Firefox 10 now available for download

It's been nine months since Mozilla announced that Firefox would be moving to a rapid release cycle, and since then the browser has moved from version 4 to 10. According to the beta changelog, the latest release brings the kind of life-changing features you'd expect from a six-week update cycle, with some extension management improvements, a forward button that hides itself until it has a function, the inclusion of APIs for full-screen web apps, and anti-aliasing for WebGL. Firefox 10 also marks the debut of the "Extended Support Release," intended for enterprises that don't want to deal with the hassle of supporting a new browser every six weeks. ESR releases receive no updates apart from necessary security fixes, and will change versions once every seven releases, making the next release due around November.
If you find Firefox's frantic product cycle a bit over the top, it's worth noting that Google, Mozilla's closest competitor, is also on a six-week cycle, and recently went a full 19 days between releasing Chrome 17 beta and 18 dev earlier this month. Both browsers are rapidly developing and have relatively similar marketshare figures, but the momentum has been in Chrome's favor. Statisticians earlier this month announced Chrome was now the world's second most popular browser, knocking Firefox from a spot it had held for many years. It remains to be seen if small iterative updates are the way back into the game for Mozilla, but this update does bring Firefox a little step closer to its rivals' feature sets. Firefox 10 comes as a silent update for those of you that already have Firefox, or is available for direct download at the PC and Mac source links below.

Twitter begins censoring tweets by country, when required by law

Twitter has confirmed that it will begin to censor tweets, if required by law, on a country by country basis. Until now the micro-blogging service has remained a free and open platform for millions of people worldwide, empowering its users to say and share whatever they like.
"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact […] almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits," the company said in a statement on its blog.
Like all worldwide, borderless businesses though, Twitter is required to obey the laws of the countries it is in, so in order to comply they will begin censoring content published that falls foul of laws in individual countries, rather than on a global level.
For example, in countries like France and Germany, where pro-Nazi comments and celebration are against the law, Twitter will censor tweets containing pro-Nazi comments for micro-bloggers in those two countries, whilst still allowing those that do not ban it to view the tweets.
"One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user's voice," Twitter continued. "We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't. The Tweets must continue to flow."
The company said it would do its best to contact any users affected by the new censorship policy, and will clearly mark any tweets that have been censored. They have also extended their transparency through chillingeffects.org with a Twitter section on the site to make it easier for people to find legal notices and takedowns – currently it is mainly full of DMCA takedown requests, presumably we will begin to see tweets that are censored added to the site accompanied by the reasons they were blocked.
As one of the leaders of a free and open web, Twitter is likely to see considerable condemnation for taking this stance. It does however have little choice if it wants to avoid heavy lawsuits and government pressure the world over. Ultimately they hope to continue to allow the freedom that has enabled creativity to flow without breaking individual country’s laws.

Beware! Facebook Usage Makes You Sad – Reveals a Study

If you want to be happy in life, delete your Facebook account right now and cheer yourself up reveals a study.
According to the study by Utah Valley University, the more the people use the hugely popular social networking website Facebook, the more they will believe that others are much happier.
The study found that the carefully-chosen pictures of smiling, cheerful faces which Facebook users tend to plaster over their pages cumulatively convey a debilitating message to others.
While logging into Facebook account many times a day in office or at home may have turned an irresistible habit for a lot of people, particularly the young.
Sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge interviewed 425 undergraduate students about their happiness and that of their friends as the part of the study. Participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as ‘Life is fair’ and ‘Many of my friends have a better life than me’.
They then described their Facebook activity including their number of ‘friends’ and the proportion whom they actually knew. Ninety-five percent used Facebook, and on average they had been there for two and a half years and spent nearly five hours a week on it.
After allowing for gender, religiosity and whether people were single or attached, the study found that ‘the more hours people spent on Facebook, the stronger was their agreement that others were happier’. This was particularly true of Facebook users who stockpiled ‘friends’ they did not actually know.
Those who had used Facebook for longer were also ‘significantly’ likely to agree with the statement that  ‘life is unfair’.
Ms Chou argues that this Facebook-related dissatisfaction is the result of a common psychological process known as ‘correspondence bias‘, in which we draw false conclusions about people based on limited knowledge.
According to Ms Chou, ‘looking at happy pictures of others on Facebook gives people an impression that others are “always” happy and having good lives’.
While Facebook users will know that their real friends have ups and downs in their lives, all they have to go on with their fake Facebook ‘friends’ is a smiling picture.
When that distorting effect is multiplied by the hundreds of Facebook friends that people don’t actually know, it is easy to see how bitterness can fester, said the study.

Facebook shutting down March 15 (or April 1)

Facebook is closing down. The Roman Emperor of social networking is tired of it all. He is heading for pastures new. Oh, and you might never be able to get your photos (or your pokes) back.
Such was the story printed by the venerable Weekly World News in order to allay the boredom of standing in line at Albertson's.
The fateful day of Facebook's going away was said to be March 15, the Ides. The tides of sadness immediately crashed over the Web, as the hurt, the bewildered, the forlorn, and, no doubt, the Schadenfreunds of freunds lamented, jeered, and cheered.
With just a few clicks from the cities and the sticks, the twig of a rumor began to sprout a trunk.

Skype - coming soon to a Windows Phone near you

The biggest problem we had with the Windows Phones we reviewed, was that there was no Skype application for the platform. Before you go, ‘so what?’ we’ll remind you that Microsoft had already bought Skype, a long time back. So what’s the delay for?
According to The Verge, Skype VP Rick Osterloh has mentioned that Microsoft is working on a WP product with Skype that will be out soon enough. The earlier promise for full Skype integration for Windows Phones was late 2011, but as we can see that hasn’t been fulfilled. Now, however, they’re planning to bring an app to WP7 till they launch a fully-integrated version for the later builds of their operating system.

Let’s hope that Skype finally comes to Windows Phones at the MWC next month, because then Microsoft will finally merge and bring to us two things they already own!

Convert your smartphone to laptop with LightPad

LightPad also works as a projector but its availability in India is not clear as of now.

A new device, named LightPad, has been launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, USA. With the device, its makers say, one can use his smartphone like a projector or a laptop!

LightPad is a pico projector (handheld projector) and comes with a Liquid Crystal display and a keyboard. If you need a projector just plug the phone into it, and the LightPad would project the screen of the phone on the nearest wall.
Once the users flip the LCD display up, it looks almost like a laptop and an in-built software of the LightPad supports a virtual mouse as well.
"The smartphone is becoming the primary computing device for consumers and professionals." stated James Lupino, vice president of business development, QP Optoelectonics, the company which makes LightPad. "But their small display and keyboard greatly limit their application for serious users, especially for those who are seeking to replace their notebooks. LightPad addresses the main drawbacks of the user-interface of smartphones by utilising dual mode projection technology."
The same concept has already been displayed in the Motorola Atrix as well, but this product has an LCD display as well. It comes with a 854x480 resolution based display whereas the next generation model is likely to go up to 1280x720 pixels.
LightPad comes equipped with a battery as well which will be able to supply power to the projector for about five hours and the next year's model will likely work up to two hours more.
The LightPad will reach the users by the second quarter of 2012 though it is not clear if it will be available in India or not.

Head to Head: Facebook vs. Google+

A metaphorical boxing match between two 800-pound gorillas is quickly shaping up in the social network arena. In one corner: Facebook, the reigning champion. In the other corner: Google+, a fast-rising up-and-comer with a big name and deep pockets behind it. At stake: the time-deprived attention of millions of social network users. There can be only one victor.

Round 1: User Base

The more users a social network has, the more opportunities there are for its users to get gabby. No social media network in history reached 25 million users faster than Google+, which achieved the feat in its very first month despite being invite-only. It took Facebook three years to reach that total, but since then the service has grown like gangbusters and currently claims an utterly ridiculous 750 million users. Even your grandmother probably has a Facebook account.

Round 2: Privacy

Both services force users to sign up with their real names, a requirement we’re uncomfortable with. Facebook’s been plagued by privacy concerns for years now, and although changing your privacy settings is easy, its privacy options aren’t as robust as Google+’s. G+ not only includes more privacy options, it also lets you choose who can see each post you make and which portions of your profile are visible to the public.

Winner: Google+

Round 3: Games

Games are a major component of Facebook: More than half of all Facebook users play games, and Facebook’s game library spans approximately a gajillion titles. Games showed up late on Google+, but the dedicated games channel and the ability to post high scores are great touches. Google+’s initial games include blockbusters like Angry Birds and Dragon Age: Legends. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there were only 16 Google+ games available.

Winner: Facebook

Round 4: Video Chat

Both networks offer free video chat services that are incredibly easy to use. Facebook’s Skype-powered video calling allows you to chat one-on-one with your friends and leave video messages if they aren’t online. But it can’t hold a candle to Google+’s Hangout, which supports up to 10 people in simultaneous video chat. Plus, it allows you to watch YouTube videos as a group.

Winner: Google+

Round 5: Mobile Apps

Google+’s mobile app for iPhone and Android devices gets all the basics right, but its highlight is the Huddle feature, a group-chat function similar to the old AOL chat rooms. Facebook countered the threat with its new Mobile Messenger app, which expands upon the features in the standard app. Not only is Facebook’s feature set more robust, it’s also available for tons of devices—and it isn’t plagued by the bugs and crashes that are sometimes found on the Google+ app.

Winner: Facebook

And the Winner Is…

In three out of five rounds, Facebook triumphs over Google+. Sure, it may have some privacy concerns, and it doesn’t have quite as clean a look as Google+, but when it comes down to brass tacks, Facebook’s seniority shows in its deep user base and myriad options. There’s a lot to like in Google’s fledgling network, but Facebook just makes it easier to be social.

Is Your Gaming Laptop's RAM Slowing It Down?

We look at the effect of memory bandwidth and clockspeed on gaming performance.

The mystique of adding RAM to a system to “increase performance” is often misunderstood by the average person. Most think that if their seven-year-old Windows XP build is getting slow, doubling the RAM from 2GB to 4GB will speed it up. Any PC tech worth his Pringles knows that won’t do much for Windows XP performance. Generally, it’s very easy to hit the point of diminishing returns with system RAM.  But there’s one bad pattern we’ve been seeing in many of the notebooks with integrated graphics lately: configuring RAM for the minimum system bandwidth.

If you’re a browser jockey, that’s not a huge issue but if you play any games that rely on the graphics card, that configuration can hobble your performance if you’re trying to play games. To see what the situation is, we decided to take a typical modern notebook and see the impact of system bandwidth on gaming. Read on.

A short history of integrated graphics

The issue at hand is how integrated graphics accesses RAM vs. a traditional discrete card. A discrete card in a notebook has its own dedicated pool of RAM. Besides offering far higher data rates from using GDDR5, a discrete GPU’s RAM usually runs at much higher speeds since they are soldered directly to the board the GPU rides on and the wires run straight to a dedicated, very wide, high-speed memory controller. While the width of the memory controller and the speed of the RAM has changed, discrete GPUs have pretty much been the same.

Integrated graphics, on the other hand, have changed quite a bit since introduction. Initially “integrated graphics” meant the graphics core was a discrete chip and RAM was soldered to the motherboard and connected to the CPU via PCI. This eventually moved directly into the core logic chipset itself with chipsets from SiS, VIA and Intel’s 810 “Whitney.” Instead of relying on RAM on the motherboard, core logic chipset-based graphics mostly use main system memory which is far cheaper to implement. We say mostly, because both AMD and Nvidia have tried to ameliorate memory bandwidth and size issues by adding internal cache to the integrated graphics component. Those solutions have mostly been outside the mainstream though. Integrated graphics has always been about making it as cheap as possible.

It doesn’t get any cheaper than integrating it directly into the CPU itself. This theoretically lowers the cost of the chipset, the overall cost of the system and conserves power too. Intel’s Clarkdale/Clarksfield and Sandy Bridge CPUs and so do AMD’s Llano and Brazos APUs. Despite this technology step forward though, integrated graphics still suffer greatly in one area: memory bandwidth. A dual-channel DDR3/1333 setup, for example, offers a theoretical bandwidth of 21.3GB/s. Compare this to a stock clocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti which has 128GB/s of bandwidth on tap and the top-end GeForce GTX 580 which takes it 192.4GB/s. Mobile GPUs don’t offer quite  the same amount of bandwidth but the  GeForce GTX 580M mobile part is moving along 96GB/s. It’s not always the case, but generally discrete parts offer boatloads more memory bandwidth.

Memory bandwidth isn’t everything in the graphics equation but it does matter quite a bit. So when we started seeing integrated notebooks with two memory slots and only one of those populated we scratched our head and wondered how much it hurt performance.

To find out, we took a Toshiba Portege R830 which was equipped with two SO-DIMM slots but only one Samsung 4GB SO-DIMM DDR3/1333 module running in single-channel mode. Making our test even more interesting, the notebook oddly was running 32-bit Windows 7 Professional so it couldn’t even address more than 3.5GB anyway. We ran the Portege in three different configurations. The first was the stock 4GB of single-channel DDR3/1333. The second was with a standard Corsair DDR3/1333 kit of two 4GB SO-DIMMS in dual-channel mode. The third was a new take on modules hitting notebooks: overclocked modules. Unlike performance desktops that give you control over what frequency you want your RAM to run at, the vast majority of notebooks have no such BIOS control – they rely solely on what the SPD or serial presence detect chip on the memory to set the speed. Overclocked RAM, such as the Kingston HyperX DDR3/1866 modules we used for our test, tells Sandy Bridge-based notebooks to run the RAM at DDR3/1866 even if you have no way to set it in the BIOS (the Portege, for example, did not).

For our test, we reached into the dust bin for several older benchmarks including Quake III, Quake IV and 3D Mark 2006. We also used some newer benchmarks such as Resident Evil 5 and Dirt 2. To see the actual theoretical memory bandwidth, we ran Sisoft Sandra 2012 as well.

The upshot:

We saw worthwhile performance increases going from single-channel DDR3 to dual-channel DDR3. We have to reiterate that even though there is a memory size difference here, it has minimal impact since we are running 32-bit Windows 7. The extra RAM adds nothing, it’s really about the memory bandwidth.

Far more dated 3D workloads, where the barrier isn’t the actual performance chip itself, we saw very significant performance gains of 29 percent. Going to DDR3/1866 saw that go to 38 percent when the two are compared. As we move from Quake III to Quake IV the frame rates from the feeble integrated graphics plummet but the performance spread from adding bandwidth is about the same.

With more of a graphics load from 3DMark 2006, we saw the spread drop a bit but still maintain a healthy 21 percent and 33 percent difference from adding more bandwidth. That’s not bad, but this is 2012.

But once you get to something far more modern such as 2009’s Dirt 2, the performance impact from single-channel to dual-channel closes up to about 3.6 percent. We didn’t expect it but moving to the DDR3/1866 modules gave the game a pretty substantial bump of about 18 percent. That really isn’t bad, but certainly not magical. You’re basically looking at 35 fps vs.  42 fps with a more modern workload. It just reiterates that you can’t magically make an integrated graphics part twice as fast by adding more memory bandwidth when running modern workloads.

Again, it’s very much about what is holding you back, the graphics core or the memory bandwidth. To illustrate our point, we ran 2009’s Resident Evil 5 at an Xbox “HD” resolution of 1280x720 in DX9 mode with the textures set to high. With the integrated Intel “HD” Graphics 3000 core in the 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M, it isn’t hard to swamp it. We still see about 12.5 percent more frames with the dual-channel configuration and 24.2 percent bump running the DDR3/1866 modules. That’s 27 fps in single channel vs. 34 fps in dual-channel. With a few tweaks though, we can get the frame rates up. Running at 1024x768 with the texture level set to low, we see the frame rates pop up nicely and a 26.4 percent bump going from single-channel to dual-channel and the overclocked RAM giving us a very nice 37.7 percent increase or 40 fps in single channel vs. 58 fps with the DDR3/1866 modules. Since you’ll likely have to crank down the image quality levels anyway, that frame rate bump can help in gaming.

What about system bandwidth?

To find out, we ran the synthetic memory bandwidth test in SiSoft Sandra 2012. Dual channel gave us – no surprise – nearly a 100 percent increase over single-channel. Those hot DDR3/1866 modules opened it up to a 167 percent increase in available memory bandwidth.

In the final analysis, we think it’s well worth running your new laptop in dual-channel mode if you are chasing 3D performance.  The cost of the Corsair kit is essentially a steal today with an 8GB SO-DIMM kit (you would only need one module if your notebook already has a single SO-DIMM in it so cut the price even more) at $35 after rebate. For the overclocked RAM you’ll have to think a bit harder. The Kingston Hyper X kit we used fetches about $120 online. You’ll have to justify its use at that price but you will definitely see a frame rate advantage from it. How much depends on the graphics load. But then again, maybe it would have been a better idea to get a notebook with a discrete graphics part in it. But if you can’t and you’re unsatisfied with the gaming performance increasing the memory bandwidth is definitely a route worth exploring.

Benchmarks

	4GB 1x4 DDR3/1333	8GB 2x4 DDR3/1333	8GB 2x4 DDR3/1866
Memory Mode	Single Channel	Dual Channel	Dual Channel
Quake III "High-Quality"	231	298	320
Quake IV "High-Quality"	40.1	50.8	57.6
3DMark 2006	3,819	4,648	5,083
Dirt 2, 10x7, Ultra Low	35.5	36.6	41.8
Resident Evil 5, 12x7, DX9, AA Off, Motion Blur Off, High Textures, Variable Benchmark	27.3	30.7	33.9
Resident Evil 5, 10x7, DX9, AA Off, Motion Blur Off, Shadow, Texture and Overall set to Low, Variable Benchmark	43.5	55.0	59.9
SiSoft Sandra	9.2GB/s	18.1GB/s	24.6GB/s