tools

The bottom line: PC Tools Internet Security 2011 will give you strong security, but a not-insignificant performance hit. Couple that with a less than competitive feature set for high-end security suites, and you're left with a definite mixed bag.

Review:

PC Tools Internet Security 2011 competently juggles the competing requirements of an effective and usable security suite. Although we were disappointed by the performance hit, the interface is clean and easy to navigate, the scans were reasonably fast, and the suite generally received high marks from independent effectiveness tests.

Installation PC Tools' installation is a simple and fast affair, … Read more

Microsoft unloaded a dump truck's worth of changes on its Bing service earlier today, and some of the real gems to come out of the lot are the updates to Bing mobile.

New to the company's iPhone app--and soon other mobile iterations of Bing--are two very visually impressive, and downright useful additions: a Streetside viewer for local maps, and something called Bing Vision, which adds a way for users to pick out specific words from photos to create a customized Web search.

Missing from the update but headed to the app in a future release is the real … Read more

It's a small world, but try telling that to anyone who shares a PC with someone who not only speaks a different language but uses an entirely different character set. Diplomatic relations are possible, thanks to Quick Locale Switcher by Captain Caveman. It's a free Firefox add-on that lets users quickly switch locale-related settings, including languages, spell checkers, context menus, and more. It will even translate complete Web sites automatically, if your browser settings support it. You can configure Quick Locale Switcher for automatic switches or manual function with notifications. Even if your locale isn't listed, you'… Read more

Here's a neat add-on for Firefox. Search Everywhere doesn't actually search everywhere; it only searches directly linked Web pages. This free extension creates a Google Custom Search Engine based on pages linked to the current page. When you enter a search term, Search Everywhere queries only those linked sites. This lets you quickly zero in on content, find hidden gems of information buried deep in large sites, and browse similar sites for related interests or content.

Search Everywhere placed its icon in the Firefox status bar in our browser window's lower right corner. Clicking this icon opened … Read more

Microsoft today unveiled the next iteration of its Silverlight technology, Silverlight 5, which the company said will improve things like media playback and the time it takes to develop applications, along with adding support for 3D and hardware acceleration.

"There's been a lot of angst on this topic in the last few weeks," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for Microsoft's developer division, told attendees of the company's Silverlight-focused Firestarter event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "Let me say upfront that there is a Silverlight future, and we think it's going to be … Read more

Picture hunters know that file names don't always indicate content, and it can be frustrating to click your way through a list of image files, one by one, opening and closing each, just to see what they are. Text to Image is a free Firefox add-on that displays image links as thumbnails that expand when you mouse over them.

We installed Text to Image and restarted Firefox. The program places a small hurricane-shaped icon in the Firefox status bar; clicking it toggles Text to Image on and off. Green indicates the program is active, while red means it's … Read more

Since the dawn of System Time, Windows has run a bit behind when it comes to timekeeping. Third-party developers have led the way with improvements like atomic clock updates and world time. While widgets and other improvements have brought Windows up to date, there is still a need for tools like My World Time. It's a handy but unobtrusive multiple time display that can show you at a glance what time it is in several parts of the world. It has some useful extras, too.

My World Time's default display is a narrow bar about 3 inches long … Read more

This week IBM announced new cloud offerings for federal and state governments aimed at providing the scalable infrastructure and ease of deployment available from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

These clouds are hosted at IBM data centers and are multi-tenant offerings restricted to government entities. And while the world doesn't need yet another definition of cloud, this use case of hosted private cloud (note: I'm not sure if this fits as virtual private cloud) is one that I suspect we'll see more and more large data center providers move toward.

For clarity, these clouds are both private and hosted, leading me to wonder if this type of offering will be more appealing than behind-the-firewall private cloud solutions. After all, in this scenario you don't have to buy hardware or hire staff to manage your infrastructure.

To a large extent, these new services look just like hosting did a few years back with the only real difference that the infrastructure is designed to be used in a multi-tenant manner as opposed to having dedicated servers. (Note: most hosting companies ran multi-tenant servers anyway, but the actual technical way of separating the tenants is different with cloud providers.)

It's not that services such as Amazon Web Services EC2 can't perform at the same level of a government-specific cloud offering, but the often challenging requirements related to government computing require a specific way of doing things.

A few weeks back I spoke with IBM CIO Pat Toole, who emphasized the fact that IBM corporate IT has a strong focus on optimizing virtualized servers in cloud-like ways to reduce costs. With nearly 400,000 employees, IBM is as big or bigger than many government entities and has similar challenges related to uptime, security, and storage.… Read more

Junko is a free tool that lets you split PDF files into separate documents by page range or number or combine many PDFs into larger files. By splitting large PDFs into multiple smaller files, you can work on just the pages or sections you need, and they're easier for small apps to handle. Combining multiple PDFs is useful for creating manuals and other multipage documents. Junko is powered by PDFsharp, the open-source .NET library of PDF wares.

Junko's interface is very basic and opens with a blank main view, but it's Aero-compatible and has a customizable toolbar. … Read more