Norton Internet Security 2006 release

Symantec released the latest version of its Norton security software on Monday, adding a new "protection center" to its Norton Internet Security 2006 applications suite.

The Norton Protection Center aggregates a variety of security information and presents it in a straightforward format intended to help consumers more easily understand what security features they need to enable. It will be included in the Norton Internet Security 2006 suite and in the company's two stand-alone products, Norton AntiVirus 2006 and Norton Personal Firewall 2006.

Purchased as a stand-alone product, Norton AntiVirus 2006 is priced at $40. The new version includes enhanced detection tools for zapping spyware and adware. Low-risk adware programs are flagged but not automatically removed, Symantec said.

California-based Symantec is now selling its updated software though its Web site's online store. Packaged versions of the software are expected to be available for purchase at retail outlets within the next two weeks.

I don't think that Norton Internet Security will live up to the mark although NAV has some good chances.

Technorati tags: NortonSecurity

Google Video New features

Google has improved its Google Video service by eliminating the need for users to download software to play back videos. The service's videos now play within a Web browser without the need for additional software.

Moreover, the previously Windows-only play-back service is now available to users whose PCs run the Linux and Mac OS operating systems.

Other enhancements to the service include a larger and resizable viewing window, and more playback controls, such as pause, skip back, skip forward and volume. Also new is the availability of 10-second video previews that can be played on the search results page.

This lack of viewable content made it pale in comparison with existing multimedia search engines from competitors Blinkx, America Online and Yahoo. However, this improvement will make Google the topdog in there.

Windows Vista will boot in 2 seconds

You will be able to switch a Microsoft Windows Vista computer in two seconds.

Microsoft official Windows Vista site is claiming that a Windows Vista computer starts and shuts down as quickly as within 2-3 seconds.

Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away.

Other noticable feature Windows Vista are "Flip" and "Flip 3D". Flip allows you to flip through open windows (by using Alt+Tab) providing a live thumbnail of each window rather than just a generic icon and filename.

Well this will be really cool if Vista will just switch on and off in seconds! Keep going Microsoft!

Technorati tags: Windows
Vista

Flaw in IE : Windows XP SP2 at risk

A flaw has been discovered in Internet Explorer that could enable a remote attack on systems running Windows XP with Service Pack 2, eEye Digital Security has warned.

The flaw, which also affects systems running Windows XP, is found in the default installations of Microsoft's IE."The flaw is not wormable but allows for the remote execution (of code) with some level of end-user intervention," said Mike Puterbaugh, eEye's senior director of product marketing.

A Microsoft representative confirmed that the company had received the report from eEye and said it will be investigating the issue. Because the details of the vulnerabilities have not been made public, users are not at risk of an exploit being developed to take advantage of the flaw, the representative said.

Already Internet Explorer is facing tough competition with Opera (Now Free) and Firefox and surely new vulneribility will let Microsoft and IE more down.

Microsoft to XP Starter Edition in 9 Indian languages

A great news for all Indians. Microsoft will offer versions of Windows XP Starter Edition in 9 Indian languages besides English in India.
The Indian language versions of the Windows XP Starter Edition are among a number of new initiatives by Microsoft to support India's efforts to bridge the digital divide, the company said.

In June, Microsoft rolled out its Windows XP Starter Edition in India. The software is a low cost, stripped-down version of Windows XP for emerging economies like India.

Although it is under considerable pressure from organizations supporting open source software, the Indian federal government as well as state governments have declined to take a decision favoring either open source or proprietary software in education and e-governance projects.

Sony will cut 10,000 jobs

Sony has decided to cut 10,000 jobs and a number of product models over the next few years, as it reorganizes its electronics division in an effort to reduce costs.

In reorganizing its electronics business, Sony is betting heavily on Cell, a microprocessor jointly designed with IBM and Toshiba that it expects to use in future video game consoles. Sony's chief executive officer will directly oversee the division which promotes and develops the processor and related products and technologies.

A similar product-specific focus will be extended to the whole of the electronics division, with the abolition of the existing structure of "network companies" and the creation of clear business groups for specific product categories, Sony said.

Google Adsense will catch software pyrites

Amit Agarwal has made a good post about it. He says that Yahoo has been accused of supplying information to China, which led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets".

Just like Yahoo!, Google can also become a "police informant" but for a noble and good cause - it can help the government catching software pirates who run warez websites from China.

He has also posted a picture which shows that warez website located in China is serving Google Ads but the main thing is that Google Adsense policies prohibit ads on sites with Hacking/cracking content. How did this particular warez site trick Google Adsense is also a major issue.

It would be great that if some of these pirates are caught. At least, the "real" programmer of particular software will get the reward when people Buy and appreciate his software and not these crackers!
Amit's blog is at labnol.blogspot.com/

Google Operating System (OS) - Really?

Well I think we cannot live without Google in today's life. That's why people are experimenting too much... Just see this picture.

Well looking at this picture I believe whenever Google will launch its OS it would sure be rocking!!!
Well don't think that Google is about to launch a new OS. It’s just a rumor and this picture is quite funny as well as good! What do you think?

Windows Vista - Positive Aspects

Roberto has posted a fairly nice insight of Vista on his Blog so it's my duty to share it with you

[Quote] from robert's blog
What does Windows Vista mean to me. Well to me it seems that Windows Vista is the light at a long tunnel. For years I have had to fight Windows security problems, Microsoft’s broken promises as well as the outside punks and dickheads who have nothing better to do than to cause problems and headaches.

Luckily most of the time I was ahead of them so I was more diligent. I was using security practices that Microsoft’s security teams are now starting to preach. But now Windows Vista is within our grasp.

The new security models are great, usability, reliability look vastly improved. Its in Beta and betas are typically slow I find this beta to be better than most others I have participated in (Mac OS X Public Beta –Ungodly slow.

The final release was a lot better. 10.2 was actually the first major stable release. Vista is not just another pretty face but it appears to be the first major release since Windows 2000 that I can call great. It wont be a UNIX or Linux killer, but it will be the release that Microsoft can truly be proud of.
[Unquote]

What do you think? Will it be as good as he thinks ??

Yahoo Lauches Instant Search

Do you like to play "guess what I'm thinking" games? Yahoo!'s hoping that you do and that you might want to play it every time you conduct a search at their site. Yahoo has introduced a new feature called "Instant Search" that provides a quick pop-up box with a suggested link as users type their search term into the query box.

Features:-

As you start typing words into the query box, Yahoo! takes a guess at what you might be looking for based on popular queries. As it comes up with possibilities, it pops up a word bubble with a description and a link.

You'll need to play with it at the Instant Search site and select to have it added as a feature to your Yahoo! Personalised search page.

So do your searches here:-
http://instant.search.yahoo.com/

Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape Critical Vulnerability

“The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an URL that contains the 0xAD character in its domain name. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.

Successful exploitation crashes Firefox [and these other browsers] and may potentially allow code execution but requires that the user is tricked into visiting a malicious web site or open a specially crafted HTML file.”

So don't browse untrusted websites until they release a fix.
Check these URLs f u think you are affected:-
http://secunia.com/advisories/16764/
http://secunia.com/advisories/16766/

Google's portal for college students

Google building a portal for college students with Google University which will contains links to Google services that are of interest to university students like GMail, Google Talk, Scholar, Maps etc. But the most surprising this is that Google Search is missing from the Google Unversity. Google is also extending the reach of GMail through Google University. I hope that Google will continue its great work and also it will include Google Desktop Search in its portal.

Great going Google!

Download Opera without Ads For Free

Wow! Another amazing news! Opera Software will no longer force users of the free PC version of its Web browser, Opera, to view advertising banners. Just 2 weeks back it gave free serial no.s and now TOTALLY FREE SOFTWARE.

From Tuesday, the company will give away an unrestricted version of the software for use on personal computers. Previously, Opera Software offered a browser with no advertising banners for a fee, while the free version displayed advertising banners in the browser window -- in addition to any advertising contained on Web sites being visited.

The free software is now available for download, in 20 languages, from http://www.opera.com/

This move will surely challenge Firefox and IE (Well IE is already very down in respect to these 2 browsers).

Google to Lauch Wi-Fi service?

Google may be close to launching a Wi-Fi service. A page on the Google Web site instructs customers on how to download Google Secure Access, a client that the site says "allows you to establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi."

In April, Google began sponsoring a free hotspot in San Francisco's Union Square.

In August, Business 2.0 magazine published a report on rumors that Google had begun buying access to fiber across the U.S. Industry observers have since speculated that Google may be on the verge of offering some sort of access service, potentially using Wi-Fi.

The Google Web page says that the Secure Access program can be downloaded at certain Google Wi-Fi locations in the San Francisco Bay area. However, the client can in fact be downloaded to any computer that is connected to the Internet.
The page also says that while Google Secure Access should work at any Wi-Fi location, Google hasn't tested it elsewhere.

Information about the Secure Access client is available on the Google Web site at: http://wifi.google.com/faq.html

Interview with Bill Gates - Microsoft Vs Google

This story is via ZDNetNews. Visit it for more details!

Would you buy Windows Vista?

For Bill Gates and Microsoft, that's the big question. This week at the software giant's Professional Developers Conference, Gates rallied the troops--software developers, Microsoft's most important audience--to build enthusiasm for Vista and Office 12, the new version of MS Office.

Q: More developers are becoming interested in building new applications using the Web as a platform, as opposed to the PC. Do you feel you're in competition with Google, Yahoo and other Web properties for developers' attention?

Gates: No, I don't think so. At this conference, we do give out APIs (application programming interfaces) for the MSN Search and the MSN Virtual Earth capability, so things that have been cloud-based services, you can have client applications that other services can connect to.Our search API is way better than their(Google's) search API.

Q:Well, I guess that's what you have to combat, right? They are in this phase, and when Google does anything, they get attention.

Gates: Yeah. You do me-too Google Talk, and it's a big deal. But we had our honeymoon phase, and it was fun from maybe 1985 to 1995.

Q:How does Microsoft want to bring that server-equals-service capability to the market? You have the servers. Do you have the services?

Gates: Well, let's go through it. We have Active Directory, which we are making a lot richer. We also have Passport. So we're making those very symmetric and having this federation capability be central to the architecture those things follow. We have e-mail where we have Hotmail and Exchange. We'll have hosted Exchange from some of the telcos, too. In terms of Web sites, we have some people doing hosted SharePoint now, we have Spaces, which is a low-end version of that. We'll bring those together. So our services have started out as very inexpensive but not feature-rich. Our servers are very feature rich.

Q:Looking at the open-source world, there's this movement away from selling licenses toward selling support. A lot of people are participating in that, and you have been skeptical. Why? Do you think that's fundamentally the wrong model?

Gates: The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night. Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it's easy to say that's not right. There are things like compatibility and 24-hour support and taking big leaps like IPTV or speech recognition. The painstaking work over a decade that you have to do, that costs hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. That's the commercial side. It's good at hiring people and selling licenses and taking the risks that go with that.

Vist ZDNetNews to raed the full interview.

The Bottom Line: Microsoft is really pushing up to competer against Google. In the coming future, we will see a huge revolution due to battle of these giants!

Beware of Google Search worm

Downloaders looking for a free "Star Wars" game may instead find themselves installing a new worm that gives them dodgy Google search results.

The worm, called P2Load.A, is being spread on P2P (peer-to-peer) programs like Shareaza and Imesh, masquerading as a free version of the Lucasfilm Ltd. game Knights of the Old Republic II.

When the software is installed, it makes changes to the computer's browser so that any user trying to access Google Inc.'s search engine is instead presented with a Google look-alike page, hosted on a server in Germany.

Even users who mistype the www.google.com address are redirected to the fake site, which also supports the same range of languages as Google.com. This redirection is achieved by modifying the hosts file in the infected computer's operating system, which is a kind of address book used to quickly connect the browser to Web sites.

P2Load.A affects Windows computers running either the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers.

Using keyboard can cause hacking

An audio recording of an individual's typing can be transposed into a transcript of what was typed, according to University of California at Berkeley researchers. The technique works because each key makes a distinct sound when hit and users leave enough time between keystrokes for a computer to isolate the individual sounds.

The researchers were able to take several 10-minute sound recordings of users typing at a keyboard, feed the audio into a computer, and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 percent of the characters entered.

While any sort of typed documents could be pilfered through this technique, the study underscores the vulnerability of passwords, said Doug Tygar, a UC Berkeley professor of computer science and information management, and a principal investigator of the study.

The work builds on research conducted by IBM's Dmitri Asonov and Rakesh Agrawal that showed how 80 percent of text typed could be recovered from keyboard recordings. Those experiments, however, were tightly controlled. The results of their findings will be presented Nov. 10 at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference in Alexandria.

Further experiments will take place. The researchers didn't examine what happens when the Shift, Control, Delete or Caps Lock keys are hit. Taking mouse actions into account also raises a major problem.

After reading this story at ZDNet, I was really shocked so I decided to share it with you. I wonder how "secure" our computers will be in future when Hackers and Crackers are growing at such a fast pace that one can't imagine!

Microsoft Office 12 - Good or Worse ?

Microsoft has made steady improvements to Word, Excel and PowerPoint in its new version of Office. But I don't believe people are going to rush out and upgrade as soon as possible because of its high price.

Today, there are plenty of free Office-like application alternatives like Open Office and ThinkFree Office Online. You can get away with using any one of them to create, edit or view these basic formats.
Generally we use only 25% feautures of the Office package. So its up to you only that after its release and after its review by me( which will be soon after its release), you will buy it or not!

Windows Vista - Very expensive ?

Well as there is much hype and buzz over the forthcoming Microsoft's Windows Vista so here is my next post on it.

Windows Vista will cost too much for business to seriously considering upgrading. Most people who are going to utilize Windows Vista's high end features already have the systems capable of doing so, those who have older 1 to 1.x ghz processors will not be able to utilize Windows Vista high end graphics.

There is no cost justification for moving to Windows Vista which is total hogwash. Better security, better productivity, ease of management, ease of use, ease of deployment, better stability and reliability. All of which are paramount.

The only thing Microsoft has to fear is Mac OS X, when it hits the x86 platform, Microsoft will have a real job and will have to modify licensing and pricing.

Roberto says that Anyone who says any Linux distribution that is released today beats Windows Vista and or Mac OS X needs some very serious counseling.

Tell me your comments! Would you upgrade to it?

Nokia's E-Mail service

Nokia on Tuesday introduced a new software platform to support mobile business applications, starting with push e-mail. The company joins a handful of other enterprise e-mail providers and vendors that are trying to penetrate a market dominated Research In Motion (RIM) with its Blackberry devices and software.

To implement the service, an enterprise installs the Nokia Business Center server software. End-users with Java MIDP 2.0-capable phones that are certified by Nokia then download the client, enabling them to receive and send corporate e-mail. MIDP, or Mobile Information Device Protocol, is part of the Java run-time environment for mobile phones.

Initially, the service will be available on a range of Nokia handsets, including the Nokia 9500 Communicator and selected Nokia 6600 phones. The first version of the offering can deliver e-mail from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, with support for Lotus Notes and Domino to follow.

World’s First Artificial Opposable Thumb

Dr Paul Chappell, a medical physicist from the University of Southampton, UK, has designed a prototype hand that uses 6 sets of motors and gears so that each of the five fingers can move independently, including what he bills as the world’s first artificially made opposable thumb. His hand is able to make movements and grip objects in the same way a real human hand does.

The new hand can be connected to muscles in the arm via a small processing unit and is controlled by small contractions of the muscles which move the wrist.

Well soon Man will be owned by robots and machines!

Yahoo's New E-mail Service - Can it challenge G-Mail?

Yahoo was set to unveil on Wednesday a limited public beta of its new Yahoo Mail service, featuring a new desktop e-mail application-type interface and faster response time.

As first reported in June, the new Yahoo Mail beta features e-mail caching, message preview, drag-and-drop filing, the ability to quickly search e-mail headers, body text and attachments and the ability to view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time.

In addition, the new version adds address auto-complete, right-click menus and standard keyboard shortcuts.

The beta will be available to a limited group of Yahoo Mail users in the United States and will be expanded to include users worldwide in coming months, Yahoo said. Users can choose to use the new version, stick with the older version, or switch between the two.

The amount of storage remains at 1 gigabyte for the free service. Let’s see if Yahoo can challenge G-Mail using this new e-mail service!

Google Launches Blog Search

I was just browsing the net (routine work) and then suddenly I stumbled upon a Blog pointing to Google's "Blog Search". I quickly clicked on it (Well any1 will click on something new!) and I was taken to its Homepage located at

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Then I did a search about the various posts of my Blog and I was really amazed to see that all of my posts were indexed while the main Google Search had only indexed my posts till Opera's free serial. I believe this is a great service by Google and it will surely become popular soon. It has a bright future.

You can also search all the great posts of this Blog so go and check it out now!

Problems with Google search

Two problems that have been troubling people with Google searches are:-

1. There are so many mirrors of Wikipedia out there and Google indexes all of them; so when you do a Google search the search results are cluttered up with links to different copies of the same text. Sometimes, half the results in a search are copies off of Wikipedia.

2. Also pages that are on eBay are indexed, and Google keeps these in its index far after the auction it picked up the keywords from has ended. So when you do a search, the search results are cluttered up with links to eBay pages where the auction has expired so has nothing valuable for the searcher.

I hope the people of Google group reads this and find a solution to this problem.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 - Rule the Net with it!

Here's what's new in Firefox 1.5 Beta 1:

Automated update- to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.

Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.

Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.

Improvements to popup blocking.

Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.

Answers.com is added to the search engine list.

Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.

Better accessibility support including DHTML accessibility.

Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.

Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
Many security enhancements.

Download it here-
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5b1&os=win&lang=en-US

New Cars equipped with I Pods

With its additional partners, Apple estimates that more than 5 million cars will ship with iPod support in the United States in the next year.

"By 2006, 30 percent of all cars will come with an option of connecting to an iPod device," Apple CEO Steve Jobs predicted during the press event where the Rokr phone and iPod Nano were also announced.

I think this is a great news for US people who are looking to buy a new car soon. So my advice, wait some time before these cars equipped with I Pod are out! And yes, when u buy one, don't forget to leave your comments here!

Windows Vista Various Editions

From Windows ITPro

Quote:
"Two days before the start of Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2005, I've received exclusive insider information about the product editions, or SKUs, which Microsoft intends to create for Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn). While the exact breakdown of the Windows Vista editions has been the subject of much speculation, this list closely matches the editions list I first published on the SuperSite for Windows last year. Here's how the Windows Vista product editions break down.
Unquote

Here is a list of the Editions:
1. Windows Vista Starter Edition

2. Windows Vista Home Basic Edition

3. Windows Vista Home Premium Edition

4. Windows Vista Professional Edition

5. Windows Vista Small Business Edition

6. Windows Vista Enterprise Edition

7. Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

8. Windows Vista Embedded Edition

You can read more about these editions @
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/47665/47665.html?Ad=1

Beware of Yahoo Messenger 7

If you're one of the tens of millions of Yahoo users asked to upgrade your instant-messaging software this week, be on your toes: The update can open the door to unwanted PC houseguests and setting changes--by default.

The newest free version of Yahoo Instant Messenger(YIM) boasts advanced Internet phone calling in a upgrade that comes "highly recommended" by Yahoo. By clicking "yes" to the update, a user can expect to get a slicker YIM interface with buttons to quickly chat, blog, swap photos or call someone online. It even has new smiley icons.

Those changes are what many might expect. What they may not expect are all the other tools they get when not paying attention.

By accepting Yahoo's "typical" installation of YIM, it will also download Yahoo's Search Toolbar with anti-spyware and anti-pop-up, as well as Yahoo Extras, which will insert Yahoo links into the Internet Explorer browser. The IM client also contains "live words," which will automatically show an icon when the user highlights words online and then hyperlink to Yahoo search results, definitions or translation tools. Finally, the installation will alter the users' home page and auto-search functions to point to Yahoo by default.

To avoid these changes, users must actively choose the "custom" installation and uncheck five boxes.

Yahoo would be thinking that most people won't care or notice the changes. But people like me will let you notice these things!

Hitachi shrinks hard drives but expands capacity

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. (HGST) has started shipping a higher capacity version of its Microdrive 1-inch hard-disk drive and has made improvements to its 1.8-inch Travelstar drives, the company said Friday.

The drives are commonly used in portable consumer electronics devices like digital music players and products featuring the drives with increased capacity could be available before the end of the year.

The new 1.8-inch Travelstar drives also incorporate the improved shock-protection technology and have also been made thinner through the use of a smaller read/write head and lower-profile motor. The new 30G-byte drive is 5 millimeters thick versus 7mm for the previous model, while the 60G-byte drive has been slimmed down from 9.5mm to 8mm. HGST will start shipping the former model this month and the latter model sometime in the first quarter of 2006.

Kazza's Violation of Copyright

Well I believe most of you know what Kazza is! For those who do't know, Kazza is a P2P music sharing program.

In a win for the music business, a judge in Australia has ruled that the operators of the Kazaa file-sharing network authorized the widespread violation of copyright works. He ordered that significant changes be made to how the Kazaa service works.

The decision is a blow to Kazaa operator Sharman Networks, which has been battling the closely watched case since early last year. In a brief statement, the company said it was disappointed with the decision and vowed to appeal it vigorously.

Sharman Networks, along with five affiliates named in the case, was ordered to pay 90 percent of the labels' legal costs. Well that's gonna be a big sum but not to worry as a further hearing will take place to determine monetary damages, Justice Wilcox ordered.

The Kazaa network can continue to operate if it meets one of two conditions. One option is to include a "non-optional" key-word filter that excludes from the service all works identified in a list provided by the copyright holders. The filter must be available to all new users of Kazaa and in all future versions. The second option is that Kazaa's TopSearch feature be modified so that it only returns results for works that have been licensed for use on Kazaa.

Recently some versions of Kazza were also found to be containing dangerous spywares.So Bad days are really not ending for Kazza's operators!

McAfee announces products for 'clean' Net

McAfee is preparing security products that service providers can use to offer users an Internet connection that's free of security threats. The company on Tuesday plans to announce a strategy, dubbed "Clean Pipes," under which it is developing the products, said Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of market development and strategic alliances at McAfee in Santa Clara, Calif. One of the products, a carrier-grade server device to offer these services, is due out in the first half of 2006, he said.

McAfee already sells products that service providers can install at the customers' site and manage remotely. The new products will let the service provider offer the same security services, but as a hosted service from their own data centers, Sonecha said. The services include intrusion prevention, secure content management, vulnerability management, virus and spyware protection, and mobile device security, he said. McAfee is working with a number of service providers, including Cable and Wireless, Telefonica, China Netcom and KPN on the products. Let see what they offer!

Get this blog in your inbox

Well for those who read e-mails daily, here is a good news for you. I have added Bloglet, a nifty tool. Just enter your e-mail address and click subscribe and voila! You will receive all my posts in short directly in your inbox without any spam!

Well you won't get the full posts but the 1st 220 chars. but if like a post and you wish to read more then come to the blog straight away! I made this so because I keep track of visitors of my site so you need to check the blog too often!

Convert OGG to MP3 for free

I think that we have enough media file formats out there now. The other day I came across an audio file for a broadcast that I wanted to listen to in a .ogg file format. Not much use for an MP3 player, so I set about finding a solution.

The Ogg Vorbis format is, it turns out, a royalty free audio format that is superior to MP3. It offers better compression and it is supported on all platforms (PC, Mac, etc). However, my MP3 player only supports MP3 and WMA, so how do you go about converting the files?

For a royalty free file format, it's actually quite hard. I expected to be able to find a lot of free converters, but the majority are shareware. In the end I found Media Join. This is a batch conversion utility which is actually designed to join multiple audio files together, but can convert the file format as it does so.

The utility works simply by you selecting the files you want and then selecting an output file and the format for it. When you click on Join, you can also select the encoding level, so you can change the compression used.

The program, from the makers of Blaze Media Pro, worked perfectly, though we found the compression at high levels to be a bit poor quality. It can convert to and from OGG, MP3 and WMA, so it is a perfect solution for those with handheld players.

Chk the homepage your out and download form there
http://www.audiovideosoft.com/

Get Free DVD and Lotz of Books

Well I believe everyone wants things that come up to your free. So that what I did. I ordered a DVD, atleast 10-11 books and 4-5 posts form NATO's (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) website! To my surprise, I received my order just in 11 days.

Previously, I had ordered Win XP SP2 CD from Microsoft’s website but it came in 28 days and NATO'S service seems to be quite good. There were around 4 books and 8-9 newsletters telling the functioning and the achivements made by NATO so far. There were 4 posters. One was of Periodic table of elements, second was of important evets in history of NATO, third was a map containing names of the member countries and fourth was a collection of Venn Diagrams of member countries of important organizations.

Really, this is quite a good source for getting the knowledge about the working of NATO.

Now that I have told u a great secret so plz. promote this blog and try to advertise it wherever applicable. Also, tell about this blog to all ur friends maybe they are missing something very good! Also, do click on the ads and use the Google Search box to search Google and click on sponsored links that appear there!!