I don’t like reporting news without exact numbers, especially when making claims like this, but the Director of Marketing at Microsoft is fairly confident about this one: “Windows 7 is by far the fastest selling Operating System in history.”

He doesn’t give the exact number of activated licenses (why not?) but he does cite some rather astronomical PC sales in 2009. PC sales on Black Friday were up 63% over the same period in 2008 — and for the entire holiday period, 2009 saw 50% more PC sales than the year before. Incidentally, the graph at Net Applications show Windows 7 as having a 5.71% share in the operating system market, up from 4% in November.

It’s not particularly surprising, considering Windows is PC sales, but it still would’ve been nice to get some raw figures. In the mean time we’ll just have to rely on data gathered by outside sources like Net Applications. Did you notice that XP is losing users faster than Vista? I suppose that’s the die-hard Windows XP user base finally jumping ship to an operating system worthy of their money.

Windows 7: The fastest selling operating system in history originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows XP – Windows 7 – Operating System – Microsoft – Microsoft Windows
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If you’re into getting the latest, greatest, most-untested updates to Google‘s Chrome Browser, the developer channel is the place for you. New updates to Chrome on all platforms just hit the dev channel, with a bug fix that should solve some problems with HTML5 audio and video. The big news is just for Mac users, though: Chrome Extension support is here!

That means OS X users now can share in the epic winningness of Download Squad’s 10 must-have Chrome extensions, compiled by our own Sebastian, and a collection of 15+ extensions put together by Lee. Or, if you prefer to find extensions on your own, head over to Google’s Chrome Extensions Gallery and start browsing.

This update to Chrome via the dev channel shouldn’t be confused with the latest nightly build of Chromium, which is the open source browser that forms the basis for Chrome. As Nik pointed out, Chromium nightlies for Mac now have Bookmark Manager enabled by default. You can enable bookmark sync in the dev channel release of Chrome Mac, but a known bug crashes the browser on adding a new folder.

[via CNET]

Google Chrome updates its developer build, now with extensions for Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Chrome – Open source – Microsoft Windows – Linux – Mac OS X
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Have you ever put much thought into Internet piracy?

‘Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!’ – no, I mean, really thought about it.

In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it’s wrong. There’s simply nothing more to it: it’s intellectual property that you’re stealing from the property’s owner. As mere users, just single faces in a crowd of millions, we’re relatively safe. It’s like stealing an apple from a busy market stall: it’s not particularly hard, it’s not very damaging — and at the end of the day, it’s hard to catch a single thief in a crowd of millions.

Organized crime, on the other hand, is serious business. You can think of BitTorrent sites and trackers as organized crime units. In some cases they control the flow of goods from the source all the way to the end user, and sometimes they’re just masters of distribution — either way, it’s these organized units that get most of the heat from governments and groups like the RIAA and MPAA. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s greater ‘value for money’ to shut down the big boys rather than go after run-of-the-mill pirates like you and I (hypothetically speaking, of course). In most Western countries it’s very easy to shut down pirate groups — it’s just a matter of asking the ISP nicely.

Enter bulletproof servers. Pirate havens. Speakeasies of the 21st century — whatever you want to call them, they represent a way for pirate groups to operate safely and outside the law. Sweden, thanks to The Pirate Bay, is the most popular example of a ‘copyright safe haven’. Until the recent ruling against TPB, Sweden was considered very soft on copyright infringement — and the moment the judge’s gavel came down, I can assure you a lot of other illegal groups moved their servers out of the country.

But now that Sweden has capitulated to the international community and ‘gone straight’, guess where The Pirate Bay’s servers now located? In CyberBunker, an old nuclear bunker-cum-datacenter located 120 miles from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. How about Demonoid? They started in Serbia, but now they’re in the Ukraine. These guys can just keep on hopping around until they get bored and shut up shop. It makes you wonder a little about conventional national borders, eh?

Unsurprisingly, China is also a very popular destination for bulletproof servers. You have to assume that eventually every nation in the world will fall into line on the contentious issue of intellectual property, but I don’t think it will happen any time soon.

If the television, film and music industries would just make it easy for us — the whole world, not just select countries — to get our hands on reasonably-priced, high-quality media… well, I think we all know what would happen. Piracy would dry up in an instant.

‘Bulletproof’ safe havens are all the rage for Internet pirates originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pirate Bay – BitTorrent – Law – Copyright infringement – Internet service provider
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If you’ve used a Palm Pre, you’re probably wondering just what’s possible with the webOS developer SDK. Over the last few updates, it would appear that Palm are really working to bump the number of technologies available for games — and the homebrew community has been busy looking at the updates to figure out what’s available.

Over the Christmas break, the folks at Pre Central noticed that some plucky coders have taken it upon themselves to bring DOOM, in full hardware-accelerated glory, to the Pre. Whilst it’s not ready for mainstream consumption, and requires the webOS 1.3.5 update that still isn’t out in certain areas of the world, the app certainly opened my eyes to applications that may potentially be in the pipeline for the Pre.

Be sure to check out the video of DOOM in action on the Pre after the break!

[via PreCentral - Photo by gillyberlin - http://flic.kr/p/76cQge]

webOS homebrew brings DOOM to the Palm Pre originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PalmPre – WebOS – Handhelds – Palm OS – PreCentral
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Let me warn you up front that Eenie Bounce is not a challenging game. None of its 25 levels took me more than a minute to beat. The object of Eenie Bounce is to bounce your ball around the screen, collecting all the stars and landing on the numbered platforms the appropriate number of times before you hit the ground. Some platforms bounce you higher than others, but that’s the only challenging part. The replay value comes from trying to beat the game in the shortest time possible to get a high score.

Eenie Bounce is more like a puzzle game than a fast-paced game of skill. Once you’ve figured out the pattern that will beat a level, execution is pretty simple. The platforms are large, and the ball moves slowly enough that you should have no trouble pulling off the necessary mid-air maneuvers. Maybe Eenie Bounce isn’t going to keep you awake and playing for days, but it’s not a bad way to kill a lunchbreak.

Eenie Bounce – an easy ball-bouncing Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Puzzle video game – Download Squad – Video game – Games – Score
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Looks like Seesmic is still trying to position itself as the Twitter client that does it all. Loic LeMeur and Co.’s most recent move -buying Ping.fm – will enable Seesmic users to cross-post status updates to 50 different social networks at once. Ping.fm has half a million registered users who post hundreds of thousands of updates a day via the service.

Ping.fm will be fully integrated into Seesmic’s various apps later this month, allowing Seesmic users to instantly post to the networks of their choice. Ping’s SMS, chat and email functions will also become part of Seesmic, and users will be able to set up triggers to automatically post certain updates to specific networks.

Not only has Seesmic bought Ping.fm’s software, it’s also brought on Ping’s team of developers. If anyone can help Seesmic become the all-in-one social networking hub Loic seems to be after, it’s the guys who perfected the scorched-earth approach to telling the world what you had for lunch.

[via Mashable]

Seesmic acquires social network cross-posting service Ping.fm originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seesmic – Social network – Twitter – Ping.fm – Loïc Le Meur
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I think this one might rank as the easiest Time-Waster I’ve ever reviewed — even I managed to finish it in just five minutes! Where is 2010? is a quaint little platformer game. You jump around, flip switches and… that’s about it really. Eventually you find ’2010′ and the game finishes. This one’s more about the ride — the artistic vision – than the actual gameplay.

You only need to know two things that might trip you up: a) You can jump from one platform to another platform on a different screen, and b) You can climb back up the wall using the sticky-outy bricks (it doesn’t make sense now, but it’ll make sense to you later when you get stuck… like me…)

Casual Gameplay suggests that this is a precursor to a bigger game, DayMare Town 3. It would make sense that this is a trailer or teaser: the artistic style is unique, very well done. Where is 2010? is way, way beyond what you’d expect in a simple jump-around-and-hit-levers game.

Incidentally, if you haven’t played the DayMare series, you really should.

Where is 2010? Cutesy (but a little creepy) Time-Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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game – Video game – Download Squad – Platform game – Action
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The Windows recycle bin can be a life-saver for anyone who’s a little trigger-happy with the delete button. By default, Windows sends deleted items to the recycle bin before removing them, which means that you have to take the second step of emptying the bin before they’re truly (mostly) gone. And that means if you accidentally delete an item, you have a second chance to recover it.

Unless the item you deleted happens to be on a USB flash drive. Because the recycle bin doesn’t cover those.

Fortunately, iBin does. It’s a portable application that you can throw on a USB flash drive to create a portable recycle bin. Basically, all you have to do is download iBin, copy it to your flash drive, and run it. From then on, whenever you try to delete an item on your flash drive, a window will pop up asking if you really want to erase it, or if you want to dump it into your iBin.

You can then right-click the iBin icon in your Windows system tray to undo the last dumping, clean the bin, or open up the Dumping Management window where you can clear or recover (recycle) selected items.

The application is available as a free download for all versions of Windows.

[via Addictive Tips]

IBin is a portable recycle bin for USB flash drives originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft Windows – USB flash drive – Windows – Portable application – Recycle Bin
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Sure, Google Reader is all the rage these days, but some folks still prefer a powerful desktop app for reading their RSS feeds. RSSOwl, a cross-platform, open source app, just got an update to version 2 that makes it competitive with the best readers out there. Its most important new features include the ability to import OPML files – essentially, your list of feed subscriptions – from another reader and the ability to search feed items.

Without importing, RSSOwl was going to have a tough time picking up new users. Now switching is easy, and it’s definitely worth giving RSSOwl a chance. The new search feature in RSSOwl 2 is the most powerful I’ve seen in an RSS app. It’s not just one field: you can filter by subscription, date, title, contents and more, to make sure you find exactly what you’re looking for. Even better, you can save searches, so new items that match your search will automatically be added to the search folder (created by saving the search). Depending on your needs, RSSOwl might give your current reader a run for its money.

[via Lifehacker]

Open source feed reader RSSOwl hits version 2 originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GoogleReader – RSS – Open source – Windows – Microsoft Windows
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It’s the second of January 2010 and the figures are in from December. In just 16 months, Chrome has caught up and passed Apple’s Safari browser. Google Chrome now has 4.63% of the global market share, while Safari has only 4.46%!

It doesn’t look like a lot when you’re talking about a fraction of a percent, but when you consider that last month Chrome only had 3.93% you can see just how quickly it’s being adopted. Last month was actually Chrome‘s biggest leap since its launch, which probably has something to do with Google‘s current large-scale advertising campaign. PC World speculates that the large surge could also be due to the Mac and Linux Chrome Beta releases last month.
Despite Chrome’s progress in December, it was not at the expense of Opera or Safari’s market share — both actually made slight gains. Firefox lost 0.1% and Internet Explorer lost almost an entire percentage point, but thankfully not from IE8! Down with IE6 and 7, down I say!

In just 16 months Google Chrome overtakes Safari originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Chrome – Microsoft – Internet Explorer – Apple – Opera
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