New Skype Beta for Mac OS X

Ads.  Oh well.  

Latest Skype for Mac Beta has Facebook Integration and Ads – TNW Facebook

Overall, the new Skype for Mac Beta is a slow, rainbow colored wheel of death. But when it does work, the integration is pretty cool. The ability to instantly video chat all of my contacts, call them on multiple numbers or send them an instant message is convenient. You can also view contacts by Facebook, Online, Skype, All and Address Book for better organization. It doesn’t appear that Skype Profiles or Skype search have fully integrated with Skype yet.

Skype Goes to Washington

Here’s an interesting little article about my favorite free service.

US Congress To Use Skype For Video Teleconferencing

The US House of Representatives Committee on Administration has announced that Skype will be made available to the Members of Congress and their staff to improve efficiency and cut down on time spent traveling.

MagicDriver Bites the Dust.

 

The guys over at SteerMouse make one of the few software packages that I think is worth the money.  So I was surprised to find this announcement about my free Beta version of the Apple Magic Mouse Driver.  I’ve used this software since the Beta 1 version and its been flawless for years – you’d think they’d just release it and make a little return on their investment. 

And worse, it looks like they plan to enforce an uninstall of the latest free version.  That leaves yours truely without a three-fingered swipe to switch between spaces.

Ah well.  I’ve already tried BetterTouchTool  and  MagicPrefs looks like it might be a good replacement, too.  Both are available for the same price as the MagicDriver’s free beta 🙂

 

MagicDriver Top

We have been working on a version of MagicDriver scheduled for release in April 2011, but we have now decided to stop further development of MagicDriver, since we will not be able to give it enough functionalities and support appropriate to its license fee, which does not fully cover the cost of programming and support staff. We deeply apologize to all users who were waiting for the product version.

The current beta version will expire at the end of March 2011. You will need to uninstall MagicDriver after the trial period because we are no longer able to build a new beta version. Please see the instructions below for uninstalling.

 

 

 

Thank God its Beta 10

 

Beta 9 had so many rendering bugs.  Lets see if that’s fixed ….

Firefox 4 beta 10 now available, fixes 500 bugs and nears completion

Just a few days after the release of beta 9, there is a new build to sink your teeth into. Beta 10 has no new features — it simply squashes about 500 bugs, thus improving stability across Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

New Skype 5.0 for Mac: Only a Beta and already tightening the screws

So I tried out the new Skype 5.0 and the good news is that multi-party video cons work, even between groups of mixed Mac and Windows users.  I haven’t tried mixing in users with the new Android update, though, since it is not supported on all platforms.  The bad news is that the second I tried to join a multi-party video, I got a pop-up asking me to agree to a free trial.  Then I got this clever confirmatory message in email:

Your group video beta free trial has been successfully activated.

For the next 28 days you can make group video calls with your friends and colleagues.

– You and your friends all have to be on the latest version of Skype to make group video calls

OK.  You’re on.  But on day 29, I’m back to using MeBeam.  Cause its like, you know, free.

Free anti-virus for Macs from Sophos

Get it while its free

Free anti-virus for your Mac – And why you need it! | ZDNet

Security form Sophos has introduced the world’s first business-strength anti-virus program for Mac users – and it’s completely free for home consumers!

OpenOffice gives LibreOffice splitters the boot.

Open is as Open does.   Here’s the new Oracle OpenOffice being about as open as you’d expect.

 

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council

“Your role in the Document Foundation and LibreOffice makes your role as a representative in the OOo CC untenable and impossible. [I]t causes confusion, it is a plain conflict of interest, as TDF split from OOo,” he told TDF members during a council meeting that took place on an IRC channel. “If the TDF members do not disassociate themselves from the [Document Foundation] then they must resign by Tuesday.”

Free Mercurial Hosting from BitBucket’s new owner Atlassian

At this price, who could resist switching from svn?

Atlassian Buys Mercurial Project Hosting Site BitBucket

As part of the integration, Atlassian is going to make Bitbucket completely free, offering free hosting for 5-devs, with unlimited private repositories. And as a launch promotion, Atlassian is offering a free year for a 10-user account.

Skype hooks up with Facebook

So with Skype 5, you’ll be able to call your Facebook friends.  Or text them.  And log into Skype using your Facebook credentials.  Clearly Facebook needed something to counter Google Voice.  This is it?

Skype and Facebook to Announce Partnership [REPORT]

Facebook and Skype are working on a deal that would integrate Facebook Connect with Skype accounts, AllThingsD has learned citing sources familiar with the situation.

ACID databases and scalability

Thinking about hopping the last train to NoSQL-ville?  Here’s an article that explores what it might take to get a RDBS to scale well on commodity hardware.  Interesting.  Especially where it says they hope to release a code base in several months.

DBMS Musings: The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL

Our objective in this post is to explain why ACID is hard to scale. At the same time, we argue that NoSQL/NoACID is the lazy way around these difficulties—it would be better if the particular problems that make ACID hard to scale could be overcome. This is obviously a hard problem, but we have a few new ideas about where to begin.