Warung Karipuf

Seems like Firefox is having some performance problems. The problems seem to be related to memory leaks in the Firefox code, which is failing to free up memory when tabs are closed. The posting goes on to argue that with the imminent release of IE7, Firefox might just find itself losing some of that hard-won market share.

Personally, I think the greatest tragedy of the browser battle is that what is arguably the best contender is largely ignored. Opera is a lot faster and smaller (the installer is about half the size) than Firefox, yet incorporates almost as many features as Firefox’s bigger brother, the Mozilla suite.

In addition to speed, Opera has many nifty features simply not found in other browsers – mouse gestures, a handy note-taking feature, an excellent (and revolutionary) mail client (incorporating Gmail like features such as tagging and an advanced searching mechanism), photo-zooming, etc etc. In addition, people who constantly sing praises of Firefox’s tabbed interface should also be aware that Opera was the first browser to incorporate tabs. My only complaints? -> no integrated html editor and poor support for web2.0 sites. Even then, the latter is more the result of unwillingness on the part of developers to support what is generally viewed as a “fringe” browser.

Update: Opera will soon be releasing a new version which incorporates a whole bunch of new features including:

1. Widgets
2. Bittorent support
3. Thumbnail previews

Check out the link above for details.

Robert Scoble doesn’t seem too happy with the amount of attention that Google is receiving over its hosted e-mail program. Seems that Microsoft is finally getting a taste of its own medicine and is finding it to be rather more bitter than what they’d been used to.

In the past, Microsoft has been the master of adopting existing ideas and pushing them onto users via integration with the windows OS. While the situations are not identical, I would in fact argue that the Microsoft sin is the greater one. In both cases, the two perpetrators are seen to be leveraging some unfair advantage (or at least perceived to be unfair) to push their offerings.

In the Microsoft case, Microsoft has on many occasions “forced” users to adopt their offerings by integrating these with windows (I use the “” because of course users still have the option to download free alternatives though this is now much less likely due to the presence of pre-packaged applications which perform the required function, albeit not perhaps in the most efficient/secure manner). By using this method, Microsoft has been able to greatly increase the market share of products like Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, both of which incorporate arguably inferior technology. For alternatives like Firefox to attract users, their developers need to create products with significant advantages to be able to induce users to download them. As the incumbent, the Microsoft offerings need only be acceptable (and in fact, many would argue that they are barely that).

In contrast, the Gmail-based “hosted” program is riding on Google’s higher “coolness” profile to gain greater publicity and (probably eventually) a larger user base. In a similar way, while the program itself is not an entirely novel concept, it was able to attract a much greater amount of attention simply by virtue of being a Google offering. For once, Microsoft is finding itself in a position where it will actually need to do more work just to compete and be noticed. After being in the comfortable monopolistic position for so long, is it any surprise that a Microsoft employee is now complaining of an unfair playing field?

CNN recently published
this article which reviews four scenarios describing the future evolution of Google. These are based on responses from questions put to a variety of technologists including former Google employees and tech visionaries. In three of the scenarios, Google becomes increasingly monopolistic and ubiquitous, though to differing degrees:

1) Google becomes the next media superpower – traditional media channels like newpaper and TV are eventually absorbed into the Google framework (key quote: “…a new generation of content creators was growing up–one that did not see why a story should be printed in the New York Times or a movie distributed by Paramount if it was all going to end up on Google anyway…”

2) Google becomes the “Matrix” – Google is everywhere. By combining extensive web caching and fast internet access, Google eventually becomes the internet – instead of accessing webpages from the ‘net directly, it becomes faster just to download them from Google’s servers. Combined with free WiFi offerings, information and services (of all sorts) eventally become instantly and universally available, and Google is the source of all. Key quote: ..Did you google dinner yet?

3) Google becomes God – it all starts with the far-reaching aim of concentrating all available human knowledge and using this to predict future problems and dangers to mankind. Sounds familiar? Well, probably only about a hundred or so sci-fi movies have made this the central theme or at least part thereof. Anyway, with its supreme technological capability and huge (and rapidly growing) archive of the world’s information, who know’s, Google just might make it. Anyway, eventually the program written to do all this cool stuff becomes self aware and becomes a kind of benevolent over-intelligence. Key quote: ..They-Who-Were-Google are no longer alone.Now we are all Google...

The fourth scenario (actually listed as the third, probably for variety’s sake) has Google gradually bogged down by the technological and social problems that will inevitably accumulate as a result of its rapidly growing significance and influence. Hackers exploit the PageRank and Adwords mechanisms in a variety of ways. Disgruntled employees abuse Google’s vast store of private data. Lawsuits and other Legal woes accumulate. Slow death. Key quote: ..Meanwhile, virtually no one attempted to optimize results on Microsoft’s MSN search, which had room to improve far beneath the SEOs’ radar..

Seems like google is having a bad week. Not only is it having to stand up to a federal government subpoena to turn over a week’s worth of search data, it is now having to fend off criticism for caving in to Chinese Government demands that it censor sensitive sites (covering issues such as human rights and Tibet) from search results returned from its .cn site.

Personally, I don’t get the big deal.

If the government wants data which has been stripped of all personal references such as IP addresses, why should privacy become an issue? The other factor is of course Google’s trade secrets, which it fears might be compromised as a result of releasing all the search data. This is probably a more valid point but whether it is sufficient cause to block the government request is debatable, and depends on the manner in which the data will be handled by the government.

With regards to the China controversy, a more balanced view point is presented in this article by BBC correspondent Bill Thompson. His argument is that it would be better for Google to be involved in China to some extent (even if it involves a little “flexibility”) than to be totally excluded from such technologically and socially formative years in China. In any case, Google is not the first US tech company to conform to China’s censorship rules – both MSN and Yahoo follow the same censorship guidelines in China, yet no one seems to have raised so much as a peep in protest. Google at least inserts a notice on the search page informing the reader that pages have been filtered from the returned results.

Short guide to get you started on building windows applications in .Net for free. Recommended tool is sharpdevelop. Users need to download the .Net SDK from Microsoft but this is free.

The trouble I’ve had with working in C# is that it’s been really difficult to get good documentation on it that _doesn’t_ involve VS.net. Instructions for building anything in C# always go like this: “first, click on the file -> new project, select…”. OK if you’re going to be using VS.net for the rest of your life but if you plan on using Mono or DotGNU, this will soon get very frustrating.

Came across this interesting idea about creating a “$100 PC” – the basic idea is to store your entire environment on a thumbdrive and to log on to virtual terminals scattered around places like McDonald’s, Starbuck’s, etc. I’m not sure if I’d call that a PC but it’s definitely a cool idea (Of course, it all depends on the cost of the dummy terminal – I don’t see how it would cost $60-70 since any such device would need at least a display unit, CPU, RAM and motherboard plus it would need to be networked to really make sense). One suggestion – if souped-up TV sets, cable boxes, games units, those information kiosks, etc can be made compatible with these devices, then the initial base of virtual PC “docking stations” would get a good start.

An additional advantage is that this concept is particularly friendly to free OS-es since not only are these cheaper (when talking about a $100 PC, the savings derived from using a free OS in terms of percentage of total cost is significant). In addition, it would be inherently difficult to enforce licensing or copy-protection rights with any thumb drive based PC – hence any propriety OS release for this scheme is likely to be clunky and unfriendly…