Johannes’ Blog

I found this on the PC World website – Toshiba on Tuesday launched a new ultraportable laptop that it claims is the world’s lightest, putting it in contention with vendors including Apple and Lenovo.

The company said the full-featured Portégé R500-S5007V weighs just 2.4 pounds (1.08 kilograms), compared to Apple’s MacBook Air, which weighs 3 pounds, and Lenovo’s Thinkpad X300, which weighs around 2.93 pounds. The laptop measures 0.77 inches at its thinnest point, according to Toshiba.

The company also claimed that the new laptop was the first to include a 128G-byte solid-state drive (SSD) to replace the hard drive. Laptops to date have had 64G bytes of storage, though both Lenovo and Apple provide 128G bytes of storage through two 64G-byte modules.

SSD has no moving parts like a hard drive, so it consumes less power that can give the battery more runtime. The laptop can run for an eight-hour runtime on a single battery charge, according to Toshiba. The company did not respond immediately to questions about the type of battery in the laptop.

Battery life is also preserved by the laptop’s transreflective 12.1-inch screen, which can shut down the LED (light-emitting diode) backlighting by reflecting the sun’s rays to illuminate the screen, according to Toshiba.

For US$2,999, users can get a laptop powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 processor at 1.33GHz, with 2M bytes of cache and 2G bytes of RAM. It will come with Windows Vista Business OS, which is also downgradable to Windows XP Professional. The laptop includes a SuperMulti optical drive that can read and rewrite DVD and CD media, wired and wireless 802.11 a/g/n networking, Bluetooth 2.0 support and built-in safety features to protect laptop data during falls.

Toshiba said the laptop includes a specially built motherboard that can provide the same functionality of boards found in 15.4-inch laptops, but is one-third the size.

The laptop will start shipping in the third quarter this year, according to the company. The company wasn’t available to comment on worldwide availability.

I found this on Yahoo!

It’s finally here: Firefox 3, the open-source browser that I overwhelmingly recommend for all users from novice to expert, arrives on Tuesday. Here it is.

I’ve been using the final beta for a few days now, and it’s really an impressive upgrade. Some thoughts. …

Most importantly: The browser is fast, renders accurately, and (so far in my testing) doesn’t crash. Multiple tabs or windows, complex pages, lots of embedded content … Firefox 3 can handle it all with no fuss.

In fact, it actually renders some pages better than Firefox 2, specifically some pop-up forms that I regularly use in our Yahoo! publishing tool, which didn’t display with the right width under Firefox 2. With Firefox 3 they execute perfectly.

I’m still getting used to the new URL history and search system. when you start typing into the address bar, you no longer just see the beginnings of URLs in your history file. Now Firefox searches your history and your bookmarks for any text that matches what you’re typing, not just the URLs but the descriptions, too.

When I type “tech” into the URL bar, for example, I not only get popups for tech.yahoo.com and techmeme.com, but also Wired and Valleywag, because they have the word “Tech” in their site descriptions.

On one hand this is very useful, but it also clutters up the drop-down box. Having two lines for each entry instead of one also adds to the overwhelming nature of the display. Like I said, it’s got pros and cons, but I’m getting used to it slowly.

Most plug-ins work well so far. I had one lingering problem with one, not-critical, add-on that I ultimately had to disable. I’m hoping the developer patches it soon.

The interface is freshened up but is largely the same as before. Unlike IE7’s changes, you won’t have trouble finding things in the menu system or the toolbars. There are some small changes to the way text selection works (which I won’t go into here); very minor bugs that will likely be addressed in upcoming versions.

The malware prevention system really seems to work well. It took me some searching, but I finally managed to find an infected site. Rather than load the page, Firefox 3 threw up a huge, red warning page urging me not to visit. No one’s going to miss this alert.

Overall: No matter what browser you’re using, there’s really no reason not to upgrade.