Comment Ironic (Score 2) 41
Spotify says the rationale is to "boost artists' earnings", but they already have full control over artists' earnings. If they were serious about that they could simply, you know, boost them.
Comment Rdio works (Score 3, Informative) 254
I'm happily streaming music from Rdio for $4.99/mo in Canada. I recommend it.
Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
Comment Re:Chrome Extensions (Score 5, Informative) 154
Why not just release them as pure Chrome extensions and call it a day? What is the benefit of calling it a separate browser?
Chrome extensions don't allow for the UI we added in Flock. No sidebars, etc...
Also, extensions are much harder to monetize than browsers, so it would be a lot harder to make a successful business out of it that way.
Third, we're going for mass market rather than niche. Extensions are cool and all, but most web users out there don't have a clue what an extension is, let alone a browser.
The new Flock will be Windows/Mac at least. Linux is still a possibility too. We think the new version offers an improved experience for most users. Not quite as feature-full as the old version, true, but it's much faster and simpler which is a good trade-off for most users.
Comment Re:Why not WebKit? (Score 4, Informative) 154
Not sure when. Only 1-2% or so of our 2.x user base was on Linux, so it's not a high priority right now -- but that doesn't mean it won't happen. A few of our devs definitely want to see it happen... but I can't offer a timeline for it right now.
Comment Re:Why not WebKit? (Score 5, Informative) 154
Exactly. (I'm one of the Flock devs.)
Chromium is much more than just WebKit, and Flock is reusing most of that. Their UI was very well thought-out, and their V8 JavaScript engine is incredibly fast -- making it a perfect platform for Flock's application layer code which is almost entirely JavaScript.
BTW, since the original article doesn't contain links, here's the site where you can grab the beta if you're so inclined:
beta.flock.com
Mac version is in the works.
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