Technology
gregladen | September 7, 2009Lifehacker has a comparison of Chrome 4.0, Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10.
Firefox boots slowest, Opera fastest. Opera takes longest to load eight tabs, Chrome the least time. Chrome totally cooks on the JafaScript Test, while Opera and Fierefox are left way behind.
Chrome uses the most memory, Opera next, and Fierfox least. The Chrome memory use seems quite large.
Lifehacker comes down with an endorsement of Chrome. You should look at the details here.
For me? When I go "apt-get install chrome" nothing happens.
razib | September 6, 2009This article about Redbox is quaint and suggests some recent trends. First, other stuff I've read about Redbox pretty much indicates that it's a boon for downscale and techphobic consumers who aren't utilizing services like Netflix, and so pay a higher per unit price for rentals than otherwise would be the case. So though Redbox is putting downward pressure on the DVD sales & rental market, this seems a case where the studios want to maintain "cash cows" in the form of consumers who simply aren't making recourse to the internet for various reasons (25% of Americans are not on the internet…
razib | September 4, 2009So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It:
So if Gmail is as good as the power grid, the phone network, and home broadband, why does its failure spark such surprise and outrage--and always make national headlines...An online service's outage, though, is sudden, inexplicable, and communal. Gmail goes down for everyone at the same time, none of us knows why, and because we're all online and gabbing, the news spreads fast. Many people also spend a lot more time on Gmail and other Web services than we do on the phone or watching TV; even if you don't really have any pressing reason to be on e-mail or IM,…
ejohnson | September 3, 2009As you may have heard from one of our bloggers, ScienceBlogs will soon be introducing an optional user membership program. We hope that this will help you, as readers, connect with one another, keep track of the posts and discussions you are interested in, and control how you interact with the site.
To that end, we'd love to hear what you think would most improve your site experience—what would be useful, interesting, or just plain fun? You can help us decide which features to introduce in both stages of our two-part development by responding to the poll below. Bump items up or down to rank…
drorzel | September 3, 2009So, I upgraded my desktop at home recently to a machine running Vista. One of the minor annoying features of this is that it defaults to requiring a password whenever it wakes up, so if I walk away for half an hour, I come back and rather than just moving the mouse to wake it up, I have to move the mouse to wake it up, and then click my name to get back to what I was working on. Given that this is a machine in my house, and I'm the only user of it, it's sort of silly to have that extra layer of security (and it makes it harder to check my email while baby-wrangling), so I decided to turn that…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2009tags: facebook, twitter, internet, technology, cyber stalking, Onion News Network, ONN, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
There are times when I am grateful for having been shunned by my family since the age of fifteen: Christmas being the most notable among them. But the Onion News Network reminded me of yet another reason to be happy I don't have to deal with them: Facebook and Twitter! In this streaming video, 'E-Mom' Gloria Bianco shows Jim and Tracy how geographical distance is no longer a roadblock to shamelessly interfering with the lives of your children.
razib | September 1, 2009Why Gmail Failed Today:
Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.
The main issue is that Google obviously has to go down less often. But it's never going to be perfect, that's reserved for God. So the question is how often can it go down without people getting angry? It isn't as if not-cloud applications don't fail, we all know of many instances when computers won't…
drorzel | September 1, 2009As a veteran of Usenet, I've only grudgingly come to accept the practice of putting all responses to an email in a lump at the top, with the quoted text below. I much prefer to have the responses interleaved with the original points being responded to. I've pretty clearly lost this one, though, and I've learned to live with it.
One consequence of this practice that continues to drive me nuts, though, is the way that people have become conditioned to believe that nothing below the first quote header exists. This is exacerbated by things like GMail, which explicitly hides quoted text. Thus, I'm…
clock | August 31, 2009WWW2010 is coming to Raleigh, NC next year. This is the conference about the Internet, almost as old as Internet itself, founded by the inventor of the Internet, and it is huge:
The World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The first conference of the series, WWW1, was held at CERN in 1994 and organized by Robert Cailliau. The IW3C2 was founded by Joseph Hardin and Robert Cailliau later in 1994 and has been responsible for the conference series ever since. Except for 1994 and 1995 when two conferences were held each year, WWWn became an…
clock | August 29, 2009I am feeling mean today. So, here is my first mean post of the day.
About a week ago I read this delicious post about the business of scientific publishing. It is a good read throughout - the title of the post is "Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists?" and the answer is interesting. But what stood out for me was this paragraph:
This past February, I was on a panel discussion at the annual NFAIS conference, a popular forum for academic publishers. The conference theme was on digital natives in science. At one point I was asked (rather rudely) by a rep from a major…
clock | August 29, 2009Leo Laporte and Kirsten Sanford (aka Dr.Kiki) interviewed (on Twit.tv) Jason Hoyt from Mendeley and Peter Binfield from PLoS ONE about Open Access, Science 2.0 and new ways of doing and publishing science on the Web. Well worth your time watching!
clock | August 28, 2009My regular readers probably remember that I blogged from the XXVI International Association of Science Parks World Conference on Science & Technology Parks in Raleigh, back in June of this year.
I spent the day today at the headquarters of the Research Triangle Park, participating in a workshop about the new directions that the park will make in the future. It is too early to blog about the results of this session, though the process will be open, but I thought this would be a good time to re-post what I wrote from the June conference and my ideas about the future of science-technology…
grrlscientist | August 27, 2009tags: Grabs-U, Grabula, software, technology, optical illusion, offbeat, streaming video
Wow, here's two hot new Finnish software programs for your mac that you can use to allow the world to touch you (Grab-U) and that you can use to reach out and touch the world (Grabula) -- I can hardly wait to get these for my Powerbook!
Grabs-U software demo video (allows the world to touch you):
And here's the Grabula demo (you can touch the world);
Okay, you are saying, that's just not real. Well, you're right! Neither is real, both are an optical illusion. How did they do it? This video shows how (I…
gregladen | August 26, 2009Hardware hackers have done all sorts of interesting things to cool down their PC's so they can be wildly over clocked. Roughly speaking, two otherwise identical processor chips rated at different speed are not necessarily designed differently. They are just capable of running at different speeds and not screwing up. The causes of screwing up are sometimes related to heat. So, a chip designed to run at a given range of speeds, then rated for, say, the middle of that range, can be run at the upper end of the range .... or beyond .... if it is kept very cold.
(I've oversimplified.)
So, you…
grrlscientist | August 25, 2009tags: iPhone, technology, Apple, comedy, humor, funny, streaming video
Apple's iPhone ads tell you that whatever you want to do, "there's an app for that." But what if you're trying to solve problems with the iPhone itself? Here's a ad spoof that addresses this, too.
edyong | August 24, 2009Our minds are battlegrounds where different media fight for attention. Through the Internet, desktops, mobile screens, TVs and more, we are constantly awash with headlines, links, images, icons, videos, animations and sound. This is the way of the 21st century - a saturated sensory environment where multi-tasking is the name of the game. Even as I type these words, my 24-inch monitor displays a Word document and a PDF side-by-side, while my headphones pump Lux Aeterna into my head (see image below).
You might think that this influx of media would make the heaviest of users better at…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2009There's a fascinating exchange between two of England's better minds, George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth, over at the former's blog/website under the rubric of "Should we seek to save industrial civilization?"
It begins with Kingsnorth's lament over the implications of all the exponential growth curves he's come across in recent times:
Sitting on the desk in front of me are a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each graph is identical: it represents time, from the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, human population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of…
drorzel | August 24, 2009"So what do I need to do, again?"
"First, you have to pick a username. So people know who you are."
"OK. How about 'Emmy the Magnificent, Queen of Niskayuna and Surrounding Regions.' That should do the job."
"Ah, no. That's 64 characters. Nobody would ever reply to you with a username that long. How about 'emmy_orzel'?"
"You just want to get your name in there, and hog all the credit. How about 'Queen Emmy'?"
"Fine, queen_emmy it is."
"OK, so now what? When do I get bunnies?"
"What bunnies? It's a Twitter account. There are no bunnies on Twitter."
"Birds, then. This will help me catch…
razib | August 23, 2009Arnold Kling mulls over various options when it comes to tacking the American national debt. Here's the one which is out "get-out-jail-free" card:
2. Technology to the rescue. Some major technologies, probably either wet or dry nanotech, produce so much economic growth that the ratio of debt to GDP stays under control. I give this a 20 percent chance. Sometimes I think the chances are higher, maybe even 50 percent. It's a difficult estimate to make--today, I'm in a mood to say 20 percent.
I think information technology is great, but at some point we probably need to increase productivity more…