worked with wolfram alpha demo, it answered some multi chained questions like”how many employees at google in 1999″

Got all Sports questions wrong.

my friend at Thomasnet, took these screen shots as the Wolfram|Alpha site was up very briefly and he was able to download the toolbar. The site was up for a bout 10 minutes and not even basic questions like 2+2 worked so the server was probably not even configured yet and must have been unintentional

for full sized non blog photos view them here

.

Toolbar Screenshot

Yesterday I attended a demonstration of Stephen Wolfram’s , “Wolfram|Alpha,” the new “answer search engine.” The software has a lot of potential, and builds on the already millions of lines of code from Wolfram’s popular Mathematica software. Like any major undertaking there are many hurdles to overcome. It seemed that there was much more money needed to keep paying their team of approximately 100 PhDs. There was apparently a large amount of work ahead to reach the end game of being able to provide “all the worlds’ computable knowledge.” The means to accomplish are their fulltime staff of PhDs as well as consulting outside experts. Wolfram said they were also open to having a structured and strictly reviewed, process for outside submission of information. Just this initial stage of gathering information seems very time consuming and labor intensive, but from what I saw of the technology, it seems that it has the potential to pay off big. The sources of the data can be viewed at the bottom of the page; this human gathered information combined with their algorithm determines what is presented.
The three steps for getting the data to the end users screen are as follows.
Gather and curate sources/data find red flags or anomalies in the data; these could either be problematic or telling information  put this information in the data flow or algorithm convert this to natural language and decide how to present this on the users screen, this is done using heuristics (best guess) and other methods.
The biggest problems he talked about overcoming, was understanding human syntax, meaning converting natural language to something the software can understand. The information is how a human can access it using natural language that is the challenge. This seems to be the major problem with search getting a computer to think like a human and borders into AI. This gets more difficult as the questions get more complex with longer chains of information/parameters/concatenation like, “What is title of Marlen Brando’s first movie.” This is question is three levels deep and would be difficult yet according to Wolfram, possible to answer. Wolfram|Alpha was not presented as a Google killer as it serves a different purpose. Search engines are looking for other peoples answers that are out there somewhere on the internet, in a blog or html page. Wolfram|Alpha, computes its own answers from information in its database. This information is proprietary and its use comes with its own ToS which was described as being fair we did not get to view it. The screen shots were kept purposely hard to read, the text was very small and hard to read and one could just get a general understanding of what the layout looked like.
Here is a rundown of questions that were asked before our eyes. Most were able to be answered but there were some errors we saw unfold before our eyes, or as Wolfram said “good we found a bug, that’s why this isn’t released yet.” Answers consisted of a broad range subjects mostly with statistical answers. These statistics may or may not have been exactly what one would be searching for. Because the text was small we only knew what was being displayed by what Wolfram told us what was there, it was possible to make out basic charts and layouts.

Questions
“Serum htl”- returned general medical information

“Medical tests serum html”- returned a breakdown of how much serum isneeded for different body types, ages and other factors.
“Male serum html”- the system could not answer this one.
“Springfield”- figured out the closest Springfield to your geo ip and gave stats for that town.
“Weather in Springfield in 1996”- this worked, or returned something at least, like everything else it was illegible.
“Microsoft Vs. Sun” – compared the two businesses, understood that sun was talking about a company.
“Blue and yellow” – the answer was green.
“C#”- gave information on the musical scales and details surrounding C# in music theory.
“Caffeine”- shows chemical properties such as the molecular weight as well as other statistics and properties.
“Hurricane Andrew Hurricane Katrina” – this question did not work at first he had to adjust his natural language which brings up the question again, how users are going to understand to use the search engine.
“Orange juice”- gave Nutritional breakdown and some other facts

“Weather in Princeton NJ when Curt Garble died” – maybe a loaded question, maybe  the most impressive example, probably a bit of both. This gave an answer weather it was right or not the ability we could not see. The ability for the system to understand the multiple chains in impressive.

Other questions which were answered with a page of statistics
“Distance to Moscow”

“Units for measurement”

mathematical questions and physics
“Mortgages”
Job info- similar to dept of labor statistics
“Universities”

my friend at Thomasnet, took these screen shots as the Wolfram|Alpha site was up very briefly and he was able to download the toolbar. The site was up for a bout 10 minutes and not even basic questions like 2+2 worked so the server was probably not even configured yet and must have been unintentional.

Toolbar Screenshot

Yesterday I attended a demonstration of Stephen Wolfram’s , “Wolfram|Alpha,” the new “answer search engine.” The software has a lot of potential, and builds on the already millions of lines of code from Wolfram’s popular Mathematica software. Like any major undertaking there are many hurdles to overcome. It seemed that there was much more money needed to keep paying their team of approximately 100 PhDs. There was apparently a large amount of work ahead to reach the end game of being able to provide “all the worlds’ computable knowledge.” The means to accomplish are their fulltime staff of PhDs as well as consulting outside experts. Wolfram said they were also open to having a structured and strictly reviewed, process for outside submission of information. Just this initial stage of gathering information seems very time consuming and labor intensive, but from what I saw of the technology, it seems that it has the potential to pay off big. The sources of the data can be viewed at the bottom of the page; this human gathered information combined with their algorithm determines what is presented.
The three steps for getting the data to the end users screen are as follows.
Gather and curate sources/data find red flags or anomalies in the data; these could either be problematic or telling information  put this information in the data flow or algorithm convert this to natural language and decide how to present this on the users screen, this is done using heuristics (best guess) and other methods.
The biggest problems he talked about overcoming, was understanding human syntax, meaning converting natural language to something the software can understand. The information is how a human can access it using natural language that is the challenge. This seems to be the major problem with search getting a computer to think like a human and borders into AI. This gets more difficult as the questions get more complex with longer chains of information/parameters/concatenation like, “What is title of Marlen Brando’s first movie.” This is question is three levels deep and would be difficult yet according to Wolfram, possible to answer. Wolfram|Alpha was not presented as a Google killer as it serves a different purpose. Search engines are looking for other peoples answers that are out there somewhere on the internet, in a blog or html page. Wolfram|Alpha, computes its own answers from information in its database. This information is proprietary and its use comes with its own ToS which was described as being fair we did not get to view it. The screen shots were kept purposely hard to read, the text was very small and hard to read and one could just get a general understanding of what the layout looked like.
Here is a rundown of questions that were asked before our eyes. Most were able to be answered but there were some errors we saw unfold before our eyes, or as Wolfram said “good we found a bug, that’s why this isn’t released yet.” Answers consisted of a broad range subjects mostly with statistical answers. These statistics may or may not have been exactly what one would be searching for. Because the text was small we only knew what was being displayed by what Wolfram told us what was there, it was possible to make out basic charts and layouts.

Questions
“Serum htl”- returned general medical information

“Medical tests serum html”- returned a breakdown of how much serum isneeded for different body types, ages and other factors.
“Male serum html”- the system could not answer this one.
“Springfield”- figured out the closest Springfield to your geo ip and gave stats for that town.
“Weather in Springfield in 1996”- this worked, or returned something at least, like everything else it was illegible.
“Microsoft Vs. Sun” – compared the two businesses, understood that sun was talking about a company.
“Blue and yellow” – the answer was green.
“C#”- gave information on the musical scales and details surrounding C# in music theory.
“Caffeine”- shows chemical properties such as the molecular weight as well as other statistics and properties.
“Hurricane Andrew Hurricane Katrina” – this question did not work at first he had to adjust his natural language which brings up the question again, how users are going to understand to use the search engine.
“Orange juice”- gave Nutritional breakdown and some other facts

“Weather in Princeton NJ when Curt Garble died” – maybe a loaded question, maybe  the most impressive example, probably a bit of both. This gave an answer weather it was right or not the ability we could not see. The ability for the system to understand the multiple chains in impressive.

Other questions which were answered with a page of statistics
“Distance to Moscow”

“Units for measurement”

mathematical questions and physics
“Mortgages”
Job info- similar to dept of labor statistics
“Universities”

A curious falsehood has surrounded Mac computers over the last decade, as they have resurged onto the market.  People believe that Macs are immune to the malware, viruses, and worms that have wrought havoc on PCs.  (correction there are far fewer viruses for mac then pc¹)

In reality, OS X is not much more or less secure than Windows Vista — rather it is Apple’s small market share that has protected it.  (correction linux has a smaller market share then apple yet has far more viruses²) Since Mac attacks would have to be custom-made, there just hasn’t been much interest among Black Hats to attack them.  Kevin Haley, a director of security response at Symantec, states, “The bad guys generally go toward the biggest target, what will get them the biggest bang for their buck.”( never trust symantic on anything virus related as they often feed the FUD it is how they sell software)

However, with surging market share and pop icon status, the Macs are suddenly finding themselves under attack.  On the heels of Apple’s announcement that customers should get an antivirus program, Apple has been attacked by what [some] are some calling OS X’s first official trojan virus. (this is not a Trojan virus it is a Trojan, this requires the user to enter their user name and password) The trojan, dubbed “iBotnet”, has snuck its way into several thousand Macs.  The virus is written specifically for Mac computers and does not affect Windows machines.

The new virus infects users’ computers via pirated copies of Mac software iWork, which have been floating around P2P networks.  It was first reported in January, and unlike other viruses, like the Conficker worm, is relatively harmless due to the small number of infected machines (precluding effective denial of service attacks) and user role in infection.

States Paul Henry, a forensics and security analyst at Lumension Security in Arizona, “We all knew it was going to happen.  It was just a matter of time, and, personally, I think we’re going to see a lot more of it.”

While the new virus is the first to only target Macs, it’s not the first botnet to consist of some Mac machines.  Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher with Arbor Networks, states, “This isn’t the first botnet that’s been built using Mac computers.  This is an interesting one in that it’s a little more flexible and includes some new features. … It’s getting a lot of press mostly because it’s Mac and people are talking about how Macs are immune to malware — and, sure enough, they’re not.”

In a statement, Apple responds, “Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users.”( mac is actually pretty slow to patch⁴)

Macs today account for approximately 7.4 percent of consumer computers in the U.S., according to Gartner, a leading market research firm.  While, according to Gartner, these users on average are more affluent than PC owners, the unproven nature of Mac virus software (owing to their low market share in the 90s) has made Mac viruses still unexplored territory.  However, that looks to be changing, and given Apple’s slow rate of patching, it could be in trouble in the near future, particularly with the prospect of Apple-specific worms hitting in the near future.

1: http://www.macuser.co.uk/news/44258/mac-virus-is-number-78-in-most-common-chart.html

2: It’s not the market-share that determines the number of viruses, because there’s more OSX out there than Linux or BSD. The Ramen worm is one widespread Linux virus.

it definitely does have something to do with it, due to the fact that Windows is has surpassed 1 MILLION** viruses, worms and other malware (of course the horrific state of security on the Win9x line helped here, which was also why MacOS 9 had a fair number of viruses for it)

However where this theory fall apart is that there are far more worms, viruses, and malware in existence for Linux/BSD than for OSX. Actually in fact, there has been more malware for specifically RedHat Linux than for OSX.

Either way, US market-share isn’t the deciding factor. It could be that it’s the market-share of Macs in Russia, China, and other nations where virus development is prevalent that is a deciding factor.

A good guess would be the fact that there are no cheap Macs has far more to do with it. When you pay that much for a machine, you’re probably not writing viruses on it.

3: The Trojan in question does not replicate. It is not a virus. It is also not a Worm which is a virus that replicates across a network (generally IP based). Worms use a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computers on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program.

4: Several security research firms have criticized Apple for leaving critical and serious vulnerabilities unpatched for long periods of time. If you search DailyTech you should find some articles about patching, which include info on research which indicates that OS X is being patched far slower than Windows Vista.

Character entity names & their entity reference decimals, to type these hold alt and press the numbers on your keypad. These do not work on a PDA.

About the character entity html reference list

The Character Entity Reference HTML 4 has been formatted with accessibility and usability considerations. The Entity Reference List is presented using the definition list format. This allows usable small screen rendering on numerous Internet devices including Internet capable cell phones and PDAs. Lists presented using tables may lose their logical relational order to the contained elements when displayed on small screen rendering devices.

HTML 4.01 supports the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. The lower part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 0-127) is the original 7-BIT ASCII standard. Most of these characters can be used without a character reference. The higher part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 160-255) can all be used using character entity names.

Character Entity Reference Browser & Font Support

Note: character entity names are case sensitive.

7-Zip/Winrar

7-Zip

7 Zip is open source software. it is legitametly free with no nag message, unlike Winrar.  Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license. The unRAR code is under a mixed license: GNU LGPL + unRAR restrictions. Check license information here: 7-Zip license.

Winrar is another alternative to the misconception that is WinZip, somehow people managed to think that Winzip is free () and is the default windows unpacking program. Winzip is NOT made by Windows and NOT free. Winrar, can extract/decompress .rar files .zip files and a host of other formats as well. FYI (the rar format provides more convenient multipart (multivolume) archives, tight compression including special solid, multimedia and text modes, strong AES-128 encryption, recovery records helping to repair an archive even in case of physical data damage, Unicode support to process non-English file names ect.)

Unlocker

ever get one of these?

Cannot delete file: Access is denied
There has been a sharing violation.
The source or destination file may be in use.
The file is in use by another program or user.
Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Unlocker is a God sent program,  when you are trying to delete a file that can not be deleted because a process is running.  This can be very annoying and is often the sign of a virus. A virus/trojan could be masquerading as any process, alg.exe, lsass.exe, svchost.exe ect. You may not know which one to end, so that you can delete or modify the file, Unlocker gives you the option to delete the file at startup, rename the file or delete the file immediately.

If the folder or file is locked, a window listing of lockers will appear

CCleaner

CCleaner is a tool to clean your system of temporary and unnecessary files that accumulate over time. This also includes a rather thorough cleaning of Internet tracks and logs like tmp files, cache, recently used files, history, cookies and more. You can select the items that you want cleaned and also specify what you do not want to delete.  A good trick is if you do not want it to delete your Mozilla cache and saved info, have that program running while you run it.   In addition, CCleaner comes with a registry scanner that scans for invalid references and other registry errors. there are options to start cleaning automatically or from the command line.

WinDirStat

(TreePie is a more lightweight simple software to get a visual view of your hardrive and see what is taking up space)

The more we use the computer, the more our hard disk gets filled with useless stuff like junk files, temp files, old song files etc. WinDirStat is a free program that gives you a visual representation of your hard disk usage. It indexes the hard drive and creates a visual map of each file and also helps you in deleting the file that you don’t need.

It uses tree maps to represent each file as a visual rectangle so you can visualize file distribution across the drive. All the files are coded with a specific and color and you can click on them to reveal file name and even open it in Explorer, copy the path, delete the file. You can also view the folder organization in a drill down interface and get an indication on how large it is. The most noticeable feature is the visual representation of the hard drive with a lots of colored rectangles representation lot of different types of files.

It is  nice software which will allow you to see which is occupying how much space on the hard drive. It is a freeware and works with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.

Process Explorer

Similar to Unlocker but more complex. Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. This program demystifies which process is linked to which application and is also great for tracking down viruses which hide as certain processes such as svchost

process explorer

VLC media player

This media player plays any file you can throw at it, no more issues with video codexs or anything else you got off bit torrent.

Best Free AntiVirus (go to Download.com

best thing to do is only run these if you have a problem, run Antivir all the Time.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware
Spybot – Search & Destroy(lets you know every time there is a change to the registry and asks approval)
SuperAntiSpyware
AntiVir (catches all sorts of stuff) learn to remove antivir nag message here http://www.byteforums.com/thread-2702.html
Malware Bytes( effective against Antivirus 2009 Trojan)

AVG is NOT recommended as it runs to large and slows your comp AND it is the biggest target for virus authors to write malware FOR because so many people have it.

Core Temp

What it does: As the name suggests, Core Temp is a quick and easy way to check out the temperature of your CPU as determined by the processor’s internal probes. If you’re a familiar face at Maximum PC, you’ve surely heard the gang wax about the wonders of the SpeedFan utility. Temperature-wise, the two programs conduct similar readings. The reason I lean to Core Temp, however, is that SpeedFan will sometimes offset the actual temperate of your CPU (depending on the processor) by a hearty 15 degrees. Core Temp gets the reading right the first time, every time–a perfect tool for novice users that don’t know about SpeedFan’s important little quirk.

Download it here!

NetStress

What it does: Although you can use innumerable online tools to give you a decent gauge of your current bandwidth, NetStress is an offline tool that will help you isolate network peculiarities within your internal setup. To gain the most use out of the program, set up your network and run the throughput benchmarking features at a time when you feel your setup is at peak efficiency. Record the numbers. Later, if you start to detect slowdowns or other strange goings-on, re-run the benchmarking application and see how your numbers stack up. Just like Sherlock Holmes, you can begin to isolate the problem to an errant network cable, problematic PC, or router based on the results of your tests!

Download it here!

Nero DiscSpeed

What it does: Curious to know if you’re getting maximum performance out of your optical drive? That’s where Nero DiscSpeed comes into the picture. Although this program is no longer being updated in favor of a new paid-for application (grr), it’s still a great way to analyze your drive’s read and write speeds. For example, it’s one of the best ways to figure out if your 52X burner is actually performing at 40X for some unknown reason–measurements like that aren’t really the kind of thing that an average user can estimate by how the reading or writing process “feels.” Get the real seek times, transfer rates, and other measurements with this helpful application.

Download it here!

HDDScan

What it does: This free application gives you a host of options for checking on the health of your hard drives. Pull up the drive’s S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic information if you’re just interested in a quick scan. If any statistic looks out-of-place or otherwise dangerous, the program will alert you via colored icons on the side of each piece of information. From there, you can conduct more thorough evaluations by using the application to run offline S.M.A.R.T. testing of any drive in your system, even those connected to your PC via USB or FireWire. If you’re concerned about your system’s airflow, the program will even display real-time temperature readings from your drives as icons on the lower-right hand side of Windows’ taskbar.

Download it here!

Memtest86

What it does: It’s an oldie, but a goodie. I have yet to find a more thorough or easier-to-use method for evaluating the health of your system’s memory. Even Maximum PC itself agrees with me on this one. In fact, it’s well worth your time to click that link and read about how you can use Memtest86 to your greatest advantage. If you’re experience blue screens that have seemingly come out of nowhere and they match the qualifications of a typical memory issue (either the PFN_LIST_CORRUPT or PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error messages), run Memtest86 as soon as you can to help you pinpoint the problem.