Windows Live Messenger 8.1 Beta is now available for everyone to download and enjoy. It has a whole host of new features and comes to us just 4-months after the initial release, which is actually a pretty quick turn around.
The holidays are coming up and wouldn't it be nice to know how many days there are until they arrive? To keep track of those upcoming events you should get Timeleft. It will give you a countdown so that you can see how many years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until the event.
Apparently Pluck decided that it wasn't worth the effort to continue their RSS reader services. They have announced to all of their users that they will discontinue the service starting January 5, 2007:
First I'll start with Google's acquisition of Jotspot. As if they didn't get there hands on enough when they bought YouTube Google went and paid an unknown amount to buy the wiki company known as Jotspot. As Google Blogoscoped points out in the screenshots they took Jotspot already has the look and feel that Google services currently have.
I know many of you were waiting for Fasterfox to release a Firefox 2 compatible version before upgrading, and now you don't have to wait any longer. The newest version also comes in 11 new languages but doesn't contain any new features.
Okay, I am going to have a few things here to keep you occupied for a little while. The first thing that I wanted to talk about was Google's recent decision to start paying independent video publishers a share of the ad revenue that is generated from users viewing videos.
A few months back I gave Kororaa Linux a shot because it installed XGL automatically on my system without me needing to do a thing. Heck, the 3D goodness that Kororaa brought even worked flawlessly on the Live CD that they offered. It didn't take long for ATI and nVidia to go after them for distributing the drivers with the kernel which forced Kororaa to remove XGL from its CD.
The Windows Vista Team Blog just announced what the packaging will look like for retail copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007. I like all of the rounded corners because it gives it a unique look that goes beyond the classic box. Somehow The Vista Team Blog came up with a very unique way of making it sound like the packaging alone is worth hundreds of dollars.
File sharing can be a huge burden for webmasters which is why RapidShare has become such an overwhelming success. People go there, upload their file, and let RapidShare worry about hosting it and the bandwidth cost.
Newegg is currently offering Windows XP Media Center Edition for just $110 which sounds like a lot of money but it really isn't when you put it into perspective. For purchasing that you will receive an upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium when it is released in early 2007.
