Ten Super-Duper Free Tools

I’ve been bingeing on free tools for the last week. Here are a bunch of the best I found.

Greased Lightning Finds

I want you to download and try the Everything search tool. It installs in a minute, and indexes your drive in another minute — and the speed of its finds will blow you away. No, really, this is the fastest thing I’ve ever seen.

My friend Darryl said, “Everything’s search engine only searches file names and folders — it doesn’t index file contents like Windows Desktop Search does. Instead, it indexes the entire hard drive by using the hard disk’s existing USN Change Journal. The result is a tiny program that uses very little resources, is deadly simple to use, and is astonishingly fast. You can find any file virtually instantly.” The question is why Microsoft didn’t use the USN functionality in the Search function built into XP and Vista. (Don’t you love these rhetorical questions for Microsoft?)

Continue reading this story…

Yahoo Share to Likely Shrink in 2009

Definitely not good news for the world’s second biggest search provider. Yahoo is set to lose a chunk of market share over the next year or so, experts say.

This is due to the loss of two toolbar partners: HP, who signed up with Microsoft’s Live Search toolbar early last year; and Acer who silently switched its search provider to Google in October.

That failure could cost the search company about 15 percent of its market share, or about 3 percent in the overall rankings. While the company does admit that the termination of the deals will cause its share to shrink, it told the Wall Street Journal its own internal study showed less of a negative effect.

Losses wouldn’t be realized right away: instead, Yahoo’s share would likely shrink slowly as consumers replace their aging machines. The search provider could even be helped out by the deep recession in the meantime, which has slowed the replacement cycle even more.

Shrinking share could also have another effect: driving Yahoo’s search business into Microsoft’s open arms.  It’s becoming ever more clear that if Yahoo and Microsoft really want to compete with Google, they are going to have to join forces.

Laid-off Virgin Mobile Customers to Get Free Service

Paying bills when you’re laid off can be quite difficult (trust me, I know). If you’re a customer of Virgin Mobile, that is about to get a whole lot easier. The company introduced a service called “Pink Slip Protection,” which offers to pay the phone bill of those who are laid off.

To be eligible, the customer must be subscribed to Virgin’s $49.99 monthly unlimited plan — another new offering from the carrier announced Thursday — and customers of the carrier for at least two months previous. In addition, the customer must also be receiving unemployment benefits.

Several automakers have offered similar assurances to their customers, but this is the first time a cellular phone carrier has offered such a courtesy. It is also a function of ever more desperate companies, realizing that the first thing people do in hard times is clamp down on spending.

As Virgin has no contracts, customers do not lose anything by canceling at will.

The $49.99 unlimited plan represents a $30 price drop from its previous offering, and puts it in line with other budget carriers. There is no text messaging or data included however.

New plans and services will go into effect on April 15.

Reality Trek

In just a month from now, I and millions of other Trekkies will have our behinds firmly planted in movie theater seats,  taking in the latest Star Trek film, directed by Lost’s J.J. Abrams. I can not tell you how excited I am. Just as with Battlestar Galactica, a re-imagining of the series is much needed to make the old show relevant to today’s more demanding audience. The Trek films of the past became campy relics of a bygone period in sci-fi. But for all its period feel, Star Trek is also oddly contemporary. Over the franchise’s four-decade history, the TV series and movies have influenced–or at least predicted–multiple new technologies and gadgets that are either now available or on the way.

So in anticipatory celebration of the eleventh Trek movie, here’s a look at eleven current and emerging technologies that were foreshadowed by the tech of Trek.

Live long and prosper.
Continue reading this story…

U.S. Power Grid Compromised by Cyberspies

Foreign intelligence agents critically infiltrated systems that operate critical U.S. infrastructure, and left behind malicious software that could disrupt and endanger the day-to-day lives of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The paper cites anonymous current and former U.S. intelligence officials in its report. The spies are reported to have been agents of China, Russia, and various unnamed other countries. The officials said that the intruders was a mission to map the U.S. electrical grid and other critical infrastructure, and to cultivate the capability to disrupt that infrastructure during a crisis. I’m certainly not surprised, and U.S. agents have probably done the same thing to other countries.

In my reporting for SD Times, I have spoken with companies that develop software according to the US National Security Agency’s Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) program. EAL is an initiative operated by the National Security Agency to help industry create secure software, and classify existing software. The program is a relatively new public initiative that was born out of the “orange book,” the U.S. military’s once closely guarded guidelines for software security.

To date, only Green Hills Software, a company that develops a specialized operating system called Integrity, has received an acceptably high score on the EAL to address the problem. The NSA is also sponsoring secure programming classes at public universities.

Why is the NSA involving itself in the private sector, you may ask? It needs help. In a recent interview, Rex Black, president of Rex Black Consulting Services, explained to be how software engineers are essentially playing a game of multidimensional chess against hackers.

Black said that a big part of the problem is that modern operating systems (and that includes open-source ones) are constantly evolving and contain tens of millions of lines of code. It is only a matter of time until a defect slips by and is discovered by cybercriminals–or spies – even when the best development practices are followed.

And the technological environment in which an operating system exists is constantly in flux, making it nearly impossible to foresee threats that do not presently exist, but might exist in the future, Black said.

People involved with the EAL effort have told me just how poor the state of infrastructure security is. But fear not, in my research, security industry executives and an NSA official have assured me that President Obama “gets it.”

The reality is that there is an infrastructure crisis, and the WSJ’s hacking report, while troubling, is only a symptom of what ails us. The American Society of Civil Engineers has spent much of the past decade grading the nation’s infrastructure, only to be ignored.

This year, the engineers give the U.S. an overall grade of a D, and estimate that it will take an investment of several trillion dollars to bring states up to code. The stimulus package only goes a small way toward meeting those needs.

It’s time for the U.S to get serious about infrastructure, and yes, it costs money to do these things. That could even require –gasp~-a tax hike to pay for our safety. The work needs to be done, and is long overdue.

Will Wright Leaving — But Still Working With — EA

Fans of Will Wright probably know about his bizarre hobbies. At times, he’s built Battlebots, collected Soviet space program relics and enjoyed a bit of illegal street racing. Those pursuits are probably easier when you’re a legendary game designer, the creative force behind Sim City, The Sims and Spore.

Effective today, Wright is taking his mind off computer games, at least partially, to pursue other creative endeavors. He’s leaving megapublisher Electronic Arts to run the Stupid Fun Club, which he founded in 2001 as a way to build competitive robots and experiment with other non-gaming ideas.

“The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,” Wright said in a press release. “Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms. In my twelve years at EA, I’ve had the pleasure to work alongside some of the brightest and most talented game developers in the industry and I look forward to working with them again in the near future.”

While it’s certainly big news, the headline has more gravity than the story itself. Wright’s comments imply that he’s not totally leaving game design. Furthermore, MTV Multiplayer reports that EA has an equal stake with Wright in Stupid Fun Club — a third investor has a smaller share — plus first rights on any games that emerge from the venture.

If Wright is taking some sort of hiatus from game design, I’ll miss his creative influence on the medium. At the same time, I’m excited to see what happens when he tries to entertain the masses with his other hobbies.

Another New E-Book Platform? Please, No, Stop It!

TheStreet.com is reporting that book-retailing behemoth Barnes & Noble may be hatching a plan to build an e-book device of its own, possibly partnering with Sprint to deliver books wirelessly. I don’t know if there’s anything to the rumor, but it would be stunning if B&N wasn’t formulating some sort of strategy for dealing with the prospect of a world in which most (all?) books are digital. If it doesn’t, it’ll turn into another Blockbuster sooner or later.

If there is a Barnes & Noble e-reader, it’ll have plenty company. There’s Plastic Logic’s upcoming device. Fujitsu is about to release its fancy FLEPia in Japan. Magazine publisher Hearst is working on an e-reader. Rupert Murdoch is making noises about jumping into the market. And then there are the gadgets that are already here: Amazon.com’s Kindle 2, Sony’s Reader, and dark horses such as the iRex iLiad.

All of which leaves me thinking one thing: I wish that the publishing and technology industries would take a deep breath, step back, and declare a moratorium on new e-book gizmos and platforms until they can agree on one file format for e-books that’ll work on every reader. It would be nice if that format was free of copy protection, but I’m willing to settle for DRM as long as it works well, and works with everything,

The books I’ve bought for my Kindle will work on the Kindle and other devices Amazon chooses to support, such as the iPhone. (Which means that even if another company comes up with a gadget that’s ten times better than the Kindle, I’m unlikely to switch,) The books Sony sells work on Sony’s reader. We don’t know what formats a Barnes & Noble e-reader will work with, but I’m guessing it doesn’t want Amazon or Borders selling tomes for its hardware. And so on.

One of the multiple wonderful things about human eyeballs is that they’re compatible with everything you can look at: I’ve got books I’ve owned since I was two that I still pull out from time to time. But e-books that are tied to a particular platform are dead ends: You’ll be lucky if you can still read them five years from now, let alone a few decades into the future.

I cheerfully admit that I’m pretty much ignorant when it comes to what’s going on with open e-book standards. I just know that I’m not going to get too excited about any new e-reader until I know that any digital book or magazine I buy anywhere will work on it…

Twitterers: Don’t Expect Privacy When You Squat a Brand Name.

There is a bit of hub-bub on the net right now over Twitter’s actions surrounding the release of contact information regarding an account that had been registered to the Skype brand name by a former employee of the company. Apparently, the VoIP provider found out that it couldn’t tweet under its own name because somebody already owned it.

The user id @skype was registered to Stephanie Robesky, a former employee of the company who is now with venture capital firm Atomico, started by the former Skype founders. According to her own account, while at the company she registered the name and told someone in marketing “who ignored her,” according to TechCrunch Europe.

Robesky then says she forgot about the account, and only was reminded of her ownership of the account when a Skype employee contacted her about the account. Twitter had released her contact information, which included an @skype.net email address, which obviously was no longer valid.

Continue reading this story…

Microsoft’s Search Engine Way Behind Google? Must be the Name!

The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield has a story up in which Microsoft’s Yusef Mehdi says that blind taste tests the company conducts show that consumers find the results from its Live Search search engine to be indistinguishable from Google results. But when Microsoft slaps the Google logo on Live Search results–in a sort of reversal of its Mojave Project prank–consumers like them better than when they know they’re from Microsoft.

Could be–although I use Live Search enough to know that I don’t find its results indistinguishable from Google’s, or as good. It’s unfair to judge a search engine based on one result, but here’s one that matters to me: If you google search Live Search for “technologizer”, its first result is our terms of service, and the Technologizer home page isn’t even on the first page of links. Every other major search engine manages to figure out that the single best result for “technologizer” is unquestionably www.technologizer.com.

That’s kind of emblematic of my experiences with Live Search, and it’s part of why I don’t go out of my way to use it. And that’s the challenge for Microsoft or any other company that wants to take on Google in search: They have to figure out how to convince consumers to go out of their way to use them.

Microsoft has a long history of changing the names of underperforming products (and sometimes of products that are doing just fine). I can’t remember an instance of the change being a clear improvement, and changing the names of things never makes them better. But in this case, a switch might be in order: Microsoft’s whole “Live” branding initiative has little traction, and it’s just confusing. The Journal’s story says that Microsoft plans to spend a lot of money promoting its search engine in the future, but has no revelations about a name switch to Kumo or Bing or anything else.

But even though either name might be an improvement on Live Search, I already have visions of consumers liking Kumo or Bing search results better when Microsoft tells them that the results are from Google…

So Much for Cheaper Music on Amazon

Well, it didn’t take very long for the other music stores to follow suit after iTunes’ price hike Tuesday. By late evening, both Amazon and Wal-Mart had simarily raised prices on some of their top tracks by 30 cents. Both had priced their tracks at 99 and 94 cents respectively.

Like iTunes, both stores have cheaper tracks too: Amazon will have tracks for 79 and 89 cents, and Wal-Mart will have selected tracks at a price of 64 cents. In either case, though, the number of more expensive tracks in the top 100 are much less than iTunes.

For Amazon, that number is only eight, and Wal-Mart has 17.

5Words for April 8th, 2009

Lotsa news tidbits this Wednesday:

Windows 7 users: happy campers.

More BlackBerry Storm 2 rumors.

Nintendo DS: pocket video player.

Apple sued over touch screens.

200 million people use Facebook.

Almost all e-mail is spam.

More and more Twitterers.

Acer unleashes tons of notebooks.

Better broadband? FCC’s getting going.

Word’s father returns to earth.

.

Is Apple’s 17-Inch MacBook Pro Expensive? Round 2: The Competition Goes Consumer

Last week, I tried to conduct an objective price comparison of 17-inch Apple’s MacBook Pro and similarly-equipped Windows laptops. After I did, my friend Steve Wildstrom of BusinessWeek pointed out one basic problem with such comparisons: They’re impossible. By which he meant that there’s no way to do one that’ll strike everybody as sensible and fair. No matter how hard you try, you can’t configure a Windows PC to precisely match a Mac’s hardware. No two people will ever agree on the relative worth of the multitude of features you examine. Hardware comparisons like the ones I do intentionally ignore the enormously important question of the relative quality of Windows and OS X. Some folks will even contend that any analysis of PCs-vs.-Macs is incomplete without discussion of resale value.

In last week’s story, I came to the conclusion that the MacBook Pro’s pricing wasn’t out of whack with its Windows-based rivals–if there was a “Mac Tax,” it was matched by some of the other machines I looked at. Judging from the almost 200 comments on my story to date, a lot of Windows users thought I was unfair to Windows, and a lot of Mac types thought I gave the Mac short shrift. I choose to take discontent from both camps as a sign that I did a decent job overall. But I wanted to come back and address one gripe that came up repeatedly–that I compared the MacBook Pro against high-end, workstation-class laptops.

I don’t think I made a mistake by doing that. The MacBook Pro is Apple’s highest-end notebook, with specs that were similar in most respects to the Windows systems I compared it to. (And when the Windows machines outclassed it–as some did with graphics, for instance–I noted so.) Several commenters contend that the MacBook Pro is a consumer notebook, but that’s not really right: It’s Apple’s only 17-inch notebook. If you’re a business customer and want a 17-inch Mac notebook, it’s the one you’ll buy.

But the fact remains that most other computer companies divide their product lines into business and consumer lines in a way that Apple doesn’t, and that the consumer systems tend to be cheaper than the top-of-the-line corporate models. So here I am comparing the 17-inch MacBook Pro again–this time against consumer-class models. This isn’t a replacement for my earlier comparison, but a complementary piece. I’m guessing I’ll fail to make everyone happy this time, too, but Lord knows I’m trying…

Continue reading this story…

Kindle Voice Function Adds Accessiblity

The fracas between the Authors’s Guild and Amazon over the Kindle 2 e-book reader’s text-to-speech feature has prompted advocates for the blind and reading-disabled to remind the guild that blind people use technology too.

In a protest outside of the guild’s Manhattan office today, demonstrators urged the guild to cease its campaign to remove text-to-speech from the Kindle. The guild maintains that it goes beyond the publishing rights that Amazon has acquired, and could impact audio book sales.

Amazon has yielded to the guild’s demands, and is permitting the feature to be turned off on a per-title basis. To its credit, the guild has worked out an agreement for the voice feature to always be an option for people with disabilities.

“Authors want everyone to read their books. We’ve been strongly supportive of the rights of the blind and disabled to obtain books…We know how to balance the interests, to make sure there is special access to books for people who need it but still protect markets that authors depend on. Audio-books is one of those markets,” Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, told News.com.

My feeling is that text-to-speech should be broadly available as part of an accessibility pack. While I take Mr. Aiken at his word, today’s protest served to remind the guild that it has an obligation to the blind that transcends its sales and the exercise of its intellectual property rights.

Twitter Will Be Down a Lot More, Count On It.

Us twitterers are used to seeing Mr. Failwhale. We’ll be getting accustomed to seeing him a lot more if the traffic statistics released by comScore late Tuesday are any indication. Traffic to the microblogging site has nearly doubled in just the past 60 days.

Worldwide, nearly 10 million unique visitors came to Twitter during the month of February, up from around 5 million in December 2008. Year over year, the service has registered a 700 percent increase in traffic, says comScore.

Some may think our youth are driving this growth as they seem to be the most apt to employ social networking tools. That is not true, says the firm. The majority of the growth in Twitter is being driven by the 25-54 age group, with the 45-54 segment the most likely to be visiting the site.

That may seem odd to many, but consider the rapid growth in twittering by professionals. It’s a pretty safe bet that most of these folks are above the age of 25, and many will likely be quite a bit beyond that.

comScore doesn’t have data ready for March yet, but it says it appears to be another “huge” month for Twitter.

Either way, the increased strain of more tweets is likely going to bring the failwhale around much more often. While the site has made some effort to improve capacity and its code, its no escaping the system was not built for the way users employ it (the company itself has admitted that fact).

Iraq War Video Game: Appropriate?

Quick, think of a knee-jerk reaction: A game based on the war in Iraq, insightful culture or crass cash-in?

Okay, now let’s think about it a little bit.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Konami is preparing a video game based on the Iraq conflict, called Six Days in Fallujah, but it wasn’t the publisher’s idea. The concept comes from a group of U.S. Marines who survived the Second Battle of Fallujah, which occurred in 2004 and left 38 troopers and an estimated 1,200 insurgents dead. Raleigh, N.C.-based Atomic Games, a company with experience designing combat software for the military, will design the game.

The marines want their story to be told through video games, and that goes a long way towards legitimizing the game in my book. One marine named Mike Ergo tells the Times that video games “communicate the intensity and gravity of war” to people — young ones, likely — who aren’t learning about it on TV or in the classroom, and aren’t as tuned in to books. (Ergo says we live in an age where the imagination isn’t what it was.) Video games it is, then.

But does that mean games are the best medium for Six Days in Fallujah? Put aside the idea that video games are more of an entertainment platform than film and books, because that’s debatable; even watching Saving Private Ryan is entertainment on some level, an escape into another world. I’d also like to ignore the knee-jerk detractors, such as the veterans calling for a ban on the game because that’s just ridiculous.

The real issue that Atomic Games will face deals with the very nature of what games are. Like binary code, video games do not play well with gray area, and that’s where so much of real drama lies. Bioshock, hailed as a pillar of artistic game design, places its moral stock in a simple decision with clear-cut ramifications — kill the Little Sisters and steal their powers, or save them for a delayed reward. Mass Effect transforms your character into a Paragon or Renegade based on your actions, but there are no facets to the character’s personality. For game designers, moving beyond “good and bad” hasn’t been easy.

So Atomic Games has the unenviable challenge of portraying the gray areas of war. I hope they pull it off, but I won’t rush to judgment.

Segway, GM Team on “PUMA”

Most of us will remember the incredible buzz surrounding the launch of the original Segway. Well the company is at it again, this time teaming with struggling automaker GM on a two-person seated device being dubbed “Project PUMA.”

While its not the way out of bankruptcy for GM, it certainly shows that the company is continuing to look for innovative ways to advance its business. Teaming with Segway is obviously one way that can be done.

The device is much faster than the Segway HT’s, allowing for a top speed of 25 to 35 mph over a range of up to 35 miles. It is maneuverable in much the same way the HT was, through dynamic stabilization, and produces zero emissions as it runs completely off of an on-board lithium-ion battery.

On-board controls would provide information on speed, battery charge, traffic and other information, which would be detachable in the form of a PDA for off-vehicle use.

In a Jetsons-like move, GM and Segway will also test vehicle-to-vehicle communications and sensors to detect objects and obstacles, allowing for automated driving while the driver can perform other tasks. This would also make it impossible to crash.

While some may ask what GM is doing risking itself on an unproven market, executives told USA Today that the partnership predated the bailouts by about a year and a half.

Still, you can’t fault the company for at least attempting to innovate. No pricing was immediately announced. GM said it hopes to start production on the PUMA in 2012. Tests of the device would first take place in New York City, the two companies said.