Technology

Photosynth, the online service which creates a 3D "synth" you can explore out of 2D photographs, has moved over to Silverlight for its default viewer. Formally you required a Direct3D based browser plugin to make use of it, and as such this opens up Photosynth to a much larger audience. The biggest advantage from using Silverlight is obviously embedding it in other websites, if I embedded a Photosynth with the D3D viewer - about two people would have it installed, however most people visiting this blog do have Silverlight installed....

InformationWeek have managed to prove their brainlessness continues. As they claim "IE8 Users Downgrade To Explorer 7". Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Internet Explorer 8 appears to be losing market share, even though the browser has been on the market for less than a week. As of 8:00 am Monday, IE8 -- released Thursday -- held 1.86% of the browser market, down from a high of 2.59% on Sunday, according to market watcher Net Applications....

OneOne of the bloggers on ZDnet interviewed Charlie Miller the bloke who nailed Mac OS X through Safari in seconds at the recent Pwn 2 Own contest, one of the questions asked is pretty interesting and nicely sums up the OS security situation over the last 3 or 4 years, of course you wouldn't know it reading the press or if you get your information from Apple's PR department. Why Safari?...

Internet Explorer 8 has been released for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Highly recommended, even if IE isn't your main browser grab it from here.

Like last year Apple has again fallen first in the Pwn 2 Own contest. This time just taking seconds instead of minutes like last time round. Charlie Miller won the $10,000 first prize. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome are being targeted on Windows 7 (I'd imagine build 7000), and Firefox and Safari on the current version of Mac OS X. In addition this year they're also going to be working on mobile phones such as Blackberry, iPhone and Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile based phones....

The WorldWide Telescope team has released a web client for WorldWide Telescope, written in Silverlight and currently in alpha but from my testing works quite well. It doesn't support the 3D solar system view yet, but pretty much everything else is in there, including tours. Performance isn't as good compared to the full Windows client which makes use of 3D hardware acceleration. Nevertheless it is pretty useable, and the servers at the moment don't seem to be under as much load as they were when the full client was released last year....

Internet Explorer 8 is probably going to be released very soon. So I thought I'd do a quick article on how to tidy the thing up a bit - I'm not happy with how the UI is configured out of the box, It's not as clean as IE7. This is what it looks like right off the bat: The most obvious addition is the favourites bar running along the top I'm not the world's biggest fan of this thing....

With Windows 7 Microsoft is expanding BitLocker so users can easily encrypt USB flash drives.  What does this look like?  Well it looks a bit like this: It then has a look at the drive for a few seconds and asks you how you want to unlock the drive, using either a password (8 characters minimum) or using a smart card and a PIN. It then forces you to either save the keys used for encryption or print them off, good for sticking in a safe somewhere - good idea because if you forget your password and don't know the keys your data is gone....

A new feature that WorldWide Telescope implemented in a recent release was the Cosmos view. This takes data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which is in the process of mapping the distance to a million or so galaxies. You've probably seen images like this one: Which are taken from the SDSS and similar surveys. Now however you can view the data in 3D in WorldWide Telescope. No these images don't do it justice....

Yes this thing just won't go away will it. Crippling the user experience to keep companies that are mostly a waste of space like Opera (although their mobile browsers are capable and fairly successful) in business is unacceptable. We've seen this before, when the Java VM was unbundled from Windows it caused pain, not just to a few people but hundreds of millions who were forced to go to Sun's website and dig around and find the Java runtime - sure that was slightly different to this - but the end result is the same the user experience is reduced and millions of hours are wasted....