Software As A Service or “SAAS” is one of the recently emerging technologies which offers the concept of having various software available as a service.

For example, currently we have to purchase a CD of a software program that we want to use . Then we install it on our computers and then use it. This service (SAAS) eliminates all these hassles, and makes the software available online.

Now if you want to work with the software you can sign in to the website just like an email account and use that software and when finished, exit the site. The advantage of this technology is that often we pay for a software which has a large number of functions, but we only want to use one or two functions. So we can pay for using those functions only. The SAAS is also beneficial for those people who are one time users or use the software occasionally.

The major concern for this technology is that of security. Users who are working would definitely want to have secure and safe data transfer. This aspect is still still under consideration and many companies are looking forward to advancing this technology.

COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in use.

It certainly is not as flashy as Sun Microsystem’s Java, and the language is not useful for the development of Internet applications. However, the programming language has quite a few uses left. Though it was once criticized for its use of what some programmers saw as an over complicated text, the language actually tries to exhibit an element of humanism in its construction. The text is actually designed to be human readable, even though COBOL is not necessarily an interpreted language. COBOL received a major face lift in 2002, and it is this added object-oriented style that has given the programming language a second chance at life. Support for Bit, Boolean, Floating Point, user defined functions, and portable arithmetic calculations was added into the language. Perhaps, in the future, some applications will once more flock to the 1959 stand by for computer programming.

Although the broadband network over electrical cable concept and solution has exsisted for years, believe it or not, an official international standard in this field does not exist. This is probably the reason we still connect over Ethernet and telephone cables.

However, this could all be coming to an end. A group working within the IEEE’s finally has given a final draft standard for broadband networking over electric power lines network. Before the standard would be accepted, there is a long process of making it finalized, but it is already known that the basic features offered are: speeds of 100 Mb/s, and that electric companies would very quickly accept it , and join the market as Internet service providers.

iSquint is a popular video conversion software for Mac.

It offers users ways of converting their videos to various formats and completing tasks such as auto cropping and fitting 18 hours of video onto one DVD, (although I am yet to figure how someone would use that) in addition to converting wrong format videos for iPod video. It works with most video formats and is simple as “drop, drag and click” to convert a video file. iSquint has an available freeware version and also a registered version called “VisualHub” which costs $23.32.

Novel writers know that standard word processors, such as WordPerfect or MS Word, aren’t always the best tool to use in crafting their masterpieces.

Those programs just aren’t made to keep track of the data that goes into writing a novel, and are feature-overkill for what writers need. Commercial software for writing novel exists, but is often expensive, or even, for those who aren’t yet getting paid for their writing, out of reach financially.

Enter y Writer from Spacejock Software. It’s free, well thought out software crafted specifically for writers of novels and short stories. y Writer 2 is the current version, and y Writer 3 beta is available, too. The download is only 3 MB, and the program installs under anything from Win 95 or Win98 and above. (I’ve got it on Win98 and WinXP machines.) With a driver downloaded from the y Writer website, you can even install it as a portable app on a USB flash drive, for portable writing wherever you can find a computer. Working the program is easy. A wizard helps create your first project. Then add chapters, characters, scenes to build your novel from initial outline to finished product. Scenes and chapters can be added, moved and deleted as your work progresses. A storyboard allows you to see how the storyline of each character progresses. Once you’re done, you can export your work to many text formats: html, text, rtf, and even NaNoWriMo obfuscated, for those who take part in National Novel Writing Month held each November.

Most of us must have had this problem of unable to delete some files in windows and windows shows an error message that the file is being used.

Most of the time we will end up rebooting the system to delete the file, even then some files may not get deleted. Unlocker is a free tool to delete such files which are possessed by a application process in Windows XP or Vista. Whenever we try to delete a file which we don’t want and windows pops-up a message that the file cannot be deleted, Unlocker will immediately come up from the system tray and provides the list of all the processes which are locking the file. You can choose to kill the Process which is locking the file, Unlock the file without killing the process. You can also rename or copy the file. If no processes are holding the file, we can select to close the processes running and let Unlocker delete the file for us.