NC "WTF" license plates to be replaced free of charge

via Slashdot:

In light of recent discussions about the Internet habits of the older generation, it's comforting to know that in North Carolina, up to 10,000 license plates containing the potentially offensive 3-letter WTF combination will be replaced by the Motor Vehicles division at no cost — if the owner of the vehicle finds the plates offensive.

Of course, "WTF" has been around a lot longer than the current Internet, but let's not let that get in the way of some Internet Outrage™

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eWeek: Google, Yahoo!, and Adobe make Flash searchable

Google and Yahoo! have teamed up with Adobe to make Flash searchable on the Internet.

"We've wanted to make an announcement of this impact for several years now," Wittman said. "There are millions of things built in Flash and there have been concerns because of search engine compatibility. We have a piece of technology to remedy this and we’re working with Google and Yahoo. Google has integrated it and Yahoo will in a period of time."

Should we really be encouraging web site authors and designers to break further away from standards and usability by making Flash-only sites? Any site that offers a complete, non-Flash based version (you know, using that crazy HTML and CSS stuff) will be able to be crawled and indexed by any search engine without any extra work.

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Facebook dropping Corporate and School's "Network" information pages

I just clicked over to my company's Network page on Facebook, and noticed the following message:

Network Pages will be discontinued soon

Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. While you will still be in your current networks, you will not be able to access Network Pages such as this one.

Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.

I can only imagine that this will have something to do with their upcoming layout changes to make profiles more consistent. I did notice that they had removed the "Networks" button from the Facebook site header earlier this year.

It looks like they plan on de-emphasizing the Networks feature, which currently requires you to "verify" your affiliation with a school or corporate e-mail address, or at the very least specify a geographic region. Since Facebook dropped network affiliation as a signup requirement long ago, it appears that they are now just a legacy feature which may be holding back implentation of other features.

My guess is that they would rather companies start taking advantage of their Facebook "Pages" corporate profiles, because everyone knows that life is not complete until we treat our friends with the same respect and profile space as companies.

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Firefox 3 Interface Detail

While searching for information about the differences between the new Firefox 3 themes on Windows and Mac OS X, I found this blog post by Alex Faaborg of Mozilla. It goes into great detail about all of the design considerations for each platform that were put into Firefox 3. While the article is a bit out dated and from the beta stages of development, it is still an interesting read for anyone interested in user interfaces or who deals with cross-platform development.

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The Website is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude (Video)

This video has been making the rounds today. A bit of humor for any IT geeks. Warning: NSFW language (click Read More to watch)

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