When it comes to media players, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more flexible solution than the VLC Media Player. We’ve always liked VLC because it will play just about any kind of video you throw at it, regardless of the platform, often without the use of external codecs.

VLC may not have the prettiest interface or the flashiest site, but today’s version 1.0 is the most feature-complete playback solution you can possibly download. That makes it a winner in our book.

Bonus: A portable version of VLC will soon be available courtesy of PortableApps. Piss off your administrators by bringing something better than Windows Media Player to work on a USB key.

Last week we mentioned that Japan had finally built a 1:1 scale replica of the RX78 Gundam.  It was all in jest, of course; we all knew Japan would be the first to build one of these things.  And it’s cool to look at, for any normal fan of giant robots.  This Gundam, however, might as well just be a big statue so, no big deal, whatever.

On Monday images were found showing the Gundam had been adorned with appropriate lighting.  Now we’re talking!  This thing looks incredible now, and makes it an even more accurate reproduction.  It certainly brings a great sense of grandeur to the Japanese skyline.  Nothing to fear, just an impressive sculpture.  I’ll get worried when the thing can wield a sword.

Today we found this:

The thing is moving now!  It was supposed to be a joke!  It was all fun and games until now, we’re all doomed!  Sure it’s only turning its head, but I figure at the rate it has been progressing, we’ve got about 2 weeks until this mecha menace is unleashed upon the world and Japan takes its place upon the grand throne of the Earth.  It’s only a matter of time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get to work on building a nuclear fallout shelter that’s equipped with an internet connection.

Seven days after the leak of Windows 7 build 7201, build 7229 has cropped up courtesy of generous benefactors in the United States and Russia.

Build 7229 is interesting as it is most likely one of the last pre-RTM builds ever to emerge from holes in Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Most build releases have been a result of leaky faucets amongst these TAP Gold subscribers which have had access to regular build updates to qualify products and systems.

Word on the street is that Windows 7 will hit RTM status in mid-June, so it is very possible that few additional builds will ever be created beyond build 7229 or 7230.

As usual, there is no word as to what has changed, but this edition is the closest we may ever get to the gold edition of Windows 7 without holding an RTM copy.

As a final note, Build 7229 is an OEM edition which means your public beta/RC keys may not work. You’re on your own if you want to activate 7229; the savvy amongst you will know where to look.

Build 7229 x86

File: 7229.0.090604-1901_x86fre_client_en-us_OEM_Ultimate-GRMCULFREO_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 2,426.87 MB
MD5: B4C090F45F2A6CE136C4413A8E56A631
SHA1: B3FEC2CFC05B6004864AB7EF99A1F9C7EE8D8BA4
CRC32: B1BBD756

Build 7229 x64

File: 7229.0.090604-1901_x64fre_client_en-us_OEM_Ultimate-GRMCULXFREO_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 3,111.09 MB
MD5: B32460CB7ABB9BF5EAC65AEA7034C798B
SHA1: F3DF1990D9242C48BC56515534911838DF0ABEA9
CRC32: 04FC6B18

Wolfram Alpha is an interesting experiment in compiling, crunching and displaying the world’s data. While many are obtusely selling it as a competitor to Google, it’s really nothing of the sort. While Google excels at returning pages, Wolfram Alpha narrowly excels at returning data. Did we mention that it errs on the painful side of erudition?

Therefore, to determine whether or not Wolfram Alpha would be useful to you as a user, we have designed the Wolfram Alpha Litmus Test found below:

If you answered no, you’re joined by the global community of laypersons who aren’t statisticians or engineers. While us simple folk dink around in our Google garden, we can still have a crack at Wolfram Alpha’s ivory tower with a neat addon that embeds Alpha’s results straight into Google queries.

In the interim, you can amuse yourself with approachable Wolfram searches like this, this & this.

Reencoding files to work on a portable device is the fine art of suffering through a gigantic pain in the ass. As every player supports different codecs, framerates, dimensions and bitrates, you either take a crash course in media encoding or get a tool to do it all for you.

Dan Cunningham’s EncodeHD will take that blob of pr0n videos and rejigger them into the right format for BlackBerries, iPods, consoles, iPhones and more. There’s not much control over the process, but only tightwads are going to cry over some banding in the blacks on a screen the size of a postage stamp.

Look, I know what you’re thinking when you read that headline. Play nice.

Late last year, federal district judge Dale A. Kimball upheld a prior court decision that dismissed SCO’s claims and granted Novell $2.54 million in declaratory relief.

While this legal brouhaha had been happening for many, many years, the November decision was the final nail in SCO’s coffin. Though SCO could have opted for an appeal, the financially-strapped firm could not cover the cost of the $2.54 million bill and subsequently entered into bankruptcy.

Fast-forward to today, where the US Trustee’s office is petitioning to move SCO’s bankruptcy from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, a move which would liquidate the firm’s assets to cover its bills.

The Trustee’s office claims that the company is beyond recovery and has been unable to cover its bills even after being given the reins to liquidate assets on its own terms.

Additionally, not only is there no reasonable chance of “rehabilitation” in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11.

This is perhaps an inevitable turn of events, but it makes for a pleasant Monday to read about SCO taking more dirt in the eyes.

Security outfit Panda is offering free copies of its beta anti-virus program that they’ve dubbed Cloud Antivirus. Rather than caching definitions from a single remote server (like most AV programs), Cloud AV uses infection telemetry gathered from every other PC running the application. The end result is that virus identification and removal should happen much faster than with traditional anti-virus.

This sort of technology first reared its head when the University of Michigan developed a technology called CloudAV in August of last year. During our initial interview with the UM researchers, they outlined several reasons why cloud virus detection is a superior approach:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

While not all of these goals have been realized with Panda’s implementation, their Cloud Antivirus touches on the important final three.

The best part? It only uses 16 megs of RAM.

No, not the VoIP protocol, but Smart Installer Pack! This interactive front-end hooks directly to download servers to grab and install over twenty different popular applications at the user’s discretion.

Winamp? Firefox? Flash? Java? Avira? WinRAR? Codecs? Yeah, SIP can do that. Stop the vast majority of your post-format downloading in its tracks! You pick the program, it grabs the download, you install the app.

What could be easier?

You know what BitTorrent does: It crushes your router’s will to live and opens connections to people all over the globe. But did you know that every version of Windows since Windows XP SP2 will only let you open 10 of those connections? You can see how this might be a problem when more than 10 people can seed a file to you, and that ignores the connections established for your peers.

Lucky for you and your aspirations for downloading Ubuntu (what, piracy? noooo…), there is a fix. Enter Half-open Limit fix. This here program will bump that limit up to the recommended 100, and it’ll work for any version of Windows currently in service, beta or otherwise.

To anyone who rocked LvlLord’s TCP/IP patcher, take note: There’s a new sheriff in town.

I know many of you swear by music to be productive at work and at home, and I am definitely one of those people. Let’s face it, though, lugging about a bundle of CDs or even the svelte profile of an MP3 player isn’t terribly efficient in this everything’s-already-on-the-internet era, so why not your music too?

Enter Sockso, the swank little app that will bring your music to any browser of your choosing. Run the app, index your music, forward the port on your router, create your login, and take the address on the UI to work. The program has many more advanced options, but it sure is hard to beat five simple steps that brings your music to you… Anywhere.

Windows 7 build 7077 x86 leaked Tuesday morning, and most were confident that the x64 build wasn’t far behind. It appears all that hope and speculation wasn’t for nothing.

Image:
7077.0.090404-1255_x64fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD.iso

Hashes:
MD5=9a5e6cdb8d4d42f528a7053f810a4765
SFV=E5A79DFA
SHA1=508afefec802613e6a3346f8d766793a562147ff

As a reminder, this is the RC Escrow build, which means that this is the first build of many where Microsoft will slowly whittle away at the bugs to prepare for retail manufacturing. This is not the release candidate, but it is the codebase that will inspire it.

Click the jump to view the ISO’s security certificate from setup.exe.

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