Microsoft has a new Secure Content Downloader tool that sounds an awful lot like a Bittorrent clone. It’s described as a ‘peer-assisted technology’ where ‘[e]ach client downloads content by exchanging parts of the file they’re interested in with other clients, in addition to downloading parts from the server.’ Right now MSCD is just a time-limited preview, intended to support downloads of select Microsoft beta releases (e.g. Visual Studio 2008). If this test goes well, Microsoft will probably start using MSCD for all their large downloads. How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft’s bandwidth costs?
Link | Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How many of us have the equivalent of a consumer electronics museum cluttering up our home?
Second Rotation, which launched its Web site on Monday, buys back old consumer electronics and sells them on eBay for you. If you’re diligent, there are ways to recycle that cell phone or iPod gathering dust in your closet. But this sounds like a convenient way to recycle and get money for your stuff at the same time.
Link | http://www.secondrotation.com
If you were counting on infinity being absolute, your number’s up
As German mathematician Georg Cantor demonstrated in the late 19th century, there exists a variety of infinities—and some are simply larger than others.
Link | www.sciam.com
A small free editor for building XSL templates and test their transformation with XML documents.
This program was written by a programmer for programmers with using other programmers’ open source code. So, it must be free to get the source code. Also the source code exist as a project on SourceForge.net
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For some unknown reason, each time we try a new graphics application, we feel the uncontrollable desire to apply the most cheesy effects to beautifully designed typefaces. These so called text effects or type effects are carefully hidden guilty pleasures that most designers enjoy to try, but would never dare to apply in real life work.
For those like me that love text effects and have the courage to admit it, here’s a thorough guide to the best 80 text effects available on the web.
To some these may be not the best tutorials on the web, but certainly they are some of the best around. I had to eliminate those that looked nice but had very little preview images. This guide includes 78 Photoshop tutorials and 2 impressive collections of Photoshop Actions, plus 3 books on the subject.
If you have created a cool text effect and you believe it should be mentioned in this list, just leave a comment with the link to your tutorial or resource in the comments section.
Link | www.photoshoproadmap.com
WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows (all current variants). WinDirStat is free software published under the GNU General Public License.
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Found here
I got to wondering recently if the Vista SuperFetch technologies were really working with me or against me when trying to get my UMPC to perform better.
Undoubtedly the drive in the ASUS R2H isn’t the fastest performing thing around even when it is bursting a lot of data and what my experience of the machine being desperately slow when I closed applications made me wonder if SuperFetch was really working against me.
SuperFetch is supposed to prefetch regularly used pieces of code, beit system code or applications and load them into RAM as RAM is available… ergo unload something and the prefetcher loads something else that may speed up the user response if that application is called upon. (as I understand it).
Given that I increased my R2H from 768Mb to 1280Mb then just maybe SuperFetch is bringing a LOT of stuff into memory each time I close things.
Anyway I disabled SuperFetch entirely by changing..
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnableSuperfetch
to 0 (from the default of 3).
The only other tuning that I have really is Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive = 1 to keep all kernel and driver code in memory anyway.
I have found that with my config that performance is generally faster so I am curious if anyone else can verify this with R2Hs running 768Mb instead of 1280Mb and possibly other UMPCs.
Specifically I have found that operations like control panel navigation are much faster – this kind of thing loads and unloads a lot of CPLs (DLLs actually with a standard entry point) and I think that particular option keeps SuperFetch quite busy.
Other info : I did have a ReadyBoost compatible SD card (SanDisk Ultra II 1Gb) running and I am presuming that ReadyBoost is now also disabled since I think only SuperFetch uses ReadyBoost and with SuperFetch disabled the machine goes back to using the XP style prefetcher.
Visual design elements can considerably improve the readability of the page. Using them, you can make it easier for your users to scan the presented content and find the information they’re actually looking for. Icons can draw reader’s attention to the key aspects of the article and visualize the topic of the post. Buttons can be used to motivate users to some particular actions; and templates are supposed to help designers to create user-friendly interface elements right away. And whatever aim you’d like to achieve, free visual design elements are always useful – simply because they can give your text content a better visual appearance.
We’ve selected fresh high quality icons, buttons, vector graphics, templates and layouts. You might know some of them, but hopefully not all of them.
Not all listed freebies can be used for commercial projects, however you can use all of them in your private projects of for you personal purposes. Please read the disclaimers carefully before using icons – they’re changing from time to time.
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Nope, you didn’t read that title incorrectly, Samsung has announced that they are poised to release an LED-lit LCD monitor that the company claims will create the best picture quality seen anywhere in the world.
The 24-inch monitor will be lit by LEDs, which will create far better color saturation, and inkier blacks. Believe it or not, the saturation level is 111% of the NTSC standard (far higher than any other monitor on the market right now) and will sport Samsung’s S-PVA technology which will allow for 180-degree viewing and a 1900 x 1200 resolution.
Although no pricing or availability is known right now, I might have to pick one of these up if I want to see Akihabara News in the highest quality possible, now won’t I? I hope to have more details for you soon.
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Sunday’s post about the closing CompUSA Vista fire sale racked up some pretty heated comment debates. Clearly, Vista is an emotional subject, which is good reason to ask you, again, to tell us what you think about Windows Vista.
We asked back in December and published comments from readers that had used Windows Vista. But that was way before the official release to everybody.
Nearly three months into Windows Vista’s public release, we ask for your reaction to the operating system. If you’ve used Windows Vista, please tell us what you think of the new software. To spice things up a bit, we’d also like answers to the question: Is Windows Vista Microsoft’s Windows Me II?
The Inquirer has labeled Windows Vista as Windows Me II. I wouldn’t go that far (yet), but I’ll say this: Over dinner last year, I told several Microsoft user interface designers that there were only two versions of Windows I liked less the more I used them: Me and Vista. They were mortally offended, methinks, but that remains my experience still.
The question of Vista as Windows Me II is no small one. Windows Me is kind of a dirty word at Microsoft. Most users clung to Windows 98 rather than go to Me, which may also have deterred consumer upgrades to Windows XP later on. If Vista turns out to be a Me II operating system, then Windows XP could become Windows 98/98 SE II—meaning the operating system people continue to use rather than going to the next version. Heck, Dell brought back XP for new PCs. How telling is that?
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