Here comes IE8, just like every IE before it. Nick MacKechnie, a senior manager on the IE8 project, blogged that webmasters should get ready for IE8 by adding special IE8 tags to their websites. The irony is that the edits to HTML needed to make sites compatible with IE8 are to tell the browser that you’re making an HTML-compliant page. Basically, IE8 defaults to wanting everything the standard way, but you can tell it to handle things the Microsoft way if that’s how you’ve previously coded your site.
While we like the idea of Microsoft finally making Internet Explorer default to Web standards, it still sucks that many sites have had to support older versions of IE for a decade, making special changes, that now have to be undone.
Microsoft really needs to figure out a better way to do this. The problem was that years ago it decided that it was too powerful to adopt somebody else’s standards for HTML and made up its own. As IE browser share skyrocketed, Web designers had little choice but do things the MS way. Now that Web standard browsers are evening the score, webmasters can do things the right way.
This is all a boondoggle that reminds one of Vietnam: it likely never should have happened in the first place, but once a mess is made you have to do what you can to fix it.
Yes, I just compared Internet Explorer to the Vietnam War. Sue me.
Verizon Wireless is running a large, nation-wide 3G network. This much is known. They don’t yet have a 4G network, though we know they’re doing trials now of LTE, or Long Term Evolution, a GSM variant, but it’s not open to the public.
Reader Jonathan snapped this shot of a Verizon Wireless reseller advertising 4G service. “4G Premium Retailer,” it says. Of course it’s just a stupid ploy to get attention, but could it also be false advertising?
We think so. Jonathan says,
I called that specific store by the way and I talked to some guy and I asked him if they were doing the 4G trial and he just answered with a sarcastic no. My cousin also said that he saw some of the stores by his house with them as well.
Where is this happening? We’re going to do some digging and see if we can get some answers. But we know this: Verizon’s not selling 4G devices today.
Thanks for the tip, Jonathan!
Scienticians have developed a way to scrub CO2 out of the air we breathe, meaning global warming from carbon emissions — like that produced from flying or driving — might be neutralized. It’s not a stand-alone solution to global warming, but if the technology goes into development we might well slow it down to a manageable pace.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and get a Hummer right now, indeed gas is still over $4 a gallon in most places, but the idea that I can tell my hippy friends to shove it when I drive my BMW around means I like this a lot.
This is pretty awesome. The fine people at Notcot have dug up an old copy of Fortune magazine featuring a cover story of the fall of Steve Jobs. This was, of course, after Jobs was ousted by the Apple board and slowly began its decline into irrelevance.
Things have changed, of course, with Jobs back in charge and Apple on top, but sometimes we fans need to remind ourselves that things weren’t always this good. It’s important to know that it could all fall away again.
Looks like Microsoft is serious about this Windows 7 thing. Starting Monday, hardware makers will have to make their drivers compatible with Windows 7 as well as Vista to get that coveted “Certified for Windows Vista” badge on their gear. Seems kind of unnecessary right now, since 7 won’t be out for another couple years, but I guess they don’t want a repeat of the XP/Vista driver debacle.
I’m more surprised that they have a build of 7 that the hardware testers can use to certify their stuff. We all saw the Windows 7 video last week, but is the OS really complete enough at this point that display drivers can be written for it?
Luckily, that’s not really my problem.
We’re getting closer to the point where I’ll actually be convinced not to use my laptop as a media center. This Onkyo system has about half of what I’m looking for – it’s got a nice big LCD for displaying info it nabs from online, an 80GB hard drive, and a USB slot for loading stuff directly. It looks classy, and although the speakers are a bit anemic at 26W each, Onkyo is a good brand and I trust them to be pretty high-quality.
Problem is, with 80GB of music you need a way better interface than a D-pad – this thing needs a decent touchscreen, or the screen needs to be a detachable controller so you can control everything from across the room. And what’s up with the supported formats? MP3, PCM, and ATRAC? What about OGG and M4A, or any of the other formats to which the discerning listener might have ripped their collection? Until these problems are remedied, I can’t see myself paying ~$750 for a system like this. Good day, sir!
There isn’t enough room on my DVR, not remotely. I don’t even watch that much TV, but my hard drive is small. Sure, there are ways to hack them to make them bigger but I like to do right by my TOS agreements, so I don’t. But now that Hitachi has released the 500GB CinemaStar 3.5-inch HDDs, I’m considering it.
They’re made to run quiet, specifically for devices like set-top boxes. You want to hear Kate and Jack argue about Locke, not your hard drive spinning. The drives are also low-power and feature CoolSpin, which means it spins up faster when activated. That gets you your TV faster.
They ship in June, and at that point I’m going to have to think about upgrading my DVR or just admitting I’ll never get caught up on Galactica.
Back in the day, the cool thing to do was to modify your lower-end Radeon 9800 into a 9800Pro, or at least something like it, by essentially drawing on it with a pencil. Well, here’s a sequel that might actually apply to you.
If you have a certain kind of Geforce 9600 (like this one), all you have to do is flash the BIOS and it rejiggers the card to unlock the unused shader units and the 2 memory units that are deactivated; basically you’re adding 128MB of RAM and some extra hardware pipelines completely by software. It ends up increasing performance by quite a bit. Pretty awesome, huh? Unfortunately, the card it works on is not very common, but it’s good to know these kinds of quickie mods are still viable. Here’s the original guide in Chinese, if you like that kind of thing.
Yesterday I had a moment of panic when I dropped my main mobile phone — Helio’s Ocean — into a mug of hot, steamy coffee. It got wet. Yes, there’s irony in the name, thanks. The phone freaked out. The Ocean’s a tank, it’s taken some abuse in its time, but I’ve always kept it dry. Eventually it dried out and now it’s working fine, but if I continue wetting my phones I might want to look at the new Fujitsus for Asia.
The Fuj has a new handset — the F706i — that’s waterproof. While we’ve seen waterproof phones before, this one boasts digital TV and very fast HSDPA 3G connectivity. Yes, you can now watch porn in the pool.
We’re actually into the idea of making phones waterproof, as it’s not that hard. A rubberized casing around the entire thing should do the trick nicely. Have you ever talked on the phone in the shower? Admit it, you have.
TGDaily reports that the Atom-based Eee PC will be coming next week, but they seem rightly skeptical of the little guy. After all, at $650 it’s no longer that cheap (you could get a used MacBook for that price), and not only is the performance not really up to par but it’s a certainty that dual-core Atoms are forthcoming in just a few months so your investment in the chipset would be unwise at this point. As much as I like the Eee PC, this doesn’t seem like a winning flavor.
This isn’t for me, but my parents might be into it. It’s a CD carousel that holds up to 150 CDs. It plugs into your PC via USB and plays via iTunes or the jukebox software of your choice. It doesn’t rip them, but instead acts as a jukebox with your PC as the interface. Interesting, but I don’t get it.
We’re guessing the RIAA is sending these out as Xmas bonuses this year. And for $130, we’d rather just rip it all to our iPods.
Many of you are waiting — patiently, I might add — to find out when exactly Gears of War 2 will be released. It’s likely going to be an Xmas release, but the exact date has been unknown.
The guy who does the voice of Cole Train in the game, though, has let slip that November 16 would be a day we’d have a ship date, or could even be the ship date. That’s a week and a half before Thanksgiving, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense. We’re guessing that’s when they’ll confirm a Black Friday release, just to make things more ridiculous on that awesome, hallowed day.
I like the idea: a jacket that is wired to shock anyone who grabs it with electricity whilst keeping the wearer safe from harm, but isn’t it — practically speaking — kind of silly?
I mean, we have other deterrents that are just as effective, such as pepper spray, kung fu, and bodyguards. Do we need this kind of active clothing? What if you’re in a crowded elevator and it just goes off? And good luck getting it through a metal detector, pal.
Still, for some people this might give them some sense of security if they’re in remote places or are expecting an attack. I guess there’s nothing wrong with making a buck off the paranoid.
Bloops! Those hackers who took over comcast.com yesterday were outted by Wired today. It’s a pair of industrious fiends who go by Defiant and EBK. They took over the comcast.com DNS records, redirecting the cable giant’s traffic to their own site.
As it turns out, they were able to take over Comcast’s account at Network Solutions. They then contacted Comcast’s technical department to tell them what they’d done. Comcast hung up on them.
Angry at being treated the same as any other Comcast customer, they edited the registration to point to their own servers. They expect to be arrested for their efforts.
These guys are my kind of stoners, but let’s not mess with other people’s domain names, k?
Back in the day, a laptop’s resolution was a big deal. The transition from SVGA to XVGA screens was a big one, but now of course they come in all kinds of shapes and resolutions. And now that HD-DVD is dead and there’s a clear next-gen disk format standard you’ll be seeing a lot more Blu-ray enabled laptops this year. But what good is having an HD optical drive if your display can’t show movies at their highest resolution? Acer’s your bet.
Enter the Acer Aspire 6920-6422 notebook. Not only is it thin and light, it features a native 1080p 16-inch display so you can watch features at full HD resolutions. It’s also got 4GB RAM standard, a Core 2 Duo proc, and a generous 250GB HD.
It’s a thin monster, like an Olsen twin with HD, and we like it. It’s also not half bad looking.
Heard of Ingenic Semiconductor? Us either, but they’ve apparently started shipping a new processor for UMPCs called the Jz4740. They’re appearing in 3K’s new RazorBook 400 series UMPCs and are apparently ultra low-cost and low-power. The $299 RazorBook 400 was discussed yesterday, but we didn’t have the detail we do now. The proc is new and could — in theory — run Windows. Until we get more information, though, it’s just another mystery chip doing cool stuff for cheap.
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This is a little out of left field, but it could also be interesting. Time Warner Cable is planning on releasing a set-top box to its customers with a built-in cable modem to allow them to watch “Internt TV” on their televisions.
The thing is, there’s no additional information on what this might be. Time Warner already has set-top cable boxes with full digital and HD capabilities, so what this additional device will give customers in addition is a mystery. And why they don’t just build the capability into future standard cable boxes is as well.
We’re guessing it’ll be some sort of DRM-friendly BitTorrent streaming box, but until we get more information, we can only guess.
