dserban

Similarly looking, simple lists of applications that will make almost every Mac user really, really happy. Not having most of these tools is like having half a Mac. The information might have looked better if organized in the form of something other than lists. http://opensourcemac.org/ and http://bestmacsoftware.org/ A few more freeware apps: Transmission and Azureus - very good Bittorrent clients for the Mac: http://transmissionbt.com/download/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ The Unarchiver - an archiving utility that works with a ton of formats - http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html MainMenu - a utility that offers a GUI to enable various Unix tasks, as well as doing convenient things like disabling that resource-hogging dashboard - http://mainmenuapp.com/ Safari beta 3 - unlike the Windows version it's quite stable and well designed, and has a vastly improved search feature, as well as being the fastest browser on the Mac in terms of rendering: http://www.apple.com/safari/ To easily block ads - http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ VMWare trumps Parallels and Q Emulator any day. Also check out: https://webkit.org/ if you have problems with FireFox or Safari on the Mac. LaunchBar - an alternative to QuickSilver: https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html Bean is a great free application that serves basic word processing needs. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (By the way, IUseThis is a great site to find popular Software for the Mac) Cabos - an alternative to Acquisition: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Cabos-for-Mac-OS-X/1101753564/2 RSS Menu - simple, lightweight RSS software, it just sits in your menu bar for when you feel like checking it. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Growl - a system wide "notification system": http://growl.info/ Pixel - an RGB, CMYK and HDR image editing, photo retouching, graphics manipulating and animation program: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

Nice work of digital art (inspired by the movie "Alien"), made in 3D Studio Max, but without the second set of teeth, no Ranch dressing for blood, and no vegetable oil drool: http://www.framebox.de/creations/3d/salad/ A reference to Giuseppe Arcimboldo's work: https://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&gbv=2&gws_rd=ssl

The Dell-Ubuntu deal has certainly cannibalized Vista sales, and another phaenomenon might have been people who wanted to save themselves the cost of a Windows license by buying Ubuntu laptops, wiping the drive and installing a pirated copy of Windows - who knows. But Dell definitely started a trend, and it looks like other companies, most notably Lenovo (formerly the PC division of IBM) are beginning to see the light. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ And while we're on the topic, here's a blog post titled "Linux Hardware Support Better Than Windows": http://changelog.complete.org/archives/644-linux-hardware-support-better-than-windows

I totally agree, and Ubuntu is undoubtedly a step in the right direction - if they could focus on the media side of things (games, music, graphic design) then Linux would be a very strong contender. But at the end of the day, Linux is for people who enjoy playing with computers. There isn't a big Linux "switch" campaign, and no one's trying to sell Linux as an OS that your average Windows user is just going to pick up, install, and enjoy. This is exactly what is needed, a buzz campaign. Hopefully the companies are catching on and will respond with driver support. Update: According to DesktopLinux.com's just completed survey, the number of Desktop Linux users has more than doubled in the past year, and Ubuntu remains their Linux distribution of choice. Of significance, Ubuntu's growing prominence has made GNOME surpass KDE as the most popular desktop environment. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Even after all the noise about the Microsoft deal, OpenSuSe still has a large cut. Most people I know weren't really expecting that much really (20%). Ubuntu's wild success is probably a factor in GNOME taking the lead on KDE, but that isn't likely to change because KDE4 will be extremely buggy until 4.1 or 4.2 release. No other big surprises, although I didn't think Opera and Konqueror would have as many users as they do. I love Konqeuror, but I thought I was alone. Text-based browsers got 4.3% of the vote - that's more than Epiphany and Seamonkey combined. True, they are fast and they have their place, but how can 4.3% use a text-based browser as their most common one? This is 2007. Images, flash, javascript, and all those other goodies are here to stay. I have the feeling that those 4.3% are probably Gentoo, compiled source, CLI, and optimization freaks or those who want to prove how "1337" they are by doing things in a console. It was dumb for not including "Swiftfox" in the browser comparision, and why don't more people use XFCE? Ubuntu is a fine distro but their users spam the crap out of everything. No surprise that Ubuntu did so well. Frankly i think most other distros' user base just didn't really care about this. apt-get is the best thing ever. Say you want GAIM. Instead of going to the site, choosing your OS, finding the right version, getting it, installing it ... all you do "sudo apt-get install gaim" enter your password, BAM! You have GAIM installed. Microsoft has finally killed off it's old anti-Linux "Get the facts" website that had been spreading lies about Linux for years. However, don't think that anything has changed, the site is being replaced with another, more insidious site called "Windows Server Compare". http://www.zdnet.com/topic/microsoft/?p=670 Evidently, Linux is a big enough threat for Microsoft to start spending resources to try to counter it; now that their lapdog SCO is out of the game, MS needs to step it up on their own. Let's see: Corporations using Red Hat: Merrill Lynch, DreamWorks, Charles Schwab ... etc..etc Corporations using Microsoft: Autozone, AMD and Jelly Belly's Wait, wait ... Jelly Belly ?????? =)) How competitive does a company have to be before they start to degrade someone/thing else to make themselves better - as a strategic marketing method? But the site is poorly designed, the 'comparison' is difficult to find. "Our [Microsoft] solution is saving us $10.5 million over five years in software costs alone." LOL Software costs?? Linux = free, while Microsoft stuff = not free. Hmm ... which one would you choose? Microsoft seem to think the way to secure a system is to encrypt the hard drive. Now, what percentage of data theft involves physically removing the disk from the machine? But a lot of people still equate open source with free. Enterprise level Linux solutions are far from free. Both Linux and Windows have their places in the data center; anybody actually in the IT industry understands this. All they keep repeating on this site is, see we are just as good a unix. We've improved our product so much that we are just as good. See. For real. See these people we gave huge discounts to, they say so too! But the truth is ... Windows Server has always been and will always be playing catchup. Any money anybody saves with Microsoft, is simply Microsoft cutting them a deal because they are like long term investors and they cut you a deal for the first year or two. They know once you go Microsoft, you can't go back! No literally, it's in some people's contracts. Also there is no way Microsoft is cheaper in the long run with their licensing scheme. For example, sure company X may have saved 2.4 million dollars switching to Windows Server 2003, but the contract says that they are forced to upgrade to the next server package that Microsoft releases, and when the next release of Windows comes out, you have to upgrade all your desktops to it too. *Boom* there goes the 2.4 million dollars. Because the companies older machines weren't fast enough to run Vista, oh and all those new Vista machines are going to need Windows Server licenses! And if you want them to remote desktop in, they are gonna need Terminal Server licenses on top of just their normal ones. I'm sure there is a reason for some people to run Microsoft, but to say they are cheaper, is a short term gimmick and nothing more. Also, is it just me, or did he do everything on Linux the hard way and then show just how hard tasks are to do in powershell without writing complicated scripts? Why show off a feature when that feature absolutely sucks in comparison to the competition? It's a bad move that will backfire on them big time, just because this is poor marketing at its finest.

Frameworks implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern in PHP. The Model part is most often the database data model and relational design. The View part is the presentation layer, which is strictly separated from the database layer. The Controller part controls the execution flow and acts as a middleman / mediator between Model and View. The most popular PHP frameworks are: CakePHP - http://cakephp.org/ A structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility. Symphony - http://symfony.com/legacy Offers a "Ruby on Rails" like approach to web development. Symphony is well documented, simple to use and can be easily extended or modified. Prado - http://www.xisc.com/ An event-driven and component-based framework for Web application development in PHP 5. Zend Framework - https://framework.zend.com/ A complete framework to develop PHP 5 applications. It provides a repository of components that are actively supported. Seagull - http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Seagull is an object-oriented framework written in PHP that focuses on best practices, clean code and reusable components.

Or take a look at a DB wrapper, such as Zend_Db:https://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.db.html

If you are good at remembering very long, very cryptic alphanumeric passwords, this article is not for you. For the rest of us mere mortals, here is a method for choosing extremely secure passwords that you don't need to actually remember - you only need to remember some patterns for generating passwords that you and only YOU know. In this example I am using two command line utilities that come bundled with any Linux distribution. I'm running Windows XP, so these are the cygwin counterparts: # echo "appserver" | md5sum | md5sum707c3d6c4e93e43ba03bf0a5ef3a605a *-#a) Leading six characters of host name, spaced outb) Trailing six characters of MD5 sum above, spaced outa) a p p s e rb) 3 a 6 0 5 ac) Your password to connect to the machine called "appserver": a3pap6s0e5ra# crypt appserver | crypt - | crypt -Zmct2/xG/czm6#a) Leading six characters of host name, spaced outb) Trailing six characters of crypt hash above, spaced outa) a p p s e rb) G / c z m 6c) Your password to connect to the machine called "appserver": aGp/pcszemr6# echo "dbserver" | md5sum | md5sum6b0828ab640ffb600892468b97762fef *-## crypt dbserver | crypt - | crypt -.bIjOuGL2XVoE#I'll leave it as an exercise to you to determine the other two passwords (to connect to the machine called "dbserver").But you can use md5sum or crypt as many times as you want, and in any combination you want, and set up the interspersing pattern just the way you see fit. Passwords generated this way are immune to dictionary attacks and the good thing is that you don't need to remember them since you can recreate them every time. The only security issue remains to secure the process of recreating your passwords. Also, check out these articles: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live--choose-and-remember-great-passwords http://lifehacker.com/247355/how-passwords-get-cracked

A video demonstration of how modern organizations can blend their IT infrastructures. Conspicuously missing from that blend is VMWare. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

According to the author's opinion, the answer is yes (he's a lawyer, from what I can tell). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/17/triumph_of_linux/ The article also contains some interesting facts about the devious ways in which Microsoft is trying to derail Linux, most recently through vague legal threats to enforce patents against Linux distributors that it does not partner with. Personally I think Linux could become the dominant OS, but many, many years from now.

This is an article which is most likely targeted at newcomers, about SQL injection, proper datatyping, query optimization and similar problems. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 10 should be the most important. Poorly written scripts can lead to an SQL injection attack with little effort from the wrongdoer. Also, be sure to test your scripts well. Put yourself in the place of a hacker, it is better you find any flaws before they do. You are going to have to properly validate user input regardless. And magic quotes have to do with the way the server is set up, so it all depends on what settings your hosting provider has set up. PHP 6 is phasing out magic quotes completely.

This is a very funny article about computer languages being like cars: http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.html

VNC stands for Virtual Network computing. It's a technology that has been around for a long time. It was originally designed by some people at AT&T Labs a long time ago. It is basically a cross-platform way for you to connect from one computer over to another computer and to be able to see a desktop that is being "served up" by the remote machine and run any graphical application – so it’s graphics-based as opposed to SSH which is text-based. In other words you can run a little application and using this application connect to another computer on your local network or over the Internet. Similar technologies have been developed by Microsoft (Remote Desktop Connection). VNC is very well supported on multiple platforms, there are lots of packages for VNC, you can find VNC for Linux, Windows, Mac. You can connect from a Linux machine to a Windows box, or from Windows to Mac, Mac to Windows – it makes no difference what operating system you’re running it on, the underlying communication protocol is the same and it's based on the same set of specifications across the operating system spectrum. Basically what you do is you run a little VNC server on the machine that you want to connect to, and then on the one you’re connecting from you are going to run a little viewer – this is the name for the VNC client application, it’s a very small widget that just lets you view the desktop of the remote machine. A couple of issues with VNC: The biggest issue is that it’s completely insecure. When you first run the server it asks you for a password that it will use to prompt clients / viewers that try to connect to it, but the whole thing is in plain text and historically it has been very insecure. It can also be a little slow at times, especially when transferring very graphics-rich desktop environments, but it’s really not that bad, because it’s oviously trying to compress the graphics over the connection. But lagging is occasionally an issue. There are several different ways to set up VNC on Linux. You can get different VNC packages (RealVNC - which is the original VNC software, TightVNC – which is very common, UltraVNC … on the Mac there is something called "Chicken of the VNC", also OSXvnc). TightVNC is nice because it runs on both Windows and Linux (it doesn’t run on the Mac as far as I know). But it doesn't really matter, you don't necessarily have to have server and client software belonging to the same package. In other words, you could be running a TightVNC server on your Linux machine and using a VNC viewer that belongs to "Chicken of the VNC" on a Mac to connect to the Linux machine. The first thing you need to do is install TightVNC on both machines. For my example I am going to connect between two Linux machines, but it really should make no difference. Let's say you have a Linux machine at home in the basement, and let's call that "server", and you have a Linux laptop called "laptop". On the server machine, you are going to need to run the VNC server application. I am going to first give you an example of how to connect without encryption, just totally insecure, just to kind of explain how to do it, and then we'll complicate things a little bit. Let's say your server's IP address on your local network is 192.168.1.50, and let's say your laptop is 192.168.1.60. On the server / target desktop, where you are going to try to connect to, all you need to do is to run: CONSOLE vncserver :1 You don't need to do this as root – you just do this as your normal user, that will work without problems. It will ask you for a password, which is not going to add too much to the security of the communication, but it's just a way to authenticate on a very weak level. You'll see some startup messages, you will see something about how it's creating a hidden directory in your home directory called .vnc, and it's creating a little script in there called xstartup. This $HOME/.vnc/xstartup script is kind of the equivalent of .xinitrc (the hidden script that has a list of stuff that will run before X is started when you do startx). This is where you are going to specify what window manager you want to run when you're running the VNC server. It defaults to TWM. You can have multiple desktops, meaning multiple servers running at the same time, and these will need to use different listener ports – 5900 and up, so :1 means it's going to be listening on port 5901, but I will explain this in more detail further down below. Before we do anything on the client side, let's stop the server: CONSOLE vncserver –kill :1 Now, let's go into that hidden .vnc directory on the server and edit the xstartup file. At the very bottom you should see what window manager is set to run by default. Like I said, you might see an entry for TWM. You want to comment this line by putting a hash mark at the beginning: CONSOLE #twm& and add a new line right below it, and pick a window manager. Let's say you have FluxBox – I would pick something lightweight, so maybe install FluxBox if you don't already have it ( http://fluxbox.org/ ) and then put on the line underneath it: CONSOLE exec fluxbox FluxBox doesn't need the ampersand if you use the exec command, it will just run it in the background. Save that file, then go back out and now run the server again: CONSOLE vncserver :1 Now, like I said, your server machine is 192.168.1.50. Now go over to your laptop and assuming you have VNC installed on it, open up a terminal and type: CONSOLE vncviewer 192.168.1.50:1 The VNC viewer is, again, the client end piece of software that you use to connect to the VNC server 192.168.1.50 on port 5901. The next thing you see after typing in the password is the default FluxBox installation. You can now mouse into the window and right-click and get the Fluxbox menu and you can run applications etc. If you were now to go back over and look at the screen on your server in the basement, you would see that nothing has changed – the VNC viewer is not controlling the desktop that you normally run. It's kind of running a new desktop in the background and you can't see that desktop on the server's monitor itself. Again, I highly recommend using a lightweight window manager with VNC. Now, like I said, what we've done so far has been completely insecure – the communication wasn't encrypted, the password could have very easily been sniffed. But the better way of running it is over SSH - and this is what I always do - and this is also the way that most of the docs I have seen recommend. Basically, what you are going to be doing is you are going to be using SSH tunneling. I didn't go into too much detail about tunneling in the other article ( http://forums.xisto.com/topic/93867-topic/?findpost=1064375719 ), but tunneling is basically a way to connect two computers over SSH on different ports. It would be a good idea at this point to go back to that article and refresh your memory. The reason why SSH tunneling is important is that you are going to be forwarding the port on the VNC server machine (5901) to a local (different) port on your laptop, and connecting your client-side VNC viewer to that local (different) port, which allows you to display the FluxBox desktop securely, over an encrypted SSH connection. So the way you want to do this is to still run the server the same way: CONSOLE vncserver :1 - there is no change there. And then on the laptop you're going to start a VNC tunnel – this is what you need to do: Normally the syntax for SSH is very simple: CONSOLE ssh 192.168.1.50 to connect to the server from the laptop. We are going to change that to include the "-L" switch in the middle. "-L" stands for local port forwarding: CONSOLE ssh –L 5902:192.168.1.50:5901 192.168.1.50 cat - & You have thus effectively forwarded the laptop's (local) 5902 port to the server's (remote) 5901 port, so you are creating a tunnel from the server's 5901 port to the laptop's 5902 port. We needed to specify the full port 5901 here because ssh is not aware of VNC's port naming convention whereby ":1" actually stands for port 5901. The "cat -" command at the end is only there for the purpose of keeping the connection open. You could use any other command that does not finish. It could be left blank, too, thereby opening a shell, but then you would need a controlling interactive terminal and therefore you could not be using the ssh command in a script. Now that you've done that, instead of pointing the VNC viewer to the server's IP address with display :1, which is mapped to port 5901, we are going to point it to the laptop's own loopback IP address with display :2, which is mapped to port 5902. That is the whole point of the tunnel. So in another terminal on the laptop you are going to run: CONSOLE vncviewer 127.0.0.1:2 and that will connect your VNC viewer to your laptop's local 5902 port, which is forwarded over an encrypted SSH tunnel to the server's 5901 port, where you have your VNC server running. There is a little twist here, though – VNC by default doesn't let you connect to your actual desktop – it's running this other FluxBox desktop in the background (or whatever window manager you choose to configure in that xstartup script in .vnc).But let's say you want to connect to your actual desktop on the server machine. In this case we need to be using a different piece of server software for that - x11vnc: the VNC server for real X displays – this one is a little buggy though, don't expect a completely perfect experience. But it works if you don't get too fancy with it. I encourage you to try it out. Use your package manager and search for x11vnc and go ahead and install it. What x11vnc does is it basically runs a single VNC server connection on :0 (that's the digit zero, not the capital letter O), which, remember, maps into port 5900. That's because you are only logged into one desktop at any given time, so if you're logged into the main desktop session, that is going to be port 5900. On the server machine, just run the command: CONSOLE x11vnc - that's all you need to do. Then you go to your laptop and it's very similar to what we did so far. We are going to forward the laptop's local 5900 port to the server's 5900 port. You would just type: CONSOLE ssh –L 5900:192.168.1.50:5900 192.168.1.50 cat - & And then in another terminal on the laptop you are going to run: CONSOLE vncviewer 127.0.0.1:0 - and you'll see the desktop that you're running on your server. There is stuff that you can play around with, like the level of compression and various other settings. If you want to do this over the Internet there is not much that needs to be changed, except for the fact that you obviously have to take care of your NAT router and your firewall. In other words, you have to establish port forwarding rules for port 5900 or 5901 (as the case may be) to be forwarded to your server machine. And do not confuse this type of port forwarding (which is of the router / firewall variety) with what I have described above (which is port forwarding of the SSH tunnel variety). Let's say the Internet-facing IP address of your router is 209.1.1.1 – you would just type: CONSOLE ssh –L 5902:209.1.1.1:5901 209.1.1.1 cat - & CONSOLE ssh –L 5900:209.1.1.1:5900 209.1.1.1 cat - & respectively, because you have firewall-forwarded both the SSH and the VNC ports. So definitely go ahead and play around with VNC, you'll really like it and when you combine VNC with SSH you've got a really nice, really killer combination of encryption plus being able to connect graphically to another desktop.

You could just use regular expressions to blindly perform the preg_replace() you want without performing the check first.As with other topics, I will give you an example of how to do this in a cygwin bash shell and leave it up to you to understand the principle behind the example and adapt it to your specific situation. CONSOLE ## echo "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Subject" | sed 's#Re: .*Re: #Re: #'Re: Subject## echo "Re: Subject" | sed 's#Re: .*Re: #Re: #'Re: Subject## echo "Subject" | sed 's#Re: .*Re: #Re: #'Subject#Note that here it is the greedy behavior of regular expression wildcards that takes hold of the entire repetitive Re: string.Also, remember that preg_replace() is always global (s###g) so you only need one iteration for this function. Putting it in a while loop could cause serious performance problems.In this particular case you do need regular expression power, but if you don't - and you just want to search and replace - you should use str_replace instead.

International terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Required reading: http://www.govexec.com/magazine/features/2007/08/security-theater/24994/ What makes terrorism so effective is how it plays on peoples fears. It doesn't matter how likely a terrorist strike is, just so long as the possibility of a terrorist strike can breed fear in the masses. Unfortunately, the US government has also discovered how powerful a motivator this fear can be and has turned it around on its own populace to institute laws and take actions that curb freedoms, with the average Joe on the street believing that the loss of civil rights is an equitable trade in exchange for a perceived higher degree of security. If you are interested in this general subject, a great place to start is Bruce Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/ He's one of those people who takes a subject about which you know little to nothing, and makes it fascinating.

If you decide to go with C++ I strongly recommend you check out Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in C++" freebie. His talent for explaining things will make you addicted to reading chapter after chapter while holding your breath. Google for "Thinking in C++" or go to: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ P.S. The forum you seem to be looking for is: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/163-forum/

Let's not confuse Disk Cleanup - which goes through things like temporary Internet files deep under your Documents and Settings folder and removes old stuff - with a registry cleanup - that fixes inconsistencies in your registry. But here is something you might want to try. Google "ccleaner" or go to /ccleaner directly and perform all the scans available in this tool. It does both registry and file cleanup.

I think you also need a very thorough cleanup of your registry - there are lots of tools out there to do that - not sure how many will work under Vista.

Here is an example of how I would solve your problem using cygwin in my setup at home. 192.168.1.1 is the IP address of my wireless router, so it always responds to a ping. 192.168.1.2 is the IP address of my PC - the one I would run this script on. 192.168.1.3 is - let's say - the IP address of a PC that is currently off. I have cygwin installed and all the binaries are in C:\cygwin - this directory is in my PATH. These binaries I'm talking about are Win32 ports of POSIX utilities - very slick, very powerful tools that I strongly believe every serious IT professional should be familiar with. They make a very good team with the pre-existing Windows command line utilities, whether they be built-in ones, or resource kit ones, or whatever other command line based power tools you may have. As a prerequisite to the solution below, I have temporarily enabled the Messenger service on my 192.168.1.2 box - this one is required in order for the net send command to work. Before I start describing the solution, this is a little experiment I did - please note the use of the $? return code, which may be 0 for successful and 1 meaning failure. What I did then is create a text file called ips.txt, like this: and I ran the following script in the cygwin bash shell (remember this is still Windows XP, you're just pretending to work the way you would in UNIX): while truedo for ipaddress in `cat ips.txt` do ping $ipaddress if [ $? != 0 ] then net send 192.168.1.2 $ipaddress is down fi done sleep 3600doneand the popup that I get looks like this: The net send command is not restricted to IP addresses, it can also recognize any kind of resolvable host name (NetBIOS, DNS, LDAP, etc...). If you want to get even fancier, you can put this on a server and configure it as a Windows background service using a small resource kit utility called srvinstw.exe. Good luck.

Well, the title says it all and I really don't have anything to add to that, except to say that this is a really, really powerful technology that is very pervasive in many programming as well as scripting languages and as well in mainstream database products. I really recommend you put in the time and effort to learn regular expressions, they are power tools that are going to open for you a whole new world of text processing possibilities. Link: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Well I think I am going to disagree with your statement. You are narrowing down the criteria too much.There are two categorizations we are talking about:1) programming language versus scripting language2) compiled versus interpretedIn my opinion, those are independent or ... (trying to find a better word to describe it) orthogonal criteria (yes it sounds more like geometry, I know).You can have:- compiled programming languages- interpreted programming languages- interpreted scripting languagesI'm trying to think of a compiled scripting language, but none comes to mind.

I subscribed to their e-mail notification service and so far they have only released silly games. But today for the first time I'm seeing a serious piece of software - Wondershare Audio Converter, a powerful audio conversion tool that can convert various audio formats between one another, such as MP3 to WAV, WAV to MP3, MP3 to WMA, MP3 to AAC, AC3, M4A ect. for playback on popular audio players including iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod, Zune, and all kinds of MP3 Players. https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/wondershare-audio-converter/ 189 people dig it (92%). I certainly am going to download and install it, and see if it can solve a problem I have been having for a long time, which is to remove DRM from my legally purchased audible.com audio books. I have tried TuneBite and GoldWave, which is what various people tend to reccomend in forums, but it looks like I haven't found the right registry tweak so far. EDIT: Today's giveaway is Multi-Edit Lite 2006, a programmer’s text editor with powerful features designed to deliver the ease of operation and timesaving functions you need to meet demanding deadlines. With Multi-Edit Lite 2006, you can manipulate text with unsurpassed ease and compile source files while you are still within Multi-Edit Lite 2006. Your ability to handle files is greatly enhanced. Up to 2048 files can be edited simultaneously, and Multi-Edit Lite 2006 effortlessly handles large files with line lengths up to 16K! You will not spend a lot of time getting up to speed with Multi-Edit Lite 2006 either. You will be doing productive work very quickly with the aid of our intuitive user interface. Drop down menus and special Key Assignments are available that will help you execute commands in a heartbeat. Plus, features like our smart indent, template editing, and construct matching make our language support second to none. Check it out: https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/multi-edit-lite-2006/ It's a super-tool for all of us programmers.

I guess it all boils down to trust.If you are picky about the software you install, then it's OK to go out on a limb and allow it to write to your registry or to your system32 directory. Some pieces of software have a legitimate requirement to do that, for example if they are going to install a driver to go with the application.I know people who promiscuously (for lack of a better word) install any and all software they come across that says in bright flashing colors "Download and install for free".Based on your statement a while ago where you said that the little purple juggling thing (Bonzi Buddy) looks awesome and you want to get it for your PC, I'm guessing you would fall under the above described category.So my advice is to heed the warnings.

The article linked below is interesting if you've ever wanted to: - Make custom PDF notepaper - Convert files to PDF online - Annotate PDF's with Skim - Password protect PDF's - Merge PDF files - Edit PDF's with PDF Tools - Speed up your PDF reader - Manage your PDF library in iTunes - Convert that whiteboard to PDF - Save any document as a PDF http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I found something interesting in it - I found how you can take just about any office document or image file and have it converted to PDF and sent to your e-mail address. The website to do that is: http://www.pdfonline.com/index.htm I tested it with a text file and the result looks pretty good in my opinion, but I noticed that there is a file size limitation - 2 MB. Also, you are stuck with the "Letter" format - I haven't found an option for how to change that on the submit page. Like I mentioned in other articles, I use the free PrimoPDF print driver and I'm pretty happy with it. This whole online conversion thing is for when I might be away from my PC or just using someone else's PC on a one-time basis. The article also served as a refresher for how to speed up Adobe Acrobat Reader - move the accessibility API file from the plug_ins directory to the Optional directory and Reader will start up a lot faster. Open any PDF using Adobe Acrobat or Reader 8. Unless you view it in full-screen mode, you are very likely seeing a set of icons to the left side of the page - icons almost as big and loud as the copies I’ve posted here on the left. In version 8, these icons provide access to a variety of systems that may be available within the document. The most familiar of these Navigation Panes are bookmarks and thumbnails, but there are at least 14 altogether, not including auxiliary panes. Click on a navigation pane button and the corresponding pane opens to the right. Prior to version 8, navigation pane buttons consisted of tiny demure gray folders with overlapping hard-to-read labels nestled together on the upper left edge of the page. The design didn’t really help users switch between panes, but these little labels were so small and quiet they made virtually no impact on the presentation of the page, and were easily ignored. Acrobat 8 introduced a much wider Navigation Panel Button bar, with big, brassy icons but no obvious way to turn them OFF. Yes, you can right-click, Hide and Save each file, but that’s far too much like real WORK, and it can’t be done in batch, nor from a menu item, nor with a (published) javascript. In short, it’s Not Obvious, and it should be. To HIDE the Navigation Pane Buttons, so your uses don’t suffer them when you don’t want them to, simply check Hide Window Controls in the Document Properties (Control-D) Initial View dialog. In Acrobat 8, this switch has effect of hiding both the navigation pane buttons AND the split-window icon and vertical scroll bar on the right side of the page. Critically, this feature may be managed on any number of PDF files at once using a simple Batch Process in Acrobat Professional.

The title says it all, this is a detailed image map that allows anyone from newbies to ubergeeks to learn about the various devices and functions of Linux.

This is a funny as hell video about MS Paint, made by Macenstein, a group of bored Mac users with too much time on their hands. This is the same news outlet that brought you the unspecified Pizza restaraunt that went bankrupt after moving onto Vista. The funniest quotes from this video: "The future is right around the corner" "The future is now" "The future is in the past" Check out the 3D Pipes screensaver in the background http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Now, to be fair, here's a time-lapsed YouTube video titled "How to paint the Mona Lisa with Microsoft Paint" http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Screenshot: or this one "How to draw a car in Microsoft Paint": http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Screenshot: He might have been using a PC pen but either way it just goes to show that it's all about the artist's talent rather than about the software.