My painfully poky week with IE 8 (Webware)

In the interest of broadening my horizons, I promised Microsoft I’d give Internet Explorer 8 a fair shake by trying the browser as my default for a week.

And, boy, am I glad that week is over.

Microsoft’s browser rules the roost with about two-thirds of the market, according to Net Applications, which collects a broad set of data on which browsers people use. There’s nothing like being built into the dominant operating system for winning a popularity contest. Microsoft takes advantage of that position by building instrumentation into IE that illuminates what a typical Web user is doing.

There’s typical, and then there’s me. As somebody who spends dozens of hours a week in a Web browser, I’m sorry to say IE 8 is not for me. Although my Web-heavy lifestyle isn’t average, I believe the challenges I face on the Web foreshadow what the rest of the world will experience as the Internet inexorably encompasses ever more of our work and personal lives. I prefer browsers that aim toward where the puck is heading, as the tired but useful cliche goes.

IE 8 (download link) catches up to where the puck is today. It’s definitely a big improvement over its predecessors, with some commendable features including default support for Web standards. And I do hope people upgrade.

It’s just that in my personal experience, IE 8 not in the same league as my default browsers, Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox.

There are competitive points from these rivals that one might have thought would weigh in to my antipathy for IE 8. Google makes a big fuss about Chrome’s high-performance JavaScript engine, which lets it run Web-based applications with greater sophistication and alacrity. Firefox fans adore the wealth of extensions that can tailor the browser to innumerable specific needs without cluttering the interface for those who don’t want those features. Microsoft counters with a study that shows its page-loading speed generally beating out rivals.

Slooooooow
In reality, it was something more mundane that gave me a Pavlovian feeling of dread when it was time to use the browser: its interface is slow.

When it was time for basic interactions such as launching new tabs, switching tabs, closing tabs, commanding IE to open pages, and scrolling through pages, I found myself all too often waiting for the browser to respond to my mouse and keyboard. I did miss some Firefox extensions, though I’m not a big user of them personally, and I did find Web applications like Gmail and Google Docs a bit slower. But those two gripes paled in comparison to performance…

See the full article at Webware.

Habbo Pulled In $74 Million In Real Revenues Last Year From Virtual Goods And Advertising

Convincing people to pay for nothing, or rather for things with zero marginal cost to produce, is a great business model—in theory. In practice, there are so few examples to point to, and most of them are overseas, such as Helsinki-based teen virtual world Habbo. The virtual world’s parent company, Sulake, today reported some selective financial and user data for Habbo. In 2008, Habbo’s revenues rose 20 percent to $74 million (50 million Euros), and posted positive operating cash flow (EBITDA) of $7 million (4.8 million Euros). It was even slightly profitable on a net income basis as well, however the company chose not to disclose that exact amount.

Perhaps the bulk of revenues are being plowed back into global expansion or to pay the salaries of Habbo’s 300 employees (yes, 300). But its sub-10% margins so far are underwhelming. And Habbo is supposed to be one of the shining examples of a real business based on a virtual economy. It also makes money from advertising, but the vast majority of its revenues comes from in-world gifting and virtual vanity items.

Habbo says it attracts 11.5 million unique visitors a month (based on internal Google Analytics data) and that more than 120 million Habbo characters have been created. How many have been abandoned, though, is unclear. ComScore estimates 8.7 million worldwide unique visitors in February, down from 9.3 million in December.

See the full article at TechCrunch.

Why toddlers don't do what they're told

New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. ‘There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,’ says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Munakata’s team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. ‘For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,’ says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. ‘You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.

Source: Slashdot.

Top 10 tools for a free online education

It’s easy to forget these days that the internet started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data and knowledge. Recapture the web’s brain-expanding potential with these free resources for educating yourself online.

LifeHacker has an interesting post listing some various sites where you can teach yourself a great number of things:

• Teach yourself programming
• Get a Personal MBA
• Learn to actually use Ubuntu
• Get started on a new language
• Trade your skills, find an instructor
• Academic Earth and YouTube EDU
• Teach yourself all kinds of photography
• Get an unofficial liberal arts major
• Learn an instrument
• Learn from actual college courses online

If any of the above interests you then go check out the original article at LifeHacker.

Archos’ Android-based MID on track for July?

It hasn’t been much of a secret that Archos has an Android-based tablet / MID in the works, but it looks like the company is now finally talking a bit more openly about it, and dropping a few choice details in its recent year-end results announcement. The key bit is that the company is apparently planning to release the device "at the start of Q3 2009," which is actually fairly specific as far as these announcements go, though no doubt still subject to change if Archos sees fit. Otherwise, the only word on the MID is that it will pack some telephony features and, of course, include all of Archos’ usual multimedia applications.

Source: Engadget.

Report: Disney in talks to join Hulu

The Walt Disney Company is discussing a deal to take an equity stake in Hulu in exchange for providing the video portal with ABC programming, according to a published report.

Citing unnamed sources, news blog PaidContent says that it’s not clear how much of ABC’s content would be involved, but a final deal could include ESPN, the sports cable behemoth that has been a goldmine for Disney.

Representatives from Disney and Hulu were not immediately available.

The talks between the two companies reportedly are "serious," but a final deal has not been reached, according to two of PaidContent’s sources.

In the year since launching, Hulu has quickly risen to the top ranks of online video. The site is currently backed by News Corp., parent company of Fox and NBC Universal.

Source: CNET News

California May Ban Black Cars

The California legislature is considering regulating the color of cars and reflectivity of paint to reduce the energy requirements to cool them. A presentation on the proposed legislation by the California Air Resources Board is below.

The problem isn’t the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don’t reflect well, so they are likely out. “Jet black remains an issue,” says the report.

Anyone who’s ever entered a very hot car knows that it can be cooled down immediately by driving a few feet with the windows open, effectively neutralizing any color-caused heat issues before engaging the air conditioner. But whatever, black is evil.

The new regulations would be phased in beginning in 2012, so if you want that black car, you better buy it soon. More on Autoblog and CrunchGear.

And you thought that black Toyota Pious you bought made you such a good person. Think again, you tree hating energy slob. Luckily, black websites are still ok, even though they, too, use more energy.

[ed]Wow, I think Batman might get screwed in this deal![/ed]

Source: TechCrunch.

Gaming Great Jane McGonigal Challenges the Industry: Make People Happier

Along with the usual news and excitement of the Game Developers Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, a speech by gaming guru Jane McGonigal stands out for one reason: She challenged game designers to actually make gamers happier.

McGonigal, the self-described "game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being" and one of the 20 Most Important Women in Gaming, planted the seeds for GDC speech on her blog Avant Game. "Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?" But if you think the argument is just another run-of-the-mill criticism of the violence, tension and attendant gore that pervades most videogames, then you’re going to be sadly disappointed.

Instead, McGonigal has a set out a sequence of design challenges to future gamemakers run to the heart of what a game could be about: entertainment, boosting human happiness, and having real-world impact.

She explains that games can "fix" broken reality by making artificial reality "happier, smarter, more engaging, and more resilient." Given that some of McGonigal’s previous projects have involved "World Without Oil"–a simulation intended to brainstorm and thus potentially avert a future post-peak oil crisis–McGonigal also foresees that over the next decade, game designers will become the "architects of extreme-scale collaboration" In particular, it’s an important part of future games design to create "diverse massively-multiplayer communities [that] tackle real-world, open-ended problems." It’d be nice to think we could game our way to a solution to the world’s issues, wouldn’t it?

Here are McGonigal’s five challenges: 

1. If you could: Make one person measurably happier. Who would it be, and what game would you make for them?
2. If you could change: What one person does every day, or how one group thinks about one thing. What would you change, an how would your game do it?
3. If your game could get: 100 people to do one thing online. What would it be, and what would it add up to?
4. If you could make a game by: Embedding one micro-controlled board or one sensor in one physical object. What would it be, and how would you play with it?
5. If you could make a game that: Connects two unlikely communities to do one extraordinary thing together. Who would it be, and what would they collaborate on?

It’s inspirational stuff, a pleasant intellectual contrast to the mindless hard-fragging first-person-shooter games we’re all familiar with. And its hard to argue with. The challenges are typified in McGonigal’s online global game "Top Secret Dance Off," which challenges participants to complete dance "quests" and e-mail in digital footage of themselves in action. The game relies on the principle that "dancing together = happy … humiliated together = even happier." Check out the compiled video of some entrants for the recent Dance Quest 3: Dance In a Crosswalk. It’ll make you smile.

Original article: Fast Company.

Mozilla, graphics group seek to build 3D Web

Wish you could play Crysis in your Web browser? Two influential organizations are banding together to try to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, a move that eventually could improve online games and other Web applications.

The Web is gradually becoming a better foundation for applications with splashy, sophisticated interfaces, but 3D graphics on the Web remain primitive. Now, though, Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox browser, and Khronos, the consortium that oversees the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology, are trying to jointly create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web.

In response to a Mozilla proposal, Khronos established an Accelerated 3D on Web working group to create a royalty-free specification. The goal is to produce a first public version within 12 months, Khronos said in an announcement at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

Underpinning the proposal is a trend toward significant speed improvements in JavaScript, the programming language used to write many Web-based applications. The proposal involves a mechanism to let JavaScript tap into the OpenGL standard to produce the accelerated graphics.

"Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every Web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open Web technologies," said Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard in a blog post Tuesday. "3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table."

Mozilla plans to release the technology first as an extension to its browser sometime after Firefox 3.5 is released.

See the full article at Webware.

Nanotech Invention May Be Golden Bullet for Controlling Drug Addiction

Scientists at the University of Buffalo have found a new use for nanotechnology–as an extremely precise way of delivering chemicals to the right part of the brain to combat drug addiction. And, pleasingly, the science really does fit the "golden bullet" label as these nanoparticles are literally made of gold. 

Medical researchers have known for a while that a particular brain protein, DARRP-32, is a key element in the chemistry of drug addiction. It’s a "trigger" for a host of reactions in the brain that creates craving, and if it’s "silenced," then the urge to re-take a drug should diminish. The trick is getting to the protein to quash its influence, which requires conventional therapies to cross the blood-brain barrier, something that’s proven difficult.

Enter the gold nanoparticles. They’re actually nanorods, and in the Buffalo technique, they’re coated with short-interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules which switch off the DARRP-32 protein. The combination is apparently 40% efficient at reaching the target sites in the brain, which is much higher than previously possible, and it’s apparently the first time siRNA molecules have been combined with gold nanoparticles. The gold is particularly suited to the task due to its high biocompatibility and the fact that the rods have a larger surface area than nanospheres, thus allowing more RNA to stick to the exterior (in the image, the brain cells show as blue, and gold nanoparticles within them as orange spots.)

Read the full article at Fast Company.