If anyone is not already convinced that DRM is bad for the customer after seeing major companies like Google, Yahoo or MSN pull the plug on their DRM servers then Walmart’s decision to do the same might convince you finally.

Walmart started selling music back in August 2007. The music was protected by DRM for the first six month after which Walmart decided that the hassle was not worth it. DRM was removed from all songs and users were able to purchase DRM free songs from then on.

The announcement that Walmart would shut down its DRM servers was send by email to all customers who purchased songs protected by DRM from one of the biggest companies in the world. The consequence for the user is dire. It is possible to play the songs on the authorized computer but it will not be possible to burn them or listen to them on a new computer after October 9, the day the servers are shut down.

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Using the Internet to send print jobs to another computer that has a printer connected to it is usually more comfortable than trying to install the printer as a network device in a network. Share Printer software makes it as easy as possible to send a print job to another computer and connected printer. It usually only means that both computers have to run the same software to share the printer.

Samer recently discovered the software Printer Share which advertises itself as the ultimate no-brainer remote printing solution. One advantage of Printer Share is that the development company provides clients for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The only requirement is an Internet connection on both computers to send the date.

Speaking of which. The company that developed Printer Share mentioned on their website that all data is encrypted before it is send which might make this printer software interesting for smaller businesses with at least two separate offices.

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Saving network bandwidth is important for those users who are subscribed to a data plan that gives them a certain amount of Gigabytes per month that they can transfer freely. If they reach the limit they either have to pay for additional data transfers or live with reduced connection speeds which are both unpleasant side effects. Another possibility would be specialized services where the user has to pay for every data transfer right from the beginning.

The rise of mobile phones, netbooks and other mobile devices pushed the need for data compression tools that reduce the actual size of a data transfer.

Toonel (via Make Use Of) provides a solution both for desktop computer users as well as those that connect with a mobile device to the Internet. It features an impressive list of operating system it is compatible with including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

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It is virtually impossible to get a clean shoot of a tourist attraction in most parts of the world. Since that is rarely the case most pictures that are taken while on holiday show a few or even many tourists on the pictures that block part of the object from sight.

Several image editing technologies have been developed that analyze and process a set of pictures from the same object removing any unwanted noise in the resulting picture. The Snapmania Online Image editor offers a tourist remover algorithm which can be used to process the images online to receive one clear image of the object or person on a set of photos.

The tourist remover is just one of the features of the image editor. The user can store images, use some basic image editing functions like red eye removal, auto correction and some special effects or create panoramas.

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The file syncing and hosting service DropBox was covered before at Ghacks and I recently had to check it out again because I needed a way to sync some files with a business partner of mine. Dropbox uses a combination of software client and web client which provide both access to the files unlike normal file hosts like Rapidshare who provide no way to sync files across computers.

The software client basically uses one source folder on the hard drive where all the files and folders are stored in locally. Uploading files is just a matter of moving files and folders into the Dropbox zone on the computer or by creating and editing files already in that special folder.

When the Dropbox client is running the files and folders will get automatically synced with the online client which keeps the most recent copies of the files and folders including file revisions. The web client of DropBox can be used to download or view files without having to run the software client. The client can also be used to upload new files to the service.

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