Neowin.net

Thanks to brad and the team at stardocks for another great release!

"Stardock has released WindowBlinds 3.5. The new version integrates Skincast, a new way of being able to install new visual styles directly from display properties. The new version also supports the skinning of sliders and has numerous tweaks to
increase compatibility.

WindowBlinds is a program that allows users to apply skins/visual styles to their Windows PCs. It changes title bars, borders, push buttons, start bars and virtually every other part of the Windows GUI. It's flexible enough that you can make WIndows look however you want.

WindowBlinds is available stand alone. It is part of Stardock's Object Desktop, a suite of desktop enhancements that allow nearly all parts of the Windows environment to be customized. WindowBlinds has recently been used by such companies as Nintendo, nVidia, and Microsoft to provide visual styles based on their products."


Screenshot: 1, 2, 3
Download: @ homepage

But with songs averaging 4 to 5mb (depending on the quality) and downloadable movies running somewhere between 400 to 600mb, this severly limits the amount of movies and songs that a user who once thought of broadband as the "you-can-eat connections to the Net".

Critics of the bandwidth caps on broadband connections worry that various internet annoyances would eat into their monthly bandwidth quotas, some of which are wholly out of the control of subscribers. Annoyances such as; Web pop-up ads or pornographic spam e-mail messages; ad-supported software programs such as the Opera Web browser could take another bite at the cap without subscribers' approval and some have even raised the specter of malicious attacks, in which streams of traffic could be sent to a computer or series of computers by an outsider (on a non-capped high speed link), pushing the targeted accounts over their monthly limit without any action on the part of the subscribers.

No US cable company has yet announced that it is imposing bandwidth caps, but most say it's an option. "It's something we're looking at," said Jenni Moyer, a spokeswoman for the newly merged Comcast Communications and AT&T Broadband, which together comprise the largest cable ISP. Cox Communications says that they already attempt to identifies customers who are using large amounts of bandwidth for any reason and tries to encourage them to move to a more expensive tier of service. DSL providers seem to be less interested in the idea, with SBC Communications saying that the company did not see heavy file-swapping activity as "a problem to be resolved."