You think your broadband provider is expensive, try US$3,355 per month for a 1.5Mbps DSL connection. Welcome to the internet in Kazakhstan. With DSL prices like these, it’s no wonder Borat left Kazakhstan behind! A new report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (PDF) paints a grim picture of Internet access in Kazakhstan and shows how difficult life can be for those in poor and authoritarian countries who want to join the worldwide community of Internet users.

Consider the prices for Internet access, for one. Most users (and only four percent of the country even has access) hook up through state-owned Kazakhtelecom, a company not concerned with competitive pricing for its services. An unlimited dial-up plan costs about €82 (US$111) in a country where the average monthly wage is €292 (US$399). As for DSL, an unlimited 1.5Mbps connection costs €2,458 (US$3,355) a month, and doesn’t even included the required ADSL modem. Want a 6Mbps cable connection? It’ll cost you, to the tune of €16,144 (US$22,032) a month. As the OSCE report drily notes, this is more than a thousand times the price of such a connection in Western Europe.

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Source: Ars Technica via Neowin

Microsoft has finally outlined the extent to which Windows Vista was unfit for the marketplace when it launched six months ago.

A mere 650 applications were certified for Vista when it launched, compared to 2,000 now. Seventy “critical” enterprise applications from corporate mainstays such as Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, McAfee, Citrix Systems, Oracle, SAP and IBM are “being resolved daily.” On hardware, 600,000 devices have been certified in the six months since launch, now making Windows Vista compatible with 2.1 million devices.

The numbers were offered by chief operating officer Kevin Turner, who tried to rally Wall Street analysts to the Microsoft flag of software – including Windows Vista – plus services.

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Source: The Register via Flexbeta

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. It provides a graphical user interface to the Clam AntiVirus engine. It features a command line interface for scanning files, updating the virus definitions, and a daemon for faster scanning needed on high performance systems.
ClamWin Free Antivirus For Windows is a completely free and open source anti-virus software package. It uses the GNU General Public License by the Free Software Foundation.

Changes:

• Added unpackers for NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) self-extracting archives and ASPack 2.12
• Improved handling of PE and UPX
• Many other bug fixes and improvements
• Fixed duplicate database loading in certain cases

Download: ClamWin Free AntiVirus 0.91.1
View: ClamWin Homepage

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Download: µTorrent v1.7.2.3458 | Language Pack | Help (Freeware)
View: Changelog | µTorrent Homepage
Source: MSFN

Firefox is an award winning preview of next generation browsing technology from mozilla.org. Firefox empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking and a number of other seamless innovations, Firefox stands out ahead.

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µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Read More »

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Download: µTorrent v1.7.3341 Final (Freeware)
View: Changelog 
View: µTorrent Homepage
Source: MSFN

Feb. 27, 2008 promises to be one of the most important dates in Microsoft’s 33-year history, as it will release a host of major new products, including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

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Today Microsoft released Windows Live OneCare 2.0 beta for download. The beta version is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74137
Windows Live OneCare delivers all-in-one PC care with powerful protection and simple PC maintenance for consumers and small businesses. Specifically, OneCare makes it easy to manage multiple PCs, adds new options for data backup and provides enhanced security for your home or small office.

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DAVID VERKLIN is a little twitchy about how traditional TV audiences are going to react to what he calls "behavioural targeting".

Online players such as Google are already using such technologies but the technique is now headed to TV land as the broadcast spectrum goes digital, paving the way for electronic program guides and TiVo-style program scheduling and recording.

These developments throw up a "data trail" that can be analysed for advertising, says Verklin, who controls about $US8 billion ($9.3 billion) in media-buying budgets as the chief executive of Carat Americas and chairman of the group's Asia Pacific operation.

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Source: SMH