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Lust, gluttony, greed, anger, envy, pride, and sloth - Microsoft's new OS suffers from each deadly sin. Here's what you can do to minimize the toll each sin takes The seven deadly sins -- for centuries, they've shaped the imaginations of poets, priests, and politicians, while giving the great unwashed a frame of reference: Do these things and you'll burn for sure! When it comes to software, few products have inspired as much debauchery as Windows. From lust to sloth to envy, Microsoft's flagship OS platform has proven to be a source of manifold transgression. Zealots have praised it, and pundits have cursed it, while those of us in the IT trenches are forced to actually live with it. So with Windows 7 just around the corner, it makes sense to examine the product through the prism of these 7 deadly sins. Just how does Microsoft's new OS drive users to acts of iniquity? And what, if anything, can you, the IT administrator, do to manage the carnal impulses ... details >>>

Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system is receiving raves in its pre-release testing. While much of the kernel that lies at the heart of the operating system is based on Vista code, several key advances have been made that get rid of Vista annoyances and greatly improve the user experience. Inside the kernel, one important change centers on how multithreaded applications are run. The threading advances provide benefits in energy reduction, scalability, and, in theory, performance. To check out the benefits on the desktop, I ran tests that reflect the most common use case for heavily threaded desktop apps -- namely, graphics-oriented software. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop and other graphical applications query a system's capabilities at startup and self-configure workloads accordingly. They typically use all the processor cores and as much RAM as they can get away with monopolizing. This approach enables them to provide the fastest performance. So I checked how... details >>>

The curtain has closed on Apple’s big event. While we’re still recovering from all the big news surrounding Jobs’ return, the new and improved Nanos, the arrival of iPhone OS 3.1, and the fact that iTunes 9 comes with sharing, we’re now able to actually play with our new toys and we’ve discovered something remarkable. Amid all the hype around iTunes 9 was one new instrumental feature for iPhone owners — app management. We were thrilled by the possibilities of finally being able to organize and manage our apps via iTunes, and now we’re even more impressed by the reality. After toying with the new feature, we can officially say that the iTunes 9 application management features are fantastic. Gone are the days of painstakingly moving apps one-by-one on our iPhones. Today we welcome effortless drag and drop app management and syncing, and here we’ll walk you through how to create application harmony between iTunes and your iPhone. Getting Started ... details >>>

History is littered with good ideas that didn’t work out because they were ahead of their time. Tablet PCs didn’t work out a decade ago, but with technology advances, they’re poised to make a comeback. Microsoft’s local information web site Sidewalk.com was a bust in 1997, but now sites like Yelp and Google Maps offer local information that many people couldn’t fathom living without. Virtual currency sites like Beenz and Flooz never took off, but the idea is making a comeback on social networks. This week we saw the release of the highly anticipated Google Wave (). Wave is an innovative communications platform that combines asynchronous communication (like email) with real-time communication (like chat), an application platform, and discovery tools. It’s been touted as both an email killer and a Facebook killer. In short, there’s a lot of hype, and while Wave may prove to be a huge success, I think one thing it potentially represents is a great opportunity ... details >>>

ClipGenerator is a web application which lets you create cool looking music video clips containing your images and videos. There is no download or registration and the whole process involves three simple steps. 1 – Chose one of the music themes. 2 – Customize it by adding images or videos. 3. Generate video and receive it via email. The site provides you with lots of ready to use themes in variety of genres (Pop, Rock, Soul, HipHop, Electronic, Folk… etc.). The images and videos can be either added from computer or imported from your account on Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket and Smugmug. Once the video is ready, you will get a download link via email. There is also an option to quickly publish it on YouTube, Photobucket or simply forward to others. Below is the sample video clip created using ClipGenerator: [youtube]jSwOrCUig6Y[/youtube] Features: Cool online video clip creator. Creates clips from your images and videos. ... details >>>

We all download software from the Internet or install applications off a CD or some other media. While some companies decide to just distribute their applications packaged in zip files, most of them use some form of an installation program, which is usually an EXE – Executable file – that runs you through a series of steps to install the said software on your machine. Have you ever wondered how those EXE files are created ? Well, there are a lot of software that can help you create install packages to distribute your software, and today we’ll walk you through using one that has been been there on your Windows system all along. This unassuming utility is called iExpress and is (probably) the easiest utility you’ll ever find to make an EXE file for your software. So, if you’ve ever wondered how those installation programs are created, how the “magic” happens during the installation wizard and how a simple single executable spits out hundreds of real useable... details >>>

There’s no debate whether or not our online activities are tracked, they most surely are. It’s not even a single party that keeps the score; your ISP, website owners, advertisers and NSA know the reason you switched to Private Browsing Mode yesterday at 22:12. If the cool kids are doing it, why shouldn’t you? Here’s how you can get to ‘know’ your website’s visitors IP address. The first thing you want to do is go about creating an account over at Google Analytics. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, in my own experience, the service provides a tremendous amount of data, has a great user interface, is easy to install on any website, and, more importantly, is completely free of charge. It’s undoubtedly the easiest, cheapest and fast way of getting your visitors’ information, including their IP address or hostname. If you already use any of the Google services, you can easily sign in with your existing credentials. The process of setting... details >>>

Does your job fit you like a glove or is it a straitjacket? When I come across the current crop of job sites, I wish we had Web 2.0 in our career planning days; a search engine, a bit of social networking and a host of sites willing to flash your resume to prospective employers. With the Web, information isn’t a problem…information overload is. A few clicks and you find yourself navigating away from the information you wanted. What we all want is a single window giving us career occupation descriptions on a list of different career choices. Mindopia seeks to answer that call by cutting short the path from career research to job hunting. Mindopia calls itself a career discovery website. Positioning itself as a single point source for job seekers to get the ‘inside scoop on careers’. Old fashioned career planning wasn’t bad, was it? Not at all, but don’t you feel that it was a bit too toilsome? Starting with a gut feeling about what we wanted to do…getting influenced... details >>>

Tabbed interfaces have become popular with time for a simple reason that they can present a lot of information without making you feel the ill effects of information overload. There are tabs in your browser, file manager, dialog boxes and other places. So why should the screen be left behind? Stick is an application that lets you attach tabs to the sides of your screen so that you have a convenient tabbed desktop. The tabs can contain a wide variety of content ranging from contents of a folder to web pages to RSS feeds to Notes to a calendar or calculator. Let’s have a look. You can download stick from iWonderDesigns. The application is available as an installer as well as a portable version that you can run off your USB drive. When running for the first time, Stick prompts you start building a tabbed desktop by adding the tabs. Go ahead and create some that you would like. You can create 6 types of tabs: Notes Lets you store notes in rich text... details >>>

Office suite applications are ubiquitous. There are so many options available if you want to a create a document or a spreadsheet. There are open source free desktop applications, then there are free cloud-based applications. Microsoft has been working on a free version of its popular Office franchise as well. The free version would be available via the cloud. Microsoft recently launched a tech preview. It is an invite-only preview, however you just need a Skydrive account and some URL tweaking to try out the Microsoft Office Web Apps Preview. Here is how: The following steps seem to work only if you have ?mkt=en-us appended to the Skydrive URL. So click here. Create a Skydrive account (Windows Live Account) if you don’t have one, or log into your existing one. It gives you 25GB of online space you can use to store/backup your files. We wrote about it some time back. Make sure there is a Word/Excel file in your Skydrive. It there isn’... details >>>