Proposition to change the prefixing policy

The web is meant to be a universal medium, agnostic in terms of device or UA. Of course, testing in several browsers is needed to iron out bugs. But when authors have to write for one browser, then port to a few other selected ones, something is wrong.

All in all, there is no simple right way for authors to use prefixes as they currently are.

via Proposition to change the prefixing policy from Florian Rivoal on 2012-05-04 (www-style@w3.org from May 2012).

From: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/05/new-proposal-could-end-the-css-prefix-madness/

CSS vendor prefixes were designed to help web developers by giving them a way to target CSS to specific browsers and use proposed standards before they were finalized. The idea was to move the web forward without rushing the CSS standards process. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always worked out that way.

China plans national, unified CPU architecture

According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property.

via China plans national, unified CPU architecture | ExtremeTech.

The other option, of course, is developing a brand new ISA — a daunting task, considering you have to create an entire software (compiler, developer, apps) and hardware (CPU, chipset, motherboard) ecosystem from scratch. But, there are benefits to building your own CPU architecture. China, for example, could design an ISA (or microarchicture) with silicon-level monitoring and censorship — and, of course, a ubiquitous, always-open backdoor that can be used by Chinese intelligence agencies. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easy to circumvent — but what if China built a DNS and IP address blacklist into the hardware itself?

Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”

Huawei says it has “recently introduced…Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps – over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks.”

via iTWire – Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”.

However it appears that Huawei is using much greater bandwidth. Its announcement goes on to say: “Key features include: innovative antenna structure [that] greatly improves performance and meets wideband requirements [and] next generation direct radio frequency technology [that] reduces costs and power consumption, and realises ultra broadband carrier aggregation.” (our italics).

The LTE-Advanced specification is for up to 100MHz of bandwidth, which need not be contiguous and up to 8×8 MIMO (eight transmit and eight receive antennas) and a maximum downstream bandwidth of 3.3Gbps.

HTML5 roundup: magazine-style Web layouts with CSS regions

The feature allows Web developers to specify that a single body of text should flow through certain regions of the page. For example, you could create several div elements in a specific arrangement and have the overflow text fill those consecutively. Another feature proposed by Adobe, called CSS Exclusions, makes it possible to have inline text automatically wrap and flow to conform with a specific shape.

via HTML5 roundup: magazine-style Web layouts with CSS regions.

3GPP Long Term Evolution

3GPP Long Term Evolution, usually referred to as LTE, is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. It is based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies, increasing the capacity and speed using new modulation techniques.[1][2] The standard is developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).

via 3GPP Long Term Evolution – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Although commonly referred to as a type of 4G wireless service, LTE release 8 currently in use does not satisfy the requirements set forth by the ITU-R organization. Future releases of LTE (referred to as LTE Advanced) are expected to satisfy the requirements to be considered 4G.

3GPP – About 3GPP

3GPP – About 3GPP.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) unites [Six] telecommunications standards bodies, known as “Organizational Partners” and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the highly successful Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies.

These technologies are constantly evolving through – what have become known as – Generations of commercial cellular / mobile systems. 3GPP was originally the standards partnership evolving GSM systems towards the 3rd Generation. However, since the completion of the first LTE and the Evolved Packet Core specifications, 3GPP has become the focal point for mobile systems beyond 3G.

P3P: The Platform for Privacy Preferences

P3P: The Platform for Privacy Preferences.

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents will allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine- and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit. Have a look at the list of P3P software.

IEEE 802.22

IEEE 802.22 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

IEEE 802.22 is a standard for Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN) using white spaces in the TV frequency spectrum.[1] The development of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN standard is aimed at using cognitive radio (CR) techniques to allow sharing of geographically unused spectrum allocated to the Television Broadcast Service, on a non-interfering basis, to bring broadband access to hard-to-reach, low population density areas, typical of rural environments, and is therefore timely and has the potential for a wide applicability worldwide. It is the first worldwide effort to define a standardized air interface based on CR techniques for the opportunistic use of TV bands on a non-interfering basis.

IEEE 802.22 WRANs are designed to operate in the TV broadcast bands while assuring that no harmful interference is caused to the incumbent operation, i.e., digital TV and analog TV broadcasting, and low power licensed devices such as wireless microphones.[2][3][4] The standard was expected to be finalized in Q1 2010, but was finally published in July 2011.[5]

Google works on Internet standards with TCP proposals, SPDY standardization

Google’s focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledged is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.

via Google works on Internet standards with TCP proposals, SPDY standardization.

More far-reaching than these SSL tweaks is Google’s proposed alternative to the HTTP protocol that underpins the Web: SPDY.