Skype Undergoes Updates

Just recently, Skype 3.0 was released for Windows Mobile phones, which provided some users with much needed bug fixes on their mobile devices. Just today also, Skype has pushed out version 4.1 for Windows, taking it out of the beta form, and has also released Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The Windows build allows for screen sharing and birthday reminders, as well as improved audio and video quality along with a few bug fixes that can be noted in the release. Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and iPod touch offers the ability to listen to voicemail and send SMS also.

Firefox 3.5 released

As expected, Firefox 3.5 has been released. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.5 is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2. Aside from the speed improvements Firefox 3.5 brings enhanced privacy and security options, and support for the next generation of web features. You can download Firefox 3.5 (Mac, Linux, and Windows) here. More information (including download options) can be found at Mozilla.

PowerColor to Begin Bundling BumpTop 3D Desktop Application

PowerColor announced today it has joined up with Bump Technologies out of Ontario, Canada to begin offering the BumpTop 3D desktop application as part of the bundle that comes with the PCS HD4850 graphics card. The PCS version of PowerColor's HD4850 line of cards offers an advanced cooling solution from Arctic Cooling that not only lowers operating temperatures but also ensures a much quieter environment.

BumpTop is a creative and customizable three-dimensional desktop that empowers users to organize their virtual desktop in a more creative and intuitive fashion. By combining the look and feel of a real desktop with the power of a PC, users can use the application's advanced search and sort capabilities to become better organized and more productive. With links to social apps like Twitter and Facebook, BumpTop allows you to share photos directly from your desktop, or you can link to Flickr and Picasa and create a digital photo frame to display the latest photo streams using an RSS reader.

PowerColor will begin distributing BumpTop with the PCS HD4850 beginning in July with plans to expand the software to its entire line of cards soon afterwards.

Firefox 3.5 scheduled for Tuesday release

PC Magazine has confirmed that Firefox 3.5, the next major update to Mozilla's popular web browser, is scheduled for release Tuesday morning. Originally planned as Firefox 3.1, Mozilla decided around the time of the third beta that a more significant version number was needed to emphasize the "sheer volume of work" that made this release feel like more than just an incremental improvement over Firefox 3.0.x. Some of the enhancements you can expect to see in Firefox 3.5 are:

• Private browsing and enhancements to data privacy,
• "TraceMonkey" JavaScript engine,
• Improvements to the Gecko layout and rendering engine,
• Support for location aware services,
• HTML 5 support (support for embedded Ogg files, and offline resources).

There have been three release candidates leading up to tomorrow's scheduled release of Firefox 3.5, all of which came in the month of June. Prior to the June 19 availability of 3.5RC1 there were four beta versions stretching all the way back into October when Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was made available.

Microsoft Releases Security Essentials Beta

Microsoft has launched the public beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). For those of you in the dark, MSE is the upcoming free antivirus software by Microsoft to provide protection against viruses and spyware, essentially replacing Windows Live OneCare. The beta is available for customers in the United States, Israel, China (in mid-July) and Brazil. The beta will work until the release of the final version of Security Essentials which is expected in September. To try out the beta, go to the Microsoft Security Essentials website.

Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.5 RC2

The latest build of Firefox 3.5 has been released as of Monday, which Mozilla claims is the fastest version available to date. The first release candidate was only released to roughly 800,000 beta testers, but this new build is being hosted by Mozilla to all users. Included with the release is the built-in ability for video and audio playback, location-based browsing, speed adjustments that allow JavaScript to run up to three times faster than Firefox 3, and page loading times up to twice as fast as the older version of the browser. Build RC2 also provides over 6,000 different add-ons, graphics support for CSS and SVG, theme changes with one click, web worker threads for multitasking, and downloadable fonts. Mozilla has built this new version on the feedback that it received from the beta testers that got to experiment with the first release candidate, so various security holes should also be fixed, along with any speed problems that previous versions may have experienced .

NVIDIA Releases New GeForce Drivers

The green company a few days ago released its new graphics drivers for its GeForce series cards, which mainly boosts performance in multiple games such as Far Cry 2 and Mirror’s Edge, along with other titles. Also included with the new drivers, known as 186.18, is support for the Ion motherboard GPU, which is gaining popularity at a rather quick rate in home and mobile use among consumers. Users of NVIDIA’s software should also note that some bugs have been fixed, though most of the solved problems relate to Windows XP 32-bit. However, the drivers are also supposed to bring support to Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. As usual as well, the new PhysX software that is included with the drivers has been updated, lifting it now to version 9.09.0428. The new drivers can be downloaded from the NVIDIA website, along with other download locations.

Badaboom Now Available in Eight Languages

Elemental Technologies announced today it has released version 1.2 of its Badaboom media conversion software with support for interfaces in eight different languages. For the first time, users can customize the interface to use French, Italian, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean in addition to the original English language version. Badaboom is a media converter which uses the massively parallel processing capabilities of NVIDIA's GPUs and it CUDA technology to accelerate the process of transcoding video files for playback on different platforms such as the iPod and PSP and YouTube.

Dell and Microsoft Offer Direct Downloads

Redmond has had its Internet store online since last year, which sells its own operating systems, Microsoft Office products, as well as a variety of Xbox products and other software. Now, Dell is receiving some of the same software that is sold on the Microsoft Store for its own online shopping area. The computer manufacturer is currently in an agreement with Microsoft to sell various office software packages, as well as other items that Dell customers will be interested in while visiting the somewhat newly created software shop. The advantage over purchasing from the Dell store, over conventional retail locations, is that products tend to cost less, and the license code is saved with the user’s ID, so purchased software can be downloaded at any time without any extra charges.

New Opera Mobile Beta Now Available

Earlier this year in March, it was announced that Opera Mobile 9.7 would be coming out for a wide variety of mobile products. Opera is now opening its new mobile browser to the public in a beta form, which is available for download and testing by all users. The main feature that the browser is touting in this version is the turbo mode that enables phones that are still on the EDGE network to browse the web with somewhat 3G speeds. This is enabled by rendering help from the server, as well as a faster rendering engine within the browser itself.

NVIDIA and Adobe Team Up

Netbooks are constantly becoming more popular, especially with manufacturers releasing new and improved models at a constant rate. Those owners of netbooks who have an older model have probably noticed that Flash-based programs, videos, or anything else dealing with the Adobe standard, is very laggy and mostly choppy. NVIDIA is now joining with Adobe to provide users of netbooks, along with all of their graphics processing units, with a more streamlined viewing experience with videos and a better experience regarding Flash overall. Both companies are working together to make the Tegra chip and other graphics cards from the green team work better with Flash-based items, while providing full H.264-powered HD video on various mobile devices is the long term goal.

Palm Pre Support Confirmed for iTunes

During the Palm D7 keynote that occurred today in Carlsbad, it was confirmed by Paul Cousino that the Palm Pre will be supported in iTunes. Many people were already figuring that the device would be supported, but Palm is now say that its Pre device will for sure be recognized by the multimedia program developed by Apple. Cousino stated at the keynote that music, photos, and videos that did not have DRM attached to them could be synced with the device. When the Palm Pre is connected to the computer, it should also show up in iTunes just like a regular device would.

Microsoft Touch Pack Brings Surface Style Apps To Windows 7

We have known from pretty early on in the development of Windows 7 that the new OS would feature much improved support for applications which make use of touch as an input source. At the moment, there isn't a lot of hardware out there that can utilise touch, but Microsoft is continuing to give the technology more exposure with the announcement of the Touch Pack for Windows 7. The pack is a collection of six multi-touch enabled applications, which were developed in close collaboration with the Surface team and are designed to showcase the kind of touch features Windows 7 brings to the table.

So what exactly does the pack include, and is there anything in there that could be called a 'useful' application? Well, included are three surface applications: Surface Globe, Surface Collage and Surface Lagoon along with three casual games: Blackboard, Rebound and Garden Pond. The Surface apps are very much the kind of thing you would expect to see popping up on Micosoft's table computer of the same name, with Surface Globe using data from Virtual Earth 3D to give you navigation of the world with your fingertips. Collage should look very familiar, giving you a place to arrange and explore your favourite photos as if you were laying them out on a coffee table. Surface Lagoon is an interactive screensaver of the fishy variety. Looking at the games we have Microsoft Blackboard, a physics puzzle where you manipulate gears, fans and other objects in an attempt to move balloons and balls towards light bulbs. Rebound appears to be a variation on the classic game of Pong and Garden Pond has yuo moving origami boats around a pond to complete various goals.

According to the Windows 7 Team blog, Microsoft will be making the Touch Pack available to PC builders, who will have the choice of pre-installing as many (or as little) of the apps as they see fit. That means you can expect to see the apps popping up on touch enabled hardware when Windows 7 is released. While the applications will no doubt make up a nice exhibition of how touch can be used on a computer, I'm not so sure it will do much to change how people feel about touch on PCs as a whole. It seems likely that touch will become part of interactions with PCs more and more, but I think it is reasonably safe to say the release of Windows 7 won't see a sudden explosion of its use.

Google Updates Its Browser

Users of all popular operating systems seem to be major fans of browsers such as Firefox as well as Opera and others. Ever since Google Chrome was released in beta form however, those same users have been installing and using the browser more than ever. Google has now updated its web surfing application to version 2.0, which contains more features requested by its user base, as well as quicker loading times. Some of these new features including form autofill, full screen mode with the pressing of the F11 key, as well as full page zoom including images and other page elements. The search engine company is also claiming that it loads JavaScript web pages up to thirty percent faster over previous versions of the program. Those who already have Chrome installed will receive the update automatically, while people not currently using the browser are encouraged to take it for a spin.

NVIDIA Produces More Beta Drivers

Drivers tend to confirm either a hit or a miss in the world of graphics. ATI seems to have bad performing drivers from one time or another, and NVIDIA it seems keeps their drivers mostly stable in performance and stability, though everyone has different stories. The green graphics card manufacturer has released a new set of beta drivers, known as the GeForce 185.81 beta drivers, to the public. In this version comes support for the latest graphics cards, as well as the GeForce GTX 275. The new CUDA 2.2 has been included, along with better support for the NVIDIA Video Encoding library for graphics processing units that have less than 32 cores. Featured in this beta too is the support for Ambient Occlusion, which is a fairly new setting inside of the NVIDIA control panel. As always, the new drivers provide performance improvements over the earlier ones, such as release 182, which consumers should find beneficial during those late night gaming sessions and LAN meets.

Adobe Reader: Time to Switch?

Recently another security vulnerability has been found in Adobe Reader, the popular PDF viewing program. The flaw is in a JavaScript function, allowing remote execution of malicious code. Adobe stated that it will release an update, but did not give a time frame. For now, another security hole is added to a long list that affects Adobe Reader. Perhaps until these are patched, it would be wise for users who are concerned to use an alternative PDF viewing program. However, hopefully these vulnerabilities will soon be fixed.

AMD OverDrive Updates to Version 3.01

In this latest release from AMD, their OverDrive application has been updated to include a couple of new features. One of the biggest in this new release is that the company has now added native support for Windows 7, so that users can still overclock their processors within the new Windows edition using the simple software. Other things that have been added include AMD Black Edition memory profiles, as well as fan control support. The download of the application can be started from the AMD site, for those who prefer to attempt overclocking from Windows, rather than the traditional way of doing it in the motherboard BIOS.

Preview of Office 2010 Coming Soon

After bad impressions of the early betas of Office 2007, some users and customers have been awaiting the new version of the Microsoft business suite to come forth in a new form. The new version, previously known as Office 14, but now official named Office 2010, will be sent out for previewing  via the public Customer Preview Program. Microsoft is also featuring a new support for web access, named Web Apps, which will alow users on the iPhone, Linux, and other gadgets or devices that have operating systems to stream online type versions of the most popular Office applications. Interface changes have occurred as well, but it is obviously not a sure thing if the broad majority of people will adapt to the changes easily, especially after the last version of Office was released.

Mac Users Can Try Office 2008 Free For 30 Days

Microsoft is giving Mac users the opportunity to try Office 2008 for Macs through a free trial. The trial is available after a free registration at Mactopia, the site for Microsoft related Mac products. The suite has been available for over a year, but Microsoft hopes that this will allow potential users to see what the software can do and hopefully entice them into purchasing it. The free trial will run for 30 days after which the user has two options if they decide to purchase the software. Users can go to an Apple reseller or purchase a key online. Office 2008 comes in different versions, with the cheapest being the Home and Student Edition for $149.95.

Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Coming Soon

Microsoft's popular office productivity suite is getting an upgrade sometime during April that will not only fix bugs and security issues but add some cool new features. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will be released through the Windows Update tool and through Windows Server Update Services for our corporate friends. One of the more popular improvements coming to Office 2007 is support for the Open Document Format (ODF), both the ability to open and save as an ODF file, this is a rumored upgrade for governments and agencies that use Office. This may be the case but I see it being very popular for anyone that uses an open-source productivity suite or works with someone who uses open-source software. The second upgrade comes in the form of the ability to save documents in a PDF format. Both upgrades will undoubtedly make Microsoft Office 2007 that much more useful.

Apple throws a contest as it nears 1 Billion apps downloaded

Apple launched the App Store on July 10, 2008. Since then, nearly one billion apps (928,560,859 and counting) have been downloaded for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As a way to calibrate and say thanks to everyone who has made the store a success, Apple is having a celebration/contest. Starting today, any app you download will earn you a chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro.

Don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Not a problem, you can enter the contest by downloading apps via iTunes or through a free entry form. You may enter up to 25 times per day per person/iTunes account up until the tickers hits a billion. Some additional rules and restrictions apply, so make sure you check out the contest page for all the additional details.

NVIDIA Releases New ForceWare Beta Drivers

Going through the year, all companies usually release new and updated drivers for their products, and two main companies that computer enthusiasts and gamers follow are both AMD and NVIDIA. New Catalyst software for Radeon cards is released every month, and GeForce drivers are found on a semi-regular basis as well. Recently though, new ForceWare drivers have been pushed out from the graphics card manufacturer, labeled as 182.65, though there is also a 182.66 build up for download at the moment. In this version comes a new interesting feature, known as ambient occlusion, which is a function inside the control panel of the updated beta version of the NVIDIA ForceWare drivers. This option allows for some older games, such as Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft, and some newer games, such as World in Conflict, to experience shadows that are normally hidden because of their softness in areas like the corners of a room and where objects meet walls. Sadly, this lighting enhancement will cost most games a frame rate hit of anywhere from twenty or forty percent, but should not be a problem on more advanced systems. The green team has also only included the feature inside of the new beta driver, and not the 182.50 ones that are considered stable for consumers.

Opera Mobile 9.7 Coming Soon

At CTIA Wireless next week, Opera will be revealing its new updated cross-platform mobile web browser to the public. The Presto 2.2 rendering engine will be found in Opera Mobile 9.7, which is currently found in version 10 of the Opera desktop web browsing software. A feature that will be especially helpful to mobile users however is one called Opera Turbo, which takes a website and compresses it before sending it over to the phone or other type of device. This will allow for faster loading times, less resources used, as well as less data sent over the network being used. The company is claiming that its turbo feature can compress web pages up to eighty percent, which should help out a variety of users

Now You Can Feel Like a CSI

You know in CSI, when they take that zoomed in picture that's all pixilated and make it clear? Well, now you can too. MotionDSP has a new program, vReveal, which allows consumers to enhance videos taken on anything from a cell phone to an actual camera. It takes information from multiple frames of video, reconstructing details not visible in the original sequence. Then, it outputs both enhanced video sequences and high-resolution stills. And, its algorithms are capable of tracking complex motion, and can therefore enhance both moving and non-moving objects, which is unlike other software programs in the field. The algorithm is so good that it can also handle complex scenes with both camera motion and object motion. All that is required is a system with Windows and a 1.6GHz microprocessor (preferably dual-core) or faster. However, with an Nvidia GeForce 8-series and later hardware, it can work up to five times faster (not surprising considering the company is partly owned by Nvidia). You can get a 30-day free trial from its website.

Office 14 Plans x86 and x64 Versions

Microsoft reported that it would be developing their business and server side programs in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, over the next five years after the announcement made in 2006 by one of the founders of the company, Bill Gates. Office 14 is now said to be shipping in both forms, as Ed Bott figured out by tinkering inside of the latest Release Candidate of Windows 7. At the moment, there is actually no Office edition that is fully 64-bit, so the new Office 14 may be the first one to come in that form. ZDNet's employee found out about the possible version by looking into the registry and finding a x64 entry, which is not present in either Windows XP or Windows Vista. This alone is indicating the possible x64 version that may come in the form of the next Office suite

CodeWeavers Thinks DirectX 10

CodeWeavers has been providing users with a type of emulation software for some time now, for both Unix and Linux operating systems. Jeremy White, who is the CEO of the company, is saying that in the next update, it plans to add support for DirectX 10 hopefully across both Linux and Unix based systems. In the last update, which brought the program to version 7.2, even more DirectX 9 support was added to the Unix platform. Eventually, CodeWeavers is literally planning to make all editions and versions of both OSX and Linux fully compatible inside of their CrossOver application. Obviously, this is a major feat to accomplish, as there are many different versions of both operating systems that users function with on a regular basis.

Exploits Right and Left, and Some Responses

Microsoft released some critical hotfixes today, addressing eight security holes in all versions of Windows. One of these vulnerabilities allowed hackers to execute any malicious code after the user views a specially created EMF or VMF image file. Another fixed issue allowed a third party to redirect all web traffic to their own, potentially harmful website. While users are happy to apply these patches to their installation of Windows, a widely used Excel vulnerability is still unpatched. Affecting Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and earlier, a single crafted spreadsheet file can execute malware when opened by the unsuspecting user. It is not known when a fix for this security vulnerability will be released.

Adobe was also busy, releasing a fix for a zero-day Adobe Reader vulnerability. This security hole, with exploits available for almost two months now, allowed attackers to completely take control of the target computer using a buffer overflow, before being fixed. However, new vulnerabilities have already been found, through a bug in the Windows Indexing Service and Adobe Reader's Windows Explorer Shell Extension, requiring almost no action, by the user, other than having the software installed, to be affected. No time frame has been given for a fix to this issue.

On the same note, Google admitted a privacy breach that occurred this weekend. Affecting less then 0.05 percent of documents, the glitch happened when users changed permission settings on several of their online documents at once. This caused these documents to be shared with all the people the user has shared any documents with previously.

What I took away from these events, is that no matter how much money is spent on security, the software we use - both online and offline - can never be considered completely safe.

Next Version of Firefox to be 3.5

Mozilla has decided the next version of Firefox will be Version 3.5, not 3.1 as originally planned. Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last June and some developers felt that the 3.1 moniker didn't fully portray the amount of changes in the next release. The changes is to be made prior to the upcoming fourth beta version scheduled to be released April 14. The beta 3 release due out this week will still carry the old 3.1 version name. Mozilla hopes the change to Version 3.5 will better reflect the amount of work that's gone in to developing the new version including its TraceMonkey and Private Browsing features. Mozilla is also counting on the new name to increase adoption as users look to upgrade from Firefox 3.0.

Safari 4 Already Square in Hacker's Sights

Last year Charlie Miller won $10,000 in Vancouver for hacking into a Macbook Air using an exploit in Apple's web browser Safari. Now, Charlie Miller has set his sights on Safari 4, and he claims he can do it again come time for the third annual contest in two weeks. Even before the contest has started, Miller is adding steam to the train of hype leading up to the contest, saying that Apple's browser will be the first to fall in the line of browsers hacked. Miller chalks the vulnerability up to a lack of address space randomization technique, also known as ASLR, which helps make software more secure. To Apple's credit, the final build of Safari will have this technology, but the version he will be hacking is a beta. However, this isn't stopping Miller from dealing an embarassing blow to the newest version of Apple's browser. If he is successful, he will take home not only money, but the satisfaction of having hacked yet another version of a browser marketed as one of the most secure around.

Folding@home Passes Milestone

Many people in this age are being plagued by many diseases, including cancer which at the moment, is growing at an alarming rate and has no known cure. Folding@home is Stanford’s attempt to gain processing power of computers to solve and understand how proteins fold, both correctly and incorrectly. The project has just announced that it has passed over the five petaflop mark. This comes as an amazing accomplishment, as even the top five most powerful supercomputers combined can not even produce this number of information. The top supercomputer, known as Roadrunner, can only produce 1.46 petaflops itself, which obviously shows the greatness in the Folding@home milestone. As always on Overclockers Club, it is encouraged to continue to fold for both science, and team leadership points.