Robots & Firefoxes

There's no way this guy isn't getting killed by his creation.

Actually, the real thing is about a foot tall, and a toy, called the Robosapien. Its one of the many robot toys that are on the market now, and the pretty interesting interview linked to the picture above talks about the future of these toy robots, and robots in general:

"As for the real future of robotics, I can say it is a/ close and b/ fun. Modern communication technology is designed to bring the world to you, but robotics will soon bring you to the world, fast, cheap, and pretty much risk free.

They won't replace humans, but there are other things they can do outside what biologics are capable of. It'll be interesting, and left-shifted from what many expect. Very different from most mass-media predictions."

For example, robots will only kill MOST of us.

In other news, I downloaded the new Firefox browser for Windows. In case that sentence didn't make sense: For a couple of years now, users of the internets have been looking to an alternative to Internet Explorer. I don't if you've noticed, but IE sucks. Like, hard. It frequently crashes, up until the recent Windows Service Pack, it let in every spyware under the sun. And, oh yeah, it looks bad.

One of the biggest charges against the IE dominace has been Mozilla, an open source web browser that picked up where Netscape Navigator died.

Personally, I had always prefered Netscape Navigator... It seemed more intuitive, and as I was learning web design at the time, friendly to programmers. So I picked up Mozilla when it first came out, and kind of hated it.

Open Source means thusly (and anybody correct me if I'm wrong): The code is written by basically everybody. IE, and Microsoft, naturally hide their code. They don't want people going in and doing ANYTHING to change their software, because that would give up their iron fisty control. Mozilla did the opposite. It said, "Hey, we're building a browser, want to help out?"

So all the users in the world could go in, tweak the code, and recommend the tweaks to the rest of the world. Slowly, a workable browser emerged. By the time I got to it, though, it still wasn't that integrated with the rest of the web. No real plug-ins, weird looking web pages, you name it.

The latest iteration though, is Firefox. And it looks great. I mean, really great. Its simply designed, integrated with Windows, it even imports all your preferences from IE when you switch over.

Plus, its faster, and, I'm probably imagining this, but the graphics and colors look crisper in Firefox than they do in IE.

However, the best part is my favorite function of the Mac browser, Safari: Tabs.



You probably can't see that well, but I currently have my Gmail, the Elephant Larry Blog, and Gadget Madness (where the robot article was) all open in one Firefoxy window. Why is this great?

A) One window. You can see everything you have open at the same time, as if it was a file folder.

B) If you have a large page (say, a movie file), opening in one tab, you can see when its done loading, or if its still loading on the tab itself.

That's pretty cool. Plus, of course, integrated google bar and pop-up blocker. And, it has a download manager that's ridiculously simple to use, telling you exactly where and when your downloaded files are.

Plus, web pages look exactly as they were coded, rather than having to conform to IE "standards." Point is, switch to Firefox:

GetFireFox.com

This has been another not particularly funny, tech oriented post by Alexander Zalben.