Samsung is kicking Apple's butt in the smartphone market

I have read that Samsung has gone past Apple in the smartphone market thanks to the Galaxy S II. Based on a study from Strategy Analytics, Samsung took over 27.8% of the global market based on smartphones while Apple only had 17.1%. The Galaxy S II is basically a smart phone with dimensions of about 4.83 (in) in height and 2.6 (in) in width that uses the Android operating system. It was launched worldwide starting from May 2011 from more than 100 different counties. This device is said to be the best smartphone out there for this year.
Samsung's previous Galaxy handset called the "Galaxy S" was a major success that pleased many customers. With the Galaxy S II, more customers worldwide have been happy and the company decided to even make customized versions for certain major cell-phone carriers such as T-Mobile USA, Sprint Nextel as well as AT&T. This is huge, especially for those such as myself who want to use this phone because my cell phone carrier is Sprint Nextel.

Samsung has been doing extremely well though due to shares that have risen three times as much compared to their market share of 7.5% a year ago. This was huge while Apple's hardly went up at all the past year from 14.1%. However, their share is capable of increasing again now that their iPhone 4S was introduced from the early part of this month. Apple's growth only escalated  in the third quarter due to operators & consumers, stiff competition from Samsung, and explosive economic conditions from a few important countries. This was due to both of them waiting for the new iPhone 4S to be launched in the next quarter.

In the future, I will be very curious based on how well Samsung continues to do. I think they are a great company who make super great products such as their LCD TVs, cell phones, etc. and I hope they will continue to succeed in the market.

Are video games really a key to modern science?

I recently read online about how video games are considered to be a key to modern science. As you may not have known, many video gamers spend more than 9,000 hours by the age of 21 shooting aliens, playing battle games with fictitious monsters, you name it. Computer scientist Adrien Treuille, who created EteRNA and Foldit wants to make non-exciting scientific mysteries such as "protein folding" to be really challenging and fun for gamers in this world. Based on impressive results from Foldit and EteRNA, about 430,000 of their players in total have made and continue to make new discoveries that have eluded scientists along with their supercomputers.

An example of a discovery made by those players from Foldit figured out a certain puzzle about proteins that benefits further research into HIV/AIDS. This was literally huge and all of their work made it into an international journal called, "Nature." Very fascinating! Proteins are basically the building blocks of life and once scientists gain a much better understanding of the protein's shapes, new ways of treatment and disease prevention might be created.

Many of those gamers teach computers and scientists how to build by using genetic code. They do so by altering the RNA's shapes and proteins in order to see which one will work the very best. For those who are in Foldit, they are awarded points based on building proteins that eat up very little energy. In EteRNA, a picture of the sequences in the game will be made by a Stanford lab.

Let us hope that many more new discoveries will continue being made and see how much of an impact it will have in this world.

Evolution of those cell phones

Wow, I just stumbled across this page where you can easily see how much cell phones have changed over the years. I can't help but laugh now after seeing how huge those devices used to be! I didn't get my first cell phone until late 2004 and it was a Virgin Mobile VOX 8500 where I had to use those stupid top-off cards (I call them "Rip-off" cards). Those were such a waste of money! What was your first cell phone and when did you first purchase it?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/07/tech/mobile/gallery-evolution-mobile-phones/index.html

Mozilla Firefox's latest version

 

Mozilla Firefox 7.0.1

On September 29, 2011, Mozilla Firefox released version 7.0.1 of their web browser where I upgraded that very same day. Version 6 had certain problems such as with the memory usage but in 7.0.1, it has been reduced to as much as 50% which is a huge improvement in terms of the broswer's speed as well as stability. I have been very happy about this improvement because I am guilty of always keeping many tabs open at once and for leaving the browser open a while.

Other changes in version 7 include upgraded support for web sockets, support for Navigation Timing spec, several repairs in stability issues as well as bug fixes and a new opt-in tool for users who send anonymous performace data to Mozilla.

The Updated WebSocket protocol support was disabled in previous versions of Firefox due to security reasons but this latest version has version 8 of WebSocket. It is great for high-latency mobile networks that have high connection set-up costs because WebSocket will provide a better experience with polling HTTP. Navigation Timing spec is excellent for web page authors because this will allow them to monitor many parts of web page performance in just the page itself. The new browser version also eliminates the "http://" URL prefex shown in the address bar by default in order for a more cleaner view of the URL. I do not know about you but I prefer to see "http://" in there rather than just for secure prefixes such as "https." To me, the complete URL should always be in the browser's address bar where it includes the URL prefix. Unlike previous versions, Firefox 7 supports the ellipsis mode for a property called the "text-overflow property." It is basically used incase any text content overflows its given layout area. Lastly, the latest version has expanded support for MathML which will make web developers extremely happy. It is a certain application of a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form called XML that describes mathematical notations.

I have been a Mozzila Firefox user since version 2.0 and always used it as my primary web browser compared to Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc. I love Mozilla Firefox a lot and I enjoy it even more now that version 7 does not use as much memory.