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.
As many of you probably noticed we had a few hours of downtime earlier today. It wasn't anything expected and took my host and I a little while to find the issue in order to correct it.
We all knew it was coming today and it has! Microsoft released Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP to the public. It has almost been exactly two-months since Microsoft released WMP 11 Beta 2 and now everyone can bask in the joy of the final release.
Do you never have enough room to write your comments here, or anywhere for that matter? The Resizeable Form Fields extension allows you to resize text boxes to anything that you want. I'm sure you'll find this extremely useful on blogs and in forums where it would be nice to see your entire comment without needing to scroll.
So Adobe has finally gotten around to releasing a PDF Reader that doesn't take ages to open. They call it Adobe Digital Editions and it is a Flash-based application without many options, which can be seen in the screenshot.
Last week we introduced you to the luxury submarines that coud possibly turn into the next "must-have" for those with nothing better to do with their money. In keeping with the same theme, this week we've got wheels in mind. Big wheels.
The search box in Firefox (located in the upper right corner) can be very useful if you put it to good use. To add some search engines you could go to this site that Mozilla has put together or there is an even easier way now.
Another holiday season is approaching us and there is nothing like the mobs of people that go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. That day is typically referred to Black Friday and it earned its name because that is the one day where most retail stores are guaranteed not to be in the red (a.k.a. guaranteed to make money).
Garett Rogers is always digging through code and files on Google's websites to try and figure out what upcoming services they might be offering. He is at it again by taking a peak at Google's robots.txt file which identifies directories that should not be indexed.
About a week ago I discovered a program, called WinExposé, that clones the Mac Exposé feature very well. There have been several new releases of that software since I mentioned it which is really nice to see. In fact, it is one of the most updated pieces of software that I have ever seen.
Here is your week in review with Sunday's Summary! If you missed something, check it out.
