Join AVI, MPEG, and Real Media files in one non-stop movie.

Multimedia mavens, rejoice: if you've been spending long hours with your video editing software, this program can help you regain the rest of your life. It lets you stitch together video clips of different formats (AVI, MPEG, Real Media, ASF/WMV) into one seamless, non-stop movie file. The program supports all major formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Divx. You can join as many video files as you wish. And the program makes it a cinch to take apart and rearrange the clips into any sequence. .

Sundance: Stars, snow, and social cyborgs

Back in the early days of the Sundance Film Festival, when video was considered an emerging technology, there were independent filmmakers, and there were technologists. The two didn't typically go hand in hand.

Fast forward to this year's festival, which starts Thursday and will for the first time feature a 3D film, and indies and techies are one and the same. These days, it's near impossible to be the former without being the latter, what with the conveniences and opportunities that come with the likes of high-definition cameras, advanced editing software, and the Internet as a distribution tool.

So it's no surprise that the 2008 festival--an increasingly star-studded 10-day indie-film showcase in snowy Park City, Utah--has stepped up its technology-related programming.

Soundtrack 1.0

Apple's Soundtrack made its debut last June, as part of the massive video-editing bundle Final Cut Pro 4. But now the same Soundtrack software is available as a stand-alone product. This puts Soundtrack within reach of video editors, Web designers, and content providers who don't need the rest of the Final Cut Pro 4 package.

It requires at least a 500MHz Power Mac, Mac OS X 10.2.5, and 5GB of available hard-drive space. Apple's official specs say that you can install the program with a CD and that the sound loops, called Apple Loops, on the included DVD are optional, but this isn't really the case. Soundtrack's entire appeal lies in the fact that it lets you mix and match the 4GB of material it provides.

7.30 Report Vodcast

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A Fondness for Quirky Teenagers

Charlie Bartlett is the movie no studio wanted to make. Impressed by his second unit directing work on Meet the Fockers, executives at Universal encouraged longtime editor Jon Poll – whose editing credits include Meet the Parents and the last two Austin Powers movies – to bring them a movie that he could direct. When he did, it was for a teen comedy in which the titular character sets himself up as the unofficial school therapist, who listens to his fellow students problems and doles out scammed prescription drugs. Universal passed. So did every studio in Hollywood.

Trucking's owner-operators on a tough road to survival

It hurts," he said. “I'm a man who's trying to make a living for my family and I'm not succeeding."Trucking's owner-operators, the self-employed drivers who haul everything from Hummers to hay, are suffering. Many say they're running on the edge of bankruptcy, about to disappear unless they get help. While a wave of trucking failures now might be invisible to consumers, when the economy rebounds, it would push up shipping rates, helping increase prices.The housing downturn and decreased consumer spending have cut into loads; the extra trucking capacity is pushing down freight rates. Diesel prices, which are always higher in the winter, have hit such highs that Truckinginfo.com runs ads for thief-stopping fuel-tank locks.“If you can run all week without a flat tire, you're a little bit ahead, otherwise, you're basically just running to put the money right back into the fuel tank," said trucker Benjamin Stanley, 40, of Spotsylvania, Va.

Deregulation and the Financial Crisis

There were good reasons for the Fed Policy, but that did not mean the Fed was helpless to prevent the housing bubble. As economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research insisted at the time, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan simply by identifying the bubble — and adjusting public perception of the future of the housing market — could have prevented or at least contained the bubble. He declined, and even denied the existence of a bubble.

Regulatory Failure Number Three: Financial Deregulation and Unchecked Financial "Innovation." A key reason that mortgages were made available so widely and with such little review of recipients' qualifications was a shift in which institutions hold the mortgages. Traditionally, banks made mortgages and held them.