Microsoft Closes Popular Third-Party Windows Update App

AutoPatcher, a popular alternative to Windows Update, was shut down today in response to a cease-and-desist e-mail from Microsoft.

Microsoft forced a popular alternative to Windows Update off the Internet today, sending the maker of AutoPatcher cease-and-desist e-mail. The free utility has been removed from its download site.

Microsoft did not give a reason for the move, which came more than four years after AutoPatcher debuted.

"Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said Antonis Kaladis, the 20-year-old Greek college student and author of the program. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down."

AutoPatcher, which was in version 5.6, let users collect Windows hotfixes and security patches from Microsoft's update services, then package them so they could be applied to multiple machines, or reused multiple times on a single PC. It was especially popular among people who frequently reformatted drives or those who did informal tech support for friends and family, or in a small business.

Each month, the current set of Windows' -- and as of this month, Office's as well -- updates and hotfixes would be added to the packages. The program supported Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Server 2003. This month, Kaladis and his team of volunteers added support for Office XP, 2003 and 2007.

The Microsoft take-down e-mail was posted to the Neowin.net forum that AutoPatcher used for its user support. "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.autopatcher.com/downloads/], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the e-mail read.

"We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," it continued after listing various versions of Windows and Office. The e-mail was signed by a Peter Anaman, a Microsoft Internet investigator.

Users of AutoPatcher were, not surprisingly, hot. "I cannot believe that Microsoft did this," Andrew Lucas said in a response to Kaladis' posting of the news. "You are providing a service Microsoft refuses to do. It has now been over 3 years since Microsoft released SP2 for XP."

"The end of AutoPatcher is the end of my use of any Windows product, period," swore a user identified only as KMan.

Other users -- lots of others -- literally swore at Microsoft in the comments attached to Kaladis' post, or on the Neowin forum. More than a few however, took a more c'est la guerre approach to AutoPatcher's demise. "I don't get why everyone is so annoyed, I'm shocked auto-patcher was allowed to continue for so long in the first place. Is anyone really surprised by this?" asked a user calling himself kudos in a post to Neowin.

Microsoft has dealt similar cease-and-desist orders to other patch-related Web sites or services in the past. In April, it leaned on Hotfix.net, whose operator Ethan Allen had posted more than 100 hotfixes he expected would be part of Vista SP1. Coincidentally, Vista SP1 was talked up by Microsoft today. Allen also complied by yanking the download.

By....http://www.pcworld.com

IBM reportedly eyes Wind River deal

Big Blue could establish a strong presence in the market for embedded operating systems with Wind River buy

IBM could establish a strong presence in the market for embedded operating systems with the acquisition of financially ailing Wind River Systems, a deal that is reportedly in the works.

After the Silicon Valley Watcher site reported earlier this week that IBM was considering the deal, industry insiders -- including Wind River competitors -- agreed that an acquisition would make sense.

Wind River, a 1,300-person company in Alameda, California, develops operating systems for embedded applications primarily in the aerospace, defense, and automotive industries, using both a version of Linux and its proprietary VxWorks OS.

In February, the company added another product to its stable when it acquired the rights to the real-time OS RT Linux from Finite State Machine Labs (FSMLabs). Wind River also does business with network infrastructure and consumer electronics companies. For example, Palm Inc. announced last week that it would use Wind River's Linux OS in future versions of its Foleo ultramobile PC.

However, the company has struggled to generate profits, posting a loss of $4.6 million for the quarter ending May 31, an even worse result than its loss of $2.1 million for the same period last year. Company executives told investors they expect to lose a similar amount in the second quarter as well, but pointed out they had increased revenue to $78 million for its fiscal first quarter, an increase from its mark of $65 million in the same period last year.

Wind River did not return calls for comment. IBM withheld any comment on the possible deal. "It is IBM's position not to comment on rumors and speculation," said company spokesman Fred McNeese.

IBM has recently acquired several other software companies, including an agreement announced in July to buy the data integration software firm DataMirror for about $162 million, and a deal announced in June to buy Telelogic, a developer of software development tools, for about $745 million.

Now, IBM would be wise to acquire an embedded Linux vendor such as Wind River, because it would allow IBM to expand beyond its core markets, one industry watcher said.

"IBM sells in other markets than just servers," said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. "For instance, IBM sells millions of POWER chips to makers of video game consoles. IBM has probably identified several market opportunities for little, intelligent, Linux-based embedded systems."

The move would also complement IBM's own embedded systems group, Clabby said.

Indeed, the two companies have done business together in the past. Wind River is a member of Power.org, IBM's industry forum for promoting the use of its Power processor architecture. Wind River is also an IBM customer, using products like Rational ClearCase as a communications tool for geographically scattered development teams. IBM also certifies that its PowerPC chips will work with Wind River's VxWorks Developer's Toolkit.

Enea, a rival of Wind River, issued a statement on Thursday applauding the potential deal. Acquiring Wind River would allow IBM to expand its share of the embedded software market and find new customers for the consulting services it has traditionally provided only to enterprise customers, Enea CEO Johan Wall said.

Thank you"http://www.infoworld.com" for detail.

AMD proposes CPU extensions for multi-core apps

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - AMD is announcing plans to extend its CPU instruction set Tuesday to make it easier for software developers to exploit the power of multi-core processors when building applications.

AMD stressed that converting single-threaded software to be multi-threaded is a highly specialized skill and a challenge for developers. The extensions initially focus on performance analysis via the company's new "Light-Weight Profiling" specification accessible on AMD's site. This technology will enable real-time feedback for performance optimization that can be directly used by software, said Earl Stahl, vice president of software engineering at AMD.

"Developers will incorporate [the technology] into the software, and the software can utilize it to at runtime to discover, for example, cache contention with their memory allocator and reallocate that memory," Stahl said.

Over time, other hardware extensions could be added in such areas as software transactional memory, high-performance message-passing, and fast context-switching for lightweight parallelism. AMD plans to offer the full gamut of specifications released under the plan up for public review.

Software that would leverage the extensions could be applications based on platforms like Microsoft's Common Language Runtime or the Java runtime, Stahl said. Access to the extensions by developers could be done either through compilers or via a small API layer.

The extensions, however, will not be in AMD chips for an estimated three to four years. They will not be in the upcoming AMD Barcelona and Bulldozer chips.

Such a long lead time is not uncommon, according to AMD officials. The company detailed its 64-bit CPU extensions in 1999, but they did not appear in processors until 2003. The purpose of Tuesday's release is to get discussion going on software optimization, Lewis said.

Intel, whose chip technologies are leveraged by AMD, theoretically could use the extensions also if it put them in its own chips, Lewis said. Intel could not be reached for a response on Monday.

AMD and Intel have approached the processor parallelism issue differently, said analyst Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight64. Intel has focused on software tools to help with multithreaded development, while AMD is offering support in hardware itself, he said.

"The AMD extensions will make it easier for multiple threads to cooperate on a single task. Intel is doing that through software, and AMD is saying, hey, with a little bit of help from the hardware, they can make it even better,' " Brookwood said.

AMD's plan could result in better-performing applications, he said.

The only issue Brookwood could raise with the extensions is that they could simply take up space on the chip when the choice is made not to use them and that this space might be used more wisely for other tasks. But the extensions will not create chaos or disorder or force any changes in what people are doing, he said.

AMD's extensions are not specific to multi-core chips, which are becoming more of the dominant processor technology. "While not limited to multi-core, [the technology] certainly will find its sweet spot there," Stahl said.

By publishing its specifications, AMD can get parties like or Microsoft to look at them and have open dialog on implementation, according to AMD. The company would submit the specifications to a standards body, but none currently exists in this area, Stahl said.

Thank you "http://news.yahoo.com" fordetail.

Novell Wins Right to Unix Copyrights

Novell today won a significant ruling in its lengthy battle with The SCO Group over ownership of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights.

Novell today won a significant ruling in its lengthy battle with The SCO Group.

judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah Central District found that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights, dismissing SCO's charges of slander and breach of contract.

The judge also ruled that SCO owes Novell for SCO's licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. SCO is obligated to pass through to Novell a portion of those licenses, the judge said.

In the ruling, the judge said SCO must pay Novell, but the amount will be determined in a trial, said Pamela Jones, founder and editor of Groklaw, a Web site that follows open-source software legal issues.

In another major blow to SCO, the judge said that because Novell is the owner of the Unix copyrights, it can direct SCO to waive its suits against IBM Corp. and Sequant. "SCO can't sue IBM for copyright infringement on copyrights it doesn't own," Jones said.
Effects of the Decision

The ruling is good news for organizations that use open-source software products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "From the perspective of someone who is adopting open-source solutions to run in the enterprise, it proves to them that the industry is going to defend the platform, and that when organizations attack it from a legal perspective, that the industry collectively will defend it," he said.

The decision is "abysmal" news for SCO, according to Zemlin. "Their future is looking bleak," he said. SCO did not reply to requests for comment.

In a statement, Novell said the ruling cut out the core of SCO's case and in the process eliminated SCO's threat to the Linux community.

Still outstanding are several counterclaims. For example, Novell's slander of title counterclaim against SCO is still ongoing and will go to trial, Jones said.

The case is so complex that the judge asked the parties to file a document with what they think is outstanding in the IBM case, Jones said. Those documents must be filed by Aug. 31.

The battle began in 2003 when SCO filed a suit against IBM claiming that it had violated SCO's rights by contributing Unix code to Linux. The following year, SCO sued Novell, saying that Novell falsely claimed it owned rights to Unix.

Thank you "http://www.pcworld.com" for detail.

AMD Launching 'Barcelona' Chips On Sept. 10

Well, it's finally (almost) here.

Advanced Micro Devices has begun sending journalists invitations to its "Barcelona" quad-core launch, which will take place on the evening of Sept. 10. According to published statements by the company, the first Opteron cores based on the new technology should be available at launch, which means that the company will likely start accepting preorders the next day.

The company has stated previously that "Barcelona production is on track for volume shipments at launch." AMD has achieved dual-core-equivalent yields on Barcelona production at Fab 36, AMD has said.

AMD's quad-core architecture has been months overdue, while rival Intel has already shipped quad-core products into the market. Price cuts, however, have helped AMD's market share rebound.

The delays in the Barcelona core have hurt AMD significantly, delaying revenue and forcing the company to float financial notes. In a troubling sign, AMD said Thursday that it will offer $1.5 billion in notes to institutional buyers, to pay off a loan AMD took out with Morgan Stanley in conjunction with its acquisition of ATI Technologies a year ago.

Read the rest of this ExtremeTech story: "AMD Launching 'Barcelona' Chips On Sept. 10"

Thank you "http://www.pcmag.com" for detail.

Apple homeward bound with new iMacs, iLife

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new iMacs with aluminum and glass exteriors, keeping the rumor mill honest this time. Apple's iMac is an all-in-one computer where the motherboard sits behind a flat-panel display, in a more streamlined approach to the traditional desktop PC.

The company also updated its software for home Mac users, known as the iLife suite. The five applications that make up iLife '08 aim to help Mac users organize "user-generated content"--that ubiquitous Web 2.0 phrase--for both internal consumption at home and showcases that can one-up the Jones' trip to Nepal.

It's been a busy year for Apple. From January to June, it seemed everything was about the iPhone, while in the interim the company has been scrambling to get Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS, ready to ship in October. However, Tuesday's event featured far less glitz and hype as Apple introduced new products for its audience of home-media enthusiasts.

Apple separates its Mac customers into two main categories: the developers and creative professionals who use its heavyweight Mac Pro desktop and MacBook Pro notebook, and the rest of us, who get iMacs and MacBooks. It's been a good year for Mac shipments, which increased by 33 percent during Apple's last quarter, but the iMac product had been stale for quite some time.

So Apple borrowed the aluminum finish that it has previously reserved for its professional products, remaking the iMac in black and silver and taking a few inches off its waist. A glass display completes the look, along with a new slimmer keyboard and Intel's latest processors.

But Jobs sped through the introduction of the new iMacs to spend most of the morning walking attendees through the improvements to iLife and iWork, Apple's suite of office productivity applications. Apple's pitch for so-called "switchers" centers largely on the iLife suite as a friendly way of organizing the pictures and videos that pile up in the Digital Age.

Shiny hardware might get customers in the door, but software is where people spend their time, and where they form an attachment with their computers. The iron curtain of the past between Windows and Apple software is more of a backyard fence these days after the success of iTunes on Windows, software like Boot Camp, and the increasing percentage of time most of us spend on the Internet, rather than using desktop applications.

So to draw curious neighbors over the fence, Jobs likes to show family-friendly applications when showing off new Macs or software, appealing to the desire of those in attendance to easily create a digital record of their children's hijinks both for posterity and for distant friends and family. For example, Jobs showed how the new iPhoto and iMovie applications can organize photos and home movies and upload them to new Web Galleries hosted by the company's .Mac service, which also now allows customers to store up to 10 gigabytes of data for $99 a year, up from just 1GB of data.

The new iPhoto application automatically sorts pictures by "events," really just compiling all the photos taken on a given day. You can "merge" or "split" events that took place over several days, or multiple events that took place on a single day.

The iMovie application was singled out as having received the greatest overhaul between iLife '06 and iLife '08. Jobs told a story about an Apple engineer who wanted to make a short home movie of his trip to the Cayman Islands, but got frustrated by how long it took to create that movie in either iMovie or Final Cut Pro, Apple's professional video-editing software. The result was iMovie '08.

Thank http://news.com.com for detail.

Mozilla Giving Away Security Testing Tools

Mozilla is releasing some of its own security tools to the open-source community.


Mozilla Corp. will release some of its homegrown security tools to the open-source community, the company's head of security said Wednesday, starting with a "fuzzer" it uses to pin down JavaScript bugs in Firefox.

The JavaScript fuzzer, said Window Snyder, Mozilla's security chief since last September, will be handed over Thursday morning, following a presentation at Black Hat, a two-day security conference that opened Wednesday in Las Vegas.

"We're announcing that we'll be sharing our tools with the community, and releasing the JavaScript fuzzer then," said Snyder. Other tools will follow, including fuzzers that stress-test the HTTP and FTP protocols. Those two tools, however, are not ready to offer to outsiders, largely because Mozilla wants to wrap up talks with other browser vendors before they are shared.

Fuzzing, a technique used by both white- and black-hat researchers trolling for vulnerabilities, and by developers to finger flaws in their code before it goes public, drops data into applications or operating system components to see if -- and where -- breakdowns occur. Typically, the process is automated with a fuzzer, the term for software that hammers on application inputs. The JavaScript fuzzer, Snyder said, has identified "dozens" of vulnerabilities in Firefox code.

Snyder said Firefox developers have created many tools, and though a lot of them are small, special-purpose ones, all of them could be useful to others.

"We want to make the work we're already doing available to other people and to other products" in the hope that the tools might help developers outside Mozilla spot problems in their code, she said. Snyder sees a direct benefit to Mozilla, too. The more people who bang on the tool, tweak it and modify it, the better the tools should become, she said.

She seemed unconcerned that any tool Mozilla released would prove a significant danger to users. Although hackers also use fuzzers in their vulnerability-sniffing tool kits, "the tool isn't bad or good on its own," Snyder argued. "They use debuggers all the time. Debuggers aren't bad" because of that.

Mozilla might have wished it had fuzzed Firefox a bit more over the past three weeks, when it was caught in a name-calling contest between it and Microsoft Corp. supporters. Early last month, Danish researcher Thor Larholm found what he said was a critical input-validation bug in Internet Explorer that let the browser pass potentially malicious URLs to other programs, including Firefox. He laid blame on IE, while other security experts said it was Firefox's fault.

Shortly after that, Snyder hinted that she saw the whole mess as an IE problem, but within days acknowledged that Firefox was guilty of the same behavior. "We thought this was just a problem with IE," she said July 23. "It turns out, it is a problem with Firefox as well."

Wednesday, she said that the very public disagreements between security experts as to which browser was to blame had actually been a good thing. "Debate is healthy," she said. "And if we're wrong, we say we're wrong and move on."

Mozilla updated Firefox twice in July, first on July 17 with 2.0.0.5, and then Monday when it released Version 2.0.0.6. Both updates included fixes for the URL protocol handling bug that started the brouhaha. "We weren't twiddling our thumbs during all of this," said Snyder. "We were also on the back end moving forward with fixes."

At Black Hat, Snyder and fellow Mozilla executive Mike Shaver, the company's technology strategist, also plan to discuss the new security features of Firefox 3, the major update that currently is in preview testing. Firefox 3 is expected to ship sometime this year.

........Thank you http://www.pcworld.com for detail news.......

Vista Super Tips

Vista is not the last Windows client OS

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft’s chief operating office said this week.

In a part-speech, part-presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Denver, COO Kevin Turner echoed comments made earlier this year by CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista is not the last major update of the company’s client operating system. Tuesday, as Turner dubbed Vista and the simultaneously-unveiled Office 2007 “huge, big dog releases,” he also promised more would come.

“Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch,” Turner said. “And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office.”

Turner’s assertions parroted those made by Ballmer Jan. 29, just before Vista and Office 2007 went to retail. In New York on the launch eve, Ballmer said Microsoft had “plenty more where that came from,” referring to Vista and its follow-on. At the time, speculation had mounted over whether Microsoft would, or even could, again mount a Vista-sized effort, in part because Ballmer himself had sworn that the company would never again take five years to craft a new OS.

read more..

Check Windows Vista Activation Status

Are you a user of Windows Vista Enterprise or Business edition and would like to know the status of activation of a specific computer? Want to make sure that the computer connected properly to the Key Management Server (KMS) or used your Multiple Activation Key (MAK) properly? Or are you a home user and just want to make sure your computer is fully activated?

Included in Windows Vista is very useful utility that will help you check the status of activation of your computer:

1. Click on the Start Button and key in CMD and hit Enter to start up Command Prompt.
2. At the prompt, type in “slmgr.vbs -dli”
3. After a few seconds you will be presented with a pop-up message with your activation status.

Freeware Game Downloads

Out of Order

A humorous adventure in the tradition of Maniac Mansion!

Pac Man

A nearly exact replica of the arcade classic! Pac Man for your PC!

Crush

Destroy as much of the city as you can before the military stops you!

These freeware games cost alot of time to develop but can be played for free! These are all full versions, no demos, no time limit restrictions, and no annoying ads or funny business! (at least at the time we tested them - let us know if you spot anything weird since we don't host the files) We try to pick the best free games from game creators all over the world!

GL Tron
Light cycle racing based on the movie TRON!

Little Fighter 2
Punch and kick your way to victory!

Beats of Rage
Fight your way to reestablish justice!

More Games........

Free download puzzle and arcade games