The alleged problem: The new transmission method uses a channel currently only employed by a handful of applications, like gaming and VoiP. With P2P traffic flooding that transmission line, users' Skype calls or World of Warcraft sessions could get interrupted amidst the P2P noise, the Register supposes.

Hogwash, says BitTorrent. The company tells the Industry Standard it's trying to implement a "performance neutral" change intended to reduce network congestion. (You can follow the technical debate in greater detail at Slashdot.)

So what will happen? Internet providers don't have the option of blocking BitTorrent traffic: Comcast (CMCSA) tried that once and the FCC pressured them to stop. (And the incoming Obama administration seems even less disposed to Internet filtering/blocking than the current one.) That leaves another option: more download caps for bandwidth hogs, which Comcast has already rolled out, and other providers are testing.

See Also:
Comcast's Diet For Bandwidth Hogs: A 20-Minute Timeout
Comcast, Slapped By FCC, Expands Testing New Tech To Slow Down Your Internet

It’s a long road to a victory in the browser wars. Just ask Firefox. The open source browser which launched in 2004 just cracked the 20 percent threshold of the market share for November, according to Net Applications, pushing it a step closer but still miles away from IE.

Recently a few new players have also thrown their hats in the ring, including Google with its much-hyped Chrome and the lesser known, Mozilla-based social web browser Flock, which released its 2.0 version this past October. But do these newcomers even stand a chance?

The Basics

Firefox is gaining ground for good reason: it’s simple, reliable and secure. Its tabbed browsing led to a similar remodel in IE and it has a slew of add-ons that give it a leg up over the competition. It’s slowly becoming the new standard with a steady audience, and that will be hard to beat anytime soon. And its open source platform leaves room for alternatives and experimental niche browsers like Flock.

Flock 2.0 is basically a Firefox with a lot of perks and pre-installed add-ons for those heavy into social networking.  Think of it as a FriendFeed of the browser world, which brings all of your friends from 23 various networks together in a sidebar. It is also one of the first browsers to incorporate media feeds for photos and videos.  Flock is all about sharing what you find on the web as you surf, and it allows you to accomplish this pretty easily by dragging and dropping them either into an email or onto a friend.

Chrome is the polar opposite of Flock, and its big advantage is that it’s even simpler than Firefox, or any other browser out there right now.  The search bar is also integrated into the address bar, which seems to be the wave of the future, at least for those who swear by Google search and don’t need any bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Chrome’s only available for PCs at the moment.

Usability

Chrome wins hands down on getting the job done.  It’s quick and painless with a clear focus of searching for information using Google’s engine.  Dynamic tabbed browsing is a staple now, and if anything crashes, only that tab will go down, not your entire session, which is nice. But if you want a richer web browsing experience stick with Firefox or Flock.  There’s also no easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds from the search bar as there is with Firefox.

Flock can feel a bit overwhelming at times with all of the sidebars of information, but once you get everything set up and get the hang of it, it’s pretty convenient and preferable to keeping a million tabs open for sites like Twitter and Facebook. The drag and drop interface is great.  When you just want to email a YouTube video or picture it’s much easier than copying any URLs, although it does also seem a bit too easy to share something that you might not want shared.

The only other problem with the social networks is that you can’t really fit all of that functionality into a sidebar.  It’s a good way of consolidating friends, but it’s more like a giant address book than anything else. Simple things like posting tweets are a bit confusing, with no clear box for entering in text. When a friend adds content, however, it will open up the profile in the main browser in full view, so you still need to go back to the source.

Speed

Despite the extra features, Flock is surprisingly just as fast as Chrome or Firefox, at least on a medium grade PC.  Looks like they’ve improved upon this concern in the latest release. And Chrome seems to have Firefox beat in this category but the difference isn’t anything drastic.

Privacy

Incognito — aka “porn mode” –  is the new way to surf, as every browser is picking up on this private surfing option that Safari first initiated.

Chrome has faced some privacy concerns at launch with its Omnibox monitoring and recording too much information, but this can all be prevented by changing the default settings and going Incognito.

Expandability

Chrome doesn’t support any extensions or add-ons yet, so Firefox still dominates in this area.  But if you are looking for simple, you probably don’t want much more than Chrome already offers.

Final Thoughts

Firefox is here to stay, but there will always be a long tail of niche alternatives like Chrome and Flock.  When Chrome moves into Mac realm it could pick up some market share from Safari.  Flock will be there for social network junkies who want to try something new, but the first step to making Flock mainstream will be for more of the social networks themselves to go mainstream. Twitter is on track, but still has a long way to go before it’s a household name. If you’re only on Facebook or MySpace, you probably don’t need to worry about the extra sidebars and features.

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Flock Gets a New Boss, Flock 1.0 Coming
Flock Public Beta Now Live
How Can Flock’s Social Browser Play Into the “Open” Movement?
Flock’s Social Browser 1.0 Has Finally Arrived
More is More: Flock 2.0
Flock CEO Jumps Ship
Anxious About Private Browsing in Firefox? Try the Latest Build

Reading the come-on to prospective entrants provides some insight into the pressures biotech and pharma generally are facing these days to impress potential investors, analysts and the scientific community (from whence comes the brainpower it needs for survival’s sake):

“Take advantage of this opportunity to showcase your organization’s efforts and talents, and contribute to the industry’s broader knowledge base.

EARLY BIRD DEADLINE (No Fee): December 18, 2008
FINAL DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: January 21, 2009

Benefits of participation:

* Gain Peer Recognition: Spotlight the talent of your team, and position your organization as a thought leader, among an elite group of life science professionals.
* Heighten Visibility: Use creative positioning to add another layer of credibility in the industry. Entries, nominees and especially winners receive recognition at the Gala Dinner, in widely-distributed press releases, in the Best Practices issue of Bio-IT World magazine, as well as continued coverage on Bio-ITWorld.com and in the Best Practices Compendium of entries.
* Leverage Exposure: Showcase your expertise and unique solutions, and use the exposure as a conduit to valuable connections, investors, sales leads, job candidates, and other external audiences.

Well, it is working with me so far!! I get the magazine and there is always something interesting about how modern science is conducted and the results disseminated.

It was interesting to read what fields are covered in competition:

* Basic Research & Biological Research: Disease pathway research, applied and basic research
* Drug Discovery & Development: Compound-focused research, drug safety
* Clinical Trials & Research: Trial design, eCTD
* Translational Medicine: Feedback loops, predictive technologies
* Personalized Medicine: Responders/non-responders, biomarkers
* IT & Informatics: LIMS, High Performance Computing, storage, data visualization, imaging technologies
* Knowledge Management: Data mining, idea/expertise mining, text mining, collaboration, resource optimization
* Health-IT: ePrescribing, RHIOs, EMR/PHR
* Manufacturing & Bioprocessing: Mass production, continuous manufacturing

I decided to take a look at what was showcased in 2008 and perusing many of the articles linked to is a good way to see how big pharma and big government science are adapting to the world of Science 2.0.

Here is an interesting article for example: Connecting the Cancer Community caBIG Time

Now this is an ambitious undertaking that I had not heard about before. Here is some of what I read here:

caBIG™ stands for the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™. caBIG™ is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to share data and knowledge. The components of caBIG™ are widely applicable beyond cancer as well.

The mission of caBIG™ is to develop a truly collaborative information network that accelerates the discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

The goals of caBIG™ are to:

* Connect scientists and practitioners through a shareable and interoperable infrastructure
* Develop standard rules and a common language to more easily share information
* Build or adapt tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with cancer research and care.

Since its inception, caBIG™ has committed to the following cornerstones:

* Federated: caBIG™ software and resources are widely distributed, interlinked, and available to everyone in the cancer research community, but institutions maintain local control over their own resources and data.
* Open-development: caBIG™ tools and infrastructure are being developed through an open, participatory process. caBIG™ leverages existing resources whenever possible, rather than building new tools in every case.
* Open-access:caBIG™ resources are freely obtainable by the cancer community to ensure broad data-sharing and collaboration.
* Open-source: The caBIG™ source code is available to view, alter, and redistribute.

Whoa! That is a pretty sweeping mandate and game plan! This is one heck of a gargantuan undertaking, but when you read about the dynamo behind it and look at how far it has come in a few years you start to have real faith in big government science and realize that within massive research organizations there are some damn impressive people who want to take a machete to stultifying processes and stodgy mindsets that have unnecessarily impeded scientific progress for too long. One such intellectual powerhouse is profiled thus:

Kenneth H. Buetow, Ph.D., is the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology and the Director of the NCI Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB). As Director of the NCICB, Dr. Buetow oversees coordination and deployment of informatics in support of NCI research initiatives and the Center’s participation in the evaluation and prioritization of the NCI’s biomedical informatics research portfolio. Dr. Buetow initiated the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™ (caBIG™) pilot project and oversees its activities.

Go, Dr. Buetow, go! Keep the good work! The hope, apparently, is to create a model in the case of cancer that will engender like networks throughout medicine. A worthy, noble goal.

By contrast, to the culture of openness Dr. Buetow exemplifies here is a case of really bad marketing. As I write this column, I am clicking around some of the links in the original Bio-IT World article. I wanted to see to check out what sorts of conferences were advertised for those in the biomedical field. I was rather intrigued by the idea of writing here about the 4th Annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress. But to get a brochure, you have to register — give me a break! How lame is that?

And then to compound the image of troglodyte thinking and the utter incapacity to grasp the revolution that is Web 2.0 that healthcare IT already has in the rest of the tech world, here is the wording on the press page.

“World Congress press credentials are available to full-time editorial staff writers employed by a trade publication, mainstream media outlet (newspaper, radio, TV, etc.), or online magazines. Freelance writers or contributing editors may request press credentials if the event is being covered for a specific publication.”

Grrrrrrrr. That pretty much excludes tech bloggers who produce some of the best coverage of IT around. If I were in charge of a major tech conference, I would not hire Patrick Golden to be my director of communications. But then I am just a little tech blogger and he has bigger fish to fry. But dissing the tech blogosphere is not the act of a smart person in the age of Web 2.0. No wonder the bright young minds of tech give healthcare a pass so very often–much to my continuing dismay, as someone who works in healthcare.

Stuff Tech 1 from Stuff Tech on Vimeo.

This is ace. James Jobs and Louis Mirra are junior video podcasters who know what they like and know how to tell the world about it.

Things I like about Tech Stuff Podcast episode 1:

• it’s short. Too many podcasts are so full of themselves that they insist on waffling on and on and on about rubbish. James and Louis don’t do any mucking about, they say what they want to say and then STOP. This is good
• it’s got Cyberduck in it.
• it’s made by kids
• it’s more watchable than most podcasts made by adults
• these lads are naturals in front of a camera

Things I don’t like about Tech Stuff Podcast:

• the music. But I’m 38 and I can remember when Billy Bragg was cutting edge, what would I know?

Things that concern me about Tech Stuff Podcast:

• Louis openly offers Vista help to the world. Does he have any idea what he’s letting himself in for?

Have your kids made a rockin’ tech podcast recently?

Pentagon is hiring experts to help them create the perfect iRobots of the future – machines that kill for a purpose and have some sort of laws embedded in their DNA’s to not commit war crimes like humans do. USA has hired Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University, who is the author of a recent book titled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Dr Allen would be advising US military on a $4 billion research program aiming to create smart “autonomous systems” for US military.

According to The Daily Telegraph:

He [Colin Allen] told The Daily Telegraph: “The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?”

Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants.

Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech university, who is working on software for the US Army has written a report which concludes robots, while not “perfectly ethical in the battlefield” can “perform more ethically than human soldiers.”

He says that robots “do not need to protect themselves” and “they can be designed without emotions that cloud their judgment or result in anger and frustration with ongoing battlefield events”.

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Twitter Classification Script for Greasemonkey

One of the most effective ways of quickly gauging the quality of someone you discover on Twitter (maybe you got a notice that they were following you, for instance), is their follower count.  Now almost every account grows its followers over time, so the ratio of following to followers can be a nice metric.  Michael Klier of Splitbrain created a really neat script for Greasemonkey that displays the ratio above each profile you visit.

There is a scale to determine just how good each user is in terms of their “crowdsourced” quality.  If a user is following a lot of other users and has very few followers, the label at the top will tell you that they are a spammer.  If the converse is true, they are a “twittercaster.”  You can use the script to set goals for yourself or simply add a little more information to the profiles of those you are following.

Twuffer - The Twitter Buffer

Sometimes you’re sitting at your computer and think “Man, I need to send some tweets out today, but this is the only time I’ll be at the terminal.”  Well if you don’t want to spam out your entire day’s tweets in a single burst, try Twuffer.  Twuffer provides a kind of buffer for your tweets so you can spread out your updates.

Also, it can be programmed to send out tweets hourly, weekly, or on any date in the future.  The interface is slick and Ajaxy so it’s a nice user experience.  It stores your personal preferences in a cookie (I believe), so keep that in mind.  You will be asked for your password, by the way, so if that freaks you out, Twuffer might not be the one for you.  It is required for the API though, so it’s not their fault.

I love how one of the suggested uses is “appear to never sleep.”

iTweet

I really like iTweet.  Talk about slick interfaces, this Twitter rehash has it ALL.  The standard tweeting functions are all there, but they are based on an Ajax system so everything flows smooth as silk.  Links and @replies are linkified, but so are hash codes, for easy searching.  In fact, the search feature is very well done.  It doesn’t even require a page-load.  Retweeting, favoriting, and @replying all have their own buttons.  Another nice feature is a feed of all your followers, so you can catch up with some of the people you may not want to follow full-time.

One word of caution.  Each time you “do” something on iTweet, the server has to call Twitter’s servers and it uses up one of your API requests.  There is a handy counter on the front panel to keep track, but you’ll be amazed how a little bit of hardcore twittering will use up all your calls.  Don’t worry too much though, they reset at a regular interval (every 30 minutes at the moment).

Twitt(url)y

With the advent of URL shorteners like TinyURL, a lot of links are obscured in Twitter until you click them.  This unique service seeks to alleviate some of the irritation shortened URLs cause.

Simply enter any user’s name onto the end of this address (my own address, “loyaleagle,” is a placeholder and a preview) and you’ll see a reworked list of everything they have EVER linked to.  The page layout is superb and there each link’s title has been retrieved from the page it goes to.

You can also see which links have got a lot of attention recently and who linked to them.  It’s almost (dare I say it?) the Digg of Twitter!  I mean there is an obvous social bookmarking aspect to it, you can tweet any link with the click of a button, and each link has a very comprehensive history of it’s use throughout the entire history of Twitter.  Don’t underestimate this one!

Mr.Tweet

This last webapp is a new one to me.  I stuck it on here because it has a nice, clean interface (in fact this whole list faired pretty well in that respect) and a simple function.

Mr. Tweet is a Twitter bot that follows you after you follow it.  Once you do so, it begins to analyze your history and followers.  Once it is ready, it messages you.  Mr. Tweet offers up a list of people in your extended network that you might consider following as well as people who are following you that deserve a second look (assuming you gave them a first one).

What I really like about Mr. Tweet is the added data about each user.  It shows not only their follower count and such, but also if they are likely to reply to non-followers and if they typically follow people who follow them.  When you are trying to grow your account, these are excellent statistics to know.  Better yet, Mr. Tweet will show you quite a few posts from their feed so that you can preview their content without having to click through (which can become quite tedious).  Try it out and if it doesn’t do much for you, unfollow and you’re done with it.  So simple!

There are so many new Twitter applications popping up every day, it can be hard to keep on top of them.  Recently we’ve got a few people saying we talk about Twitter apps too much.  If you like lists like this one, let us know (in the comments)!  We’ll probably be scaling them back a bit otherwise. We really do listen to you guys, we swear.

Oh one last thing, if you can spare a follow (don’t want to mess up your ratio!), here is MakeUseOf’s Twitter account and here is my lowly Twitter account. Follow the rest of the MakeUseOf authors as well if you like!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

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Voice Search plus the First Speech Recognition mashup to Facebook, Myspace, iTunes. Voice Tech Group, Inc. announces that in it’s first few months of availability more than 40,000 people have downloaded the free version of tazti (pronounced “tasty”) speech recognition.

tazti is the first Speech Recognition software to include robust voice search of more than 16 important web sites and search engines as well as speech recognition navigation of Facebook and  Myspace and voice control of the iTunes music player. In addition users can create their own speech commands, search their bookmarks by voice and search the iTunes music store by voice.

Voice Search: tazti enables a user to “talk to their PC” to perform searches, local searches and “spellsearches” of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ASK, AOL Video, Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and even Google Finance (for stock market data). tazti also allows users to voice search the USA government information website  usasearch.gov. Users can also search the iTunes music store by voice.

tazti mashup to Facebook and Myspace: tazti enables a user to log into and navigate Facebook and Myspace “by talking to their PC.” Speech commands include: “go Facebook profile”, “go Facebook friends”, go Facebook inbox”, “go Myspace home”, “go Myspace mail”, “go Myspace music forums”, “go Myspace favorites”  plus 27 other speech commands.

tazti mashup to iTunes: tazti enables a user to control the iTunes music player application when it is installed on their PC, via 35 speech commands.  Speech commands for iTunes includes changing tracks, searching  iTunes music store and controlling most music player capabilities, all by talking to your PC.

Create your own Speech Commands: tazti allows users to create their own speech commands and associate a web page, file or program to each new speech command. Your new speech commands can be anything from “Who’s the boss now?” to “Play Star Trek trailer”. Use your creativity. Many users create speech commands to play their favorite music tracks when they speak the name!

Available from http://www.tazti.com, tazti speech recognition software is a free download.

tazti Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1tt_aeIAM8

tazti AltSearch Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Po6PPdMtQ

tazti German Video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-7OUZCkZrE

Road warriors using a notebook PC, Mobile Internet Device or Ultra Mobile PC can use  the speech recognition  voice search - local search capability and other features in tazti wherever they can get connectivity. They can search for a coffee shop in a particular city or zipcode or for anything else on the internet, by voice.

tazti versions are available for Windows Vista and  XP, XP Pro, & XP Tablet operating systems. tazti can also be installed on  Intel based Macs running Parallels or other similar desktop environments.