An article in FT cites a recent report about tax levels around the world. Not surprisingly, United Kingdom has one of the highest levels in general and in property it has actually scored the first place.

In property there was a sharp rise in taxation during the last 5-10 years, when the prices were soaring and therefore more properties were affected by the Stamp Duty, which is charged based on value. Other taxes, such as Council Tax, inheritance, capital gains and so on have been adding up to the bill of an average taxpayer.

According to the press release from Mozilla Foundation, there is a new e-mail initiative, which will be developed via a separate entity to be formed by Mozilla and the head of ActiveState.

Given the fact, that Thunderbird is already an impressive and very useful mail client, we can hope for great new features in the future. And the healthy $3,000,000 of funding, provided by Mozilla Foundation will make it quite realistic.

Looks like IMAP support has been added to GMail. More details at Google help center

I haven’t posted much to this site recently. In the future I want to fix that and start publishing more often. I plan to introduce a few new topics, aside from software and finance. In particular, photography and health & fitness will be covered. Stay tuned.

It is not uncommon for the richest people in the world to present themselves with luxury yachts . Billionares, such as Paul Allen, Roman Abramovich, many of the Saudi royal family, are all quite keen of long and well-equipped marine vehicles. These yachts are large and self-contained, providing all the services one can find in a modern house, but wherever his or her owner desires to travel.

I have always thought, that buying a large yacht was just another way to enjoy enormous wealth, but now I think that at least some of the buyers have plans beyond tanning and having good time in different parts of the world. By trying to put myself in billionair’s shoes (unfortunately, only in my dreams), I thought about what I would do, if I had more money that I could possibly spend in 100 years.

I have upgraded my hosting database to MySQL 5. Let’s see whether it gives me any trouble. So far it seems to be much faster, than the previous version.

I was quite impressed by the spellchecking features of Konqueror - the KDE web browser. It highlights misspelled words as you type in web forms. Luckily, there is an extension for Firefox, which gives you similar functionality. SpellBound works for Windows and Linux builds of Firefox. Multiple languages, including English, Russian, German and so on are supported. The version, found on the main site, actually doesn’t support on the fly spellchecking, but if you download the latest development version, it will do it happily. More information can be found here .

Lord Chancellor has delivered his new budget speech for 2007. Surprisingly for many, he promised some tax cuts for businesses and individuals alike. Not surprisingly, most of the money will be recovered from the tax payer using new taxes and elimination of existing allowances. All in all, according to most comments, the speech is more about politics and much less about UK economy.

Ever wondered how to convert a Word document into PDF? Or wanted to share a PowerPoint presentation with a Linux user? You can do it very easily by using PDFCreator - an open source printing driver for Windows operating systems.

I personally use it to convert proprietary Microsoft multi-page TFF files, generated by MS Office scanning tools. I scan quite a lot of documents, and Microsoft Office Document Scanning is very convenient to use, but it is almost impossible to open the generated TIFF files in anything, but MS applications. However, by printing them into PDF, I can easily share them with anyone, and the size is not much different from the original, or sometimes even smaller.

Quite interesting review of Google practices, compared to Microsoft . While reading, don’t forget, that it was compiled by Microsoft people.