To be fair this is still a beta, and I did not have the massive slow downs on all websites, however the fair majority of the ones were quite unbearably slow. Another complaint I have about IE8 is the way it handles tabs. One the one hand they have broken out each tab into its own process similar to Safari or Chrome, but still when I click a link, instead of it by default opening in a new tab, it opens a whole new IE window. And given the lack of any real notable change to the user interface, I have to wonder if the Vista team didn’t get demoted to building the new IE8. Also if you like tear away tabs, don’t look to IE8 to get your fix. It won’t even make a bookmark on your desktop if you try to drag a tab outside of the IE8 main window.

As far as new features go Accelerators are about the only thing reasonably worth mentioning. The premise behind accelerators is that you select text from the site you are viewing and then a little blue button symbol appears above that selection offering you tools such as, maps and directions, blogging, translation, email etc. There is also a compatibility view that is supposed to help render web sites that aren’t yet ready for IE8. Web slices is just stupid for the most part. The premise is that some site allow for a sort of preview window that contains some bit of info. Examples are weather and EBay auction items.

IE 8 really looks and feels like Microsoft wanted to catch up to the other browsers without adding any real new innovative or useful features. And in that I would say they’ve succeeded. But ultimately I think its time for Microsoft to ditch IE all together and consider a new browser project. I don’t entirely blame Microsoft for IE’s problems, however they are responsible for the majority of them. I think that IE has been exploited into oblivion by the black hats and that this version is once again an attempt to repair some of that damage. There are many new security features, which hopefully will protect their user base better then prior versions. But like so many Microsoft products these days, IE feels and acts like bloatware.

First things first: Let’s get this Xbox 360 networked!! You can network your 360 via network cable or wireless – both are very, very easy – simply follow the on-screen instructions. Once you’re connected to your home network go to your windows machine and make sure it has, at least, windows media player 11 (with all your songs, videos, and photos mapped out already – if not, set the directories where all these reside in your library options). So far so good? Great! Next go to tools, options, and click on library. Click the ‘configure sharing’ button and ‘check share my media’. In the list of devices, choose your 360. Click on allow and whooo hooo, you’re ready to go! You can access your whole music, video, or picture library from either Music, Photos, or Video from your 360 dashboard (easy, no?). In any of those sections, select your PC and stream away. If your xbox is brand new, make sure you download all the updates for it, otherwise some of your music and videos may not play.

If that’s a bit too much for you, and you still want to view/listen to music/photos/videos without clogging up your xbox hard drive (or if you have the arcade version, memory card) there’s a way to do this, too. Get a usb thumb drive (oh my, they’re cheap these days) and format it to FAT32. Put movies, music, photos onto your usb drive and plug it into one of your controller ports on the 360. From the 360 dashboard, access music, videos, photos and select ‘portable device’. Everything that’s on the thumb drive is now accessible to your 360. You can only stream using this method, it will not work for data transfer. And there you have it, a few simple tricks to turn your gaming console into an entertainment system!

Here’s a link to the youtube video about these five innovations. Among them are ‘solar technology to be built into asphalt, paint and windows’, a “crystal ball” to see into your health (further, personal, genetic mapping), OMGWTFWEBBERNETS! (you’ll be able to carry on a conversation…. with the internet?), digital shopping assistants, and better (brain) memory.

The Genetic mapping and solar technology ‘innovations’ seem the most plausible. Who wouldn’t want to live longer and healthier? Who wouldn’t want to help the environment with clean and renewable energy? I, personally, don’t see having a conversation with the internet as if “having a conversation with your mother” as a very applicable technology – annoying isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind. The last thing I need is the net ‘talking’ back to me. I also place ‘digital shopping assistant’ in the same category as a ‘talking internet’.

The ‘enhanced’ memory via ‘reminder’ appliances and applications sounds the most entertaining if only for the new and innovative excuses we can look forward to. “Sorry, I don’t remember meeting you, some nano-bugs ate that sector…”, “I forgot to log out of my rdp session because my backup memory replicator over-wrote my daily tasks with my grocery list. I’m seeing a member of the geek squad about it later this week; as a side note, help me drink this milk before it spoils”, or perhaps “a solar-flare flashed my ‘time to wake up’ application and that’s why I was late for work”.

IBM is far from the only company to make such innovative predictions – here’s a few vintage ‘space age’ illustrations from Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Yes, there are jetpacks.

First of all, if you don’t know how to cook a turkey, consult with real life chefs via chat at Chef’s Line. There is a fee, but preparing the perfect turkey for your pesky in-laws makes it worth it.

The Halogen Oven boasts a 50% drop in turkey cooking time over conventional ovens. TurboChef has an oven that will cook a turkey in about 40 minutes. Don’t like traditionally cooked turkeys? Char-Broil has an infrared turkey ‘fryer’ that promises to produce a turkey as good as the fabled deep-fried kind only without the mess or the oil. Don’t trust some fan-dangled ‘infrared’ turkey fryer – Masterbuilt has a counter-top electric fryer that promises a safer turkey frying experience. And if, by Jove, you must deep fry a turkey with a gas source, read Alton Brown’s Turkey Derrick schematics! Make sure your turkey is completely cooked with the Connoisseur Digital Infrared Thermometer which can tell you the temprature of your bird without ever even touching it.

Watch the video here!

Stick around after the jump to hear about a new Nvidia Quadro graphics card with 4gigs of ram and how vmware is wanting to bring virtualization to your cell phone.

Nvidia announced the FX 5800, a graphics card that has a whopping 4 gigs of ram! The FX 5800 “has a memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second, and fill rates for the beastie exceed 52 billion texels per second” as well as ” a geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second”. If that doesn’t make your jaw drop, maybe the price will – the MSRP is $3,499. You might be wondering, as I did, who would need such power in a graphics card? Well the card is aimed at those in oil and gas exploration, advanced medical fields, and of course those in design fields who need the best of the best. Gamers are strangely absent from the list of target consumers but I’d imagine there’s quite a few foaming at the mouth right now over this release.
Vmware is banking on mobile phone virtualization being as popular as server virtualization. Vmware has “announced a new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform based on technology it acquired with France’s Trango Virtual Processors last month”. the goal is to give mobile users “benefits of multiple mobile operating systems using just a single handset”. The current list of supported technology includes Linux 2.6.x, Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0, Symbian 9.x, and phone operating systems eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II. It’s projected that by 2012 half of all smart phones will be shipped with virtualization capabilities.