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Microsoft announced on it’s pricing for the Office 2010 suites on the Office Development Group blog on Monday. There will be four different versions this time around (Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional, and Professional Academic), and two different prices depending on how you want to get the software. There will be a boxed version of the software that will include the installation CD and license, and there will be the alternative Product Key Card version. The Product Key Card version is just a small plastic card (credit card size) with a product key sticker on it. The software will come on new systems pre-installed with the Office starter/trial. For anyone that has an OEM version of Office 2007, you will most likely be familiar with the Product Key Card.

The Home and Student will have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Home and Business adds Outlook to the software. Professional and Professional Academic will be the full suite containing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher and Access.

Home and  Student will cost $149 for the boxed version and $119 for the Product Key Card version. The boxed version can be installed on up to 3 PC’s. Home and Business will run $279/$199, Professional $499/$349. Both of which (boxed version) can be installed on 2 PC’s. Professional Academic will go for $99 and will only be available in boxed form and only to students, teachers, and academic faculty. The Product Key Card versions and Professional Academic version only allow for a single installation.

I’ve been playing with the beta version of Office 2010 for the past week, and I can’t really see all that much functionally, that they’ve changed from Office 2007. There are some nice additions though. The “minimize ribbon” button/widget, the “Background Removal Tool” and a 5:1 contrast ratio added into the silver theme. They also did away with the Office 2007 Button, and replaced it with a ribbon tab. Nifty, but hardly a reason to upgrade from 2007.

That’s something else they did away with. There is no upgrade option from previous versions of Office. So, for most people, that will mean having to buy the full boxed version of the software.

Something interesting to note, was that they mentioned that “Office Home and Student was one of Amazon.com’s top 3 Hot Holiday Bestseller software products in 2009.”. That just points out the amount of people that most likely won’t be buying the 2010 version.

Came across an application for your iPod and iPhone users via Chris Pirillo’s site (  http://chris.pirillo.com ).

It’s called CopyTrans® Manager. It’s apparently much faster than iTunes and easier to use. Hey, for a free download, give it a try here.

I figured that might catch some people’s attention. Hey, I’m like just about everyone else. I like free stuff too! Over the years I’ve amassed a plethora of free applications that make living a digital life much easier. Some you may already know of, some you may not. Now, although the software is free, the authors actually do need to eat. So if you really like any of the applications, please send in a donation to support them. Even a small donation helps. Not only does it put food on their table and a roof over their heads, it also gives them a reason to keep updating the software, and writing more great applications. I’m not going to list all of them all at once, because that would take forever. So, check back frequently, because I’ll constantly be adding to the list.

 The first on the list, is 7-Zip. Although Windows natively supports uncompressing files, it’s still a bit clunky how it does it. 7-zip has a very small installation, and doesn’t eat up system resources like WinZip which, if you don’t do a custom installation will put something called “Quick Pick” in your task bar. It also doesn’t have any annoying “Buy the full version!” splash screens, or popups. It just plain works, and works well. They’re even working on a version for Windows mobile. You can give it a try by downloading it here.

 Next up, is Opera. Some of you may already be familiar  with it on your mobile phone. Opera is a web browser that’s much faster than Internet Explorer, and even Firefox. It has all the features you would expect nowadays in a browser, and even some more. What I particularly like is when you open a new tab, it opens what they call “speed dial”.  In their own words,

“Speed Dial gives you quick access to your favorite Web sites. Every time a new tab is opened, you are presented with a 3×3 grid of thumbnails, each representing a Web address.”

It’s so much more intuitive and useful than having to look through your bookmarks for the websites you access the most. But, the bad part? Not everyone recognizes it as a standard web browser, so some websites just won’t allow you access with it. Windows update for instance (if you’re still running windows XP or earlier), some banks won’t allow you to use anything other than Firefox or Internet Explorer, etc… But, for all the rest of your browsing needs, I suggest you give it a whirl. Check it out here.

Well, I’ve been messing with Windows 7 Beta (build 7100) for the past month or two, and I have to say, I’m actually impressed. I know this is not what was released to the OEM’s last week, and is still only the Beta version. I expect that the release will have much more compatibility for devices and software than what I’m currently using.

Finally, Microsoft has gotten their act together and taken a good look at the market and taken it into consideration. For years people have been staving off Windows Vista, due to it’s lack of compatibility, it’s awkwardness of it’s interface, and annoying UAC (user account control). While Windows 7 looks, visually very similar to Vista, they function very differently in key spots.

The first thing I noticed with Windows 7 was it’s taskbar, which is now called the “superbar”.  In previous versions of the taskbar, if you had a lot of windows open and you had it set to “group similar taskbar buttons”, all you got was a text description of what you had open. Niffty, but lacking a bit of functionality. If you were like me, and didn’t like the that type of stacking, your task bar would fill up until you had so much in there you would have to increase the height of your taskbar to accommodate everything or have to deal with scrolling through your taskbar via the little arrows that would appear on the right hand side. They’ve really put a lot of thought into it this time. But hey, a picture says a 1000 words, right? Video says even more.

Well, got done installing Debian, and so far so good. Couldn’t really say how long it took for sure, because I had go out on a service call (that pesky work thing). So I left it installing as I headed out the door. I continued the installation when I got back. It seemed to take roughly the same time as my Ubuntu installation. Which kind of makes sense as Ubuntu is built on a Debian base. It does however seem to be the slowest distribution of the three I’ve tried. Once again the video is causing problems. I think it’s going to be the bane of this project. Sound is a little distorted as well. Video files play well, although DVD’s do not. I should mention that this was also a problem with Ubuntu as well, although like I stated in my previous post, this really isn’t a big deal. At this point I’m wondeing if there’s an incompatibility with the DVD/CD-RW itself.

What I found fairly annoying, is that to install applications through their recommended method, the “apt-get” way. You still need to have the correct package DVD’s. Similar to the microsoft products if you don’t choose a custom installation and select the”run all from my computer”, or if you don’t copy the cab files to your hard drive. Now some of you are saying to yourselves “…well, just download the package DVD’s and carry them with you.” . (Yes, I know there are ways around this problem) The problem with this is that there are 4 package DVD’s. This is in addition to the primary installation DVD. So 5 DVD’s total. 4.4 gigs each for the installation disk and three first package DVD’s, then the last DVD that’s 1.8 gig, for a total of 19.4 gigs. That’s just ridiculous. For some people, that’s almost their entire bandwidth alotment for a month.

While Debian is (potentially) feature rich, it’s falling behind it’s cousin Ubuntu for this project. I’d elaborate more, but it’s almost 12:30 am and I have to be up early. So while I get some sleep, Mandriva (Mandrake), Fedora, and  Knoppix images are downloading.

More to come…

I’ve been test driving a few Linux distributions on my laptop to find out which I personally like the best. Ubuntu, and CentOS so far and more to come. Why am I doing this?

The laptop is a little bit of an older model, aDell Inspiron 5150, 3.06 Ghz P4, with 2 gigs of ram. Not the fastest thing on the planet, but I does what I need it to do, albeit a little slower than I would like. Hence the Linux project. Keep the laptop viable for as long as I can by spending nothing other than the cost of a few blank CD’s/DVD’s and some spare time. I do have a few older 20 gig 2.5″ drives. I have aquired them from clients who have upgraded to much larger drives, had no use for the old drive and I was told to keep them for my own use. So while my next test flavor of linux is downloading (Debian). Here what I’ve come across with the two installations I’ve done so far.

The Ubuntu installation went very well, and took a little less than an hour. The only hitch is the video. The Nvidia FX GO 5200 on the laptop seems to have driver issues. I should mention that I expected this, as even the latest drivers from Nvidia for Windows installations don’t recognize it. The driver issue only seems to affect playing video’s, DVD’s and such. Not really a big deal seeing as I really don’t see the the need to be watching video’s on my laptop. The latest updates to the drivers suggest that this is an issue that the developers are aware of. It does seem a little bloated (I chose the default installation).

The CentOS installation went much faster than the Ubuntu installation. There were however two issues once the OS was installed. The first, once again being the video. This time though, there was no driver availible for it other than a generic VESA driver. No desktop effects . I’m still playing with this installation, so I may come across a solution. But, from the research I’ve done so far the odds don’t look too good in my favor. I also haven’t tried playing a DVD or video yet. The second problem that I’m still working on is getting the wireless card functioning properly. In my case it’s the Dell 1450 dual band wireless (Broadcom  based chip). While CentOS recognizes the Broadcom chip and installs a driver for it, it’s still unable to initialize the card properly. I’m sure this has to do with it being rebranded as a “Dell” card. This I also suspect is the same problem with the video. All in all the installation runs a little bit quicker than the Ubuntu installation. Neither problem is a deal breaker, but a little disappointing.

Well, in another half hour or so, I’ll be onto the Debian installation. So there will be more to come. But, first I need more coffee…

Anyone remember the good old days of Quake? Playing online with a 28.8bps dial up connection. Hoping by the time you joined a game an it loaded it wasn’t already over. Well, it looks like those days are at an end. ID Software has a game that’s currently in open beta, that may change online gaming. At the very least it shows the how far things have come and how well something can be programmed (albeit, not if you ask some members of the community).

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Quake Live”. A free to play online FPS (First Person Shooter).

Now for some of you, who have played Quake 3 Arena, you’re shrugging your shoulders saying “So what? Been there, done that , that game is 10 years old.”. This is a little different. Let me post the non-cropped image.

That’s right! That’s a browser, and that’s the game being played in it. How cool is that? It’s not a simple Adobe Flash based game. It has it’s own game engine that installs and integrates into your browser. It has a great interface whereby you can choose what type of game you want to play, skill level of the game, and what maps are available to play at that point in time. (”maps” are the premade arenas that you play in) The interface also has a list of awards that you can earn so you can compare yourself to others that are playing the game. It allows add your friends into a friend’s list so you can see when they’re online and has an integrated chat messenger. Did I mention this is all still in your web browser?

When you sign up and start downloading the game client, it lets you play a “practice” match against “Crash” (one of the games characters and anyone who’s played Quake 3 will recognize her). Now while you’re playing the practice match, the game is doing something in the background. It’s assessing your skill level to match you up against other players (real people, not computer controlled characters), so that you are not necessarily playing against people of a much higher or lower skill level than you. Represented by A green check mark in the games map choice area. A ^ symbol means that the game is rated above your skill level, whereas a ˇ symbol means the game is below your skill level.

Mousing over one of the maps, will open an information menu showing you how many players are playing on that map, timeleft, score, etc… Clicking once will give you a detailed list of the players, their score, and the big shiny red “Play” button.

Once you start playing, you can fairly quickly forget that you’re playing in a web browser. Especially if you hit the option to have the game go fullscreen, if you can (more on this in a second) . The level of detail is incredible, as is the game play. What you may or may not notice are the ads on the walls of the maps. This is how the development is being funded and how supposedly, when and if the game is released, will be continued to be provided for free.

Now for the “bad” part. Which isn’t really bad when you think about it. I had mentioned setting the game to run in fullscreen earlier. I’ve never seen the game in fullscreen. I’m for some reason limited to playing in the “windowed” mode. It’s most likely due to the application not liking my setup or something I’m running in the background that’s causing the game to crash every time I try to go fullscreen. This really doesn’t bother me all that much considering I have a fairly unique setup here. Not to mention that the game isn’t a release yet, and is still in beta. When using Internet Explorer, the interface doesn’t display properly. Once again this could be due to something I’m running in the background that’s causing this issue, and not a big deal as it works fine in Firefox.

There’s a few things that are really interesting about Quake Live. The first is that the amount of development that went into something like this. There’s nothing else out there like this. I’m assuming this is just the start, and that there will be more games like this (most likely pay to play) in the future. The second thing that stands out in my mind is how interested the sponsors must be to be paying for the development, the servers and the connections to the servers for this, seeing as it’s a free game. As far as I know the only benefit they will have is having their name thrown up on a wall inside the game, and/or be listed on the website through banners and as sponsor’s for the various competitions that are sprouting up. All in all I think it’s a great opportunity for people to try their hand at a first person shooter without having to go out and buy one. If you feel like giving it a try, head to http://www.quakelive.com and sign up