If you’re reading this, the world hasn’t ended… yet. Allow me to explain: It would seem the fine folks at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN) have a new toy, namely a new particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, buried deep under France and Switzerland.
Built with one primary purpose – find the Higgs-boson – and several secondary – determine which particles, if any, are responsible for gravity and try to find tangible evidence of dark matter – the LHC has been rumored to be a Doomsday machine by conspiracy theorists the world over.
Supposedly, finding the Higgs boson necessitates a small black hole be formed to see the boson’s shadow. Small black holes have been formed before and contained successfully. The LHC will be replicating old experiments, with instrumentation that will allow results to be analyzed properly.
If we’d been sucked through to another universe or something, as the conspiracy theorists feared, then you’d be having a lot more difficulty reading this.
Google Chrome update
A week into using Google Chrome, my impressions haven’t changed. It’s still got Usain Bolt’s insane speed and is still light and agile with heavy pages. I’ve noticed some features of Facebook didn’t work with the first release, but the recent update fixed those problems.
Firefox does indeed do all of Chrome’s stuff with extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome does all of its stuff straight out of the box. No assembly required.
Firefox is extensible, but is fairly barebones when you get it. If you yourself.
Internet Explorer users have told me that some Web pages don’t run properly or that some things don’t render properly. That’s because Microsoft developed old "standards" that only worked with IE and aren’t actually recognized as true World Wide Web Consortium standards. WebKit, Chrome’s engine, is compliant to the proper W3C standards and thus won’t render older IE-specific sites properly. Deal with it.
Amazingly, Chrome now has a 3.8 percent market share, according to ZDNet Australia. Opera, which has been around for well over a decade doesn’t even have 1 percent market share.
But I’ve tried to find things wrong, but it seems Google’s just done a stellar job of a first release. There are a few things I’d like (a Home button being chief among them) but overall, it’s a solid product.
I expect it to gain 10 percent market share by year’s end.
It’s still shiny, and it’s still blazing fast. I’m hooked.
