The idea behind this initiative is that many sites and publishers offer trial downloads; but only we offer giveaway downloads. What does that mean?

Basically, every day we nominate one software title that will be a Giveaway title of that day. The software will be available for download for 24 hours (or more, if agreed by software publisher) and that software will be absolutely free. That means – not a trial, not a limited version – but a registered and legal version of the software will be free for our visitors*.

The software product will be presented in its full functionality, without any limitations save for those mentioned in Terms and Conditions.

The download link will remain on our web-site for the agreed period of time, together with the review of the software product and the information about other products from the software publisher presenting the giveaway title.

Both reviews and the information on the product line will remain active even when the Giveaway period is over.

The information about Giveaway of the day and the participants of this initiative will be included in our newsletters and distributed among our visitors and subscribers.

We will pay the software publisher for the Giveaway license, and our visitors will only receive those after downloading a special verification program and agreeing to the Terms and Conditions, thus protecting software publishers’ interests and making our initiative beneficial for both clients and publishing companies.

We believe that Giveaway of the day will allow both publishers and clients to meet each other and win together with our initiative.

How can I win with Giveaway of the day?

1. You will get to know new software, for free!
2. You will learn more about the software product, because we will provide a detailed software review for every title we nominate!
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4. You will be offered an easy access to new software products and new versions of existing ones.
5. Vast software selection as well as the extensive search capabilities of our web-site will allow you to find just the software you need.
6. News of the world of software, daily updated information, new reviews and software downloads – all and everything for you, every day, together with our daily giveaways!

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That’s simple! Our visitors will always stay informed about Giveaway of the day initiative and its current publishers. The information about giveaways for upcoming week will be posted on our web-site; all of our subscribers will receive this information in their weekly newsletter. Plus, Giveaway Tickers will also help us spread the information around the world.

So just visit us frequently, subscribe to our newsletter and stay updated with our giveaways!

See also information about our Giveaway Ticker, the fastest way to find out what’s hot on our web-site today.

http://www.technibble.com/tried-and-tested-software-recommendations/

Friday, November 09, 2007 3:00 PM PST If Microsoft Corp.‘s Windows Vista were graded for its first year, the report card would read “not meeting expectations,” analysts said Friday, a year and a day after the operating system code went gold and was sent off for duplication.

On Nov. 8, 2006, Jim Allchin, then the head of Vista development, announced that Vista had gone RTM (release to manufacturing) — the first step toward its release later in the month to businesses, and in late January 2007 to consumers. “This is a good day. I am super happy,” Allchin told reporters in a conference call.

While Vista might be a sales blockbuster — Microsoft’s last quarter broke eight-year-old records, in large part behind Vista — it hasn’t made the kind of progress anticipated in the enterprise world. And if Allchin, who retired as soon as Vista shipped in January, was still with Microsoft, he might not be super happy now.

“The uptake is much lower than expected,” said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc. “Organizations really seem to be way behind where they said they would be last year.” Silver compared the results of a Gartner survey last month on Vista adoption plans with an identical survey taken in October 2006, and concluded that enterprises are 9-12 months behind their original expectations.

“They overestimated their vendors’ abilities to get Vista-supported versions of their applications done, they underestimated the difficulty of moving to Vista and they overestimated the value of Vista,” Silver said in explaining why corporations have fallen behind their original plans.

“It’s just a much slower deployment overall,” he said. “Now we’re hearing a lot of folks talking about late 2008, early 2009. Before, they’d been saying late 2007, early 2008.”

Michael Cherry, an analyst with Decisions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash. research firm, echoed the slow adoption mantra. “I don’t see anyone rushing out to do [the upgrade], especially now that SP1 is on the immediate horizon,” said Cherry. In fact, he argued, it’s because companies have realized the difficulties in upgrading existing hardware to Vista that deployment plans didn’t meet expectations.

“Vista is totally a product for new hardware,” said Cherry, who recommends that companies leave existing operating systems in place on current hardware. “I think you need to be real careful of [Vista's] hardware requirements.” He said many companies underestimate what’s really needed to drive the OS.

Microsoft has touted huge numbers for Vista, saying just two weeks ago that it has shipped 88 million copies, twice the number Windows XP shipments during a similar stretch after that OS’s release in 2001. So neither analyst would even come close to calling Vista a bust.

“It’s pretty hard to call it a failure,” said Cherry. “Any other company would love to have had a product launch like this.” But Microsoft isn’t just any other company, he added. “Microsoft can afford to wait for Vista to become a success.”

Silver was somewhat tougher in his final analysis. “Vista’s done about what we expected for consumers, but to a lesser extent in the enterprise,” he said. “People have realized that there are a lot of bumps when it comes to an upgrade, especially when it’s coming [after] something good, and something stable, like Windows XP.”

That, in fact, is one reason for Vista’s poor reputation, and poorer-than-anticipated showing in the enterprise. “When you’re coming from an OS that wasn’t all that great, you don’t notice the hiccups as much,” Silver said, citing the move from Windows Millennium to XP as a perfect example. “But when you’re moving from something stable, like XP, and end with instability, everything is magnified.”

Firefox 3 Beta 1 includes dozens of security enhancements, like this panel full of information that helps determine the legitimacy of the site you’re visiting.
Screenshot: Wired News

After falling months behind schedule, Mozilla released the first official beta of Firefox 3 on Tuesday. While not without a few bugs, the release showcases the substantial improvements to both user interface and performance that are in store for the final release, which is due sometime later this year.

Firefox was once the only real alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But in a month or so when the final version of Firefox 3 is released, the browser will enter a significantly more mature browser market than its predecessors. Recent versions of the Opera browser, previously a paid download, are available for free. Microsoft’s much-improved Internet Explorer 7 is installed by default with Windows Vista. Also, Apple’s svelte Safari 3, which the company has made available on both Mac and Windows to fuel web-app development for its iPhone, has also entered the browser fray. In short, Firefox 3 will have its work cut out for it.

The open-source and fully customizable browser remains popular, but has recently had to parry heavy criticism from users complaining of Firefox’s bloat, memory leaks and dodgy performance. Mozilla hopes to change that perception with this release, which is indeed slimmer and sleeker than its predecessors. It’s an important milestone for Mozilla and shows that, though a bit late, Firefox 3 remains on track both in reducing memory usage and bringing some new, useful features to the table.

Firefox 3 beta 1 is noticeably snappier. Page loads are quicker, and Ajax-heavy sites like GMail refresh almost imperceptibly.

In our testing of beta 1 and its final-release candidate on an Intel Mac running Mac OS X Leopard, the browser never consumed more than 60 MB of memory, and it disappeared from our CPU usage monitor entirely when running in the background, something Firefox 2 has never managed to do. Of course, it was running sans add-ons, a common source of performance problems. (Add-on developers will need to tweak their code to run in the new browser, so for the time being, many are unavailable.) To that end, Mozilla has said it will step up efforts to help add-on creators track and eliminate bugs in popular extensions.

Another tester at Wired News encountered massive memory usage with the beta on Windows XP, and other varying reports will no doubt continue to come in. There’s already an add-on for the beta to help patch some memory issues.

While the speed alone is likely to convince many people to upgrade, Firefox 3 has some new features as well. Not everything planned for the final release has made it into beta 1, but there are plenty of enhancements.

Beta 1 features a new bookmark-management system dubbed Places, which aims to help you keep your bookmarks organized and easy to find. Recent alpha builds included Places, but did not implement all the planned features. Even now, Places doesn’t look completely baked, but it’s close enough to be very useful. Places supports bookmarking tools borrowed from social sites like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia — including tags and starring to classify, organize and prioritize your favorites.

On the right side of Firefox’s main Location bar, you’ll notice a new star icon. Press the icon once, and the page is stored in your bookmarks. Press it again, and a small panel pops up to let you edit your bookmark without having to open the Places panel.

We encountered a bug here: Although clicking the star is supposed to create a bookmark in the folder “All bookmarks,” opening up the Places panel showed the bookmark was nowhere to be found.

The new star icon isn’t the only change for the Location bar. In fact the Location bar isn’t just a window to display the URL anymore — it’s also a full-text-search bar for finding bookmarks or pages stored in your browsing history. The new Location bar will search page titles, URLs and any user-specified tags within your bookmarks. That makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for, even when you don’t know where you saw it.

Mozilla has also dropped the age-old padlock symbol from the location bar. Because the lock symbol, which denotes an encrypted site, can be evoked falsely by scammers, Firefox 3 beta 1 instead offers a clickable favicon for each site. Clicking on it displays a panel that reports the page’s connection status. An additional link will open a panel that displays even more information, like whether or not the site is bookmarked, how often you’ve visited the page and any saved passwords you might have stored. This would hopefully prevent you from being duped into visiting a fake site for your bank, for example. However, the need to click through to see the extra info is a barrier to the feature’s usefulness.

Other changes include many streamlined user-interface elements, like the revamped add-on manager for installing and maintaining third-party plug-ins. The add-on manager now features a tab for managing common plug-ins like the Flash player or Quicktime, including the ability to disable them. You also get links to find any additional add-ons and a handy new “Restart Firefox” button for quickly enabling and disabling add-ons or themed skins. Previously, this button only showed up when you installed new plug-ins.

The downloads panel has also been improved by the addition of a new info icon, which tells you not only where the download is located on your hard drive, but also where you got it. There’s also a small search bar at the bottom of the panel for finding those needles in your haystack of many downloads.

Although beta 1 is far from a finished product and some interface changes like platform-specific skins are still in store before the final release, the speed and memory improvements in Firefox 3 beta 1 make it worth the upgrade. That is, of course, if you don’t mind losing your add-ons for a while.

TechNibble.Com

If a person received an email from the US Department of Justice, he or she may believe that it was actually coming from that department. However, an article on The Register notes that these emails may be phony and it will try to install a malware on their computer.

The email instructs the recipient to download an attachment which contains a trojan according to MessageLabs and Websense.

These type of emails are called Spear phishing. According to The Register, a recent phishing occured. The Federal Trade Commission was involved in that other case.

I don’t have the space here to give you a complete rundown on what Leopard can and can’t do, and Computerworld has already done that online. What I can tell you is how Leopard has impressed me.

Brick House Stability

Boot times were quick, and the system’s Sleep and Resume features worked flawlessly on the MacBooks I used for testing. On a variety of G5 and Intel-based Macs, I had no performance or stability issues, even when I upgraded from Leopard’s predecessor, Tiger, instead of performing a clean update. In only one instance did a system freeze. That’s a level of stability I haven’t achieved with any machine running any other operating system.

As with most new operating system releases, computers older than, say, 18 or 24 months may need an upgrade of memory or disk drives. While Apple lists 512 MB of RAM as a system requirement, 2 GB is a more realistic number. Of course, your mileage may vary.

As with Windows Vista, a lot of that memory is needed to support the eye candy. Apple has again redefined what personal computing looks like. Tiger fared well against Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) offerings, but Leopard takes a real leap ahead. It builds upon the already solid Mac OS X platform and advances almost all of the core features. The Finder has been given a new coat of virtual paint, with transparent menus and a new Dock that “reflects” the applications stored there. Users can collapse applications and document folders into the Dock and then easily access them via fly-out menus. Cover Flow, a feature first used in iTunes, lets you browse files visually and then see a file’s contents without opening it.

Unbeatable Features

Apple’s IM client, iChat, runs rings around what’s available for other systems. It now has green-screen capabilities that allow users to place themselves in front of still or animated back-grounds, and it lets users share screens or applications for collaboration.

Vista has widgets, but they can’t beat Leopard’s for ease of use. Dashboard lets users take any Web page and turn it into a widget that auto-updates, going well beyond the concept of creating HTML applets that can show snippets of information.

I’ve always used my e-mail in-box as a to-do list, and Apple’s Mail client makes that really work. You can turn any e-mail in your in-box into an item on a to-do list and then keep track of what needs to be done.

What’s in It for IT?

Does any of this matter to IT? More and more, it does, now that getting Apple’s software to work as part of an infrastructure is mostly a nonissue. Boot Camp, Apple’s method for running Windows natively on Intelbased Macs, allows those who must use Windows applications to consider a Mac. (With Leopard, Boot Camp is integrated directly into the operating system.)

There’s no doubt that the vast majority of IT shops will stick with Windows, but there are always users for whom a Mac makes sense. Thanks to Boot Camp, it’s no longer a one-or-the-other question. There’s certainly appeal in Leopard’s host of refined productivity features and rock-solid stability. With little or no price premium for a Mac, more will say yes.

By Walaika Haskins
TechNewsWorld
11/21/07 12:12 PM PT

It’s been almost a year since Microsoft released Windows Vista, so it’s high time the operating system got its first Service Pack. Vista SP1, scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2008, will include improvements suggested by users. Microsoft also plans a third Service Pack for Windows XP, its last before the OS is retired in June.

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With the one-year anniversary of the launch of its Windows Vista operating system on the horizon, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for the past 10 months or so has been able to turn its attention to other projects. In particular, the software maker has been working to put out Vista’s first service pack and a third service pack for its Windows XP operating system. The two software updates are designed to improve the performance and stability of their respective OS.

Microsoft has rolled out the final release candidate for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), which has a scheduled release during the first quarter of 2008. Microsoft has also scheduled the release of the Windows Vista Service Pack (SP1) for sometime between January and April of next year.A beta version of Vista SP1 was released to a group of private testers in September and the final release date “will depend on customer feedback and the quality of the beta,” said David Zipkin, senior product manager, Windows Client.PC users can expect the two SPs to come out within a few weeks of each other, with the Vista SP released to coincide with the launch of Windows Server 2008, said Michael Cherry, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft.“Microsoft will be promoting that the two things work better together. And you want to have both of them there,” he stated.

Better Vista

With Windows Vista SP1, users of the operating system will have the benefit of receiving all the updates released for Vista throughout 2007 in one package. The SP also includes improvements to the OS based on customer feedback to Microsoft, Zipkin explained.

In addition to previously released updates, SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability, performance and compatibility issues, supporting new types of hardware , and adding support for several emerging standards, he continued.

“SP1 also continues to improve upon the IT administration experience. SP1 is not intended to be a vehicle for releasing new features; however some existing components do gain slightly enhanced functionality in SP1,” Zipkin told TechNewsWorld.

Adoption rates for Vista have lagged behind those of XP during the same time period following its release. So, the release of this first SP is particularly important for Microsoft as IT administrators traditionally begin planning to upgrade their machines to a new OS following the initial SP.

“Many admins still have a SP1 policy where they wait for the first service pack before deploying,” said Gary Chen, a Yankee Group analyst. “Vista is really somewhat a victim of XP’s success.”

However, “while SP1 contains valuable updates to Windows, organizations don’t need to wait to deploy and can experience the improved security, management and deployment benefits of Windows Vista today,” said Zipkin.

The launch of SP1 could lead to an uptick in adoption for the new OS, but it will not be significant, according to Cherry.

“The big thing is it takes people time to test things. And then they have to work it into their regular [schedule] of work they perform. Not everyone has a whole bunch of [down] time just waiting for Microsoft to do something,” he stated.

“I think Vista will roll out at a somewhat slower than expected but steady rate. It’s never going to be so fast that everyone goes, ‘Look at that.’ But, it’s not going to fall away to nothing,” Cherry added.

XP Feels Its Age

It is six years and counting since Windows XP was loaded on its first PC and since then Microsoft has sold more than 400 million copies of the OS, according to a January 2006 estimate from IDC. The first service pack for the OS came in September 2002, 11 months after it hit store shelves. That SP contained security patches, hot-fixes, compatibility updates and a new version of Windows Messenger.

In August 2004, Microsoft rolled out XP SP2 that brought users an enhanced firewall protection and security in the form of Windows Security Center, improved Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth support and a pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer.

The upcoming XP SP3, put on hold while Microsoft pushed out Vista, has been in the works for more than three years. And while it is not unusual for the software company to put out a third or even fourth SP, XP’s continuing popularity among PC users has prompted Microsoft to release one more service pack before it discontinues sales of the OS in June.

Wrapping It Up

“It’s about to enter a new stage of its lifecycle. That is generally a good time to send out a service pack so that as it moves into the next port cycle you can say ‘We need you to be at this release of the service pack.’ It does two things for Microsoft. Because there has been a significant amount of time since there was a service pack for XP, it resets the baseline and provides all of the code up to a certain date. The second thing is they will update certain components that have changed, and bring them into the product as well,” Cherry explained.

As with Vista, XP SP3 is a rollup that includes all the previously released updates for Windows XP, including security updates, out-of-band releases and hotfixes, Zipkin noted. The service pack contains a few new updates but should not significantly change the Windows XP experience.

“Windows XP SP3 will not include most Windows Vista features, with the exception of Network Access Protection (NAP). NAP is a capability of Windows Vista that is also being made available on Windows XP SP3 and will require Windows Server 2008,” he added.

“XP is a very popular operating system and it is about time for a service pack,” Chen told TechNewsWorld. And although “the popularity of XP has already affected Vista, I don’t expect anything to really change with SP3.”