] July 1, 2004
] Hungry Bot Behind Microsoft's New Search
]
] Webmasters across the Internet have been tracking a surge
] in spider activity coming from Microsoft's MSNbot over
] the past few months and sleuthing over what kind of new
] search offerings the software giant is cooking up.
]
] MSNbot ... appears to be aggressively
] crawling the Web as part of the algorithmic search effort
] to be included at a future point in its newly revised MSN
] Search portal.
]
] In a sample of ... Website traffic logs ..., we saw a substantial
] increase in activity by its MSNbot crawler in May. In
] most cases, the number of visits more than doubled. The
] activity increased in June though by a smaller
] percentage.

Hungry Bot Behind Microsoft's New Search

] Opera gets US$12.75 million settlement from Microsoft
]
] Last week Opera Software (makers of the Opera browser for
] Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X) announced they had entered
] into a settlement with a large company, but did not name
] the company provide details on what the settlement
] covered. Now, sources are reporting that Microsoft is the
] party behind the payout. Opera had threatened Microsoft
] with a lawsuit over incompatibilities between Opera 7 and
] Microsoft's MSN.
] The incompatibilities were allegedly due to a
] browser-specific style-sheet sent to surfers browsing the
] MSN website with Opera, which then caused MSN to render
] improperly on Opera 7. If Opera identified as a
] Mozilla-based browser, the pages would render just fine.
]
] Microsoft in 2003 admitted that it had taken steps to
] detect different types of browsers accessing MSN and sent
] different Web page layouts to different products. But the
] company said its efforts were aimed at promoting
] standards compliance rather than at hurting products that
] compete with its dominant Internet Explorer browser.
] Microsoft said it has since stopped the practice.

Opera (web browser) gets US$12.75 million settlement from Microsoft

] Powerbook Trackpad Senses Pressure
]
] Apparently, many semi-recent
] Powerbooks and iBooks have trackpads that are capable of
] reporting X, Y, and Z (pressure) information.

The comments mention non-Apple laptops.

HML Blog: Powerbook Trackpad Senses Pressure