Microsoft to introduce free version of Office

Microsoft is to include a free, stripped-down version of Office on new PCs from next year, abandoning Microsoft Works after years of service.

Office Starter 2010, which will be supoorted by advertising, will include Word 2010 and Excel 2010, dropping PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 - the other applications that will be bundled with the lowest-priced package, Home & Student - as well as Outlook 2010, which is part of the next-level-up Home & Business edition.

Office Starter 2010 will not be a trial edition that times out, said a Microsoft manager today. "Office Starter is different than a trial, in the sense that there's no expiration," said Scott Kahler, the test manager for the new suite, in a video posted on a Microsoft blog. "You can continue using it until your needs exceed what Starter can give you."

At that point, Microsoft hopes that users will pay for a more substantial version. "We insure that when you've upgraded, all your documents come across," added Brian Albrecht, Office's group program manager, in the same video clip. "There's no conversion or anything that needs to happen, and everything's there for you." [Detail]

Max99 - Mobile Instant Messenger

Max99 is a global community software that lets you keep in touch with your friends and family and make New Ones right on your mobile.

Max99 messenger is cheaper and consumes less battery and with smaller download size as well as it has got Chatrooms and group chat features. It is comparable to any other PC instant messenger.

Pakistani net users can get MiM (Mobile Instant Messenger) Max99, compatible with most of the GPRS enabled mobile phones, pocket PCs and other mobile devices.

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Excellent Free Editors and IDEs for Developers

Most developers have picked their favourite editor and/or IDE and use it many hours every day (and night). Still it can be quite useful to know what the free alternatives are. Some of the free editors and IDEs available are really high quality and may be worth investigating. If your manly using a large IDE it is likely that having a simple editor as well may improve your efficiency when just editing sigle files. The free alternative IDEs are also very powerful oprions and may beat some commercials competitors easily when it comes to feaures and easy of use. In this article tripwire magazine provides a list of more than 20 free Editors and IDEs useful for most developers. Let us all know if I missed a great product by posting a comment. [Detail]

ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly

ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. The first assembly in the list of input assemblies is the primary assembly. When the primary assembly is an executable, then the target assembly is created as an executable with the same entry point as the primary assembly. Also, if the primary assembly has a strong name, and a .snk file is provided, then the target assembly is re-signed with the specified key so that it also has a strong name. [Detail]

10 Must Have Portable Applications

Portable applications are handy when you are on move and can be run on most of the removable storage media like USB drive, mobile hard disk, iPod etc., Here in this article you will find extremely good 10 portable applications, that are very useful to carry with. If you are interested in application, just click through and you’ll get much more technical info and descriptions there. Hope this will be useful for some people! [Detail]

Microsoft Office 2010

Tell your story with video. Instantly brainstorm and share. Inform and inspire using photos and graphics. Connect, share, and collaborate in real time. Access and edit your files from virtually anywhere on your PC or smartphone.
Microsoft® Office 2010 gives you powerful new tools to express your ideas and work together, wherever your life takes you. [Detail]

16 Impressive Image Optimization Tools

Images are an important component of blogging. Nobody likes to wait an eternity before a page loads, just because it has heavy images. One of the surefire techniques to reduce website load time is to compress your images as much as you can so that your server, your visitors, and you benefit from it. [Detail]

Xen

The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows®, Linux®, Solaris®, and various versions of the BSD operating systems. [Detail]

Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. [Detail]

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. It is based on Subversion. TortoiseSVN provides a nice and easy user interface for Subversion.
It is developed under the GPL. Which means it is completely free, including the source code. But just in case you don't know the GPL too well: you can use TortoiseSVN to develop commercial applications or just use it in your company without any restrictions. [Detail]

MySQL

The MySQL® database has become the world's most popular open source database because of its consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use. It's used on every continent -- Yes, even Antarctica! -- by individual Web developers as well as many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube, and Zappos.com. [Detail]

NetBeans IDE

A free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java language, C/C++, and even dynamic languages such as PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. The NetBeans IDE is easy to install and use straight out of the box and runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. [Detail]

OpenOffice.org The Free and Open Productivity Suite

OpenOffice.org is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems has released the technology for the popular StarOffice[tm] Productivity Suite. All of the source code is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Sun is participating as a member of the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org is being hosted by CollabNet. [Detail]

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise

irtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). [Detail]