Raxco released its new version 7.0 (free evaluation) of PerfectDisk, a great disk defragmenter. Already tested the version 6.0 of PerfectDisk here.

Great tool, very strange interface….

What’s new in PerfectDisk V7.0?

• Faster defragmentation times. PerfectDisk V7’s performance has been increased more than 20%.
• Reduction in system resource usage. PerfectDisk V7 uses 20% less system resources than PerfectDisk V6.
• New look and feel. A more intuitive and Windows XP style interface makes using PerfectDisk even easier.
• Support for mount points (drives that have no drive letter assigned to them)
• Tighter integration with Active Directory Group Policy allows for easy software deployment, updating, configuration and scheduling of PerfectDisk.
• Certification for Windows. PerfectDisk V7 has been certified by Microsoft for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

What Windows platforms are supported for PerfectDisk?

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows 2000 Professional and Server
• Windows XP Home and Professional
• Terminal Server (Windows 2003/2000 based)
• MS Cluster Servers (Windows 2003/2000 based)
• All levels of RAID

Does PerfectDisk defragment safely?

Yes. Windows has exposed APIs that can be used to safely defragment most files online, while Windows is running. These APIs safely move (defragment) files on both the NTFS and FAT file systems. The APIs on Windows 2003, XP and Windows 2000 also support moving files on FAT32. These APIs are a part of the native Windows file systems and have been coded, tested and certified by Microsoft to ensure that no data loss or corruption occurs when a file is moved. These APIs are fully synchronized with all file I/O and memory management functions of Windows. You can even safely defragment files that are open and currently being modified.

Interesting article from Knowledge@Wharton called “What’s Behind Edward C. Prescott’s Nobel Prize?“. Great macroeconomics discussions!

Last month Edward C. Prescott and Finn E. Kydland won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for two important papers they coauthored that advanced the field of dynamic macroeconomics. […]

Prescott and Kydland have long been respected for successfully combining theory and applied economics. Their work together has focused on the interaction between theory and a society’s aggregate statistics such as the level of unemployment, inflation and productivity. Prescott, an economics professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, has been a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for 23 years. Kydland is an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kydland was initially a graduate student of Prescott’s at Carnegie Mellon. […]

“I love creating models and coming up with explicit structures I can play with,” says Edward C. Prescott. “Economists create their own worlds. We’re like little gods with our artificial economics, wanting to see what happens.” […]

“I liked that general equilibrium language – with models and people, with substitution and thinking about what these people are doing in their environments, with borrowing and lending and knowing that there’s somebody on each side of any exchange or contract,” says Prescott.

(A general equilibrium model refers to a model of the economy that takes into account all aspects of that economy, and in which individuals, companies and institutions like the central bank make decisions they consider the smartest and most appropriate at the time. Substitution refers to the decisions individuals make such as the decision to spend money now or save it for the future.) […]

In “Rules Rather Than Discretion,” their 1977 paper, Prescott and Kydland established that a monetary authority’s policy decisions are often time-inconsistent. This means that monetary policy changes intended to remedy an immediate problem such as unemployment will often have unintended ramifications that work against the stated goal of reducing unemployment.

When a government announces a remedy to a short-term problem, individuals and companies adjust their behavior and make new decisions based on that information. Those decisions change the economic landscape, reducing the incentives the government had in the first place for wanting to institute the policy changes. […]

[Richard Rogerson] points out that parents who threaten to punish their children often display a time-inconsistency problem. A parent who wants to produce a certain behavior may tell a child not to do something or he will punish the child. “The hope is to influence behavior,” says Rogerson. “But the kid figures out that the parent doesn’t want to punish him, so he knows that if he does it again he won’t be punished. The parent thus has a time-inconsistent policy and cannot achieve what he wants.” […]

The second influential paper by Prescott and Kydland mentioned in the Nobel citation was “Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations.” This paper turned Keynesian theory upside down by finding that business cycles were caused by supply-side shocks rather than shocks to a society’s aggregate demand. […]

Prescott and Kydland’s business cycles paper showed that real, supply-side shocks – such as a hike in the price of oil or hurricanes hitting Florida or the invention of a new technology – by and large account for the business cycles in a well-functioning economy. “Business cycles are therefore not the result of a malfunctioning economy,” says Rogerson. “It’s the economy responding to shocks that hit it – and policymakers must therefore think differently about business cycles.” […]

I cannot say anything yet (Non Disclosure) but I would like to mark this particular day (yesterday) with a post, to be able to find this milestone in the near future. So, Thursday, November 18 2004, was surely one of the most important day of my professional life :-) More about this in some weeks!

Again, a very interesting article from Olivier Duffez (this time, in English too ;-) about the relationship between the PageRank and the number of Backlinks, and the evolution of this relationship. I’ve already talked about the blog of Olivier here.

Results

The results are presented in the following table. For example the cell corresponding to column 5/2004 and row PR5 shows that in May 2004, an average of 104 backlinks was required to get a PR5.

Conclusion

• With a few exceptions, whatever the PR is, more backlinks than the month before are required every month to get a given PR.
  
• As expected, one needs far more backlinks in order to get a high PR than a low one. Even if there may be exceptions, because the study deals with a good number of data, it gives experimental support to the theoretical hypotheses or ideas never proved before but only discussed in forums.
  
• During this summer (2004), Google changed the behaviour of the link: command which now includes low PR pages. Only PR4 or higher PR pages used to be listed by this command. Conversely since this summer you can also list the low PR pages backlinks, which you can see in the table.

Interesting comparison and database performance test from AnandTech between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon.

Over a year and half has passed since AMD announced their K8 architecture to the world, and what has changed? Well, “a heck of a lot” is the answer. The Opteron has proven itself as a worthy competitor to the infamous Intel Xeon line-up of processors, and Intel has been following AMD for a change, something no one could have predicted a few years ago. Dual-core processors are on the horizon; AMD demonstrated theirs with Hewlett Packard just a few weeks ago, and Intel demonstrated theirs at the Intel Developers Conference in September, 2004.

[via Joy Ito]

[…] Global warming and the risk did not seem like some sort of disputed theory as some politicians seem to lead us to believe. All of the scientists involved in energy and ecology that I heard speaking seemed to believe that our earth was immediately at risk and that we had to act now. The combination of the increase in population and our addiction to energy would not allow us to stabilize at any sustainable equilibrium without drastic changes in the way we make and use energy.

Canada wants to help :-)

Ladies and gentlemen, drop your borders

Now that George W. Bush has been officially elected, single, sexy, American liberals – already a threatened species – will be desperate to escape.

These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven.

You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American. Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save our southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism.

Cowboy conservatism? Great definition!

As you perhaps already know, Microsoft launched a beta version of its search engine called MSN search. Their Program Managers launched a blog at the same time:

As you all know we have decided to join the fray and we have been listening to what you’ve had to say about our TechPreview. We’ve decided to start our own blog so that we can keep you all up-to-date on what’s happening with our product, our team and our industry.

Keep watching this space for updates.

I played a bit with this search engine and I was quite impressed by the quality of the responses. Worth a try! It is great to see that Microsoft is positively developping its communication strategy, the posts seem to be quite open and transparent, and they are also talking about problems (avaibility, etc.). Interesting. Their blogroll also mentions the blogs of their….direct competitors (Google, Yahoo, etc.). Again, interesting!

PS: the now famous query with the word “the” in MSN search is returning 2.6 billion pages indexed by the Microsoft search engine, in comparison with the more than 8 billion pages indexed by Google.

Ultimate tool for geek – Part II

For about 2 weeks and thanks to vowe, I tested Kapsules, a desktop widget engine for Microsoft Windows. A widget is like a miniature application which rests on your desktop. Kapsules is great but quite limited concerning the number of widgets.

The leader in this field is Konfabulator. This tool is coming from the MacOS world and the first Windows (XP, 2000) version was released last week. You can download the version 1.8 here, this standard version integrates some standard widgets. The stability is ok (no crash in 5 days of intensive usage), the memory foorprint is more or less ok – about 10 MB per widget. I installed it, tested it and….switched definitely to Konfabulator.

Konfabulator is doing about the same things as Kapsules. The main difference, as already mentionned, is the number of widgets. Kapsules is quite an “old” (first release in February 2003 ;-) program on the MacOS, and now, a lot of widgets are compatible for both platforms (MacOS and Windows).

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. What sets it apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of Apple’s Quartz rendering. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home.

I am using four widgets: The Weather (standard package), What to do (standard package), Battery (standard package) and a mini Calendar. How does this look like?

A tool for geek, I told you :-)

PS: to be able to have two instances of a widget runnning at the same time (as for me with the weather in Male, Maldives and Mulhouse, France), just make a copy of the corresponding file (.widget) with another name!

Shame on AOL, shame on AOL, shame on AOL.

I had already almost no respect for this company, its services and products (I’m speaking about AOL, not Winamp ;-), but THIS…. BetaNews published yesterday an interesting article – Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp – about the catastrophic integration of Winamp in AOL. As a quite fanatic user of Winamp since years, this article sounds desperate concerning the future of this great tool. Again, a very bad example of an integration of a little structure (Winamp) with its own history, people and efficient way of working, in a big and fat monster (AOL), as usual with the same consequences: no values generated for the monster, no future for the people of the little structure, and a VERY BAD SERVICE for the customer!!

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp’s abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn’t long until the two ideologies collided.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

Despite the somber farewell, Nullsoft’s former masterminds are proud of their accomplishments. Winamp helped start a digital audio revolution and boasts an incredible 60 million users per month.

After a disappointing Winamp3, Nullsoft developers returned to the drawing board and completed long-standing goals with the release of Winamp 5.0 in late 2003.

[…] Without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.