impl.emented» Google http://impl.emented.com — tracking the Web Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:12:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Native Client Brings Native x86 Speed to the Browser http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/19/native-client-brings-native-x86-speed-to-the-browser/ http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/19/native-client-brings-native-x86-speed-to-the-browser/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:18:23 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=63 Native ClientContinuing my recap of noteworthy stuff from late last year. In December it was revealed that Google is working on a project dubbed Native Client, which aims to bring native x86 execution speed to web apps in a secure way. It is an exciting project, "so crazy that it just might work", wrote Neil McAllister.

How is this different from Microsoft's ActiveX technology? Security wise, ActiveX relies on trust, i.e. it's up to the user to give the ActiveX control permission to run. Native Client on the other hand relies on automated sandboxing and code analysis to make sure that the application is safe to run. Native Client also takes a more open approach, by open sourcing the technology. Native Client is portable across the x86 architecture, which includes Windows, Linux and Mac machines, but it potentially leaves important mobile platforms in the cold.

Initially, the main target for the project is resource intensive applications, like physical simulations and visualizations. The image above depicts the Mandelbrot set, as generated by a port of the fractal viewer application XaoS to Native Client. The 3D game Quake has also been successfully ported to Native Client. Generally it has proven easy to port existing C/C++ applications to run in the trusted environment, which is really promising.

If the launch of the Chrome browser was Google's first step towards making the OS desktop obsolete, Native client is yet another step in that direction. Soon we might be able to do all computer tasks, even resource intensive ones, inside the browser window.

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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/19/native-client-brings-native-x86-speed-to-the-browser/feed/ 0 Google's SearchWiki - a "PR nightmare" [Best of November '08 #2-3] http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:25:38 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=59 A few tidbits from mid November blogging (Nov 10-23 2008):

  • PR-guru Steve Rubel outcries over Google's new experimental search service SearchWiki, which allows people to comment, vote and reorder search results, provided they are logged in with their Google account. The reordering should only be privately visible, but voting and comments are public to others. Rubel calls this a "PR nightmare", as there is no community moderation of the comments like in Wikipedia for example, and he continues:

    of course people are going to run amok on the world's biggest online stage! That's like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It's going to be a haven for spam.

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  • Tangible mediaIn another piece a couple of weeks ago Steve Rubel foresaw the end of tangible media by 2014, by tangible meaning all physical media like newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. Like Rubel, I'm already almost free of tangible media, keeping only a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal, which I'll probably quit next year. I'm also buying a handful of books each year, but once there's a Kindle-like device available in this country, at a reasonable price, I'll probably go completely digital.
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  • Google's virtual world experiment Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, will be discontinued at the end of the year. Apparently, the experiment never took off, though Google states that the reason is to focus more on their core search, ads and apps business.
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  • Adobe labs has announced Alchemy, a research project that aims to bring the wealth of existing C and C++ code to Flash. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 bytecode that runs on Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5. Alchemy is ideally suited for computation-intensive tasks and can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, though still 2-10 times slower than native C/C++ code.
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  • Josh Catone writes that Yahoo has officially launched their browser extension BrowserPlus, which back in July was suggested as part of a Web 3.0 trend. BrowserPlus offers web developers a number of services, such as drag-and-drop, file browsing, image processing and persistent storage, just to name a few.
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  • A final note on two social media apps: SocialToo, a service that allows you to automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter, now has a polling feature.
    Tarpipe lets you automate your social media publishing via a Yahoo Pipes-like user interface. Tarpipe supports a number of social services, comes with an API, and supports OpenID, OAuth and Microformats, writes ReadWriteWeb.
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/feed/ 0 Google is for Geeks - Microsoft for Nerds [Best of June '08 #4] http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/01/google-is-for-geeks-microsoft-for-nerds-best-of-june-08-4/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/01/google-is-for-geeks-microsoft-for-nerds-best-of-june-08-4/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:32:32 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=39 This week started slowly, but turned out really interesting (June 23-30 2008):

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