Did you get some nice shots last week? In the end, your answer doesn't matter much, because if your last week's pictures are not that great, you can play with them a little and try to improve everything. Since you can do this with a bunch of completely free programs, that's even better! Today's pick is called PC Image Editor, and its last version was released yesterday, if I'm not wrong, so let's take a look at it, shall we?

The last version of this program is labeled 3.70, and if you're not going to use it for any commercial purposes, it's completely free. Otherwise, you should order a license, priced at $19.95. Why would you use it to replace Paint or the image processing application you got bundled with your digital camera? There is a pretty long answer to that, so here we go...

First, you should know that PC Image Editor is able to work with various image formats, including JPG, TIFF, PCX, PNG, TGA, J2K, or RAS, comes with 18 built-in filters, such as Blur, Sharp, Add Noise, Mosaic, Twirl, Emboss, and so on, 12 adjustment commands, has full print functionality and allows you to easily resize images.

There is no special system requirement for running PC Image Editor, so if you have a decent computer that runs Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Media Center 2005, and even Vista, all you have to do is download the program and enjoy it. Good look and may you have a creative Saturday!

PHP 4 is now 7 years old, and no matter how much programmers love it, the world must move on without it. In fact, PHP 5 is also 3 years old, and since it fixes a lot of flaws and missing features from PHP 4, its adoption was very slow, so far. Anyway, now is the time for a change, and in less than 3 days, several leading open source PHP-based projects will say "good bye" to the old PHP 4.

To make this happen, a campaign called "Go PHP 5" has been started, with its sponsors and main supporters including Typo3, Drupal, Symfony, and Doctrine. To find out more about it, you can go to this page.

Other than the above, there isn't much to say. Finally, PHP 4 will be left behind, and people should start preparing for PHP 6, which should be arrive someday, too. According to the team behind "Go PHP 5", "PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application.", so PHP 4 will still be around just enough time for everyone...but don't be lazy, and start making the move today!

Today, if you're not using a system security applications suite, you must have at least a good antivirus, an antispyware tool, and a firewall. Well, let's rephrase that - "you should have[...]", because I am sure there are a lot of people out there that only use an antivirus and think they're safe... Anyway, today I just found out about a new update to a very good firewall, and you may want to give it a try, especially if you're not using such a program already...

Jetico Personal Firewall, the software I want to tell you about today, is an application developed by Jetico Inc., a company notorious for its encryption software, first of all, but their firewall is not a product to overlook either, featuring inbound/outbound protection, system and behaviour monitor, with its only (minor) drawback being the less friendly interface.

Recent leak tests place Jetico Personal Firewall on the podium, usually taking the second or third place, sometimes ahead of the notorious Comodo Firewall, which is a performance worth being considered when choosing your firewall.

The last version, labeled 2.0.1.4, was released earlier today, and according to the official page, this is only a minor update, the only thing new, apart from some bug fixes and updates, being the Spanish translation.

To download a trial version, you should simply click here, and if you are wondering about the price, I'll tell you about it now: Jetico Personal Firewall is available for $39.95/single user license, with volume discounts that can go as low as $27, for over 100 licenses acquired.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's the hot topic of the day - Microsoft made an offer to Yahoo! A big one. In fact, it's a huge one. If Yahoo accepts, we could see the greatest merger in the history of the IT industry so far, but let's not rush into it. For now, a good idea would be to buy some Yahoo stock, and sell it in a few hours, that's a quick hint for making some easy money, but since we have to get serious, let's cool down and take a closer look at this...

First of all, I must add that, back in May 2007, there was some noise around the fact that Microsoft made a $50 billion to purchase Yahoo, so today's price tag of $44.6 billion should give us some hints. Yahoo is slowly going down, that's obvious, but I am sure they can stop this process, but the problem is they simply can't fight Google, at this time. Since they rejected Microsoft's 2007 offer, why would they accept it now?

Now, Microsoft offered $31 per Yahoo share, over 60 percent more than the market value Yahoo's shares had at that time, but now the stock market has seen a sudden raise of Yahoo's shares, and they will probably reach the price tag offered by Microsoft later today.

According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, "The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.", but, to make things straight, the reality is Microsoft simply can't enter the search engine market without help, and they are trying to get Yahoo's help. The fact that Yahoo is now vulnerable seems to be their luck, but I guess Microsoft won't get to see this deal completed in 2008. I guess and I hope...

These being said, I throw you a question - would you like to leave in a world dominated by Google, or by Microsoft? Google is one of the companies that reshaped the online landscape in the last few years, and I am confident they can keep doing a great job in the future too, while Microsoft... should be happy with their slice of the OS market, and work hard to keep that one on their plate!