It sounds like a coffee mug; “You don’t have to be a student to get great software deals but it helps”.

A lot of high-end software companies provide extremely good value packages for students often involving completely free giveaway editions, stripped-down versions or huge discounts on the off-the-shelf price.

Maybe you hate Microsoft for charging so much for its operating system, but at least it also has plenty of great free software giveaways (such as Windows Live). This year it has released two great deals, one for students only and the other for anyone else interested in getting into software or web development:

We’ve previously covered Songbird on Make Use Of when Mark wrote about it as an iTunes killer back in January. I then wrote my own article six months later presenting my own favourite Songbird extensions.

Since then I’ve been following the development of Songbird with a great deal of interest and was excited when Songbird 0.7 was released a few weeks ago.

This release introduced a great new UI, more features and significant performance improvements, all very welcome additions.

Some time back I wrote an article on Syncplicity. First off let me start off by making clear the cheers/boos system that I used as some people have asked about it.

So the cheers/boos system worked like this: A feature that I liked and/or worked as claimed on the Syncplicity site was given a cheer, a feature on which I saw a potential room for improvement was given a boo. The score at the end of each bullet point represented the cumulative score which means that the total of cheers and boos up till that point. I apologize if you found it hard to comprehend. (damn the cumulative system! From next time I will not be using cumulative scores).