System Mechanic 14: An excellent PC maintenance suite, packed with capable features [Review]
Keeping your PC running smoothly can be a complicated, time-consuming business. There are so many important issues to consider that even expert users can struggle to monitor them all.
Iolo’s System Mechanic 14 claims it can help by cleaning up your system, optimizing settings, and then running in the background, fixing problems as soon as they appear. This isn’t just marketing spin, either, as over the years the suite has built up a very impressive feature list. There are tools to clean and defragment your hard drive, repair the Registry, find and fix system problems, tune your internet connection, even optimize running processes in real time.
IBM: Watson, go help those nice scientists with their research
IBM's Watson supercomputer is set to tackle scientific research head-on after being re-programmed to analyze big data in the cloud.
Currently, the testing of scientific hypotheses and theories often takes days or months of arduous work, but with Watson's Discovery Advisor program, this can now be carried out at a significantly faster rate.
Harvard scientists develop a self-organizing thousand-robot swarm
The Harvard school of engineering and applied sciences (SEAS) have created the "first thousand-robot flash mob". The swarm consists of 1,024 "kilobots" that collaborate and provide "a simple platform for the enactment of complex behaviors".
Michael Rubenstein, a research associate at SEAS, said "Biological collectives involve enormous numbers of cooperating entities -- whether you think of cells or insects or animals -- that together accomplish a single task that is a magnitude beyond the scale of any individual".
Amazon kicks off new pilot season later this month
Last year Amazon debuted a number of pilots, though only two survived the final cut -- both Alpha House and Betas had first season runs. Of those, only the former will survive to season two. However, the company continues pushing its own original content, and is now set to debut a new run of pilots for viewers to decide upon.
On August 28th the retail giant will kick off several new shows, all available to any customer who has a Prime subscription. The episodes cover the gamut of content, so pick and choose as you wish.
Why is iPhone so destructible?
It's the question I keep asking, wondering whether to blame the device or my daughter. Last night, she texted: "My screen cracked again. I'm so sorry". That's the third shattered iPhone 5s since May; two 5ers busted before that. Clearly, she's fumble fingers, but something just doesn't seem right. The college student sticks the damn device in a protective case. Did Apple put pretty design before damage durability?
I spent several hours searching for smartphone breakage data today -- on the web and contacting several sources compiling stats. Strangely, the most compelling comparisons are years old. For example, in late 2010, SquareTrade reported that iPhone 4 accidents exceeded the 3GS and devices from competing smartphone manufacturers. In a 2012 survey of 2,000 iPhone users, 30 percent had damaged their device in the previous 12 months.
Happy SysAdmin Day -- we're giving away $700 worth of software to celebrate
The last Friday in July may not mean much to the average person, but it holds a special place in techies' hearts. It's System Administrator Appreciation Day. And we're celebrating it today, for the fifteenth time, with a giveaway!
As we cannot offer you any cake, ice cream or pizza (although would sure love to), we have 10 licenses for System Mechanic to give away instead, courtesy of the software's maker iolo which has reached out to us to make this happen. Every BetaNews reader can enter the giveaway.
Microsoft looking to end bugs in software by monitoring developers
Modern programs are so complex that bugs are pretty much unavoidable, but Microsoft is looking at ways of reducing coding errors as much as possible, including trialling an experimental approach that involves monitoring developers as they work.
The idea is to track eye movements and other mental and physical characteristics of the developers, in order to spot when their alertness levels drop or they are struggling with a task -- which is when errors are most likely to creep into their work.
Best Windows 8 apps this week
Eighty-fourth in a series. Big news this week was China's ban of Windows 8 on government computer systems which Wayne covered yesterday. Country officials seem to believe that the NSA is using the operating system to gather data.
Microsoft has released Xbox One controller drivers for Windows that users of the operating system can use to connect the controller to a Windows PC for games that support controller input.
Activehours for iOS and Android lets you get your money when you need it
As a trained Sociologist, I am always analyzing my surroundings. One of my particular interests is the plight of the working poor. It breaks my heart to see people toil away for low pay, while struggling to pay bills. Even sadder, these hard-working people are often taken advantage of by "pay-day" lenders -- they offer an extremely high-interest loan which targets the poor who cannot make ends meet.
Luckily, technology can be developed to solve many of the world's problems, including the pains of the workers living paycheck to paycheck. Yes, a new app for Android and iOS, called Activehours, is aiming to solve this problem.
Google Trends helps you be relevant and the life of the party with 'Hot Searches'
Have you ever been at a party and felt out of touch? I have. Quite often, the conversation turns to some Internet meme or current event and I just have no idea what people are talking about. It's my own fault, I tend do focus mostly on technology news as world news is rather depressing. Not to mention, it is hard to find time to stay on top of it. Believe it or not, I even ignore weather reports as I prefer to be surprised.
Google apparently feels my pain as it aims to make me relevant and sociable again with an updated Google Trends. Yes, the search-giant has created a way to get hot trends delivered right to your inbox.
Big Data is the new Artificial Intelligence
This is the first of a couple columns about a growing trend in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is likely to be integrated in our culture. Computerworld ran an interesting overview article on the subject yesterday that got me thinking not only about where this technology is going but how it is likely to affect us not just as a people. but as individuals. How is AI likely to affect me? The answer is scary.
Today we consider the general case and tomorrow the very specific.
Anki -- an easier way to study almost anything
Anki’s developer describes the project as "a program which makes remembering things easy". That sounds a little vague, but it's also very accurate. Anki is a smart and versatile flashcard-based tool which really can help you remember just about anything.
The program allows you to create, download and edit flashcards. Each card has a question on one side, its answer on the other. This could be simple text -- a deck on capital cities might use "France", "Paris" -- but Anki also supports graphics, audio, video, even scientific markup (via LaTeX), so there's plenty of scope to be inventive.
Facebook separates sex from gender
A person's genitals do not define their gender. At least that is what some people believe. As a trained Sociologist, I accept that forces beyond biology define how a person identifies. In other words, a person may identify as a man, despite having female reproductive organs. Maybe they identify as something else altogether.
Like I said, not everyone believes this, but quite frankly they do not have to. Regardless of your comfortability with transgender people, they exist, they have feelings, and they live their lives. However, they face adversity in many facets, including social media. Today, Facebook takes a huge step towards equality in addressing the difference between sex and gender.
Best Windows 8 apps this week
Sixty-sixth in a series. There are now over 106,000 apps in the US Windows Store. Growth has improved considerably after last week's weak performance, as 773 new apps were published to the store in the last seven days.
83,437 of those are free to download and install, while the remaining 22,606 are either paid apps or desktop applications.
If Facebook is like a disease, I don't mind getting infected
Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.
Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.
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