Windows Vista RED edition

Microsoft is set to release the (PRODUCT) RED version of Windows Vista Ultimate on December 15th. Dell has been selling computers preloaded with this special version of the OS for a few months now, but starting next week you'll be able to to buy a standalone copy.

So what makes Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED different from plain old Windows Vista Ultimate Edition? First, it comes in a red box and includes a few extra wallpapers, screensavers, sidebar gadgets, and a Dreamscene moving background. Second, a portion of the proceeds from sales will help buy and distribute AIDS medications to patients in Africa.

Amazon appears to be selling it for about $70 more than the price of the vanilla edition of Windows Vista Ultimate, which means either that those wallpapers (which you can probably find online for free) are really awesome, or Microsoft or Amazon are jacking up the price a bit in order to support the charity.

[via iStartedSomething]

How 2 Extract Images from PDF files

PDF Image Extract is a free Windows utility that does exactly what the name suggests: it extracts images from PDF files. Sure, you could save pictures one at a time the old fashioned way by hitting print screen and pasting the image into an editor or using a screen capture program. But PDF Image Extract saves you a lot of time if you want to save multiple images because it will save every single image in a PDF file for you. In fact, you can create batch jobs to save images from multiple documents.

The only down side? I'm not kidding when I say PDF Image Extract saves every image. You'll likely wind up with a folder containing hundreds of images, only a few of which are the ones you were looking for. That's because the program will save all sorts of segments of the original PDF as image files, including the background.

FireFox3 Hitz the WEB....

On June 17, 2008 Mozilla attempted to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. According to Mozilla over 8 million downloads were recorded. Currently they are awaiting word from Guinness if they were successful.

But there was one thing we wanted to know about this number. Out of the 3 major operating systems in use today which one blazed away with the most downloads. So we decided to ask and a Mozilla spokesperson gave us the following numbers:

• Windows 79%
• Linux 13%
• OS X 8%

Now the number 1 spot didn't surprise us at all since Windows leads in overall computer operating systems it's almost a given that most of the downloads would come from Windows. But what was a bit surprising was that Linux bested OS X in the numbers of downloads.

One could say that Ubuntu, which is a very popular Linux distro comes packaged with Firefox so it's only natural that more downloads would come from Linux users. But according to w3counter, OS X accounts for 4.95% of the operating systems in use while Linux is barely half of this at 2.01%

So this strikes us as odd. What would cause OS X to slip to 3rd place in the number of downloads? Do these numbers suggested that Apple users only like to use Apple apps? Or did a large group of Mac users not get invited to the download party?