The forward-thinking folks at Google have implemented a novel solution to prevent regretful drunken digital correspondence to friends, family, co-workers, and loved ones. Gmail engineer Jon Perlow is introducing Mail Googles, a new feature that will tease the bean before ill-conceived late night and weekend emails can be sent out. Mail Goggles are presently available in the Labs tab on Gmail settings. Once activated, users can select the days and times when they’re most likely to be recreating in a fashion unsuitable for CC’ing the entire office.

Default settings are the tender hours between 10 PM and 4 AM on Fridays and Saturday. Before an ill-conceived email is allowed to make its rounds, Mail Goggles offers the constitution a checkup by asking a series of math problems that must be solved in 60 seconds. Several levels of difficulty are available for drunken savants. To activate Mail Goggles, go into Gmail’s settings, and turn on Mail Goggles in the “Labs” tab. Then adjust how and when it works in the “General” tab.

Source: Cnet, Register

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While the importance of FAXes is constantly decreasing, you will still need to use it from time to time and an application Snappy Fax can help you a lot to emulate it. Cracked and released by group BEAN.

Snappy Fax (SF) is a full-featured fax document management system. It allows you to store previously sent faxes that can be retrieved on demand, annotated, and processed again. You can resend the entire document, or send one or more pages without the need for re-transmitting the entire document. Annotation capabilities allow you to mark up a document and send it back to the original sender for review. SF stores all fax images sent or received and by whatever method (virtual fax, inline email or email attachment, or web fax) in its local database for later retrieval.

Version 3 of SF introduces true Fax Broadcasting capability. Any document can be captured in a Queue and saved for sending at a later time, either on demand or at a predetermined date and time. You can also have queued faxes sent repeatedly to any number of recipients at specified intervals. For example, a restaurant may want to establish a fax database of menu “flyers” that can be faxed to a number of business establishments on the first day of each week. With SF, this can be done very easily and with custom cover pages if desired.

Key features:

• Faxes can be sent from any Windows program
• Receive faxes directly to your PC
• Supports acquiring images from your scanner for faxing
• Fax Queueing (broadcasting) - faxes may be queued to send at a specific date, time and frequency or to send on-demand. Great for sending out that weekly newsletter or other publication.
• Support sending fax images via email
• Automatic forwarding of incoming faxes to either another fax machine, or any number
  of email addresses.
• Filtering of unwanted incoming junk faxes.
• “Capture mode” allows you to capture images from different windows applications and send as one multi-page fax in a single transmission.
• Automatically generate ready-to-fax images of Word or Excel documents or documents from other applications that support the “printto” command line directive.
• Fax images can be printed automatically (incoming) or printed at any time on-demand (outgoing and incoming)
• Supports saving of fax images in PDF Format
• Fax images can be sent to a website for viewing with a web browser.
• Supports sending and receiving faxes to other Snappy Fax users via email, ftp or local area network
• You can easily resend a fax without re-entering any information. The entire fax or just specific pages can be sent.
• Includes Address Book which supports Importing from Outlook contacts
• Includes extensive set of tools to annotate (markup) fax images.

Release name: Snappy.Fax.v4.22.1.1-BEAN
Size: 17 MB, bsnfaxc1.zip
Links: homepage, trial ($29), nfo, torrent search

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Network operators Vodafone and Verizon Wireless will sell Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Storm smartphone from next month, the companies said Wednesday. The Storm will be available from Vodafone in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Romania, Spain, Italy, France (via partner SFR), India, Australia and New Zealand from next month, and from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. With a touchscreen interface, the largest screen size ever on a BlackBerry device and a long list of features, the Storm will be a worthy competitor to Apple’s iPhone all over the world, according to Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight. Pricing will be announced in the coming weeks, according to RIM.

The Storm is the first touch-screen BlackBerry device and has what RIM calls a “clickable” screen: The user feels the screen being pressed and released, similar to the feeling of a key on a physical keyboard or a button on a mouse, which should make it easier to type, according to RIM. The touchscreen technology is very impressive, according to Wood, who describes the 3.26-inch, 480 by 360 pixel screen as a big key. “They have reinvented the touchscreen with the Storm. It’s not as good as a qwerty keyboard but it comes close,” he said. The Storm measures 112.5 millimeters x 62.2 mm x 13.95 mm and weighs 155 grams, compared to 115.5 mm x 62.1 mm x 12.3 mm and 133 grams for the iPhone. Users can surf the web and download email using either EV-DO Rev. A or HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), but there is no Wi-Fi.

Source: PC World

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This sounds like a pretty good news, potentially a new source of early DVD releases similar to Russian R5 rips. In an effort to head off pirates in South Korea, Warner Bros. will start releasing movies online there before they are even available on DVD. The move is an attempt to monetize a market known for the wide availability of illegally copied DVDs by taking advantage of its high broadband penetration. If the experiment proves successful, the studio and others like it may expand its pre-DVD-release online distribution to other countries. Warner Bros. hopes that, by offering movies online before their release on DVD, South Korean customers won’t be tempted to buy the movies for next-to-nothing on the street or hunt them down online.

And, of course, profit margins are higher on online downloads than discs, allowing Warner Bros. to make more from the downloads than they would by selling DVDs. “The beauty is that the consumer does not have to spend any more money on the product,” Tsujihara said. The company is apparently considering a similar move in China, where movie piracy is even more rampant than South Korea. Tsujihara acknowledged that China is very similar to South Korea when it comes to moving physical products (that is, not very good), but China could be ripe for online distribution as more of the country gets access to broadband. Warner Bros. has already changed its distribution strategy in China by offering legit DVDs at prices comparable to what pirates charge for illicit discs. In fact, this is a tactic that Warner China (a joint venture between Warner Bros., China Film Group, and Hengdian Group), Paramount and Fox are trying as well.

Source: Ars Technica

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A real jazz hero Mccoy Tyner released a new album Guitars and group OMA pred it on the scene approximately 60 minutes ago. If you like this kind of music, this is a must have.

McCoy Tyner is one of the most renowned jazz pianists of all-time, his next album, his second for McCoy Tyner Music/Half Note Records, is titled Guitars. Appropriately, the album, spotlights a bunch of ace guitarists — Bill Frisell, Derek Trucks, John Scofield and Marc Ribot —as well as one banjoist, Bela Fleck. The rhythm section is bassist Ron Carter and drummer Jack DeJohnette. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” Tyner said in a press release. “It was great, and each guy had his own concept and own sound, which is very, very important on any instrument,” said Tyner. “You know, I look for that, the individual sound and concept.”

Legendary producer John Snyder oversaw the project along with executive producers Jeff Levenson, VP of McCoy Tyner Muisc/Half Note Records, and Steve Bensusan, President of the Blue Note Jazz Club. Said Levenson, ”What impressed me about the project was how seamless the integration was. We have guys with disparate styles. You have guys who approach their instruments differently. The beauty of this project is how they all found common ground with McCoy. ”

Tracklist:

01  Improvisation 2 (with Marc Ribot)                  01:35
02  Passion Dance (with Marc Ribot)                    06:10
03  500 Miles (with Marc Ribot)                        06:23
04  Mr. P.C. (with John Scofield)                      06:21
05  Blues on the Corner (with John Scofield)          06:07
06  Improvisation 1 (with Marc Ribot)                  03:47
07  Trade Winds (with Bla Fleck)                      06:36
08  Amberjack (with Bla Fleck)                        04:36
09  My Favorite Things (with Bla Fleck)              07:02
10  Slapback Blues (with Derek Trucks)                03:47
11  Greensleeves (with Derek Trucks)                  06:15
12  Contemplation (with Bill frisell)                  07:55
13  Boubacar (with Bill Frisell)                      02:19
14  Baba Drame (with Bill Frisell)                    05:22

ARTiST.. McCoy Tyner
TiTLE... Guitars
GENRE... Jazz
LABEL... half note rec
ENCODER. Lame 3.97
YEAR.… 2008
QUALiTY. avg. 180kbps
PLAYTIME 74:15 min
REL.DATE 10.05.2008
SiZE.… 100,1 MB

Release name: Mccoy_Tyner–Guitars-2008-OMA
Links: Homepage, Amazon, Torrent soon

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Thirty percent of U.S. consumers who purchased the Apple iPhone 3G ditched their previous wireless carrier to go with AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive stateside carrier, according to a new report from the NPD Group. In the report, NPD Group, a wireless market research firm, said carrier defectors made the leap from June through August 2008. The iPhone 3G was released in mid-July. The AT&T boom surpassed industry  standards, which saw just 23 percent of consumers, on average, switch carriers in the same time period. NPD Group estimated that 47 percent of new AT&T iPhone users that switched came from Verizon Wireless, while another 24 percent left T-Mobile and 19 percent jumped from Sprint.

The launch of Apple’s latest generation iPhone also boosted the device’s clout in the consumer smart phone market. Before the 3G, iPhone sales accounted for 11 percent of the consumer market for smart phones, while after the 3G model’s launch, Apple propelled to 17 percent of the market. That jump in market share helped make the Apple iPhone 3G the top-selling consumer smart phone from June to August. The iPhone 3G was followed by Research In Motion (RIM) Ltd.’s BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Pearl and the Palm Centro. NPD Group’s report also found that average smart phone prices are on the decline. Between June and August 2008, the average smart phone ran $174, a 26 percent drop from the same period last year, when the average smart phone had a price tag of $236.

Source: CRN

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Given its history of moving deadlines at a moment’s notice, it hardly seems surprising that Microsoft is keeping Windows XP alive even longer than expected, but its latest move looks particularly bad for Vista. The apparent decision to allow OEM computer sellers to offer disks that downgrade installations of Windows Vista to XP until the end of July next year clearly bumps up against the period when Windows 7 might be released.

Partners originally had up until January 31 2009 to provide the Windows XP Professional recovery media with machines running Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate. Now they have until July 31, 2009. Microsoft had previously said it would end the scheme next January, but the continued lack of demand for Vista appears to be behind the change of heart. If the move is confirmed, it’s yet more bad news for Vista, as XP users may have the option to skip the unloved OS entirely and move straight to Windows 7.

Source: Techradar

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