technology

Another political thread? Nah back to the geek wars. Just came across this Windows Vista Beta: A lot like Mac OS X. Well no, not really. I'll deal with the whole Widget and Gadget thing first. Microsoft announced the sidebar before Apple copied Konfabulator, yes that is right they copied Konfabulator almost exactly. Microsoft's sidebar (which hosts the gadget platform) existed prior to Apple copying it, don't believe me go check out the early PDC videos....

Here are the new icons, which in typical Microsoft fashion weren't used in the public beta, just like they're holding back the new Vista sounds until RTM, d'oh! The crazy curved corner matching the crazy curved corner in the actual applications is a nice touch, makes a nice change from the boring old square icons.

Microsoft have recently released the new beta version of Internet Explorer 7 which can be downloaded here. Couple of new things I've noticed include a new add to favourites button, even the new Windows Vista build doesn't have this icon yet. FTP sites that require authentication also now functions properly, in the beta 2 build this was broken. One of the key new features however is being able to re-arrange the tab order which can be very useful sometimes....

Now we're getting somewhere. When the Beta 2 branch was forked we were only getting bug fixes, now we're back to get features on the new fork. A few things I've noticed after using the new build for a couple of hours: Aero Glass has been tweaked and looks much better. Font weight and size has been changed some what. Performance is right up there with Windows XP SP2. New icons....

The Windows Mobile 5 powered Xda Mini S, also sold as the SPV M3000, MDA Vario, K-Jam, Qtek 9100. Built by HTC and codenamed the Wizard. We'll kick things off with the specs: Screen 65k Colour Transflective LCD Touch Screen (240 x 320 Pixels) Imaging 1.3 Megapixel Camera Zoom Flash Night Mode Video Record (MPEG4) Video Player (MPEG4, H.263, Motion JPEG AVI) Video Indicator Video Download Video Calling Photo ID Contacts...

Nearly one million people cancelled their AOL accounts last quarter and it looks like AOL are now desperately trying to hang on to every customer they can. Check out the couple of videos on the article: Two weeks ago, Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his 5-year-old account—he'd heard from others in the blogosphere that AOL customer service could be awful. So he recorded the conversation with a representative named John. Here is the transcript of the conversation:...

Wow, seems like a while since I've done a technology post. Anyway Founder pointed out to me the new Apple adverts - more PC bashing of course. What always bugs me the most about these adverts is the fact Apple always brand themselves as not being a PC - in these specific adverts they've got two guys stood up, one guy in a suit trying to portray a PC, and some "...

Forty five years ago Yuri Gagarin rode a tower of fire into space, Vostok 1 propelled him into Earth orbit. Cosmonaut day became an official holiday the following year. Yuri Gagarin visiting Manchester, UK. And of course one of my favourite monuments; the Space Obelisk, built to celebrate humankind's conquest of space. It stands at over 100 meters, which is about 350 feet and was built in 1964. The guy sat in front of it is the father of space travel - the guy who thought of using multi-staged liquid fuelled rockets to reach orbit - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in Siberia in 1857, at the age of 10 he lost his hearing due to scarlet fever and was excluded from any schooling - however he educated himself, he wrote over 500 scientific papers and influenced many Soviet engineers, including Sergey Korolev who became Chief Designer of the Soviet Space program....

If you've not seen Live.com for a while I suggest you check it out again. It's really developing well - I'm sure Founder will love it as it's huge on AJAX. If they can get the performance up a bit more they may replace Google as my homepage. I just can't say no to having all my RSS feeds sat there. If they can really get the average Joe to use the feeds and other gadgets on this site I could well see it going down a storm....

I don't like people messing with me. Roodis announced his contraband network a while ago, now this seems to be like a blatant act of war, how someone could want so badly to destroy the community around the dasmirnov.net websites is beyond me. So here's my first salvo. The daFilm and daMusic Portal sites. They'll move in and cut the contraband's primary advantage out from beneath him - once his film and music sites have been destroyed, an already extensive portfolio of gaming websites will unite and utterly crush the contraband network into oblivion....