suit

LED suit for the skiing cyborg

Battlestar Galactica freaks, take heart. If you're suffering major withdrawl waiting for the series to return in March, you can still pretend you're a Cylon Centurion with an LED-outfitted ski suit, especially if you wear the jacket backwards.

As funky as they may look, these garments may actually serve a practical purpose; after all, if LEDs are being used to improve bicycle safety on the road, surely it doesn't hurt to have a little protection on slopes that can be equally dangerous (skiiers vs. boarders). And as Gizmodo points out, you can wear them in good conscience … Read more

Adobe Creative Suite 3 sales 'on fire'

People are taking a serious shine to Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3.

Creative professionals are buying the most recent version of Adobe's flagship product, released in April, much faster than the previous suite, according to retail data compiled by NPD Group.

Unit volume sales of CS3 after six months were up 87 percent when compared with the first six months of sales of Creative Suite 2, which was released in May 2005. A comparison of dollar sales through U.S. retail outlets and e-commerce sites shows almost the same increase.

"This shows that the CS3 launch was an … Read more

The Rise of the Super-App

Last week saw the release of Flock 1.0 beta, a Firefox engine that's been built out with extensive social-networking tools. Is it a flash in the pan, taking advantage of the latest fads, or does it herald a sea change in top-tier open source software? The changes from Firefox to Flock are hardly the work of one extension. The new sidebar includes features that let users add photos to their Flickr account by dragging and dropping, creating new posts to their self-published blog on the fly, and much more.

PCLive offers a free security suite

PCLive.com, a service offered by SecurityCoverage Inc., is attempting to upstage security giants Symantec and McAfee by offering a complete suite of security tools for your desktop--for free. Included within the basic PCLive Security package is a firewall, the open source ClamAV antivirus product, antispyware, a pop-up blocker, plus system cleaner (removes old temp files). PCLive will also check for the latest Microsoft Windows updates that haven't yet been applied to your PC. For a mere $4.95 a month, PCLive Premium Security includes all the basic PCLive Security along with Web content filtering, parental controls, disk maintenance and 24-7 live technical support. SecurityCoverage also offers users of their free PCLive service instant 24-7 technical support for a flat fee of $49.95 per session.

How does it work? OK. The ClamAV product is designed for UNIX and Linux systems. It hasn't been independently tested by Windows-based antivirus testing labs. Also we found that PCLive runs three active processes on your desktop. A couple of times, for no apparent reason, the PCLMonitorService process consumed up to 53 percent of our system resources, considerably slowing our test PC.… Read more

PCLive.com provides a free security suite

PCLive.com, a service offered by SecurityCoverage, is attempting to upstage security giants Symantec and McAfee by offering a complete suite of security tools for your desktop--for free. Included within the basic PCLive Security package is a firewall, the open-source ClamAV antivirus product, antispyware capabilities and a pop-up blocker. What's more, PCLive will take out the trash (clean out old temp files) and check for the latest Microsoft Windows updates that haven't yet been applied to your PC. PCLive will also e-mail you a monthly report of any changes it has made on your computer.

SecurityCoverage offers users … Read more

PCLive.com offered as free Internet security suite

Upgrades for two, please: OpenOffice.org and Pidgin

Two popular open-source and extensible apps have come out with minor-point updates in the past few days, but some of the changes are worth noting. OpenOffice.org has gained a lot of traction and notice this year as a credible alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, and Pidgin, the program formerly known as GAIM, supports multi-protocol text chatting including Google Chat, Yahoo, AOL, ICQ and others.

Zoho simplifies Web 2.0 file management

Zoho, the Web application company that seems to release a new product at every Web 2.0 conference, today launched a tool to make accessing these applications easier: A Start page, Zoho Start, that shows you all your Zoho files (not apps) in one place. This document-centric page is important, since human beings don't tend to organize their projects around the applications they were created in. It's why we have folders and directories, and indeed, Zoho Start lets you create folders that you can put your documents in.

As ReadWriteWeb pointed out, Zoho Start doesn't yet support … Read more

Buy.com has the Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 9.0 for $63.99, after a $15.96 saving and $20 mail-in rebate, plus free shipping.

Buy.com has the Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 9.0 for $63.99, after a $15.96 saving and $20 mail-in rebate, plus free shipping. >> Regular price is $99.95 >> After rebate $63.99 >> Offer ends 3/31/2008 >> Click here for deal

Life without Office

On our weekly Real Deal podcast yesterday, Tom and I covered Microsoft Office replacements. It turns out Tom is a day-to-day user of Open Office. I'm impressed. I know a lot of people who talk up the benefits of the free suite, but few people who've actually committed to it.

I mostly still use Office. When I want to collaborate with someone on a document I'll use Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I've dabbled in Zoho and ThinkFree, and other interesting online office apps like EditGrid (spreadsheet) but nothing has torn me away from Microsoft's suite … Read more