Five Best System Rescue Discs

When your computer starts behaving strangely, won't boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can't pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you'll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we're looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers.

Earlier in the week, we asked you to nominate the best system rescue disc for our roundup. You rolled in with tons of great suggestions, and now we're back to look at the top five.

The Trinity Rescue Kit

The Trinity Rescue Kit is a customized Linux distribution that's designed specifically for troubleshooting and reviving ailing systems, whether you're running Windows or Linux. It fits nicely on a CD (or a USB stick if you prefer) and once booted gives you tools to reset lost Windows passwords, scan hard drives for viruses and malware, clone drives, recover lost partitions, even open up the drives as network shares so you can get files off of them and to other computers on your network. It's completely free, although a donation to the developer behind it is always appreciated and keeps the project alive.

Hiren's BootCD

Hiren's BootCD is pretty legendary, and anyone who's ever worked in support or systems administration has probably used it at least once (or has several version of it lying around still.) The rescue disc is aimed squarely at repairing Windows systems, and includes a wealth of tools to that effect, including antivirus tools to scan your hard drive, anti-malware utilities to clean out spyware and adware, even rootkit detection tools. Hiren's BootCD can also help you repair, adjust, or re-flash your system's BIOS or wipe your CMOS, clean out temporary files and folders, securely erase files, back up your data to another hard drive or to the network, update and back up hardware drivers, scan your system for hardware failures, repair lost or damaged partitions, and much much more. We're only scratching the surface here. It's completely free and always has been. Even if there are other tools in your toolkit, Hiren's BootCD should be among them.

by Alan Henry, Lifehacker |  Read more:
Photo by Karin Dalziel.

Ali Gulec (Turkey)
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Upgrade or Die

Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better. The iPhone 6 may dispense with the annoying home button and feature a 4.8-inch screen and quad-core processor. Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, and execute other essential functions of contemporary life simply by issuing conversation-level spoken commands to a smart lens attached to a lightweight frame worn above the eyes.

Yelp has a hundred million unique monthly visitors, up from seventy million at this time last year. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high, having passed 14,000 last week, while, according to the Times, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age”; as a share of national income, they are at their highest point since 1950.

Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection by Season Five of “Girls.”

In other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.

Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. Analysts predict that the figure will pass ninety per cent at some point during Season Three of “House of Cards.”

The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent.

The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers. Last month, four days after the price of its shares passed a record high of ninety dollars, the company announced that it would eliminate three thousand employees, after having let go four thousand in 2012.

Detroit is experiencing a boom in private investment, with two new clothing stores already open, and a boutique hotel, coffee-bean roasters, and a Whole Foods store planned for downtown.

Detroit is so broke that its firefighters don’t have enough boots and toilet paper. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city’s finances.

“It’s almost a tale of two cities,” Rachel Lutz, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the clothing stores, told the Times.

It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have recovered, the public sector has in many cases struggled and shrunk.” “Although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits—or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock market.” “The wealthiest .1 per cent of Americans now enjoy a life expectancy of 107.3 years and typically die in their sleep, while the bottom sixty per cent can anticipate living only 56.8 years and are statistically more likely to perish in hideous car accidents and firearm incidents, from drug overdoses, or after losing their lower extremities to diabetes.”

All right, I made up the last one. But it’s thinkable, even probable. Things are moving in that direction. Peter Thiel—perhaps the only conservative libertarian tech billionaire who spends much time worrying about this situation, and who also contributes part of his fortune to finding the “cure for aging”—once told me, “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”

by George Packer, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration by Richard McGuire.

Santana

Courtney Murphy
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Alvin Lee (December, 1944 – March, 2013)

[ed. Alvin Lee, British Blues-Rock Guitarist, Dies at 68.]

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Foo Fighters

Kiichi Asano Tokamachi (a solitary woman in the snow), 1957.

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Hanni El Khatib

[ed. Yeah... a bit different. I've never used the term "lol" in my life, but it might apply here.]

Seeing at the Speed of Sound

The term "lipreading" implies that the skill is, in a sense, exactly like reading—in which the words on the page are clear and perfectly legible. "Can you read my lips?" strangers ask when they meet me. (Never mind that the question is inherently illogical: If I couldn't lipread, how on earth could I answer?) As they ask it, I can see the other, unspoken questions reeling in their heads—What if she can't? What will I do then? Mime?

When I answer that, yes, I can lipread, they relax. Then they prattle on as if all preconditions are off. Because I can "read" their lips, I must therefore be able to "read" everything they say. After all, it would be absurd for me to protest that I can sometimes read the words in a book, but sometimes not. Either you can read, or you can't. (Likewise, either you can hear perfectly—meaning hear and understand everything—or you can't hear at all. Forget hearing aids and microphones and other assistive devices.)

"How did you learn to lipread?" is another common query. I do not have a satisfactory answer. The truth is, I can't explain it. No more than I could explain how I learned to walk, or than anyone else could explain how she learned to hear and understand language. "Practice," I usually answer. Since I entered a mainstreamed public school in first grade, there have been no other deaf people occupying center stage in my life. My world is primarily a hearing one, and I learned to deal with this reality at a very young age. There was no reason to sign with anyone besides close friends and family, no reason to expect anyone to communicate on my terms. Surrounded by hearing people all the time, my only option has been to adapt, and lipreading is the skill that I have practiced most.

But this answer is too simple. The foundation for my success with communication was laid in my earliest years, at a deaf preschool. That was perhaps the only time in my life when I experienced full communication access each day. Everyone—students, teachers, speech therapists, parents, siblings—signed. From ages 2 to 5, I lived, breathed and conversed with people like me—at least, as alike as a young child understands. There was no reason for me to doubt myself or my abilities, so I grew fluent and confident with language. I learned its nuances, its facial and emotional expressions. I learned that it was not inaccessible, as it would sometimes later seem.

Self-confidence fuels the desire to practice and protects against the degradation of communication breakdown; but my ability to lipread is attributable not only to my own efforts, but also to the contributions of others. When I was less than a year old, my parents started me in speech therapy, which I continued for 18 years. There, I encountered the visual and physical fragments of the sound that was so absent from my world. This sound was mysterious to me. I could not grasp it—even with hearing aids—but I could see it. Under the tutelage of a succession of speech therapists, with support from my family, I became a student of its aftereffects.

In teaching me how to make sound's shapes with my own mouth, they taught me how to focus on their faces with the deepest intensity. Like a detective-in-training, I learned to recognize consonantal stops, the subtle visual differences between a "d" and a "g." (On the other hand, "p" and "b" are all but impossible to distinguish by lipreading alone, because their only difference is that one is voiced and one is not.) I learned how to zone in on the minutest changes in the muscles of the face. Over many years of drills and refinement, I learned how to construct the appearance of functioning like a hearing person. But I did not hear: I saw.

by Rachel Kolb, Stanford Magazine | Read more:

Image:  Julia Breckenreid

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Slow Art In A Fast Culture

One of the hotly discussed cultural shifts in the past decade has been the resurgence of singles as the dominant musical format. In the early years of rock and roll, singles—sold as 45s—were the marquee format. From roughly the late 60s through the early 2000s, however, albums reigned supreme. The reasoning behind this, from the record labels' perspective, was of course monetary: records, and later CDs, generate bigger profits than singles. But for artists and fans desiring a more complete and complex statement than what three-minute songs typically embody, albums offered the possibility of a more sophisticated narrative—either thematically speaking, or literally, in the case of concept albums—to become immersed in. Today, though, due to several factors, including the ease of file sharing; the dominance of digital retail structured around per-song sales/downloads, most notably iTunes; and the multi-artist song-focused formats of the Spotify playlists and Pandora stations that monopolize how many of us listen to music today, the cultural pendulum at large has swung back toward experiencing music on a per-song basis, not 45-minute artistic statements.

And yet despite the discouraging techno-cultural environment, not only has the album not died, there's much evidence of a hunger for it. It's almost obligatory now for a certain type of trend-setting band, such as Death Cab for Cutie or The Flaming Lips, to release new long-play albums on vinyl. The format has seen a massive sales uptick, more than quadrupling from 2007 to 2012. Part of the vinyl sales can be chalked up to a faux-nostalgia of millennials seeking a perceived "authentic" format for their music, as well as to fidelity aficionados who seek vinyl for its believed sonic superiority, but these reasons hardly can account for sales growth charting at a 45-degree incline.

Alec Bourgeois, of the legendary D.C. independent label Dischord, talked about his label's exploding vinyl sales in an interview with the Washington City Paper, where it was suggested that there is a continuing allure of full albums for serious fans [emphasis mine]. In an article on vinyl's resurgence among millennials in The Daily Universe, a BYU college paper, Corey Fox, an owner of a live music venue and a fixture of the Provo music scene for decades, put it well: "Most bands have a purpose to what they're doing. I mean you're supposed to put [the album] in and listen from beginning to end and it takes you on a journey. Now, it's an industry of singles. I listen to music to get an emotional connection and I don't think you get that from the 'hot single.' It's fun to dance to, it's fun to drive to and if that's all you care about music for, that's one thing. But there's a lot of people in the music industry and fans of music that want more than that from their music."

Length in and of itself has virtue. Vinyl strongly encourages one to listen to a side at a time. When you put an album on a turntable you submit to a different experiential frame—one that positions you for a 20-plus-minute commitment to one artist's vision. The technology itself fundamentally changes how one experiences music. Often you listen to tracks you may not love because you're too lazy to get up to lift the needle to the next track. (Even with CDs, where it's easy to advance tracks, this can happen. There's something about knowing the song you're listening to is part of something larger that encourages one to take the format on its terms.) And an interesting thing happens—songs that at first were a bore or even objectionable, sometimes, magically, reveal themselves to be the best tracks. This approach to music listening offers an instructive corollary to the much-lamented dangers of our a la carte, personalized news consumption today. It's critical for both our spiritual and intellectual well-being to be exposed to stuff we don't immediately want to be exposed to. In the right circumstance, this is one of the virtues of slow art.

In this sense, your Spotify playlist or iTunes shuffle, in all their scattershot glory, fit under the umbrella of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, a treatise on how the interface and vastness of the Web encourages "shallow" rather than deep thinking. But something strange has been happening in the shallows of our Internet media consumption, as we restlessly click from blog post to charticle to HuffPo "quick read": long-form journalism is thriving. Interestingly, links to in-depth pieces, via sites like Longreads, are particularly popular on Twitter. It seems an engaged minority are harnessing the connective power of social media, that too often is so shallow and disjointing, to promote and celebrate in-depth writing. As BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith suggested in an AdWeek piece (one of a wave of articles covering the trend), "People like sharing things that reflect well on them, and there's a prestige attached to the longform hashtag." His point indicates there is an inherent acknowledgment that long-form pieces offer not just more quantity, but quality as well.

But it's not just about an intellectual putting on airs; people really are reading the pieces. In the AdWeekarticle, James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic, noted that Longform, a site that links to excellent current and old long-form articles, "has had a very powerful effect on our overall audience in the last year." In fact, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?", a nearly 10,000-word, 30-year-old article, regularly appears "at the top of TheAtlantic.com's traffic reports." In an interview on AllThingsD, New Yorker editor David Remnick talked about how there is still a "human hunger for deep information, real examination, and the kind of reporting that takes time." And, he mentioned, to that end, the Web has been a "godsend" for his magazine. The structure of the Web, so oft-noted for its bias toward brevity and encouraging users to flit around, also is proving to be a terrific platform for advancing in-depth writing. Clearly, readers are increasingly seeking a nutritious complement to all those sugar-pellet news bits.

by David Zweig, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: Almost Famous

Susan Romaine
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Interview: Lee Kuan Yew on the Future of U.S.- China Relations

[ed. Foreign policy analysis, as good as it gets.]

Few individuals have had as consequential a role in their nation's history as Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore. During Lee's three-decade long tenure in office, he helped transform Singapore from an impoverished British colony lacking natural resources into one of Asia's wealthiest and most developed countries.

Over the years, Lee has also become one of Asia's most prominent public intellectuals, one whose unique experience and perspective gives him tremendous insight into trends shaping the continent.

In the following conversation, Lee trains his sights to the most prominent geopolitical issue of our time: the rise of China. Rather than attempt to thwart China's emergence as a global superpower, Lee argues, the United States should find ways to work constructively with China in forging a new global order.

This conversation is excerpted from the book Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World comprised of interviews and selections by Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, with Ali Wyne, and a foreword by Henry A. Kissinger.

How likely is a major confrontation between the United States and China?

Competition between the United States and China is inevitable, but conflict is not. This is not the Cold War. The Soviet Union was contesting with the United States for global supremacy. China is acting purely in its own national interests. It is not interested in changing the world.

There will be a struggle for influence. I think it will be subdued because the Chinese need the United States, need U.S. markets, U.S. technology, need to have students going to the United States to study the ways and means of doing business so they can improve their lot. It will take them 10, 20, 30 years. If you quarrel with the United States and become bitter enemies, all that information and those technological capabilities will be cut off. The struggle between the two countries will be maintained at the level that allows them to still tap the United States.

Unlike U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War, there is no irreconcilable ideological conflict between the United States and a China that has enthusiastically embraced the market. Sino-American relations are both cooperative and competitive. Competition between them is inevitable, but conflict is not.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

A stabilizing factor in their relationship is that each nation requires cooperation from and healthy competition with the other. The danger of a military conflict between China and the United States is low. Chinese leaders know that U.S. military superiority is overwhelming and will remain so for the next few decades. They will modernize their forces not to challenge America but to be able, if necessary, to pressure Taiwan by a blockade or otherwise to destabilize the economy. China's military buildup delivers a strong message to the United States that China is serious about Taiwan. However, the Chinese do not want to clash with anyone -- at least not for the next 15 to 20 years. The Chinese are confident that in 30 years their military will essentially match in sophistication the U.S. military. In the long term, they do not see themselves as disadvantaged in this fight.

China will not let an international court arbitrate territorial disputes in the South China Sea, so the presence of U.S. firepower in the Asia-Pacific will be necessary if the U.N. Law of the Sea is to prevail.

by Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Tim Chong/Reuters

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“La Decadanse” Daria Werbowy by Mario Testino for Vogue Paris May 2010
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The True-Life Horror that Inspired Moby-Dick

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman.

Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.”

Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To Bennet, the tale was like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.”

The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14, 1819, just two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that was supposed to last two and a half years. The 87-foot-long ship was hit by a squall that destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it. Still, Pollard continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. But the 20-man crew found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so they decided to sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific, far from any shores.

To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the Galapagos, where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises. As a prank, one of the crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly spread. Pollard’s men barely escaped, having to run through flames, and a day after they set sail, they could still see smoke from the burning island. Pollard was furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set the fire. Many years later Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland, and the fire was believed to have caused the extinction of both the Floreana Tortoise and the Floreana Mockingbird.

By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what the crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old first mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Pollard went whaling. It was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet in length, he estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing the ship. Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for the Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would recall—at about three knots. The whale smashed head-on into the ship with “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces.”

The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the water. “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. Then the whale disappeared. The crew was addressing the hole in the ship and getting the pumps working when one man cried out, “Here he is—he is making for us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head half out of water, bearing down at great speed—this time at six knots, Chase thought. This time it hit the bow directly under the cathead and disappeared for good.

The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only thing the crew could do was lower the boats and try fill them with navigational instruments, bread, water and supplies before the Essex turned over on its side.

Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance, then returned to see the Essex in ruin. Dumbfounded, he asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?”

“We have been stove by a whale,” his first mate answered.

Another boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their captain still pale and speechless. Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of the extent of their deplorable situation.”

by Past Imperfect, The Smithsonian |  Read more:
Illustration: Wikipedia