SlimWare Utilities SlimCleaner 4

Traditionally, PC tune-up utilities have performed a very basic, straightforward function—improve your computer's overall system performance via a number of behind-the-scenes tweaks that ditch unused files. You ran it and moved on—it was a solitary experience. That changed with SlimCleaner's debut. The free tune-up utility uses aggregated data collected from its user base to recommend the optimal settings for your PC. It even rewards you with badges for contributing accurate information back to the community. In short, SlimCleaner is a mashup of social network and utility that does a fine job of cleaning gunked-up PCs.

System Requirements and Interface
Compatible with Windows PCs, SlimCleaner requires just an Internet connection for downloading the software and any updates that may be required during installation. Like Comodo System Utilities and Iolo System Mechanic 12, SlimCleaner gives users permission to install the software on an unlimited number of systems. This gives it the edge over TuneUp Utilities 2013 and other tools with the three license industry standard.

SlimCleaner's attractive interface features a pleasant color scheme that deftly balances blacks and grays with a bright blue gradient. Clicking one of the categories located in the column located left of the main content area—Cleaner, Optimize, Software, Browsers, Disk Tools, Windows Tools, and Hijack Log—highlights the selection and displays that individual interface to the right. SlimCleaner also displays your PC's operating system, CPU, and GPU information just south of that. A gripe: I didn't like that SlimCleaner sometimes opens secondary windows when you click an option. Clicking "Disk Tools," for example, opens another window that lets you run disk utilities—I didn't dig that. I prefer a tighter interface that keeps everything in one place (such as Iolo System Mechanic 12's interface).

Cleaner, Optimizer, Social Features
The "Cleaner" area—the section that contains tabs for Windows, Applications, Browsers, Advanced, and Registry—is what you'll encounter upon firing up the application. Clicking the "Analyze" button causes SlimCleaner to run and spit back a list of problems—my initial scan uncovered dozens upon dozens on my test computer. The "Clean" button removed all the problem files and Web cookies, but I preserved the log-in cookies of Facebook and other sites I frequent using the IntelliCookie Filter. That's a great touch.

That's far from the only tool at your disposal. "Optimize" lets you alter which programs boot at launch—handy for those who may not realize that resource hogs are slowing the boot process and hindering the overall system performance. Here you can find detailed file information so you know exactly what it does before taking action, sort software (based on user feedback) using an adjustable, color-coded slider, and rate programs yourself using drop-down menu selections and mini-reviews—all very useful. I especially liked that SlimCleaner gives you a warning if you are about to remove software that's been well-received by the community; it's a nice way to safeguard yourself from removing a file that may prove vital to the computing experience. Unfortunately, because the feature is community-based, your PC has to be connected to the Web to get the crowd-sourced software ratings.

Taking a cue from popular social networking sites like Facebook, SlimCleaner gives users a wall where they can display personal information and view badges, awards that are given for users with helpful useful reviews. In order to have badges saved to your wall, you need to create an account from scratch, or log in with your Facebook account. Personally, I could do without the badges, but I suppose they're carrots that will entice some users to contribute ratings, which improves everyone's experience.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ovphX7JIMp0/0,2817,2388692,00.asp
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Chinese growth rebound shores up world markets

LONDON (AP) — News of a rebound in China's economy shored up markets on Friday at the end of a volatile week that saw the U.S. veer dangerously close to defaulting on some of its debts.

Now that the U.S. Congress agreed to raise the country's borrowing limit, eliminating for now the risk of default, investors were able to focus on something other than the squabbling in Washington a day after the S&P 500 index closed at a record high.

"The sentiment in the market today is one of mild relief and back to business as usual," said David White, a trader at Spreadex.

China's economic rebound in the third quarter was the main driver of sentiment on Friday. Government figures showed that the world's number 2 economy grew by an annual rate of 7.8 percent in the third quarter, up from a two-decade low of 7.5 percent during the previous three-month period.

The improvement eased fears of a deeper Chinese slowdown that could crimp the world economy and should ensure that full-year growth doesn't fall below Beijing's 7.5 percent target.

Corporate earnings were also on the radar of most traders — the start of the quarterly results season had taken a backseat to the developments in Washington. On Friday, solid earnings from General Electric and Morgan Stanley helped shore up the market mood.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was up 0.5 percent at 6,611 while Germany's DAX rose 0.3 percent to 8,839. The CAC-40 in France was 0.9 percent higher at 4,276.

In the U.S., the Dow Jones industrial average was steady at 15,374 while the broader S&P 500 index rose 0.4 percent to 1,740. On Thursday, the S&P day closed at a record high of 1,733.15 after investors breathed a sigh of relief that the U.S. government cobbled together a deal to avoid a potential default.

Lawmakers reached an eleventh-hour agreement late Wednesday evening to raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit. Still, investors are assessing the long-term cost of the drawn-out political battle and the likelihood of another high-stakes standoff early next year, when the short-term increase to the U.S. debt ceiling runs out.

Earlier in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng closed up 1.1 percent at 23,340.10 and China's Shanghai Composite Index added 0.4 percent to 2,193.78. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.7 percent to 5,321.50. Japan's Nikkei 225 bucked the trend, dropping 0.2 percent to 14,561.54. Markets in India and Southeast Asia rose.

The U.S.'s economic reputation and the status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency have taken a hit from the standoff. As a result, the dollar suffered a broad-based drop Friday.

The euro was up 0.1 percent at $1.3680, just shy of its earlier 8-1/2 month high of $1.3704. The dollar was 0.2 percent lower at 97.79 yen.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-growth-rebound-shores-world-markets-142102510--finance.html
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Murder trial of Utah doctor could turn on bathtub

PROVO, Utah (AP) — Prosecutors have brought a bathtub into court to demonstrate how a former Utah doctor charged with murder in his wife's death found her listless body.

Martin MacNeill is accused of killing his wife, Michele, after convincing her to get a face lift, giving her a lethal combination of prescription drugs for recovery and then helping her into the bathtub.

The trial is resuming for a second day Friday with testimony from neighbors, police and paramedics, and prosecutors said they're showing the same model of bathtub the couple used at their home in 2007. Defense lawyers say they aren't objecting to the demonstration.

Prosecutors say Martin MacNeill plotted his wife's death to carry on an affair with his mistress, who the doctor invited to his wife's funeral and asked to marry him weeks later.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/murder-trial-utah-doctor-could-turn-bathtub-051543955.html
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American Airlines to add flights to Asia from Dallas/Forth Worth

(Reuters) - American Airlines on Wednesday said it plans to add nonstop flights to Hong Kong and Shanghai from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport next year.

AMR Corp's American, which hopes to exit bankruptcy protection by merging with US Airways Group and forming the world's biggest carrier, said it would operate Boeing 777 planes on the flights to the Asian cities.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in August challenging the proposed merger with US Airways, saying it would lead to higher prices. A federal trial in the case is set to begin on November 25.

(Reporting by Karen Jacobs)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/american-airlines-add-flights-asia-dallas-forth-worth-170627060--finance.html
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Screenwriter Mann Rubin Dies at 86

Courtesy Marty Colasuonno

Mann Rubin, a veteran film and television writer who co-wrote the screenplay for the 1959 melodrama The Best of Everything, died Oct. 12 in West Hills, Calif., after a long illness. He was 86.

Rubin also adapted Lawrence Sanders' novel for the crime thriller The First Deadly Sin (1980), starring Frank Sinatra in his last major film role, and adapted Norman Mailer's book for the drama An American Dream (1966), starring Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh.

Rubin also wrote Brainstorm, starring Jeffrey Hunter, and Walk a Tightrope, starring Dan Duryea, both released in 1965, and The Human Shield (1991). 

The Best of Everything, based on a popular novel by Rona Jaffe, starred Hope Lange, Suzy Parker and Diane Baker as secretaries and roommates who work at a New York City paperback publisher. Joan Crawford played a maniacal editor at the firm.

A native of Brooklyn and graduate of New York University, Rubin started out in live television in the late 1940s working on such anthology series as Studio One and Tales for Tomorrow.

He went on to write for other series including Perry Mason, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man, Ironside, Harry O, Starsky and Hutch, Future Cop, Quincy, M.E., Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files, Dynasty, Knots Landing and The Paper Chase.

Rubin spent more than a decade teaching screenwriting in the cinema/TV division at the University of Southern California. 

 

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/film/~3/X-KCFsy3yDI/story01.htm
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12 Years a Slave

Lupita Nyong'O and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.

Photo courtesy Francois Duhamel/Fox Searchlight

After you've seen 12 Years a Slave, come back and listen to Slate's Spoiler Special with Dana Stevens, Aisha Harris, and Forrest Wickman.

There are movies to which the critical response lags far behind the emotional one. Two days after seeing 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 memoir of a free black man kidnapped into slavery, I’m still awaiting delivery of the apparatus that would permit me to analyze it. So overpowering is this film’s simple, horrible, and almost entirely true story—and so impressive the feats of acting, cinematography, historical research, and set and costume design that conspire to bring that story to us—that it’s hard to get enough distance on 12 Years a Slave to poke at its inner workings. I want to try, though—if only because it’s that tendency to overwhelm the viewer that strikes me as this generally stunning movie’s chief flaw.

Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

One of the first observations to make about 12 Years a Slave is that it’s lushly, paradoxically gorgeous: a beautiful film about the ugliest of subjects. McQueen got his start as an experimental video artist, and his compositions and lighting choices are often exquisitely painterly. He loves to use the contemplative insert shots—often focusing on a detail from nature—known as “pillow shots”: cypress trees reflected in peach-colored bayous at sunset, caterpillars crawling over cotton bolls. The early scenes, in which Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is still a free and relatively prosperous man living with his wife and two children in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., unfold in an almost gauzy glow of memory (framed by an opening scene of Solomon, now renamed “Platt,” as he works in a field of sugarcane).

After Solomon, a part-time violinist, is promised a lucrative gig by two white men who run a kind of traveling circus, he’s drugged and wakes up in a brick cell in shackles. Along with some other captured blacks—some free, some not—Solomon is transported by boat to the South, where he’s sold to a series of increasingly bad masters. First comes William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), a pious, well-meaning hypocrite who sees no contradiction between preaching Scripture to his slaves on Sunday and forever separating a mother (Adepero Oduye) from her children. That separation happens in a starkly staged, rigorously unsentimentalized auction scene that’s one of the film’s hardest to watch, and to forget. One of Ford’s petty overseers, the loathsome Tibeats (Paul Dano, taking a little too much pleasure in his own villainy), takes a particular dislike to the initially defiant Solomon, and goads him into a fight that will result not only in Solomon’s near-fatal torture, but his sale to the cotton farmer Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).

If Solomon is the film’s moral center, Epps is its moral black hole, an alcoholic psycho who sometimes forces his exhausted slaves to dance for him into the wee hours of the morning. (Grand Guignol as it sounds, this horrific detail is true to Northup’s narrative.) And that’s one of the nicer things he does: In darker moods, Epps is prone to chasing the people he calls “my property” around the pigsty with a knife or whipping them till the flesh flies off their backs. His sexual obsession with his beautiful young slave Patsey (the astonishing Lupita Nyong’o) means that she is subject both to near-nightly rape and to random abuse from Epps’ jealous, neglected wife (an excellent Sarah Paulson).

The long stretch of the film that takes place at Epps’ plantation contains the best examples both of McQueen’s artistry and his occasional tendency to gild the lily. In this section, he explores, with remarkable attention to behavioral nuance, a rich array of social relationships governed by the institution of slavery—not just master and slave but mistress and slave, shopkeeper and slave, and most of all, slave and slave. The well-kept mistress of a neighboring plantation owner (Alfre Woodard) tries to convince Patsey that life as a sexual prisoner has its comparative advantages, ignoring the fact that Patsey’s owner both rapes her and makes her work harder than any man in the cotton fields. Later, Patsey and Solomon become close allies after she begs him to put an end to her misery by killing her, in a scene that’s as painful as it is sublimely acted. McQueen is particularly adept at exploring the intense yet guarded nature of relationships among the slaves, for whom friendship—not to speak of love—is a dangerous and necessarily transitory proposition.  

But in a climactic set piece in which Solomon is forced by a gun-wielding Epps to whip Patsey nearly to death, I sometimes felt smothered by McQueen’s insistence on wallowing in the extremes of human anguish. McQueen has been accused in the past of aestheticizing suffering, a critique which seems fairer to make of his two previous features (Hunger and Shame) than of this one. Hunger, in which Michael Fassbender starves himself before our eyes as the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, and Shame, in which Fassbender plays a man sinking into a swamp of sex addiction, both struck me as movies with unpleasantly sadistic relationships to their audience: Let’s see how much human suffering and moral degradation you can take. When the subject matter is a historical horror on the order of slavery, McQueen’s miserablist approach would seem to make a kind of sense—but you could also argue that Solomon’s dehumanizing ordeal is powerful enough in itself to need minimal directorial underlining. And though Fassbender is electrifying as Epps—he gives a broad, kinetic, constantly menacing performance that strikes sparks off Ejiofor’s quieter, steadier one—there’s sometimes a sense that the script (by John Ridley) uses the character as an all-purpose scare machine, the red-bearded equivalent of the shark in Jaws. I was terrified of Epps, but I’m not sure I left the movie with any sense of who he was, other than the most nightmarish master imaginable. Maybe that’s all we needed to know.

None of these quibbles matters, though, by the time you get to the soul-rending last scene of 12 Years a Slave, when a stunned Solomon at last comes home to his wife and now-grown children after more than a decade of hard labor and isolation, so damaged by the years he’s lost he seems scarcely able to remember what bodily autonomy feels like. It’s the unhappiest happy ending I’ve ever seen, a moment that makes you weep not just for this one man who found his way back to freedom, but for all those men and women who never knew it in the first place.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2013/10/_12_years_a_slave_directed_by_steve_mcqueen_reviewed.html
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Cults, Live In Concert

Live in Concert

October 17, 2013 The New York City synth-rock duo of singer Madeline Follin and keyboardist Brian Oblivion expanded to a raucous five-piece band for NPR Music's Oct. 16 showcase at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York. Watch a nine-song set including cuts from the new album, Static, just one day after its release.

Set List

• "High Road"


• "Slow Song"


• "Abducted"


• "Always Forever"


• "Were Before"


• "You Know What I Mean"


• "I Can Hardly Make You Mine"


• "Go Outside"


• "Keep Your Head Up"

Credits

Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Robin Hilton, Frannie Kelley, Amy Schriefer; Event Coordinator: Saidah Blount; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Alex di Suvero, Becky Harlan, A.J. Wilhelm; Special Thanks: (Le) Poisson Rouge; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann

Source: http://www.npr.org/event/music/236236447/cults-live-in-concert?ft=1&f=1039
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