Seeker Blog

Wired has a fun replay of the birth of Chrome:

Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google’s Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that’s been under way for more than two years. The weekly Monday meeting of managers — or “leads,” as Google puts it in its nonhierarchical way — will be one of the last before the upcoming launch. Rakowski writes 12 items on the board with a black dry-erase marker. The first is “State of the Release.” It’s late August, and the release in question is called Chrome, Google’s first Web browser. Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity — the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation, and porn consumption — this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud — where Google holds advantage. And it’s an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator.

This recently released film may be worth a try — at least for wine buffs. There are a few customer reviews at Amazon:

“Bottle shock” describes what can happen to wine as it travels from place to place. Set in 1976, Randall Miller’s widescreen docudrama concerns the real-life showdown between California’s wineries and their French counterparts. Napa Valley’s Jim Barrett (Lost Highway’s Bill Pullman) has been plugging away for years with minimal success. A former attorney, Barrett runs Chateau Montelena with his wayward son, Bo (Chris Pine, the Star Trek prequel’s Captain Kirk), who would rather do anything than assist his stern father. Bo’s co-workers include Gustavo (Six Feet Under’s Freddy Rodríguez) and Sam (Transformers’ Rachael Taylor), who long to produce the perfect chardonnay. Naturally, the young men compete for the favors of the beautiful blonde (the movie’s least interesting angle). Across the Atlantic, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) struggles to keep his Parisian wine shop going (cheapskate American Dennis Farina is his only regular customer). Then Spurrier conceives a contest to attract customers; surely, his beloved French growers will put those upstart Yanks in their place. He flies to Napa to look around, and persuades the Barretts to compete. Miller and his wife, screenwriter Jody Savin, previously worked with Pullman and Rickman on Nobel Son, but decided to release Bottle Shock first. Though comparisons to Sideways will be inevitable, the filmmakers take more of a historical look at California wine country. The “Judgment of Paris” changed the face of the business forever, and they’ve found a lively way to recount the tale. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

…The tale — set far in the future, on a planet called Arbre — is told by Erasmus, an 18-year-old member of a monk-like sect, the Concent of Saunt Edhar, that has been walled off from the “saecular” outside world for 3,000 years. Barefoot in only a robe and a belt, Erasmus spends his days studying and his nights geeking out with friends. When he’s not calculating celestial mechanics, he’s participating in meticulous rituals that hone his ability to handle complex systems in his mind.

Here’s the catch: None of St. Edhar’s male and female devotees uses any sort of computers or electronics. They do their math by hand, scratching out equations on paper that lasts for millennia. They memorize their world’s knowledge rather than using a search-engine crutch. Instead of arguing sports or breaking into fistfights, Erasmus’s teenage friends pour their hormonal energies into heated philosophical jousts and stylized combat maneuvers. They consume oversize books as eagerly as the less- educated slines outside their walls feast on fast food and porn.

But to be clear, the Concent of Saunt Edhar isn’t a religious order. Erasmus and his fellow fraas and surrs (brothers and sisters) revere visionary scientists and intellectuals from their past. Religions are regarded as intractable fads among the foolish slines. Deadly sins at Saunt Edhar’s are flawed logic and sloppy methodology.

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Google argues that current Web browsers were designed eons ago, before so many of the developments that characterize today’s Web: video everywhere, scams and spyware, viruses that lurk even on legitimate sites, Web-based games and ambitious Web-based programs like Google’s own Docs word processor. As Google’s blog puts it, “We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser.”

What this early version of Chrome accomplishes isn’t quite that grand. But it is a first-rate beginning.

With no status bar, no menu bar and only a single toolbar (for bookmarks), Chrome is minimalist in the extreme.

Some might even call it stripped-down. This initial version is labeled “beta,” meaning it is still in testing. True, Google labels almost everything beta — four-year-old Gmail is still in beta — but this time it’s serious.

At the moment, for example, there’s no way to e-mail a Web page to someone, no full-screen mode, no way to magnify the page (rather than just the text), and no bookmarks organizing screen. Google says that these features are at the top of its to-do list.

Chrome is, nonetheless, full of really smart features that seem to have been inspired by other browsers — or ripped off from them, depending on your level of cynicism.

More from David Pogue

Technorati Tags: Google

The Spore PR machine is in hyperdrive. How to build a better being airs on the National Geographic channel Tuesday September 9th. And on September 1st, the New York Times has a lengthy article on the much-anticipated commercial release of Spore:

By day, Thomas Near studies the evolution of fish, wading through streams in Kentucky and Mississippi in search of new species. By night, Dr. Near, an assistant professor at Yale, is a heavy-duty gamer, steering tanks or playing football on his computer. This afternoon his two lives have come together.

The game begins with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures, like the Tiktaalik.

On his laptop swims a strange fishlike creature, with a jaw that snaps sideways and skin the color of green sea glass. As Dr. Near taps the keyboard, it wiggles and twists its way through a busy virtual ocean. It tries to eat other creatures and turns its quills toward predators that would make it a meal.

The chairman of Dr. Near’s department, Richard Prum, watches him play and worries about his reckless lunges.

“You’re just attacking them?” he asks as Dr. Near tries to eat a fat purple worm that looks too dangerous to bother.

“If you kill them, you unlock their parts,” Dr. Near explains. But then the purple worm sticks its syringelike mouth into Dr. Near’s beast and begins to drain its innards. “Uh-oh, I’m about to die,” he says. The screen fades to black.

…Mr. Wright said he had been hearing similar reactions from other scientists. “I find that scientists are incredibly open and excited that we can portray this stuff in games, even if it’s not perfectly accurate,” he said. “It’s manure to seed future scientists.”

Dr. Shubin said: “The differences between Spore and nature do not bother me. I see Spore for what it is: a game. And it is a game in the best sense of the word. It is not identical to nature, but it is a world that evolves, that changes and where the players are part of those processes.”