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Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Windows market share reaches new low - 89.6%


Windows Market Share
If you gauged the market share of various operating systems by counting the number of Macs vs PCs you see in the typical urban coffee shop, you'd probably believe that Apple and Microsoft were duking it out like Republicans and Democrats in a close US presidential election.

But the truth of the matter is that Microsoft is the dominant company when it comes to consumer oriented computers. In fact, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks these things, Microsoft had more than 90% of the market share. Until last month, anyway.

In November, 2008, Microsoft's market share dipped to 89.62%. Which is to say, Microsoft's Windows operating systems still dwarf the nearest competitors, Mac OS X and Linux. But a slightly smaller percentage of people who visited web sites tracked by Net Applications in November were using the operating system.

Net Applications reports that OS X has also seen a slight jump in usage, and that Windows Vista use is up while Windows XP use is down. More than 20% of computer users were running Windows Vista for the first time in November.

[via Computer World and Slashdot]

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Songbird 1.0 released

Songbird 1.0
Just over a month after the first release candidate made its ways to the masses, Songbird 1.0 is available for download. Songbird is an open source music player built on Mozilla code.

The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.

Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Search, Web

Microsoft adds similar images feature to Live Search Images

Live Search Images
When you're using a search engine to find what you're looking for, you're probably used to typing a query, looking at the results, and refining your query. Every now and again you might even click a button that says it will show you similar results. Now Microsoft has added a button with exactly that feature to the company's image search engine.

When you conduct a search using Live Search Images, you can hover your mouse over any image and click the "show similar images" button. To be honest, it's a bit tricky to tell exactly what this does. Because if you've searched for something like "stick" you're probably already looking at a window filled with pictures of sticks. If you click the similar images button, you'll wind up on another page with images filled with sticks. That said, when I said I wanted to see similar images to a stick bug, I did get another picture of an insect - and several pictures of deodorant, glue sticks, and stick figures.

If you're looking for a more advanced image comparison service, check out TinEye, a beta site that allows you to upload a picture and find images on the internet that are compositionally similar.

[via Google Operating System]

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Web services, web 2.0

Find, play, and download web music with Songbeat

Songbeat
Songbeat is a desktop application for accessing web-based music search and discovery services including Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, and Last.fm without a web browser.

When you fire up the application you're greeted with a search box. Just type an artist or song title and Songbeat will attempt to find songs from the music search engines mentioned plus a few more. Or you can click on the Station tab and enter an artist or song title to launch a Last.fm audio stream.

Songbeat lets you listen to as many songs as you want for free. But you can also use the program to download music or record audio from Last.fm. Once you hit 25 downloads, you'll have to pony up some cash to keep downloading the free music. A full license costs 19,99 Euros or $29.99 US.

There are a few kinks to be worked out. While I found the search and playback features worked fairly well, once I tried recording an audio track Songbeat went hog wild and started downloading a bunch of songs I hadn't asked for. In a matter of minutes all of my 25 free downloads were used up.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

WinFlog powers up your Windows context menus

WinFlog
WinFlog Extreme is a tiny Windows utility that lets you add a handful of useful items to your right-click context menus. That includes the ability to turn Aero desktop effects on or off in Windows Vista, eject a CD or DVD, or turn on the Flip 3D Windows switcher in Windows Vista. You can also add an option to turn off your display from the context menu. Don't worry, it will come back on as soon as you move your mouse.

The utility lets you pull up these features when you right click your My Computer icon, when you right click on your desktop or a Windows Explorer Window, or when you click your middle mouse button or scroll wheel.

The only feature that actually seems to work for Windows XP users is the option to turn off the monitor by right-clicking on the My Computer icon. So if you're running Windows XP, I'd recommend downloading the lite version of WinFlog, which offers just a few features, rather than the full WinFlog Extreme. Of course, both versions take up less than half a megabyte, so unless you're on a dialup connection where every KB counts, you might want to just go ahead and splurge and get the full version.

[via Download.com]

Mount remote storage, use web apps as local apps with Gladinet

Gladinet is a new Windows utility that aims to help bridge the divide between desktop and web-based applications and storage. Here's how it works. You install the free (at least while in Beta) Gladinet utility and select the web based services and applications that you want to access locally. For example, you can mount your Windows Live SkyDrive or Amazon S3 Storage as a local drive that you can...

gOS Cloud - From zero to web browser in just a few seconds

gOS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that's designed to make it easy to interface with web-based applications like Gmail, YouTube, and Meebo. It uses the slightly OS X-like Enlightenment desktop environment, and the developers have been pushing it as a good operating system for low powered netbooks, thanks to its integration with web applications. The latest version of gOS goes a few...

Soovle offers search suggestions for 7 search engines

Soovle is a search engine for people who might not know exactly what they're looking for. As soon as you start typing a search term, Soovle will begin to offer suggestions for related terms that may help you refine your search. And it doesn't just offer suggestions for one service, but for 7: Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Answers.com, Ask.com, YouTube, and Amazon. If you want to take Soovle up on...

Select multiple checkboxes with CheckBoxMate for Firefox

CheckBoxMate is a Firefox add-on that can save you a ton of time if you frequently need to select multiple check boxes when doing things like cleaning your email inbox or responding to surveys. The utility is considered an experimental Firefox plugin, but all that means is that you need to sign up for a free Mozilla account and login before downloading CheckBoxMate from the Firefox add-ons...

Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles

Sure, you always mean to keep up on the news by reading dozens of interesting articles every day about politics, the economy, and you know, tech news. But who has the time? Great Summary is here to help. Just copy the URL of an article that's so long you get exhausted by looking at it, decide how many lines of text you're actually willing to put up with (from 1 to 100), and push the summarize...

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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