Tag: SOFTWARE

For most people, it doesn't mean anything. But for people writing the software that lets the rest of us see imaginary worlds, SIGGRAPH is an acronym for the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques. SIGGRAPH is dedicated to the creation and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques. The group specializes ...

Believe it or not, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the Christmas or Underwear Bomber, might have been prevented from flying if his name was a little less complicated to spell. In a report summarizing the attempted terrorist attack of December 25, 2009, it is made apparent that the software used by counter-terrorist intelligence agencies is perhaps not all that great. A month before the attack, ...

It's amazing how many apps we review over the course of a year. There's no way I could count the number of times I've run appwiz.cpl (add/remove programs) on my desktop and laptop in the past twelve months. Certain apps, however, stand the test of time. The ten I've listed after the jump are permanent fixtures on my Window systems - some old, some new, but all awesome. ...

This weekend signals the beginning of holiday shopping craziness in the U.S., and there's no shortage of deals to be had. We're scouring web sites around the 'net to find discount prices on games, apps, and operating systems - if you've found some, share them in the comments! Be sure to check back, we'll be updating this post as we find more savings to pass along! Applications and Operating ...

They've been awfully quiet the last couple of years, except for the recent PS3 price reduction and slow drip-feed of good games. But it seems, after the appointment of a new CEO back in 2006, the results of some internal reshuffling might finally be coming to fruition! There's no name for the new software reported on by BusinessWeek. There's also very few details of the functionality Sony's ...

While software giveaway sites like MacHeist allow indie developers to trade a bunch of free copies of their app for publicity and new customers, some developers aren't on board with that arrangement. Red Sweater Software's Daniel Jalkut believes in getting paid for his hard work, so he decided to offer a 20% discount instead of giving his apps away for free. It turns out he's not alone. In ...

Shirt Pocket released an update to its Mac backup software package SuperDuper! today, and though it's only a minor version number revision, it's a major speed improvement. The software company announced on their blog that, while they understated the speed increase on the official announcement (there they only claimed a 2x increase), during their in-house testing they were seeing speed increases of ...

Open-source software is everywhere, and developers use it to speed up their development on a regular basis. This is as it should be, for the most part, assuming the developers follow the licensing for whatever open-source software (OSS) they use. Along with licensing, the open-source community is, probably rightly so, very focused on attributing credit correctly. Considering that most OSS ...

Way back in January I wrote about my corporate-sanctioned machine, complete with a few pieces of bloatware (sorry kids!). I appreciate the awesome suggestions, although since I need this thing for work purposes, I'm opting to go light and lean whenever possible to begin with. Yes, I realize Microsoft Office is the antithesis of "light and lean" but the suite is required to stay on the machine. For ...

I use Firefox for work. I interface with Blogsmith, our CMS, using Firefox. I use my primary email in Firefox. I eschew multiple plugins and add-ons because I want to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the "main window" to my work world. Today I see that there's a 3.0.6 update -- but I'm not updating yet. Why? Because I don't trust it. Until I poke around and see that my (few) ...

A lot of you read yesterday's post about the school teacher who cautioned us that spreading the "misconception of free software" is harmful. Today we're going to put a positive spin on things. Free software does exist. Every retail customer that I've built a computer for in the past six years has at least three pieces of free or Open Source software on his or her system. It's everywhere, and ...

A reader dropped us an email recently, requesting information on where to find educational software for elementary and middle-schoolers. That's a great question -- there are plenty of Web-based sites to choose from but, as our reader pointed out, it can be tough to find things to put on your computer to use later without an Internet connection. If you dig around a little, though, you can find a ...

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects? Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including ...

So you're thinking, "Hey, I want to be totally irresponsible with my computer and load it up with crapware!" Really, isn't everyone getting tired of having to be so stinking responsible on the Internet all the time? We certainly are. We're ready for system protection that isn't afraid of our reckless browsing, indiscriminate downloading, and general apathy towards good computer usage habits. ...

If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that WordPress 2.5 was released. Depending on what kind of web space maintenance type person you are, you may or may not have upgraded immediately. Today's big admission at Download Squad is that some of us, ahem, ignored the Upgrade Now! link for the last two weeks. It wasn't that we didn't care. It ...