As bandwidth increases, television moves from offline to the online realm, and even if you don't have a TV tuner card, but your bandwidth is large enough, you can easily watch a lot of TV stations and get access to HD video content. Joost was one of the first programs to step into this realm, closely followed by Democracy Player, which became in the meantime Miro, and one of these days, Miro got its first update after the "maturity" version, 1.0, bringing the current version number up to 1.1.

Now, I will try to tell you a few things about Miro and its features. If you didn't use any such program so far, I am sure you'll be really excited to try this one, so here we go...

Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), Miro is, basically, an Internet TV application that doesn't stream live media from the Web, but can automatically download videos from a very large list of RSS-based channels, helping you to manage your video content and, of course, play it. Since it uses the BitTorrent protocol for downloading files, Miro integrates an RSS aggregator, a media player and, of course, a BitTorrent client.

Since Miro is not the only product developed by the PCF, its design allows easy integration with Video Bomb, a social video tagging site, and Channel Channel, a TV guide for Internet TV, both coming from the same producer.

I guess that most of you have downloaded and used Joost already, or at least you heard of it or see it used by a friend, so I think it's great to see two reasons why Miro claims to be better than Joost. According to their official site, Miro has 2,500 unrestricted channels, while Joost has only 250 DRM ones, and while Miro has a huge selection of HD content, there's no such thing to be seen in Joost!

At last, here's the download link for the Windows version - click here. If you're using Mac OS X or Linux, check this downloads page, with versions for more operating systems. Enjoy!

After talking about EarthView less than a week ago, now I just found a very good alternative to it, called simply EarthDesk. Since this program just got updated, here you have it...


I know the image above doesn't say much, but you have to try it for yourselves. For now, I will only give you some small hints...

EarthDesk is available for both Mac OS X and Windows, but I will only tell you about the latest Windows version, 4.5.2, which was released earlier this week, and is almost 3 times as faster as older versions of the program...

The real-time clouds are updated every 3 hours, you get accurate sun, moon and city lighting, and best of all - you get full support for multiple displays, so you can have different map projections displayed at the same time!

I don't want to say how nice it is to have the world on your computer's desktop, as a dynamic wallpaper, because there's also a very practical use for this program. Being given its ability to refresh cloud position, you can track hurricanes and typhoons, and maybe change your travelling plans, or your route, if that is required.

At last, you should know that the Windows version's kit has 16.4MB in size, and can be used as a trial version. Fortunately, EarthDesk also has a decent pricing, having a price tag of $23.95, so you can go ahead and grab the trial right away, from here.

As a personal opinion, I can say that Windows Vista and Office 2007 took a wrong turn, and - unfortunately for Microsoft - it seems that people much more important than me think this. I am talking about the guys from the British Education Communications and Technology Agency, shortly known as "Becta", because their report on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 doesn't look nice at all for Bill Gates...

The report I mentioned has 40 pages, and is available for download as a 300KB large PDF file for anyone who may be interested, here, but since I am sure you won't take your time to read those 40 pages, let me give you some hints about what's inside this document...

A year ago, when Vista was just released, Becta released an interim report, which concluded that the features added didn't justify deployment of this new OS in the education sector, and since Office 2007 was showing a lot of interoperability issues, Becta said "educational ICT suppliers should ship computers for the educational marketplace with a choice of office productivity suites on the desktop. Ideally, this choice should include an open-source offering".

In the meantime, they took things seriously and tested Vista and Office 2007 properly, and they got to the conclusions most of us expected to hear (for those that won't agree with the statements below, please remember we're talking about schools, where money should be spent properly, and the existing infrastructure should also be taken into account)...

The two important statements in this last report, in my opinion, are that regarding the need to upgrade to Vista - "we advise that upgrading existing ICT systems to Vista is not recommended and that mixed Windows-based operating-system environments should be avoided", and the one related to the fact that "schools and colleges should make students, teachers and parents aware of the range of ‘free-to-use’ products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to access and use them".

This is it, and I bow to those at Becta. I am sure their studies will be taken seriously, and I only hope that administration and educational structures everywhere would think twice before deciding to make a step they may regret later. As for home-users... I am waiting for your opinions - did you upgrade to Vista? If you did, do you regret it?

For all those Linux guys and girls, and not only them, today is a day that may go down in history as one of those "to remember", because KDE 4 was released. Now that we have Leopard available, Vista has been around for more than a year, the Linux world also got a refreshed desktop environment, and some changes are really interesting, as everyone expected...

First of all, I should mention, for those that ask themselves "What is KDE, after all?", that KDE stands for "K Desktop Environment" and is a free software project that got one step closer to its goal, that of becoming a powerful system for an easy to use desktop environment.I won't get into the history of this project, which is almost 12 years long, but I'll jump straight to KDE 4, and its new features.

While this major revision makes the environment faster and improves its memory usage efficiency, KDE 4 enables the use of 3D effects in the KWin window manager, has a new default icon theme and visual guidelines, and was completely redesigned.

The entire design effort changed the desktop and panels, and the new name for this new desktop shell is Plasma. Plasma will easily intergrate with Kicker, SuperKaramba and KDesktop, and tries to bring a whole new meaning to the old desktop metaphor defining today's interaction between user and computer.

Apart from the above, KDE 4 now has a new multimedia interface, called Phonon, an API for network and portable devices (Solid), a new default file manager, known as "Dolphin" and, a very important part, in my opinion, comes with improved Windows and Mac OS X support by its libraries, making KDE applications easier to be ported on these operating systems.

These being said, it's only a matter of time until the software world starts to feel the winds of change coming from KDE 4, because I feel that a KDE 4-based Linux distro may be the OS-hit I've been waiting for, and I mentioned it here.

BitComet, originally called SimpletBT, between versions 0.11 and 0.37, is one of the many BitTorrent clients available for the Windows platform, and its first public release was 0.28, almost 5 years ago. Despite its pretty long life, BitComet didn't reach version 1.0 yet, but it got really close to it with today's release, 0.98...


Last version of the program was out on the 7th of December, 2007, and now, only a month after it (a month and 3 days, in fact...), version 0.98 brings us only two steps away from the 1.0 milestone. While this last version only brings some GUI fixes and improvements, and a couple of fixes to the core of the application, I must repeat the fact that version 0.98 is very close to the version that should show that BitComet reached its maturity to everyone.

If you didn't use BitComent so far, then it would be good to know that this BitTorrent client has support for no less than 43 languages, an internal Internet Explorer window which allows you to search for torrents from within the program, support for downloading eD2K links (it uses a plugin which is a modified version of the open source eMule program for this), and its features also include an embedded media player able to play Flash Video files (.flv and .swf files), called BitComet FLV player.

BitComet is completely free to download and use, being designed to work on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. Since the hardware requirements section from the official page says "tested on AMD K6 266MHz MMX, 128M RAM", I am sure everyone with a decent computer for the operating system they are using should also run BitComet without any problem. To download this program, simply click here and be careful what you download, RIAA has its eyes on you!(just kidding, but be sure to check twice before downloading something)