Interesting Links for 10-05-2012

[andrewducker]

• Queen’s Speech – what have the Liberal Democrats brought to the table?
  (tags: libdem politics uk )
• Behold the TV of TOMORROW!
  (tags: tv technology thefuture )
• Computer scientists show what makes movie lines memorable
  (tags: science language movies )
• What could possibly go wrong? U.S. Army wants to give war robots more power to make their own decisions
  (tags: military technology ai usa )
• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Joins Obama In Supporting Gay Marriage
  (tags: usa marriage lgbt )
• Edinburgh has a hidden Wild West street
  (tags: scotland cowboy usa edinburgh )
• On-demand music gets own chart
  (tags: music uk streaming )
• Piracy getting too popular? US government thinks the answer is to make legitimate DVDs worse.
  (tags: usa piracy copyright EpicFail )
• Hands On With Boot2Gecko, the Mobile OS Built Entirely on Web Standards
  (tags: mozilla mobile_phones )
• What would a growth agenda look like?
  (tags: growth economics europe )
• Emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge
  (tags: emotions thinking )

Comments

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I was at a Mozilla open day yesterday [they've just opened offices in London, and have a "drop in space" I've used a couple of times, in the hope a getting a free t-shirt... ;) ], and was given a quick demo of their phone OS. I have no idea why it is called Boot2Gecko, but it was very fast, very snazzy and overall rather impressive.

It is built on a Linux kernel, but, I was told, is otherwise completely different to Android.

WHilst the demo was on a Samsung like the one in the review, I was told that it is equally good on low-end handsets. Their aim is to produce cheap smart phones for the mass market.

And like the review say, the crystal skull graphics were very impressive!

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Ben Francis gave a talk on Boot2Gecko to Cambridge Geek Night, slides here if you're interested. http://people.mozilla.com/~bfrancis/cgn16.pdf

[andrewducker]

Gecko is the internal name for the rendering layer of Firefox - the bit that does all of the page layout and suchlike. The idea being that you go straight into, basically, a web browser, with all of the apps being packaged-up sites.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

What we've learned today:

The people who work at DARPA don't watch James Cameron films.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Gah DVDs. The other day we watched one that forced us to sit through not far off 10 minutes of trailers. Given it was a fairly old film I'd picked up cheap from HMV those were for old films. Does nobody think about how that's going to work in 5 years' time when nobody cares at all about those trailers?

Stuck watching those all I could think was 'A torrented video file would be better than this'.