ACM Convert 1.05
Sunday, April 30th, 2006ACM Convert is a simple to use standalone utility that allows you to convert between MP3 and WAV, using ACM (Microsofts Audio Compression Management API).
Download: ACM Convert 1.05
Archive for April, 2006
PlexTools Professional HDD 3.09
Sunday, April 30th, 2006Plextor is a leading international manufacturer of extremely reliable, high quality recording equipment and is also one of the pioneers in the field of optical disc technology. Since its establishment in 1994, Plextor has introduced a number of award winning products, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, CD/DVD recordable drives, CD/DVD media, USB Flash Memory Drives and Digital Video Converters.
PlexTools is released by Plextor to give extra support to Plextor hardware by enhancing the possibility to directly control specific functions. The standard version was discontinued in April 2003, and replaced by an advanced version: PlexTools Professional.
PlexTools Professional has many excellent features, like hardware tree and direct feedback to our support team as well as more hidden advantages like Direct OverWrite of CD-RW discs and accurate logging of all writing functions.
Download: PlexTools Professional HDD 3.09
'Pentagon hacker' prepares for verdict
Saturday, April 29th, 2006Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who’s due to hear whether he will be extradited to the US on 10 May, rates his chances of avoiding trial in the States as only “50/50″.
McKinnon, 40, faces possible trial under US anti-terror laws over alleged attacks on military and NASA systems between 2001 and 2002.
The unemployed sys admin has had these charges over his head since first been arrested by officers from the UK’s National High Tech Crime Unit in March 2002. The case against him lay dormant until July 2005 since when he’s been unable to find work. Bail conditions mean he’s unable to access the internet except in the course of employment and even then under tight conditions. He is, however, allowed to have a mobile phone.
Lawyers for McKinnon want him to be tried over his offences in the UK rather than the US. “I’m very worried. Whatever happens I’ll have a fight on my hands for the next 18 months or so,” he said. “If I’m sent to the US, I’d face trial in front of a secret military tribunal.”
McKinnon admits he looked at computer systems without permission but claims he did no harm. He got involved in hacking after reading Disclosure by Stephen Grear and becoming convinced that the US had harvested advanced technology from UFOs and was keeping it secret to the detriment of the public. His hacking activities were a means to an end, uncovering evidence that the US had developed anti-gravity and zero point energy devices.
Full story: The Register
IKEA 2006 Office planner
Friday, April 28th, 2006IKEA 2006 Office planner lets you move in a whole new office without getting out of your chair. Drag and drop pieces into a layout, view them in a 3-D view, try different colors, print your design, and see the total cost of your new office from IKEA.
Download: IKEA 2006 Office planner Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, or XP
Add-Ons for Internet Explorer 7
Friday, April 28th, 2006Browser add-ons can help personalize the way you use the Internet. The add-ons available here have been carefully screened by Microsoft and rated by users to help you select the ones that suit your needs and preferences. Start exploring them today.
Intel Active Monitor 1.2.2
Friday, April 28th, 2006Intel?Ç¬Æ Active Monitor is an alerting utility created by Intel and available exclusively on Intel?Ç¬Æ Desktop Boards1. As PCs increase in performance and decrease in size, monitoring the cooling and overall system health becomesmore important. The Intel Active Monitor works with specialized sensors on your Intel Desktop Board to constantly monitor the system’s temperatures, power supply voltages, and fan speeds. If temperatures become extremely hot or asystem fan or power supply fails, the user is immediately notified.
In addition to displaying cooling information, Intel Active Monitor makes it easy for a user to identify the processor type and speed, look up desktop board, chipset, and memory information, and customize the alerts that may begenerated and their thresholds. The Intel Active Monitor utility requires less than 1% of system resources.
Note: Before you upgrade your computer’s operating system to Windows XP, be sure to first uninstall the previous version of Intel Active Monitor as described in the README.txt file.
Note: Users with Intel?Ç¬Æ Pentium?Ç¬Æ 4 processors with 512KB cache or Intel?Ç¬Æ Celeron?Ç¬Æ processors in the 478-pin package should use Intel Active Monitor v1.17 or later for proper processor identification.
Download: Intel Active Monitor 1.2.2
MSN adCenter a Demographic Profile
Friday, April 28th, 2006TORONTO — The holy grail of search marketing is to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time. But is reaching that goal worth the price of user privacy?
Using a mix of analytics and user demographics, Microsoft may well be further along on the quest of search ad nirvana than other search vendors.
In a session at Search Engine Strategies here on targeting search ads, Jason Bailey Search Media Strategist at Microsoft gave the standing-room-only crowd a demonstration of how Microsoft is using user demographics to fuel its new adCenter platform.
The MSN adCenter is Microsoft’s answer to Yahoo Overture and Google AdWords. It has been live in France and Singapore since September and a U.S. pilot has been active since October.
With MSN adCenter, advertisers can find out from a demographic point of view who the people are that are searching for a particular term. They can also find out geographic, as well as time-based information about the searchers.
Bailey explained that with adCenter, advertisers can target their ads by day of the week and also by specific time of day.
Full article: internetnews.com
AMD replacing faulty Opteron chips
Friday, April 28th, 2006Advanced Micro Devices is trying to track down and replace as many as 3,000 faulty Opteron processors that could produce “inconsistent results” under an unusual circumstance.
The potential problem affects a number of single-core Opteron 152, 154, 252, 254, 852 and 854 processors manufactured in late 2005 or early 2006, AMD said Friday. The company hasn’t seen the problem in production use, but has seen it in a test that combines high processor temperature, high outside temperature, and a large number of floating-point mathematical computations.
AMD is working with computer makers to track down the chips and is offering free replacements.
Full story: ZDNet News
SizeMe 2.0.0 Build 1926
Friday, April 28th, 2006SizeMe makes possible to scan a directory and get detailed information back on the number of floppy/zip/CD-R/DVD-discs required to copy the data. It tries to fill each disc up as much as possible, and gives you the result on each disc.
Download: SizeMe 2.0.0 Build 1926
Phishers adding VoIP to their bag of tricks?
Friday, April 28th, 2006Scam emails tell recipients to call in their PIN…
In a new twist on phishing, fraudsters are sending out emails that attempt to trick people into sharing personal information over the phone.
Cloudmark, a San Francisco-based email security company, said it has seen two separate attacks this week. In both cases, the spammed message warns of a problem with a bank account and instructs the recipient to dial a phone number to resolve it, the company said in a statement published on Tuesday.
The caller is connected to a voice response system that is made to sound exactly like the bank’s own system, Cloudmark said.
It added: “The phone system identifies itself to the target as the financial institution and prompts them to enter account number and PIN.”
Full story: silicon.com
Microsoft takes down barrier in Vista firewall
Friday, April 28th, 2006The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant.
When Windows Vista is released early next year its firewall will be set to only block incoming traffic even though it will be capable of blocking outgoing traffic. According to a statement from Microsoft, the firewall’s protection will be curbed in order to make life easier for the company’s enterprise customers.
“Because the nature of an outbound firewall is to restrict the traffic sent to specific ports, the outgoing access in the Windows Vista firewall is open by default,” a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet Australia. “The reason for this is Microsoft has received strong feedback from its customers, especially from large organisations and government departments, saying that they would like to manage this feature from an administrator level.”
Microsoft claims that configuring the Vista firewall to block outgoing connections from rogue applications and malware will require a varying degree of technical knowledge, depending on each user’s security requirements.
Full article: ZDNet Australia
Nokia and MIT to build phones of the future
Thursday, April 27th, 2006Researchers working on speech control and web services
Nokia and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have teamed up to develop the next generation of mobile phones.
The Nokia Research Centre will look at new technologies that can be applied to mass market products rather than experimental technology.
Among the first areas to be developed is Project Simone, which is aimed at using voice commands to control a mobile phone.
Full article: vnunet.com
Norton uninstall tool
Thursday, April 27th, 2006The Norton uninstall tool uninstalls ALL Norton 2004/2005/2006 products from your computer. It also uninstalls Norton Ghost 10.0/9.0/2003.
Download: Norton uninstall tool
Hydranode 0.3
Thursday, April 27th, 2006Hydranode is a modular, plugin-driven peer-to-peer client framework which is designed with true multi-network downloads in mind.
Features
:: Ergonomic, easy-to-use and visually appealing user interface
:: Modular plugin-driven architecture
:: Built-in shell functionality
:: Background daemon mode (only on Linux)
:: Support for eDonkey2000 and Bittorrent networks
:: Support for controlling the core remotely
Download: Hydranode 0.3 Windows, Linux
RoboForm Firefox/Mozilla Adapter 6.9.3
Thursday, April 27th, 2006RoboForm is a free password manager and one-click web form filler with some serious Artificial Intelligence.
What it does:
· AutoSave passwords in browser.
· AutoFill passwords to login form.
· Click Login button for you.
· Fill personal info into online forms.
· Save offline passwords & notes.
· Generate Secure Random Passwords.
· Encrypt passwords and personal data using 3-DES.
· All personal info is stored on your computer only.
· Take RoboForm with you on USB disk for ultimate portability.
· Sync your passwords and notes to Palm or Pocket PC.
· Backup & Restore, Print your passwords.
Roboform is FREE if you have 10 logins or less in it. No Adware. No Spyware.
Download: RoboForm Firefox/Mozilla Adapter 6.9.3
CD Art Display RC4
Thursday, April 27th, 2006CD Art Display (formerly Winamp CD Case) is a free desktop program that shows the current song’s cover in a skinnable display.
Main Features
Skinnable
High quality graphics
PNG transparency support
Reads cover from players database, local folder or ID3v2 tag
Download cover from Amazon.com via built in tool
Cover as system tray icon
Fancy ratings (click to rate)
Progress bar styles
A lot of text options (font, color, outline, shadow etc.)
Hotkeys (including rating ones)
Invisible playback buttons (display bottom area)
Control Panel for easy access to Options and Skin settings
Context help
Free! No spyware or adware!
Requirements: Windows XP and Visual Basic runtime 6.
Download: CD Art Display RC4
Hotmail's new address
Thursday, April 27th, 2006MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–After an hour-long discussion at a status meeting last month, the Hotmail redesign really boiled down to one key decision: one big ad, or two?
After months of reworking the venerable Web mail program, Microsoft’s team had made all the easy fixes: They’d added more colors and even offered a way to make the new Windows Live Mail look just like the old Hotmail.
But sitting around a table in the nondescript Pyre conference room in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley offices, the half-dozen developers and managers couldn’t avoid the thorny issue that remained. A significant number of people believed that the new design had too much space devoted to ads, making it hard to use some of the mail program’s new features.
The ad placement decision may seem minor. But it’s a key one for Microsoft, which is trying to turn Hotmail’s hundreds of millions of casual e-mail users into customers for a wide variety of Windows Live personal services.
Offer too many ads and the company risks alienating users and sending them flocking to rival online services. But if it forsakes the second ad, it risks choking the revenue the business needs to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google.
Full article: ZDNet
KLogicalDrives 1.0.2
Thursday, April 27th, 2006KLogicalDrives is a simple, light and free software to retrieve informations on logical drives and has also standard Windows options to manage them (rename, clean, search on, format and so on….).
It displays, for each logical drive detected, the size (total capacity, used, free), the serial number, file system, max of file length supported, and if it’s the system drive. KLogicalDrives is easy to use: simply select a drive !
The software offers also possibilities to empty recycle bin, copy informations to clipboard, save informations in a text file and to take screen shots.
Informations are refreshed each time you select a drive. They can be manually refreshed (Press “F5″). Transparent window is supported.
Download: KLogicalDrives 1.0.2
Microsoft updates Vista business beta
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006The new code does not add any major new features, but does add some performance improvements and device support
Microsoft has provided some of its current business testers of Windows Vista with a slightly updated beta version.
On Saturday, the computer maker provided some of its Technology Adoption Customer partners and technical beta users with Build 5365. The new code, which Microsoft is calling an “External Developer Workstation”, does not add any major new features, but does add some performance improvements and device support, Microsoft said Monday.
Read more: ZDNet UK
