“SMART” CITY FOR 2022 WORLD CUP

If you’re trying to create the perfect 21st-century city, it helps to start with a blank slate. Even if that slate is a sweltering strip of sand.
That’s essentially what the government of Qatar and its developers are trying with Lusail, an ambitious planned city on 28 square miles of waterfront desert along the Persian Gulf. Now under construction, the compact city will contain a commercial district, a lagoon, four islands, two marinas, an upscale shopping mall, a hospital, a zoo, two golf courses and housing for some 250,000 people.It also will feature an 86,000-seat soccer stadium, surrounded by a moat, that’s expected to host the final game of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Residents and visitors will get around via a light-rail network, a water-taxi system and a network of underground pedestrian tunnels. And all the energy, communications and transportation systems will be run with the help of computers from a single command center, making Lusail a “smart” city that can automatically adapt to changing traffic and weather conditions.
Funded by the oil-rich Qatari government, Lusail can offer innovative solutions to urban problems because it’s being built from the ground up. For example, the city’s gas, electric and water lines are being laid out in an underground network of tunnels, allowing for maintenance work that won’t disrupt buildings, roads or people above.
The city will be fitted with a network of surveillance cameras, monitored around the clock, to keep streets safe.
Anchoring the city’s skyline will be four commercial towers, up to 75 stories each. These will be surrounded by five-star hotels, an entertainment district and the Marina Mall, a retail palace measuring more than 600,000 square feet.
Scheduled to open in 2017, the mall is a cluster of five interconnected pods, shaped like giant boulders, with cantilevered white roofs to repel the heat. Its architects want the space to evoke desert canyons. A canal runs through it, and waterfalls splash throughout.
The scope and design of the mall echoes the grand, futuristic vision for Lusail itself. It is a very ambitious and optimistic plan; it’s a plan that has helped land Qatar the World Cup!
Which Browser is Best?
Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

Today’s Windows Web browser choices are fast, secure and compliant with new Web standards. The products most people are likely to have heard of—Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox also sport trim, clear interfaces.

But each browser has its own appeal and unique features. Microsoft Internet Explorer excels at graphics hardware acceleration, as you’ll see in the benchmark results in the reviews linked below. It’s also the only 64-bit program of the lot, and the only one that includes powerful Tracking Protection against site code that tracks your browsing activity.

Google’s Chrome exceeds other browsers in cutting-edge technologies like voice response and instant page loading for search. Firefox is known for its extensions that let you customize the browser beyond what’s possible in the others. Other innovations include its clever Panorama bookmark. A couple of lesser-known players—Opera and Maxthon—also have a lot to offer. Opera has been around since the early days of the Web, and it is now distinguished for two things.

First is its Speed Dial start page of tile links. This page not only gives easy access to frequently used sites, but it can also even display live-updated content from said sites. The second is its Off-Road mode, which reduces webpage data by sending it compressed from Opera’s cache servers. This can save you money on metered data connections.

Finally, and perhaps most extra-jammed of all, is the least-known of our browser candidates—Maxthon. A slew of tools like media download, screen capture, and integrated cloud services are just of few of this China-made browser’s goodies. And it includes both Internet Explorer’s and Webkit’s page-rendering engines for extra compatibility.

Despite how excellent these browsers have gotten, website consumption is such a complex matter these days that every one of them will encounter particular sites that won’t display correctly reasons, it’s always a good idea to have more than one browser installed.

So while no one browser will be perfect for all your Web needs, you still have several excellent choices. It’s just a matter of deciding what’s most important to you.

 

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