Microsoft UK commissioned British comedian Ricky Gervais to tape a training video on Microsoft's corporate values.  Gervais is best known for his character David Brent, the bumbling, sexist, racist and generally incompetent manager of a branch office for an English paper manufacturer in the BBC comedy series, The Office.  Gervais, along with The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant sit down for a 37 minute segment, approximately the length of one television episode, where they spoof ever...

Hardware dies.  It's a fact of life that at some point, your beloved gizmo will give up the ghost and go off to that great big CompUSA in the sky to forever rest comfortably in cushioned boxes with all of its fallen comrades.  Some hardware lasts longer than others, as is evidenced by the Macintosh Powerbook (original) that still runs weather data tools in my dad's lab.  Some hardware however has a short lifespan and can sputter and die sooner than one would expect, and typically ...

This is on pretty much every tech news site out there, so there's no point in posting a link to any one in particular, so here's the summary: After AOL released around 660,000 search queries, purposefully it turns out, AOL has bid a probably not-so-fond farewell to Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern this week.  Govern was in charge of the division of the company that released the data publicly and drew heavy fire from the public, press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is...

Kevin Mitnick, at one point considered the most notorious hacker in the world before being arrested by the FBI in 1995 and serving a 5 year prison sentence, has been himself hacked.  On Sunday afternoon, the webistes KevinMitnick.com and MitnickSecurity.com were hacked to display an explicit message about Mr. Mitnick and hacking, starting with "ZOMG!! THE MITNICK GOTZ OWNED!!" along with a string of expletives and a photoshoped image of Mitnick. The hackers, presumed to be from Pakis...

Just another manic Monday... wish it was Sunday... But since it's Monday, it's time for another poll here at your favorite Windows Customization site on the entire intarweb!  Last week we asked what version of Windows Vista you would be likely to upgrade to in the eventuality that you had to.  Yes, I know some of you intend to stick with WinXP for the next 30 years, but eventually everyone has to upgrade and that's what we were trying to capture.  In total, 268 of you responded, s...

Yet another zero-day exploit has been published for Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software.  This vulnerability can give attackers complete control of a vulnerable box and allow them to run arbitrary code on the system.  This comes on the heels of another vulnerability in PowerPoint discovered last month and addressed in August's "Patch Tuesday" which allowed the same sort of attack.  There is little known on this new attack yet, except that it is distributed via a trojan ho...

Welcome to Week 3 of the Pick of the Week.  Last week, the pickings were slim because I forgot to poll the moderators in time so the small number last week were entirely my fault.  This week however I've given everyone plenty of time so there's a fair bit of good content to pass your way.  Now, on to this week's picks... WOM (Wizop) Two picks from WOM this week... A Logon Screen, A Storm's Pandora Box by Mike56 A WindowBlind, Quotidian v5 by ...

The Skinner of the Month series for August continues today with two new articles. An Interview with .Zer0. A brief IM interview I conducted with .Zer0. a little under a month ago discussing everything from Eminence, his background in skinning, to what he has coming up next.  It's a pretty interesting look at the artist behind one of the most popular skins to grace WinCustomize in quite a while. [ Link ]   SkinStudio T...

Back in March, Google acquired the web-based word processor, Writely , a poster child for the entire Web 2.0 movement.  Writely took basic word processing which had been seen in web-apps for years through Java applets and added in collaboration and sharing features.  After the purchase, new account creation was disabled, while existing users could still use the service. Well, yesterday Google quietly reopened registrations and formally adds its fourth major office application to ...

Boeing yesterday announced that they would be abandoning their Connexion service, which launched in 2004 and provided passengers Internet access for either hourly rates or a flat fee.  The service involved an expensive satellite network to provide the network connectivity globally, and was disregarded by most carriers who are choosing to go to cheaper cellular-based services.  For airlines that did carry the service, uptake by consumers was not quite what the company had hoped.&nb...

As part of the first video podcast for PowerUser.TV Brad Wardell recorded a video demonstration walking us through all the components of Object Desktop 2007.  This video should give users who are not familiar with the suite (or are only familiar with a part of the suite) an excellent idea of how much of their desktop they can customize with Object Desktop. To make it both more convenient and quicker to download, we've separated the video demo from the larger video podcast and uploaded it ...

As part of the first video podcast for PowerUser.TV , Brad Wardell recorded a video demonstration walking us through all the components of Object Desktop 2007.  This video should give users who are not familiar with the suite (or are only familiar with a part of the suite) an excellent idea of how much of their desktop they can customize with Object Desktop. To make it both more convenient and quicker to download, we've separated the video demo from the larger video podcast and u...

Yesterday, the U.S. government renewed it's contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers through to 2011.  ICANN is the non-profit organization that administers the overall naming and addressing rules of the Internet such as which companies get to sell domain names, which new Top Level Domains (TLDs) can be added (i.e. .com, .net, .tv etc...), managing the "root" zone and portioning out IP addresses to major carriers. The U.S. Department of Commerce maintains m...

Starting with August, every month we'll be taking a closer look at an up-and-coming skinner who has submitted strong work that shows a lot of promise.  Everyone already knows the names JJ Ying, Essorant, adni18 etc.  But you may not know names like this month's featured skinner, though I bet you'll recognize his work. To kick off Skinner of the Month, I'd like to direct your attention to a skinner who has so far submitted two WindowBlind, won the ...

PowerUser.TV recently passed the one year milestone having posted 52 weekly audio episodes.  So after tormenting the eardrums of fans for an entire year, they've decided to move into the world of video.  Now you can see the antics that typically go on when they record a podcast. This week's show talks about tech news such as the IBM PC celebrating its 25th birthday, an "expert" claiming that 40% of all World of Warcraft gamers are addicted to t...