Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 9, 2013
by sjvn01
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Lies, damned lies, and Android benchmarks

I’ve been making, evaluating, and using benchmarks for decades. Along the way I’ve seen vendor after vendor try to play games with them so that their products would look better than the competition. So, I wasn’t surprised when the news broke that Samsung had fudged recent Galaxy Note 3 benchmarks to make its hot new smartphone look better. I’m even less surprised that AnandTech has subsequently discovered that almost all Android device OEMs have rigged their devices to show their best on certain benchmarks.

Lies, damned lies, and Android benchmarks. More>

October 9, 2013
by sjvn01
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The Web at 20: What’s in store over the next two decades?

This is as good a time as any to wish the Web a happy birthday. It’s been a bit more than 20 years since I first wrote about what I then referred to as the “World-Wide Web.” I might want to pat myself on the back for jumping on that subject pretty early, but I did spend a good chunk of that article touting something called WAIS before I ever got around to what I also styled as “the WEB.”

But next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Mosaic Web browser, which gets a lot of the credit for bringing us the Web most of us now know and use every day. And that was true even before Mosaic became, by way of Spyglass, the basis for Internet Explorer 1.0, in 1995.

Many changes have been wrought in the past two decades. And I think many more are in store.

The Web at 20: What’s in store over the next two decades? More >

October 7, 2013
by sjvn01
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Internet for all: Alliance for Affordable Internet founded

In the 21st century, you could argue that Internet access is almost as important as literacy. In much of the developed world, Internet access is affordable and easily available. In the third world, it’s often neither affordable nor available. The newly created Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) seeks to make the Internet accessible to almost anyone, anywhere.

Internet for all: Alliance for Affordable Internet founded. More>