Wonder why Microsoft.com website works best only on Internet explorer? Not only this, most part of its website works ‘only’ in internet explorer. We call it monopolies of Microsoft that it has always disgraced use of software’s that are not made by Microsoft. EU has already fined Microsoft for this bad business practice. There is no doubt that Microsoft is a reputed company and we all use their software because they are easy to use but I don’t understand why they have to follow such cheap tactics. If internet explorer fails to meet security standards then they should work on it instead and something like Internet explorer 7 should have been made long before.

Yesterday when I went to my nearby PC store, I was surprised to see original antivirus software packages kept for sale. I asked the owner of anyone buy them and he said that now people are buying genuine antivirus software! Till now everyone buying a PC would ask the dealer to install all the software’s he/she needed and it was known to both seller and buyer that pirated software will be installed free of cost. It begins with installation of pirated windows xp or vista then pirated antivirus and then pirated office package and finally whatever software customer ask for. The dealers have a bag full of pirated software CD’s. However the trend of using pirated antivirus software is slowly changing and more and more people are buying genuine software. But this is limited to antivirus software only and other software’s are still used pirated only.

Ubuntu we all aware of now is one of the famous free Linux flavor has a new version of its LTS series available. With each new release, it’s getting better and better and giving tough competition to premium operating systems. This new Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS can be downloaded from here instantly or you can order free CD’s of this OS from here if you have a limited or slower internet connection and cannot download big files.

Linux turns 17 today and in these 17 years it has evolved so much that it can be seen almost everywhere, from school books to office computers and hey even my smart phone runs on Linux! Today 6th October was the day when world saw its first Linux, it came to existence from a post made on usernet named Linux. No one would have thought that Linux will come to this stage giving trouble to software giant Microsoft. From the consumer point of view, Windows is still the preferred OS and home pc are always found to have windows installed but for commercial use where security is more important than ease of use, Linux is the way to go. This gave rise to Linux flavors like Red Hat which are premium and comes with support just like any other paid software.

Computer literate people know how much secure and powerful UNIX operating system is but we still use windows because it’s more useful to common man. However in times when you have to study UNIX, you have no choice but install some Linux flavor on your PC just for learning UNIX commands and scripts. However as the title of this post says, you can learn UNIX on your Windows system too! Telnet and free UNIX account provider like sdf.lonestar.org makes this possible. All you have to do is type: telnet sdf.lonestar.org in the run box and you will be connected to a UNIX system where you can create free UNIX account. This account remain active for 100 days but if you want it to be forever then you have to pay a tiny fee of 1$ (or 5$ via paypal). This service is best for students who want to learn UNIX without messing up with their existing operating system.

We all have a habit of finding small apps on net for editing, converting and recording video on media but we end up installing huge number of small software which often messes up our PC and we are not able to do any productive work. Blaze Media Pro is a great all-in-one multimedia application that offers conversion, ripping, editing, recording, burning, playback, and much more. So no more small apps to do one task as now you can do all you need by just using a single software and even use it as a CD burning software to burn videos on CD. Sure it’s powerful software, yet it’s easy to use. Previously I also had number of software’s to complete single task like one for ripping, encoding, other for editing, one for burning and a number of players to play videos of different format. Blaze Media support a number of formats which include CD, MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, MPEG-4, AIFF, M4A, AAC, AC3, FLAC, and ALAC, and two-way conversions among MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, WMV, ASF, Flash (SWF and FLV), iPod, PSP, 3GP, and MOV are available for video. You must not forget that it’s also a DVD burning software so all these huge files can always be burnt on DVD directly without wasting HDD space. Talking of space, DVD movies take a lot of space and if they are converted to other formats like avi, mpg, they take less space without much loss in quality. Blaze media pro also allows you to convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV! So whatever you need to do with your videos, Blaze media is all you need.