Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 5

Mozilla has released the fifth beta of the 3rd generation of its award winning Firefox browser. With this, it has inched closer towards releasing the final build to the public. The beta phase is lasting longer than expected, the primary reason being the enthusiasm being shown by developers around the world in contributing to the nightly builds, resulting in improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

As reported in the release notes,  Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever.

Some of the major enhancements are

- One-click site info   – New Web Forgery Protection page      -  Anti-virus integration

- Full page zoom        – Easier password management               – Resumable downloading

- Simplified add-on installation    &      – Improved Speed and Memory Usage.

Google And Virgin Team For Human Settlement On Mars : Project VIRGLE

Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.

Sir Richard writes:

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.

Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source.

Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel.

Okay, come on — seriously. Is this Virgle thing for real?

What, you doubt us? Well, yes — Virgle is real.

Google Launches Future Search

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Get started now:

Try gDay™