WIN: Superpowers
With the apparently unceremonious departure of Charles “Chic” Eglee from the creative team at The Walking Dead last week came a boon for fans of Brian Michael Bendis’ cop tale Powers. Word has it this week that Eglee has been pondering making Powers into a television series for months. As the series crosses the ever-popular police drama genre with stories of superheroes and supervillains, it might just have what it takes to be a commercial hit. Eglee certainly backed the right horse with The Walking Dead, after all. More superpowers on our television? Maybe we’re the ones who win this one.

FAIL: Caps Lock Paranoia
Keen-eyed and concerned folks noticed the Google Chrome notebook appears to be without a Caps Lock key, which sparked a considerable amount of angry grumbling this week despite the fact that the average geek’s eyes bleed at the mere appearance of “noob-ish” ALL CAPS. Never fear, however; Google hasn’t done away with the key altogether. They’ve merely allowed users the choice of modifying key functions.

WIN: Wine Connoisseurs
If you love wine, live in Pennsylvania, and have a thing for creative (if not slightly dubious) application of technology, you’ll be pleased with this recent development. Walmart’s found a loophole in Pennsylvania legislation that otherwise makes it illegal to sell booze in grocery stores: sell it in a vending machine. A vending machine that scans your ID, shows your face real-time via CCTV to a state official off-site for verification, and gives you a breathalyzer to check that you’re not over-indulging. The machines are in place in select stores, and may be spreading throughout the state soon.

FAIL: Fact Checking
When WikiLeaks was knocked off the grid due to DNS service revocation, the press misidentified the culprit company as EasyDNS – when, in fact, the company responsible was EveryDNS. The end result of this seemingly minor mistake? When any story about something as explosive as WikiLeaks hits the New York Times, correct information or not, attention is attracted. In this case, not so nice attention. EasyDNS were the targets of multiple attempts at retaliation, but in actuality they agreed to help WikiLeaks when they were approached about services.

WIN: Mythbusters
What do you get when you cross 500 schoolkids with President Obama and something called the Archimedes Death Ray? It’s not a plot from one of the several Barack comic books floating around out there – more’s the pity. It’s an episode of Mythbusters that aired this week, in which the myth busting team tackled the Archimedes Death Ray concept for the third time – with some (scripted) help from the Commander in Chief. If for no reason other than giving us the ability to discuss the President of the United States and “death ray” in the same sentence, Mythbusters FTW.

WIN: Zombies
Again. After the bazillionth week trending on Surchur and Google Trends, zombies are still going strong. Of course, this is largely due to the overwhelming success of The Walking Dead, which premiered on Halloween night. The comic-to-TV adaptation drew in the most viewers ever for a premier on its channel, AMC, with over a cool 5 million tuning in on the night and more than 3 million following up the day it was rerun.

WIN: Sobriety
Or more specifically, social media sobriety. And just what is that? It’s a plug-in for Firefox that forces users to pass a field test of questions when posting after 1 am, to weed out drunken tweets and other social networking faux pas. No longer do you have to worry about embarrassing yourself in front of your friends, followers, and fans after a night on the town. The rest of the time? You’re on your own.

FAIL: Parakeets (And, by extension, Google)
Really, it’s the Google search query suggestions that are failing in this one, and the popularity of one of the most bizarre searches in the history of the Internet is actually giving parakeets their best week ever. Trending lately has been the query “Why Wont My Parakeet Eat My Diarrhea?”, which was suggested automatically by Google as a query following the phrase “why will not”. Thanks, Google, for giving us one of the most amusing fails in search engine tech so far.

WIN: Hackers
Ever wanted to get paid for breaking things? Google’s shelled out $7500 to industrious hackers who are causing errors in their browser Chrome, as part of new version development. The list of recipients so far reveals a spate of $1,000 payments per high-risk vulnerability bug. Whether you’re digging your hands into the guts of the browser or banging your head on the keyboard until something interesting happens, the pay-to-break initiative is a dream come true.

Anyhow, in one of those infographics sprees, I ran across one that I simply couldn’t pass up on.  It’s meant to be taken in the spirit of fun, which I know you guys will get. ;)

Quick summary:

Personification of the browsers aside, I mainly use Chrome now for performance reasons. As the image shows, it is extremely lean and user friendly. However, there are times when I need to use Mozilla Firefox because of all the “stuff she puts in your memory.” So which browser do you use?

Going back to personification one last time – I wish I could create one of these with the title “If Men Were Browsers.” Now that would be so much fun! Anyone want to work on it with me?

via Sharenator

The search engine giant has finally released the long rumored web browser that it has been developing over the last two years. Google Chrome, according to its engineers, the open source browser is not a content viewer as much as a window manager for web pages and applications. I dunno exactly what that means but the result is a zippier web experience. Pages that I frequent with both IE and Firefox load much faster in Chrome. This has got me really excited as another alternative in the browser space is very welcome. I also love the very minimalist UI of Chrome. There are no space-eating icons and bars. It’s a pure web browsing experience.

Let’s see if the upcoming Safari 4.0 will further heat up the browser market.