Since the tech world is largely quiet aside from the flurry of Apple related news following the WWDC keynote yesterday, I'm going to share possibly one of the stranger technology news stories I've run across lately.  It's an article on CNN.Com today entitled "Couple-surfing: 'Love me, love my blog'". The basic premise is that as we become more hooked on technology, become more at home with blogging and instant messaging, that it has begun to move into some of the most intimate parts of o...

BBC News reported yesterday that Internet search giant Google has struck a $900 million deal with News Corp. to provide search and advertising for the popular MySpace social networking site.  The deal says that starting in October, MySpace users will be using Google to search for friends and groups within the site.  Also expect text-based adwords advertisements to appear along side those search results. Google is currently the king of the Internet search market space, and Ne...

Aquarium Desktop 2006 brings your desktop to life by turning it into a virtual aquarium.  Your background becomes a fish tank, you can add various aquarium toys and plants on your screen and watch as virtual fish swim around the screen.  Today, we are adding a new fish pack, which comes with 8 brand new fish and other elements.  To the right you can see one of those new fish, the Scissortail. The price of the pack clocks in at a mere $4.95 and requires Aquarium Desktop...

Yes, that's right, another weekly feature item.  Starting to get crowded here on the front page isn't it?  The Pick of the Week series of posts will appear every Monday and will list off the favorite submissions by various members of the WinCustomize moderator team from the previous seven days.  The goal is not necessarily to highlight the absolute best work ever posted to the site, but to show the best of the past week.  This means that lesser known skinners will have a much...

Chances are you're pretty familiar with this new-fangled thing they call the World Wide Web.  I mean, you're obviously using it right this very moment.  What you may not know however is that yesterday, August 6th, was the 15th birthday for the technological wonder that has transformed business, education, entertainment and communication on a global scale. Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at CERN, posted to the alt.hypertext newsgroup saying that his fledgling hypertext project was...

Welcome back, intrepid WinCustomize readers!  You've survived another week, made it through a weekend and now we're back to Monday, the most beloved of all days.  And as you're all coming to expect, Monday means a new poll!  Last week, you were asked if you read Stardock Magazine.  We received 228 responses, with about an even split between "Yes" and "Huh?"  Here's the breakdown: Do you read Stardock Magazine?   Yes 95   41.67% &n...

A lot of people have been hearing in the news lately about the potential NWA Flight Attendant Union strike. The issue is over a new contract that the airline is putting forward that forces concessions on the workers, again. It's a raw deal for the workers in an industry that has been seeing benefits and pay cut after cut. Airlines have mismanaged themselves into a corner and are now taking it out on their rank and file workers instead of making adequate cuts at the top in line with what they'...

It's been 24 years since the introduction of the audio CD back in 1982.  Since then, it has reigned supreme as the preferred physical format for music (and in more recent years, for computer software), but sales have finally started to drop.  A combination of competing distribution methods, and a drop in consumer interest in recently released titles has brought record companies such as Warner Music Group back to the drawing board to figure out what the next step is in the consumer mu...

On Tuesday, Microsoft launched the next version of it's Spaces blogging site , beginning the transition from MSN spaces for thousands of users.  However, the launch was not a smooth one and users experienced a number of performance-related issues.  In the first 12 hours, one could expect very slow server responses, if you got any response at all.  Microsoft acknowledged this issue on the Space Craft blog, the official blog for the Live Spaces team. "We had a bunch of people ...

Patch Tuesday is almost here again, and this month Microsoft has a pretty hefty set of fixes and updates ready to fling our way.  Expect a whopping 12 updates to show themselves in the Windows and Office Update tools early next week, ten updates for Windows and two for Office.  Details on what these patches are for are not available, but it may be reasonable to assume that at least one of them is a fix for the PowerPoint exploits that came out since last month's patch day.  ...

Is the list on the right actually updating?

Perhaps one of the biggest online sites in direct support of all things Windows, and a long-time champion of Windows Longhorn (now Vista), Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has come out with a scathing article on the inadequacies of Windows Vista as it currently stands in beta.  While Paul picks apart others who have complained about the beta thus far, mostly for being less than intelligent in his eyes, he does agree with their end-assessment, if not with the reasoning they used to re...

Ever since Xerox showed off the first mouse-driven interface to a computer decades ago, scientists and researchers have continually worked towards creating the perfect human-computer interface.  The mouse and keyboard have seen steady improvements over the years, we've seen the addition of eye and head-tracking controllers, tablet/pen interfaces etc.  The problem however is they're all limited by what we already have.  They're just different ways to emulate the mouse.  To thi...

As a part of the restructuring effort that is seeing their mail and web services being opened up as free products to the public, Internet Service Provider AOL has announced that approximately 5,000 of its 19,000 employee workforce will be shown the door in the next six months.  This 26% slash is in addition to it attempting to sell off its 3,000 employee European division. CNet picked the story up off of the Reuters newswire.

Today, many people send an e-mail instead of writing a letter.  A fair number pay their bills electronically.  Businesses are shifting to electronic transactions and carriers like UPS , DHL and FedEx account for the majority of the parcel shipping market.  In a world like this, you'd think that services such as the United States Postal Service would be having trouble, that the Internet might have made them obsolete.  However, the USPS has found a niche for itself, a way ...