K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-Decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. This Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. You should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats.

This is a cumulative update for the latest version of the K-Lite (Mega) Codec Pack.

K-Lite Codec Pack has the following other editions available: K-Lite Codec Pack Basic, K-Lite Codec Pack Standard and K-Lite Codec Pack Full.

Source BetaNews 

Google (GOOG) is rolling out its most ambitious print advertising initiative yet, an online marketplace that will let advertisers place bids on space in more than 50 major newspapers across the U.S.

The search giant will launch an alpha test of Google Print Ads this week. Since last fall, Google has tried at least three small-scale experiments with placing print ads in newspapers and magazines. Some of those earlier efforts were not well received (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/12/05, "Can Google Go Glossy?").

Source: BusinessWeek 

GI.biz reports Electronic Arts CFO, Warren Jenson, says they don't believe Sony will hit their year-end PS3 shipment of 2 million consoles for North America and Japan. The North American shipment was to be between 1 and 1.2 million units. This 2 million target keeps being debated back and forth. A few weeks ago Sony had us spinning over a Bloomberg report (since pulled), that didn't jive with a Gamespot interview, to the point where the spin had become so bad, all we could confirm was a direct quote from Sony's Jack Tretton saying, "Sony Playstation 3 is in full production and our target quantities for North America remain unchanged ... We plan to have more than one million systems in North America by December 31, 2006"

 Source: JoyStiq

An Internet advertising firm called Zango Inc. has agreed to pay $3 million to the U.S. government to settle allegations that its pop-up ad software was secretly installed on millions of personal computers, federal regulators said on Friday.

As part of the settlement, Zango must give consumers a way to remove disruptive adware and is barred from future downloads of its adware without consumers' consent, the Federal Trade Commission said. "Consumers' computers belong to them, and they shouldn't have to accept any content they don't want," FTC consumer protection chief Lydia Parnes said in a statement.

View: Full Story

Source: Reuters

Responding to the myriad complaints over ambiguities and outright uncool (that's a technical term) licensing terms, Microsoft has revised the Windows Vista retail license to remove some of the most major causes of complaint. A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica that the changes do indeed come in response to concerns from the PC enthusiast community. "We heard that users wanted more flexibility, and this change should give hardware enthusiasts in particular more latitude to upgrade their PCs or reassign their license to a new PC, while still making clear our intentions to protect our software from piracy," the spokesperson said.

A previous version of the Windows Vista retail license restricted the number of times you may transfer Vista from one device to another. The license read: "The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the 'licensed device.'"

Source: ArsTechnica 

The application requres a java-enabled phone and a data plan (other mobile devices can still access Gmail through the browser). To download the application, go to gmail.com/app and follow the instructions. You can also get a link to the download URL directly via a text message by going to mobile.google.com and entering your phone number.

Source: TechCrunch 

Stung by Oracle's entry into its Linux support market space and Novell's partnership with Microsoft, Red Hat has quietly sneaked in an indemnification guarantee for customers against any possible patent infringement claims.
 

Oracle and Microsoft have stung Red Hat with a double blow, both companies providing Linux users with assurances that they will be protected against intellectual property infringement lawsuits resulting from proprietary software blended with open source Linux.
Oracle, which announced last week that it would offer Red Hat customers support at half the price of Red Hat's services, also announced that it would imdemnify customers against patent infringement legal claims.

Microsoft, which on November 2 rocked the Linux world with the announcement of a partnership with Novell to promote Suse Linux, announced that it would not pursue any patent infringement claims against Suse Linux users.

View: Full Story (ITWire)

The photograph alone is monumental: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, sharing a podium with their companies' respective logos adorning the wall behind them.

What they announced was nothing less than a redrawing of the battle lines in the operating system market. What could be a boon for enterprise system administrators may, at the same time, be a nightmare for Red Hat and IBM, the latter of which may not have felt this kind of sting since Microsoft first licensed DOS to another manufacturer.

And yet there was at least one reporter in the crowd in San Francisco this afternoon who didn't get it, and who admitted as much. Unashamedly asking the executives to please explain themselves in 45 seconds for the layperson what they had been discussing in detail for the previous 40 minutes. Ballmer rewound his tape and summarized as follows:

View: Full Story (BetaNews) 

Microsoft have launched the official Zune website.  Just in time for Christmas now let's see if it can break into the dominant world of the ipod.  

Zune™ is your connection to the world of media and to entertainment-loving people like yourself. Starting with 30 GB, Zune is easy to use and easy to love. Choose one of three colors−each combined with a distinctive double-shot finish. Wirelessly share select full-length audio files or pictures directly from Zune to Zune.

Zune Official Site 

Nintendo claims that it is ready to pull off the largest worldwide videogame console launch in at least a decade, with around four million Wii systems being made available globally soon after its American launch. 

The games company will have four million units ready to ship during the six weeks between Wii's 19 November launch in the Americas and the end of 2006.

Nintendo is also hoping to keep up with demand during the busy Christmas period using a rapid replenishment programme designed to keep retailers' shelves fully stocked.

Source: Vnunet