Category: Software

Software

Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector

On Sep 19, 2007 10:34 pm, by NeutralX2

Most savvy computer users know that one of the best ways to keep their PC secure is to run updated security software. However, many of those same users overlook an equally important security precaution: keeping all of their software patched and up to date. Typically, keeping all of your applications updated can be a chore, requiring you to check all of the vendor’s websites for new versions.

However, one application from Secunia, a company that tracks software vulnerabilities, promises to make that task a whole lot easier. Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (currently in beta) can check for updates for more then 4,200 different programs. It checks the version of the software you have with the latest version of that software, and notifies you not only if they are different but where to get updates as well. It isn’t perfect though, as some software does not correctly report its version. Still, PSI is a pretty useful application worth checking out.

There are two versions of PSI. One runs in your browser, while the other one you download. The web version can be found here, and the download can be found here.

Software

Office 2007 for Students for $60

On Sep 14, 2007 6:45 pm, by NeutralX2

If you’re a college student and need Microsoft Office software you are in luck. Microsoft is running a promotion that offers Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for all of $59.95 to eligible college students. Eligibility criteria are a bit strict, but if you qualify, you can score a $680 piece of software for more than 90% off. The offer ends in April 2008.

What’s Included:

  • Access™ 2007
  • Accounting Express 2007*
  • Excel® 2007
  • Groove® 2007
  • InfoPath® 2007
  • OneNote® 2007
  • Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager*
  • PowerPoint® 2007
  • Publisher 2007
  • Word 2007

What are the requirements you ask? You must hold a valid email address at a U.S. educational institution ending in .edu (for example, [email protected]) AND be actively enrolled with at least 0.5 course load. Also, you must be able to provide proof of enrollment status (ie, student card) upon request by Microsoft. If you are unable to provide proof of enrollment, you will be required to pay the full retail price of Office Ultimate 2007 (approximate ERP $679USD).

*Accounting Express 2007 and Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 is a separate download

Games Software

Xfire

On Apr 18, 2007 5:01 pm, by NeutralX2

Not a lot of people know about Xfire, which is surprising considering all of the cool stuff that it offers. What is Xfire? Well, it is basically as close to Xbox Live as you can get on a Windows PC (at least until Live for Windows launches later this year). Many of the features offered by Xbox Live, such as a unified friends list, one click joining of friend’s games, in game chat (including voice), and automatic patch downloading are offered by Xfire. They even offer a gamercard like image that shows your most played game and what you are currently playing. They are also working on stat tracking for some games such as Quake 4 and Call of Duty. Best of all, everything is absolutely free. Here is a list of the main features:

Friend Tracker

  • See when your friends are online, what game they’re playing, and what server they’re on
  • Join in on their games with one click
  • See what the friends of your friends are playing

One-Click Join

Once you’re ready to join one of your friends in a game, simply select your friend’s name and click the Join button. (Say goodbye to cutting & pasting server IP addresses!)

Server Browser

Xfire’s server browser is built right into the client so you don’t need yet another app running while gaming. You can easily filter by game type, map name, ping, etc. Xfire also keeps track of your recent servers, your favorites, and your friends’ favorites.

Xfire In-Game (IM While You Play)

Unlike other IMs, you can send and receive messages from inside games without having to minimize (Alt+Tab) the game window. Your IMs appear right on screen: just hit Scroll Lock + X to respond. You can even take screenshots by pressing Scroll Lock + S and automatically upload them to your profile page.

Voice Chat

Xfire’s voice chat lets you talk 1:1 or in groups with your friends while you’re in or out of game. Superior voice quality and custom bandwidth settings ensure your gaming will still go on lag-free.

File & Patch Downloads

You can download the latest mods, patches, and trailers for your favorite games to your desktop over our flexible and convenient P2P file network. Subscribe to Xfire’s download channels and get game patches and files automatically delivered as soon as they’re out- no more waiting around to get a patch, just play.

Profiles with Automatic Stats

Xfire shows off your gaming stats, such as the games you play and how many hours you’ve played them. They’re on your profile and Miniprofile, which can be embedded anywhere on the web.

Over 800 Games Supported

Xfire supports many popular online PC games, including server and non-server based First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy, and Role Playing Games. If you play it, we probably have it. And we’re constantly adding newly suggested games.

Xfire can be downloaded here.

Games Software Tech 1

John Carmack at CES

On Jan 11, 2007 9:00 pm, by NeutralX2

Game Informer has a pretty lengthy interview with ID Software’s John Carmack (creator of Doom, Quake) and Todd Hollenshead. They voice their opinions on Windows Vista, the Xbox 360 vs. PS3, digital distribution, new PC hardware, and Quakecon. The whole interview is pretty interesting and worth reading. You can find the entire interview here.

GI: At QuakeCon two years ago, you were very adamant during your keynote about not being too thrilled about developing for multi-core systems. Not just specifically with PCs, but also the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now that you’ve been working with both of them since then, have your thoughts changed at all?

Carmack: Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that it’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, it’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. It’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this. We’re going to be incentivized, obviously, to take advantage of the system, because everybody’s going to be doing that. It’s not like anyone’s going to say that it’s impossible to do. People tend to look at it from the up side. It gives you this many more flops and it gives you this much more power to do that. But you have to recognize that there is another edge to that sword, and you will suffer in some ways for dealing with this. I don’t have any expectation that anytime soon, a massive breakthrough will occur that will make parallel programming much easier. It’s been an active research project for many years. Better tools will help and somewhat better programming methodologies will help. One of the big problems with modern game development with C/C++ languages is that your junior programmer who’s supposed to be over there working on how the pistol works can’t have one tiny little race condition that interacts with the background thread doing something. I do sweat about the fragility of what we do with the large-scale software stuff with multiple programmers developing on things, and adding multi-core development makes it much scarier and much worse in that regard.

So we’re dealing with it, but it’s an aspect of the landscape that obviously would have been better if we would have been able to get more gigahertz in a processor core. But life didn’t turn out like that, and we have to just take the best advantage with it.

GI: You talked a lot about the Xbox 360. What are your thoughts on the PlayStation 3 now that you’ve had more time on it?

Carmack: We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we’re not going to do much until we’re at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We’ll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It’s not something we’re going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, let’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3’s strengths. I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking it’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and it’s now looking like it might not be. I’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly–they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint.