FaceFilter Xpress is a handy tool to add and modify the emotions and features of the faces in your graphics. FaceFilter Xpress is a very effective and fast software, which allows you to change the facial features in digital images in such a way as to make them more attractive and beautiful. With FaceFilter Xpress, you can edit a face so as to have a balanced structure, better eyes or nose, a sexier mouth, an attractive smile.

You can achieve a younger or slimmer look, and your photos can now convey a smart and confident impression to the viewer. This software application provides you with face editing capabilities, in a very simple and speedy fashion. The user interface is easy and intuitive to learn, and the editing can be done by following the simple sequential flow in the software.

You can select expressions out of a large template gallery to apply to your image. Multiple faces in the same image can also be edited with the same software. The more advanced user can take advantage of manual adjustments to achieve the desired results.

Download: FaceFilter Xpress 1.0
View: Screenshot
View: Reallusion Homepage

Even though the retail launch of Windows Vista just a couple of weeks away, Microsoft is still continuing to fine-tune its licensing and pricing details. Sources said that Microsoft will announce some time over the next few days that the company will allow Vista Ultimate customers to purchase two additional copies of Vista Home Premium for somewhere between $50 to $99 a piece. In order to qualify for the so-called “Family Pack” promotion, customers will first need to purchase at retail a copy of Vista Ultimate, which carries an estimated retail price of US$399 (AUD$509, according to exchange rate). The deal will not be offered to those who purchase Ultimate preloaded on a new PC, sources said; it will be for customers buying and/or upgrading via retail channels only.

Source: WinBeta

Pirates decided that the copy protection scheme for HD DVD was worth a shot. The result? The movie is entitled Serenity and was made available as a .EVO file which is playable on most DVD playback software packages. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 resulting in 19.6 GB worth of hard disk space. The first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. Who knows, maybe this is yet another factor in the HD war.

An announcement less than a month ago by an anonymous programmer known as Muslix64 specified that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed. The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD. The software cleverly avoids (for how long?) legal justice by placing the responsibility of cracking on the user, not the software. To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material the user has to fetch that disc’s volume or title key.

CyberLink, the makers of PowerDVD playback software, have already assured everyone that their software is not responsible for extracting the title keys from the media. Content providers, on the other hand, have declared that they reserve the right to invalidate known pirated keys in the future. Of course, they will have to figure out which application gets the volume keys (Cyberlink has not yet been cleared). Future titles could potentially require, as soon as a disc is inserted, that the user upgrade their software in order to play discs.

Source: Ars Technica via Neowin

GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8300 are the two series of graphics cards which will fill the void beneath NVIDIA’s already launched 8800 series. Based on the G84 core 8600 Ultra and GT will have 64 and 48 shader processors respectively with cores running at 500MHz and 350MHz. With a 256-bit memory bus and memory speeds at 1400MHz and 1200MHz the cards will replace the 7600 series of today. The launch date for these cards is about the same as for when ATI will launch R600, that is, around CeBIT at the start of March.

Except from the 8600 series Bear Eyes has also published specifications for 8300 GT and 8300 GS (via VR-Zone). These cards will replace the 7300 series of today and is based on the G86, an 80nm core. The number of shader processors has been halved to 32 and 24 respectively, while both cores will work at 500MHz. The GT model will have slightly faster memories though, 1200MHz vs. 1000MHz. With a 128-bit bus and up to 256MB the performance will most likely be reflected by the price.

View: Full Story
Source: Nordic Hardware via Neowin

From the Campaign Monitor Blog: As I type this post I still can’t believe it. I’m literally stunned. If you haven’t already heard, I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

Now c’mon, how bad can this be?
First things first, you need to realize that Outlook enjoys a 75-80% share of the corporate email market, which is similar to Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market – they make the rules. We’ve been doing some early testing, as have a few other brave souls, and come February, here’s just a taste of what won’t be supported:

No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone, meaning Mark’s image replacement technique is out the window.
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HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

Download: WinHTTrack 3.41 RC1 Install | zipped (no installer)
View: Changelog | WinHTTrack Homepage
Source: Neowin

Here is Episode 35 of our weekly PodCast, Consumer Apple Show.

The topics covered in this episode are:

- How do you fix a undersea cable?
- Victim spots stolen GPS on eBay, seller gets pinched
- ASUS Unveils External Graphics Card
- More details about IPTV on Xbox 360
- Apples keynote
- SanDisk Sansa View

You can subscribe to the PodCast by putting this link into your iTunes / PodCast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews.

Download: Episode 35: Consumer Apple Show (38:41, 17.7 mb)
View: AusTech News PodCast Forum

A new search engine, Cranky, was launched earlier this week and plans to profit from age-specific ads by targeting the 50-year-old-plus baby boomer. The man behind the site is Jeff Taylor, known for founding the online employment site Monster.com. The name “cranky” was chosen by Taylor – it supposedly illustrates his mood whenever he gets lost searching the web.

Now CEO at Eons, Taylor hopes that the search engine’s design will simplify Web searching by only displaying results pertinent to someone at least 50 years of age. Compete, an online market research company, helped the site find advertisements by identifying and analyzing 5,000 of the most popular Web sites used by a group of 500,000 users aged 45 and up.

Cranky includes a user interface that limits the first page to the top four authoritative sites matching the search term. The sites are rated and reviewed by Eons members and the ratings in turn influence the top sites. The search engine can potentially improve as more users engage with rankings. Of course, any rating system is prone to abuse and Cranky.com will have quite a workout converting users from other search engines already out there.

View: Cranky
Source: InfoWorld via Neowin

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy the 550 square metre principality of Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy the self-declared sovereign nation. Outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country, The Pirate Bays believes it could safely run the world’s largest ‘bit torrent tracker’.

Last year the Pirate Bay was closed down after raids by the Swedish police, and although it returned to a new Swedish server after a short stay in the Netherlands, the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay’s closure.
Read More »

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Two sparsely-buttoned large, touchscreen phones: the Apple iPhone, and the LG KE850 (which already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007). Separated at birth, or possible lawsuit number two for Apple? You decide.

Source: Engadget