Interesting and useful information for the computer geek inside us all. If you like reading about Apple Computers or Microsoft and their software then this is the Blog for you! I also cover Green Tech and Digital Photography as well as FOREX & Futures trading. In addition you will find Travel topics are covered here as well.
"Microsoft's new antimalware solution, Microsoft Security Essentials, is now available for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Ars puts MSE through its paces and finds an unobtrusive app with a clean interface that protected us in the dark corners of the Internet.
After a short three-month beta program, Microsoft is officially releasing Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), its free, real-time consumer antimalware solution for fighting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans. MSE is yet another layer of defense the company is offering to help its customers fight the threats that plague Windows PCs.
Microsoft Security Essentials is available for Windows XP 32-bit (8.61MB), Windows Vista/7 32-bit (4.28MB), and Windows Vista/7 64-bit (4.71MB). The final build number is 1.0.1611.0. Microsoft warns that MSE should not be installed alongside any other antimalware application. Indeed, MSE's installer disables Windows Defender completely, which makes sense as it is a sort of superset to Windows Defender. It builds upon Windows Defender by offering both real-time protection and on-demand scanning for all types of malware."
Computerworld - "A network of Russian malware writers and spammers paid hackers 43 cents for each Mac machine they infected with bogus video software, a sign that Macs have become attack targets, a security researcher said yesterday.
One example, which has since gone offline, was Mac-codec.com, said Samosseiko. "Just a few months ago it was offering [43 cents] for each install and offered various promo materials in the form of Mac OS 'video players,'" he said."
When Apple first switched to Intel chips, allowing users of new Macs to virtualize Windows on their machines, much of the business companies like Parallels saw was from experienced Mac users who needed to also use Windows. Now, more of its sales go to PC-to-Mac switches who don't want to cut ties with Windows just yet, and a new edition of Parallels addresses those customers directly.
By John P. Mello Jr. MacNewsWorld 09/21/09 4:00 AM PT
As with other versions of Parallels Desktop, Switch-to-Mac includes the cabling and software to transfer an existing Windows setup from a PC to a Mac and run both systems in an integrated environment. That means running a Windows application from the Mac desktop is as simple as clicking an icon.
"You don't have to think about which operating system you're working in," Prestele said. "When you click on a Windows application, it launches. It actually launches faster with Parallels desktop than it does on a PC."
Windows integration is part Apple's subtle strategy to expand its corporate presence. That strategy includes leveraging the popularity of its iPhone and iPod products into home computer sales. Those home sales, in turn, are being converted into a workplace presence.
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - September 21, 2009 - Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX) today began global shipments of the world’s fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive – Barracuda® XT, a 7200RPM product featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface. The 3.5-inch desktop drive, the industry’s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface, meets the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications while delivering the highest performance in its class.
The introduction of the Barracuda XT drive marks the shift to the next generation of desktop computing speed as Seagate doubles the storage bandwidth of current computers.
“Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date.”
The Barracuda XT product, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second – for all PC applications, maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The hard drive’s SATA 6Gb/s interface enables system builders using SATA 6Gb/s drive controllers to build high-performance desktop PCs, full-tilt gaming rigs, and home and small business servers, and its 64MB cache optimizes burst performance and data transfer speeds.
“Marvell is pleased to be announcing the industry’s first commercially available SATA 6Gb/s solution and working with Seagate to introduce this technology,” said Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, vice president of Marketing, Business Storage Group at Marvell. “Marvell has been working with a broad group of partners and customers to bring this solution to market. As early adopters of Marvell’s SATA 6Gb/s technology, both ASUS and GIGABYTE offer motherboards to complement SATA 6Gb/s hard drives.”
Why You Should Never Talk to The Police, with out your lawyer or immunity "Dont talk to the Police" is the word of advice of a Professor in law, and a former Criminal Defense Attorney share their views and experiences on the law"
Example Reasons 1) There is no way they can help you. You can not talk your way out of getting arrested. 2) Police cannot testify to your benefit at trial. See Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2)(A). Police can only testify against you. 3) Even if your are totally innocent you will always give information that may be used to convict you (wrongly).
4) Police are not your best friend, priest or buddy they are paid to arist
"Kara Lynn has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., which has attacked the muscles around her mouth and throat, removing her ability to speak. A couple of years ago, she spent more than $8,000 to buy a computer, approved by Medicare, that turns typed words into speech that her family, friends and doctors can hear.
Under government insurance requirements, the maker of the PC, which ran ordinary Microsoft Windows software, had to block any nonspeech functions, like sending e-mail or browsing the Web.
Dismayed by the PC’s limitations and clunky design, Ms. Lynn turned to a $300 iPhone 3G from Apple running $150 text-to-speech software. Ms. Lynn, who is 48 and lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said it worked better and let her “wear her voice” around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son, Aiden, who has Down syndrome.
Medicare and private health insurers decline to cover cheap devices like iPhones and netbook PCs that can help the speech-impaired, despite their usefulness and lower cost.
Instead, public and private insurers insist that, if Ms. Lynn and others like her want insurance to pay, they must spend 10 to 20 times as much for dedicated, proprietary devices that can do far less.
The logic: Insurance is supposed to cover medical devices, and smartphones or PCs can be used for nonmedical purposes, like playing video games or Web browsing.
Disease experts say companies like DynaVox and Prentke Romich make many sophisticated, helpful products. Still, advocates argue, advances in computing and easy-to use speech software have opened doors to use cheap mainstream alternatives. Indeed, the price drops have made it possible for A.L.S. assistance groups to buy dozens of netbooks, install specialized software like Proloquo2Go and lend them to clients."
Once again, we have taken a look at the new iPod nano to see if its new features are cool enough to keep it at the top of Apple's bestseller list. And, since video is one of the nano's major new features, we compared its video quality to other pocket video cameras.
The new nano (fifth generation, for those keeping count) is very similar to the fourth-generation version. What differentiates the 5G nano, however, are a few major feature additions plus a handful of refinements intended to keep the nano on everyone's stocking stuffer list.
Quick look at what's new
If it weren’t already plainly obvious, the major new feature of the fifth nano is the addition of a video camera. That alone could have probably justified the new device, but Apple went a few steps further, leveraging existing (but latent) capabilities already on the nano to add several other features. These include a full-featured FM tuner application, a pedometer, a Nike+ receiver, VoiceOver support, and a voice notes application.
Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple's new OS offering to see what's new, what's still the same, and whether it's worth upgrading.
In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealedMac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin. Apple's marketing campaign reflected this, touting "over 150 new features."
All those new features took time. Since its introduction in 2001, there had been at least one major release of Mac OS X each year. Tiger took over a year and a half to arrive. At the time, it definitely seemed worth the wait. Tiger was a hit with users and developers. Apple took the lesson to heart and quickly set expectations for the next major release of Mac OS X,Leopard. Through various channels, Apple communicated its intention to move from a 12-month to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X. Leopard was officially scheduled for "spring 2007."
As the date approached, Apple's marketing machine trod a predictable path.
Apple even went so far as to list all 300 new features on its website. As it turns out, "spring" was a bit optimistic. Leopard actually shipped at the end of October 2007, nearly two and a half years after Tiger. Did Leopard really have twice as many new features as Tiger? That's debatable. What's certain is that Leopard included a solid crop of new features and technologies, many of which we now take for granted. (For example, have you had a discussion with a potential Mac user since the release of Leopard without mentioning Time Machine? I certainly haven't.)
Mac OS X appeared to be maturing. The progression was clear: longer release cycles, more features. What would Mac OS X 10.6 be like? Would it arrive three and a half years after Leopard? Would it and include 500 new features? A thousand?
At WWDC 2008, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as "unprecedented" in the PC industry.
That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.
This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.
Many of these same developers applauded the "150+ new features" in Tiger and the "300 new features" in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?
It probably helps to know that the "0 New Features" slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ("well, there is one new feature...") slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, "no new features" may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.
The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: "We're adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we're going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We're not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we're going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers."
"Another week, another lax Mac OS X security FUD emanating from the usual quarters, making the risible claim Apple’s platform is inherently less secure than Windows.
Story goes like this: The hacker who successfully broke into a Mac at a hacker’s conference some time ago has tested Snow Leopard against WIndows 7, and accuses the Mac OS as being “less secure” than Microsoft’s Vista upgrade.
Charlie Miller is one of the team from Independent Security Evaluators who successfully "pwned and owned" an Apple MacBook Air, in a hacking contest sponsored by TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative."
"He conveniently forgets all of the other security features in Snow Leopard. Why doesn't he touch on: - stack frame protection - code injection protection - automatic replacement of common C functions (e.g. srtcpy) with hardened versions - heap consistency checks - the reduction in setuid executables His opinion on ASLR is valid, but extrapolating that to the overall security of the OS is garbage."
MacForensicsLab Field Agent is the first and only freely available (to law enforcement) tri-platform tool designed specifically to help combat Crimes Against Children. It offers investigators a powerful yet easy to use tool with a skin tone analyzer that makes finding images of child pornography fast and easy.
The ability to quickly and effectively identify files of interest based on the percentage of skin tone contained therein makes MFL-FA an invaluable tool for law enforcement. In fact, MFL-FA was specifically designed to fill the technological gap that sexual predators have exploited for years; the lack of a fast and accurate way to identify images of evidentiary value amidst the seemingly insurmountable volume of data. Therefore, MFL-FA is perfectly suited for any Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, probation and customs officers and/or any officers dealing with sexual predators. MFL-FA is the answer for all those seeking to gain the advantage over sexual predators who use technology in furtherance of their criminal acts.
Law enforcement only
To order your copy of this freeware tool please click on the "buy now" button at the bottom of this page. There is no charge whatsoever for this software but we do require the name of your agency, and some way to contact you.
You will be provided a serial number for MacForensicsLab Field Agent for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux via email. It is therefore important to ensure your email address is input correctly.
Designed for non-technical personnel, Field Agent can be run in three easy steps; there is no rebooting, troubleshooting or complex interfaces. Utilizing the computer's USB port, it can run natively on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux to search suspect drives and devices. By quickly providing images relevant to an investigator's interests (typically under 2 minutes), MacForensicsLab Field Agent is an invaluable tool to all law enforcement. Field Agent has the ability to export files of interest or generate an HTML report with thumbnails, path and date information of any or all files.
Typical deployment of MFL-FA is less than two minutes per machine, making it an invaluable tool for locating data of interest and increasing officer safety. Further, MFL-FA has the ability to export files of interest or generate an HTML report with thumbnails, path and date information of any or all files.
MacForensicsLab Inc. makes Field Agent freely available to all law enforcement. To acquire a serial number for MacForensicsLab Field Agent, please submit the request form (purchase order, for a zero cost purchase, no credit cards or payment required) using a law enforcement email address. Field Agent contains just a small subset of the features available in MacForensicsLab. If you like Field Agent, checkout MacForensicsLab for the most powerful cross-platform digital forensic suite available.
Using remote access software, a Miami man helps cops track down and recover his two stolen laptops.
"This is a true story about sex, computers, the Internet, spying, theft, intrigue, and the police--and it all began this past February when David Krop made the mistake of leaving his two laptop computers inside a locked SUV in a parking garage.
While Krop, 41, attended a brief business meeting in downtown Miami Beach, Florida, a smash-and-grab thief stole the two laptops, a Toshiba and an Apple Macbook. When he returned to his SUV, Krop saw the shattered passenger window and realized that his computers were gone.
"It's just a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach," Krop, a vice president of marketing at Nationwide Diabetic says. He reported the theft to the police, who were not optimistic the laptops would be recovered. Then he drove home, thinking about the personal data stored on his laptops. He had never planned for a catastrophic event like this--in fact, he hadn't even bothered to set up a user password to shield the laptops' contents.
When he got home, though, Krop remembered that he had installed a trial version of remote access software called LogMeIn on his Toshiba laptop. LogMeIn is designed to allow a user to access the desktop of a remote PC; it doesn't have laptop recovery features of the type you'd find on, say, Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops. Connecting to his stolen laptop might be a long shot, but it was the only shot he had."
The new Apple iPod touch uses a Wi-Fi chip that can support the just-approved high-throughput 802.11n standard, though Apple apparently has not switched on the cranked-up wireless link.
If it does, the iPod touch (which is almost identical to the iPhone but lacks the 3G cellular radio) could support a 50Mbps data rate, more than twice that of the current 802.11ag radios used by the product family.
Apple last week lowered the price for the original 8GB iPod Touch and introduced two new higher-priced models, with 32 and 64Gbytes of memory respectively.
The chip inside is the Broadcom BCM4329, announced last December, the first Broadcom 11n product designed for mobile devices. The single chip combines 802.11n with 802.11abg, Bluetooth, and FM radio. It runs in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. Full details are in the company’s data sheet for the chip.
The chip was discovered during a step-by-step disassembly of a brand-new 32GB iPod touch byiFixit, a Web site founded in 2003 by a pair of Cal Poly tinkerers, to help other people tinker with their electronics.
They discovered the Broadcom chip at step 14. An enlarged image shows the Broadcom name and chip identification.
The latest update to iTunes is such a drastic change that many users are scratching their heads trying to figure out where everything is and how to work it.
Sure, if you just want to hit Play, you're good to go, but if you're looking for the alleged ringtones Steve was talking about, or how to share your music via Twitter and Facebook, it's not that cut and dry.
We jumped right into iTunes and hopefully, this list of tips will help you get back to enjoying your music while basking comfortably in the new features of iTunes 9.
SAN FRANCISCO--Though technically he returned to work two months ago, it was as the host of Wednesday's Apple music event that Steve Jobs publicly retook the reins of the company he founded.
Microsoft releases the new LifeCam Cinema Aluminum body webcam that is capable of true 720p HD video capturing at up to 30fps. The LifeCam Cinema features Auto Focus, a high-precision glass element lens, ClearFrame image-processing technology for smooth, detailed video, even in low light conditions, and integrated digital microphone. It's similar in looks to the old Apple iSight and unlike the iSight it does not use FireWire rather it uses USB 2.0. The LifeCam requires a beefy computer to get the best performance: Intel Dual-Core 3.0 GHz or higher, 2 GB of RAM.
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