PORI, Finland, Feb. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The latest release of a cutting-edge Windows utility suite developed by the engineers and researchers at Macecraft Software was announced today. Known as jv16 PowerTools 2011, the new software both advances and refines the popular 2010 version.
This extraordinarily versatile program includes utilities for encryption, privacy management, system optimization, file and directory management and data security. Additionally, jv16 PowerTools 2011 has significantly improved the performance standards of both its registry cleaner and software uninstaller, and has added many features not found in prior versions.
"We have made a number of highly useful additions to the software," said Faisal Habib, spokesman for Macecraft USA. "We truly believe that our latest version is the best optimization and tune-up utility suite on the market today."
Existing customers can take advantage of a special offer to purchase the new jv16 PowerTools 2011 for the discounted price of $5.95, no matter which prior version they're using. "The regular price will be $29.95 for first-time buyers," according to Mr. Habib, "which is still a tremendous value for a product of this quality."
According to Mr. Habib, users of jv16 PowerTools 2011 will experience an improvement in the overall stability of their computers, which keeps computers running faster, smoother and error-free. More details on the features of the new release can be found at http://www.macecraft.com/jv16powertools2011/
"Our engineers have completely re-written the Software Uninstaller," he said. "Its ability to both find and properly remove unwanted programs has been greatly improved, and our new User Action History allows you to see exactly what the program has removed in the past." Additionally, the new version has fine-tuned the Registry Cleaner engine to provide for additional safety and accuracy, and provides detailed information on the specific nature of registry errors.
Other improvements were made to the Clean and Fix My Computer feature, which now also scans for broken shortcuts and unneeded empty folders in the Start Menu and Desktop. The Remove on Reboot feature allows you to delete protected or locked files during the next system startup.
"The Startup Manager is now fully compatible with msconfig," Habib added. "This is very helpful because it means that users can now enable items previously disabled with msconfig - and vice versa."
The new Tag System allows users to tag individual lines, a feature that was not offered on earlier versions.
With headquarters in Finland and offices in Europe and the United States, Macecraft Software is a leading provider of Windows registry and maintenance utilities. Macecraft produces software that has been recognized by tens of thousands of computer users worldwide, from helpdesk professionals to home users, as well as leading computer magazines. Macecraft Software's flagship product, jv16 PowerTools 2011, is available in all the major languages.
For more information, please visit http://www.macecraft.com/ or contact Mr. Faisal Habib at 1 (888) 469-2973.
This press release was issued through eReleases(R). For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at http://www.ereleases.com.
Read also:
http://regrepair.ra5.us/2011/02/23/discover-the-registry-cleaner-that%E2%80%99s-best-for-you/
http://topreg.8ra.org/
середа, 23 лютого 2011 р.
Microsoft removes Autorun from Windows Vista, XP, 2000
Last night, on Patch Tuesday, Microsoft distributed a security fix that disables Autorun with USB drives and other forms of removable storage on Windows Vista, XP and 2000, and Server 2008 and 2003. Windows 7 by default has Autorun disabled for removable storage, so this is just bringing the older OSes into line.
This marks the end of an era, at least as far as worms like Conficker are concerned. Historically, all a virus had to do was place a a very basic Autorun.inf file in the root of a removable drive, and it would be automatically executed upon its insertion. As you can imagine, this was a very, very easy attack vector, and incredibly effective too.
Incidentally, because Microsoft says it hasn't seen an in-the-wild malware attack that uses CDs or DVDs, AutoPlay will still work with "shiny media."
Read also:
http://vitips.8ra.org/
http://vitweaks.6ra.org/2011/02/23/windows-vista-easiest-tweaks-lower-image-effects-to-attain-better-efficiency/
This marks the end of an era, at least as far as worms like Conficker are concerned. Historically, all a virus had to do was place a a very basic Autorun.inf file in the root of a removable drive, and it would be automatically executed upon its insertion. As you can imagine, this was a very, very easy attack vector, and incredibly effective too.
Incidentally, because Microsoft says it hasn't seen an in-the-wild malware attack that uses CDs or DVDs, AutoPlay will still work with "shiny media."
Read also:
http://vitips.8ra.org/
http://vitweaks.6ra.org/2011/02/23/windows-vista-easiest-tweaks-lower-image-effects-to-attain-better-efficiency/
Hasta la Vista, or maybe not
A new member joined our retirement home for ageing laptops. We now have an Acer Aspire complete with Vista.
This is our first time using Vista with it being so badly received by Windows users who preferred to stay with XP. We can see why they didn’t bother to upgrade because on the surface there seems little changed from a user’s point of view.
Ours is Vista Home edition without the translucent layers copied from MacOS X of some years before. Also unseen in our initial poke-arounds, are the many security features and the new shell, moving many commands to the toolbar and so on. What we did note is the enormous amount of updates needed to bring the laptop on from mid-2007 to the present day.
This all had to be done over a wired network because Vista 2007 wouldn’t connect to our Virgin Netgear hub. Rather than placed on the coffee table as we sat watching telly, or more likely, snoozing through the dire new series Outcasts. For some reason 22 people voted it as 9.3 at IMDB and they all had similar names to members of the crew and cast (probably).
In total there were over 100 updates. An initial 89 took an evening to download and install over our 50MBps line. Followed the next day by further updates to updates, installing a new anti-virus and most important of all, new drivers for the wireless card. It all resulted in a reasonable laptop which is no slouch either, considering it is 4 years old.
However, our MacBook from the same year is just as fast and could run Vista as well as Mac OSX if we wanted it to. We checked to see how many updates it had undergone over the same time period and from the total of less than 20, a handful had been for iTunes adding new features and a few security updates but by far they were for Microsoft programs.
Compared with MacOSX Leopard, also released in 2007, is Vista any better? After all, it is now installed on just under 20% of Windows PCs, less than Windows 7 or both combined are less than Windows XP (Wikipedia 2010). Given the choice we wouldn’t run any version and not just because we are Mac fans.
The problem we have with every Microsoft operating system is they are a mess of multi-tabbed dialogue boxes, helpful wizards that just aren’t and leave you high and dry plus Microsoft’s arse-about-face ways to do things. It is like wearing boxing gloves and trying to use chopsticks, you feel you are kept away from the good stuff. For example: the Internet connection wizard could see the network but not get out onto the Internet. Its solution was to suggest keep rebooting the router, which every other Mac, Hackintosh and iPhone could use without a hitch.
Then there is the famed ’user choice’ Windows is supposed to give. In our experience this is just a way to make life more difficult and most of the time the average Windows users we work with haven’t got the faintest idea about changing anything. They still haven’t grasped the concepts of drag and drop or having multiple windows open and visible. If their PC is ‘broke’, IT, 100 miles away, has to fix it, even if it simply just a case of user error.
This article ‘User Choice, Customization and Confusion’ explores whether user customisation is a good thing or not. It might have been written by a Mac programmer.
The author, Mike Gunderloy, is a US-based lead developer and author of 20 or more books on the subject. He comes down firmly in the camp of the default choice which is to offer no choice within an application. Or maybe just a little, à la Apple. Enhancements and customisations can be done via special and often third-party applications. Apple has always maintained this stance, tweaks can be made via the Terminal or by little apps such as Tinkertool and Onyx.
As Mike Gunderloy says: ‘Many applications today expose dozens or even hundreds of customisation options in this way, Microsoft Office applications are prime offenders in this regard.’ We would add their operating systems, too.
Read also:
http://www.musicforte.com/article/music-of-technology/
This is our first time using Vista with it being so badly received by Windows users who preferred to stay with XP. We can see why they didn’t bother to upgrade because on the surface there seems little changed from a user’s point of view.
Ours is Vista Home edition without the translucent layers copied from MacOS X of some years before. Also unseen in our initial poke-arounds, are the many security features and the new shell, moving many commands to the toolbar and so on. What we did note is the enormous amount of updates needed to bring the laptop on from mid-2007 to the present day.
This all had to be done over a wired network because Vista 2007 wouldn’t connect to our Virgin Netgear hub. Rather than placed on the coffee table as we sat watching telly, or more likely, snoozing through the dire new series Outcasts. For some reason 22 people voted it as 9.3 at IMDB and they all had similar names to members of the crew and cast (probably).
In total there were over 100 updates. An initial 89 took an evening to download and install over our 50MBps line. Followed the next day by further updates to updates, installing a new anti-virus and most important of all, new drivers for the wireless card. It all resulted in a reasonable laptop which is no slouch either, considering it is 4 years old.
However, our MacBook from the same year is just as fast and could run Vista as well as Mac OSX if we wanted it to. We checked to see how many updates it had undergone over the same time period and from the total of less than 20, a handful had been for iTunes adding new features and a few security updates but by far they were for Microsoft programs.
Compared with MacOSX Leopard, also released in 2007, is Vista any better? After all, it is now installed on just under 20% of Windows PCs, less than Windows 7 or both combined are less than Windows XP (Wikipedia 2010). Given the choice we wouldn’t run any version and not just because we are Mac fans.
The problem we have with every Microsoft operating system is they are a mess of multi-tabbed dialogue boxes, helpful wizards that just aren’t and leave you high and dry plus Microsoft’s arse-about-face ways to do things. It is like wearing boxing gloves and trying to use chopsticks, you feel you are kept away from the good stuff. For example: the Internet connection wizard could see the network but not get out onto the Internet. Its solution was to suggest keep rebooting the router, which every other Mac, Hackintosh and iPhone could use without a hitch.
Then there is the famed ’user choice’ Windows is supposed to give. In our experience this is just a way to make life more difficult and most of the time the average Windows users we work with haven’t got the faintest idea about changing anything. They still haven’t grasped the concepts of drag and drop or having multiple windows open and visible. If their PC is ‘broke’, IT, 100 miles away, has to fix it, even if it simply just a case of user error.
This article ‘User Choice, Customization and Confusion’ explores whether user customisation is a good thing or not. It might have been written by a Mac programmer.
The author, Mike Gunderloy, is a US-based lead developer and author of 20 or more books on the subject. He comes down firmly in the camp of the default choice which is to offer no choice within an application. Or maybe just a little, à la Apple. Enhancements and customisations can be done via special and often third-party applications. Apple has always maintained this stance, tweaks can be made via the Terminal or by little apps such as Tinkertool and Onyx.
As Mike Gunderloy says: ‘Many applications today expose dozens or even hundreds of customisation options in this way, Microsoft Office applications are prime offenders in this regard.’ We would add their operating systems, too.
Read also:
http://www.musicforte.com/article/music-of-technology/
вівторок, 22 лютого 2011 р.
Einstein beats Watson hands down, say computer experts
CORVALLIS, Ore. – “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination,” wrote Albert Einstein before his death on April 18, 1955, at age 76; while, a new IBM computer named “Watson” is touted to be the new Einstein because it can compute and even read at an incredible rate.
Einstein's brain better than Watson's, say experts
“Watson” is a super computer that’s about the size of “10 refrigerators,” stated its “official biography” issued at the IBM Research headquarters in Yorktown Heights, New York. IBM showcased “Watson” to the world during a recent Jeopardy TV game show program when the machine beat contestants in a duel of trivia. IBM describes Watson’s avatar as “a global map projection with a halo of ‘thought rays’ that flicker and flash when it’s thinking.”
Unlike Einstein, the legendary physics professor and brilliant scientist who played a crucial role in the discovery of nuclear fission – and who was a passionate pacifist who spent the later years of his life agonizing over his part in the creation of the nuclear age – Watson is simply a big computer that turned green when it answered a Jeopardy trivia questions correctly, then orange when it got the answer wrong.
When asked about the coming age of computers, Einstein simply answered “it’s a machine,” and nothing more.
Unlike the human brain that uses chemicals to transmit information, Watson uses massive amounts of electricity through electrical signals. IBM”s biography of Watson states it uses “15 terabytes of RAM, and 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops for 80 trillion operations per second.”
Moreover, Watson can scan the “2 million pages of content in its ‘brain’ in less than three seconds. The system is not connected to the Internet, but totally self-contained,” states IBM.
According to IBM’s senior vice president and director of IBM research, Dr. John E. Kelly III, “We are at a moment where computers and computer technology now have approached humans. We have created a computer system that has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for computers to do.”
Watson is named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. IBM also touts this supercomputer as “one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years.”
Watson’s “brain” contains more than 200 million pages of content, or equal to one million books that were “scanned” into its memory banks.
As for the price tag, IBM states that a “Power 750 server retails for $34,500, and that the 90 Power 750 servers that make up Watson would cost $3 million.”
Watson vs. Albert Einstein
While all this information about IBM's new super computer may sound impressive, a retired computer science professor here at the University of Oregon in Corvallis thinks Watson or any current artificial intelligence machine “could never be another Einstein.”
“First, you have to understand that Watson is not anywhere as complex as a human brain, and certainly not par with Einstein’s brain,” explained Professor Larry Welton. “Also, Watson has no imagination. And, one of Einstein’s most famous quote is: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.’”
Moreover, Watson and the next generation of “thinking computers” can’t solve problems, in the same way as Einstein solved them.
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” explained Einstein during a Princeton University lecture in 1952.
Welton points out that Einstein should know something about Watson and computers in general "since his work helped to make quantum physics possible, and without such work today’s modern technology – to include computers and even Watson – might still be unknown today."
It was in 1905 that Einstein made his famous equation: E=mc2 without the aid of computers, said Welton.
In turn, “Einstein feared these super computers because a machine would not stop to think if it was ordered or programmed to drop a nuclear bomb," he added.
Towards the end of his life, Einstein was also reflective about God as the “plus” in life, and the devil or evil as the “minus.” Einstein also wrote about love and his passion for Nature that he could touch, feel and even smell. Even the powerful supercomputer Watson can do none of these things, state a host of international computer experts about the merits of Einstein "thinking" over what a computer today can achieve.
“When men are engaged in war and conquest,” said Einstein, “the tools of science become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child.”
“The fate of mankind,” he said, “depends entirely on our sense of morality.”
It’s clear that super computers such as Watson have no concept of morality or love. They are not human, but, as Einstein warned, they can harm humans.
Read also:
http://www.3fatchicks.com/diet-blogs/dernen/2011/02/22/accelerate-the-computer-for-the-benefit-of-doing-your-daily-projects-effectively/
Einstein's brain better than Watson's, say experts
“Watson” is a super computer that’s about the size of “10 refrigerators,” stated its “official biography” issued at the IBM Research headquarters in Yorktown Heights, New York. IBM showcased “Watson” to the world during a recent Jeopardy TV game show program when the machine beat contestants in a duel of trivia. IBM describes Watson’s avatar as “a global map projection with a halo of ‘thought rays’ that flicker and flash when it’s thinking.”
Unlike Einstein, the legendary physics professor and brilliant scientist who played a crucial role in the discovery of nuclear fission – and who was a passionate pacifist who spent the later years of his life agonizing over his part in the creation of the nuclear age – Watson is simply a big computer that turned green when it answered a Jeopardy trivia questions correctly, then orange when it got the answer wrong.
When asked about the coming age of computers, Einstein simply answered “it’s a machine,” and nothing more.
Unlike the human brain that uses chemicals to transmit information, Watson uses massive amounts of electricity through electrical signals. IBM”s biography of Watson states it uses “15 terabytes of RAM, and 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops for 80 trillion operations per second.”
Moreover, Watson can scan the “2 million pages of content in its ‘brain’ in less than three seconds. The system is not connected to the Internet, but totally self-contained,” states IBM.
According to IBM’s senior vice president and director of IBM research, Dr. John E. Kelly III, “We are at a moment where computers and computer technology now have approached humans. We have created a computer system that has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for computers to do.”
Watson is named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. IBM also touts this supercomputer as “one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years.”
Watson’s “brain” contains more than 200 million pages of content, or equal to one million books that were “scanned” into its memory banks.
As for the price tag, IBM states that a “Power 750 server retails for $34,500, and that the 90 Power 750 servers that make up Watson would cost $3 million.”
Watson vs. Albert Einstein
While all this information about IBM's new super computer may sound impressive, a retired computer science professor here at the University of Oregon in Corvallis thinks Watson or any current artificial intelligence machine “could never be another Einstein.”
“First, you have to understand that Watson is not anywhere as complex as a human brain, and certainly not par with Einstein’s brain,” explained Professor Larry Welton. “Also, Watson has no imagination. And, one of Einstein’s most famous quote is: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.’”
Moreover, Watson and the next generation of “thinking computers” can’t solve problems, in the same way as Einstein solved them.
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” explained Einstein during a Princeton University lecture in 1952.
Welton points out that Einstein should know something about Watson and computers in general "since his work helped to make quantum physics possible, and without such work today’s modern technology – to include computers and even Watson – might still be unknown today."
It was in 1905 that Einstein made his famous equation: E=mc2 without the aid of computers, said Welton.
In turn, “Einstein feared these super computers because a machine would not stop to think if it was ordered or programmed to drop a nuclear bomb," he added.
Towards the end of his life, Einstein was also reflective about God as the “plus” in life, and the devil or evil as the “minus.” Einstein also wrote about love and his passion for Nature that he could touch, feel and even smell. Even the powerful supercomputer Watson can do none of these things, state a host of international computer experts about the merits of Einstein "thinking" over what a computer today can achieve.
“When men are engaged in war and conquest,” said Einstein, “the tools of science become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child.”
“The fate of mankind,” he said, “depends entirely on our sense of morality.”
It’s clear that super computers such as Watson have no concept of morality or love. They are not human, but, as Einstein warned, they can harm humans.
Read also:
http://www.3fatchicks.com/diet-blogs/dernen/2011/02/22/accelerate-the-computer-for-the-benefit-of-doing-your-daily-projects-effectively/
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