Windows only: Free application Disable Startup keeps just any old app from adding itself to your list of startup applications, keeping your boot time snappy and RAM happy.

At its core, Disable Startup is a startup manager similar to the built-in Windows System Configuration Utility. It does the trick if you just want to use it for that, but it's really nothing special strictly as a startup manager. If you're willing to run Disable Startup in your system tray (which will cost you about 4MB), it'll closely monitor your startup applications for new additions. The app gives you the option to disable all new startup entries, warn you when new startup apps are added, or allow any new additions. Likewise, Disable Startup can prevent new software installations from changing your IE start page. It may not be worth the added system tray app for some, but if you install a lot of software that ends up sneaking entry after entry into your list of startup apps, this simple utility is perfect. Disable Startup is a free download, Windows only.

LifeHacker

The heat in Max Butler's safe house was nearly unbearable. It was the equipment's fault. Butler had crammed several servers and laptops into the studio apartment high above San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, and the mass of processors and displays produced a swelter that pulsed through the room. Butler brought in some fans, but they didn't provide much relief. The electric bill was so high that the apartment manager suspected Butler of operating a hydroponic dope farm.

But if Butler was going to control the online underworld, he was going to have to take the heat. For nearly two decades, he had honed his skills as a hacker. He had swiped free calls from local telephone companies and sneaked onto the machines of the US Air Force. Now, in August 2006, he was about to pull off his most audacious gambit yet, taking over the online black markets where cybercriminals bought and sold everything from stolen identities to counterfeiting equipment. Together, these sites accounted for millions of dollars in commerce every year, and Butler had a plan to take control of it all.

Wired

Get ready for an onslaught of the cheap. With the economy more unstable than Plaxico Burress' mental state, electronics manufacturers are putting the e-brakes on their budgets, flattening their costs, and rolling out their cheapest, most practical gadgets. You know, the ones that people like you and me can afford.

You'll get a glimpse of this "fashionably cheap" approach to gadgets at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show, which runs from January 6 to January 11, is the electronics industry's biggest North American conference. This year's tradeshow will no doubt feature some excessively large HDTVs, as it has in the past. It will still attract more than 100,000 attendees, mostly members of the electronics industry, plus a few thousand journalists, though CES attendance will be down a bit compared to last year. And it will still have its celebrity appearances (including Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Akon), paid for by companies hungry for publicity.

Wired

Two weeks after the Recording Industry Association of America announced it had struck deals with top internet service providers to cut off unrepentant music sharers, not a single major ISP will cop to agreeing to the ambitious scheme, and one top broadband company says it's not on board.

The RIAA's announcement came as it revealed it was closing down its massive litigation campaign, which has targeted more than 30,000 individuals for allegedly sharing copyrighted music on the internet. Instead of federal lawsuits, the RIAA claims it would now rely on a series of accords it had reached with "leading" internet service providers, in which the ISPs have agreed to terminate customers the RIAA catches uploading three times, the association said.

Wired

Apple has cut deals that will finally enable iTunes to offer songs free of copy protection software from the three largest music labels, according to two sources close to the negotiations. In exchange, Apple has agreed to become more flexible on pricing, the sources said.

Under the terms of the deal, song prices will be broken down into three categories--older songs from the catalog, midline songs (newer songs that aren't big hits), and current hits--said one of the sources. Apple has offered songs free of digital rights management protections from EMI for more than a year. But EMI accounts for less than 10 percent of music sold in the U.S.; these new deals will expand iTunes' DRM-free library to include songs from the other three major labels (Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music).

C|Net

Intel and Adobe Systems on Monday announced that they're working to adapt Adobe's Flash media technology, widespread on PCs, to work in TV-focused devices.

The two companies will work on fine-tuning the Flash Player and Flash Lite for Intel's Media Processor CE 3100. The goal is for Intel to ship the first CE 3100 chip with Flash Lite support before the middle of this year.

A Flash-CE 3100 combo would give consumers a better viewing experience of Web-based and other videos via digital TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, cable set-top boxes, and audiovisual devices, the companies said.

"Our effort with Adobe is poised to accelerate a rich yet relevant Internet experience on the TV that will provide consumers with access to a growing number of Flash-based applications that will ultimately be enjoyed across a number of screens seamlessly, from the laptop to a MID and now the TV," William O. Leszinske Jr., general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group, said in a statement.

C|Net

Edraw Max is a versatile graphics software, with features that make it perfect not only for professional-looking flowcharts, org charts, network diagrams and business charts, but also building plans, mind maps, workflows, fashion designs, UML diagrams, electrical engineering diagrams, directional maps, program structures, database diagrams… and that’s just the beginning!

With more than 4600 built-in vector symbols, drawing couldn’t be easier! Create a wide variety of business charts and presentations based on templates and examples while working in an intuitive and familiar office-style environment.

GiveAwayOfTheDay

2008 was something of a vintage year for popcorn-munchers (see our 2008 Top 50 here) . But is there a 2009 film that can equal the colossal success of The Dark Knight? Which hot franchises will step up to fill the spaces left by Batman, Bond and Indy?

We’ve taken a look through the studio schedules and picked out the most promising prospects for the coming year. History tells us that when times are tough, box office takings boom. Here’s our selection of the best films Hollywood has to offer us in 2009.

Click on the links to discover movie trailers, stills, official sites and more.

TimesOnline

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

TimesOnline

Occasionally you need to check spelling in an application that does not include a spelling checker and you don't want to launch your word processor just for that. This is when tinySpell becomes handy. It is a small utility that allows you to easily and quickly check and correct the spelling in any Windows application.
tinySpell can watch your typing on the fly and alert you whenever it detects a misspelled word. It can also check the spelling of text that you copy to the clipboard.
tinySpell installs itself in the system tray for easy access. It comes with an American-English dictionary containing more than 110,000 words.


tinyspell

We last reported on MediaSentry, the firm hired by the RIAA to snoop around various P2P networks for potential lawsuit targets, when they accidentally targeted the distribution network of Revision3, a legitimate content provider, causing a disruption in Revision3's service. Recently, however, rumors began to circulate that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was severing ties with MediaSentry (a division of SafeNet Inc.) for reasons unknown.

According to a new story published less than two hours ago by the Wall Street Journal, those rumors had their basis in fact. The RIAA does in fact plan to stop working with MediaSentry to identify ripe lawsuit targets. However, this doesn't mean that the RIAA is abandoning the practice of monitoring P2P networks. Instead, the industry group plans to work with the Danish firm DtecNet Software ApS, which claims to have a more advanced means of determining whether a person shared a particular song. MediaDefender's tactics were only capable of determining that defendants had shared the music file with them, with no proof that the song had been shared indiscriminantly, a fact that had caused the RIAA some trouble in court earlier.

TechGage

It goes without saying that piracy of any sort is a huge issue, from movies to music to software, and sometimes, even to hardware. In the US and Canada though, we are well aware of what can happen to software pirates, as through the years, many have been carted off to prison for an uncomfortable sentence, even if they weren't selling the software, but only making it available.

One common conception though, is that China couldn't care less about the piracy issue in their country, but stories leaking out now contradict those beliefs. Just last week, a Shenzhen court handed out 11 penalties to people tied to a sophisticated counterfeit ring that's existed for years. They mass-produced Microsoft software, specifically it seems, and distributed it around the world - not just China.

TechGage

Given I'm not a Macintosh user, I'm unsure of this situation on that platform, but I think for the most part, many people well-understand how things go down with a fresh Windows installation. Once the OS is installed, the quest for normality is far from over. We'll need to go online and download a variety of patches, updated drivers, and if you plan to watch videos, a robust player and some codecs. With Windows 7, Microsoft hopes to take some of the hassle out of the video issue for people, by including a few of the most common codecs within.

Included will be DivX support, which is great given so much of the web offers downloadable videos in that format. In addition, H.264 and AAC audio will also be supported, meaning most high-definition downloadable video will be good to go right away. With these additions, will we also see Adobe Flash built-in? Not surprisingly, no. Bundling that would cause a conflict of interest, given Microsoft develops a competing technology (Silverlight).

TechGage

The U.S. economy is bleeding jobs, but -- at least, so far -- the high-tech industry is something of a safe haven. That's not to say there haven't been tech losses or that it's easy to find an IT job. However, people with the right skill sets and the savvy to sniff out the particular areas of demand are much better positioned than professionals in some of the more-beleaguered industries.

High-tech job seekers should take heart. Despite the daily onslaught of grim economic news, the need for skilled information technology staff remains stable, according to the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, released earlier this month.

Twelve percent of chief information officers polled in the survey said they planned to expand their IT departments in the first quarter of 2009; 4 percent, by contrast, expected to make staff cutbacks. That net 8 percent hiring increase remains unchanged from the fourth quarter.

ECommerceTimes

Customers of online storage service Xdrive have been warned to make sure they have retrieved all of their data by 12 January as it will shut down on that date.

The company has recommended that customers transfer their data to alternative services such as Carbonite, Windows Live SkyDrive or Mozy.

"We've created a new tool on Xdrive to save the entire contents of your archive into a single Zip file," a message on the site reads.

"You can download this file and either save it to your hard drive, upload it to another storage service, or store it elsewhere," the message continues.

WebUser

If you are a member of Twitter and receive an email informing you of a direct message then treat it with caution, the website has warned.

Fraudulent emails masquerading as Twitter messages have been spotted in circulation, containing URLs that will actually take you to a spoofed Twitter site designed to steal personal information.

"The link redirects to a site masquerading as the Twitter front page," said Twitter's Biz Stone, writing on the Twitter blog.

"Look closely at the URL field, if it has another domain besides Twitter but looks exactly like our page then it's a fraud and you should not sign in," Stone continued.

WebUser

During this time of year, I always take time to reflect and try to think of ways to improve myself. In the three years since I started writing for TechRepublic, my writing style and the topics that I discuss in this space have changed dramatically as a result of this process. So, after some self-examination and considering reader feedback, here’s a general roadmap of what I plan to write about in 2009. Happy New Year!

Legacy code holding you back?There is an extremely visible divide in the development community: Programmers who are working without the burden of legacy code, and those who are being held back by legacy code. The people in the first group are in relatively new companies, or maybe working on projects that are completely separate from the rest of the IT infrastructure. These programmers usually have the freedom to try the latest and greatest, experiment with new languages, or develop code using a product or library currently in a pre-release state, knowing that the final version will be shipping before the product they are working on goes into production. In addition, these developers have a lot more flexibility in development methodologies since their teams are often new.

TechRepublic

You knew it was coming. Surely you did. First Google had their “Google Desktop” that mostly went nowhere. Then came Chrome, the browser that threatened to “out cool” any other browser. And then came Android, the operating system for the phone of the future (the one that supposedly could take down the iPhone). Android. An operating system for mobile phones.

…and more.

That’s right. The creators of Mobile-Facts.com have managed (in less than four hours and with rusty skills) to compile Android to run on a Netbook. That’s not surprising since Android is Linux and Linux can run on everything from a toaster to a PS3. What is surprising is that they discovered Android was actually designed for both phones and for mobile Internet devices (such as Netbooks).

TechRepublic

Anyplace Control is a universal program for remote PC control that gives a solution for a wide range of tasks. Home users can use the program to get access to their office PCs and work from home or check their own PC while being away from home. It also helps when you need to quickly resolve some problem or share files in the home network. Anyplace Control is also the right choice for remote assistants and network admins.

Anyplace Control is a remote control software, that allows you to control a remote PC over LAN or Internet.

The program displays the remote computer’s desktop on your local screen and lets you use your mouse and keyboard to control that PC remotely. In other words, using this program you can operate a remote PC just as if you were sitting in front of it, right from where you are, no matter where you actually are.

The built-in File Transfer feature provides an easy way to transfer files to and from a remote computer.

GiveawayOfTheSDay

Intel has a lot to be happy about with their new CPU and X58 family launch, firmly taking over the enthusiast market with new processors that are clearly faster than the last generation. The DX58SO motherboard is nearly as fast as the other boards on the platform, with minor differences due to the board manufacturer tweaks in performance. Feature-wise, the DX58SO has done away with legacy connections like IDE and PS/2. The only troubling thing about this board is the layout, with SATA ports that are not sideways facing and the positioning of the 8-pin power connector. I wish everyone a safe and prosperous Holidays as this article was written in the midst of them.

motherboards.org

End with a question?
Today, 07:50 AM
by the_burner

4peeps word association game
Today, 07:48 AM
by the_burner

What have you done today?
Today, 07:48 AM
by the_burner

Giveaway of the Day - Edraw Max 4.3
Today, 07:45 AM
by the_burner

Intel, Adobe to tune up Flash for TV devices
Today, 07:44 AM
by the_burner

Sources: Apple to expand DRM-free music, new pricing
Today, 07:43 AM
by the_burner

Top Internet Providers Cool to RIAA 3-Strikes Plan
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by the_burner

What a sad day.
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Cheap Thrills: Gadget Makers Bet on Budget Gear in 2009
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One Hacker's Audacio