syragon.com 2003 has been released officially today. this site features (of course) wallpapers, prints, services, personal info, guestbook, and tutorials.

Due to so many requests, I have begun creating tutorials and including them in this site. They will be only graphical in nature, meaning no text walkthroughs just screenshots.

Exclusive content. There is , and soon will be more exclusive content, wallpapers and related offered no where else.

Nifty features:
Image output engine; you can select any wallpaper and download it at any resolution or JPG quality.
Forum-like guestbook with emoticons and plenty of room to sign.

www.syragon.com

As I have been watching this section, and administrating it, I have noticed over the past years the VARIETY of submissions to it. Now normally that is a good thing, we like variety in art. However there is one area of Wallpapers that we don't need that in... dimensions. Re-read the rules folks.

What needs to be addressed here is a more basic understanding of wallpapers. I've noticed a few submissions where people honestly thought wallpapers meant you could hang it on your wall. In that case, we could hang corpses on our walls, that doesn't make it a wallpaper. Actually, believe it or not, wallpapers have nothing to do with walls or paper! They are soley for Computer Screen Background Images.

Wallpapers also are NOT screenshots. That is another misconception. All screenshots belong in their respective category, guess what it is called? Screenshots, yes that's right.

Just another information update from your lovable admins

Designs (layouts) might not be complete graphically however interfaces will be.

This will be for new submissions, don't worry about moving previous website designs to this category.

There is a new addition to the Designs category: Web Sites

I'm sure you have looked for this before, now we have it

New wallpaper section for game-theme wallpapers!

Due to demand a new section has been created for wallpapers dedicated to gaming or certain games. Please make sure your game wallpapers fall within the copyright rules set forth in deviantART's policies.

A new wallpaper section has been added, for dual-display wallpapers.

This section is ONLY for dual-display wallpapers that span a dual-display system (two-monitors).

Submissions to this section have the normal height of a wallpaper but twice the width.

This section will become browseable once we receive submissions to it.

"AOL Time Warner has won a U.S. patent for instant messaging, a potential goldmine as the online activity rivals mobile phone text-messaging as the most popular new communication tool. The new patent defines AOL's IM application as one that enables users to chat with and identify one another across a specific "communications network," opening up the possibility for AOL to collect royalties from rivals.

Media giant AOL Time Warner has quietly won a U.S. patent for instant messaging, a potential goldmine as the online activity rivals mobile phone text-messaging as the most popular new communication tool.

The patent, issued in September, grants AOL's instant messaging subsidiary ICQ broad ownership rights to the technology, which enables users to chat quickly and cheaply across the Internet.

The broad wording of the patent means AOL could get an important legal leg up on rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo, the other players in the potentially lucrative instant messaging (IM) arena that have their own proprietary technologies.

AOL Time Warner, CNN's parent company, has offered little comment on the patent or whether it it intends to enforce it.

"There are no plans to do anything with the patent at this time," a London spokesman for AOL's Internet division, America Online, said Thursday.

Microsoft and AOL have recently embarked on a project to develop secure chat applications for corporate users, the first major effort to cash in on what has been a largely free software tool. Reuters Group is one of the biggest corporate clients, using Microsoft's IM technology.

AOL has scores of other technology patents, including one for Internet browsing memory tags, or "cookies," and another for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), an application that secures e-commerce transactions. But it has never sought to enforce these.

It has, however, been notoriously protective of its IM technology. It did not permit rivals' proprietary IM applications to communicate with its own AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ for years. It now allows this, albeit in a limited fashion.

The new patent defines AOL's IM application as one that enables users to chat with and identify one another across a specific "communications network," opening up the possibility for AOL to collect royalties from rivals.

Developed in the mid-1990s by a group of Israeli technologists at a company called Mirabilis, ICQ was the first breakthrough chat application. It filed a patent for its technology in 1997 and was acquired by AOL in 1998 for $287 million.

AOL said it has 180 million registered AIM users and 140 million registered ICQ users. The company said 2.1 billion instant messages were sent across its network daily."

Editors Note: The contents displayed herein are property of the Reuters News Service. [°attila]