In their latest promotion, Microsoft is giving students a chance to "steal" (as they put it) Office Ultimate for $59.95. The promotion started yesterday in the US, UK and Canada, and expands to Spain, Italy, and France on 9/20. Office Ultimate includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, and Infopath.In...Read more...
The short answer is: yes, Microsoft is updating/changing software in a stealthy fashion. Microsoft's own Nate Clinton has acknowledged that the Redmond juggernaut is indeed updating computers regardless of the preferences set by the user in the 'automatic updates' settings menu.According to Nate, here's what's happening:“So what is happening...Read more...
In June Microsoft agreed to modify the built-in desktop search feature in Vista, in hopes of staving off another Justice Department battle, as well as to assuage Google. On Wednesday Microsoft outlined the upcoming changes, which will appear in Vista Service Pack 1.The primary impact of the change is giving Vista users who choose a non-Microsoft...Read more...
Yesterday Microsoft introduced a nifty new wireless mouse for your laptop. The Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 includes 1GB of flash memory, and since it transmits wirelessly, people who need USB ports for other things should love it. It works on Bluetooth enabled notebooks as well by flipping a switch on the underside of the unit and connecting...Read more...
When you think of supercomputers, you usually imagine a bunch of IBM looking fellows and ladies wearing white lab coats and clutching clipboards in a clean room next to a big rack of silicon. But that's old-fashioned thinking; New Zealand computer scientist Peter Gutman did some calculations, and the most powerful supercomputer in the world...Read more...
It's an interesting concept; an online desktop, that sort of mimics windows - or really any desktop-based OS, in Ajax. It even connects to your Gmail account (assuming you have Gmail) to allow storage of documents and files there.A web applications company is hoping to legitimize the web operating system concept with the release of ajaxWindows,...Read more...
Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, a service which uses Human Intelligence to perform tasks (HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks) that humans are best suited for, such as image identification, is joining the hunt for Steve Fossett.In an email we received this morning, Amazon.com said, On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the...Read more...
In what should probably be a surprise to none, China hosts nearly half of all the world's malware sites. The U.S. places a distant second (but we are trying harder, right?). What's more surprising is the daily number of newly detected malware sites. According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China--including...Read more...
Citing a post from Hackintosh, the iPhone Atlas is starting to uncover the dark side of iPhone unlocking, namely the allegedly explosive nature of some of the devices.Here's an tidbit from the original post, spelling errors and all: “We were so happy, all the software part was done, so we started opening the iphone. The antenna cover was...Read more...
If you've used Google News, you know typically it carries a headline and a few snippets of text but sends readers to publishers' sites for the full story. This means that you might end up at the Seattle Times for an AP story. Now, however, Google will host wire service stories on its own site, instead of redirecting users to other sites....Read more...
When will people learn? If you have a laptop with sensitive data on it, you should encrypt it. So many laptops or hard drives have been lost or stolen. And here we go again. A laptop containing unencrypted personal data on current and former employees of the AT&T Corp. was stolen recently from the car of an employee of a professional...Read more...
Dell reported a 46% profit increase in its latest results Thursday, topping estimates - but it also indicated that future cost declines would slow, which could indicate problems to come for the beleaguered company. Dell, like competitors Hewlett-Packard Co and Apple Inc, profited from lower costs for computer components amid...Read more...
You can bet Palm, Motorola, and any other smartphone makers broke out in a cold sweat today. This is just speculation still, but RIM shares are up $1 (at the time of this writing) over rumors that Microsoft is interested in buying the Blackberry manufacturer. "Microsoft has been mentioned as a possible buyer," said Frederic Ruffy,...Read more...
Some of you may never have heard of AutoPatcher. Well, how many of you have received a new computer with Windows XP SP2, and immediately hooked it up to the Internet to download all the post-SP2 hotfixes? What a pain, right? AutoPatcher was the fix for that. It was a freeware project that put all the fixes into one downloadable image, that...Read more...
OCZ Technology Announces MicroSD Flash Cards and Adaptors, the Optimal Mobile Multimedia Storage Solution Sunnyvale, CA—August 27, 2007—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today introduced 1GB and 2GB microSD cards and adaptor kits to their...Read more...
If you are a user in the United States, you can no longer use TorrentSpy. However, that's not necessarily a bad thing as the site had been ordered to start tracking users. Citing privacy, TorrentSpy now gives an error message if a user with a U.S. IP address tries to search. US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy...Read more...
Wanting to focus (no pun intended) on Flickr, Yahoo will close its Yahoo Photos site on Sept. 20 at 6 p.m. EDT. Yahoo said it will automatically move photos to a site of the user's choice, including Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Photobucket. Yahoo said it will automatically move users' photos to the photo-sharing...Read more...
Grand Theft Auto has always served as the poster boy for video games that drive parents and government officials up the wall. Take-Two Interactive Software took a lot of heat for the violent and sexualized content, and made a whole lot of money selling it. But they've had trouble coming up with a follow-up to their signature title. It looks...Read more...
Microsoft Hardware’s Got Game: SideWinder Line Is Back With a Mouse That Defines Customized Gaming Control LEIPZIG, Germany, Aug. 22, 2007 Today at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, Microsoft Hardware debuts the revival of its SideWinder™ line with its first gaming mouse built from the ground up...Read more...
Dominos Pizza has been experimenting with different forms of digitally ordering pizza in recent years. It all started with opening a web-site to take online orders (something Papa John’s Pizza made quite popular), then moved on to the infamous /pizza command in EverQuest 2, and now has moved on to the wonderful world of SMS.The big question...Read more...
2K Games' Bioshock Pre-Orders Available via Steam NEW YORK, NY, August 16, 2007 - Valve today announced that BioShock, the highly-anticipated and award-winning first-person shooter by 2K Games is available for pre-purchase now via Steam®. Starting today, gamers can pre-order BioShock...Read more...
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Closes $1.5 Billion Offering of 5.75% Convertible Senior Notes due 2012 SUNNYVALE, Calif – August 14, 2007 --Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE:AMD) today announced the closing of its offering of $1.5 billion aggregate principal amount of 5.75% Convertible...Read more...