Out-Dated Technology for Future Generations
This pretty sums up how I’m envisioning interaction with my kid when he gets to this age.
So what common everyday technologies do you think will be considered out-dated in 10 years?
Bonus points for the movie reference made in the comic, too. 
Twitter and Ambient Awareness
Being a Twitter user myself (mikesol007), I’ve often wondered what purpose it truly serves in the context of my life. This New York Times article sums it up pretty succinctly. In a nutshell, each individual twitter by itself is meaningless, but in true gestalt fashion, as a whole, Twitter feeds give you an “ambient awareness” of what’s going on in your friends’ lives, a sort of “distant telepathy.”
One step closer to a singularity-spawned hive mind, eh?
via BoingBoing via NYT
Google Enters the Web Browser War
If you haven’t seen the buzz in the blogosphere yet, Google is releasing their own web-browser, dubbed Chrome, tomorrow. I just perused the info-comic (made by Scott McCloud of all people) explaining the ideas and architecture behind Chrome, and I must say that I’m curious.
Here is what stands out to me:
- Multi-process *and* Multi-threaded – Each browser tab will be its own separate process with its own thread pool. If a website causes a crash, the whole browser won’t go down–only that one tab. There will also be a built-in task manager that will enable you to kill processes and threads and also identify exactly what is causing the crashes. This will require more memory up front, but could potentially save memory in the long run.
- Process compartmentalization – Google reinforced process boundaries to an even higher degree to prevent malware attack and bad plugins from hosing the entire browser. The “sandbox” (as they call it) is completely user driven.
- Compiled Javascript – Instead of being interpreted, Javascript will be read once and then compiled into machine code. Huge performance increase potential here. Chrome will be using multiple garbage collection strategies to further optimize memory usage (e.g. precise and incremental)
- Using WebKit – The Webkit rendering engine is fast, light-weight and used in both conventional laptops/desktops and mobile devices. Potential iPhone app anyone?
- Omnibar - This will be Chrome’s equivalent to Firefox’s “Awesome” bar, or what we traditionally refer to as the location bar.
- Open Source – Google’s entry into the browser war can only help the internet as a whole. The entire Chrome project will be open sourced so I’m sure we’ll start to see some of these features absorbed into Firefox, Safari, IE (maybe), etc.
- Stability – Google has an index of, I daresay, trillions of webpages. Apparently they are subjecting test builds of Chrome to millions of websites each day and are approaching asymptotically that “100% compatibility” mark.
UPDATE (9/2/08):
Google Chrome is available for download now for Windows users.
Technorati Tags: chrome, google, open source, web browser
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