Today is the 40th anniversary of Gordon Moore's famous law that stipulated that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would grow exponentially. Essentially saying that processor speeds would double every 18 months to two years. And for four decades this had held true — and Intel estimates that it should for another couple of years before they start running into theoretical limits. Alternatives to silica based transistors have been popping up, such as carbon nano-tubes, molecular adders and others that while promising probably won't make it into any sort of commercial production. (At least not outside the US gov't ;P)

I for one look forward to the day when we are able to break free of our traditional computer model and explore an entirely different paradigm for mechanical computation.

This week is a busy week in browser town. There are new versions or updates available for Opera, Safari and Firefox.

• Opera — release of new version 8. This new version boasts a number of improvements and it took me quite a while to get it downloaded today because the demand is so high.

• Safari — updated with the recent release of OS X 10.3.9 to version 1.3. According to David Hyatt, there are a number of improvements which change the rendering to make it faster and more like it will be in version 2.0 due out with Tiger in a week and a half. One of the things I noticed about it so far is that it now handles CSS colouring of <form> elements. They also changed the shortcut key for viewing the source which is kind of annoying. I also read today that there is an issue with this new version of Safari with Java apps, so I imagine that a fix for that will be out soon — probably in the guise of a security update.

• Firefox — A security fix discussed at The Register. I guess there is some trouble in paradise, but as usual, there is a swift response. This new version is 1.0.3 and is merely a bugfix release.

Dan over at SimpleBits posted an interesting article about jockeying for elbow room on an airplane. The post has diagrams as well and some of the comments include other diagrams. An amusing read. :)