Here’s an interesting idea – rent a virtual desktop on the internet and use that instead of a PC. Nivio are selling exactly that – for under £10/month you get a Windows PC with MS Office. A range of other applications can be installed for a nominal monthly fee.
Digital mapping software is starting to become more common with the growth of more powerful phones and PDAs. Effectively replacing an entire pocket full of Ordinance Survey maps, “Quo” from Mapyx is the latest to join the lineup.
Quo is a simple application to use and (more importantly) it’s free to download. Once installed, you can plan routes using the tool which can then be exported to GPS waypoints. A Windows Mobile version of the software is also included, which will display your chosen route on your smartphone/PDA.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, Microsoft are gearing up to launch the next version of their desktop OS, Windows 7.
For a limited time you can get it from select resellers at the discounted pre-order price of £49.99 for Home Premium and £99.99 for the professional edition.
If you’re wondering what the difference is, Paul Thurrock over at WinSuperSite has done a pretty thorough comparison of the different editions. For most of us the extra networking capabilities of Professional won’t make a difference but the inclusion of a licensed copy of XP (for use in the funky new compatibility mode) might just make the extra £50 worthwhile.
If XP mode isn’t important to you then £49.99 sounds like a bargain so head over to your favourite e-tailer and snap up your copy. A list of participating vendors is available from the Microsoft UK pre order page.
If you’ve ever investigated alternatives to the standard Internet Explorer browser that ships with Windows you’ll have come across Firefox, but you may not have seen Opera.
They used to charge for it but it’s been free for the last couple of releases and offers a slightly different experience to the other two big players. It’s also available for Mac and Linux users.
It feels quite fast (even without the “Turbo” mode enabled) and has a couple of nice user interface touches – you can try it for free at http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
The weekend saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha – a search engine designed to do more than just return lists of results – in fact, it doesn’t work that way at all so if all you’re after is a picture of a chocolate bar you’re better off sticking to Google.
If, on the other hand, you want to know what’s in the chocolate then Wolfram comes into it’s own. The idea behind Wolfram is to make knowledge “computable” – in other words, to take raw information and turn it into something meaningful.
I’ve recently bought an Asus EeePC901 which runs an Asus version of Xandros as standard. All very nice and simple but I wanted to take a look at some of the replacement Linux distributions that are out there without actually having to install them, at least until I find the one that works for me.
The thing is this means creating a bootable USB memory stick which takes time and gets a little technical. It was while I was looking at the various distributions that I stumbled across the Unetbootin utility which automates the entire process for you whether you run Windows or Linux on your PC.
The usual warning about messing with your OS applies: you do this at your own risk so don’t blame us if you accidentally trash your main hard drive!
Having said that, the process worked for me so if the warning didn’t scare you away, read on…
Google released their location tracking service Latitude last week to a mixed reception. If you’ve been living in a cave and missed the launch, Latitude is an application that sits on your phone (Android, Windows mobile, Nokia and Blackberry, iPhone coming soon) and tells Google where you are. Google then publishes your location on Google maps so all your friends can track you.
To see the location of other people you either need to run the mobile maps application or use an iGoogle widget. (hint – before you install it on your phone, first uninstall any previous version of maps and power-cycle the phone otherwise the “locate” menu might not appear)
If you’re even semi-serious about digital photography you owe it to yourself to check out Lightroom – it’s hard to describe the product in a sentence but Adobe pretty much have the niche to themselves, at least until Bibble Labs get around to releasing version 5 of their much-acclaimed RAW converter.
Word hit the net last week that Microsoft were cutting 1400 jobs over the next 18 months but the brunt of the casualties so far seem to be in the entertainment division. It looks like most of the Aces team responsible for the long running Flight Simulator series of games have lost their jobs, leading to speculation that there will be no further developments in this area.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has been part of the computing landscape for nearly as long as PCs have been around - amazingly the series started in 1978 although the first Microsoft branded version came out in 1982. In the 25 years since that first version arrived it’s seen a dedicated following spring up, together with a host of hardware and software addons.
Luckily for flight sim buffs X-plane (Flight Sim’s main competitor) still looks strong and it wouldn’t surprise me if a number of current add-on vendors started looking that way for potential converts.
Via [Gamasutra]
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