At first glance an audio encoder called LameXP doesn't look like it'll be the most appealing of products. You might easily assume that it's just going to be an outdated front end for the LAME MP3 library -- too basic to be really useful. But don't be misled. LameXP is far more interesting than its name suggests.

This open-source program doesn't just run on Windows XP, for instance, it acts as a front end for several encoders. So it's able to import AC3, MP4/ AAC, ALAC, AIFF, DTS, FLAC, ADPCM, APE, MP1/ MP2/ MP3, Musepack, Shorten, Speex, Au, TTA, WAV/RIFF, WavPack and WMA files, and can convert these to AAC, MP3, Ogg, AC3, FLAC or WAV/RIFF.

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Forensic computer security company ATC-NY on Thursday released a new, free tool called Dropbox Reader which helps investigators read "evidence files" associated with Dropbox cloud storage accounts.

Dropbox Reader is actually a series of six command line Python scripts which parse the configuration and cache files of a Dropbox account, including the user's registered e-mail address, dropbox identifier, software version info and list of recently changed files stored in config.db, the information about shared directories and files marked for sync stored in filecache.db.

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Program bugs, hardware problems, virus attacks, human error -- there are many possible reasons why you might lose valuable data. And so it's a very good idea to have a file recovery tool to hand, ready to call into action just as soon as you notice there's a problem.

Which one, though? That's a tricky question. There's plenty of choice, but if you're a home user then MiniTool's Power Data Recovery Free Edition has more to recommend it than most of the competition.

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Fulfilling its promises from earlier this year, Microsoft on Thursday released the Kinect SDK Beta for Windows, giving creative interface designers legitimate access to the famous 3D motion controller without the need for a hacked third-party driver.

Along with the software development kit, Microsoft has published a series of "quickstarts" to help aspiring developers get a jump on installing and using the Kinect Sensor, setting up a Kinect development environment in Visual Studio, as well as setting up and working with code samples. These samples require Microsoft's DirectX SDK (June 2010 or later) and the current runtime for DirectX 9, as well as Microsoft Speech Platform Runitme 10.2 and SDK 10.2.

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Pandora's second day on the New York Stock Exchange hasn't been much better than the first. In midday trading the stock was down over eight percent, amid a fairly stable market overall. The stock has traded as low as $15.50 in intraday trading, 50 cents below its IPO price.

The music service's continued weakness followed yet more doubts from financial analysts that the company could ever pull a profit. Simply put, Pandora's userbase may be growing faster than its growth in ad revenue, which makes up 87 percent of its total revenues.

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The nation's first chief information officer is leaving the White House. Vivek Kundra, who was named to the post in March 2009 to manage the day-to-day technological operations of the US Government, is leaving for a fellowship at Harvard University in August.

Kundra is credited by the Obama White House in saving taxpayers about $3 billion annually by streamlining government IT operations. He was also instrumental in moving Washington into the cloud, and strengthening the country's cybersecurity defenses.

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Today, Pew Internet released an 85-page report that is best described as a love letter to Facebook. The study smooches up to the social networking service in just about every conceivable way. Bottom line: Facebook has fundamentally changed where people spend time online and with whom they interact.

Pew surveyed 2,255 Americans 18 or older between Oct. 20 and Nov. 28, 2010. Among them: 1,787 were Internet users and 975 used social networking services.

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More than 100 different Android device designs have been released over the last three years, but there have only been a handful of "ruggedized" smartphones (Motorola i1, Defy, Casio G'Zone Commando) and no rugged tablets. Thursday, Panasonic announced it will be releasing the first enterprise-grade rugged Android tablet under its Toughbook line in the fourth quarter of 2011.

"The vast majority of tablet devices--regardless of the OS--are engineered for consumers and don't offer appropriate levels of security and durability or the functionality needed for business use," Rance Poehler, president, Panasonic Solutions Company said in a statement on Thursday. "Like all Toughbook products, our Toughbook tablet will be designed and constructed with the mission-critical mobile user in mind."

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What else could Microsoft be up to today? The company is holding a big Kinect press event, starting at 12:30 p.m. EDT that will go on for -- get this -- four-and-a-half hours!

According to a blog post by Microsoft's Nic Fillingham the Kinect event will be broadcast live from Channel 9. "The broadcast will be in IIS smooth streaming 720P so please ensure you have Silverlight installed and for the full high definition experience select 'Fullscreen' from within the player," he writes. So no Adobe Flash is required, but you'll still need Microsoft's alternative.

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This morning, I awoke to find email from Apple about its 2011 school promo -- "$100 Back to School Card to use on the Mac App Store" when buying a new computer. In past years, Apple gave away iPods, which had higher resale value. For example, last year, students got an 8G iPod touch, worth $199, for free (well, they paid up front and received a rebate).

The promotion may be as much about future marketing as selling more computers to students now. The Mac App Store is an add-on to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and it's built-in to Lion, which goes on sale next month. Apple is slowly, but deliberately, shifting software distribution to the digital web store. For example, Lion will be available download-only for about $30. It's in Apple's best interest and that of its development partners to get students used to buying from the Mac App Store, which also can deter piracy. Better for Apple and its developers that students spend $100 on something rather than grabbing it from some torrent site.

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I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

When Duke Nukem 3D came out, I thought it was stupid.

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There has been a dramatic change in the Betanews poll asking readers if they would buy a Chrome OS laptop. The number for respondents answering "No" dropped significantly, while the yeses and maybes are way up. That's all just today. What does it mean?

The first Chromebooks went on sale today, from Acer and Samsung, ranging in price from $379.99 to $499.99. About seven hours ago, I posted the obligatory launch day story and included the buying-intention poll first posted six days ago. During the first days the poll was up, more than 85 percent of respondents said "No" to Chromebook. When I posted the earlier-day's story, the number was 69.4 percent, from 562 respondents. The number answering "Yes" was 11.57 percent, while 19.04 percent answered "Maybe."

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One day after opening a hotline to take requests for its next hacking target, black hat security group LulzSec appears to have taken down the website belonging to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA.)

The image above is from the group's Twitter feed just about half an hour ago, CIA.gov remains unreachable (Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.) from our location in Maryland (others claim to see no change to the site.)

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There was some buzz earlier today -- wild speculation, really -- about when Microsoft would release its next major operating system. Let's skip over the rumors and get right to the important stuff: what matters to you. So I'm asking: When do you want Windows 8?

The immediate answer many people might expect is now. Sure there are enthusiasts who can't wait to get their grubby hands on the software's pristine packaging. But there are many other Windows users who would wait longer. For many reasons.

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After initially surging out of the gate to $26 in early morning trading, Pandora's highly anticipated IPO ended giving up much of its gains by the close of trading on Wednesday. At the close, Pandora was only up $1.42 -- about 8.9 percent -- from its IPO price of $16 per share.

The music service's results were drastically different than that of LinkedIn, which saw its shares more than double in its first day of trading last month. It should be noted though that the social networking site's shares have given back about half of those gains, but are still trading some 65 percent above its IPO price.

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