Via Googlesystem blog,

Google Chrome has been built in a time when browsers no longer render mostly web pages, but full-blown web applications. That’s why browsers need to be more powerful, more stable and more secure. One of the problems of the existing browsers is that a web page can lock the browser and there’s no way to isolate that tab and close it. Google Chrome uses a new process for each tab. “We’re applying the same isolation you find in modern operating systems,” says Arnaud Weber. Each process is sandboxed to prevent malware from affecting your computer.

The new browser has a JavaScript virtual machine built by the V8 team from Denmark that generates code dynamically and has a better garbage collector.

Google Chrome’s UI is inspired by Opera: tabs are displayed above the address bar, the address bar combines previously typed URLs with search results and suggestions and there’s a homepage that includes frequently visited sites, recently closed tabs, bookmarks and searches.

Google released some information via comic sketches which can be seen here. Google is all set to become the undisputer leader of the internet!

The Antikythera Mechanism has puzzled academics for more than a century after it discovery. Latest technology revealed beneath the surface of the 82 encrusted gearwheels bronze fragments a mechanism that could predict the Sun and Moon trajectories over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that gave headaches to Isaac Newton himself.

The complexity of the technique used in Greece around 150-100 BC, believed to be invented by the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, was comparable to what people made one millennium later. The mechanism takes its name after the island of Antikythera, between Crete and the Peloponnese, where Greek sponge divers, exploring a Roman shipwreck at a depth of 42 metres (136 feet) in 1901, discovered the fragments inside a broken bronze and wooden case.

The pieces were thickly encrusted and jammed together after lying more two millennia on the sea floor. A closer investigation revealed them to be exquisitely made, hand-cut, toothed 29 gearwheels, possibly making some kind of astronomical calendar.

The historian of science and technology Derek de Solla Price, who studied the device from 50s to 70s, had hypothesized the number of gearwheels to 31 and the mechanism would have measured did something pretty amazing: the so-called Metonic cycle, known at least from Babylonians, during which the Moon takes 235 lunar months (19 years) to the same phase on the same date in the year.

Now, an international team went further, establishing the precise and sophisticated tasks of the mechanism. The scientists used three-dimensional X-ray computation tomography and high-resolution surface imaging to watch beneath the Mechanism’s surface, yet without damaging the priceless artifact. They could read inscriptions on the bronze cogs, impossible to see since the discovery of the artifact.

The original device must have comprised in fact 37 gear-wheels and two clock-like faces, one front and one back, encompassed into a slim wooden box measuring 31.5 x 19 cm (12.5 x 7.5 inches) and a thickness of 10cms (four inches). The apparatus was a 365-day calendar, which ingeniously factored in the leap year every four years. “Your jaw drops when you work out what they did and what they put into this,” said astronomer Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University, Wales.

“The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. Whoever has done this has done it extremely well. It implies the Greeks had great technical sophistication.” said Edmunds. “It does raise the question: what else were they making at the time? In terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”

Beside the Metonic cycle, the device also measured the so-called Callippic cycle, which is four Metonic cycles minus one day and reconciles the solar year with the lunar calendar. It could also measure the Saros cycle, a 223-month repetitive interplay of the Sun, Earth and Moon, provoking lunar and solar eclipses. As eclipses are traditionally seen as omens, these measurements probably had religious purposes.

The device was also a star almanac, pointing the times when the major stars and constellations of the Greek zodiac would rise or set. A tiny pin-and-slot device counts the movement of a main lunar anomaly, when the Moon appears to move across the heavens at different speeds at different times, due to its elliptical orbit around the Earth, which is something very impressive indeed.

The British-Greek research team was able to double the number of deciphered inscriptions, which gave them new clues to the purpose of the Antikythera Mechanism.

Among the new deciphered inscriptions, there were references to planetary movements which pointed to the knowledge of predicting the positions of the five known planets in relation to the stars by Ancient Greeks. The great Hipparchos, who drew up the first stars catalogue and wrote about the lunar anomaly in the 2nd century BC, is believed to have designed the Mechanism as the ship was found to have carried jars and coins from Rhodes, where Hipparchos lived. “The computer is so advanced in its mathematics and technology that the history of ancient Greece may have to be rewritten,” contends Edmunds.

“We now must ask: What else could they do? That’s a difficult thing, because this is really the only surviving metallic artifact of its kind. Who knows what else may be lost?”

“The new model is highly seductive and convincing in all of its details. It ought to force us, definitively, to abandon Price’s reconstruction, which is still frequently reproduced in general and scholarly books.” said François Charette, an academic in Munich.

Only one millennium later, during the golden age of Islamic science, the astronomer al-Biruni (in 996) constructed something technologically similar and wondrous, an eight-geared astrolabe, depicting the movements of the Sun and Earth. The question is: al-Biruni inspired from ancient Greek technology, transmitted somehow to later periods, or the Islamic scholar rediscovered what had been realized a thousand years before?

Holographic discs have been rumored around for some time now, but Hitachi Maxell is already willing to showcase 300GB samples this week. Hitachi Maxell is also planning to make their 300GB holographic discs available to select customers in the entertainment industry as soon as the end of December 2006. This small scale launch will be followed by a general product release aimed at enterprise-class users in the first quarter of 2007.

Hitachi Maxell acquired InPhase Technologies in 2000 and the subsidiary has been working on the development of holographic media ever since. The present 300GB holographic disc is called Tapestry HDS-300R. The new DVD-like medium is being demonstrated this week at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition in Tokyo. InPhase announced the technology breakthrough in holographic storage earlier this year. The first generation of holodiscs is primarily aimed at commercial users, but InPhase plans to release consumer-grade products over the next two years, when the format should be standardized, hopefully.

The 300GB holodisc will have data transfer rates of about 20Mb/s and will serve as an excellent support for high-speed, high capacity film recording demanded by the entertainment industry. Enterprise-class companies should also be pleased by the advanced data archiving operations enabled by the holodiscs. In this respect, InPhase aims at displacing magnetic storage cartridges with the holodiscs.

To support the new holographic technology, Displaytech announced the availability of its Spatial Light Modulators that are to be integrated in the appropriate optical drives. A Spatial Light Modulators allows data to be written to holographic discs that feature a capacity 10 to 100 times greater than high-definition HD-DVD or Blu-ray formats.

In 2008, InPhase plans a second-generation 800GB rewritable optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MBbps, with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010. The current 300GB holodiscs are supposed to retail for around $100-$125, while the optical reader drive is expected to cost $15 000.

Kentsfield is out for almost a week now. That’s good but when it comes to availability, things don’t look that ok anymore. Although several large retailers are already selling QX6700 CPU, most of them do not actually have it in stock. A $1000 price for this CPU calculated using 1000-unit shipments as reference value seems quite high but at least, it’s comparable to the price that the X6800 has.

The retail price actually varies from $1020 to $1218 with a medium value of $1167 per CPU. That may not be as cheap as you would expect but it will surely turn out cheaper than the offer coming from Dell: $1234 over an E6300 Core 2 Duo, when you choose the CPU that will be mounted onto your new PC.

Dell plays it cool since it probably has a sufficient amount of QX6700 CPUs, unlike most suppliers who are almost out when it comes to Kentsfield. A quad core with no less than 8MB of level 2 cache is not an easy thing to find in stores. And the situation can only change for the better with the arrival of another CPU from the same family. Q6600 is set to come out in January and will have the same attributes as his older brother but it will work at a lower speed (2.4GHz). The price tag will be of $851.

Core 2 Duo is slowly evolving into quite a successful product. It’s both a powerful and affordable CPU. And then there’s the fact that it succeeded in turning the tables to INTEL’s side after 2 years of AMD supremacy.

Take into account that there is still a large quantity of older NetBurst CPUs represented by the 900 series and only about 20% of the sales this year INTEL has made represent Core 2 Duo products. And there’s also the problem of availability, since high priced Conroes are pretty rare. And you’d better remember this if you’re planning to buy a new PC on Christmas, since you’ll be lucky if you catch an Allendale CPU.

When it comes to future chipsets, it seems that INTEL has already figured out the recipe.
Salt Creek is the following chipset line coming from INTEL and will include several variations of the following products: X38 (Q3 2007) as the new high end chipset, P35 (Q2 2007) representing mainstream segment and G33/35 chipsets which will be value oriented. All chips will be built around the new ICH9 southbridge. X38 for example will be the first to introduce FSB 1333 and DDR3-1333. G33/35 line will have an integrated GPU with HDCP support and DirectX 10 features and will also use DDR3 rated at only 1066MHz. ICH9 means the disappearance of PATA connectors as well as integrating no less than 12 USB ports onboard among many other things.

The second quarter of 2008 will also bring the new 45nm line represented at first by the mobile Perynn line. That may sound a little far, but the fact that AMD is still struggling with 65nm CPU production should give INTEL all the time it needs.

Tech Specs of Nokia N70

Latest Changes:

• Previous beta version could create duplicate copies of same file when updating an archived file with high ASCII characters in file name
• SFX module crashed if single string length in “License” or “Text” block exceeded 4096 characters

They are recruiting software professionals. I’ve joined their mailing lists so ill keep you updated.
Get it here.

Sony is shipping 25-GB BD media, which will retail for about $25 each disc. The 50-GB versions

of the media (BD-R and BD-RE) will be dual-layer discs that will be sold for $48 and $60, similar to pricing on TDK’s or Panasonic’s BD media. mesothelioma

It seems that, later this year, Sony will also release the internal BWU-100A drive, which will be able to handle both 25-GB and 50-GB discs, burning a full 25 GB disc in about 30 minutes. Retail pricing for the BWU-100A drive will be available later this year.

Changes between 0.8.4a and 0.8.5

Core support:

• Statistics collection (bitrates, packets, connections, …)
• Support for downloading updates
• Updated strings

Input:

• Initial support for RTSP-over-HTTP (to allow NAT traversal)
• Linux DV (Digital Video – Firewire) input
• Improvements to the Audio CD input
• - Separate playlist entries for the tracks
• - Support for CDDB
• Support for more DVB (satellite) encryption modules
• Improved subtitles encoding support
• Improved support for playing MP4 files from the Web

Decoders:

• Cook (Real audio) support

Playlist / Services discovery:

• XSPF playlist support
• Podcast support
• Updated Shoutcast to use new listing

Audio output:

• New JACK audio output

Video output:

• New video filters:
• - magnify: allows you to zoom on part of the image
• - gradient and edge detection: “cartoon-like” effect
• - bluescreen: overlay parts of a video transparently on another one
• Logo video filter: can now loop through multiple images
• RSS video filter: display feed images. Support for Atom feeds.
• Improvements to the subtitles rendering

Stream output:

• Initial support for throttling users on VOD streams

Interfaces:

• System to inform the user and request information
• - HTTP authentication
• - Fatal errors
• - …
• wxWidgets
• - VLM (VideoLAN Media Manager) control panel
• - Improved media information panel (shows statistics, metadata, …)
• - Drag & Drop support in the playlist
• Skins2
• - New default skin
• - Support for Winamp 2 skins
• - Improved playlist handling
• - Support for popup menus, animated bitmaps, equalizer, …
• OS X
• - Embedded Video output
• - new Go-To-Specific-Time feature
• - Video cropping and aspect ratio changing while playing
• - Improved media information panel (shows statistics, metadata, …)
• - support for processing multiple items with the wizard in a single run
• - option to save selections in the wizard for a session (default enabled)
• HTTP
• - New default interface pages for VLC and VLM (including a mosaic wizard)
• - A bunch of new RPN functions

Windows Port:

• MSN messenger “Now playing” support

OS X Port:

• Mac-Intel compatibility
• Enhanced support of various audio output devices
• Growl “Now playing” support

*Nix port:

• Ability to log to syslog
• Root wrapper to avoid running VLC as root

Developers:

• New libvlc API (not finished yet)
• Java bindings
• A bit more automatic testing

Get it here.