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Get IE 8 Beta 1 from Microsoft Now!

Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web

Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2.

download-internet-explorer-8

Here are the download links for IE8 mentioned on the Microsoft IE8 Readiness website:

This release is essentially for people who want to make sure their websites or web applications do not break with the upcoming release of IE 8 that contains some key changes.

Update: The links for IE8 downloads are giving a 404 error at the moment, hopefully just a temporary glitch.

Tags: ie8, internet explorer 8, microsoft, public beta

Read more | Comments (0) | March 5th, 2008

Practice What You Preach: New NIN Album on BitTorrent

Posted by James | Filed under Music, Play, Web

Ghosts_i-iv

It’s not like we doubted him, but Trent Reznor really meant it when he said that he hates the way the music industry operates and that he encourages sharing of his music on the Internet.

Nine Inch Nails have put up the first volume of their album ‘Ghosts’ on torrent sites, under a creative commons license. If you want to the whole package of the multi-volume album (36 tracks; ~ 2 hours!) though, you can go over to NIN’s official site and download it for $5. You can also order a 2xCD box set for a mere $10, "deluxe limited edition package" for $70, and you can get an "ultra-deluxe limited edition package" for $300.

Let me just stop here for a moment and say, if there’s one album I’m gonna buy this year (I usually go to concerts and buy t-shirts as I feel the band profits more directly from this), it’s going to be this one (just ordered the $10 package). Finally, you get really great value for money, and you get a fantastic number of options which cater to every pocket. I’m sure that fans will realise this and get the option they can afford, be it free, or the ultra-deluxe version.

Here’s what Trent has to say about BitTorrent:

Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Tags: creative commons license, ghosts, music industry, music on the internet, nine inch nails, torrent sites, trent reznor

Read more | Comments (0) | March 3rd, 2008

YouTube Testing Higher Resolution Video

Posted by James | Filed under Play, Tube, Web

Following the announcement in November, YouTube has started to test higher quality videos. If you append &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, you should get better quality videos. Note that this works only for a small number of videos so far.

Here’s an example of a video that’s available in both the regular (320×240) version, and in a higher quality encoding (448×336). The audio is now encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 22050 Hz. As you can see from the screenshot, the right image is clearer and more detailed.

youtube-better-quality-videos

While this increase of resolution might seem minor, for the example above YouTube’s re-encoded FLV file is more than twice bigger than the old one (from 9 MB to 22 MB), so it will load much slower.

If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360. Here’s the same video encoded as MP4.