Sunday, May 11, 2008

FOREWORD TO 20 THINGS

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FOREWORD TO 20 THINGS
any of us these days depend on the World Wide Web to bring the world’s information to our fingertips,
and put us in touch with people and events across the globe instantaneously.
These powerful online experiences are possible thanks to an open web that can be accessed by anyone through
a web browser, on any Internet-connected device in the world.
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But how do our browsers and the web actually work? How has the World Wide Web evolved into what we
know and love today? And what do we need to know to navigate the web safely and efficiently?
“20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web” is a short guide for anyone who’s curious about the
basics of browsers and the web. Here’s what you’ll find here:
First we’ll look at the Internet, the very backbone that allows the web to exist. We’ll also take a look at
how the web is used today, through cloud computing and web apps.
Then, we’ll introduce the building blocks of web pages like HTML and JavaScript, and review how their
invention and evolution have changed the websites you visit every day. We’ll also take a look at the modern
browser and how it helps users browse the web more safely and securely.
Finally, we’ll look ahead to the exciting innovations in browsers and web technologies that we believe will
give us all even faster and more immersive online experiences in the future.
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Life as citizens of the web can be liberating and empowering, but also deserves some self-education. Just as
we’d want to know various basic facts as citizens of our physical neighborhoods -- water safety, key services,
local businesses -- it’s increasingly important to understand a similar set of information about our online lives.
That’s the spirit in which we wrote this guide. Many of the examples used to illustrate the features and
functionality of the browser often refer back to Chrome, the open-source browser that we know well. We hope
you find this guide as enjoyable to read as we did to create.
Happy browsing!
The Google Chrome Team, with many thanks to Christoph Niemann for his illustrations
November 2010


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WHAT IS THE INTERNET?
OR, “YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY TCP/IP”
hat is the Internet, exactly? To some of us, the Internet is where we stay in touch with friends, get the
news, shop, and play games. To some others, the Internet can mean their local broadband providers, or
the underground wires and fiber-optic cables that
carry data back and forth across cities and oceans. Who is right?
A helpful place to start is near the Very Beginning: 1974. That was the year that a few smart computer
researchers invented something called the Internet Protocol Suite, or TCP/IP for
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short. TCP/IP created a set of rules that allowed computers to “talk” to each other and send information back
and forth.
TCP/IP is somewhat like human communication: when we speak to each other, the rules of grammar
provide structure to language and ensure that we can understand each other and exchange ideas. Similarly,
TCP/IP provides the rules of communication that ensure interconnected devices understand each other so that
they can send information back and forth. As that group of interconnected devices grew from one room to many
rooms — and then to many buildings, and then to many cities and countries — the Internet was born.
The early creators of the Internet discovered that data and information could be sent more efficiently when
broken into smaller chunks, sent separately, and reassembled. Those chunks are called packets. So when you
send an email across the Internet, your full email message is broken down into packets, sent to your recipient,
and reassembled. The same thing happens when you watch a video on a website like YouTube: the video files
are segmented into data packets that can be sent from multiple YouTube servers around the world and
reassembled to form the video that you watch through your browser.
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What about speed? If traffic on the Internet were akin to a stream of water, the Internet’s bandwidth is
equivalent to the amount of water that flows through the stream per second. So when you hear engineers talking
about bandwidth, what they’re really referring to is the amount of data that can be sent over your Internet
connection per second. This is an indication of how fast your connection is. Faster connections are now possible
with better physical infrastructure (such as fiber optic cables that can send information close to the speed of
light), as well as better ways to encode the information onto the physical medium itself, even on older medium
like copper wires.
The Internet is a fascinating and highly technical system, and yet for most of us today, it’s a user-friendly
world where we don’t even
think about the wires and equations involved. The Internet is also the backbone that allows the World Wide Web
that we know and love to exist: with an Internet connection, we can access an open, ever-growing universe of
interlinked web pages and applications. In fact, there are probably as many pages on the web today as there are
neurons in your brain, as there are stars in the Milky Way!
In the next two chapters, we’ll take a look at how the web is used today through cloud computing and web
apps.
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CLOUD
COMPUTING
OR, WHY IT’S OK FOR A TRUCK
TO CRUSH YOUR LAPTOP
odern computing in the age of the Internet is quite a strange, remarkable thing. As you sit hunched over
your laptop at home watching a YouTube video or using a search engine, you’re actually plugging into the
collective power of thousands of computers that serve all this information to you from far-away rooms distributed
around the world. It’s almost like having a massive supercomputer at your beck and call, thanks to the Internet.
This phenomenon is what we typically refer to as cloud computing. We now read the
news, listen to music, shop, watch TV shows and store our files on the web. Some of us live in cities in which
nearly every museum, bank, and government office has a website. The end result? We spend less time in lines
or on the phone, as these websites allow us to do things like pay bills and make reservations. The movement of
many of our daily tasks online enables us to live more fully in the real world.
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Cloud computing offers other benefits as well. Not too long ago, many of us worried about losing our
documents, photos and files if something bad happened to our computers, like a virus or a hardware malfunction.
Today, our data is migrating beyond the boundaries of our personal computers. Instead, we’re moving our data
online into “the cloud”. If you upload your photos, store critical files online and use a web-based email service
like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, an 18-wheel truck could run over your laptop and all your data would still safely
reside on the web, accessible from any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world.
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WEB APPS
OR, “LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE
PURSUIT OF APPINESS”
f you play online games, use an online photo editor, or rely on web-based services like Google Maps, Twitter,
Amazon, YouTube or Facebook, then you’re an active resident in the wonderful world of web apps.
What exactly is a web app, anyway? And why should we care?
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App is shorthand for an application. Applications are also called programs or software. Traditionally, they’ve
been designed to do broad, intensive tasks like accounting or word processing. In the online world of web
browsers and smart phones, apps are usually nimbler programs focused on a single task. Web apps, in particular,
run these tasks inside the web browser and often provide a rich, interactive experience.
Google Maps is a good example of a web app. It’s focused on one task: providing helpful map features
within a web browser. You can pan and zoom around a map, search for a college or cafe, and get driving
directions, among other tasks. All the information you need is pulled into the web app dynamically every time you
ask for it.
This brings us to four virtues of Web Appiness:
1. I can access my data from anywhere.
In the traditional world of desktop applications, data is usually stored on my computer’s hard drive. If I’m on
vacation and leave my computer at home, I can’t access my email, photos, or any of my data when I need it.
In the new world of web apps, my email and all my data are stored online on the web. I can get to it on a
web browser from any computer that’s connected to the Internet.
2. I’ll always get the latest version of any app.
Which version of YouTube am I using today? What about tomorrow? The answer: Always the latest. Web apps
update themselves automatically, so there’s always just one version: the latest version, with all the newest
features and improvements. No need to
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manually upgrade to a new version every time. And I don’t have to go through a lengthy install process to use
my web apps.
3. It works on every device with a web browser.
In traditional computing, some programs work only on particular systems or devices. For instance, many programs
written for a PC won’t work on a Mac. Keeping up with all the right software can be time-consuming and
costly. In contrast, the web is an open platform. Anyone can reach it from a browser on any web-connected
device, regardless of whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop, or mobile phone. That means I can use my
favorite web apps even if I’m using my friend’s laptop or a computer at an Internet cafe.
4. It’s safer.
Web apps run in the browser and I never
have to download them onto my computer. Because of this separation between the app code and my computer’s
code, web apps can’t interfere with other tasks on my computer or the overall performance of my machine. This
means that I’m better protected from threats like viruses, malware and spyware.
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HTML, JAVASCRIPT, CSS
AND MORE
OR, THIS IS NOT YOUR MOM’S AJAX
eb pages are written in HTML, the web programming language that tells web browsers how to structure
and present content on a web page. In other words, HTML provides the basic building blocks for the
web. And for a long time, those building blocks were pretty simple and static: lines of text, links and images.
Today, we expect to be able to do things like play online chess or seamlessly scroll around a map of our
neighborhood, without waiting for the entire page to reload for every chess move or every map scroll.
The idea of such dynamic web pages began
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with the invention of the scripting language JavaScript. JavaScript support in major web browsers meant that web
pages could incorporate more meaningful real-time interactions. For example, if you’ve filled out an online form
and hit the “submit” button, the web page can use JavaScript to check your entries in real-time and alert you
almost instantly if you had filled out the form incorrectly.
But the dynamic web as we know it today truly came to life when XHR (XMLHttpRequest) was introduced
into JavaScript, and first used in web applications like Microsoft Outlook for the Web, Gmail and Google Maps.
XHR enabled individual parts of a web page — a game, a map, a video, a little survey — to be altered without
needing to reload the entire page. As a result, web apps are faster and more responsive.
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Web pages have also become more expressive with the introduction of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS
gives programmers an easy, efficient way to define a web page’s layout and beautify the page with design
elements like colors, rounded corners, gradients, and animation.
Web programmers often refer to this potent combination of JavaScript, XHR, CSS and several other web
technologies as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). HTML has also continued to evolve as more
features and improvements are incorporated into new versions of the HTML standard.
Today’s web has evolved from the ongoing efforts of all the technologists, thinkers, coders and organizations
who create these web technologies and ensure that they’re supported in web browsers like Internet Explorer,
Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. This interaction between web technologies and browsers has made the web
an open and friendly construction platform for web developers, who then bring to life many useful and fun web
applications that we use daily.
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HTML5
OR, IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NO

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY

IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY
You ever watch the movie Spiderman?
Certainly, it is.
There are interesting stories about Spider-Man stories, especially about the net or white fibers coming out of the hands of Peter Parker.
Is a scientist from Eastman Kodak that is Harry Coover, around World War II. At that time he did not intend to make glue, but the imagination wants to make synthetic spider Sawang. Sawang spider, though flexible, is known to have the strength of steel. So people try to imitate it until now. Now, instead of getting a spider's web, the liquid, methyl-2-cyanoacrylate, even making all the things that touched attached. Then, in 1955, the Kodak brand to market with Flash Glue.
When the Vietnam war, Eastman Kodak initiated the idea for this glue can be used to close the wound. So no need to be bandaged so as to close the wound. Team doctors also use and quite successful. Then developed a new variant, 2-octyl cyanoacrylate for medical needs with safer Dermabond brand. (Koran Tempo, 24 August 2006). For in Indonesia itself, the super glue is known by the brand Alteco made from Singapore.
One can innovate and produce a product because one of them through the process of imagination. Imagination gave birth to creativity, apart from Harry Coover above, many examples of people who succeeded because of the results of his imagination. Imagine if Alexander Graham Bell did not imagine at the time of his life then maybe we do not yet know whose name the phone, let alone mobile phone or email. Imagine if Thomas Edison in his lifetime could not use his imagination so far we have not been able to enjoy the bright lights.
For the imagination to bear an innovation we need an action to make it happen.
If imagination is not accompanied by action is tantamount to a mere daydream.
Our weakness as an employee is still low power of imagination, this all is not entirely the fault of the individual itself, but the current system that sometimes makes one a dull imagination. For example an administrator who is compartmentalized with existing work and the dateline which is waiting to be fulfilled, to make it work on targets that have been determined, because if it does not fit the target will get a penalty or a reprimand from his superiors.
In training Indomaret store clerk who had just passed with the headline productivity, I had invited his fellow clerk to innovate for something that can improve productivity for themselves and also productivity salesman for his shop.
I illustrate with country chicken egg products sold in stores expirednya Indomaret that period for 2 weeks. If there are eggs that have been in stores for more than one week but not two weeks what should be done by a clerk for the eggs quickly sold out and no foul. Some salesman said "50% Discount aja pak", which means margins will come down and store the rest just stay quiet because they do not know what to do. Then I continued, "Why do not you ever think to make boiled eggs, or egg / omelette then diwrapping sold for the same price, so our loss will be smaller." They said, "Father of thinking that just weird, ordinary aja deh, sir."
The problem we are as an employee because we never imagining the weird, such as a store clerk who always run the SOP that are already in the store, an officer who is always working on the administration of every day as if tida forever, whereas people who are successful are always imagining exceed lines so that the dreams of others can produce an extraordinary result.
As a boss, rarely do we encourage our subordinates to use their imagination a bit 'crazy', we usually ask our subordinates to think that never get out of trouble everyday job. And crazy ideas sometimes generate new innovations which are needed also in solving the problems of work that might be solved better than conventional methods thus productivity will increase.
Never be afraid to use their imagination, because then we become full of creative people with new innovations.
Do not ever hung up on routines because "the main killer of creativity is routine."
Of imagination gave birth to innovation and creativity that led to increased productivity.
Good creative and good luck!
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ALB adaptive creation of a variety of sources