Author: Payam

Chemist, philosopher, vagrant.
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Browser Wars on Windows: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer

There were many who believe that the browser wars are long over, but this is simply not true. With Apple’s entry into the Windows browser space and Mozilla’s spectacular capturing of Internet Explorer’s market share, there is little doubt that the browser wars are back on! Comparison of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer on Windows XP

How does one decide? It was quite easy for me. On the Windows platform, Internet Explorer simply cannot compete with Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The collection of themes and extensions (collectively called add-ons) make Firefox indispensable.

But, not everybody needs or wants to have all of the amazing extensions that block ads, help with html code, script, and manage online social networks. In those instances, one wants pure browsing enjoyment, and the absolute latest Safari beta (3.0.3 as of this writing) delivers. Safari provides this pleasure in three ways: fast beautiful rendering, elegant interface and a good collection of basic and desirable features.

The first surprising thing about Safari for Windows is its speed. In my experience, it renders pages far faster than Internet Exploder and Firefox. In addition, it offers Apple’s own brand of font smoothing in the appearance tab of Safari’s preferences. If you click the thumbnail above and click again to see the full-sized image, you will see what a huge difference this makes. The pages rendered in Safari do not only appear faster, but they appear crisper. The graphics are much more alive and the text resembles written text in finish.

The aesthetics extend from page rendering to the interface itself. Safari is made to look exactly like iTunes in order to leverage iPod’s popularity to push Windows users toward Apple’s services (iPhone and iTunes Music Store) and user interface. (This is Apple’s way of encouraging people to switch, and Apple’s way of building a revenue stream on Windows to make money from users who don’t want to switch.) Some people think iTunes looks drab, but it has an elegant design in as much as it places all the right buttons in the right places. After all, many users who don’t have iPods like iTunes because it is as easy to use as a CD player: press play, and listen to music. Safari’s user interface is similarly spartan, neat and functional. Like iTunes, it’s ready to go on installation.

Safari is not nearly as feature-rich as Internet Explorer or Firefox, but it need not be. It has all the features one wants. It has a terrific popup blocker, which politely asks you if you want to turn it on upon the fist popup encounter. It has a spell checker that checks what you are typing as you type (this is not activated by default, however). It has a very elegant tabbed browsing scheme (also not activated by default), and a superb forms manager that really takes the pain out of entering forms over and over. The “private browsing” feature allows you to conceal your tracks on public terminals. Like most Apple products, it has everything you need, though not everything you want.

So, Firefox is the best browser on the Windows platform, but if all of the bells and whistles of Firefox are making you dizzy, get Safari and enjoy internet surfing in its purest form. Until they let you out of the office, this could very well be your only source of pleasure.

PS If you are curious to make Windows XP look like OS X, read this. PNM

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Market Regulations Foster Profitability

GM back in black | | Guardian Unlimited Business

I have spent considerable time blasting American car makers, General Motors especially, for being such lousy stewards of one of the nation’s most important industries. Specifically, I wrote this post, and this one and this one in the aftermath of Big Three’s spectacular decline over the past five years.

When I saw this headline from The Guardian, I thought that I would have to eat my words, but then I started reading the article, and I happened upon this golden nugget.

GM, which made a loss of $3.4bn during the same period a year ago and came close to bankruptcy in 2005, is shedding more than 30,000 jobs in the US where it made an operating loss of $39m compared with one of $3.95bn a year earlier.

The company, which owns brands including Vauxhall, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Saab, is struggling to cope with fierce competition from Asian rivals in its core US market. But Carl-Peter Forster, GM Europe president, said it had made record sales and net profits ($236m) in Europe – the highest earnings since 1996.

And, there’s the rub. Just like Ford, General Motors is still losing money in the US, but making record profits in Europe. This begs the question as to whether capitalism is working in the United States. After all, the general consensus is that nearly all of the profitable companies on Wall Street make all of their profits from their offshore operations, not from their domestic operations.

And, this further begs the question regarding regulations. If General Motors and Ford are making record profits–indeed, the companies’ salvation comes from their European profits–in the most highly regulated marketplace on the planet, yet still recording losses in the least regulated marketplace in the industrial world, how can anyone argue that regulations are inherently bad for the marketplace?



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Goliath vs Goliath

Google and eBay in furious dust-up | | Guardian Unlimited Business

Google Checkout vs Ebay’s Paypal. Round 1. Two internet monstrosities duke it out, and all that happens is “well, I’m not gonna advertise on your search engine anymore. Nya, nya, nya.” Geeks have such pitiful ways of fighting.

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Electronic Voting: Truthiness in Democracy


State: E-voting open to hacking – The Californian / North County Times

There is no shortage of evidence that electronic voting is totally unreliable. Nevertheless, two UC Santa Barbara computer scientists demonstrated yet again that electronic voting systems are easy to hack and to manipulate. In this instance, the Riverside County, California, electronic voting system was compromised by the researchers in many ways. This paragraph sums it all up:

A team of computer scientists hacked into the Edge II touch-screen systems used in Riverside and a dozen other counties, according to a report released Friday. The report laid out eight ways the system could be infected by rogue software capable of changing votes, including seven ways the team said it had successfully tested this summer on the actual Edge II systems manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.

Conservative dogma and conservative ideology seek to counteract change, by definition, because not all change is good. It is baffling, then, why people who seek to change from paper voting to electronic voting despite the oceans of evidence that this is a horrible, unproductive and disastrous change insist on calling themselves “conservative”.

Change is part of nature, indeed, part of life. However, not all change is good. The greatest virtue of conservatism is in its opposition to changes that deteriorate the status quo, changes that erode moral values, that compromise human dignity and that reduce individual autonomy. The notions that pass for “conservatism” in the United States at the moment advocate the erosion of moral values, the destruction of human dignity and the elimination of individual autonomy. In as much as “conservative” support for faulty electronic voting schemes reflects the conservative moment in the United States, American “conservatism” is precisely the “liberal nightmare” that the movement is constantly lambasting and claiming to avoid.

Irony, it seems, is a word and emotion that still eludes the American lexicon and psyche.

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Aerial Coverage of High Speed Chases: Stupidity Manifested over Phoenix

Google News’ Summary of the Coverage of the Crash of Two Helicopters Covering a High Speed Chase in Phoenix

The stupidity of the endeavor–aerial television coverage of high speed police chases–manifested itself most violently today over the skies of Phoenix. Whether the practice will ever stop remains to be seen.

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Listening to: iTunes: KCRW Simulcast
via FoxyTunes

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Bluehost ‘CPU Exceeded’ Errors

I was surprised to experience “CPU Exceeded” errors with bluehost.com, the hosting company to which I switched recently with much enthusiasm. The development was surprising because Bluehost seems to offer a lot of resources to clients, and here I was getting these strange errors while I was editing this blog.

Fortunately, many have experienced this problem, and Bob Morris has come up with a solution that works for now. If the solution were not to last, I would be pleased.

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Listening to: iTunes: KCRW Simulcast
via FoxyTunes

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Put Down the Butt, Pick Up the Bottle

ScienceDaily: Outdoor Alcohol Ads Boost Kids’ Urge To Drink

From the children’s perspective, is this trading up or trading down?

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Listening to: iTunes: KXLU 88.9 FM Los Angeles 56kbps
via FoxyTunes

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To Nuke or not to Nuke?

Renewable energy could ‘rape’ nature – earth – 25 July 2007 – New Scientist Environment

The quest for a viable solution to the coming energy crisis takes countless unpredictable turns. Enter environmentalists for nuclear energy.

Yes, that most favorite of our energy sources received support, again, from purported environmentalists. The argument is entirely logical, too. It is the primary argument against the use of bio-ethanol as a source of fuel. Corn prices are already soaring as a result of the demand for ethanol made through corn fermentation, and there is already ample warning that the earth’s arable land area may not be sufficient to feed cars economically.

So, do we cover the entire land mass of the earth with solar cells and fuel crops, or do we use less space for nuclear power plants and risk periodic radioactive contamination? This is quite a dilemma.

For certain, we must abandon the fuel reprocessing plan that is currently being advocated by the US Department of Energy under the acronym GNEP, Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. It is not much of a partnership, and the only aspect of the program that is global in scope is its potential for global disaster.

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Makeup. A Dishonest Business?

Cruzs fluttering eyelashes land LOréal in trouble | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health

Is it surprising that a company that is in the business of selling and advocating products that encourage people to discriminate based on color, L’Oreal, itself discriminates based on color? Is it more surprising that it employs false advertising to convince people of the effects of its ridiculous products?

Either way, it is difficult to feel sympathy for a company that sells sham products in service of a color-neutral world. It is even more difficult to feel sympathy for a company that hires Penelope Cruz. Does anyone besides insane directors (Pedro Almodovar who is insane, but great) and reputed closeted homosexual scientologist moguls (Tom Cruise) find her appealing?

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Finding Convenience in Religion

MP3 juror appears in court on contempt charge | The Guardian

Necessity is the mother of invention, but indolence is a very evil step mother. It seems as though humans, impelled by indolence, know no limits in inventing new ways, using new religions and finding new gadgets in order to shirk duty.