I’ve recently reformatted my laptop’s hard drive and reinstalled Windows because it was getting a bit slow and also unstable. Well I normally install and test software on my desktop computer but sometimes I am too lazy to boot it up so I ended up installing it on my laptop. This time I am very careful on what I install because I do not want to slow it down and then had to reinstall windows and set it up all over again. It’s not difficult, just time consuming…
Weirdly after using the laptop for a few weeks, a problem started to appear that is the computer sort of hangs for a while about 10 seconds whenever I right click on a file or folder. I checked Windows Task Manager and there isn’t any process that shows any high CPU usage during that 10 seconds. I didn’t think it was virus because I could not find any suspicious autostart entries.
The only extra context menu I see when I right click on a file or folder is PowerArchiver, RightLoad, NotePad++ and SmartFTP. So I disabled the context menu from the software itself (most software has the options to disable right click context menu) for all 3 software. Now the right click is totally clean without any extra context menu but it is still slow. Then I remembered NirSoft has a Shell Extension Manager for Windows called ShellExView, which perhaps I can use that to view any hidden context menu. I downloaded it, ran it and ShellExView instantly showed me more than 200 items on the list. It was easy to check because there is a column called “Type” in ShellExView which will group all the Context Menu together. Then there is another column called “Microsoft” which makes it even easier for you to determine which context-menu doesn’t belong to Microsoft. Moreover by default the Non Microsoft context menu are marked for easier identification.
What I did was right click on the ShellExView and select “Disable Selected Items” to disable one of the Non Microsoft shell menu extension and then try to right click on a folder/file. I repeated the steps above until I found that the culprit was “PowerArchiver Shell Extensions”. It is weird that even after I’ve disabled PowerArchiver’s “Use Explorer Shell Extensions” from the program’s configuration, the PASHLEXT.DLL file which is responsible for the context menu is actually still loaded, enabled and causing the right click to be very slow! ShellExView is definitely a keeper. Moreover it’s portable, small and it’s free.
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New internet piracy law comes into effect in France
The law was passed after a long struggle in parliament, and in the teeth of bitter opposition from groups opposed to internet restrictions.
Illegal downloaders will be sent a warning e-mail, then a letter if they continue, and finally must appear before a judge if they offend again.
The judge can impose a fine, or suspend their access to the internet.
The Creation and Internet Bill set up a new state agency - the Higher Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (Hadopi).
The law was backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy and the entertainment industry.
Many opponents
Its supporters say it is a model for other countries around the world that want to protect their creative industries and make clear to ordinary web-users that not everything is for free.
Michel Thiolliere, a French senator and member of the Hadopi, says that if the law is explained properly, then people understand it.
"The internet is a fabulous world, but it needs rules, if you want to get cinema, music or video games in the future.
"What we think is that after the first message... about two-thirds of the people (will) stop their illegal usages of the internet.
"After the second message more than 95% will finish with that bad usage."
The law has many opponents, who say either that it is too draconian, or that it has already been overtaken by technology and that serious downloaders will simply sidestep it.
But for supporters, it is a long-overdue necessity.
For them, it is a way of reminding law-abiding citizens who have been tempted by an abundance of apparently free material available on the web, that it does come at a price.
By : BBC New
Impact of ‘iSlate’ Could Rival iPhone
LONDON — You don’t need a crystal ball, seer stone, scrying pool or any other spooky stuff to guess what one of the most talked-about design projects of 2010 will be. The tech blogs have been buzzing about it for months. It’s the iSlate, iTablet, iProd, Magic Slate, or whatever else Apple finally decides to call its new tablet computer.
We’ve been here before: three years ago, to be exact. The drill was the same. Months of frenzied blogging culminated in ecstatic cheers on Jan. 9, 2007, when Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, brandished a prototype iPhone before an adoring audience of Apple nuts at a convention in San Francisco.
What’s happened since? Not only has Apple sold tens of millions of iPhones, it has pulled off a stunningly successful exercise in design democracy whereby thousands of D.I.Y. designers have developed applications, or programs, for them. Some 100,000 “apps” have been invented, and more than two billion downloaded from Apple’s App Store. What’s almost more impressive is that Apple has achieved this despite its own history — and instincts — as the consummate corporate control freak.
Mr. Jobs is expected to show off the iSlate (as we’ll call it, if only because that’s the latest rumor) in San Francisco later this month. If the bloggers are right, it will hit the stores in March. At the risk of party-pooping, we should note that not every new Apple product has been a hit. Remember the Newton PDA? Or the G4 Cube computer? But if the iSlate is another of the company’s successes, it promises to have as much impact as the iPhone, if not more.
It’s that tantalizing possibility of “more” that puts it on the top of the design agenda for 2010. There are other contenders, despite the recession. The automotive industry will discover whether its investment in electric cars has paid off when the Nissan LEAF and other zero-emissions vehicles go on sale. Vitra, the Swiss furniture group, will experiment with new ways of designing the home in the VitraHaus, a model modern house built by the architects Herzog & de Meuron at Vitra’s headquarters in Weil am Rhein, Germany. And a proposal to help consumers monitor their environmental impact by introducing a global system of identifying the carbon and water footprints of products and their packaging is to be discussed at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, later this month.
Even so, the iSlate is particularly interesting, not only because of that promise of “more,” but because it sums up so much of what’s happening in design now.
The iSlate would probably be successful simply by dint of being Apple’s first tablet computer. Ever since the non-profit organization One Laptop Per Child showed how cute a small version of the laptop could be when it unveiled the first prototype of its XO machine in 2005, tablet computers have been one of the fastest growing areas of the computer market. That wasn’t OLPC’s intention. Fuseproject, the San Francisco design group that develops its hardware, reduced the computer’s size in the hope of making it cheap enough for developing countries to buy for their schools. Spawning a profitable new product category for the I.T. industry wasn’t part of the idealistic agenda.
Accidental though it was, consumers have leapt at the chance to buy computers that are not only smaller than laptops, but lighter and cheaper too. Apple may be a late entrant to the market, but there is no reason to believe that its designers won’t be able to replicate their past success at battling against the laws of physics to produce a tablet that’s sleeker, lighter and generally hotter than anyone else’s, so much so that people will be willing to pay more for it.
The outcome of that battle will be even more important when it comes to the “more” element of the iSlate. Like many new digital devices, it will combine several products in one. An extreme example is the iPhone. It fulfills the functions of dozens of products including a watch, diary, alarm clock, barometer, satellite navigation system, Internet browser, dictionary, DVD player and MP3 player as well as a phone, and that’s before we come on to those 100,000 apps. The iSlate will do lots of that stuff too, as well as basic computing. Critically it will also act as an electronic reader, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.
Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.
By : nytimes.com
New visa proposal to help create the next big thing
Congressman Jared Polis has proposed a start-up visa to entice "foreigners with good ideas" to stay in the US.
The issue has been gathering steam in Silicon Valley where half of all tech company founders are immigrants, according to Duke University research.
The idea is part of a proposed overhaul of the US immigration system.
"Every day the American economy is losing ground - not to mention high-tech jobs and technologies - to India and China because foreign-born entrepreneurs cannot secure a visa to stay in the US," he said.
Lost opportunity
Eric Diep, who has just turned 22, could be regarded as one entrepreneur who got away.
He came to Silicon Valley as a student like many immigrant founders who have helped start companies such as Google and PayPal.
Mr Diep was one of the first developers to get into social games with his application called Quizzes, initially launched on the social networking site Facebook.
 Google, Pfizer, Yahoo and eBay were in-part founded by immigrants |
Over a year ago he started to apply for a visa to allow him to carry on working in the Valley, but he soon encountered problems.
"The reason it was so difficult for me was because I dropped out of university and the stipulation for a lot of visas is undergraduate experience. My age also seemed to be an issue for the attorneys
"At the beginning it wasn't the expense in terms of legal fees but the big problem soon became one of distraction. I was trying to spend as much time working on perfecting my product but then I would have to go away and figure out the legalities of applying for the visa," Mr Diep told BBC News.
In the end, Mr Diep decided to base himself in his native Canada and travel back and forth to Silicon Valley.
"The flying is so tiring between the two places and it's expensive. At one point, I had no money left in my bank account but at the last minute money came in and now I feel pretty fortunate that I can still do this.
"It was a pretty close call," he added.
He backs a start-up visa because, for him, being in Silicon Valley is where he needs to be.
"Being there at the time really launched me. I would never have spotted the social gaming opportunity had I not been there."
Visa details
The start-up visa is aimed at streamlining the country's EB-5 visa system which was initially introduced in 1990 to attract foreign capital to the US.
Each year 10,000 EB-5 visas are available but to get one, applicants need to invest $1m and create 10 full-time jobs.
Mr Polis said he wants "a new class of eligibility" with the start-up visa.
 The new visa would require $100k-$250k in venture capital funding |
It would be granted to foreign entrepreneurs if their business plan attracts either $250,000 from a venture capital operating company that is primarily US based or $100,000 from an angel investor.
They must also show that the business will create five to ten jobs or generate a profit and at least $1m in revenue.
Some of these requirements may well be changed when the bill goes to committee in the new year.
"Immigration reform is a big discussion in Washington," said supporter Brad Feld, who is also a managing director with venture company the Foundry Group.
"We think the start-up visa is an easy thing to talk about and get consensus around in terms of having a positive spin on entrepreneurship and creating jobs."
Job creation
Some critics fear that making it easier for entrepreneurs to set up shop will hurt Americans by taking jobs away from them.
"I feel incredibly strongly that that is a misinterpretation of the proposal," said Eric Ries a venture advisor and author.
 Start-up companies are needed to boost the economy say backer of the visa |
"Some people have called those opposed to new immigration reform xenophobes and that is why I think it is important we craft this proposal so it addresses those concerns. This is not a new visa category but reform of an existing but flawed category," he told BBC News.
The proposal's backers say that far from taking away jobs, new jobs will emerge that were never there in the first place.
"If the capital is available for the market, we should jump to bring those people here. Those jobs only get created once the founders get funded. This is a market driven decision," said Dave McClure, an internet entrepreneur, investor and start-up advisor.
YouNoodle is a start-up company founded by two British entrepreneurs. It tracks the start-up sector and said the figures speak for themselves.
"If just ten thousand start-up visas were made available this would mean over 3000 additional new innovative and funded companies would be based in the US every year," said Kirill Makharinsky, YouNoodle co-founder.
"They would generate more than 10,000 jobs on average every year. In the first 10 years that would add up to over 500,000 highly-skilled new jobs
"So the upside is huge and the downside is negligible because no jobs are being taken away from US citizens," Mr Makharinsky told BBC News.
And for Mr McClure, the consequences of not establishing a start-up visa class are obvious.
"We will lose out because we are not being competitive with the rest of the world," he said.
"There are similar programmes in Canada, the UK and Australia. They are all vying for the top entrepreneurs and if we only look at our own citizens, we are only taking 10-20% of the world's talent into consideration here. That would be short-sighted in the extreme."
by : BBC
Difference Between the Free and Paid Version of Rising Antivirus 2009
Yesterday I read a post in forum saying that the free and paid version of Rising Antivirus 2009 is exactly the same. I second that because I did a quick comparison a few months ago and found that they don’t have much differences. If you go to the RISING FREE Antivirus homepage, it says that the latest Rising Antivirus Free Edition has the same service and function as Rising Antivirus 2009 paid version, but there are some four differences which is:
1. Information centre service: The free edition has an information centre window in its main interface where it displays the latest news of company. As for the paid version, there is no such window.
2. Update Service: RISING paid version product gets update through high speed update server each day, but Rising Antivirus Free Edition product does not.
3. Fast response technical support
for paid version and limited support for free edition.
4. Licensed users gets Rising Firewall for free.
Basically only the first two points are the differences in the software. The third and the fourth point are extra benefit/service offered by RISING to their customers. The paid version of RISING Antivirus cost USD$19.95 per year and let’s see if it is really worth the money or not.
I downloaded both paid and free version of RISING Antivirus 2009 and tested it one at a time. Both the program folders has the exact same files. So I thought that maybe the registry is the place where it determines if the program is recognized as the free or paid version. I analyzed the registry keys created by RISING and also found not much difference.
I had to go deeper by monitoring the installation with SysTracer and Total Uninstall. This time I found that RISING Antivirus created some files at the application data folder. This path is being used by some software to stores its settings and configuration. If you go to %appdata%\Rising\Rav folder, there is a file RsConfig.cfg that determines if the program should be a free or paid version. If you copy the RsConfig.cfg file from the free edition to the paid version, the paid version instantly turns into a free version. Vice versa. This RsConfig.cfg file is encrypted and not editable by text editor or hex editor. You also cannot delete the RsConfig.cfg file. Once it’s gone, the program will treat it as corrupted and wants you to reinstall again. That’s about the “information centre service” window.
Next, I’ve used URLSnooper to check on the URLs that RISING Antivirus connects to get the latest program updates and virus definitions. Both versions first connects
to rsup09.rising.com.cn to get a few xml files to compare if the computer has the latest virus definitions. When it requires to download the definitions, both version connects to down.rising-global.com.
This shows that point number 2, “RISING paid version product gets update through high speed update server each day, but Rising Antivirus Free Edition product does not” is fake.
If you ask, why is it that the installer for paid version is 5MB bigger than the free version? That’s because the installer for paid version is compiled with a newer engine and virus definition so you don’t need to spend as much time as the free version in updating after installation.
Since I never reviewed RISING Antivirus 2009 before, here are some little information about it. After installing RISING Antivirus 2009, there will be an extra 6 processes namely CCenter.exe, RavMonD.exe, RavTask.exe, rsnetsvr.exe, RsTray.exe and ScanFrm.exe. All of the 6 process takes up about 23MB during idle. A full scan on a clean Windows XP service
pack 3 with all latest hotfixes took 17 minutes 36 seconds.
Now you know the difference between the paid and the free version of RISING Antivirus 2009. Whether it is worth paying USD$19.95 for the paid version is entirely up to you to judge. As for me, I would be just fine with the free version since there are no popups or any nag screen like Avira free (which of course can be disabled). Just another thought, I wonder when will RISING Antivirus 2010 be out since most of the antivirus companies has upgraded their version to 2010…
