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Firefox

Firefox 8 20% Faster Than Firefox 5 441

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pedal-on-the-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to continued improvements to start-up and first paint performance, tweaks to memory footprint and garbage collection, and the addition of a new 2D graphics backend called Azure, Firefox 8 is some 20% faster than Firefox 5 across all major metrics — and actually about equal with Chrome 14 on JavaScript and 2D rendering performance. Azure (which is new with Firefox 7) replaces Cairo, and instead of dealing with Direct2D and Quartz, it allows Firefox to deal directly with the Direct3D and OpenGL subsystems — resulting in a 20% speed boost under Windows, and probably even more under OS X."
Google

Glen Beck Warns Viewers Not To Use Google 1276

Posted by samzenpus from the the-sky-is-falling dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Glenn Beck has told his viewers to do research, but to not use Google, because 'Google is pretty deeply in bed with the government.' He points to the fact that Google is having some problems overseas, as well as Jared Cohen. Cohen is Director of Google Ideas, has worked with the State Department, and has played a role in the 2009 unrest in Iran. He also mentions social networking in sinister undertones, asking if it's government propaganda."

Comment Re:Crushing poverty is one hell of a motivator (Score 2, Interesting) 534

by v1k (#32445838) Attached to: Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling?
While I agree that adversity is a great motivator, it doesn't apply here. Asians, on average, earn more than any other racial group in USA. Eastern culture (ex, Indian, Chinese, Japanese) is also typically collective (vs. individualistic in the West), leading to higher family income. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Race
Space

Voyager Clue Points To Origin of the Axis of Evil 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the seriously-who-named-this-thing dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Cosmologists have been scratching their heads over the discovery of a pattern imprinted on the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This pattern, the so-called Axis of Evil, just shouldn't be there. Now an independent researcher from Canada says the pattern may be caused by the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space where there is a sharp change in pressure, temperature and density of ions in space. Known as the termination shock, astronomers had thought this boundary was spherical. But last year, data from the Voyager spacecraft which have crossed the boundary, showed it was asymmetric. The new thinking is that the termination shock acts like a giant lens, refracting light that passes through it. Any distortion of the lens ought to show up as a kind of imprinted pattern on an otherwise random image. But the real eye-opener is that as the shape of the termination shock changes (as the Solar Wind varies, for example), so too should the pattern in the microwave background. And there is tentative evidence that this is happening too (abstract)."
Media

Remote Kill Flags Surface In Kindle 630

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
PL/SQL Guy writes "The Kindle has a number of 'remote kill' flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a 'read only once' flag? A 'no turning the pages backwards' flag?"

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