Tommy Nation

The first Beta version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has just been released publically.

Improvements include default mode interpreting web pages much more correctly according to W3C standards. A button to “Display as IE7″ is available for debugging.

The big news that MS is touting is something they call Webslices. Essentially Webslices are like RSS feeds - small subscription services, except they can go both ways - output and input. An example of output would be a weather service, while input could be a task manager.

A crash recovery feature is also in place, to recover crashed sessions.

Oh, and it passes the Acid 2 test with flying colors. The Acid 3 test however…

Click here to download the Internet Explorer 8 beta client
(only works on XP SP2, Vista and Server 2003).

PS! I don’t recommend you install this on your main system, as it is beta software and could be unstable.

I daily enjoy the possibility to access the files on my other computers at home directly, without having to share the root of the harddisk using normal file sharing. I recently built a HTPC (Home Theatre PC), and as fate would have it, chose Vista for its fresh new Media Center possibilities. Problem? How to enable access to admin shares using a local administrator account remotely in Vista?

When you try to do this the same way you could in XP, you get prompted to log in, but get access denied. Apparently, for “security reasons” this option has been disabled. Thankfully, a small registry hack is all it takes to get around the issue:

1. Open regedit (<Windows> + R, type “regedit”).
2. Expand the tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ policies \ system.
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New -> choose “DWORD Value (32bit)”).
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value of “1″.
5. Click OK.