A (very) small threat from firefox

According to WebSideStory, a web analytics company, suggesting firefox has attracted more user than ever, pushing IE’s market share well below 90%. Still, its loading speed really irritates me and needless to say its memory footprint (more than 100MB). It’s big enough to contain a programming language called XUL and a fully customized look-and-feel widgets system so you can create your plug-ins and beautiful themes. While some of the slashdotters pointed out that firefox’s success could be dexterously vanished, plug-ins and themes for IE isn’t difficult to implement, actually some people have done it without any difficulty. If you choose to use IE, you’ll get ActiveX, which is unique in industry and constantly associates with adware/spyware so until Microsoft knocks it off (very likely I think when Longhorn is out) firefox will continue to gain popularity. I’m not a technical expert on this matter but what they could do is replaced it with .NET framework (ActiveX is a pre-.NET product).

Without doubt, Bill Gates is aware of the issue, however, he claims that he’s not unhappy with the situation at the moment and does not fear the rise of firefox. The recent CES tells you that Microsoft is making a bet on the consumer electronics like XBOX2 and Media Center 2005, and they are also busy with pre-longhorn schedule and .NET 2.0 release. Clearly, if you see it like I do, they’ve tons of work to deal with. Back to the browser war in the 1990s, Microsoft was rushing for its first browser release, Internet Explorer, since they saw it as a devastating threat from Netscape. It is an entirely different story in 2005, browser is still a browser, HTML is still being used, and most importantly firefox runs on “their” windows platform. “You” still use their OS and its impact is certainly less than what Linux does, therefore, the threat isn’t imminent.

While the adoption of firefox in general public is still growing slow (my opinion), it seems that most of the average computer users are quite happy (or accept) with all the troubles with IE.

A380

The European giant Airbus recently revealed its latest addition to its airplane catalogue, a double-decker super-jumbo. Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson has ordered 6 of them with an option of 6 more. The current plan in Richard’s mind is going for a luxury; incorporate a bar, a casino, a beauty parlor and even 35 double beds in each of them, which has 555 seats remaining, rather than 840 seats. Are all these facilities available to economy flyers, like me?

The answer from Boeing is 7E7, called dreamliner, which will be more fuel-efficient and carrying from 217 to 300 passengers. It isn’t a direct competitor to A380 despite of common conception. The release date is about 2007 and running commercially on 2008. Airbus A350, on the other hand, has a total of 245 seats with a cruising range of 15900km. The plane will not be flying until 2010.

I always prefer, if possible, a smaller plane instead of a larger, simply because sitting with another 500 people is too overwhelming. I have difficulty of breathing up there.

The BitTorrent Frenzy

My computer recently hooked up with BitTorrent, a booming file-sharing protocol is now accounting for more than 1/3 of web traffic according to some reports. At least many of schools/universities/record-labels/movie-makers feel the waves in case of you haven’t, your madness begins with a broadband line, because the line doesn’t disconnect, you can use it anytime of the day. Now I don’t switch my computer off just because I always have something coming in whether it’s music/movie/TV-show. Most of the time I look for Asian TVs and movies, however lately I’ve discovered a lot of American torrent sites including isohunt and lokitorrent. You’ll be amazed of what you can find in these sites. Apparently, there’s one more needed to be mentioned, Supernova, it was forced to shut down by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) at Christmas. I guess they simply cannot manage the legal fees to back up their service, or they may lose the legal challenge even provided with sufficient cash. Lokitorrent, another giant of torrent search/hosting service is asking their users to make donation to keep the site alive. They wrote on the home page, “We are looking at a cost of $30K per month in fees”. Unlike the Napster lawsuit against RIAA few years ago, torrent is a different thing, Guillaume Champeau at p2pnet claims torrent file is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which means such a file contains nothing about the file you intend to download, and it contains a hash code of the file and the addresses of tracking server, again, such server holds no files. Hence, a torrent file doesn’t infringe the copyright law by conventional wisdom. P2P applications such as WinMX/Kazza/Morpheus only favor small to mid-size files (5-100MB), when 1GB+ files come into play, BitTorrent is the primary choice of sharing. Since the invention of such protocol from Bram Cohen in 2001, BitTorrent has been useful for large file sharing such as Linux Distro download, however, the illegal adoption of the public overwhelmed it. Now, you can find every piece of commercial software available on the marketplace, for free. But certainly, ISPs and hard drive manufacturers are at least benefited from this BitTorrent phenomenon, for instance, myself is going to get a 200GB drive to replace my “little” 40GB drive very soon. Yay!

Watch out from Exeem, a new product from Supernova folks, they’ve been tight-lipped about its technical details, I’ll write something about it when I know more. As far as I know at the moment, it is an improved version of BitTorrent used to offset the heavy loads of its tracking server. However, it doesn’t backward-compatible with BitTorrent.