By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

You, yes you webmaster, you are warned, that Internet Explorer 8 will have its next public release, Beta 2, in Q3. Why the warning? Well, as you recall, Internet Explorer 8 will be standards-compliant, and will be released in that mode by default. Since many web sites are coded to IE’s quirks, webmasters will have to add some code to force IE8 into IE7 emulation mode if they want it to render as IE7 did.

In a blog post, Nick Mackechnie, a senior Microsoft account manager in New Zealand gave the warning:

However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.

We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.

It’s not like this is new news; it was stated when IE8 Beta 1 was released, and many broken sites should have already warned enough webmasters. Still, Microsoft is nothing if not cautious.

Site tips are here, and involves setting the X-UA-Compatible property to “IE=EmulateIE7.” Of course, past builds of IE8 have included a prominent button, “Emulate IE7,” that enables end users to switch modes. It’s unclear if this button will still exist in Beta 2 (my guess is it will).

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Let’s be precise here: by PDA we don’t mean “public display of affection.” Nope, the Alton Towers Resort is banning personal digital assistants during May Half Term (May 25th - June 1st inclusive).

The new policy, a pilot program, was announced on Alton Towers Resort’s web site. According to the site, the resort will have a set of “PDA Police” patrolling and asking adults to report to a “PDA Drop-Off” zone to eliminate the distraction and allow them to connect to their family.

The site is vague as to what constitutes a PDA, but my guess is that it includes smartphones and dedicated PDAs. It’s also unclear as to what ramifications will occur if someone refuses to give up their Blackberry, but I’m sure the consequences won’t be dire.

Russell Barnes, Divisional Director for the Alton Towers Resort explained on the site:

“What we have here is the ultimate short break location where every member of the family can unwind and have fun. We feel it’s so important for parents and kids to focus on nothing more than having the best possible time, we are prepared to take drastic action to ensure that parents really leave their work behind!”

If the pilot program is successful, Alton Towers Resort expects to make the program permanent, although no timeline for a decision was given.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Watchmen is arguably one of the greatest comic book mini-series ever written. Next March, Warner Bros. hopes to answer the question “Who watches the Watchmen” with millions of dollars worth of ticket sales. At the same time, Warner Bros. hopes to boost flagging DVD sales with a unique new idea.

A side-story in Watchmen is Tales of the Black Freighter, which is a comic book within the Watchmen universe. The comic is read by a teenage boy while he sits beside a newsstand. On March 10th, five days after the release of Watchmen, Warner Bros. will release a DVD with both Tales of the Black Freighter (animated) and Under the Hood, the memoirs of one of the characters in Watchmen, the Nite Owl (pictured left).

Both releases are being directed by Zack Snyder, director of the mega-hit 300.

The reason behind this approach are simple: money. According to Adams Media Research, in 2007 domestic DVD sales fell 3.2%, the first annual drop in the medium’s history. Blame has been laid on the shoulders of both piracy as well as streaming video.

By taking this tack, Warner Bros. can create a series out of one movie: Tales of the Black Freighter, followed about four months later by release of Watchmen itself on DVD, and then an “ultimate” edition in which the two are edited together into one megamovie.

In a statement, Ron Sanders, president of Warner Home Video said:

“There is a fear that if the DVD category declines over time that any well-run retailer is going to re-evaluate its commitment. We are offering retailers a meaningful opportunity to be involved with the theatrical event, to have a product that will generate foot traffic and sales.”

Although I earlier indicated that Blu-ray has won the hi-def DVD battle, only to lose the war to streaming video. Of course, I don’t believe that will happen for quite a long time. However, this seems somewhat of an admission by Warner Bros. that they see something to be concerned about as well, and is being proactive.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Billionaire J.R. Simplot, whose wealth earned him the title of “spud king” of America, passed away Sunday at his Boise home (where else but Boise for the “spud king”) at the age of 99.

Simplot and his family were ranked at No. 80 on Forbes magazine’s 2006 list of richest Americans, with an estimated wealth of $3.2 billion.

His wealth also helped fund what became one of the world’s largest computer chip companies, Micron Technology, which is based in — you guessed it, Boise. In 1980 gave Ward and Joe Parkinson $1 million for 40% of the company. He added $20 million over the years to help Micron build its first manufacturing plant and to stay afloat. Micron Technology is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

Although his business was successful prior to the war, it was his expansion into freezing and canning after the war which developed the product that would become his company’s mainstay: the frozen french fry. He struck a deal with McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, and the rest is history.

At one time Simplot was a McDonald’s board member, and later in life he could be seen driving his white Lincoln Town Car with “Mr. Spud” personalized plates to McDonald’s for hash browns or french fries several times a week.

By Martin Regtien
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

 Remote Viewing with Motion Detection
Our previous Swann Communications product review was about the Digital Private Eye.
It was a handy device, unobtrusive but ultimately rather limited.
The DVR4-Pro-Net Combo Kit is a much more professional setup and a bit more complicated, both to install and to suss out the various features.
With 4 CCTV cameras, an LCD Monitor and a DVR recorder this combo kit means business: it will keep your home or business premises under surveillance for a long, long time, recording only when it detects motion as one of the options.  It can even alert you over the Internet if an intruder is afoot!

Check the full review here on DigitalReviews.net

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

It’s no secret that Zune sales are a fraction of those of the iPod, and GameStop has seen enough. In its earnings call on Thursday, GameStop indicated it has exited the Zune marketplace.

David Carlson, Chief Financial Officer of GameStop, said on the call:

The hardware margin was down slightly from the prior year. That was mostly due to our exit from the Microsoft Zune category and to some extent our de-emphasis of warranties related to Microsoft’s manufacturing issue they had with the Xbox 360 which really began in the second quarter of last year.

Previously their exit wasn’t publicly known. According to GameStop the decision was made about a month ago, and was due to both to poor demand as well as a poor fit with GameStop’s mix of products. Of course, you can assume poor demand was probably the #1 reason for this decision.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Mozilla has announced a rough date for final release of Firefox 3 as well as a date-driven release schedule for Firefox 3.1.

Firefox 3 is now slated for “sometime in June,” while Firefox 3.1 is scheduled for the end of the year. The delay for 3 (besides Firefox’s own bugs) is that Mozilla wants time for extensions to catch up. That’s my pet peeve with trying out Firefox 3 RC1 (and past early releases) as well. I don’t want to have to struggle without the extensions I’ve grown used to. Most of them aren’t obscure, but rather well-known, like Roboform and Tab Mix Plus.

Naturally the best user-experience would be no impact on users; the ideal situation would be for extensions to update themselves with versions compatible with 2.0 as well as 3 prior to the Firefox release, and then after installing Firefox 3, everything just works seamlessly. So far my experience has been a lot of hunting for beta versions of extensions for 3, so I have just given up for now, though I may consider trying again on a spare system this weekend.

Meanwhile, in a post on the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, indicated the plans for 3.1 (emphasis mine):

There were a number of features that we held back from Firefox 3 because they weren’t quite ready - but they were nearly complete. These include things like XHR, native JSON DOM bindings, ongoing performance tuning, awesomebar++, better system integration, etc. This along with the overall quality of Gecko 1.9 as a basis for mobile and the desire to get new platform features out to web developers sooner has lead to us want to do a second release of Firefox this year. This release would be date-driven and targeted at the end of 2008. Any features not ready in time will move to the next major release. This is currently planned to be based on Gecko 1.9.1 - but if there are solid technical reasons for breaking frozen APIs we will bump the version number to Mozilla2.

Since it’s date-driven, that’s a pretty solid estimate for 3.1. Schroepfer also indicated that Firefox 4 has a tentative date of late 2009. Of course, that’s waaaaay off in the future, so that’s carved in butter, not stone.

In February Firefox passed 500 million downloads; it’s now at over 557 million. It’s made serious inroads into both corporation and personal use, vs. Internet Explorer; as long as I have my extensions, I personally won’t go back.