Cody Taylor

Dr Pete writes “Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google’s Chrome browser. ‘Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that’s an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission’s antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'” Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.

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basementman writes “I recently purchased a 10 inch white MSI wind. As you can see it’s a small computer and it’s good for what I use it for. I get a lot of comments from women saying it is ‘cute’ or ‘adorable.’ Not the good kind of cute that will get me the attention I want though, the kind of cute that says they think I have a different presence than I actually want to portray. So how can I make my netbook more manly, or at least have some witty line to respond to the their comments?” Hopefully basementman didn’t get a netbook with the hopes of it getting him some action, but what cool mods (or witty one-liners) have others used to salvage their dignity from hardware that is “a good size”?

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Surrounded writes “It appears TomTom bowed to the pressure and settled with Microsoft over the recent patent infringement claims from the Redmond software giant. In the agreement, TomTom will pay Microsoft for coverage under the eight car navigation and file management systems patents in the Microsoft case. Also as part of the agreement, Microsoft receives coverage under the four patents included in the TomTom counter-suit. TomTom also has to remove functionality related to two file management system patents (the ‘FAT LFN patents’).”

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TechDirt has an interesting look at some of the questions arising about the copyrightability of Twitter messages. I haven’t seen any actual copyright lawyers weigh in yet, but it certainly will be interesting to watch the feathers fly until someone nails down the answer. “[…] it seems like there would be two issues here. The first is whether or not the content is covered by copyright — and, for most messages the answer would probably be yes (there would need to be some sort of creative element to the messages to make that happen, so a simple ‘hi’ or ‘thanks’ or whatever might not cut it). But, the more important question then would be whether or not ESPN could quote the Twitter message. And, there, the answer is almost certainly, yes, they could, just as they could quote something you wrote in a blog post.”

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Combating the stigma that investigative journalism is dead or dying, the Huffington Post has just launched a new venture to bankroll a group of investigative journalists to take a look into stories about the nation’s economy. “The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of .75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said. The Huffington Post Web site is a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news. It has seven staff reporters. Huffington said she and the donors were concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely. She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists for the venture.”

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Kylar writes “For those of you who have already discovered Michael ‘Rands’ Lopp’s blog Rands In Repose, I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience. For those of you who haven’t, or for the less discerning (or, perhaps less blog-oriented), this book provides an excellent entry into the writings of Rands. Containing edited selections from his blog as well as new material, Rands uses many anecdotes and stories to convey a startling amount of deep wisdom into the facets of the Silicon Valley programmer, and a bevy of tools that are helpful in attempting to herd, er, manage them.” Read below for Tom’s review.

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CNet is reporting that a free Skype client will finally be landing on the iPhone this week. Unfortunately some are saying that it seems many of the “critical” pieces of functionality are still missing. While the Skype engineers claim their native client will offer better audio quality (because there is no need to route through another server and transcode audio) they are still missing text messaging, file transfers, and integrated voice mail. Since the iPhone does not allow for multiple programs running concurrently, many are expecting existing multi-function apps like Fring and NimBuzz to continue their reign at the top.

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Wired is reporting that Google has a launched a new music download service in China to better compete with the leading search company there, Baidu.com. Offering some 350,000 songs, a number set to rise to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.1 million in the coming months, the library includes both Chinese and foreign artists signed by Sony Music, EMI, and Universal Music. Proponents of the new service are also hoping it will combat illegal music downloads simply by offering higher quality songs for download. There are no immediate plans to expand this service beyond China.

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Barence writes “Mozilla has revealed how it plans to integrate plain text commands directly into future versions of Firefox. Dubbed Taskfox, the move sees Mozilla’s Ubiquity project become part of the browser itself, allowing users to type commands directly into the address bar. You can, for example, type ‘map cleveland street london’ to bring up a Google Map of that location, or ‘amazon-search the great gatsby’ to find that book on Amazon, without visiting the website directly. ‘The basic idea behind Taskfox is simple: take the time-saving ideas behind Ubiquity, and put them into Firefox,’ the Taskfox wiki claims. ‘That means allowing users to quickly access information and perform tasks that would normally take several steps to complete.'”

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We’ve been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click ‘More’ in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We’re experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you’ll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that’s gotta change. We’re aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I’m hoping will put the beta page render time into the “Sane” time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that “Insane” time frame we’re currently seeing).

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