Rumors have been circulating that computer maker HP would be offering customers the ability to downgrade to Windows XP later this year when Windows 7 ships out. Now that rumor has been confirmed with an announcement by software giant Microsoft, confirming that users will not only have rights to downgrade to Windows Vista, but also…
April 1st Conficker Worm Activates – What You Should Know and What to Do
It must be a slow news month, but the media is absolutely eating up this Conficker virus. Why? Because it’s pulling the old 1990’s “on this popular holiday X, this virus will activate and wipe your hard drive or do some other dastardly deed” schtick. This worm / virus has been out for about six…
Google and Sony Partner for 500k eBooks Deal
In an effort to squash competition from Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation), Google and Sony have struck up a deal to put over 500,000 eBooks on Sony Connect eBook store for FREE. Granted, all of these books are public domain, but they’ve been specially formatted for Sony Reader. Ars Technica weighs…
Internet Explorer 8 is Out Today, If You’re Into That Sort of Thing
Just a quick note: the new Internet Explorer 8 was released on the official Internet Explorer home page today. It’s supposed to be faster, stick to web standards (Ha! Believe it when I see it) and a lot more secure. If it asks me once if I’d like to Allow or Deny with a Vista…
Bleeding Edge Technology: Vista SP2 RC Released
Today Microsoft announced that the release candidate (RC) for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is now released to the general public for beta testing. How can that be a bad thing? It works for OSS projects like Firefox and various Linux distros. Just anyone can go and download these might-as-well-be-final versions of their product and…
Same Browser Wars, Different Day
In the European Union, Opera is in the process of bringing a suit against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. Microsoft is slated to include Internet Explorer 8 in its latest operating system, Windows 7. Recently, Mozilla foundation threw its hat in the ring with Opera to go up against Microsoft, and…
Linux for n00bs: Prepare Your Hard Drive
For the next part of our “Linux for n00bs” series, you’re going to be preparing your hard drive to install Linux. I may be taking a big leap here, but if you’ve been successful so far with burning the Ubuntu Install CD, you’re probably also familiar with the term “hard drive.” Usually, on any given…
EA Downplays Spore DRM and Pirated Download Count
Popular video game publishing company Electronic Arts (also known as EA) released a video game not long ago on the PC platform called Spore. First, they released a “teaser” demo called Spore Creature Creator, which let you play around with creating your own creature out of miscellaneous parts. You could change the colors, length, width,…
Google Reverse Engineered Vista Code to Write Chrome
It’s no big surprise that Google makes a superior web product for a lot of our day-to-day needs. Recently, Google announced their new web browser called Google Chrome. It’s code is based on Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Web Kit used in Safari (on Mac, PC, and iPhone). There are several suspicious lines in the code,…
Adobe CS4 Released
Adobe has released the newest version of their highly successful Creative Suite of products, including familiars like Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and newcomers formerly from Macromedia are back with a revamp. Apparently in Creative Suite 4, Adobe has tried hard to really unify the interfaces amongst all the programs. This may upset both die-hard Adobe fans…