Why proprietary software is dangerous for business-critical applications

But this software company said, "No, we can't give you a new registration for your old software. You need to upgrade to our latest version, and the upgrade will cost you [several thousand dollars]." Nope, they said, you must upgrade to our new version. That is your only choice. Take it or leave it.

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Microsoft backs down on XML patent claim. OSS celebrates.

The New Zealand Open Source Society has claimed a moral victory in the patent office after Microsoft amended its patent on XML schema. NZOSS president Peter Harrison says the changes made to the patent were such that the organization was no longer concerned about the threat posed by the patent.

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Kerala (Indian State) to go 100% Linux

After the cola ban it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12500 high schools in the state will not be taught Windows. Instead instructors are lining up Linux for them. Kerala has 99.9% Literacy.
No Tech Support Comments Please

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Mastering Wget

wget is old school unix and is quite handy. "Wget is a highly hackable, handy little tool that can take care of all your downloading needs. Whether you want to mirror an entire web site, automatically download music or movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly" hellz yeah

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A Gentle Introduction to SQL

Interactive SQL tutorial, learn about: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Mimer, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Access.

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Best Ubuntu Guide Ever

Frustrated with trying to get simple stuff done? This guide has everything you need. Things like mapping the windows key to something useful, where to get codecs, getting XGL to workCovers Dapper Drake as well as earlier versions.

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25 things you must know before buying digital camera

very-very important things that u might forgot when you buying your new digital camera

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Major Linux Apps

The list contains the best and most popular Linux apps

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Linux Flash 9 Player Making Progress

In the most recent blog post on Penguin.SWF, Mike Melanson notes that all Flash-based sites he checked recently, Flash 9 for Linux was completely stable. Now they're moving on to more specific feature tests. Here's hoping it comes out soon!

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Making Movies: New Camcorders Shake Up the Market

The new camcorders can shoot in 24-frames-per-second mode (which looks like film). Both of these camcorders look like they will be big hits with indie filmmakers. They are designed with the wide selection of professional controls that appeal to aspiring directors who like to take control of their shooting. Canon also announced a new DVD camcorder.

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RAW vs. JPEG

If upgrading to a dSLR from a compact, there are a few advantages and disadvantages to learn about when choosing to shoot in JPEG or shoot in RAW...

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Gmail addresses available with a shorter / cooler domain name

izi.jp is a domain name powered by Google's hosted Gmail. The address is very short and many generic words and names already taken on Gmail.com are available on izi.jp because it's newer and not as well known. But the email system is powered by Gmail, which means everything works the same wonderful way, including Calendar, GTalk, Spam filter etc.

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Gmail cryptography plugin.

FreeEnigma brings cryptography to webmail, with an ingenious set of free and open browser plug-ins that work with Yahoo, Gmail, and others. The plugins implement a version of GPG and scramble and de-scramble the text in your webmail before you send it and after you receive it.

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Computer boots Linux in 1.69 seconds

A maker of board-level computers has released a Linux OS that can boot one of its boards in just 1.69 seconds. This allows, for example, a battery-backup/control accessory to wakeup the board, boot Linux, record data, and go back to sleep (step and repeat). Many other possibilities come to mind.

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Rate Hike is Causing Sellers to Drop eBay

Frustrated customers often threaten that they'll never shop at a store again. Now, a number of online retailers have become angry at eBay, and many of them claim they'll never again sell on the site. One group has grown so frustrated with eBay that it named itself "Google We Need An Auction Site."

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The People Behind KDE...

Who are these creative people? Why are they working on KDE? What motivates them to contribute to the project? What do they eat? Who are their favourite writers, singers and actors? Well... you get the picture. At this web site there are interviews with the people who work on KDE to find the answers to questions like these.

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AOL to offer video from all the big guys

AOL announced today that it has finalized deals to offer download to own deals with 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group through Video.AOL.com. AOL will now distribute content from all 6 the corporations owning major studios in the US, either through download to own or onl

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EA says Wii might be $170: "“I’ve heard in Japan that the price is about $170, but I don’t know if the price has been set in Europe yet. Nintendo has come up with a very clever strategy. They’ve made a choice which is great for the consumer. Now we’re going to have a choice whereby consumers can buy a Wii plus one other console.” - Executive VP and COO of EA, David Gardner

Wii for $170…sounds damn good to me!

Link




New email address for news tips! Please send all your news related emails to tips@gonintendo.com. GoNintendo needs your news tips!
Source: Go Nintendo"

.Mac's slow death

"Somebody call the ambulance, because .Mac is dying...and Google is the assassin (with a little help from his sidekick Firefox)."

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Google's MP3 Player: "Google has a nice little MP3 player you can use on your site, as Amit Agarwal found out by digging through Gmail code. Just append the URL of an MP3 file to 'http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl='.

Below I've included a link to a podcast using Google's MP3 wrapper in a simple Iframe... and now you have streaming capabilities and a Google Video-like interface with a progress bar and sound adjustments.

You can also replace above podcast with an MP3 URL of your choice:


[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]
Source: Google Blogoscoped"

Ten tips for new Ubuntu users! Excellent!

Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution for new Linux users. It's easy to install, easy to use, and usually "just works." But moving to a different operating system can be confusing, no matter how well-designed it is. Here's a list of tips that might save you some time while you're getting used to Ubuntu

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Gmail Audio Player

Gmail has a built-in player for MP3 attachments. If you receive emails that include MP3 files (maybe a podcast or a public domain recording), you can listen them directly from Gmail.

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Kickoff - The new KDE start menu

This is a nice little flash movie about what the new KDE start menu will look like. It looks like this will be in openSUSE 10.2

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Open source guru advocates ideological shift

Eric Raymond, one of the high priests of open source, has told the community that painful compromises are needed to the way it deals with closed source platforms and formats to avoid losing ground on desktops and new media players.

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Google CEO wants $74 billion TV ad market | Digital Micro-Markets | ZDNet

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes television viewers should not have to stand for tv commercials that are a waste of your time.Schmidt is frustrated that when you watch the television you see ads that are clearly not targeted for you. What does he plan to do about it?

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Crazy Egg - visual heatmap of where visitors are clicking on your site

Crazy Egg is a program that shows you a visual heatmap of where your users are clicking. It tracks clicks on links, ads, flash and Ajax and more.

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What Is OpenDocument, why should I care?

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an emerging file format standard for electronic office documents. Representing a triumph of common sense over the methods conceived before the rise of the Internet, ODF's goals are both exciting and controversial. Early adopters of the format include state and municipal governments in some near-and far-flung places

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How do you get a price cut? just ask

Most people don't think twice about bargaining when it comes to something big, like a new car or home. But getting a price cut on smaller things, cable bills, doctors' fees, electronics goods, can be surprisingly easy: Just ask.

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Cool map of Starbucks & McDonalds taking over the world

This pair of maps show the global presence of Starbucks coffee shops and McDonald's restaurants. When examined graphically, both companies act as global hubs that connect some of the world's poorest, most remote countries with some of the wealthiest. Very cool yet freaky at the same time!

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Can't hear me now? Verizon is dropping a lot of DNS requests!

Verizon drops 3.14% of all DSL subscribers's DNS requests! CNET just rehashed a report that Nominum commissioned to look at the speed and reliability of ISP DNS servers. The verdict won't shock any of you: ISPs are pretty bad at providing DNS!

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HOW-TO watch YOUTUBE videos from LINUX Shell Prompt

Publishing your own video on YouTube, or watching other people's videos, is all the rage these days. Why are we talking about YouTube, in a column about the CLI? Because this week we're writing about youtube-dl, a clever little CLI tool that's easy to install and and use to fetch YouTube videos.

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Exclusive Q&A With Linus Torvalds

Linux creator says his 15-year-old creation is growing up nicely


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In-depth review on why Google bought Neven Vision

An in-depth over of Neven Vision, image recognition software, and why Google bought them. Review breaks down patents, past publishings and integration into Google's services.

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Big Blue Sings Linux

Linux showed off its big ally. Big Blue on Tuesday touted plans to boost Linux development with a commitment to open-source business models that it hopes will usher in a new era.

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Lockheed Says F-35 Could Fly Pilotless

"Lockheed Martin Corp. has proposed an unmanned version of its Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, which would make it the first full-scale fighter to operate without a pilot and signal the Bethesda weapons maker's push into the growing market for drone aircraft."

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IBM Puts Weight Behind New Open-Source Markets

Among the projects underway are tuning the Linux kernel to run faster and more securely on IBM's new Cell processor, shipping versions of Lotus desktop apps that run on Linux, and expanding IBM's open-source Web server business, company executives said Tuesday at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

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Google Talk Adds Voice Mail, File Sharing

Google Talk is offering an update today that will enable users to easily transfer files, set presence with music, and send and receive voice mails.

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AnandTech: Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor

Here we're going to be looking at the Mac Pro as a Mac (mostly) and compare the performance of two speed grades (2.0GHz and 2.66GHz) to the outgoing PowerMac G5. We'll also take the thing apart and give you a nice tour in pictures of the new chassis.

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Top 10 Municipal Wi-Fi Plans

"Some of the largest U.S. cities have hatched big plans for providing low-cost wireless broadband to residents. Want to know where you may be getting free Wi-Fi next? Here's a look at 10 of the biggest municipal Wi-Fi plans."

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Google's 3D Video Camera Project

Using technology similar to doppler radar, this live motion camera made by Advanced Scientific Concepts can translate what it shoots into 3D data. The result is that you can digitize anything you film into 3D data, complete with textures. Google seems to be involved with the project. Could VR walkthroughs be coming to Google Earth?

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New installer gives Debian Etch an edge

The Debian Installer team has released the third beta of its installer for Etch, the next version of Debian. According to the announcement, there is now an optional graphical installer for the i386 and AMD64 platforms, and you can now set up encrypted partitions during installation. Not all features are present yet in this beta.

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Trolltech woos developers with "open" Linux phone

Trolltech, best known for the Qt graphical framework and toolkit that form the basis of KDE, will ship an "open" Linux-based phone in September. The "Greenphone" features a user-modifiable Linux OS, and is meant to jumpstart a third-party native application ecosystem for Linux-based mobile phones.

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Windows 5x More Expensive than Mac OS X

Apple released 5x as many major updates, and over 15x as many minor updates to Mac OS X since 2000 vs Windows, but buying Windows actually costs users 5x as much! How will Microsoft's expensive platform affect sales of PCs next year under Leopard & Vista? Daniel Eran at RoughlyDrafted Magazine 'splains.

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Amazing comparison of a 32-core Sun running Ubuntu versus 4-core AMD

60 days ago Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz issued a daring invitation to developers: write a public review of "the world's most power efficient server" and keep the server. Be careful what you wish for.

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Google Adding Face Recognition Technology to Picasa

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects

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Atheist

Awesome video of atheist people and their accomplishments...disproving how atheists are thought to be.

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Thailand Plans to Give 1 Free Laptop Per Child

"Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has announced that an ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to all of Thailand's millions of elementary school students will begin in October."

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Indian village uploads itself onto Internet

An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India.

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So You Wanna Change Your Default Browser In Vista?

Microsoft has designed the User Account Control (UAC) to work so perfectly that it will be difficult for the average person to switch the default browser.

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TV interview with Mark 'Ubuntu' Shuttleworth

A rare chance to see Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu, on television.

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Google: the Godfather of Open Source?

It's well known that Google runs its vast array of servers using a custom version of GNU/Linux. But this is only one aspect of its support for free software. Others include its Summer of Code, now well established as an incubator of both coding talent and projects, and more recently its open source code repository.

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Google: Govts are the greatest threat to web privacy

CEO Eric Schmidt told the Search Engine Strategies industry conference that Google had put all necessary safeguards in place to protect its users' personal data from theft or accidental release.

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How To Run A Ubuntu Webserver And Torrent Client Under Windows XP

This tutorial is meant for Linux newbies who want to try and build a Ubuntu server box as a webserver and torrent client. It is a step by step instruction on how to do this in VMware on Windows XP to get the feel of it.

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Apple thrashes Dell on Mac Pro pricing

"We thought it would be interesting to compare pricing between similarly specced systems from Dell and Apple, and were gobsmacked at the results - this should be very good reading for Apple advocates..."

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IE7 is basically non-compliant with CSS web standards.

IE6 51%
IE7 55%
Firefox 93%
Will this affect Web 2.0?

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt Tackles Net Neutrality and AJAX

Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared to play the role of cryptic savant in remarks at the search engine strategies summit in San Jose. Schmidt, who once opposed development of Java during his days at Sun, conceded that it is very difficult to predict the future in the technology business in general and in the search business specifically.

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Managing Users In Ubuntu

I think a lot of people new to GNU/Linux don't understand the whole "users thing". This short, practical guide to user management in Ubuntu and GNU/Linux will make it all clear.

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Google says click fraud estimates are overblown

Google is fighting back against what it says are exaggerations in industry estimates of click fraud in its bread-and-butter pay-per-click advertising system.

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Japan is Producing Electricity from Train Station Ticket Gates

Busy train stations (those with large numbers of passengers willing to bounce heavily through the gates) will be able to accumulate a relatively large amount of electricity. It works by embedding piezo elements in the ground.

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Thunderbird 2.0 preview

I addition to the front-page attractions, Thunderbird provides several improvements to the existing features. The new mail notification area has undergone extensive revision -- this is the pop-up transient window that appears when Thunderbird finds new mail on the server during a routine background mail-check...

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Nuremberg hopes to create 'Linux Valley'

Linux Business Campus Nuremberg has opened the doors of its new Innovation Center in the Maxtorhof office center north of the city's historic center. The group is targeting young companies interested in developing new Linux-based or open source-based software applications..

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Black Hat: Researcher creates Net neutrality test

Dan Kaminsky, a Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for net neutrality. He will share details of this technique, which will be rolled into a free tool, today at the Black Hat conference. The software can tell whether computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others.

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First Ubuntu Billboard spotted

"The above billboard was spotted near the Ralston exit in Redwood"

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Top 10 Websites for Students

"You've checked the course schedules, bought your sheets and towels, shopped for a laptop, gotten in touch with your new roommate--you're all ready for college, right? Wrong. Your campus orientation isn't complete until you get a little Internet orientation, too."

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Google Launches Picasa Web Albums for Mac

"I'm happy to tell you about the release of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders (beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we've made it even easier on the Mac."

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AOL to provide 5GB of online storage for FREE

AOL is leading the industry by providing 5GB of online storage FREE for all web users.

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GNOME 2.14.3 Released!

The latest stable release of GNOME is here: GNOME 2.14.3! This is the
final release in a series of point releases for the 2.14 branch.

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Linux Command Line Cheatsheet

A list of linux commands for common operations including: file searching, networking, directory navagation, etc.

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A Five Minute Guide to Opposing DRM

I've been covering the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Designcampaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies since its planning stages. Starting from scratch, in less than three months, the campaign has grown to 7000 members. This number is impressive.

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Introduction to 90 Online File Storage Services

"You can use them to send big files, or backup your documentations. Some services can be accessed from your web browser, others may have a client program for you to auto-backup your hard drive."

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Learn How to Develop Firefox Extensions!! - A step-by-step Tutorial

What is your dream firefox extension? Don't wait, Do-it yourself!! This tutorial has been created for individuals wanting to develop full-featured extensions for the Mozilla Firefox browser. The tutorial has been constructed as a step-by-step guide providing many examples, explanations

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Developers Flock To Google's SourceForge Rival

Google is winning good reviews from early adopters of its new open-source development hub, Google Code Project Hosting. Less than a week after its launch, several thousand projects are hosted on the site, and users praise its simplicity.



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Microsoft's secret record of every website visited on your PC!

Windows creates invisible, undeletable files listing all the websites the PC has visited. Not only every URL but also all of the email that has been sent or received through Outlook or Outlook Express is also being logged. This information is untouched by clearing history, internet cache folder and temporary internet files. Link shows how to remove

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Free book: The Easiest Linux Guide You've Ever Read

The author Scott Morris says: "After several months of writing and revising, I have made available the Easiest Linux Guide You've Ever Read. It is a book geared towards people who are competent with using Windows, who have never attempted to use Linux but are interested in giving it a try."

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Four countries order 4 million OLPC laptops

Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have EACH ordered a million Linux laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, DesktopLinux.com reports.

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Four countries order 4 million OLPC laptops

Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have EACH ordered a million Linux laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, DesktopLinux.com reports.

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Finally a device to cure Hiccups

The Hic-Cup, a patented Class I medical device, allows hiccup sufferers to enjoy 100% drug-free relief from this plaguing condition.

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Personal Wiki Application As Easy As Notepad -It is FREE

Zulupad is a personal wiki application for both windows and osx. The great thing about ZuluPad is that it combines the best parts of a notepad with the best parts of a wiki,

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3 out of 4 women now prefer a plasma tv to a diamond... THANK YOU GOD

i think 100 out of 100 men agree with this

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