Would you pay if it’s up to you?

Since yesterday the latest album “In Rainbows” of the British band Radiohead is available. That’s not a big deal – but the exciting thing is, it can be downloaded – for free. It’s totally up to the user whether he pays and how much. The first polls showed that about 2/3 of the 3000 first people, who downloaded the album, paid for it. On average, the users paid 5.70€.
Some of the users complained about the fact, that it’s not possible to pay after you downloaded the album and found it worth some money.
Some other artists like Jamiroquai und Oasis, also think about a similar way to publish their songs.
What about you? Would you pay for any album if it’s up to you?

Viewsonic announces high resolution 19" LCD

VX1940w is the name of the new 19” high resolution LCD display which will be released to public in November. The size of 1680×1050 for 19” means a resolution of 104ppi. Thats pretty cool since expensive 30” displays only get 101ppi for 2560 x 1600 pixel.

But also the other values are promising:

- 2sec for one black-white-black switch
- dynamic contrast of 3000:1
- luminance 300 cd/m2

If you need a new display anyway, this might be an option. For about 250$ a pretty sharp option.

OpenSource DVD 7.0 released

Yesterday the latest version of the OpenSource DVD 7.0 has been released. The image contains about 300 windows programs. Some prominent members are the new OpenOffice version 2.3 and the emulator DOSBox 7.2. The 2.2GByte of the packet can be downloaded or ordered on a DVD. So check it out! Maybe you'll find some pearls...

Google WiFi after the first year

The WiFi of Googles “hometown” Mountain View just celebrates its first anniversary. For that Google published some statistics about the open network. Approximately 15.000 users per month produced 300Gbyte of traffic each day. Therefor 95 percent of the 400 routers had been used. It seems that a big part of the 72.000 citizens used the free offer of Google. Hope remains that other cities (or companies) will follow to provide free networks to the people.
What about your city? Do you have free wireless networks (even if they doesn't span the whole city)?

I got MyBook!

My internal harddrive overflows! For about two months now! I simply have to many photos, games, programms and backups from past times... Yeah I know, I shouldn't stick with this old stuff but maybe I'll need it later...
A few days ago I ordered MyBook! Today I got it! The installion was really smooth. The two pages for each supported language in the manual are definitely sufficient. After I connected power and USB cable, the drive was found and identified by Windows. There is already some google software and the manuals saved to the drive. And the thing works pretty quiet, too! I also don't have to care about turning on or off - for this MyBook follows my computer.
Maybe the MyBook is the way out of messiness...

Gran Paradiso

This natty name is the description for the newest alpha version of the Firefox browser (Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 7). Its released only for testing purposes, but I had a look at the release notes. The developers basically had done some fixes and adjustments. But there are also some new features like the full page zoom of images, layout and text.
So lets give it a try and see what's the future of the Firefox.

Need a free computer virus scanner?

Eset, the producer of the virus scanner software NOD32, ended the beta testphase for their online virus scanner today. It uses the same technologies and signatures like the full blown scanner NOD32. And if you are pretty lazy with updating your scanner like me, you would probably like tha fact, that it is always up-to-date!
The only thing you have to do is download a 15MByte package for your Internet Explorer. The options of the scanner aren't that extensive but always enough for an on-demand scan.
The ActiveX based software should work from Internet Explorer 5 on.