They’ve just showed off hardware-accelerated HTML5 at the MIX10 keynote, and it’s damn impressive. Main points:
* Full-screen, HD-encoded video on netbooks — the keynote highlighted the dropped frames in Chrome, while IE9 rendered it fine — made possible by the hardware decoder on the netbook.
* Multiple HTML5 videos on one page? — then they scroll the page down… and there are two HTML5 videos playing full-screen, on the same document! Using only half the CPU (while Chrome used 100%). Can’t see a reason you’d have two full-screen videos on the same page, but it leads into…
* A richer, more animated Web — the demo showed off a video carousel. Rather than the four icons at the top of the Download Squad page, you might see a carousel that rotates. Done entirely in HTML5; no Flash or Silverlight required.
The IE9 keynote has finished, so we’ve now had all of the details. Microsoft says they will be releasing a new Developer Preview (download it here) every 8 weeks — I wonder when it will become a full-blown beta. Surely this year…
More information [Downloadsquad]
This news would have made my week if not for one little caveat: “Upcoming Features Include: Snow Monster.” It’s like a Rolling Stones reunion tour without Keith Richards.
More information [Gizmodo]
SkiFree! for iPhone
Ubuntu has been the “Flagship Linux” distro for quite a while now. This is the distro most people judge Linux by (and the only one I personally work with). However, its visual style remained constant for a long time, and has been starting to look a bit stale. It’s difficult to convey “innovation” to end users when your product keeps the same look, version to version.
There’s been a lot of talk of changing this, and yesterday Ubuntu finally announced their new look for Lucid Lynx, dubbed “Light”. It includes a new logo (both light and dark), new theme (light and dark), bootsplash, and even logos for the Ubuntu forums, Xubuntu and other related projects. I’ve put up the theme and splash screen after the jump, and you can see more eye-candy on the announcement page itself.
More information [downloadsquad]
This man is tightening a mold in a Samsung factory in Kaluga, Russia. Inside that mold is a portion of what will soon be a television. Let’s take a tour of the rest of the factory.
Samsung opened this particular factory in 2008 and its been putting out products ever since. Aside from quality inspections, it appears that from the moment components arrive in gigantic sacks from Korea nearly everything is automated in this factory—from hot plastic being piped into molds to microcircuits being produced to the little logos being stamped onto panels. Humans mostly oversee the production and yes, occasionally tighten molds.
More information [Gizmodo]
Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.
It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.
Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.
#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG
#2 TORRENTZ.COM (RECOMMENDED!)
#3 ISOHUNT.COM
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET
#6 DEMONOID.COM
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET
#8 MONOVA.ORG
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM
#10 MININOVA.ORG
As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.
More information [Torrent Freak]
