technology

Microsoft have just released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1! You can download it from here. Seems solid so far, you can tell it to Emulate IE7 if you need a website that won't work correctly in IE8 at the moment. As IE8 will now be using standards mode by default it'll probably effect a great many websites (even the back end of the blogs here doesn't work properly in standards mode IE8), so they'll need to be updated, or use the following to tell IE8 to render in IE7 mode:...

So today is the day I've been waiting for Microsoft officially announced WorldWide Telescope. Sadly it isn't available yet for general download, but it will be sometime during the Spring. WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience....

So the government have been drafting out proposals that, at least at the moment would force Internet Service Providers to side with the big content companies, and would place sanctions on ISPs that fail to tackle piracy. I don't know who they've got putting these plans into place, but they're technically unworkable. How do you determine a packet being sent over a network contains illegal content or not? Short answer, you can't....

The number of wireless networks around here is slowly growing, there was just one insecure network a couple of years ago. I just checked now, and I can find 6 other wireless networks, there's probably more during different times of the day. The lower six networks shown here are all insecure. Three have no security what-so-ever, and the other three use WEP, which was part of the original 802.11 standard from back in the 90s and deprecated about 5 years ago as it can be broken in just a few minutes....

So my sister got a new laptop a week or two ago. I of course have the job of sorting it out, of which I'm only to happy to oblige. In the end she went for a Dell Inspiron 1720. It has Windows Vista Home Premium on it, which is somewhat annoying as I have to actually work at the machine instead of being able to use Remote Desktop - track pads always make my fingers hurt after a while, luckily I've had a wireless mouse sat unused for about a year here, so what better way to try that out....

According to MP Madeleine Moon at least, who will raise the issues with the police following several suicides. From the BBC article: Mrs Moon said she was growing increasingly worried by the appearance of so-called "memory walls" on networking sites like Bebo, where members leave messages to mark the death of a friend. I fail to see how that is a problem, or how it promotes suicide in any way. I've used this blog to post messages remembering the deaths of people I look up to....

Internet Explorer 7 is now the single most used web browser out there, (at least according to Net Applications), December marked the first month where it surpassed Internet Explorer 6. I still think it is disappointing it took this long, just over a year. Hopefully Internet Explorer 8 will be able to eclipse 7 much faster, targeting multiple browsers is annoying, but at least we can say IE6 is no longer the market leader....

Other than the small news item that Internet Explorer 8 is under development, the IE team today announced the first real details, they've said the current build of IE8 in standards mode successfully renders the Acid2 test. This means that it is more standards compliant than both Firefox and Safari. Hopefully Microsoft can find away to ensure both good standards support, as well as solid backwards compatibility and hopefully a beta version isn't too far out....

I will not be buying, nor recommending that anybody buys any more products from this company. No doubt many of my readers are aware of my long running battles with the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista, which eventually made me so fed up I blew £1600 on a new Tablet PC (without any nVidia junk in I might add). nVidia right up to the launch of Windows Vista said they would support the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista....

According to Microsoft's website, PlaysForSure is being re-branded to Certified for Windows Vista. Now PlaysForSure was created so you could see if devices would be compatible between different music stores and so on, both have the logo on and they both work together. Simple, it avoided as much lock-in as possible for a DRM system. It was a breath of fresh air from how extreme Apple are, everything of which they do is to lock you into them, and them alone....