Reuters - Federal Reserve Chairman
Ben Bernanke tackles financial stability in a key speech on
Friday but economists doubt he will provide solid clues about
future policy action to calm the credit crunch.
Reuters - Investors' growing belief in the
likelihood of a federal bailout of home-funding giants Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac triggered a rally in the
debt prices of the two companies on Thursday while a steep fall
in their shares prices abated.
Reuters - Oil prices rose nearly 5 percent on
Thursday, the biggest percentage gain in more than two months,
driven by rising tensions between the United States and energy
behemoth Russia.
Three big banks settle with NY state over ARS
(Reuters)
Reuters - New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
on Thursday said Merrill Lynch & Co Inc , Deutsche Bank
(DBKGn.DE) and Goldman Sachs have agreed to settlements
regarding their auction rate security sales practices.
FINRA probes 40 firms on auction rate securities: source
(Reuters)
Reuters - Financial industry enforcement agents
will review the auction-rate debt operations of about 40 firms
industrywide starting next week, sources familiar with the
investigation said on Thursday.
Trends & Innovations - Wednesday
(Investor's Business Daily)
Investor's Business Daily - The proportion of working-age Americans facing medical debt rose to 72 mil or 41% last year, up from 58 mil or 34% in '05, according to a new survey by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund. About half of those facing health debt have up to $2,000 in bills, while 12% have more than $4,000 in debt and another 12% have more than $8,000. The survey also found most of those with medical debt said they had exhausted their savings, with some also tapping into credit cards, home equity or cutting back on food or heat to cover health care costs.
NowSmart Studio has released the new version of Audio Record Wizard, a real-time Windows sound recorder and playback program that is easy enough for novices to use, and powerful enough for professionals. Audio Record Wizard works directly with your sound card to create CD-quality recordings from a microphone, stereo equipment, streamed audio, and from software such as Windows Media Player, Winamp, and RealPlayer.
For the hobbyist, creating a recording is as easy as selecting a recording device, setting the recording quality and volume, and clicking the Record button. Whether you're using a microphone, a music-playing program, or a line in feed from your stereo system or Walkman, Audio Record Wizard makes it easy to create a recording. If you have a fast computer and you're not running other CPU-intensive programs, you can record a MP3 file directly to your hard drive.
If you're using a more limited system, you can create a WAV file, and convert your recording to MP3 format later.Serious music lovers can use Audio Record Wizard's powerful options to fine-tune their recording. You can select 11, 22, or 44 KHz sampling rates, and create 16-bit stereo or mono recordings. You can set the bit rate from 32k per second, which is ideal for creating tiny files of low-quality voice recordings, to 320k per second, which is designed for the highest quality recording. The program supports variable bit rate (VBR) encoding of MP3 files. You can even set the program to skip silent passages, and stop recording after a user-defined period of silence.
Whether you're interested in recording high-quality music, creating voice recordings for business associates, or sending personalized voice messages to your family and friends, Audio Record Wizard makes it easy to create high-quality recordings.
Features:
Record from all sound sources (including winamp, realplay, windows media player and more);
Direct to disk ability allows you to record without stopping;
Stop Recording automatically;
Integrate the intelligent silent detector to skip silent passages;
Support recording to mp3 file directly without creating any temporary files;
Easy to use playback function;
Supports 44100Hz/22050Hz/11025Hz, Mono/Stereo.
Single Task Schedule;
File Length Limitation System;
Real-time oscilloscope;
Record-Pause function;
Ease of use interface;
Operation Indicators;
ID3 Tag Editor;
Hot Keys;
Command Line Mode(e.g."C:Program FilesARWizard3ARWizard3.exe" d:test.mp3);
To link to this page, insert the following HTML code to your page:
Reuters - Comedian Jerry Seinfeld will star
in a $300 million marketing campaign for Microsoft Corp aimed
at burnishing the image of its computer operating system, a
person familiar with the effort said on Thursday.
Photosynth Stitches Photos Into a 3-D Web Canvas
(NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Microsoft's name has never been synonymous with photography, visual imaging or innovative online applications. But its release Wednesday of Photosynth -- a hybrid software/service that allows users to create 3-D environments by stitching multiple photographs together -- suggests the company has more than a few cards up its sleeve.
Apple tries to de-bug iPhone
(USATODAY.com)
USATODAY.com - Apple acknowledged that a software update for the iPhone partly fixes the connection snags that have caused a global firestorm for the new iPhone 3G.
Salesforce.com stock drops on cautious outlook
(AP)
AP - Salesforce.com Inc. kept its financial guidance within the range of analyst estimates Wednesday, disappointing investors who expected a more bullish forecast from one of the Internet's most popular software services.
Microsoft Eases Server-Virtualization Restrictions
(NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Microsoft has elected to jettison certain licensing restrictions that previously discouraged its customers from moving the software giant's server applications within a server farm at will.
NewsFactor - In a move that could help it avoid an iPhone 3G-like software drama, Google wants bug hunters to test its Android mobile platform. On Monday, the Android Security Team posted a message to introduce itself to the security research and vulnerability communities.