Latest Posts from Download Squad

Here at Download Squad, we like saving money. We love finding freebies, and we're certainly not ashamed to walk up to the cash register with a fistful of coupons. Since the announcement of the Windows 7 pricing scheme, we've been looking for ways to cut the costs to make the move.

We've compiled a list of seven ways you can get that Windows 7 goodness without shelling out quite as many bucks. Read on for savings!

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The federal government -- alongside everyone else with web access and a pulse -- seems to have taken a sudden interest in adopting cloud computing technologies. Late yesterday saw the launch of Apps.Gov, an internet portal built to allow government organizations quick and painless access to purchasing cloud services for their operations.

Partnering with companies like Google, VMware, and Salesforce.com, Apps.Gov aims to provide government agencies a streamlined method of purchasing, provisioning, and maintaining cloud-based applications. This is achieved in part by the fact that the applications featured on Apps.Gov have already gone through the federal examinations necessary to allow for procurement, saving agencies time and duplicate effort.

Apps.Gov is starting out small and will expand as they collect feedback and usage metrics; however, the Feds are looking at a very tall goal of reducing the number of taxpayer dollars required to operate the various IT departments that keep the government running.

[via ZDNet]

Google has decided that you're not getting enough news in your balanced diet of information. Equatable to hooking up an IV of coffee to get your necessary caffeine, Google Fast Flip, a new Google Labs project, aims to provide you with more news than you probably want, faster than you probably want it. Fast Flip provides a magazine-ish interface to news stories from (currently) three dozen popular news publishers.

You can flip through news articles based on popularity, news sections, hot topics, or publishers. On the home page, you can scroll through a strip of stories to find the first one you're interested; once you've selected a story, you can use the big left and right arrows on either side of the story to go to the previous or next story in the section. You can also scroll through the section's stories using a pop-out sidebar on the left side of the page. Also, the iPhone and Android versions let you actually flip through the stories using touch gestures, making the whole experience more fluent.

Google makes loading the news stories faster by caching them as images; this way, to read a news story, you don't have to load the entire publisher's web page (with all of its graphics and other elements) making load times significantly faster. Instead of having to wait ten seconds for a news site's page to load, the next story's screenshot has already been downloaded and cached in your browser.

Fast Flip also provides recommended results for anyone with a Google Account; it can automatically track the stories you read as well as base recommendations on articles you click the "Like" button for.

Residents of New York City beware... Engadget is planning to take over the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design for the evening on September 13th!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the folks over at Download Squad's sister blog Engadget are excited to announce the first taping of The Engadget Show, a monthly coagulation of interviews, round-table discussions, video clips, live music, and whatever else the Engadget crew can come up with.

This coming Sunday's taping will include a one-on-one interview with Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, who we're all sure will have a lot to say about the new webOS-powered Pixi, as well as the success of the Palm Pre and other goings-on at Palm. Also featured will be live music from Bit Shifter, a popular chiptune artist.

Tickets will become available at 2PM on Sunday, and the Tishman Auditorium seats about 450 people. Doors open at 4:30PM, and the show will begin at 5. If you can't make it to the taping, don't fret; The Engadget Show will be made available free for your viewing pleasure just a few days after the taping.

(Oh, and you can thank Nokia for sponsoring this event, as well as Parsons The New School for Design for hosting it.)

The folks over at Facebook decided their social network's user interface needed to lose some weight. So, after a few weeks on a treadmill, Facebook Lite is now available for public preview. This new fat-free version of Facebook looks to put Twitter in its sights as far as simplicity is concerned; it's more straight-to-the-point and less "just in case you're interested."

On the inside, Facebook Lite seems to load and run significantly faster than the standard interface. It uses far less styling and scripting, and conveys simpler information to the user. In fact, after using the regular version for so long, Facebook Lite starts to feel somewhat like a mobile website. For on-the-go people, this should speed up the social networking workflow a little bit.

Facebook Lite isn't quite ready for full-time use, however. There are still some "to do" items. For example, six of the seven selections in the Options screen, and the advertisement on the left side of the page seems to be locked on Facebook Lite's feedback page. The rest of the interface seems to be functional, albeit lacking (though that is the general idea of a lite application) in some areas.

Facebook Lite is available for public preview to (currently) all US and India members.

[via Mashable]

A few months ago, we brought you news of Download Squad's long time friend and blogger Drew Olanoff's Hodgkin's Lymphoma, as well as his efforts to get everyone to blame everything on it. Since then, almost 12,000 people have credited Drew's cancer with more than 26,000 of their unfortunate or ridiculous happenings.

At midnight this morning, Drew and his crew of blamers kicked off the Blame Drew's Cancer Blame-A-Thon party/benefit concert in Philadelphia. The blame games will go on for 24 hours, during which time Drew and company will be Livestreaming the event for all to watch and chat about.

The Blame Drew's Cancer team has put together a few ways of helping to support LiveStrong during the Blame-A-Thon; blamers in Philadelphia can purchase tickets to the second portion of the event, which will be located at North Star Bar and begin at noon. Supporters can also purchase a raffle ticket for a Twitter raffle going on during all 24 hours of the event. If you simply want to donate, the blame squad encourages you to donate directly to LiveStrong on behalf of Blame Drew's Cancer.

A few weeks ago, we covered some leaked documents showing just what a Microsoft retail location might look like; well, some lucky folks in the Scottsdale, Arizona and Mission Viejo, California areas might get the chance to see if the real thing looks as enticing as the concept images. The Microsoft JobsBlog pointed us in the direction of a hiring portal for positions at the soon-to-open retail stores.

Microsoft is looking for managers, associates, technical advisors, and trainers to staff the new stores opening inside Scottsdale Fashion Square and the Shops at Mission Viejo. These two locations are expected to open this fall, somewhere in line with the general release of Windows 7.

More Microsoft retail stores are expected to open across the country (and outside the U.S. at some point) but Microsoft has not yet released any details on upcoming locations.

The open source zealots over at the Free Software Foundation have left us here at Download Squad slightly speechless over a press release dropped in our never-ending pile of random crap from around the Internet. It would appear the FSF is pulling out all the stops in their new campaign (read: crusade) entitled Windows 7 Sins.

The folks over at the FSF have been known for some time now for their stances against proprietary and closed-source software. Their pent-up frustration toward large software companies has generally been channeled by pumping out lines of code and creating resources for free, open-source projects that provide alternatives to the payware already on the market. These free software initiatives are generally good for two things; providing software for people that don't need all the features and polish included in most commercial software packages, and keeping the open-source zealots occupied with relatively harmless work.

Occasionally, however, the zealots manage to escape their cages and enter the real world.

More after the break.

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The inner geek in all of us is constantly curious about what exactly is going on under the hood of our computer; the trusty ol' Task Manager is usually pretty good at letting us keep an eye on things. Sometimes, however, said inner geek needs a little bit more control over their not-always-well-oiled machine.

Process Hacker is an open source application that incorporates all of Task Manager's features while adding a plethora of other functions, charts, and options. Included in Process Hacker's features are things such as a tree view to see where active processes came from, detailed graphs displaying each process's resource usage and statistics, and (my personal favorite) over a dozen different ways to kill a process.

Sysinternals fans may notice that Process Hacker is very similar to Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer utility. The two utilities trade off a few features; Process Explorer is a little more developer-oriented, where Process Hacker is geared somewhat more toward the average power user.

The download link on Process Hacker's home page is broken, but you can download it directly from their project page on SourceForge.

Microsoft's struggle with the European Commission's demands regarding browser choice just never seems to end. Today's soap opera episode introduces another main character into the cast: Mozilla. Earlier this week, Harvey Anderson and Mitchell Baker, two highers-up of Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation, blogged about concerns and issues they had about the fairness of Microsoft's proposed ballot screen.

Mitchell's post outlined how Internet Explorer remained "uniquely privileged" within Windows (no big surprise there) while Harvey argues various points with the technicalities of the design and functionality of the ballot screen concept.

If Mozilla's suggestions are taken into account for the final release of the ballot screen, users may be provided with a more seamless experience at the ballot screen itself, allowing users to not just download their choice of browser immediately, but also immediately install the chosen browser and set it as the default, with minimal or no extra work required on the part of the user. It could also require that Microsoft prevent future Internet Explorer updates from asking to set IE as the default browser.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly explained that these recently expressed viewpoints on browser choice are a part of Mozilla's plan to "get across our point of view," as he puts it. Mozilla is expected to officially voice their concerns to the EC soon, as final word on the ballot screen is expected before the end of October.