The new coalition has proven itself a huge disapointment regarding the Digital Economy act. Prior to the Election both Conservative and Liberal parties denounced the new laws. Now they are in office it seems they like the power too. So watch out - after three accusations from Copyright holders proven or not your Internet access can be severed. You may appeal through the courts. However, this is landmark event which marks the end to the presumtion of innocence. Most experts have pointed out that the real criminals will just work out very quickly how to hide from the process leaving the accident prone public exposed to action and the original authors unprotected.
Theogenes De Montford, 29, of Blandford Way, Hayes has been sentenced to four and a half years for his role in one of the UK's biggest chip and pin scams. The gang put card cloning equipment on pin entry handsets at petrol stations around the country. De Montford was caught with 35,000 card details when arrested. An amazing 7,000 of these came from one garage - a Shell garage on Bluebell Hill in Maidstone, Kent.
In the first three months of sales Apple claims to have peddled more than three million of its netbooks without keyboards for nearly twice the price of anything else on the market. Apple's CEO said that "people are loving Ipad as it becomes a part of their daily lives," and promised, "We're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month." Not all reports are positive. One said, "For the life of me I can't see why. I spent an afternoon playing with one and still could not find a use for it. It was too heavy to read with and too expensive to use as a coffee tray".
Don't expect Debian 6 to be release this year. The Debian 6 (codenamed Squeeze) freeze was planed for December 2009. It looks that it is not so easy for the Debian project to switch to a fixed 2 year cycle. It was pushed back because of the high number of critical bugs. Got some time? why not help the project. Details: http://www.debian.org/
Microsoft is warning companies to check what version of Windows they're running, saying some firms aren't even aware they're running Windows 2000. Microsoft will end all Windows 2000 support on 13 July. One the same date Server 2003 moves to extended support and will only receive security fixes. Also XP users should upgrade to Service Pack 3. XP Service Pack 2 users will be unsupported after 13 July.
OpenOffice.org 3.2: http://www.openoffice.org/ £free
Microsoft Office 2010: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/ £239.99
Office 2010 receives a full report in the August PC Pro. The author point out that OpenOffice.org does the job nicely. However, the article points out that Microsoft Office 2010 has extra features over previous versions Microsoft Office to make it easier to produce flashy new styled documents. So if you are in marketing Office 2010 is definitely your choice!
VLC media player has been updated to version 1.1. New features including GPU-based (depends on your video card) video decoding, a number of new decoders, a new extension framework, performance improvements, and more. Details here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
I cant add much more to the infomation on the Microsoft site. It does the job without impacting performance unduly. Details here:
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
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