How to Use a 64-bit Web Browser on Windows. 64-bit version of Windows don’t use 64-bit browsers by default – they’re still in their infancy, although even Adobe Flash now supports 64-bit browsers. Using a 64-bit browser can offer significant performance benefits, according to some benchmarks. This article is for Windows users – 64-bit Linux distributions include 64-bit browsers, so you don’t have to do anything special on Linux. Mozilla Firefox ExtremeTech found that the 64-bit version of Firefox 8 was 10% faster than the 32-bit version in the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. Mozilla doesn’t yet offer official, stable 64-bit builds of Firefox, though. If you want to run 64-bit Firefox on Windows, your choices are an official-but-unstable nightly build or a stable-but-unofficial Waterfox.
Mozilla offers nightly builds of Firefox for testers – they’re constantly updating and can break, so they’re not the ideal candidate for your primary browser. Instead, you’ll find them buried on Mozilla’s FTP site. Internet Explorer Google Chrome Opera. The Org Charts Of All The Major Tech Companies (Humor)
Social. Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s Sights and They’re Going to Kill Us” By Sarah Lacy On January 17, 2012 When you see Snooki’s book on the New York Times Best Seller List, you know publishing is in trouble. You can blame readers and say publishing is just giving the public what they want. But that’s only half the problem. The rest is a lazy publishing industry that does far too little of the work that got them here: Discovering new authors and giving them a shot. But that was a short term mistake that has put the publishing industry behind the eight ball. So Amazon, pretty much since they started selling books, has been selling them for razor thin or zero margin. I have no insight into whether Amazon has planned this out, or it’s just a happy accident given the success of the Kindle, the iPad and other eReaders and the general dysfunction of publishing. And good for them. Someone will build the next great publishing imprint out of these ashes.
Costolo is Right: Wikipedia’s SOPA Blackout is a Terrible Idea. By Paul Carr On January 16, 2012 Earlier today, Radar correspondent Alex Howard asked Twitter CEO Dick Costolo if he had the ‘cojones’ to black-out Twitter in protest of SOPA. Howard was referring to Jimmy Wales’ plan to close down Wikipedia for 24 hours this coming Wednesday. Costolo’s response was unequivocal… And, you know what? For one thing, Jimmy Wales and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation have spent the past few months pleading with users from around the world to donate money to keep their service up and running. Arguing that a one-day closure reminds everyone of the importance of net freedom is like burning down one church to underscore the importance of the First Amendment for all of the others. But that’s not the worst of it. One of the core principles of Wikipedia is its neutrality. The trouble with taking a political stance on one issue is that your silence on every issue becomes a stance.
The Sad Story of Illustration on the Web. I’ve argued that you can’t design for digital publications the way you design for print publications, but that doesn’t mean that what we leave behind in the print tradition is not missed online. One of strengths that print designers have long brought to their publications is illustration, where artists are commissioned to create visual translations of an article’s most salient or provocative concepts. Print publications have a long, long history of truly great illustrations that became indelible companions to the content they accompanied. Not so much online. In fact, in digital media, illustration is missing in action, and its absence is palpable. I can’t think of a single, regularly publishing, large-scale digital publication that uses original illustrations prominently, much less pays illustrators a working wage for their efforts.
Words and Pictures Search Engine Land has a very literal take on content farms. This article from VentureBeat shows a man carrying cash. Time and Money. How much is a petabyte infographic. Filed under: All Infographics , Internet Infographics , Technology Infographics | 4 Comments » The preceding infographic, provided by the online storage site Mozy , is an intense look at all the qualities of a petabyte, which is equal to one quadrillion bytes. Quite a lot of memory, right? To put things into perspective, one single petabyte is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text, as the graphic notes. It’s also equal to 13.3 years of HD-TV video. Since this graphic was created by Mozy, you might be wondering how many petabytes Mozy has stored, and the answer to that question is roughly 15 petabytes. Design: A- The graphic doesn’t rely on fancy gimmicks–it goes for elegant simplicity, and it delivers.
Content: A- I am giving the content high marks as well. Ambitious Startup Beyond Oblivion Closes. 31 December '11, 12:49pm Follow Beyond Oblivion, a New York-based startup with an innovative take on the idea of unlimited music, has closed its doors before its product had even launched, the Financial Times reports [paywalled link]. The idea behind Beyond Oblivion’s Boinc service was that it would remove the need for users to have to pay a monthly subscription or listen to adverts, as with Spotify and its rivals.
Instead, users would pay a flat fee for the service which would be bundled into the purchase price of hardware such as PCs and smartphones. Users would get unlimited streaming and downloading access to Boinc’s music library for the lifetime of the device you bought it with. Social music discovery and sharing features were to be included as well. Despite Beyond Oblivion having the financial backing of News Corp, the FT’s sources put the blame on the company’s failure on persuading labels to license their music, and electronics companies to include the service with their products. Symbian is still top mobile OS – finished 2011 with resurgence.
Posted in Tech blog on December 29th, 2011 by Pingdom As we’re quickly approaching the end of 2011 we take a last look at what the year for mobile operating systems was like. Would it surprise you to know that Symbian finished 2011 stronger than it started the year? The much-maligned operating system is still number one, ahead of Android, iOS, and the others.
Here’s how 2011 panned out in mobile operating systems. Symbian finished 2011 over 11 percentage points ahead of iOS Using StatCounter’s figures for mobile operating systems we charted the main mobile operating systems during 2011. A few notes about how the mobile OS market developed over 2011: Symbian started and finished 2011 as the undisputed king of mobile OSs. Despite great 2011, Symbian’s future is uncertain As interesting as it is to see that Symbian has actually increased its share of mobile web browsing a bit in 2011, doubt remains as to the future of the platform. Photo credit: “symbian fanboy” by rhinman. 2011 Year in Review - Android's year. As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time to take a look at the year that’s been. In this post I’m going to take a tour of the highs and lows of Android’s year. It's been a very mixed year for Android.
Without a doubt it's been a great year in terms of sales of devices and activations, with over 700,000 devices now being activated daily. However, Android has seen malware attacks and also been the focus of patent infringement lawsuits and patent deals that bring in millions each year for Microsoft. Also, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Android a stolen product. All in all, 2011 was the year of the Android OS ... only problem is that fragmentation of the platform is so bad (because most users never get the chance to upgrade) that you can't really tell which version of Android is the winner. January 4th - Google updates Android SMS bug status to "Critical" Following negative press over an SMS bug in Android platform, Google updated the status of the bug from “Medium” to “Critical.”
February March. The Problem With Gamification. Adrian Lee | December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare0 Before you develop a social loyalty program, ask these questions. It's going to happen sooner or later…your client sidles up to you and asks you the golden question: "What are we doing about gamification? " Sure, you've heard all the great things about gamification, about how adding a few badges and levels to your campaign will instantly increase customer engagement and make instant followers of your brand, and your client believes that it will bring in the much needed key performance indicators to show off during their critical annual business review. If only. Now, I'm not an expert on this subject matter, but it seems to me that there is increasing hype around gamification and how it might be the silver bullet to help customer engagement and increase brand loyalty.
But the fact is, the act of infusing game mechanics into a non-game scenario is not an easy task, and here is why. Gamification Tools Are Just That…Tools Taking a Step Back. Robert Scoble - Google+ - New blog post: "Oh No! Blogging is REALLY, REALLY dead… There's a reason why I surround myself with +Hugh MacLeod's art. The dude nails so much and is still using new media better than any other artist. Plus, he doesn't just draw little graphics on the backs of business cards, his writing and marketing thinking is top rate. As far as blogging, I think Hugh wrapped up the foodfight, started by +Jeremiah Owyang about whether the Golden Age of blogging is over, quite well. You can find that food fight over on Techmeme at and Hugh's wrap-up is at Is Google+ a blog? What the f**k is a blog anyway? +Dave Winer used to say it's the single voice of a person.
Both Facebook and Google+, this year, added the ability to do long-form writing inside a social network. Why is Google+ taking off? I read some of the "no, blogging isn't dead" pieces, too. Of course, it really doesn't matter. Why do I blog here? Does Skype save $3.4 million by failing its customers? That's an evocative title for sure and one that may get me into trouble but bear with me. According to the last reports I could see covering Skype's earnings, it was tracking $860 million in annual revenue. That was back in July. Since then Microsoft has acquired Skype and we await any breakdown Microsoft chooses to provide in its next earnings call, sometime in January 2012. Searching for card fraud rates, I discovered that back in 2010, an industry report from Aite Group estimated that US card fraud cost card providers $8.6 billion on $2.1 trillion transacted value.
Using those metrics as a basis for calculation, I am assuming that Skype is no different to any other provider and, therefore, based upon reported revenue, is subject to fraud amounting to $3.4 million per annum. In other words, while everyone in the chain of activity may have some measure of responsibility, the customer ALWAYS ends up paying. What is worse, this is nothing new. There is a caveat to that.