Archive for: September 18, 2007

Another challenger to Microsoft Office is stepping into the ring.

IBM on Tuesday launched a beta suite of free, online office applications intended to compete with Office and boost the presence of IBM's Lotus Notes.

The IBM tools, dubbed Symphony, are available for download free of charge online and will provide access to documents, spreadsheets and presentations on machines supported by Windows and Linux desktops, according to IBM. Customers who purchase the latest version of IBM's Lotus Notes will also receive Symphony.

Symphony will be based on the open document format (ODF). IBM last week joined OpenOffice.org, an open source project founded by Sun Microsystems in 2000, to which IBM will be making code contributions.

This latest offering actually marks a return for the Symphony moniker, which made its debut in the early 1980's as part of Lotus Development, but was trampled in the market by rival software options. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995.

Ed Brill, a business unit executive for worldwide sales at IBM/Lotus was not concerned about unearthing a name with such a storied past. "I ... like the bit of nostalgia in Lotus's renewed focus on the desktop."

Head to pcmag.com for more details on IBM Symphony.

The next time you decide to go behind your spouse's back to cheat by meeting others on dating sites or chat rooms, make sure it's not actually your spouse who you're planning to cheat with. Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, a couple from Bosnia, were having marital trouble. Each of them, on separate occassions of course, decided to scour the Web for a person to spice up their life.

What they didn't know was that while the husband was at work and the wife was in an Internet cafe, they were talking to each other online, chatting under the names Prince of Joy and Sweetie, respectively. After agreeing to meet up, they realized that their mystery person was in fact, each other! "When I saw my husband there with the rose and it dawned on me what had happened I was shattered. I felt so betrayed. I was so angry." Adnan said: "I was so happy to have found a woman who finally understood me. Then it turned out that I hadn't found anyone new at all."

Obviously upset, each decided to file for divorce since both of them were caught being unfaithful. Let that be a lesson to all of you: sometimes the Web isn't as big as you think it is!

[via DavesDaily.com]

If you're looking to move to a new home, the last thing you want to deal with is a neighbor whose barking dog or subwoofer is going to keep you up all night. RottenNeighbor.com is designed to give ordinary people an opportunity to vent their frustration at their bad neighbors, post their experiences and complaints, and warn people who are considering moving to their neck of the woods. The idea is great, but the implementation is awful.

RottenNeighbor.com is a great idea; you can learn which neighbors like to keep their cars on cinderblocks in their backyards before you have to deal with seeing it each morning from your bedroom window. Unfortunately, RottenNeighbor.com is un-moderated and open to the public. This means that the complaints at the site are at best just random gripes, and at worst potentially libelous.

Like any site that is totally public, anyone with a gripe against his or her neighbor can add a pushpin to the Google Map on RottenNeighbor.com and complain to their heart's content. You can type in your zip code on the front page to see who or what the people in your area are complaining about. Note that RottenNeighbor.com only displays certain areas at a time, so if you zoom out and don't see anything for example, in Los Angeles when you live in New York City, it doesn't mean there's nothing there--just find a zip code for the area you're interested in and type that in to get results for that area.

Once the results are displayed, click on an entry ...

If you've been following my Linux tales, here's another one. It's a bit tricky to figure out how to sync music to your iPod using Linux. As we all know, there's no iTunes version for Linux. There are several apps you can install—gtkpod, YamiPod, and iPodder—in order to sync music on a Linux machine, but I've only tried gtkpod with both my iPod mini and 2nd gen nano, and couldn't get it to work.

Well, it seems that Apple is happy about that. The company decided to rid of Linux compatibility altogether in its newest iPods. DownloadSquad reports that "The song database on the new iPod Classic, Touch, and Nano includes a new security measure that prevents users from synchronizing their portable media players with anything other than Apple's iTunes software." But that doesn't stop Linux users: someone figured out how to hack the new iPods to get them to work with Linux. Unfortunately, the web site that lists how to hack into the new iPods has since been taken down by Apple.

When I had my Windows machine, I used Red Chair Software's Anapod ($19.95 to $29.95): an app that lets you manage your iPod through Windows Explorer. (I loathe using iTunes; I want to be able to drag and drop!)

But when I bought my Dell Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu, I realized that Anapod doesn't support Linux. Keep in mind that Ubuntu will play your iPod's music as long as they are in MP3 format and not iTunes' AAC format; it's just difficult to sync music. I've yet to figure it out, but hope to soon! It's all a ...

When I reviewed Griffin's iKaraoke device back in April, one of my only complaints was the lack of lyric support. Still, it was lots of fun to use, and as long as you stuck to familiar songs, quite entertaining. While you can add the lyrics yourself via iTunes, there's no "bouncing ball" effect to give you a sense of the song's rhythm. Griffin had said that lyric support was in the works, and in July launched iKaraoke TunePrompter, a DIY karaoke video creator that's compatible with both Macs and PCs.

I gave it a go and must say, it's lots of fun, despite being a bit labor-intensive. Basically, you choose a song, search for lyrics online (or type them in yourself), upload the audio file and sync the lyrics with the song, all within the app. After the jump, I walk you through the process, step by step.

Getting Started: Once you install and launch TunePrompter, you can type in the lyrics to your fave songs or better, search for them on the Internets. (Much less typing this way.)

Lyric Search: You don't have to leave the app to search for lyrics--just type in your search terms, and the Google results appear right inside the app's window. Click a link, select and copy the lyrics, and click done. And. . .

Importing the Lyrics: Voila! We've got lyrics. Click on "import song" to grab the matching audio file from your hard drive.

...

Mozilla Firefox is a fast full featured Web browser that makes browsing more efficient than ever before Firefox includes pop up blocking a tab browsing integrated Google searching simplified privacy controls that let you cover your tracks more effectively a streamlined browser window that shows you more of the page than any other browser and a number of additional features that work with you to help you get the most out of your time online

The Mozilla Corporation have today uploaded the follow up to their hugely popular web browser Firefox Despite not being featured on the Firefox homepage the files have all been uploaded to the Mozilla FTP site English versions of Linux Macintosh and Windows versions are available

Google announced today the launch of a mobile version of their ever-popular AdSense model. Functioning contextually like standard AdSense, the mobile version will help advertisers target ads formatted especially for the small screen. AdSense publishers are able to generate revenue via clickthroughs.

The program is now available in the following countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

Microsoft's Mac BU team launched a preview site highlighting features of the upcoming Office 2008 for OS X. Among the newly introduced features are the new elements gallery interface, publishing layout view, the OfficeArt graphics engine, SmartArt Graphics, Excel guilding charts, and the My Day standalone organizer app. The site will also be home to regular updates and announcements regarding the suite, which contains new versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, and should be available to users by Q1 2008.

Second Life takes another blurry step toward reality on September 15th, when Italian IBM employees will take to the world's pixilated streets to protest a recent 1,000 Euro (1,377 USD) a year pay cut, out in front of the company's virtual corporate campus and marketing site.

Hundreds of avatar versions of Italian IBM employees are expected, along with other IBM employees and unionists from across the globe.

You've got to hand it Glide--they've got no problem going after the big dogs. Better than Powerpoint? Turn any phone into an iPhone? Jeez, Glide, is there anything that you can't do? Should anyone hasten to answer "yes," there's a pretty decent chance that the creators of the eponymous Web-based OS are working on a soon-to-be released patch at the moment.

The newly-released Glide Presenter 2.0 is the company's "mobile collaborative platform," which is being positioned as something of a Powerpoint/Apple Keynote killer, with a little bit of Google trumping thrown in for good measure.

Presenter 2.0 lets users access presentation on their desktop or Web-friendly mobile device and add, "unlimited video, music, photos, and documents." The app, like all of Glide's programs, exists in their online OS, which helps translate them across a number of devices--hence the whole turning any phone into an iPhone thing. The list of compatible devices is too long to reprint here, but can be found on Glide's site.

The app automatically syncs and converts Powerpoint docs between PC and handsets. It also supports themes, layouts, spell check, PDF creation, and a variety of other features, and is available now.

iTunes is a piece of software that lets you add to organize and play your digital media collection on your computer as well as sync it to a portable device It 39 s a jukebox player along the lines of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player and you can use it on a Mac or Windows machine The most significant difference between iTunes and some other media players is the built in iTunes Music Store where you can get podcasts music videos movies audiobooks and TV shows too and its multi level integration with Apple 39 s iPod portable media player With iTunes 7 4 sync your favorite music and more with the new iPod nano third generation iPod classic and iPod touch plus create custom ringtones exclusively for iPhone with many of your favorite songs purchased from the iTunes Store You can now also play purchased videos with closed captioning when available easily rate your favorite albums from one to five stars and watch videos at a larger size inside the iTunes window

What 39 s New

iTunes 7 4 2 addresses an issue with creating ringtones using iTunes Plus song purchases and includes bug fixes to improve stability and performance

Nvidia has released Vista amp XP drivers for the Geforce 6 7 amp 8 series This is not a WHQL release is in beta form and available in 32bit and 64bit flavours International versions are available only for Vista English versions are up for XP ForceWare ensures the best out of box experience for every user and delivers continuous performance and feature updates over the life of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs
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Release Notes
Supports GeForce FX 6 7 and 8 series GPUs
Improved compatibility and performance for NVIDIA SLI trade technology on Microsoft reg DirectX reg 9 0c and OpenGL reg 2 1 applications
Improved compatibility for The Way It rsquo s Meant To Be Played trade game titles BioShock Crysis Enemy Territory Quake Wars Hellgate London and World in Conflict
Numerous game and application compatibility fixes Please read the release notes for more information on product support features driver fixes and known compatibility issues
Vista specific Added HD video post processing for H 264 VC 1 and MPEG 2 HD content on the GeForce 8500 and 8600 series GPUs
XP specific Added PureVideo trade HD decode acceleration for GeForce 8600 8500 and 8400 series GPUs