Neowin.net

It might not be the same as having a big gold record on the wall, but the Recording Industry Association of America has issued its first gold, platinum, and multiplatinum certifications for digital downloads.

The first obvious winner? Outkast's "Hey Ya!" is the only multiplatinum single so far, with more than 400,000 downloads. Six songs qualified for platinum, or sales of 200,000 singles, and 45 titles got gold status, for selling 100,000 songs.

These awards "are a reflection of both the commitment of the entire music community to consumer-friendly legitimate digital services and fan appetite for high-quality music," RIAA Chief Executive Officer Mitch Bainwol said in a statement.

The awards are a sign of a maturing online music market, and a clear message that the business has a long way to go before reaching full mainstream status. The standards for reaching certification are much lower online, reflecting the fact that far fewer consumers buy music online, and that online sales remain just a small fraction of the overall music business.

News source: C|Net News.com

Asa just updated his blog with more information on the release candidate:

Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. If all goes well in testing these builds, then we're on target for our 1.0 release in early November. If you're interested in testing these candidates and reporting bugs to Bugzilla, you can get them from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the "feature complete" preview) and you're not particularly interested in active testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

Testing application update is one area we could really use your help. To test this, please see the instructions at Testing Software Update page. It will require you set a hidden preference to point your PR build at a testing server that should deliver you an application update to RC1. The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. If you can help in verifying (feel free to skim the bug titles and find ones that interest you) that would be great! Update: According to Asa, the Mozilla Update function is confirmed to be broken in the RC

With this release, we're also featuring Mozilla Foundation builds for up to two dozen locales (slowly trickling in. if you don't see your language, try back in a bit.) These builds are hot off the press and haven't received as much testing as we'd like so if you're a non-English user, or speak any non-English languages, we'd encourage you to download one of the new localized builds and hammer on it some. The more testing we get at this stage, the easier time we'll have releasing all these localizations when we ship the en-US builds on November 9.

If you do find regressions from the Preview Release, please file bugs in Bugzilla and nominate them as Firefox 1.0 blockers using the "blocking-aviary1.0?" flag on the bug. Thanks for your help in testing Firefox!