Rest in Peace, Netscape
The Netscape Blog has officially announced today the end of an era. As of February 1, 2008, there will be no further releases of Netscape from AOL and it sounds like the small team working on it there has been closed down. That means no security updates for Netscape users and no update to Gecko 1.9 when Firefox 3 is releases this coming Spring.
The announcement states:
While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.
Q: What will this mean?
A: We’ll continue to release security patches for the current version of the browser, Netscape Navigator until February 1, 2008. After February 1, there will be no more active product support for Navigator 9, or any previous Netscape Navigator browser. This includes Netscape v1-v4.x, Netscape v6, Netscape v7 Suite, Netscape Browser v8, and Netscape Navigator/Messenger 9.
This is the end of an era. I think it is safe to say that most of us believe that the torch was passed to Mozilla years ago and many of us hardly think of the fact that a Netscape browser still technically exists. On the other hand, there has been a Netscape Navigator since the early days of the Web. This is the first time in 13 years that there won’t be an actual “Netscape Navigator” out there since the initial 0.9 release in late 1994. Navigator has been a shadow of its former self for years but I still know plenty of people here and there that run it, for brand recognition as much as anything else. On a positive note, they do recommend people go and install Firefox and continue down the road with us.
Let us have a moment of silence for the final passing of Netscape (or perhaps it is time for a nice wake).
Talk on the Shamatha Project by B. Alan Wallace
B. Alan Wallace did a talk this last Wednesday in Santa Barbara on the Shamatha Project, its history, and some of its initial results, now that the first cycle of it has concluded. Wallace is a well known Tibetan Buddhist author and translator who is the head of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.
The Shamatha Project is a controlled study of extended meditation practice done in groups of thirty over periods of three months in secluded retreats. Shamatha is a standard form of Buddhist meditation using focused attention and is often translated as “Calm Abiding.” The study describes itself as follows:
Recent studies of the effects of meditation practices on stress management and emotional stability and of meditation as a therapeutic agent have produced exciting results. But the studies conducted to date have been short-term and have generally used non-intensive interventions. We have engaged a team of talented neuroscientists and psychologists in a longer-term study, with state-of-the-art methods, to examine the effects of intensive meditation training on attention, cognitive performance, emotion regulation, and health. This effort, the Shamatha Project, has garnered the endorsement of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and initial funding from three private foundations, The Fetzer Institute, the Hershey Family Foundation, and the Yoga Research and Education Foundation. The training methods, taught by Dr. Alan Wallace, will include deep, intensive meditation training that fosters attentional vividness and stability as well as compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The expected benefits will include greater attentional control and increased ability to regulate emotions and apply prosocial values and motives.
The questions we address include: What measurable changes in attentional ability occur as a function of intensive meditation training? What are the neural correlates of these changes and the range of their consequences? Is it true, as Buddhist contemplatives claim, that improvements in the voluntary control of attention and associated improvements in attention systems in the brain make it easier to recognize and overcome negative emotions, maintain resilience in the face of stress, and improve relationships with other people? Do the changes persist after meditation trainees return from the retreat experience to the cacophony of everyday life in a modern society?
Google Video has an introductory talk available by Wallace on the Shamatha Project that I’ve added below:
The more recent talk on December 19, 2007 discussed the goals of the project, the history behind it and some of the preliminary findings from it. This is the first time that this kind of data has been gathered in a controlled environment working with people without a previous background in meditation.
You can view the slides or listen to the mp3 in five parts on the page for the talk. I have enclosed an mp3 of the talk with all of the parts joined below for playback or download but it is an hour and a half long as one file. It is definitely worth listening to if you are interested in the intersection of meditation, consciousness studies, and science.
The Shamatha Project - Unlocking the Power of the focused Mind [1:32:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadDiverse Mythologies in the Media
Earlier today, I heard a story that was on NPR a week ago. It was about Virgin Comics, which is a comic book company based in Bangalore, India. The NPR story is online (or you can listen to it). I offer a short excerpt below:
…But in a building on a quiet residential street downtown, an army of Indian animators is working to export their culture to the rest of the world. Their source material: The elaborate pantheon of Hindu mythology.
“In every state of India we’ve got, like, about a hundred different gods,” says Neha Bajaj, an editor at the fledgling Virgin Comics. “‘Cause everybody believes in a different god; they’ve got their own idol, and every idol is given its own name in every village. It’s vast — and it’s amazing!”
This use of Indian mythological material is what drives the work of Virgin Comics. They have comics such as “Ramayan 3392 A.D.“, which is based on the Indian epic, the Ramayana, but recast as a Good versus Evil post-apocalyptic story. Other titles include “Devi,” “The Sadhu,” and “India Authentic.” All of these tell stories based on Indian mythological and philisophical themes, even if reinterpreted into typical comic book idiom and format. “India Authentic” is actually a series of one-shot comics that retell specific bits of India mythology.
One of the executives for Virgin Comics (quoted in Wikipedia) has also stated:
“I have always felt that a culture is sustained and nurtured by its myths. Mythical themes influence our behavior and even our habits of consumption. Myth encapsulates the collective imagination, the collective dream, the collective aspirations of society. We are in need of new myths as we move into a global culture. The super heroes of tomorrow will be cross-cultural and transcend nationalistic boundaries. They will provide the raw material for a new imagination that will take us across the seas of space, time and beyond. I am excited about participating in the creative aspects of the comic project because I see an opportunity to bring to our society a message that goes beyond the narrow boundaries of nationalism, and invites them to a domain of awareness where we experience our universality and hopefully, go beyond racism, ethnocentrism, bigotry, prejudice, and hatred. The new super heroes will be hybrids of all cultures helping us dream infinite possibilities and actualize our highest potential.”
There is an interview, by Comic Book Resources, with Deepak Chopra, one of the three founders of the company, that is worth reading as well. (Yes, that Deepak Chopra…)
I have noticed that Virgin Comics has an account on Youtube and offers “trailers” for a variety of their comics. Below is one for “The Sadhu,” which focuses on some obvious themes drawn from India:
I find all of this quite interesting and refreshing compared to the constant rehashing of old and tired themes that one often sees in most comics or even other media. This is not an entirely unexpected development. As an example from outside of comics, Ian McDonald wrote his award winning science fiction novel, “River of Gods,” and set it in a version of India 50 years from now, for example. As the world grows more diverse and economies (and the power that goes with them) develop, I expect that the two billion plus people of India and China to have moe and more of an impact on popular culture. Simply by sheer numbers, one would expect that this would be the case but it is also to be expected because both India and China have rich and diverse cultures. There are traditions of philosophy, spirituality, mythology, literature, and other art that extend back millennia. There is no reason to except that cultures that constitute a third of the people in the world are simply going to consume the output of the West and I would expect that they have a lot to offer.
Not everyone reading this is, I expect, a comic book fan. I’ve been a fan of comics since childhood but have grown tired of what Warren Ellis refers to as the “Underwear Perverts” end of comics (super heroes in tights) over time. The medium is a rich one though and it is not limited to simple super heroes. I hope that work continues to come out of Asia (and other parts of the world) that is influenced by these cultures.
All original work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.