes into account the amount of data shifted. DRM won't stop infringement, but it'll give right holders a powerful legal weapon.
Most ordinary sites, when linked by Slashdot, are brought to their knees as long as the link is on Slashdot's front page, because there are a lot of people reading "/." news.
The W3C gets about 600 times as much in pointless traffic, because even more people apparently cannot read or don't bother to. All wasted, and almost always caused by robots and other crawlers programmed and used by people who shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
Even today, two and a half years after killing my RSS feed because of excessive and unneeded requests, some so called newsreaders - including Feedfetcher-Google - still try to access that resource every few minutes. Status and Error codes are apparently something understood only by a select few.
Adobe introduces its Flash Player 9 as .tar.gz or .rpm and with a .yum repository file. It's available for OS X and Windows Home computers as well.
You must've read it several times this morning, as lots of media repeat MSFT's PR saying "Microsoft rolls out search improvements". What they do is adding stemming to their search engine, plus a few other tricks in discovering and discounting stop words.
Stemming was an advanced technology when first published in 1968. Because it wasn't finished then, Martin Porter published his improved and elegant algorithm for english language words in 1980, which was used, rewritten and cloned umpteen times, but never improved. More like slightly broken, as none of the implementations were error free when compared to Porter's publication or an english dictionary. For this reason he released a library of code for english and other [stemmable] languages about 20 years later.
Google started using a form of stemming around 2003. And now Microsoft regards itself on a par with Google as it will introduce stemming as well. It seems to ignore the fact that others may have moved on.
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.