Office 2010 scheduled for June release

Office 2010 scheduled for June release



Microsoft is set to launch an entirely new updated wave of Office applications in June 2010. The Office suite will be updated for Windows, including ribbon support for all products, and will also be launching Office 2010 for Mac OS X sometime in 2010.

Office 2010 will be released in six different flavours, including a free version that includes Microsoft Word and Excel, but comes with limited functionality and includes advertisements. The editions of Office 2010 will come in Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus.

Office 2010 Professional Plus, which is available for public beta, will offer all of the office products, excluding Visio 2010 and Project 2010. Microsoft will be releasing Office 2010 with a full version and upgrade version, for users that have Office 2007 installed. Office 2010 will be available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit, excluding Windows XP x64.

No official pricing for the full version or upgrade edition of Office 2010 has been announced yet. Although the retail store date is scheduled for June 2010, users should be able to get their hands on a download-able version through TechNet and MSDN earlier than the street date.

For the time being, users with the beta can check out the top new features for Office 2010.

A complete list of Office 2010 application include:

• Microsoft Access 2010
• Microsoft Excel 2010
• Microsoft InfoPath Designer 2010
• Microsoft InfoPath Filler 2010
• Microsoft OneNote 2010
• Microsoft Outlook 2010
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
• Microsoft Publisher 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010
• Microsoft Word 2010
• Office Communicator 2010

Other updated products include:

• Microsoft Visio 2010 (not included in any Office 2010 Package)
• Microsoft Project 2010 (not included in any Office 2010 Package)

[via Neowin]

Department of Defense Buys 2,200 PS3s to Upgrade Supercomputer

Department of Defense Buys 2,200 PS3s to Upgrade Supercomputer






Apparently the Department of Defense believes that PS3s are a better value when it comes to supercomputers than IBM products specifically designed for the purpose. Granted recent price drops probably didn't hurt in justifying a 2,200 console order either.
This isn't the first time that the DoD is using PS3 consoles for supercomputing. In fact, these 2,200 units are going to be added to an existing Linux cluster of 336 PS3s used by the United States Air Force. According to Justification Review Documents, the purchase is all about getting the best value out the DoD's budget:

With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

I'm all for balancing cost and features, but isn't it just a bit curious that someone thought to save on upgrading the supercomputer just after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released?



[via Gizmodo]

10 Alternatives To Mininova

10 Alternatives To Mininova



With an impressive 175,820,430 visits and close to a billion page views in the last 30 days, Mininova set a record that they will be unable to break in the near future. Last August a Dutch court ruled that Mininova had to remove all links to ‘infringing’ torrent files, with disastrous consequences.
Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.
Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora release.
Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below – preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.


1. Torrentzap - (http://www.torrentzap.com/)

2. Fenopy - (http://fenopy.com/)

3. ExtraTorrent - (http://extratorrent.com/)

4. KickassTorrents - (http://www.kickasstorrents.com/)

5. BTjunkie - (http://btjunkie.org/)

5. Monova - (http://www.monova.org/)

7. isoHunt - (http://isohunt.com/)

8. yourBitTorrent - (http://www.yourbittorrent.com/)

9. The Pirate Bay - (http://thepiratebay.org/)

10. ShareReactor - (http://sharereactor.com/)


Update: The owner of Monova, told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here. Also, we replaced some sites in the original top 10 because they went down or started to serve trojans,or viruses.



[TorrentFreak]