Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha took time yesterday to talk business strategy, the advantages of Android, and to take developers to task for poorly optimized apps. At several points during the 50-minute chat the topic turned to lackluster battery life, and Jha placed blame squarely at the feet of hastily tested apps — which he said can sap between 30 and 40 percent of your phone’s juice. The chairman even suggested their effect on longevity and performance were the impetus behind 70 percent of handset returns. But, the company has a solution, and (surprisingly) its name is Blur. In a moment of presumably unintentional creepiness Dr. Jha said, “MotoBlur allows us to know, with precision, what battery life you’re seeing,” before suggesting that future phones could warn you about power draining apps and bandwidth hogs. What wasn’t clear though, was if he was talking about the existing Android battery manager or if Motorola has been collecting usage data — since we never opted-in to such a program, we’re really hoping it’s the former. Hit up the source link for the entire conversation, you’ll find the relevant bits at the 4- and 25-minute marks.

Motorola’s Jha blames apps for poor battery life, says Blur can save the day originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may not be the first go-round for the Karmetik Machine Orchestra, but the automated musicians, fashioned by a group of students at the California Institute of the Arts, took the stage last night to prove that robots can rock. Among the mechanized musicians scheduled to perform at the Walt Disney Modular Theater were MahaDevibot, Glockenbot, BreakBot, and NotomotoN, described as a “duel-head drum with twelve beaters and a mallet orchestra.” Each of the robots was built from salvaged parts and programmed by CalArts students, who control the machines from laptops during performances. A description of the show posted to the CalArts website touts music-producing robots suspended from the ceiling that trigger sound activated light shows and animation — now that sounds like a way to spend a Thursday night. Check out a video of the players and their masters after the break.

Continue reading Robot orchestra marries music and machines (video)

Robot orchestra marries music and machines (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 May 2011 08:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is looking to drastically improve the JavaScript performance in Firefox 3.1 when it is released later this year. When Firefox 3 was released back in June it included a significant boost in the JavaScript performance arena, but will they be able to do it again?

If you decide to download a nightly build of Firefox 3.1 to test out the improved JavaScript performance it’s important to know that the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, isn’t enabled by default. To enable it you’ll need to open the about:config and find the javascript.options.jit.content setting. Set the value to true by double-clicking on it, and the changes will be applied without needing to restart the browser. Refer to this article if you need help using about:config.

I know you’re wondering how much better it performs, and so I’ll turn your attention to the Sunspider test, which we’ve used in the past to compare the various browsers. I ran all of the following tests on the same MacBook Pro computer with the Mac OS X operating system (lower amount of time is better):

1. Safari 3.1.2: 3062.0ms
2. Firefox 3.0: 2997.2ms
3. Firefox 3.1 nightly without TraceMonkey: 2510.2ms
4. Firefox 3.1 nightly with TraceMonkey: 1610.4ms

That’s a rather significant difference. Compared to Firefox 3.0 the new Firefox 3.1 nightly build is nearly twice as fast, and my results are consistent with those that Mozilla got. Bravo!

Behind the scenes the optimizations occur when repetitive tasks are done in JavaScript. For example, the folks over at Mozilla whipped up a quick image editor that lets you adjust the brightness and contrast of a photo. It’s nothing fancy, but there is a noticeable difference using Firefox 3.0 compared to Firefox 3.1 with TraceMonkey enabled. That’s because the JavaScript runs significantly faster due to the image editor consistently repeating the same task. Generally that’s how it works, but the nitty gritty details can be found here.

There’s still some work that needs to be done on TraceMonkey, and some bugs need to be ironed out before it will be ready for prime-time. I’m already getting pumped about Firefox 3.1 though.

Thanks natmaster!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 01, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
For the longest time I’ve always been good about regularly defragmenting my hard drives. With Windows 7/Vista that has been a bit easier since it is set up to automatically defrag all drives every Wednesday, but I have to admit that Smart Defrag trumps many of the alternatives because of how fast it really is.

Smart Defrag is free for both personal and business use, and can be set up to automatically manage the fragmentation of your drives. According to the website this program has been designed with large-sized drives in mind, and I can vouch for it’s ability to defragment drives much faster than any other application I’ve tried. Plus it can be configured to automatically defragment your system drive or all drives after your computer has been idle for a given amount of time… definitely a nice feature.

Here are some highlights from their website:

• Extremely Easy to Use – Its intuitive interface makes Smart Defrag the ideal utility for complete computer novice.
• Exceptionally Efficient Defragmentation – Smart Defrag has the world’s fastest defragmenting engine. It’s been specially designed for modern, large hard drives, so it eliminates long waiting time.
• Optimize Disk Performance – Smart Defrag doesn’t just use simple defragmentation. It also streamlines your file system, places the frequently used files and directories into the fastest area of the disk, enabling your computer to run at top speed with the most stability.
• Always-on to Work Automatically – Smart Defrag works automatically and quietly in the background, so it continually and constantly keeps your computer fragment-free.
• Data Safe and Reliability Guaranteed – Besides, unlike other “Automated” Defragmenters, Smart Defrag does NOT constantly perform analysis and defrag, which does damage your hard drive and shorten its life. Smart Defrag has a “Safe Intelligence” technology that can assure the health of your disk by deciding When and How to execute defragmentation.
• Free Defragmenter Forever – Smart Defrag is 100% freeware. Download, use, and update it absolutely free for your personal computers, business or enterprise servers –– it won’t cost you a penny.

Smart Defrag Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

The main reason that I thought this was worthy of its own article was because a lot has changed in the last year. Since March 2008 we’ve seen major milestone releases from each of big browser makers, and to top it off Google Chrome has come onto the scene. These browsers have also shifted focus from adding nifty new features to diving deep into the code trying to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

We’ve got a lot in store for you today ranging from JavaScript speed tests to memory usage comparisons, and we’ll even throw in some Acid 3 coverage. Lets go ahead and dive right in.

Notes about testing:

• All of these tests were performed on the same Windows XP SP3 machine that is wired into a network to eliminate the effects of wireless disturbances.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions were installed.
• All browser data, including caches, were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time, and no other applications (other than standard XP services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was used in the native rendering mode (“standards compliant mode”).
• No plug-ins (Flash, Java, etc…) were installed on the machine to ensure that slow performance wasn’t due to the loading of a plug-in.

–JavaScript Tests–

The main speed test that everyone seems to use for JavaScript is SunSpider. Last year we compared the browsers with the SunSpider test prior to writing our first comparison, and so we wanted to try something different. That’s when we turned to the MooTools SlickSpeed Test. It tests various operations against a lot of common JavaScript libraries including MooTools and JQuery.

So which one did we go with this year? Well, we did both. We ran each test, SunSpider and SlickSpeed, a total of three times each. Then we averaged the results together to get the pretty little graphs you see below. For both of them the goal was for the browser to complete the tests as fast as possible, and so a lower number is better.

Sunspider Test:

1. Safari 4: 603ms
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 636ms
3. Google Chrome 2.0: 720ms
4. Firefox 3.5: 1278ms
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2975ms
6. Opera 9.64: 3931ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 5441ms

MooTools SlickSpeed Test:

1. Opera 10 ^Beta: 330ms
2. Safari 4: 355ms
3. Opera 9.64: 375ms
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 464ms
5. Firefox 3.5: 580ms
6. Google Chrome 2.0: 763ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 1901ms

–Website Rendering Tests–

I used the same method for testing website load times as I did last year. It’s a website called Numion Stopwatch that uses some fancy JavaScript to monitor when a page has finished loading, and then spits out the amount of time it took to complete.

We used two extremely popular sites for these tests: ESPN and the Wall Street Journal. Each site was loaded up three times in each browser, and then the results were averaged together. Obviously we were targeting which browser could load the websites the fastest, and so a lower number is better:

ESPN Load Time:

1. Safari 4: 1.936 seconds
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 2.194 seconds
3. Firefox 3.5: 2.380 seconds
4. Internet Explorer 8: 2.604 seconds
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2.605 seconds
6. Opera 9.64: 2.651 seconds
7. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.873 seconds

Wall Street Journal Load Time:

1. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 1.612 seconds
2. Opera 10 ^Beta: 1.989 seconds
3. Opera 9.64: 2.141 seconds
4. Safari 4: 2.166 seconds
5. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.552 seconds
6. Firefox 3.5: 2.886 seconds
7. Internet Explorer 8: 3.292 seconds

–Memory Usage Tests–

I’m sure this is what many of you were looking for. As geeks we like to have a lean browser that knows how to handle itself without us having to keep a watchful eye over it. That’s why we ran numerous different tests to see just how well a browser controls its memory usage when loading a decent number of sites, and also whether it’s able to release that memory once you’ve closed the tabs.

Here’s a rundown of the order in which we ran the tests to collect the stats:

1. We started the browser, and took a memory usage reading.
2. Loaded 10 predetermined sites in tabs, and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
3. Loaded 15 more predetermined sites in tabs (totaling 25 sites), and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
4. Let the browser sit for 10 minutes with the 25 tabs open, and then took a memory usage reading.
5. Closed all the tabs except for Google.com, which was always the first site opened. Then we took a memory usage reading.

And here are the results. The best browser for each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

–Acid 3 Tests–

Last year we also took a look at how the various browsers scored on the Acid 3 test. At the time a Safari nightly build was the closest to perfection by reaching a score of 86 out of 100. Today, however, is a different story. A few browsers can handle the test perfectly, some are very very close, and others (yeah, IE) have some work cut out for themselves.

Note: Click on any of the thumbnails for a full-size rendering.

1. Safari 4 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
2. Opera 10 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
3. Google Chrome 2.0 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
5. Firefox 3.5 (93/100) – It gets a near perfect score.
   
6. Opera 9.6 (85/100) – This is the oldest release we tested, and it comes as no surprise that it doesn’t pass the test. It should be noted that the next milestone, version 10, does pass the test perfectly as seen above.
   
7. Internet Explorer 8 (20/100) – While they still have a ways to go before they get a perfect, I do have to give them credit for at least making the image look halfway normal. You know what I’m talking about if you remember what IE7′s rendering of the Acid 3 test was like.
   

–Conclusion–

So which browser is the winner? I wouldn’t really say any of them outshine the others. The problem that we are going to face with performance tests from here on out is that the browsers will all come very close to each other in the standings… often within a fraction of a second from one another. As the browsers continue to get optimized we will see these times get even closer, and performance might become less of a concern which picking which one we want to use. So I’d say to pick the browser you feel the most comfortable with, because it’s getting hard to distinguish one browser from another when it comes to performance.

What’s your take on the stats? Anything stand out to you? Will you be switching browsers based upon anything you learned here?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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