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Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now 3 years later, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard of theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries. One theme to find. One theme to upload. One theme to rule them all.

Alright, enough Lord of the Rings talk for one day. Devoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on one of the “people_ready� television commercials airing in the States. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered this mystery XP theme by Microsoft. W3bbo writes,

During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass� effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noir�, it even works with Office 2003.

Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel� (they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.

You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.

If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.

This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.

Here is a screenshot and the download link

Download

Install:

Extract files to “c:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir� and double click on “luna.msstyles�. Select “Noir� from color scheme. Code-signed by Microsoft. No UXTheme hack required.

Hey,

are you tired of stupid Flash 7 on your Linux. That you are not able to watch any cool stuff on the web as it is Flash 8 or Flash 9? Are you sick of the audio not being synchrononous with the video?

Well finally someone has thought about us Linux users at Adobe. They have published the first beta of the Flash Player 9 for Linux.

The only problem now is: Why is there no .deb for my Kubuntu?

Well there is no need for it. If you have flashplayer-nonfree installed you can simply do this:

# wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/
flashplayer9_update/FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# tar xvzf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# sudo cp flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/
# sudo cp flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

This will get you and install you your FlashPlayer 9. Then just restart Firefox / Opera and you’ll get your FlashPlayer 9!

Have fun watching all that video content on Youtube, Google Videos, DailyMotion or Myspace.

Hey everyone!

I stumpled upon this website, a site of the Northwestern Infolab.

They generate automated Video News. It isn’t perfect, but it seems to work.

It uses the HalfLife 2 engine to create the news cast.

The question is: Will this be a way of news in the future?

Visit their Website here

BT has been the belle of the file trading ball for years. But, are they selling out? Recently, BT has announced deals with over 25 companies (including Warner Bros and ASUS) and has taken their software off the open-source market. What’s next?

read more | digg story

It only 2 days since Apple released OSX 10.4.8 and it’s already available on the hackintosh scene! This guide clearly describes how to create the HFS+ partition on your computer and install OSX without messing up your Windows partition.

read more | digg story

Two years ago the source code of Windows 2000 (the basis of XP) was leaked. It’s good code… but who knew Microsoft programmers swore so much?

read more | digg story

Hey,

for all the people who have strong maths in school and need to do “Polynomdivision”, here is a link you should really check out!

http://www.arndt-bruenner.de/mathe/scripts/polynomdivision.htm

Great script!

Have fun getting 10s !