Siu Lun

Ok folks. I know each of us probably have a million or two mp3 files on our hard disk of our favourite music. We can say we’ve almost taken the mp3 format for granted all these years. A little known fact to those not in the business though is that mp3 is a proprietary format and they are actually charging a hefty sum for royalty payment!

Little do we know that when we do podcasting with mp3 files. While the sound that comes out of the file is copyrighted by us. The fact that you’re using a mp3 format to stream your podcast is enough for you to pay for a license before you use it!

Those in the business knows all about this. They also know about an open-source alternative codec that is truely free to use and distribute and free from royalty called ‘Ogg Vorbis’. But for one reason or another, major manufacturers of mp3 players (Apple) are not incoporating support for ogg files on their players!

Many smaller manufactuers of mp3 players such as iRiver have been incorporating such features for a while now! Guys, I believe it is time to re-encode all our files into ogg.

Come on, make some noise for ogg! (Flac is a lossless alternative format)

http://www.vorbis.com/

I’m officially switching alliegance to the ogg format. Though my iPod nano has no chance in playing ogg. I’ll have to just endure a slight delay when I use iTunes to re-encode ogg into aac for the iPod. No biggie, and at least I know that I’m not paying some tossers who’ve come up with the mp3 file format just to have some sort of patent on it and collecting royalties for something that should never have been.

I would like to pledge those who’re in the music ‘scene’ to start releasing files in ogg format!

Later
/rant over

I’ve been reading various news stories about IE8 on Ajaxian. So I know IE8 is in development, somehow I didn’t quite catched the news that IE8 beta is actually out! until I was looking at some google anayltics stats on browsers today and found some people coming on my sites using IE8…

Well now I’ve installed IE8 on a VM. My first reaction after I’ve installed it, is simply jaw-droppingly-remarkable. I look in horror as all the sites that I’ve made failed under IE8.

Everybody has been touting IE8′s ability to be truely standards compliant. Which adds to an even more deepened sense of depression when I realise the sites I’ve been making – the css techniques and experiences that I’ve gathered in the past 7 years… have failed me.

I admit – I never actually sat down and look through the HTML and CSS specs, that doesn’t mean I’m clueless – in fact, I’ve been pretty good at keeping just 1 stylesheet across all browsers – didn’t even have to use browser specific stylesheets. All these gained through trial and error, experimentations and experience.

So have I really got to go now to read through the standards documents and specs?

Luckily I won’t have to as I can simply tell IE8 to render as IE7.
Here is the official link from MS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx

I won’t get too depressed, until I see the release candidate, as not suprisingly, pretty much every site I’ve come across on the internet doesn’t look correct under IE8. Can we hope that it is simply a matter of time these issues are addressed?

Or is MS’s IE8 plan simply to make it strictly standards compliant and not implement any backwards and additional compatibility that has existed in all previous versions and competitor’s browser just to “please”/”aggrevate” the whiny standards compliancy developer crowd? – If that’s the case – IE8 is a lost cause – which will simply function as IE7 for most sites and the standards compliancy that it has been boosting is simply a comeback at the critics of MS.

Still a new version is better than stalling on IE7, as we developers really need people to upgrade from IE6. The introduction of a newer version would hopefully shift the balance and we can begin to see IE6 being phased out just as IE5.5 has.

Later.

I saw an article from Tom’s Hardware saying gaming in Vista is absolute rubbish. It’s interesting that they say the drivers are “unstable” though with RTM Vista and current drivers. Personally I’ve not a problem with stability but only performance issues, these are unrelated items, stability does not mean performance, have the got their terms wrong? or did I just not look at the article at the right part?

In any case, I thought I’d post my own version here since I’ve access to a copy of Vista Business Edition before anyone else from MSDNAA. Generally graphics are slower by around 10%-20%, originally I thought this could be due to the AERO desktop but I’ve tried turning it off without any increase in performance. In regards to the current set of drivers offered by ATI and Nvidia, I’m not sure whether it is because they haven’t optimised their drivers for performance yet or not but in any case I’m speculating that it is actually due to the DirectX 10 architecture. I’ve read an article from Microsoft that stated that DX10 actually is capable of offering 5-10 times performance increase, but the problem is now everything on your desktop is rendered using DX10 and so it requires more resources on your card, and if your card is not made for DX10 there will be issues.

One of the things that I find annoying in Vista is when you change screen, say… in Guild Wars you zone to a different area. The screen will go blank to refresh and renew a screen to display where as back in XP, this does not happen. Having said that DX10 now allows multiple programs to access what the graphics card has to offer, so I can have 2 games opened.

One of the MAJOR performance problem though is actually the amount of memory avaliable, because Vista takes around 500-600MB of ram, if you have 1.5Gb of ram, games will only be able to access 1Gb max. This is a major bottleneck for me when I was playing some recent games. I’ve upgraded from 1Gb to 1.5Gb not so long ago to enjoy better game play in XP as newer games can take up to and beyond 1Gb of ram. As such it advisable for anyone who play games at all that they have at _least_ 2Gb of ram. Otherwise your system will be suffering from a lot of hard drive access which can lead to stutter and severe lag in games as the game will be using the hard drive as both a storage and a memory device (page files).

Hope this helps. Don’t forget to use the PCI Latency tool I’m using a v3.1 Build 2 and it works fine on Vista. It’ll help with getting more performance from your graphics card.