Politically Correct Season’s Greetings

“Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all; and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures, and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishees.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.”

Have a great festive season & a magnificent 2010 !

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Software to tweak Windows settings

I’m getting older and I just can’t remember all these tips and tricks that I read in so many of these online forums and social media sites ;-) . Merely saving them would entail my having to manually perform the required editing within the registry. Personally, I’m a big fan of the GUI, so I’d much rather have a decent looking but workable interface where I can pick and choose the tweaks I’d like applied.

Most tweaks are present in a number of tweaking utilities available with just a quick web search. Here are some of my favourite tweaking utilities:

tweakui1. Microsoft TweakUI – One of the rarer instances where Microsoft has named a product which users will find easier to know the function of by looking at its name. The newer TweakUI PowerToy for Windows XP is one of those listed on the PowerToys page and needs at least Win XP SP1 or Windows Server 2003 to work. Lots of easily customizable options and explanations are provided. A tree style listing categories on the left and the actual tweaks available on the right make it very easy to work with.

group-policy-editor

2. Group Policy Editor: Although not an out-and-out tweaking software per se, it still has the ability to make changes to the UI and to other Microsoft components of the OS like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and others. Very powerful, not for the faint of heart but worth taking a look if you love tweaking stuff to your staisfaction. Only available on Professional and better editions of XP & Vista – you’ll need admin rights to run it. START > RUN > gpedit.msc

An excellent guide for GPO. Heed the warnings well !

xsp_screen1_highres

3. X-Setup Pro: The big daddy of tweaks! Supported by a community which frequently adds tweak and hacks that can be downloaded straight into the program. It has unfortunately gone shareware now, but here’s a link to an almost as capable last known freeware version 6.6. It’s largish in size ~4.1 MB but it also has the features to match – backups can be created, experimental plugins can be disabled depending on the user’s level of proficiency etc. What I like best is the RECORD mode which logs all the changes made to the registry and allows you to save it in a corresponding REG file. There are other tweakers like FreshUI too, but I’ve found X-Setup more than capable and beats the others hands down.

vistatweaker

4. Ultimate Windows Tweaker: For Vista users, an unofficial freeware comparable to TweakUI does indeed exist. Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware Tweak UI Utility for tweaking and optimizing Windows Vista, 32-bit & 64-bit. It can simply be downloaded and used as a portable application to customize your Windows Vista to meet your requirements. With judicious tweaking, It can make your system faster, more stable, and more secure with just a few mouse clicks. The tweaker detects whether you have IE 7 or IE 8 installed and accordingly offers you the relevant tweaks only.

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Socialism Explained

An economics professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.  After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied only a little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied less than what they had. The second test average was a D!  No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.
Could not be any simpler than that….

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2009 F1 Rule Changes

The 2009 F1 season gets off to a start with the season-opener in Australia this weekend. The sport’s governing body the FIA has made a number of significant changes to the overall rules overseeing the entire season. According to the official website: “The new technical changes have 3 main objectives -  reducing the role of aerodynamics in the cars’ performance; making overtaking easier; and keeping lap times in check.”

Here are a few (not all), of the regulations and changes in rules that come into effect for the 2009 season. The rules can be broadly separated into two distinct categories – Technical Regulations – affecting the design of the cars and Sporting Regulations – inmpacting how the races will be run.

Changes in the Technical Regulations

180px-f1_slick_tiresTyres: After ten years of seeing grooved tyres, F1 enthusiasts wil lsee thereturn of slicks. A change in nomenclature too for the tyres known as ‘standard wets’ last year are now called ‘intermediates’ and ‘extreme wets’ are called just ‘wets’. At each race the softer of the two dry compounds available and the wet weather tyres will be marked with green rings to distinguish themselves.

KERS: In a radically new approach endorsed by the FIA, teams may use Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS). Using a KERS system is not compulsory and teams are allowed to run KERS and non-KERS equipped cars at different races. KERS may give them a power boost of up to 400 kilojoules per lap which roughly equals 82bhp for 6.6 seconds, though the power could be used in different ways, although the most common way would be in the form of giving a boost to the engine for a short period of time to aid in overtaking.

Aerodynamics:
The cars’ front wings may be adjusted while the car is moving a maximum of twice per lap by a maximum of six degrees. There are new restrictions on the aerodynamic shape of the cars: front wings may now be wider, rear wings are narrower and taller leaving many people disappointed with the apparent lack of aesthetic appeal of the 2009 season cars.Most of the winglets and other aero aids like barge boards, winglets, turning vanes and chimneys that used to be on the cars have been banned. Rear diffusers are more tightly limited in size and shape.
The cars must now have four onboard camera housings instead of two, so hopefully viewers should see TV pictures from a variety of different camera angles this year.

engineEngines: Engines may not exceed 18,000rpm (reduced from 19,000 rpm of last year). Drivers must now use the same engine for three, rather than two, consecutive events. Teams will be limited to eight engines per season – eight for each race driver and an additional four for testing. Just one team – Renault – has been allowed to make performance modifications to their engine for 2009 in order to help equalise power outputs.

Testing: In an attempt to reduce costs, the FIA and manufacturers have agreed that there will be NO testing during the entire F1 season. Any and all testing will have taken place in the pre-season. There is also a limit on 15,000 Kms of allowable testing within a calendar year.

Changes in the Sporting Regulations:

safetyPitlane Access during Safety Car periods:
The rule stating that the pit lane is closed during a Safety Car period will be scrapped in 2009. The rule was introduced in 2007 to avoid people rushing back to the pits to refuel, possibly speeding through a danger zone, but software has been successfully developed to solve this problem. The pit lane will now remain open throughout any safety-car period, allowing drivers to refuel without penalty. However, to ensure that drivers are not tempted to speed back to the pit lane, a new software system which employs GPS and the cars’ standard ECU has been introduced. When the safety car is deployed, each driver is given a minimum ‘back to pit’ time based on his position on track. If he arrives in the pit lane before that time he will be penalised.

Points System: After a lot of hemming and hawing and a controversial decision to award the Drivers’ Championship to the driver with most wins was vetoed by the Formula 1 Teams Association (FOTA), there will be no change in the 2009 season from the previous year with the 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 points system remaining in place. The driver with the most points wins.

Pre-race weights: After qualifying, the FIA will publish the weight at which all cars are expected to start the race, giving spectators an accurate gauge of what fuel load each driver is carrying.

Calendar changes:

The debuting Abu Dhabi Grand Prix has been added to the race calendar, as part of Formula One’s expansion in the Middle East. The race will take place at the Hermann Tilke-designed Yas Marina Circuit, which is will be the final round of the 2009 World Championship on 1 November, 2009.

After being dropped in 2007 and replaced by the Fuji Speedway, the Suzuka Circuit will return to host the Japanese Grand Prix in 2009. The race will then alternate between the two circuits.

2009 will be the first Formula One season since 1958 with no Grand Prix in North America

The organisers of the French Grand Prix announced via their official website that the race would no longer be part of the 2009 season, citing “economic problems”. This will be the second time that there has not been a French Grand Prix on the schedule since the start of the World Drivers’ Championship in 1950. The only previous time was 1955.

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Installers Hall Of Shame

There exists a number of disturbingly growing trends these days when we think of new software releases – the ever growing size and bloatedness of software and of course the propensity of developers to include additional (optional) software like toolbars and the like. The ever vigilant folks at Calendar Of Updates have a recent list of software that include these “add-ons”. IMHO, this is wholly unacceptable and is only a step away from actual spyware.

  • Adobe Flash Player – Google Toolbar
  • Adobe Reader – eBay Desktop
  • AOL Instant Messenger – AOL Toolbar
  • Apple’s Software Updater – Safari Browser, QuickTime, iTunes
  • Applian FLV Player – Yahoo Toolbar
  • AVG 8 – AVG Security Toolbar (Yahoo Search bar)
  • BitComet – Google Toolbar
  • CCleaner (standard installer) – Yahoo Toolbar <<<Offers ‘Lite’ version, without toolbar
  • Comodo Firewall Pro – Ask Toolbar (This toolbar is detected as spyware/adware by several vendors)
  • Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 – Google Toolbar and BETA of Moovielive
  • Daemon Tools – Search tool and sponsor ad module
  • DivX – Yahoo Toolbar
  • GoogleTalk – no addon but will change default search setting of IE
  • GoogleEarth – Pre checked Google Toolbar installation
  • ICQ 6 – ICQ Toolbar
  • Iobit advanced one care – Yahoo Toolbar (selecting no will still do changes on the system)
  • IrfanView (Google Toolbar for IE and Google Desktop Search)
  • Logitech Setpoint (Logitech Yahoo! Toolbar)
  • MP3 WMA Converter – Yahoo Search and Delio Comparsion Shopping Toolbar
  • Nero Burning Rom – Ask Toolbar (This toolbar is detected as spyware/adware by several vendors)
  • PC Tools Firewall Plus – Google Toolbar and Threatfire
  • Shockwave Player – Norton Security Scan or Google Toolbar
  • Skype – Google Toolbar
  • Spyware Doctor – Google Toolbar
  • Spyware Terminator – Web security guard, Crawler
  • Sun Java RE (online installer) – Google Toolbar
  • Sun Java – OpenOffice.org
  • Trillian – Ask Toolbar and Weather Channel Desktop
  • Veoh media player – Yahoo toolbar, search engine change & search protection
  • Webroot SpySweeper – Ask Toolbar (This toolbar is detected as spyware/adware by several vendors)
  • Winamp – Winamp Toolbar
  • Windows Live Installer – Windows Live Toolbar and Sign-in Assistant
  • Windows Update – Windows Genuine Advantage Notification – (pre-checked, not required, should not be high-priority)
  • Windows SteadyState – Windows Live Toolbar
  • Winzip – RegistryBooster
  • xplorer2Lite – Conduit toolbar
  • YaHoo! Instant Messenger – YaHoo! toolbar, with ‘YaHoo! Search Protection’ and homepage change to YaHoo!
  • ZoneAlarm – SpyBlocker (Ask Toolbar) (This toolbar is detected as spyware/adware by several vendors)

CoU Link here

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